The Summer Without Men

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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.