Then he was at the door.
“Catherine,” he said softly. “Are you asleep?”
She closed her eyes and tried to pretend, but her chest was heavy, and the plate was tilting.
“Catherine,” he said, alarmed. “Can’t you get your breath?”
She opened her eyes and said, “How’s Mother?”
He sat down on the bed, and it dipped deeply under his weight. He took her hand. “Catherine, don’t pretend.” He paused. “I tried to pretend your mother would have a miracle. That’s what I prayed for. But I have to tell you and Donny. Dr. Higgins says it won’t be long now. He says we ought to go to the hospital where they can keep her more comfortable.”
Catherine cried till she thought she’d choke and vomit. Her father quietly moved the plate of beans and hot dogs and set it on the plank floor. Then he gathered her into his burly arms.
“For her sake,” he said, “we got to bear up. If we can. That’s about all you can do for your folks, Cat, when they’re dying. Bear up.”
Later her father helped her off with her school dress and into her pajamas. While he undressed and dressed her, he closed his eyes, and he averted his face, too. The slow way her father moved his arms—she could tell how sad he was. Tired to the bone.
THAT NIGHT WHEN the house was sleeping, Catherine slid out of her bed onto the floor. She puddled down onto her knees, slowly and softly. Donny had not come home, she was sure of that. But she knew where he was. He was in the barn, in the hayloft. He was covered with hay and warm and sleeping. Even in his dreams, he knew that she knew where he was. Catherine began to crawl toward the sound of her parents’ tandem snoring.
Crawling was almost as difficult as walking. It was more unfamiliar and slower. But she couldn’t fall when she crawled. She tried grasping the legs of heavy chairs, and she tried to hold on tight and to pull herself toward the chair, but her grip was too weak. In the end, she could do little more than undulate her torso, arch and heave her back forward, like an inchworm.
She heard the mantel clock strike once and knew it was half past some hour.
She was cold on the floor, and wondered, if she could regain her feet, if they might not suddenly work, the way they did sometimes, and if she might not walk like a mechanical doll across the room. But she could not hope to regain her feet. The balancing act of stacking bones on top of bones would be too difficult.
The mantel clock cleared its throat and then struck on and on. It must be the number twelve, she thought, clanging through the night. The clock threw out hoops of sound, widening and large as brass Hula-Hoops as they clattered down to the wooden floor. She stretched her hand out to feel the woolly edge of an area rug. She let her fingers stroke its nap as the last bong clattered down. Slowly she wormed her way forward till her whole body was resting on the rug.
Then she worked her way beyond the rug, first her hands and forearms, then her torso, then finally not even her bare toes were on the wool.
The clock struck twelve-thirty: a single bong.
Ahead was the large braided rug in front of the fireplace. Another island, she thought. And I’m swimming over the boards. Not an island, a continent, and I will reach the shore. The embers in the fire grate beckoned to her. A bonfire on the headland, she thought.
The clock struck once again, but she was fatigued and could not remember if it was one or one-thirty. But her fingers touched the scalloped edge of the braided rug. When she reached the middle of the rug, she lay flat and absorbed some of the heat from the fireplace. Perhaps she dozed a little, but when consciousness returned, the dark stillness of the house welcomed her. It was a welcome—her home at night, but still her home—a mysterious welcome of shades of gray and black.
When she reached the side of her mother’s bed, she saw her mother’s hand hanging limply over the edge. Once she scooted close enough, she reached up easily and took the hand. She could not squeeze but perhaps she could pull. No, her hand slid out of her mother’s. Lifting her hand again, Cat fitted the palm of her hand against her mother’s palm. She butted the relaxed hand, the way a calf might butt its mother’s udder.
Finally, her mother spoke. “Catherine?” she said. Her voice had the texture of a china plate, its glaze crazed with innumerable spider cracks.
“Mama,” she whispered. “I can’t walk.”
“You can’t walk?” her mother asked feebly, incredulous, displeased.
“Only sometimes.”
Her mother was silent. Catherine waited. She feared her mother might have gone back to sleep. “How are you?” Catherine asked.
Her mother took a long slow breath. It was a smooth breath, and it seemed to Catherine that her mother was pulling air up the slope of a long hill.
“Better,” her mother said.
Catherine couldn’t find her own words. She didn’t know what to think. Finally she heard herself say, “That’s good.”
“Can you climb up here in the bed?” her mother asked.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then I’ll push a pillow off for you. Let’s not bother your father. He’s so tired.”
Her mother paused as though to gather her thoughts.
“I know,” Catherine encouraged.
“Crawl under the bed,” her mother said. “I’ll work the pillow over the edge in a little bit.” She breathed three quick breaths, as though she were panting. “You can sleep under the bed till morning. Then we’ll see what can be done.”
Catherine began a sideways inching toward the bed. When she was parallel to the bedframe, she slowly rolled onto her back. Needing to rest, she lay there beside the long plank of the bedframe and stared at the ceiling. Soon she would scootch sideways till she was under the bed. She wanted to sleep on her back. The soft pillow dropped down on her chest.
“I have it,” she said.
Her mother didn’t answer.
She was asleep, Catherine supposed. She removed the soft pillow from her chest and slid it under the bed. Already her hands told her how pleasant it would be to rest her head among the feathers. She cocked a leg so that one knee thrust up in the air, and the sole of her foot was flat against the floor. She pushed hard, and again. She visualized her head on the pillow, and all at once the back of her head was on the pillow. Cat felt safe under the bed, on her back. It was a house inside the house. A house with a very low ceiling. No one could sit up in such a house. It was for lying down, for resting.
IN THE MORNING, Cat saw her mother’s bare legs hanging over the bed. Her nightgown must have hiked up.
“Harvey,” her mother said, “come help me get up, please. I want to fix breakfast, and then we need to take Catherine to Dr. Higgins.”
“Olivia!” her father said. “Olivia! Do you feel like getting up!” He was excited.
Cat heard his feet hit the floor, and he hurried around the foot of the bed. She saw his pajama legs standing beside her, and his bare feet. Long ago, his little toe had been dislocated and it was reared back in a fleshy curl.
“Just help me,” she said. “I’ve not stood up so long, I’m ’fraid I might fall.”
Catherine watched the tips of her mother’s toes test the floor, and then the balls of her wan feet settled down, and she flattened the arch and her heels on the boards.
“Now pull,” her mother said. “Gently. Not too fast now, Harvey.”
Her mother’s nightgown unwrinkled and fell down around her ankles, a cascade of white flannel with small blue roses printed all over. Flanking each rose were two tiny green leaves.
“Help me to the chair,” her mother said. And she sank softly into it. “I’d like my robe, please.” And he got it for her.
From under the bed, Catherine watched the hem of the robe swish by and the swaying tail of its dark green belt; the robe was the quilted maroon satin one that she and Donny had given Mother last Christmas, and the piping on the shawl collar and the deep cuffs was dark green to match the sash. The robe was very lightweight, as though the whi
te batting of the lining was more made of air than of threads.
“Now,” her mother said, “help Catherine up.” Her father started for the door, but her mother said quickly with a chuckle, “Harvey, she’s under the bed.”
“What?”
“Look under the bed,” and now her mother was laughing a little, as though they’d played a good joke on her father.
Suddenly, his face was upside down, looking at her.
“Well I’ll be durned,” he said. Then he got down on one knee and reached out both arms. “Just like sliding a drawer out of a chifforobe,” he said.
It took two hours, but her mother cooked and they got dressed for town. As they approached the car, Donny came walking from the barn. He slid into the backseat next to Catherine. He patted the back of her hand. She always braced herself now, when she rode in the car: one hand on each side to help her keep her balance.
“I guess we’re going to the doctor?” Donny said.
Cat nodded.
“Soon you’ll be better.”
But Dr. Higgins said he really couldn’t tell what was wrong. “Neurological disorder,” he said. “Or a different strand of polio.”
He advised them to drive on to Carraway Methodist in Birmingham, and he would phone ahead.
“What do you make of Olivia?” her father asked. “Ought she check in, too?”
“See how she feels when you get there,” Dr. Higgins answered. He surveyed her through his rimless spectacles held on with slender silver wires that ran from the lenses to curve around the backs of his ears. “Looks to me like Olivia’s in a remission.”
SO THE BIRMINGHAM DOCTORS began their tests to determine the cause of Catherine’s debilitating weakness and lack of balance. The family sold the farm after a few months and moved to the city. Don was going on nineteen; he graduated from high school in the country and then started college in Birmingham. “I’ll borrow the money,” he quietly told his father. “They’ll let me.” He spoke with enough emphasis to cause his father suddenly to focus again on his son.
Cat was fourteen. They tried resting her in an iron lung. They tried hydrotherapy.
With her new silver crutches, she walked in the front door of Phillips High School, her brother and her father on either side of her, walking slowly. At home, Mother studied the house to make things more and more convenient for Catherine. “Why don’t you saw the legs off the bed?” she asked Don, “and then Cat can get in by herself.” And Don had said, “I’ll hang a trapeze from the ceiling, too, for her to hold to.” Their father worked all night at his night watchman job and slept most of the day. On Sundays, sometimes, they would drive back to the country and visit with family or friends they used to know.
A month before their first Birmingham Christmas, the Cartwright men left the females in the car to ask the board of their old church to help them buy a wheelchair for Catherine. Not that she would use it all the time, but just when they had a distance to cover. Cat could imagine what they had said almost as if she had been present and listening.
“So she can go shopping,” her father would have said wistfully to the minister, just as if they had enough loose money for the daughter of the family to shop for fun.
The minister would want to know what was wrong with Catherine, and what they would do with the wheelchair when she got better.
Donny would speak up and say, “She’s not going to get better. She’ll get slowly worse.” He would tell the truth.
“Why what’s wrong with her?” the minister would ask.
Father would look helplessly at Donny, who would explain, “They don’t understand it, but it has a name—Friedreich’s ataxia.”
“It’s rare,” their father would add.
(Later, Don told Catherine, with just a whiff of irony in his voice, that their father took strange comfort in that fact. “He told the minister,” Don said, “ ‘She has a rare disease that’s got a name and that’s all. They don’t have any cure yet.’ ”)
When Christmas was only a week away, Mother told Cat and Father that she didn’t want to give Don but one thing for Christmas, and it would be in the toe of his stocking. She asked if they could guess what that gift might be. Catherine was shocked by the question, but she knew if she just sat in the wheelchair and waited a moment, from deep in her psyche the answer would come. “Wait,” she said to her mother. “Let me think.”
She thought about the essence of her mother, and the phrase “the bowels of compassion” came to her. She thought of Donny, and the term was “self-sacrificing.”
Suddenly she reached down and released the brakes of her chair. In case she broke down and cried, before she cried, she wanted to be able to make a fast getaway.
“It’s a key,” she said. “A key for a little apartment all his own. Let’s do it.” And she wheeled away.
“He can’t afford any apartment,” their father was saying.
“Yes, he can,” her mother said. “I’ve found one, and it’s close by. It has a Murphy bed in the wall, so it’s just one room and a kitchenette and a bath.”
Catherine made it into the kitchen, where she took deep, long breaths to try to control her panic.
Faintly, she heard her mother’s continuing explanation. “Don’s going to get an after-school job, and he can use the money to pay the rent. After we get him started, help him just one month.”
“I thought he wanted to save for a car,” the father said.
“No,” she answered. “He can ride the bus. He needs a place of his own. I won’t have him sacrificing his life to us.”
That night, Catherine lay in her bed and listened to the city noises. She liked it when a siren shrieked. Maybe it was for her. Maybe it was coming to save her. The tears rolled out of her eyes. That her brother needed to leave home, that he had to leave home! She felt ashamed. She felt the cup of herself filling with loneliness. Never for a minute did she want him not to have his own place. For the first time, she thought, I hate my body, I hate it. Then she told herself, It’s not me. It’s not the real me. The real me is my mind and my spirit.
She knew how it would be on Christmas morning. Don would go to his red-and-white peppermint-striped Christmas stocking. (Her own was winter-green and white.) He would see that it was mostly limp, but with a pointy weight in the toe. When he reached in, he would not believe what his fingers told him without seeing, but when he drew out the key, he would know, he would know immediately, and his face would ignite into the happiest smile she had ever seen.
There was a fire someplace in the city, and she heard the clanging of a bell added to the howl of a siren. Keep them safe, she prayed. Staring at the ceiling, she wondered where God was in her life. The ceiling promised nothing for them, for her. She felt that she needed an afterlife; that after this thwarting, she deserved to have something and not nothing. All her life she would be robbed, increasingly, of her power. Then she thought in biblical terms, not to God, but to her body, I will contend with thee.
When the real Christmas Day came, Cat saw a mysterious, loopy bulge in her own stocking. It seemed ridged like a skein of stiff rope or starched yarn. Mother unhooked the stocking from the mantel and handed it to her. She drew out an extension cord, looped like a figure eight, tying itself in the middle.
“It’s the electric cord to your new typewriter,” her mother said.
“Look, Sister,” Don said, holding the brass door key in his hand. He gestured toward where their father was standing. Father whisked off a Christmas tablecloth, and there near the window was a low, handmade table. It had a stained and varnished plywood surface with a large cutout, so a person in a wheelchair could drive right into her desk. And on the tabletop sat a big electric typewriter. Electric! How she had labored to form legible letters for her essays. On an electric keyboard, you barely had to push down.
“You can write your school papers on it,” her mother said.
AFTER THEY WERE SETTLED in the city, after both Cat and Don had finished their freshman yea
rs in high school and in college, their mother suddenly and unexpectedly died in her bed.
Looking for comfort, his face bathed in tears, her father said, “She had her remission. She got that. She got her remission.” Then he asked Cat to phone Donny. “You’ve got to tell him,” he said. “I can’t.”
AFTER HER MOTHER’S DEATH, Catherine tried again to love her body—her mother had. She tried to believe that human beings were a holy trinity—body, mind, and soul. It was easy to believe in the last two, but was she really this person who spilled things and lost her balance, who bumped into things, who couldn’t get up without a heroic effort, who dreaded the ordeal of getting on and off a toilet?
Murmuring compliments, she tried to bribe her body. Not only to appease it with lotions, but also to value and flatter her good points: her nice eyes, after all, were a part of her body. And her lips were nice—pleasantly full. Her hair could look shiny, if not curled in the latest flip style. She had tried the pink plastic cage curlers; she had tried the soft blue sponge ones with the white clip bar, but neither type was manageable. Her ears were small and delicate—“like seashells,” her mother used to say. And she was a straight-A student—but with that consoling thought, she was slipping away from the body inventory into the realm of the mind. Well, she had a fine brain for thinking, if haywire in the motor control department.
In her bedroom, each morning, she sat before the long dime-store mirror hung low on the wall and started again: “You have nice eyes, bright blue, and the eyebrows are arched naturally in a pretty peak.” She smiled at herself. “Keep your lips closed, so the slight gap between the front two teeth doesn’t show.” Rolling closer to the mirror, she inspected the mossiness on her teeth near the gum line and wished they made electric toothbrushes.
Even in college, she kept up the ritual of addressing herself in the morning, of saying something positive to her body to start the day. The day of graduation, she told herself, “You did it, you gorgeous woman! You earned a college degree.” And Stella would come over to help her put on the black robe over her dress. When she and Stella got jobs teaching at the night school, she told the mirror, “You are a gainfully employed human being. You are an adult.”