Pause while she draws a ragged breath. None of us speaks. Moe, with his eyes on Sally’s face, gropes his coffee down blindly, feeling for the saucer.
—She paid the bills, too—just went to the office and settled the whole thing and asked them to send any further bills to her. Larry was upset, but my goodness, how much she took off our minds! He got her to take his note for it, and later for a lot more she advanced us. We were years paying it back, and every time we’d send a few hundred dollars they’d act as if we were some kind of paragons of honesty, as if nobody ever heard of people who tried to pay back a precious debt.
—I never heard any of that. It sounds like Mom.
—Like both of them. He’d write me these letters full of news and funny little poems, and snapshots of Lang, and sound as if it was a privilege to take care of all those children while he was starting a new term. Nearly every day, something to cheer me up. Then when the doctors said my best chance of getting back some muscular control was Warm Springs, that really sunk us, it was so utterly impossible. This was the Depression, remember, there wasn’t any unemployment insurance, or health care, or anything. Larry didn’t even have a job. But Charity and Sid just jumped at it. Yes! they said. Do it, whatever it costs. Don’t worry about costs. So Larry took me to Georgia, and at first I was terribly depressed. My legs were gone, and one hand not much use, and I was surrounded by people as bad off or worse, people who gave me an idea of what I could expect my life to be like. Some parts of the therapy were all right, but some were so rough and callous they almost killed me. They’d put you on a treadmill, for instance, with rails to hold on to, and you were supposed to try to walk. There was a nurse behind you with a hand in your belt, but she never kept you from falling. They were careless, they didn’t hang on tight. We all fell. I found out later they did that on purpose, to harden your will. Unless you’d grit your teeth and take any amount of punishment and failure and still go on trying, they knew you’d never improve. I was so discouraged I cried all the time, and when Charity heard that, she abandoned the family again, and came down. When they put me on the treadmill she was right there to help me and encourage me. She made me try, and try, and try. I never did get so I could walk, but I got more control in other ways. There was a boy there, about seventeen, a high school athlete from Chicago, a very nice boy. They hoisted him up and tried to make him start again, and he wouldn’t. He just hung there with his teeth in his lip and tears running down his face. He never did get on again, and after a while they sent him home. He’s written me for years. He’s lived ever since in a wheelchair.
The tranced voice pauses, the tranced eyes become aware of what they see. Sally blinks, and sends a startled, apologetic-defiant look around the table. She laughs, a strangled little hiccup. We are all silent. Surely Hallie and Moe never heard anything like this passionate rush of feeling from Sally. I never did either, not in public, nowhere except once in a while in bed when she has awakened from a dream to find herself still imprisoned in her helpless flesh.
—So who was wonderful? I was just a crippled thing that had to be made to want to live. They made me—Charity especially, but both of them. I had to live, out of pure gratitude.
The girl looks out again, gets a nod from Hallie, and begins loading dishes on a tray. Sally, her thin shoulders pulled together, sits stiffly, her eyes downcast and her breath uneven. Her hands, the half-clenched one on top, are folded in her lap, in the sun. Her feet are quiet on the metal step of the chair, also in the sun. But her face is in the shade that moves and changes with the movement of leaves up above.
—I’m ashamed. For years now we haven’t been as close as we used to be. I let myself get irritated at her way of taking charge of everything. I thought she was a tyrant to all of you in the family. I still do. But I shouldn’t have ever let myself forget what a wonderfully unselfish friend she has been. I should have had the grace to forgive what I knew she couldn’t help. We parted almost as if we weren’t friends, and it’s been eight years.
She sits. Her eyes go quickly around from one to another of us. She forces the tension out of her lips and cheeks; the kore smile tries to return. But something will not quite loosen. Under the returning placidity some tight muscle gives her expression a shadow of sternness. Her eyes lift, and fix themselves on Hallie.
“Tell me exactly how she is. Is she in pain? I can’t tell from her letters.”
“If she was, she wouldn’t let on. But I don’t think so. Stomach cancer is supposed to be less painful than other kinds. Of course, it’s metastasized, it’s all through her now. Earlier this summer, just in case, she and David did some meditation training—controlling pain by a sort of self-hypnosis. I don’t know if she’s had to use it. I do know she hasn’t taken any pain-killers. Won’t.”
“No. I remember when she was having David, she didn’t even want any ether. She wanted to experience everything. She isn’t afraid, is she?”
“Not a bit. She’s incredible. The other day we were talking, and somebody—Nick, I guess, he was still here—forgot for a minute how things were, it was such an ordinary kind of family conversation, and asked her how she was going to vote in November. You know what she said? She looked at him with her eyebrows cocked in that way she has, and her eyes just dancing, you’d have thought she was letting some happy secret out of the bag, and said ‘Absentee.’ We cracked up, we couldn’t help it. No, you’re absolutely right. She wants to experience everything, and she won’t be shortchanged. You know how she likes to plan. Well, she’s planning this the same way. She’s like a choreographer, every little step is plotted out. Even . . .”
Hesitation. “What?” Sally says.
“Better not,” Moe says.
“Oh, they have to know! I hate it, I can’t bear to think about it. But she’s already signed the papers. She’s willed her body to the organ bank of the Hitchcock Clinic in Hanover. God, I just . . . I blew up when she told me. I said, ‘Mom, who wants a sixty-year-old kidney or a pair of sixty-year-old corneas? You’re doing this for some theoretical reason. It’ll torture us. Let your poor body go in peace.’ But she says she wants to be a good steward. Whatever’s worn out can be cremated and go back to the earth, but whatever’s still useful ought to be used by someone who needs it.”
Indignant tears stand in her eyes. She bends her head and puts her fist to her lips, then looks up, laughs, shakes her head. Sally, from her edge of shade, looks out broodingly as if from a cave.
“She’s really getting ready.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Oh, I wish she’d let me know sooner! We should have come weeks ago. It’s what she would have done for me. But she sounded as if it was under control.”
“She’s known since May. But there was a remission, it just seemed to mark time. She didn’t want to worry you.”
“She knew I couldn’t do anything,” Sally says, with a sad mouth. “She’d have been trying to look after me.” She broods at the crumpled napkin in her hand as if she can’t make up her mind what it is or how it came there. Then she lays it on the table. “When can we see her?”
“Anytime.”
“Won’t they be having lunch?”
“She hardly eats anything. Dad generally has just a sandwich at noon. She said bring you when you’re rested and have eaten.” She looks at her watch. “We’ve got a couple of errands to do before the picnic. We’ll leave you there and meet you later, on the hill. So anytime you’re ready.”
“I should make a couple of telephone calls,” Moe says. “Maybe now is the time.”
Sally reaches for her canes and props them against her chair. Moe leaps up, but I sit still, because I can see that she is still brooding, not ready to move. I know what she is doing. She is looking, in her steady way, at what we have until now pretty well covered over with a mulch of nostalgia.
Hallie, thinking aloud, says, “Moe, you’d better make those calls. I want to talk to Clara, too. Would you two mind waiting just a few minutes?”
/> “Of course not,” I say. Sally says nothing, sitting stiffly and staring into the past or the future, whichever it is that oppresses her.
Hallie has paused in mid-departure, watching Sally’s face. “Is something wrong? Can I do anything?”
Sally lifts her eyes, huge wide-spaced eyes in a face whose skin is tightly stretched on its bones. The slight pucker in her forehead smooths out, the plane of her cheek softens, the look that only seconds before glared out like the high beam of a headlight is shuttered and focused down.
“Nobody can do anything,” she says. “It’s the way things are.”
Left without anything to do but mutter agreement, Hallie and Moe delay awkwardly for a moment and then excuse themselves. We sit on. Sally blots her eyes one after the other with a knuckle.
“I guess I was hoping I’d wake up and find it wasn’t so.”
“It seems to be closer than we thought.”
“It’s hard to take in, there are so many reminders. She lives so. She’s everywhere you look. Did you notice the dishes?”
“Cantigalli, weren’t they?”
“Yes. From Florence. Remember the day we went with her to buy them?”
“Was I along?”
“Sure. We went out to the factory. She bought sets and sets of them. Later they arrived in Hanover in three big barrels.”
“I take your word for it.”
“You can. I haven’t forgotten one hour of that year.”
“A year without housework.”
“Oh, more than that! That year was all spring, even when it snowed. Every so often I wake up and that little poem of Lorenzo’s is running through my head. Remember? The one they teach to every tourist?
Quant’ è bella giovinezza
Che si fugge tuttavia”
She shakes her head. “Youth did flee, too, but that year we were young—that was the second year. The first was Madison. Before that it was all kind of gray, and since then it’s been mainly hanging on. Is that the way it’s been for you? But that year in Florence we were young. Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.”
“Che si fuggono,” I say, and then, because I don’t want to add to her desolate mood, I say, “You weren’t the first to find your youth there. Remember Goethe? Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen? And Milton? When he couldn’t stand any more English winters and English politics you know what he’d do? He’d eat an olive to remind him of Italy.”
“I don’t need any olives,” Sally says.
4
Once, at a Cambridge dinner party, I had an imaginary debate with the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who was holding forth on upward mobility. He called it “vertical peristalsis in society.” Obviously he liked the phrase; he thought he had invented something pretty good.
Since he had been born nameless in a nameless Russian village and had risen to become a member of the Council of the Russian Republic and secretary to Prime Minister Kerensky, I granted that he knew more about upward mobility than I did. I had only my own limited experience to generalize from, and three martinis to make me skeptical of other evidence. But I didn’t like his metaphor, and muttered to the lady on my left that social scientists should stick to semantically aseptic language, and leave metaphor to people who understood it.
Peristalsis, I informed this lady or someone else, consists of rhythmic contractions in a tube, such as the gut, that force matter in the tube to move along. In Sorokin’s trope, society was the tube and the individual the matter to be moved, and the tube did the work of moving him. I thought the individual had something to do with moving himself, not necessarily rhythmically.
And why that word “vertical”? Man being an upright animal, at least in his posture, any peristalsis he had going was bound to be vertical, unless we conceived him to be lying down, which there was no reason to do.
Finally, I had the impression that normal peristalsis worked downward, not upward. Upward peristalsis was reverse peristalsis, whose name was emesis. Did Professor Sorokin mean to suggest that he had been vomited up into revolutionary prominence, and later into an international reputation and a distinguished position on the Harvard faculty? Probably he didn’t. But there was no way out of his metaphorical difficulty. He couldn’t extricate himself by reversing directions and accepting the normal alimentary flow, for that not only ruined his upward metaphor but left him looking even worse than if he had been vomited up.
Professor Sorokin never figured in my life. I had never seen him before that night and I never saw him afterward; and our argument never took place except in my head and out of the corner of my mouth. But we had just returned from a Guggenheim year in Italy, and in Italy I had discovered, rather to my surprise, that I had myself been ferociously upward-mobile since my first day in school. In reducing my strenuous life to a social inevitability, and giving it that taint of routine communal digestion, Sorokin insulted me where I lived.
Until Italy, I had been too busy to notice what I was. I was learning, and interested in the learning. Or I was diving into a hole and pulling the hole in after me. Or I was simply trying to survive. But even in our most oppressed times, I was a cork held under, my impulse was always up.
According to Aunt Emily’s theories, I should probably have been led to walk in my father’s footsteps. I loved him, we got along, I worked off and on in the shop. There was no reason why I should not succeed him as proprietor and make a life out of transmissions, brake bands, ring jobs, lube jobs, yard chores, neighborhood barbecues, baseball, and beer. But I had no intention, ever, of doing that. It wasn’t snobbishness. I was never ashamed of him. Nothing in dusty Albuquerque led me to envious comparisons. I just expected more than Albuquerque offered. I took it for granted. And everybody important to me—my parents, my teachers, my professors in college, Sally when we met in Berkeley, and for that matter the Langs when we met in Madison—made the same assumption. I was headed somewhere.
Without knowing what I was after, I pursued it with the blind singlemindedness of a sperm hunting its target egg—now there is a metaphor I will accept. For a long time it was dark, and all I could do was swim for my life. Union and consummation finally took place in the fourth-floor front room of the Pensione Vespucci, an old palazzo on the Lungarno a little below the American consulate in Florence. There, one September morning, it hit me that things were altogether other than what they had been for a long time. Wherever it was that we were going, we had arrived, or at least come into the clear road.
Usually the bells from churches over on Bellosguardo awoke us at six, but this morning I awoke earlier, before dawn. For a while I lay on my back and sent my ears abroad in search of what had brought me awake. But I heard nothing, not the slightest whisper of rumore from the street that was practically never silent, no switching of trains in the stony distance, no bells or whistles, no snarl of a Vespa starting off up some alley, no footsteps on bare stone, no stir of our awakening house communicating itself through marble and plaster, no voices of early fishermen down in the trough of the river.
Nothing but Sally’s soft purr beside me and the ticking of the clock, sounds so near and comfortable and reassuring that they accentuated the hush into which they fell. In the bed that was still strange to me I lay listening for outside sounds that I was not sure I could interpret, and I had a thrilling sense of the safety of hereness and the close dark. It didn’t really matter what noise out there had caught my sleeping ear. Sally breathed quietly beside me. The clock ticked us toward morning.
Then I woke up another notch. Clock? We had no clock. Then what was I hearing? Holding my breath, I listened. Tick-tick-ticket-tick-tickety-tick-tick, not one clock but many, unsynchronized. I brought my watch to my ear: inaudible an inch away. But the faint, hurrying, ratchety, dry ticking went on.
Folding back the covers, I went to the French doors, opened one, and stepped out onto the roof terrace. The night was lighter than the room, and the ticking was much louder,
hastier, its rhythms more broken—such a sound as several children might make running sticks at different speeds along a picket fence a block away. I went to the balustrade and looked down into the street, and ecco, there it came, a bobbing line of lanterns that curved off the Vittoria Bridge and came on up the Lungarno toward the city. Every lantern swung from a two-wheeled cart, and beside every cart walked a man, and drawing every cart was a donkey whose hasty feet ticked on the pavement.
The swinging lanterns threw exaggerated shadows of spoked wheels, scissoring legs, and long donkey ears onto the stone parapet of the river. Below the pattering and ticking of hoofs, now that sounds were not partly cut off by the jut of the roof, I heard the grit and grate of iron tires on pavement, the squeak of axles, scattered talk, a laugh. When someone stopped to light a cigarette, his face bloomed red for a moment in the flare of the match.
I sprang back inside, stopping long enough to unlatch the other half of the doors and leave both sides standing open. When I snapped on the bed light, Sally lifted her head. “What is it?”
“I’m going to pick you up,” I said. “The quilt too. Up we go.”
I scooped her out of the bed, gathered the quilt over her legs, and started for the doors. “But what is it?” she cried, alarmed. “Is there a fire? What’s the matter?”
“No fire,” I said. “No time either. I might be gone. You’ve got to see it.”
On the balustrade I set her down, wrapped the quilt around her, and got my arm around her to hold her. Her arm came around my neck before she dared look down.
I needn’t have worried that the procession would be over. It was still ticking and grating past, a half mile of moving lights and half-seen shapes of men and donkeys and loaded carts that constantly renewed itself off the bridge.