Returning to Earth (24 page)

“That was a beautiful way for your husband to die,” Vera said, clenching my hand.

“Yes, it was.” To avoid the lump rising in my throat I got up and walked down to the water to where David stooped like a child with a hand swishing through the waves.

“It must be ten degrees warmer than Lake Superior.”

“Ten?” I teased. He always ascribes pointlessly exact numbers. The weather is never in the seventies but “seventy-four” or “seventy-seven.” The time is always “8:47” or “8:33,” or “the first dawn light came at 6:08.”

“How was Clare when you left this morning?”

“She drove me to the airport then was headed to Snowbound Books to pick up her fresh shipment of bear books. She must have a hundred different titles. K is humoring her but is upset because she has decided not to go to the Ghost Supper. She's refusing to say good-bye to her father.”

“Maybe she'll talk to Coughlin. She liked him.”

“Nothing doing. She'll talk to me a little. She'll talk to K, but mostly she drives over to Au Train to see Flower and hear bear stories. I spoke with Coughlin and he said there's really nowhere to go but to let her work it out over time.”

We walked up to the bench and sat down on each side of Vera. Her eyes were moist but she was smiling. She had had our father's baby and I supposed or wondered if that made her our stepmother? She leaned against David's shoulder. We sat there in silence and I began to half doze in the weak sunlight. I'm not sure what sleep is anymore. It's intermittent at best with a dozen novels always on the night table. There's an incalculable rudeness to death. How much am I meant to understand? A dark-complected young man in running
clothes quickly passed us, nearly as large as Donald had been, and I felt the slightest twinge of desire, the first in a very long time.

I stayed in Chicago for three mostly pleasant days despite the weather, which became wet and blustery but not as cold as it would have been in Marquette, where, the television had said, there had been a major snowstorm that had stranded thousands of deer hunters in their tents and camps. Vera spent much of the days at the wholesale clothing convention showing lines for the coming spring. David and I bundled up and walked a great deal and had one mildly awkward conversation about being the sons and daughters of privilege. The explicit question was “What are you going to do now?” and I said “Continue teaching, I guess” though I didn't enjoy Marquette as I had the Soo or Brimley or Bay Mills, where I taught Indians, mixed breeds, and poor white kids. Prosperity rarely brings out the best in children. David was looking into an international version of the Peace Corps that had headquarters in Switzerland but had an opening in the Veracruz area for someone who could afford to work for very low pay or had the predilection to do so. Much of the work would be directed toward ensuring pure drinking water in villages since so many diseases were waterborne. This seemed oddly limited but David said with conclusiveness, “I always liked the idea of water,” as if it were an idea. This conversation took place in front of the Newberry Library, where he was showing me the exact spot on the sidewalk where he had met Vernice. I looked gravely downward
at this historical place and couldn't help myself and laughed at the ordinary ways lovers first meet. Donald was digging down a hole. David met Polly at a hamburger stand in Iron Mountain. And David meeting Vernice the Matchgirl, who had helped him more than anyone else but Coughlin. When Vernice was terribly ill with tropical parasites I had sent her a check and in return she had given me a double-volume set of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. I admit I rarely read poetry but somehow no writer had helped me as much with Donald's fatal illness as Akhmatova, who had one of the most spacious minds in human history. I had kept in touch with Vernice since meeting her in Chicago so long ago partly to have her insight into David's precarious mental condition, which Donald described succinctly: “David doesn't seem to have both oars in the water.” There is a specific visual of a man rowing with one oar, or a crow trying to fly with a single wing. The psychologism in the term
depression
scarcely covers the thousands of varieties but it is always a circular infirmity.

Each of my three evenings we had dinner with Coughlin. The first one was a little iffy because we went downstairs in the Drake to the Cape Cod Room and halfway through the meal David abruptly left for the ground-floor bar, where we found him eating a cheeseburger. He explained that the Cape Cod Room was where he'd had dinner with Father the evening before the fatal trip to Mexico. Things got even rougher in the bar when the subject of war came up and I carelessly described a little research I had done on the World War II battles in the Philippines in which both my father and Vera's father, Jesse, had taken part. A martini had made
me half daft as I rambled on about the Battle of Cape Engano and also gruesome land battles where my father lost most of the men he commanded. Coughlin said he had met an ex-Green Beret medic while fishing in Montana who had tried to duct-tape together several dozen children who were in pieces when our personnel had called in mortar fire in the wrong place. I wasn't hearing Coughlin clearly when he quoted some poet saying, “There's a point at which the exposed heart can't recover.” I was looking at the increasingly pale face of my brother, who got up abruptly and walked out. Vera also looked stricken and followed. Naturally I was upset but at the same time amused that Coughlin continued drinking with relish. I raised an eyebrow.

“In thirty-five years of practice I've heard everything. There are no true monsters, only some people like your father who with regularity acted like a monster. It's still episodic.”

“Meaning?” I quickly drank a full glass of wine.

“Well, David managed to spend half his life researching the wrongs his family visited on everyone. Long ago I told him he should be looking into what happened to his father during the war. You managed to do so. It never works when you leave out even a small part of the picture. It's a little like the doctor who failed to diagnose the reason for a woman's stomachache but then she failed to tell him that her husband punched her there. War can do horrible things to men. Most recover well enough to behave well and some can't. And some don't seem to want to as if the horrors are encysted in their brains to be examined over and over almost as if they deserved affection or at least loving attention
because what would be there if the horrors were taken away? In crude farmland lingo, pigs love their own shit.”

“Even as a boy David never seemed to have enough skin. I mean his skin wasn't thick enough while mine was.”

“Precisely. Once on the way to fish we stopped to look at a big snapping turtle crawling along the road and I said to David that it would be bright of him to take this creature as a model, you know, develop a carapace.”

He paused because David returned sheepishly but with Vera looking as if she had told him an important secret. The old waiter stopped by, shaking his head at the cold hamburger, and David said he'd settle for a dozen oysters. Vera ordered a cold lobster “just in case” she had to leave again. She laughed and tickled him somewhere critical under the table.

“To close the conversation and get on to something more interesting like a beauty queen's perineum, true, I never gave my father the slightest break. Mother told me that she remembered him before the war and that's why she held on with the help of booze and pills. Let's give the dead a break today.”

David raised his glass and we all followed. I felt slightly choked and Coughlin gave me a peculiar look that I get from K and used to receive from the young men on Donald's work crew. I admit I felt pleased.

Through an old friend of my mother's who is on the board of the Art Institute of Chicago I wangled two passes to visit the big Gauguin show at seven a.m., two hours before the
museum officially opened. David and I were quite dumbfounded and when we left the museum in a cold, windy rain I thought of how undemocratic art was in that so few do so much while the rest of the world looks on. I recalled that when I took Herald and Clare to the Tate in London when we were on our English trip in their teens Clare had been transfixed by the Turners and asked, “How can one artist be so much better than others?” Gauguin didn't bring you happiness but consciousness.

I had a rare insomniac night that was pleasant, drifting in and out of sleep, but awoke trying to determine what was reality and what was dreaming. I called Clare at three a.m. thinking she had called me. “Mom, I'm asleep!” she hissed, but it was precipitated by a dream of a call she had made from college when distraught over a crush she had on a professor (eventually consummated). Most of the thoughts and dreams were about Donald and dealt with what he had said again only a week before he died: “You're going to have to find yourself a boyfriend.” Before dinner last evening I had taken a walk with Coughlin and he had taken my hand when we crossed Wabash. I told him his hand felt strong and he laughed and said it was because he had been rowing and fly-fishing at least ten hours a day for months and now that he was back therapizing his hands would become weak again. He then spoke of a man he had been counseling for thirty years whose father had died in a building fire in Chicago. The man had been ten years old at the time, a single child, and had basically spent his bachelor life with his
mother maintaining their West Side apartment as a shrine to the dead father. “We just do things we need to do without consciously thinking about them. But then we can become trapped if we don't finally think them over. There's something to be said for the old European model of wearing black for a single year. Of course you lived with Donald's death sentence for quite some time. We've been so inept and careless about death in America and have paid big for the consequences. Surprise! We die. That sort of thing.”

“I think we're a little better than that up in the north. I don't mean the cities of the north but the villages. Over at the reservation death was an open book we all at least glanced at every day.”

“Well, yes, because life was slower and more ruminative. Farm kids eat the animals, the pigs and cows that they loved. Once in Italy I entered a basilica by a side door and in the lintel above me skulls were embedded as a reminder, a memento mori, and then there are all of those paintings and murals clearly illustrating the end of the life process. I must have counseled a thousand patients on this matter and there is always a nearly mute craving for reassurance that there's something more in the offing for their loved ones.”

“And what do you say?” He had paused overlong and we were standing there looking at wind-tossed and rumpled Lake Michigan, a view shorn of anything comforting.

“I say I don't know.” He laughed at himself. “I say that I have no idea. I say that no one knows. Back in college in Dublin we wise young cynics used to tease devout Catholics with the question of just where in the human body is this soul located? We were witty smart-asses, children of
the Enlightenment, and in the postwar gloom barely past the century's halfway mark we had noted that ninety million had died under God's supposed tent in two wars. Last year I was talking to this kindly old biologist from the University of Chicago who was dying of a kidney tumor. He was nominally an Episcopalian but mostly because he loved their church music. He was neither plus nor minus about the prospects of life after death feeling it was unscientific to assert anything either way. He did point out that in terms of DNA each of our cells contains thirty-two thousand indicators of what we are, so that there's plenty of room for a soul. ‘It needn't be very large. What's wrong with a nanosoul?' That's what he said to me.”

I was instantly transfixed by what he said. I remembered a walk along a river over near Au Train with Flower, who told me that our departing spirits enter the bodies of our favorite animals. That meant that Donald was a bear, but then I was absurdly troubled that my own preferred animal had been the very ordinary dog. Did that mean I had no chance for a reunion with Donald? Standing there looking out at the troubled water with the cold north wind burning against my face I felt a palpable heartache. Dogs and bears don't like each other. Somehow I managed to laugh at the blatant silliness of it all. Coughlin looked at me, his face a question mark, and I couldn't explain myself so said nothing.

“Well, despite your being well-read and educated it's natural to slide toward your daughter's thoroughly irrational point of view. She's also well-read and educated. You said last evening that you'd like me to come up to Marquette
and talk to her but why should I dissuade her from thinking like her father's people? Back to being well-read and educated. What does it offer us when someone we love dies? We keep talking about Clare going off the ‘deep end,' especially David, who's overfamiliar with that territory.”

“But then what's an appropriate response to death?” I interrupted.

“There isn't a singular response. You keep on truckin', as that cartoonist Crumb said. You're probably having a thousand responses a day because your brain simply can't stop trying to comprehend what has happened to you. It's the largest question mark we deal with in life and no response will make it go away. We envy the devout who experience the pain but have a surefire explanation. I'm curious if Donald gave you any advice before he passed on?”

“He said, ‘You can remember me but let me go.' He also said, ‘Find yourself a boyfriend.'” And then I collapsed as if the bones inside me had dissolved. I simply crumpled and began to sob for the first time since we buried Donald. I felt my chest might burst from sobbing. Coughlin knelt down on the sidewalk and cradled me in his arms. A passing jogger stopped, his face a blank.

“Is this a medical emergency?”

“No. Her husband died,” Coughlin said.