The Hours (22 page)

21
5

Mrs
. Dalloway

C
lariss
a puts her hand on the old woman’s shoulder, as if to prepare her for some further shock. Sally, who has preceded them down the hallway, opens the door.

‘‘Here we are,’’ Clarissa says.

‘‘Yes,’’ Laura replies.

When they enter the apartment, Clarissa is relieved to see that Julia has put away the hors d’oeuvres. The flowers, of course, remain—brilliant and innocent, exploding from vases in lavish, random profusion, for Clarissa dislikes arrangements. She prefers flowers to look as if they’ve just arrived, in arm-loads, from the fields.

Beside a vase full of roses, Julia sleeps on the sofa with a book open on her lap. In sleep she sits with an air of surprising dignity, even authority, foursquare, shoulders relaxed and both feet on the floor, head bowed discreetly forward, as if in prayer.

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7

A
t this moment she could be a minor goddess come to attend to mortal anxiety; come to sit with grave, loving certainty and whisper, from her trance, to those who enter, It’s all right, don’t be frightened, all you have to do is die.

‘‘We’re back,’’ Sally says.

Julia wakes, blinks, and rises. The spell is broken; Julia is a girl again. Sally strides into the room, shrugging off her jacket as she walks, and there is a brief impression of Clarissa and the old woman standing shyly in a vestibule, hanging back, carefully removing their gloves, though there is no vestibule and they are not wearing gloves.

Clarissa says, ‘‘Julia, this is Laura Brown.’’

Julia steps forward, stops at a respectful distance from Laura and Clarissa. Where did she get such poise and presence, Clarissa wonders. She’s still a girl.

‘‘I’m so sorry,’’ Julia says. Laura says, ‘‘Thank you,’’ in a clearer, firmer voice than Clarissa had expected from her.

Laura is a tall, slightly stooped woman of eighty or more. Her hair is a bright, steely gray; her skin is translucent, parchment-colored, aswarm with brown freckles the size of pinpricks. She wears a dark floral dress and soft, crepey, old-woman shoes.

Clarissa urges her forward, into the room. A silence passes. Out of the silence rises a feeling that Clarissa, Sally, and even Laura have arrived, nervous and edgy, knowing no one, more than a little underdressed, at a party being given by Julia.

‘‘Thanks for cleaning up, Julie,’’ Sally says.

21
8

‘‘
I reached almost everyone on the list,’’ Julia says. ‘‘A few people showed up. Louis Waters.’’

‘‘Oh, god. He didn’t get my message.’’

‘‘And there were two women, I don’t remember their names. And somebody else, a black man, Gerry something.’’

‘‘Gerry Jarman,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘Was it pretty awful?’’

‘‘Gerry Jarman was all right. Louis sort of, well, broke down. He stayed almost an hour. I had a long talk with him. He seemed better when he left. Sort of better.’’

‘‘I’m sorry, Julia. I’m sorry you had to handle all this.’’

‘‘It was fine. Please don’t worry about me.’’

Clarissa nods. She says to Laura, ‘‘You must be exhausted.’’

‘‘I’m not quite sure what I am,’’ Laura says.

‘‘Please sit down,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘Do you think you could eat something?’’

‘‘Oh, I don’t believe so. Thank you.’’

Clarissa guides Laura to the sofa. Laura sits gratefully but cautiously, as if she were very tired but could not be certain the sofa was entirely stable.

Julia comes and stands before Laura, leans close to her ear.

‘‘I’m going to make you a cup of tea,’’ she says. ‘‘Or there’s coffee. Or a brandy.’’

‘‘A cup of tea would be nice. Thank you.’’

‘‘You really should eat something, too,’’ Julia says. ‘‘I’ll bet you haven’t eaten since you left home, have you?’’

‘‘Well—’’

Julia says, ‘‘I’m just going to put a few things out in the kitchen.’’

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9

‘‘That’
s very nice, dear,’’ Laura says.

Julia glances at Clarissa. ‘‘Mother,’’ she says, ‘‘you stay here with Mrs. Brown. Sally and I will go see what we’ve got.’’

‘‘Fine,’’ Clarissa says. She sits beside Laura on the sofa. She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.

Sally says to Clarissa, ‘‘Does it seem too morbid to eat the food from the party? It’s all still here.’’

‘‘I don’t think so,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘I think Richard would probably have appreciated that.’’

She looks nervously at Laura. Laura smiles, hugs her elbows, seems to see something on the toes of her shoes.

‘‘Yes,’’ Laura says. ‘‘I think he would, indeed.’’

‘‘Okay, then,’’ Sally says. She and Julia go into the kitchen.

According to the clock, it is ten minutes past midnight. Laura sits with a certain prim self-containment, lips pressed together, eyes half closed. She is, Clarissa thinks, just waiting for this hour to end. She is waiting until she can be in bed, alone.

Clarissa says, ‘‘You can go right to bed if you’d like to, Laura. The guest room’s just down the hall.’’

‘‘Thank you,’’ Laura says. ‘‘I will, in a little while.’’

They settle into another silence, one that is neither intimate nor particularly uncomfortable. Here she is, then, Clarissa

22
0

thinks
; here is the woman from Richard’s poetry. Here is the lost mother, the thwarted suicide; here is the woman who walked away. It is both shocking and comforting that such a figure could, in fact, prove to be an ordinary-looking old woman seated on a sofa with her hands in her lap.

Clarissa says, ‘‘Richard was a wonderful man.’’

She regrets it instantly. Already, the doomed little eulogies begin; already someone who’s died is reassessed as a respectable citizen, a doer of good deeds, a wonderful man. Why did she say such a thing? To console an old woman, really, and to ingratiate herself. And, all right, she said it to stake her claim on the body: I knew him most intimately, I am the one who’ll be first to take his measure. She would like, at this moment, to order Laura Brown to go to bed, shut the door, and stay in her room until morning.

‘‘Yes,’’ Laura says. ‘‘And he was a wonderful writer, wasn’t he?’’

‘‘You’ve read the poems?’’

‘‘I have. And the novel.’’

She knows, then. She knows all about Clarissa, and she knows that she herself, Laura Brown, is the ghost and goddess in a small body of private myths made public (if ‘‘public’’ isn’t a term too grand for the small, stubborn band of poetry readers who remain). She knows she has been worshipped and despised; she knows she has obsessed a man who might, conceivably, prove to be a significant artist. Here she sits, freckled, in a floral print dress. She says calmly, of her son, that he was a wonderful writer.

22
1

‘‘Yes,’
’ Clarissa says helplessly. ‘‘He was a wonderful writer.’’ What else can she say?

‘‘You were never his editor, were you?’’

‘‘No. We were too close. It would have been too complicated.’’

‘‘Yes. I understand.’’

‘‘Editors need a certain objectivity.’’

‘‘Of course they do.’’

Clarissa feels as if she’s suffocating. How can this be so difficult? Why is it so impossible to speak plainly to Laura Brown, to ask the important questions? What are the important questions?

Clarissa says, ‘‘I took the best care of him I could.’’

Laura nods. She says, ‘‘I wish I could have done better.’’

‘‘I wish the same thing myself.’’

Laura reaches over and takes Clarissa’s hand. Under the soft, loose skin of Laura’s hand, palpably, are the spines and knobs of bones, the cords of veins.

Laura says, ‘‘We did the best we could, dear. That’s all anyone can do, isn’t it?’’

‘‘Yes, it is,’’ Clarissa says.

So Laura Brown, the woman who tried to die and failed at it, the woman who fled her family, is alive when all the others, all those who struggled to survive in her wake, have passed away. She is alive now, after her ex-husband has been carried off by liver cancer, after her daughter has been killed by a drunk driver. She is alive after Richard has jumped from a window onto a bed of broken glass.

22
2

Clariss
a holds the old woman’s hand. What else can she do?

Clarissa says, ‘‘I wonder if Julia has remembered your tea.’’

‘‘I’m sure she has, dear.’’

Clarissa glances over at the glass doors that lead to the modest garden. She and Laura Brown are reflected, imperfectly, in the black glass. Clarissa thinks of Richard on the windowsill; Richard letting go; not jumping, really, but sliding as if from a rock into water. What must it have been like, the moment he had irrevocably done it; the moment he was out of his dark apartment and released into air? What must it have been like to see the alley below, with its blue and brown garbage cans, its spray of amber glass, come rushing up? Was it—could it possibly have been—a pleasure of some kind to crumple onto the pavement and feel (did he momentarily feel?) the skull crack open, all its impulses, its little lights, spilled out? There can’t, Clarissa thinks, have been much pain. There would have been the idea of pain, its first shock, and then—whatever came next.

‘‘I’m going to go see,’’ she says to Laura. ‘‘I’ll be back in a minute.’’

‘‘All right,’’ Laura says.

Clarissa stands, a bit unsteadily, and goes into the kitchen. Sally and Julia have taken the food from the refrigerator and piled it on the counters. There are spirals of grilled chicken breast, flecked black, touched with brilliant yellow, impaled on wooden picks, arranged around a bowl of peanut sauce. There are miniature onion tarts. There are steamed shrimp, and glistening bright-red squares of rare tuna with dabs of wasabi. There are dark triangles of grilled eggplant, and round sand

22
3

wiche
s on brown bread, and endive leaves touched at their stem ends with discrete smears of goat cheese and chopped walnuts. There are shallow bowls full of raw vegetables. And there is, in its earthenware dish, the crab casserole Clarissa made herself, for Richard, because it was his favorite.

‘‘My god,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘Look at all this.’’

‘‘We were expecting fifty people,’’ Sally says.

They stand for a moment, the three of them, before the plates heaped with food. The food feels pristine, untouchable; it could be a display of relics. It seems, briefly, to Clarissa, that the food—that most perishable of entities—will remain here after she and the others have disappeared; after all of them, even Julia, have died. Clarissa imagines the food still here, still fresh somehow, untouched, as she and the others leave these rooms, one by one, forever.

Sally takes Clarissa’s head in her hands. She kisses Clarissa’s forehead firmly and competently, in a way that reminds Clarissa of putting a stamp on a letter.

‘‘Let’s feed everybody and go to bed,’’ she says softly, close to Clarissa’s ear. ‘‘It’s time for this day to be over.’’

Clarissa squeezes Sally’s shoulder. She would say, ‘‘I love you,’’ but of course Sally knows. Sally returns the pressure on Clarissa’s upper arm.

‘‘Yes,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘It’s time.’’

It seems, at that moment, that Richard begins truly to leave the world. To Clarissa it is an almost physical sensation, a gentle but irreversible pulling-away, like a blade of grass being drawn out of the ground. Soon Clarissa will sleep, soon everyone who

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4

kne
w him will be asleep, and they’ll all wake up tomorrow morning to find that he’s joined the realm of the dead. She wonders if tomorrow morning will mark not only the end of Richard’s earthly life but the beginning of the end of his poetry, too. There are, after all, so many books. Some of them, a handful, are good, and of that handful, only a few survive. It’s possible that the citizens of the future, people not yet born, will want to read Richard’s elegies, his beautifully cadenced laments, his rigorously unsentimental offerings of love and fury, but it’s far more likely that his books will vanish along with almost everything else. Clarissa, the figure in a novel, will vanish, as will Laura Brown, the lost mother, the martyr and fiend.

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

22
5

Heave
n only knows why we love it so.

Here, then, is the party, still laid; here are the flowers, still fresh; everything ready for the guests, who have turned out to be only four. Forgive us, Richard. It is, in fact, a party, after all. It is a party for the not-yet-dead; for the relatively undamaged; for those who for mysterious reasons have the fortune to be alive.