The Distinguished Guest (23 page)
Read The Distinguished Guest Online
Authors: Sue Miller
Lily nodded, thinking she would not even try to explain the context to Violet: the cretin jokes that even Alan knew by heart.
What did the cretin say to the one-armed man? Why did the cretin
cross the road?
“In
front
of him. As though he weren’t even a person. As though he were invisible.” Violet’s eyes swam with tears. “Oh, here I go again.” She drew a
long breath in and turned to the mirror.
Lily didn’t know what to do. She was afraid if she touched her mother, Violet would collapse. She sat down on Violet’s bed and waited.
“I want you to promise me something, Lily,” Violet said at last.
“Of course,” Lily said.
“It’s not so easy as that,” Violet said. “I want you to help me if I’m dying as your father is. I couldn’t bear to . . . ” Violet stopped, but after a
moment her throat made a little involuntary whimper. She cleared it then, and said firmly. “I want you to help me.”
Though Lily wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to do what Violet seemed to be asking, her devotion to her mother was deep and absolute. “I will,” she said.
“I’ll rely on you. You are far braver than I. I’ve always been . . . too fearful. But I count on you, Lily. On your courage.”
“I understand.”
“And you will? You will do as I wish?”
“I will.”
“Thank you, dear.”
Fortunately Lily hadn’t had to do anything. Violet’s death had been as discreet and unobtrusive as her life. She died in her sleep, at age eighty-one, with her clothes for the next
day neatly laid out over the upholstered bench at the foot of her bed.
When the doctor told Lily she had Parkinson’s disease and explained the possible sequelae, Lily had remembered Violet’s request. She was looking at the doctor, but she was seeing in
her mind’s eye her mother’s face as it had looked then, in the mirror—the curious reversal of her features, the watery eyes, the hectic circles of rouge, the fear.
There was no one in her life with whom Lily had the intimacy Violet had had with her, no one of whom she could exact the promise Violet had exacted of her. But Lily did have more courage than
Violet, courage of one sort anyway, and she was certainly more resourceful. All by herself she did the necessary research, she told the necessary lies to her doctor, she made the necessary
arrangements.
How could she have decided such a thing, prepared to implement it, with apparently so little doubt, so few second thoughts?
Of course, Violet’s veiled request had given her a kind of permission. And then, too, Lily had been alone with her will and her own sense of right and wrong for many years by then. Even
her religion was something she experienced in isolation from others. Though she had continued to meet with the Bible group until it finally dissolved, she had never joined another church after
Blackstone, preferring for a while to call, as it were, on one church or another, or the University Chapel, on different Sundays. And then increasingly she didn’t stir herself on Sundays at
all.
Not that she didn’t believe, or didn’t pray. But prayer had become for Lily a concentrated and other-focused way of thinking, a yearning state she sometimes gave words to in her mind
and sometimes didn’t. As she said in her memoir about her withdrawal from organized religion, “Sometimes I fear I hear God less well now, I understand less well, perhaps, his intentions
for my life. But I also know that I don’t hear the false voices speaking for God that would silence my own, inner voice, that would come between me and him.”
In any event, God did not seem to offer her an objection to her decision.
Monday was a bad day for Lily. She’d hardly eaten anything through the morning, and the cereal sat now, a little skin congealed on its surface. To move seemed something
beyond volition. She’d simply dropped the few letters she’d managed to read into the basket by her chair. She couldn’t close her fingers with enough force to tear them. She felt
undone by the letters too. Or perhaps it was just that she’d virtually reached the end of them, of this long history she’d decided to put herself through one last time before it
disappeared. Before
she
disappeared, she thought.
Outside the window, the sun did its lively dance in the long-skirted, curtsying pine branches. To Lily it was just blurred and shifting light. Irrelevant. Everything seemed irrelevant.
Through the long weekend, Lily had closed in on herself. She had come to understand that she was to live a life in which the words would simply be stopped. The writing, the endless imaginative
arguments about life, wouldn’t be there anymore. Her disease seemed for the first time a visceral thing to her, a tree trunk growing inside her, filling her with thickness, woodiness, and now
tentacling into her thoughts, her soul itself, hardening them.
The week before, when it had first come to her that Parkinson’s was taking this part of her life away, she’d had a surge of energy—the will, as she felt it, to rise to this
insult. To surmount it, in fact. Even, perhaps, a sense of this as adventure. The last adventure. The last drama. She had wondered where it might come from, the final thing that would happen to
her, and now here it was. Well, then.
She had believed the words she’d spoken to Linnett. She had never feared the truth. She had tried always to meet life without flinching, and she thought she could in this case too. She had
felt Linnett’s admiration for her as she made those first efforts, and she’d been nourished by it. This is who she would be then, until death. This brave person.
This
Lily. Her
afternoon on Friday with Linnett had been almost gay, and it was Lily’s sparkling flirtatiousness that had kept Linnett long past the time she usually left.
Almost from the moment Alan had come in to wake her Friday night though, it seemed Lily would be asked to accept something less triumphant about all this.
“Put on your dancing shoes, Lily,” he’d said. “We’ve got company.” There was a secret, teasing smile on his face, but he wouldn’t tell her who it was.
He smelled of liquor too, and Lily, as though she didn’t drink herself, felt a sense of indignant repulsion.
He’d had to shake her several times to wake her. She was tired after the long afternoon with Linnett, and, in all likelihood, also from the effort of accepting her new diminished
life—though she hadn’t yet dwelt on that. Still, as she rearranged her hair and smoothed out her clothes (how fortunate that she’d put on this pale lilac outfit this morning), she
felt the familiar anticipatory pleasure in the notion of company, the hungry eagerness to occupy once more her public self.
Imagine then her hurt, to discover Linnett,
her
Linnett still there, sitting at the table, laughing with her grandson Thomas. The conversation had begun without her, and it was quick, too
quick for Lily to join it—Linnett to Thomas, Thomas to Alan, back to Gaby, over to Linnett, to Alan, to Thomas again. They were all, Lily thought,
flirting
with each other. Something
in this struck her as deeply perverse, disordered. What’s more, they barely seemed to notice Lily. In fact, as the evening wore on—and on, and on—Alan asked several times if she
didn’t want to go to bed. As though she were a child. She could have slapped him. Once or twice she managed to say something, to speak up, but then they all pretended she’d said
nothing. The conversation simply continued around her as though she hadn’t spoken. She felt canceled out. Erased. And then, at the end, Thomas played that terribly loud and melodramatic
music—which she found, somehow, upsetting beyond words—for far too long. Someone should tell him there could be too much of such a thing.
Lily’s sleep that night was deep and yet somehow not refreshing, not restful. She woke from it on Saturday with a sense of a thick, woolly fatigue or remorse she couldn’t have named
the source of. Though her routines through the weekend were unvaried, the days seemed interminable. Was this what life would be now, this vegetable creep of time?
We have many little deaths to prepare us for the final one, and often we have to struggle to find God’s loving hand in them. For me my separation from the church
was one such death, and my divorce another. I think that what accounts in part for the depression I allowed myself to fall into in the years that followed these two changes in my life was
partly the sense they brought me of being cut off from God’s love in a way that other events—the deaths of my parents, for example, or the small unnoticed deaths of my
children as they became adult—did not. I found it comforting to read Job through this period, not that I thought of my own suffering as in any way comparable to Job’s, but
that I was similarly shaken and distressed by it. And that the answer God gave to Job seemed the most strangely reassuring one possible.
But I think what finally reconciled me to God’s shape for my life was the gift he made me of self-understanding at the time of Paul’s dying.
Paul had been ill throughout all of 1968 and 1969. I had written to him oftener in this period than I had before. Neither of us had ever asked the other about our personal lives after
our divorce, but I think friends had probably kept him informed of what I was doing as they kept me informed in a general sense about his life. I knew, for example, that Paul had had one
long and serious involvement after he moved to California, and I knew also when it was over. Is this a kindness or a disguised cruelty, this passing on of information by friends? I
don’t know. However, I could tell simply from the tone of his letters to me through the period of his illness that he was alone then. I wouldn’t have needed the tender mercies
of a friend.
I suppose it might fairly have been said of me that I was alone during this period too, but I did not feel this to be the case. I had begun to write, both the occasional story and this
memoir, and I felt my life had never been more crowded—with memory, with the will to understand what memory was telling me, and with fictional explanations, too, of what I
understood. In addition, in order to maintain some discipline in this activity, I’d enrolled in not one but two writing classes, and I often felt that my days and evenings were
fuller than they’d been since I was Paul’s wife.
Now Paul was writing me sadly and often about his failure of faith, and about his inability to make sense of or to come to peace with the course of his life—the losses he’d
endured, the pain he was experiencing in his final illness. He spoke of our life together nostalgically, as of a golden time, a time of sweet innocence.
I came to feel uncomfortable with this tone, and I discovered it reminded me of the period before we were married, when he’d written to me from his exile in Ohio, “You are
going to be a marvelous woman one day, Lily Roberts, and I want to be the man there to witness that transformation.” At the time, I remember, I was nothing but thrilled by this
idea, but it later seemed to me the height of the unconscious condescension that marked the relations of men to women in that era.
I wrote him back now and called up that remark. I said the tone he was taking now reminded me of it, and that I found his easy nostalgia for our believing youth belittling and
sentimental. That I thought he misjudged my faith if he imagined it had been untested or unexamined. That while there was almost nothing I wished more than to be of comfort to him at this
time, I couldn’t write to him again if he continued to seem to ask me to accede to this way of remembering our life together.
He wrote back immediately and apologetically and said he was shocked at the picture of himself he encountered in my letter, but also grateful for the encounter. He felt as though he
were seeing himself “face to face.” It made him recognize, he said, the sin of the pride he’d been taking in his desolation—“I see I’ve had a real
sense of pleasure in the notion of myself as so rigorously honest as to have let my questioning lead me to despair. And how strange that while I no longer believe in God, I do,
apparently, still believe in sin.”
He wrote, “I don’t remember writing you that foolish remark, Lily, but I can easily believe I did. The irony, of course, is that you have grown into that marvelous woman,
and that I am not there to see it.”
I wept when I read his letter. I wept with a combined sense of the most painful loss, and gratitude—blessedness, even,—for that loss. For the first time, I understood how
much who I had become was necessarily intertwined with it. “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” How could I not have remembered that, not have understood it? Now, through
Paul and our rapprochement as he drew near death, I did.
Over the weekend, Lily had come to the point in Paul’s correspondence with her when he’d written the letter she’d quoted from in her memoir, one of her last letters from him.
Holding it in her trembling hands this time, she read it in its entirety, she met again the words he’d gone on to write after his apology, the words she hadn’t included in her account
of things then.
These words:
But I think you underestimate even your youthful self. Because always under your seeming devotion and compliance was the warmth—I would even say the heat—of
your bracing coldness. (And you know there is heat in coldness, do you not, Lily? At this age I have used cold packs enough on various arthritic joints to welcome the pain of the cold for the
soothing fire of blood heat that follows.)
I had the easier version of faith, and of love, for you Lily. Because you came to faith, and to love, so slowly, so carefully, that it required far more of you in the end. You were always
more analytic, and then, once you’d satisfied yourself with your examination of things, more passionate, more radical in your feelings. I sometimes worried that the more instinctive
forms of love were not so available to you. That easy maternal devotion, for instance, that seemed so natural in some women and which, as we spoke of from time to time, was something you had
to struggle to feel. Or the simple neighborliness of people like Adele Footman, or Polly Mayer. Sometimes, yes, I wished we had that more comfortable life together, the sense of a table at
which angels might be entertained, unawares. But never, never would I have substituted those creature comforts for your fine coldness and the exacting passion it brought with it. Even, I
think, as that exacting passion drove us apart. It was the bedrock of our life together, while that life lasted, the force in you that compelled me in every way, and that fed my deepest
hungers—spiritual, physical, intellectual.
