State of Grace Read online

  I don’t understand. I look at Corinthian and then at the book.

  “It wasn’t me,” I say finally. “I didn’t do that.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Corinthian,” I say as clearly as I can. “You know very well it was not me.”

  “It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you.” He takes the book away and puts it back where he got it. He drinks his warm Coca-Cola. We sit and watch the animals. They are portents, like cards or constellations. The juke-box music stops. The lights go out in the bar. The only sound left is that of the aerator and the water slapping against the sides of the tanks.

  Corinthian gets up and unlocks the leopard’s cage. After a while, the leopard walks out.

  “How long have you been doing this?” I ask.

  “Two weeks,” he says. “I did it for two months before he would come out. Now he takes water from my hands. You’ve been here when the cage was open and you didn’t even know it because he wasn’t coming out.”

  The aerator seems to be assisting me with my breathing. Everything is effortless. Everything is simple and whole. The words are easy as I say them.

  “Would that leopard walk beside somebody for a minute or so?” The animal is close enough for me to touch him. I rest my hand on his calm judicatory skull. He does not move away. His eyes are like suns.

  I tell Corinthian about the Queen Serenade. He is reluctant. But the words are easy. I convince him. I am impressed how his concern and gentleness are changing the beasts. Is it not true that they are changing? Have they not responded to his love? I become very animated. I reassure him. It is all arranged. Corinthian’s mood lightens. We talk cheerfully until morning. We are friends.

  31

  I go to the hospital daily, to the smallest wing in the hospital, the old wing. Everyone seems to shun it, being more interested in the recent additions. Small men move about, pushing floor polishers down the hall. It is not sanitary here. For example, only the corridors, where the patients never are, have been tiled. Tiny tiles in a random design of fake slate. The rooms have brown rugs which absorb oxygen and which, a helpful candy striper told me, could be fatal if brought in contact with vinegar. Vinegar thrown on these rugs would produce copper acetate which is poisonous. This, she told me, is true in any hospital whether it be a Memorial one or not. I’m telling you this because you can’t be too aware.

  The candy striper was very tiny although not young. She had a tiny pocket in her apron from which she took a miniature snapshot, the type that is responsible, if you ask me, for all the cataracts going around. It was a photo of her cat which had since been smashed flat. She also offered me a tiny piece of gum. It was not the real thing. Lewis Carrol, who as you well know, was as well not the real thing, once invented a substitute for gum. I believe that this was that.

  This place is not at all favorable to health. The pitcher beside my Grady’s tape-wrapped hand is only one half full with gray water. Their excuse is that the water table is down. There is a bureau in which there is a mirror (this discourages me, but when I make inquiries, I am told that it’s for the patients’ primping), three wash rags, a pencil upon which is stamped VOTE FOR PARIS SHAY LEVER 2, a half-gone sponge cake and a bedpan. All these things belong to the hospital. Nothing here belongs to Grady but me.

  He is so tiny. Everything here is so small. The white bed made of skinny noodles of iron. The sheets with their tiny mends folded just so across his chest. On the window ledge are tiny rods which one uses to open the windows. One inserts them in a tiny hole and cranks. The protozoans in this room! The energy! It is difficult to remain calm. Around my Grady’s eyes are hundreds of bruises. And tiny lines, all across his lips, his pale cheeks, visible for the first time. In the hall there is a little cart laden with tiny plates of food. Tiny Foo-Yung. Tiny breaded veals. And for the less able, cups of broth, 1- by 1-inch squares of Jell-O. Let me tell you about Jell-O. Any new mother (of one or two days) could but you do not have any new mother. You have me. I will tell you about Jell-O. The secret of it. The Cult. Its importance to healing and the rhythm of life. In remote communities, families often worship Jell-O in lieu of anything else. There has even been buggering of Jell-O. It is a protean item. Its true importance, however, lies in its presence at our hour of birth. For you are aware, I’m sure, of the passages in literature and in films when the woman is in labor and the order goes, bring clean towels and heat a pot of water. The water is for Jell-O.

  The wheels of a hospital are greased with Jell-O. It mends a man. It comforts the nurses who administer it for they feel that they are truly doing their part. No one gives my Grady Jell-O. They bring his lunch in a soft plastic pouch which resembles the bags of fresh livers you buy in groceries. It takes a little over an hour and a half for him to eat. I wait. Down the hall, someone is playing the greyhound scores on a radio. A nurse comes in and looks at me, sitting on the floor by the molding. There is no room for chairs in this ward and thus no need for visitors. Nevertheless, I am one and, crouched by the molding, am trying to be careful. The nurse can’t help but see me, I am so gigantic. She goes to the bed and moves it out a bit from the wall. Behind it is a nickel and a few hairpins. She picks up the nickel and leaves. Grady has finished eating. I am trying so hard to be still. I am making such an effort to not be disruptive in here. Everything is so small. I could hold the whole place in my hand, even on the tip of my finger. There is a light which has been on ever since I arrived even though the room is naturally bright with noon. I get up and lean over Grady. The floor creaks. The tubes and hoses swing in my wake. I crawl into bed beside him. There is sweat on his temples. There is a hole beneath his jaw. It is covered with bandages but the hole’s presence remains. Nothing fills it properly. It glows through the most professional and cleverly wrought wrappings. I place my lips lightly on his pillow which is clean, crisply ironed but blotchy, with small colorless spots. I pull the sheet up over us. I can hear the radio. It announces the Big Perfecta. Through the wall a woman’s voice is coming.

  “… thought the roast would be good for ten …” and close by, maybe directly over us, someone says,

  “That poor young man. Doesn’t he have anyone?”

  “I guess not. No mail either.”

  “That poor young man.”

  Beneath the sheets, I whisper to my Grady. His hair moves with my breath. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Don’t die, Grady. I love you and I’m sorry.”

  No one answers.

  “He’d be about the age of my Randy, I should think,” the woman says.

  “Who could tell?”

  “My rat Randy, my own son. Isn’t it nasty the way life turns on you?”

  “Just be grateful he has all his faculties, not like this poor devil here.”

  “He’s his faculties all right and uses them for nothing but tearing around and breaking his mother’s heart.”

  I whisper to my Grady, “Don’t go, Grady.”

  No one answers. The women leave. Beneath the sheet it is blue and rocking like the sea. “I could go with you,” I say. He is growing smaller still. I am so clumsy. My neck bangs against the ceiling. My kneecaps shoulder the door shut. This will alert them, I know. Doors are only shut after you here. “If we’re lucky we could be like radiolaria,” I say, “and become something really beautiful. They’re plankton and when they die, the cells disintegrate and they form pretty shells which almost always become fossils. Wouldn’t that be something nice to happen after we’re dead?”

  No one answers. “Oh, Grady,” I say, “I don’t mean that. You musn’t believe what I mean. We don’t want anything to do with that oceanic ooze. Listen, Grady,” I say brightly. “Remember the river fog, the way it would come in the middle of the day and make things so bright and sharp, not at all like New England fog which hushes everything up. Remember how pretty everything was?”

  I never cared for it myself but I am host to Grady’s loves. It is his world that is lacking in this ward, not mine. You’ve done the same I�
�m sure. For love. For the lingering. “You always loved me up so well, Grady,” I say.

  No one says anything. My words are cumbersome as my sprawling body. I try to pull myself away from him but I am so monstrous now, I am so vast, and my words lie with us beneath the sheets, resting on Grady, pushing my Grady down. Between the bandages he is naked. In his prick is a long plastic rod, flat on the end like a golf tee. I kiss him. So lightly. And yet … a crust of flesh returns on my lips. I embrace him. So slightly. And yet my arms return coated with something like natural shinola. His hair is cold as though he had come out of the snow.

  “Oh, love,” I say, “let’s begin again. Let’s be good to each other and careful with each other.”

  Grady is deciding what to do … “if left my mind, I’ve life in a way; it would be worth the pain” … that’s the bun they try to peddle here. Baking in their brain pans daily. “Nothing’s too hard to endure but Death,” they shout over the racket of the machine shop as they discreate a hand, a foot, a nostril or perhaps a neck even though who knows it was just a mole that itched a bit, nothing that couldn’t have been helped by scratching. But Life’s the dish served here. As for drama, there’s not much. After all, if you won’t have that, there’s not a soul, licensed or what, who can help you. They wheel it in and drop it off. There it is. You regard it slowly. Oh, of course take your time, they say (and there’s little else to take at that point, they’ve got you at that point). And you say, May I take it into my privacies and look it over? May I have it and return it if displeased with no loss to me? Well, there’s a charge for that, they say. Well.

  But my Grady will decide what to do. Watching him, my breasts ache as though I was in the days of weaning all my children. Even though I have none. Even though I am swollen with waiting. My head and stomach are tight as a drum and pounding with the waiting.

  Grady turns his head a bit. Something black runs erratically out from someplace in his head. At first it doesn’t matter. It comes and goes. I can’t even remember it beginning, that’s how slight it was at first. In less than a minute, however, it overwhelms everything here, even though it is hardly anything, a trickle, very tiny, and a dull black. In less than a minute again it becomes a lake, very miniature, but enough to flood this room, and although I am here (or rather, although my stomach is here, my mountainous stomach spraddling this tiny bed), I dare not move for to do so would be to crush thousands of weeping invisible things, for the air is full of them. For this shrinking room where my Grady lies, into which an assault of personnel are coming to take me away, is crowded with things infinitesimal. Things annihilable and yet without end. Like the pain the evil suffered in Daddy’s pulpit hell, there is no limit to their reduction. And the very least of their reductions has a weight that the mind can’t bear—

  It all stops. Three nurses come in. They are actually a little larger than I. The room becomes quite ordinary. White. Airy. I see the lacing of one of Grady’s boots trailing out of the closet locker. There’s a breeze and it shakes the shade. The nurses are very angry. Two I’ve seen before. One depilates her arms, but only to the elbows. The other is the novice who gave me the substitute gum. The third does all the talking.

  “How did you get in here! It’s quite apparent that there’s to be no one here. You have to get a pass at the desk and the pass must be punched. It’s only good for the other floors. There are no passes accepted on this floor.”

  “Oh please,” I say, crawling from the bed. “There’s something there on the pillow. Something that’s come from his head. Please.”

  “That’s our concern,” she says.

  “You’d better straighten up and start breathing deeper,” the shaved girl says, “or that baby of yours is going to come out harder than a watermelon.”

  “That’s right,” the talking one says, “you’ve got to think of those who haven’t had their living yet. Put the other affairs behind you. Last summer I worked in the birthing ward and each night I’d go home, I’d like to tell you, with a song in my heart.”

  32

  I try to think of the baby once and for all but things keep getting in the way. I know this is my only chance, to think about him now, before he comes. I try to think of his needs. Things that I can buy that will define him.

  I forced myself to go into a store. But I was stymied by a bib. A tiny drooling bib. And then a small washcloth. No bigger than a saucer. I stared and stared. I couldn’t think. Women came and went with casual assurance. Salespeople asked me again and again what I wanted. At last I was asked to leave.

  It was not a success. Except for one thing. I learned one thing. Hidden beneath its blouse, each Raggedy Ann doll has I LOVE YOU printed in a heart upon its chest. I think that is one thing that more people should know.

  33

  It’s June third. Where has the time gone? Sometimes you can hear it overtaking you, making, while passing, small crunches, like owls breaking the backbones of mice. There’s certainly nothing subtle about it.

  I’ve always disliked this date. It’s an anniversary of course, everything is. And every day brings back to mind something mean or blue. The man on the radio reminds one of this continually. Just before daybreak, the last caller calls in. Yes. The lady caller says,

  “The parakeets nest each night in my punk trees and are driving me crazy and what can I do?”

  “Action Line” is a little annoyed. After all, he’s answered this before, but he gives the proper reply as always and then it’s sign-off time, preceded by one minute of “On This Date.”

  “Eleven years ago today,” he says, “a nurse shark in the Durban Aquarium threw up a human arm before the distressed eyes of visiting schoolchildren.”

  On this date, the Japanese beetle was introduced to this country.

  And 135 people simultaneously went mad in Sverdlovsk U.S.S.R. after eating rolls from a dirty bakery.

  Then they stop transmitting. The man goes home, I suppose.

  Well, I want to tell you something.

  On June 3, 1844, on the island of Eldey, off Iceland’s southwestern coast, a nesting pair of auks were killed by Jon Brandsson and Sigourour Isleffson. Their single egg was smashed by Ketil Ketilsson and the great auk was forever lost to the world.

  A CRIME AGAINST NATURE. At last, the proper use of the term. No one speaks any more about crimes against God. Perhaps they never did. And the auks were good creatures. Not wicked, like the types that attempt to defend themselves. As for the men, I imagine they had good teeth, warm clothing and sweethearts. Now where has all the time gone with them safe in their graves? I have heard that others wanted to claim the distinction. But were not accepted. Turned down by diligent research. Like the Hiroshima pilot, everyone wants a piece of the pie.

  It’s seven o’clock and the sun has come up as usual like a picture postcard. It’s June third, come around again for the first time. With just a slight dislocation, I feel that things could be better. A small act of substitution could make up our life. But the variance never comes. Each day has only enough difference in it to make what you’ve already learned unnecessary. We’re all left out of the years that might make the difference. Not scheduled. Scratched. We’re all just pieces of marbly meat, with great margins of white to our lives, not off to the sides where they belong, but running right through our best days.

  Grady’s sleeping. They say it’s only sometimes that he sleeps. Other moments he’s doing something else. It takes a conscientious eye, however. It takes a practiced witness to tell the difference and I am neither. His lips rest on my face. His breathing whispers to me but it is almost impossible to understand. It rises in despaired intensity. I try to calm him by placing his hand inside my blouse. My nipples are shiny and like glass. His fingers fumble and slip off them. They are so bright. Like hard little spoons. Once I looked intently at them myself and found reflected there a child, baking obscene cupcakes. It’s only a toy oven but, nonetheless, everything works.

  I kiss him. My mouth is tired. My lip
s swollen, my gums faintly metallic. I practiced my cornet for two hours one evening but that was more than nine years ago and surely my lip would not be exhausted still. I was a child then and now I am of course a married pregnant lady, waiting for deliverance and stinking dimly of milk. For weeks now I have been awakened by the cold wet sheet of my bed and the sight of my poor wilted breast, the left, squashed as a tube of toothpaste carelessly employed.

  Deftly, I unbutton my blouse further and slip out a breast. I feed it to his cheek, hoping he’ll root for it, not that it would give him any nourishment certainly but it might mean something. But the gesture’s dry as my tit once was and someone comes in and interrupts the moment. I can tell they’re not going to like me in this place. They don’t like my attitude and they despise my circumstances. As Father said (of course about himself), easy to calumniate but difficult to imitate. And I’m my father’s daughter, born and bred in his love.

  Father, of course, was the one who alerted me to this date, albeit in another season. He mentioned it at Mother’s service and drove the congregation wild. He said, FOR THAT WHICH BEFALLETH THE SONS OF MEN BEFALLETH BEASTS AS THE ONE DIES SO DIES THE OTHER THEY HAVE ALL ONE BREATH SO THAT A MAN HAS NO PRE-EMINENCE ABOVE A BEAST FOR ALL IS VANITY.

  The people protested but it was difficult to disagree. Father quotes everything more or less, and is impeccable in his sources. The souls on that island were simple, good-hearted, ordinarily vicious. All they ever had were boats to catch fish from and a pot to cook the catch and a ballroom in the center of town where a five-piece band played monthly. They knew that all was worthless and that they were lost but they didn’t want to be as lost as the animals they shot. That was asking too much. Because they knew how they died. And they knew that their hides whipped from car antennaes and rotted on mud-room floors. They didn’t want any part of that.