Part II: A Past That Is Also a Future — INTERMEZZO - The Time Traveler's Wife

Wednesday, August 12, 1998 (Clare is 27)

Clare: Mama is asleep, finally. She sleeps in her own bed, in her own room; she has escaped from the hospital, at last, only to find her room, her refuge, transformed into a hospital room. But now she is past knowing. All night she talked, wept, laughed, yelled, called out “Philip!”

and “Mama!” and “No, no, no...” All night the cicadas and the tree frogs of my childhood pulsed their electric curtain of sound and the night light made her skin look like beeswax, her bone hands flailing in supplication, clutching at the glass of water I held to her crusted lips. Now it is dawn. Mama’s window looks out over the east. I sit in the white chair, by the window, facing the bed, but not looking, not looking at Mama so effaced in her big bed, not looking at the pill bottles and the spoons and the glasses and the IV pole with the bag hanging obese with fluid and the blinking red led display and the bed pan and the little kidney-shaped receptacle for vornit and the box of latex gloves and the trash can with the biohazard warning label full of bloody syringes. I am looking out the window, toward the east. A few birds are singing. I can hear the doves that live in the wisteria waking up. The world is gray. Slowly color leaks into it, not rosy-fingered but like a slowly spreading stain of blood orange, one moment lingering at the horizon and then flooding the garden and then golden light, and then a blue sky, and then all the colors vibrant in their assigned places, the trumpet vines, the roses, the white salvia, the marigolds, all shimmering in the new morning dew like glass. The silver birches at the edges of the woods dangle like white strings suspended from the sky. A crow flies across the grass. Its shadow flies under it, and meets it as it lands under the window and caws, once. Light finds the window, and creates my hands, my body heavy in Mama’s white chair. The sun is up.

I close my eyes. The air conditioner purrs. I’m cold, and I get up and walk to the other window, and turn it off. Now the room is silent. I walk to the bed. Mama is still. The laborious breathing that has haunted my dreams has stopped. Her mouth is open slightly and her eyebrows are raised as though in surprise, although her eyes are closed; she could be singing. I kneel by the bed, I pull back the covers and lay my ear against her heart. Her skin is warm. Nothing. No heart beats, no blood moves, no breath inflates the sails of her lungs. Silence.

I gather up her reeking, wasted body into my arms, and she is perfect, she is my own perfect beautiful Mama again, for just a moment, even as her bones jut against my breasts and her head lolls, even as her cancer-laden belly mimics fecundity she rises up in memory shining, laughing, released: free.

Footsteps in the hall. The door opens and Etta’s voice.

“Clare? Oh—!”

I lower Mama back to the pillows, smooth her nightgown, her hair.

“She’s gone.”

Saturday, September 12, 1998 (Henry is 35, Clare is 27)

Henry: Lucille was the one who loved the garden. When we came to visit, Clare would walk through the front door of the Meadowlark House and straight out the back door to find Lucille, who was almost always in the garden, rain or shine. When she was well we would find her kneeling in the beds, weeding or moving plants or feeding the roses. When she was ill Etta and Philip would bring her downstairs wrapped in quilts and seat her in her wicker chair, sometimes by the fountain, sometimes under the pear tree where she could see Peter working, digging and pruning and grafting. When Lucille was well she would regale us with the doings of the garden: the red-headed finches who had finally discovered the new feeder, the dahlias that had done better than expected over by the sundial, the new rose that turned out to be a horrible shade of lavender but was so vigorous that she was loathe to get rid of it. One summer Lucille and Alicia conducted an experiment: Alicia spent several hours each day practicing the cello in the garden, to see if the plants would respond to the music. Lucille swore that her tomatoes had never been so plentiful, and she showed us a zucchini that was the size of my thigh. So the experiment was deemed a success, but was never repeated because it was the last summer Lucille was well enough to garden.

Lucille waxed and waned with the seasons, like a plant. In the summer, when we all showed up, Lucille would rally and the house rang with the happy shouts and pounding of Mark and Sharon’s children, who tumbled like puppies in the fountain and cavorted sticky and ebullient on the lawn. Lucille was often grimy but always elegant. She would rise to greet us, her white and copper hair in a thick coil with fat strands straggling into her face, white kidskin gardening gloves and Smith & Hawken tools thrown down as she received our hugs. Lucille and I always kissed very formally, on both cheeks, as though we were very old French countesses who hadn’t seen each other in a while. She was never less than kind to me, although she could devastate her daughter with a glance. I miss her. Clare.. .well, ‘miss’ is inadequate. Clare is bereft. Clare walks into rooms and forgets why she is there. Clare sits staring at a book without turning a page for an hour. But she doesn’t cry. Clare smiles if I make a joke. Clare eats what I put in front of her. If I try to make love to her Clare will try to go along with it...and soon I leave her alone, afraid of the docile, tearless face that seems to be miles away. I miss Lucille, but it is Clare I am bereft of, Clare who has gone away and left me with this stranger who only looks like Clare.

Wednesday, November 26, 1998 (Clare is 27, Henry is 35)

Clare: Mama’s room is white and bare. All the medical paraphernalia is gone. The bed is stripped down to the mattress, which is stained and ugly in the clean room. I’m standing in front of Mama’s desk. It’s a heavy white Formica desk, modern and strange in an otherwise feminine and delicate room full of antique French furniture. Mama’s desk stands in a little bay, windows embrace it, morning light washes across its empty surface. The desk is locked. I have spent an hour looking for the key, with no luck. I lean my elbows on the back of Mama’s swivel chair, and stare at the desk. Finally, I go downstairs. The living room and dining room are empty. I hear laughter in the kitchen, so I push the door open. Henry and Nell are huddled over a cluster of bowls and a pastry cloth and a rolling pin.

“Easy, boy, easy! You gonna toughen ‘em up, you go at ’em like that. You need a light touch, Henry, or they gonna have a texture like bubble gum.”

“Sorry sorry sorry. I will be light, just don’t whack me like that. Hey, Clare.” Henry turns around smiling and I see that he is covered with flour.

“What are you making?”

“Croissants. I have sworn to master the art of folding pastry dough or perish in the attempt.”

“Rest in peace, son,” says Nell, grinning.

“What’s up?” Henry asks as Nell efficiently rolls out a ball of dough and folds it and cuts it and wraps it in waxed paper.

“I need to borrow Henry for a couple of minutes, Nell.” Nell nods and points her rolling pin at Henry. “Come back in fifteen minutes and we’ll start the marinade.”

“Yes’m.”

Henry follows me upstairs. We stand in front of Mama’s desk.

“I want to open it and I can’t find the keys.”

“Ah.” He darts a look at me, so quick I can’t read it. “Well, that’s easy.” Henry leaves the room and is back in minutes. He sits on the floor in front of Mama’s desk, straightening out two large paper clips. He starts with the bottom left drawer, carefully probing and turning one paper clip, and then sticks the other one in after it. “ Voila” he says, pulling on the drawer. It’s bursting with paper. Henry opens the other four drawers without any fuss. Soon they are all gaping, their contents exposed: notebooks, loose-leaf papers, gardening catalogs, seed packets, pens and short pencils, a checkbook, a Hershey’s candy bar, a tape measure, and a number of other small items that now seem forlorn and shy in the daylight. Henry hasn’t touched anything in the drawers. He looks at me; I glance at the door almost involuntarily and Henry takes the hint. I turn to Mama’s desk.

The papers are in no order at all. I sit on the floor and pile the contents of a drawer in front of me. Everything with her handwriting on it I smooth and pile on my left. Some of it is lists, and notes to herself: Do not ask P about S. Or: Remind Etta dinner B’s Friday. There are pages and pages of doodles, spirals and squiggles, black circles, marks like the feet of birds. Some of these have a sentence or a phrase embedded in them. To part her hair with a knife. And: couldn’t couldn’t do it. And: 7/7 am quiet it will pass me by. Some sheets are poems so heavily marked and crossed out that very little remains, like fragments of Sappho:

Like old meat, relaxed and tender
no air XXXXXXX she said yes
she said XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Or:

his hand XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
in extreme XXXXXXXXXX

Some poems have been typed:

At the moment
all hope is weak
and small.
Music and beauty
are salt in my sadness;
a white void rips through my ice.
Who could have said
that the angel of sex
was so sad?
or known desire
would melt this vast
winter night into
a flood of darkness.

1/23/79

The spring garden:
a ship of summer
swimming through
my winter vision.

4/6/79

1979 was the year Mama lost the baby and tried to kill herself. My stomach aches and my eyes blur. I know now how it was with her then. I take all of those papers and put them aside without reading any more. In another drawer I find more recent poems. And then I find a poem addressed to me:

The Garden Under Snow
for clare

now the garden is under snow
a blank page our footprints write on
clare who was never mine
but always belonged to herself
Sleeping Beauty
a crystalline blanket
she waits
this is her spring
this is her sleeping/awakening
she is waiting
everything is waiting
for a kiss
the improbable shapes of tubers roots
I-never thought
my baby
her almost face
a garden, waiting

Henry: It’s almost dinner time and I’m in Nell’s way, so when she says, “Shouldn’t you go see what your woman is up to?” it seems like a good idea to go and find out.

Clare is sitting on the floor in front of her mother’s desk surrounded by white and yellow papers. The desk lamp throws a pool of light around her, but her face is in shadow; her hair a flaming copper aura. She looks up at me, holds out a piece of paper, and says, “Look, Henry, she wrote me a poem.” As I sit beside Clare and read the poem I forgive Lucille, a little, for her colossal selfishness and her monstrous dying, and I look up at Clare. “It’s beautiful,” I say, and she nods, satisfied, for a moment, that her mother really did love her. I think about my mother singing lieder after lunch on a summer afternoon, smiling at our reflection in a shop window, twirling in a blue dress across the floor of her dressing room. She loved me. I never questioned her love. Lucille was changeable as wind. The poem Clare holds is evidence, immutable, undeniable, a snapshot of an emotion. I look around at the pools of paper on the floor and I am relieved that something in this mess has risen to the surface to be Clare’s lifeboat.

“She wrote me a poem,” Clare says, again, in wonder. Tears are streaking down her cheeks. I put my arms around her, and she’s back, my wife, Clare, safe and sound, on the shore at last after the shipwreck, weeping like a little girl whose mother is waving to her from the deck of the foundering boat.