David Gates: The Wonders of the Invisible World

“The mail’s here,” Alice calls from down in the kitchen, over top of the music. “Are you done your tray?”

She’ll find out whether or not I’m done my tray, as she puts it, when she comes back upstairs, not sooner. I won’t have all this hollering in the house.

When I finally do get myself down to the living room, I find Alice working away with her plant mister.

“Don’t you look spruce this morning,” she says. I have on a pink oxford shirt and my gray wool slacks, neither spruce nor otherwise. “You know,” she says, “I was thinking. You’ve been cooped up in here for days with the rain and all. Why don’t we bundle you up warm and walk down together and get the mail? I think the fresh air would do you good.”

“Sea a mud,” I say. Just look at that driveway. They were supposed to have brought in a load of traprock last fall, but they didn’t come and didn’t come, which seems to be the way it goes up here. And then the ground froze, and then I had my shock.

“Such a beautiful morning,” she says.

It’s one of those early-spring days when you begin to smell the earth again. Painfully bright blue sky and the sun giving a false warmth. The branches of the bare trees seem silvery. Once I get down the steps, I stop and work open the buttons of my overcoat to let the air at my body, though what’s wrong with me has nothing to do with the body. Halfway down the driveway I stop to rest, take Alice’s arm to steady myself, and poke the muddy wheel rut with one of my cane’s rubber-tipped spider legs.

“Get in out,” I say, meaning You’ll never be able to. “Moon vehicle need the moon vehicle.”

“Moon vehicle?” Alice says. “Why are you saying a moon vehicle, dear?”

“Truck the truck,” I say. What I’m trying to get across is the mail lady’s pickup truck. I float my good hand up to show the tall tires. No use. Oh, I hate these times when Alice thinks I’m making no sense and I am making sense. But this is serious business, this situation with the driveway. To keep out of the mud, Alice has been driving along the edge of the grass, which is tearing up the lawn and now we’ll have that on our hands, too, getting someone in to reseed it and roll it. On her hands, I suppose I mean.

The mail lady has brought a telephone bill, a letter from Wylie and the new Smithsonian. Good: there’s this afternoon taken care of. Alice tucks the envelopes inside the Smithsonian, and we start back. It’s become our custom to save the opening of the mail for when we get back to the house.

“Why, I think that’s a robin,” Alice says as we start back. “See? In that maple tree? No, over there — that’s an oak tree.”

Something or other flies off in the direction of the Paquettes’.

“I’m certain that was a robin,” she says.

“So be it,” I say. The way my mouth works now, I seem to be saying Soviet. This walk will have been enough and more than enough. I make her stop to rest three times on the way.

When we’ve finally gotten my things off — I manage the coat all right, but the overshoes prove too much — we go into the living room so we can sit comfortably over the mail. I open the telephone bill, and she opens Wylie’s letter. Our old division of responsibilities: the human side for her. Though now my responsibilities are only ceremonial.

The telephone bill is sixty-eight dollars!

I study it and study it. Most of the calls are to Wylie. One to Scottsdale, Arizona, which must be Alice’s sister Celia. Framingham (her friend June Latham), Taunton (her brother Herb), Taunton again. Oh, I suppose it’s correct. I’ve long given up trying to make sense of all those pages they send. I lay the thing down and look out the window.

“Wylie say?” I ask. It looks like such a long way down there to the mailbox. How had I managed it? The trees are dead motionless, even in their smallest branches, but beyond them, in the pure blue, a small cloud riddled with blue gaps is traveling steadily from left to right. Its shape slowly changes as it moves. On a high branch of our apple tree is perched a bird — a robin, if it pleases Alice to think so — that’s lifting its throat and opening its beak. Singing, apparently. A tiny speck drops straight, swift and silent from below its tail. This simple process is not an occasion for shame. At least among those of His creatures who are not accountable.

Alice hasn’t answered. I turn away from the window, and she’s holding the letter out to me with an expression I don’t know what to make of. Glad, but something else, too. It’s the expression I caught when she first watched me, cheered on by Mrs. Midgely, lurching up a flight of steps. I take the letter with my good hand. Like all Wylie’s letters, it’s written in blue felttip on lined notebook paper. Since they never taught penmanship at that school of hers — I came close to pulling her out of there because of it — her handwriting, part script, part print, still looks like that of a child. Though by no means as bad as mine looks now. As for her style, so-called, we also have progressive education to thank.

Dear Mom & Dad,

I thought I would tell you this in a letter instead of on the phone because I thought you might like having this letter to keep. Not to keep you in suspense anymore, you are going to be grandparents! I am having a baby sometime the beginning of December. We found out today and are so thrilled. I sort of wanted you to know right off by phone but thought this best. Please do phone though when you get this, but I decided you would like to have this to keep. Jeffrey sends his love.

Love you alot, Wylie

Well, my first reaction is, why all this folderol about sentimental keepsakes when the plain truth of it is, Wylie can no longer bear talking to me on the telephone. And of course such a piece of news might well have set me off, since I’m so — they have a wonderful expression for it — emotionally labile.

I tried to feel something more appropriate. I mean, good heavens, a grandchild.

“Oh, I’m so glad,” says Alice. “I thought she didn’t want children.”

“Trend the trend now the trend,” I say.

“The trend? I don’t like to think of Wylie as part of any trend.”

I wave my hand and say, “Shining individual,” meaning Fine, have it your way. Alice cocks her head: more gabble she won’t bother trying to decode. She looks at her wristwatch.

“Almost noon,” she says. “So it’s about nine o’clock.” She picks up the phone.

It’s so quiet in our house that I can hear the purr of the telephone ringing on the other end. Save this letter! Save it for when, for pity’s sake? Things like this make you realize that Wylie still thinks of us as we were when she was a child. I recall the time, a couple of years ago, when she was still living in New York, we came down to visit and she walked Alice’s legs off shopping. More to the point, look at her decision to move a continent away from us. The pace was slower out there, she said. The air was better. The air was better! I blame Jeffrey, in part. Of course this was before my shock; would she make the same choice today? I don’t know. I don’t suppose I want to know.

As Alice listens to the phone ring and ring, her smile becomes less and less a smile. Finally it’s not a smile at all. She lays the receiver back down. Here we are.

It’s a thing I try not to dwell on, but at times — talk to myself as I will, pray as I will for understanding — I can see no spiritual significance whatever in my ruin. And let’s for heaven’s sake not be mealy-mouthed about it: I am ruined, in this life. No appeal, no going back. Dragging a half-dead body from room to room, numb lips and steak-thick tongue refusing to move as I command. If I am of use at all anymore, it can only be as an example of patient endurance. Or, more likely, of the perils of cholesterol. Since I was neither a smoker nor (in recent years) a drinker, it keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it? Apparently I’ve thrown away my birthright — the everyday miracle of a functioning human body — for the sake of two eggs, every morning for forty years, over easy. For the sake of two strips of bacon, wet with fat, laid parallel beside the eggs, and the whole thing set before me like the four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. Initially out of love and ignorance, then later, as the magazine articles began to appear, out of love alone.