Alice LaPlante - Turn of Mind

No, of course not, he said. Nothing of the sort. He shifted in his chair, picked up his glass, and raised it to his lips again, even though it was empty.

I guess I’m grateful, he said, finally.

That’s an odd emotion to feel when it’s more than one hundred degrees at six o’clock in the evening, I said.

He refused to smile. No, grateful is the right word, he said. Grateful for every moment that the bottom doesn’t fall out. He paused, then laughed. It’s those damn cicadas, he said. They make one think about Old Testament–style wrath-of-God type things.

You know, he continued, there are remarkable parallels between events documented in an ancient Egyptian manuscript, Admonitions of Ipuwer , and the book of Exodus. Pestilence and floods, rivers turning red, and no one able to see the face of his fellow man for days on end because of locusts. Many a doctoral candidate has been grateful for these points. Although if I never read another thesis with the word locust in it, I myself will be eternally grateful. He stopped, leaned forward, suddenly intent.

And you, Jennifer, he said. What would you be grateful for?

Taken unaware, I gave him a breezy reply: Oh, the usual. Health and happiness. That the kids keep doing as well as they’re doing. That James’s and my late fifties are as productive as our early fifties and our sixties not too dull as we start to slow down.

He took it more seriously than I had intended.

Perhaps. Yes. Those are not unreasonable hopes.

Well, I’m a reasonable woman, I said. But frankly, you’re alarming me.

I don’t mean to. But I do have a decade or so on you. Enough to know that the words reasonable and hope don’t always fit well in the same sentence.

Then, a bustle and a little noise, and Amanda was back with the camera. She gestured for Peter and me to stand together. No no, I said. I’m a little spooked by what Peter has been saying. I’d rather not have this particular moment recorded with me in it. Here, let me.

And so I took the picture—my sense memory is so clear I can hear the double click-click of the predigital camera—and at that moment James arrived, bearing flowers and wine and keeping his own counsel on things of import. But I didn’t realize that at the time.

It is a day for the rending of garments. For the gnashing of teeth and the covering of mirrors. Amanda.

I rage at Magdalena. How could you withhold this information from me? I may be impaired, but I am not fragile! I accepted my diagnosis. I buried a husband. I am nothing if not resilient.

We did tell you. Many times.

No. I would have remembered this. It would have been as though my own fingers had been severed. As if my own heart sliced open.

Check your notebook. Here. Look at this entry. And this. Here is the news article of her death. Here is the obituary. Here is what you wrote when you first found out. And we’ve been to the police station twice. Visited by investigators three times. We’ve gone over this and over this. You have mourned. And mourned again. We went to church. We said the Rosary.

I? Said the Rosary?

Well, I said the Rosary. You sat there. You were calm. Not aware, but not distressed. You get like that sometimes. Calm and accepting. Almost catatonic. I like to take you to church when that happens. Magdalena isn’t looking at me when she says this.

I have a theory, that it is a good thing when you’re in that state, she says . That those are the times your soul is most open, the possibilities for healing greatest. The echoing silence, the sweet smell, the soothing filtered light. The Presence. This time was different, however. You roused yourself. You saw the people waiting their turn for confession. You got in line. You went behind the curtain. You stayed a very long time. When you came back you had tears on your face. Tears! Imagine that!

I can’t, actually. But go on.

But it’s true. I swear. You reached out, and took my Rosary. You closed your eyes. Your fingers touched the beads. Your lips moved. I asked you, What are you doing ? And you answered, as clear as could be, Amanda. My penance.

That sounds implausible. I wouldn’t know how to say a Rosary. Not after all these decades.

Well, you gave a pretty good impression of knowing what you were doing!

I consider this. I am calmer now. I consider the written evidence. I accept that there was no betrayal on Magdalena’s part. Just my damaged mind. But this doesn’t lessen the agony. Amanda my friend, my ally, my most worthy adversary. What will I do without you?

I think of the time around Mark’s graduation from high school. He and James had fallen out. He had, disconcertingly, attached himself to me. Just as I was getting ready to let him go. He was then coming into his dark, dangerous looks. Always good-looking—the girls started calling when he was twelve—he had in the last year been transformed into a dangerous man, a walking risk to those around him.

That summer was memorable for that, and because Amanda was for once not teaching. We spent the long evenings together while the sun lingered on her porch. Fiona, a very mature twelve, preferred to stay at home reading, that summer it was Jane Austen and Hermann Hesse. But Mark would inevitably join Amanda and me, sometimes for a few minutes on his way to a friend’s house, sometimes for hours, and sit quietly, listening while we talked. Although he was a year from being of legal age, Amanda would pour him a beer and he’d drink it thirstily and fast, as if we might change our minds and take it away.

What did we talk about night after night in that waning light? Politics of course, the latest petitions and rallies and marches Amanda had participated in, which she was constantly pressuring me to join.

Take Back the Night. Walk for Breast Cancer. Run for Muscular Dystrophy. Books—we were both Anglophiles, both knew the works of Dickens and Trollope by heart—and travel. The many places James and I had traveled, and Amanda’s curiosity, despite her own inclination to stay at home, which I never understood. And Mark there, listening.

Something significant occurred on one of those evenings. James and I had just returned from St. Petersburg, where we had purchased an exquisite fifteenth-century icon of Theotokos of the Three Hands. It had been outrageously expensive.

I had seen it at a gallery in Galernaya Place and had fallen in love. James resisted and resisted and then, on our last morning, disappeared for half an hour and came back with a package wrapped in brown paper, which he held out to me with a mixture of amusement and anger.

I held it on my lap on the flight home, unwilling to trust it to my suitcase or the overhead bin. Now I carefully unwrapped it to show Amanda. Perhaps eight inches high, the icon showed the Blessed Mother supporting the Christ Child with her right hand. Her left hand was pressed to her breast as if trying to contain her joy.

At the bottom of the icon appeared a third hand. The severed hand of Saint John Damascene. As the legend went, it had been miraculously reattached to his arm by the Virgin. Now at her feet, a testament to her healing powers.

Amanda held the icon in silence for perhaps five minutes, intent as when she was deeply engaged in giving a lesson to a difficult student or preparing for an important school board speech. She finally spoke.

I like this, she said. I never really understood your passion for religious iconography, but this is different. This one moves me in a way I can’t explain.