Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

The story they all took home on Friday was not true; it was a version they could all live with, very much like national histories that blur and hide and distort the movements of people and events in order to preserve an idea. The girls did not want to hate themselves and, although self-hatred is not at all uncommon, the consensus they reached about what had happened among them was considerably softer than the one advanced by the Viennese doctor I quoted earlier. As for me, by the end, I felt my encounter with the Coven had done me good. I was hugged by all seven, my praises were sung, and I was presented with a gift: a violet box filled with an odiferous soap, hand lotion in a bottle of an undulating shape, and a container of large crystals for the bath tied up in a lilac bow. What more could anyone ask for?

* * *

And then my Daisy blew into town. This tired expression, with its Wild West connotations, nevertheless suits the beloved offspring. The girl has a windy quality, an ability to stir things up without really doing much. When she jumped out of the cab, large leather bag over her shoulder, its zipper gaping open to reveal messy contents, attired in tiny T-shirt, man’s vest, cut-off jeans, boots, a straw fedora, and enormous sunglasses, she seemed to embody agitation, excitement — in short: a small tornado. She’s a beauty, too. How Boris and I produced her is a puzzle, but the genetic dice fall every which way. Neither of us is homely, and my mother, as you know, believes me still to be beautiful, but Daisy is the real thing, and it’s hard not to look at the child when she’s around.

She’s an affectionate little devil, too, always has been, a hugger and a kisser and a nose rubber and a stroker, and when we got our arms around each other on the doorstep, we hugged, kissed, nose-rubbed, and stroked for a couple of minutes before we let go. And, as it sometimes happens, it wasn’t until that moment that I understood how much I had missed her, how I had pined for my daughter, but I did not, you will be happy to know, burst into tears. There may have been a touch of wetness in the vicinity of my ducts, but nothing more.

We spent the evening at my mother’s and, although I remember only bits of what we said, I do remember the animation in my mother’s face as she listened to Daisy tell us stories about the theater and Muriel and her nights trailing her father and how he hadn’t discovered his “tail” until she confronted him outside the Roosevelt with the words “What the hell is going on, Dad?” And I recall that my mother had more news of Regina. She had been rescued by one of her daughters. Letty had arrived and was making arrangements to move her mother to Cincinnati, where there was a “home” very close to Letty and her family. My mother confessed to not knowing how that would all go, but it was certainly preferable to the “horrible jail cell” in the Alzheimer’s unit.

* * *

The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, but the very old know it far better than the rest of us. They live in a world of continual loss and this, as my mother had said, is bitter.

* * *

I saw her for a few minutes over in Care two days later. My mother did not want to come. I understood why; the specter of losing every faculty that made life life was too close to her. Abigail was lying on her side; her curved spine meant that her head was near her knees, so she occupied only a small part of the bed. Her eyes flickered open every now and again, but their irises and pupils were empty of all thoughts, and when she breathed she rasped loudly. My friend’s thin gray hair looked a little greasy and uncombed, and she was wearing a flowered hospital gown she would have detested. I smoothed her hair back. I talked to her, told her I remembered everything, would get the will from the drawer when it was time and would do everything in the world to get the secret amusements into a gallery somewhere. And before I left, I leaned over and sang into her ear very softly, the way I used to sing to Daisy, a lullaby, not Brahms, another one. A nurse startled me when she came through the door behind me, and I lurched back, embarrassed, but she was cheerful, matter-of-fact, and said it would be fine to stay, though somehow then I couldn’t. Two days later, Abigail was dead and I was glad.

* * *

I wrote to Nobody about her, about her works and the long-ago love affair. I don’t know why I told him. Maybe I wanted an answer of some grandeur. I got it.

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. Who would deny us the mere pantomime of frenzy? We, the actors who pace back and forth on a stage no one watches, our guts heaving and our fists flying? Your friend was one of us, the never anointed, the unchosen, misshapen by life, by sex, cursed by fate but still industrious under the covers where only the happy few venture, sewing apace for years, sewing her heartbreak and her spite and spleen and why not? Why? Why not? Why? Why not?

In all his bleakness, he made me feel better, strangely better. Why? Although for the first time I wondered if Mr. Nobody couldn’t just as well be Mrs. Nobody. Who knew? I wasn’t so sure he was Leonard anymore. But I realized I didn’t care. He or she was my voice from Neverland, from neverness, from Why, not Where, and I liked it that way.

If I ever do anything really stupid again, nail me to the wall.

Your Boris

* * *

Daisy was standing behind me when I read this message on the screen, and I felt her hands on my shoulders. “What’re you going to say, Mom? Tell me, Mom.”

“I’ll have my staple gun ready.”

“Oh, Mom,” she groaned. “He’s trying, caand you see? He feels bad.”

My daughter rolled back the desk chair I was sitting in, jumped into my lap, and began cajoling and wheedling me to say something encouraging back to dear old Pa. She pulled at my earlobes and pinched my nose and used various accents — Korean, Irish, Russian, and French — to plead with me. She leapt off my lap and soft-shoed and shuffle-ball-changed and waved her arms and wished loudly for the reunion of the aging couple, one Mommy and one Daddy, Sun and Moon or Moon and Sun, the double orbs in her childhood sky.

* * *

On the day of Abigail’s funeral, it rained, and I thought it was right that it should rain. The rain came down on the mown grass, and I remembered the words she had stitched in needlepoint: O remember that my life is wind . Rolling Meadows was heavily represented in the pews that afternoon, which meant there were a lot of women, since women were the ones who lived there, mostly, anyway, although the lecherous Busley showed up on his Mobility Scooter, which he parked in the aisle, toward the back. I saw the niece, who looked old, but then she was probably in her seventies. My mother had been asked to speak. She clasped her speech tightly in her lap, and I sensed she was nervous. She had tried on several black outfits before we left, worrying about collars and pressing and what may or may not have been a spot on a skirt, and she finally decided on a tailored cotton jacket and pants with a blue blouse that Abigail had always admired. The minister, a man with little hair and a suitably grave demeanor, could not have known our mutual friend very well because he uttered falsehoods that made my mother stiffen beside me: “A loyal member of our congregation with a generous and gentle spirit.”