There was no immediate sense of release. She went outside and sat on the front steps. Before her Campbell’s Cliffs, darkly wet from the last snow, lay against the slope of Flagstaff and looked much the same as they usually did at that time of year, though the snow, coming in late October, had been early. The mountain still wore its autumn reds and yellows. The cold air stung her eyes and made them water, simulating grief.
The ambulance came and went. The day girl came and tidied away and made up his bed. His pillows were as crisply white as an arctic landscape, the sheets as desolate as the sweep of arctic plain.
The doctor left her some capsules to help her sleep.
Then she was alone. Truly alone. Someone had thoughtfully collected the three green interconnected oxygen tanks which had stood side by side in the downstairs hall. There were only the circular indentations in the rug in the hall to remind her. She supposed in time they would disappear.
There was an odd, uneasy silence in the house. She didn’t miss the sound of the oxygen because it had made little sound really, no more than a gust of wind. It had never hissed except when she had, in the beginning, filled the portable tank for him when he wanted to go out of the house. But it had been months since he had wanted to do so.
From time to time throughout that first evening she imagined she heard a scuttling, a rustle in the dark, or would glimpse a movement out of the corner of her eye. Then nothing. Nothing when she put on the lights, all the lights, and went slowly through the house. The undraped windows of the dining room shone as black and hard as obsidian, mirroring her solitary image, satisfying her that she was truly alone. Except for the smell of him, which lingered, clinging to rug and walls and bed most strongly in his room, but layering the air throughout the house with the oppressive sweetness of illness. She blamed the sounds on the resurgence of a memory of some long-forgotten pet, the clicking of a dog’s nails across the kitchen tiles, then muffled in the carpet. Something like that.
She had looked down at the narrow shape of him beneath the sheets as they wheeled him across the porch and lifted the gurney down the steps. He had become a ridge of snow drifted against stainless-steel tubes. As pale and remote already as the memory of spring.
She avoided looking in mirrors for the rest of that day and night as she made the obligatory telephone calls: to her daughter in Colorado Springs, to Hal’s cousins, to the English Department, to two or three of their friends.
She did not remember much of the funeral or the colleagues who eulogized him as a scholar, an educator, generous with his knowledge and his time. Thoughtful of his students. Widely respected and admired.
His colleagues and friends and the elderly cousins had filled the funeral home in which he lay in Brooks Brothers splendor prior to cremation, his nostrils pinched but free at last of that damned tube.
She did not recognize many of the people there. It had been five years since Hal had retired. His colleagues were mostly younger than he was, and one by one had disappeared from Hal’s life. Now it had been too long for her to remember them with confidence. She would recognize their names as they whispered them to her and took her hand, but she identified them tentatively, as she might music heard faintly from another room. There were, of course, couples whom she and her husband had seen up until fairly recently, who had pretended to ignore the tubing and the outer trappings of his illness, but she was not close to any of them. They were really his friends — their friends.
Her daughter Catherine, smooth-faced and assured, had come from Colorado Springs. Her husband was away on business and could not attend the funeral. Catherine insisted that she spend the night with her mother. Though Sarah agreed, she wished that her daughter would mourn by herself, if she had a mind to. She had seen the tears at the funeral and had been angered by them. If Catherine had felt like that about Hal, where had she been all these months? An intermittent presence. A disembodied voice on the telephone. Yet she knew she was being unfair. Her daughter had her own life. She supposed the younger woman was genuinely sorry her stepfather was dead, but Sarah suspected she mourned for what she had lost long ago rather than the yellowed husk Hal had become. But that was all right, wasn’t it? What should she mourn for?
“You — I don’t know — seem so remote,” Catherine had said to her. “The doctor says it’s simple depression—”
Simple depression? She almost laughed and had to turn her head away. She feigned a cough.
She awoke with a start in the night and lay listening for the familiar creak of the house in the wind. But there was nothing. She listened for the sounds her daughter might make while sleeping, but it was as if she had gone deaf. For a moment she debated getting up to see if Catherine was still there, but was suddenly afraid that if she tried, she might be unable to move her limbs. She sat up then, heart pounding. Then, fearing she might wake her daughter, she made herself lie back and calm herself and wait for sleep. She found herself thinking of an incident some years after her marriage to Hal.
They had been sitting one Sunday afternoon in the living room, she on the couch beneath the large window which looked out on Flagstaff and he in the leather chair which had the good light. She had looked up at him appraisingly from her puzzle, at his handsome, patrician profile. He was frowning at the journal in his hand and making notes in the margin to take some luckless scholar to task.
“What does ‘iconography’ mean?” she asked.
He stirred uneasily, as he always did when she asked him a question to which he should know the answer. She supposed that was part of the problem between them: The longer they were together, the more severe the erosion of her confidence in his omniscience as she found the soft places in his armor. By then she was experienced in doing so.
“It isn’t in this dictionary,” she said, tapping the paperback which rested against her thigh as snugly as a cat.
“An icon is—”
“I know what an icon is,” she said.
He paused, pretending that she had not interrupted him, tactfully ignoring her rudeness.
“Iconography is not, however, the study of icons, as one might guess, but rather the relationship of a group of symbols representing — or rather — bearing the meaning of a stylized work of art.”
She wondered if he was ashamed of the “or rather.” He had to know that she would recognize it as a clearing of the throat (which he knew she hated), a pause to allow him to think of a more exact reply.
“Such as? Could we perhaps provide an example?”
“If you like. Hamlet, for one. Ophelia and Polonius, Hamlet and Gertrude. The Oedipal interpretation. If one views the characters as symbols, they can be manipulated and interpreted virtually at will. A feminist version of the play — which blissfully I have neither seen nor read — purports to have Ophelia running off to join a lesbian guerrilla group. Dear God.”
He laid aside his journal and looked at her expectantly, seemingly surer of himself, as if he supposed that he had gained a foothold on the slippery slope of her esteem. She knew he wanted more.
“Does that make it clearer?” he asked. “Shakespeare is rife with examples. Take Othello—”
But she was unwilling to grant him more.
“Never mind. I get the drift.”
She was acutely aware of his disappointment. It was as if she had wantonly turned her back just as he had seized on the heart of the matter. She knew he longed for another chance to preen himself before her, but she bent her head ungenerously again to her puzzle. After a moment, she heard him pick up his magazine.