16
Migration of the Soul
The end of November was so balmy that the Judge’s yellow rosebush flowered again, and trees clung to their ochre and scarlet leaves. The Gazette warned Elmirans that their town was below the level of the Little Ohio River, and when polar ice caps fully melted, it would become a new Atlantis, just like Bangladesh and Fiji. Elmirans reacted to the news with local pride concealed under a curmudgeonly shell. At the library, the two world atlases that Mrs. Crandall kept on a shelf near her desk were in such high demand that she decided to leave them out permanently. They were put on a table, far enough from her so that people would not be embarrassed to be caught looking for submerged Fiji and Bangladesh, but in her direct line of vision, so that no one would rip out a page or walk off with the expensive volumes. Not that Elmirans had ever vandalized their public library, but certain people, who had moved to Elmira from other, coarser places, would have done it a thousand times already had it not been for Mrs. Crandall’s vigilance.
A week after the woods of chance incident, and following a fifth visit by the doctor, McCabe rolled up the carpet and vacuumed and scrubbed the naked floorboards. “That’s where it belongs,” she said when I finally asked her why she was moving the Judge’s Biedermeier console from one corner of my room to another. It was not an opinion, but a fact, she said when I prodded her further: she had no opinions. McCabe’s accounts of herself were always too objective and materialistic to be truthful.
For the most part, however, I was left with no explanation of her whereabouts or behavior, such as the night when she came in, breathless and sweaty, two hours late to change my bandages, or the afternoon when she opened my door several times and glanced at me from the threshold without a word.
If McCabe was a random cipher outside her Magdalene duties, it was not because she was rude. On the contrary, she treated me with what is usually referred to as “great care.” Coming from her it was not insulting. McCabe seemed new to the world in this, and so many other ways. Her abruptness was innocent. She just did not believe in the healing power of explanations, as she herself would tell me later in her own, sharper words, which I cannot now recall.
When she was done drying the floorboards, McCabe brought in a shiny, new wheelchair, and put it by my bed. Then she sat across the room, to watch me go from bed to wheelchair. All this without a word.
A nurse, a home attendant, a friend, a neighbor, a lover, a co-worker—a normal person, in short—would have helped me go from bed to wheelchair, at least this first time, and would have made sure I knew how to, or else taught me. Not McCabe, whose blank face was unreadable: sadistic voyeur, sink-or-swimmer, or worse, squeamish about touching me? She had never offered to bathe me. I would have refused, of course, but it bothered me that she had not asked. She made sure my night table was well stocked with antiseptic hand wipes and lotions, and every morning she left fresh underwear and pajamas on my bed. My feet were the only part of my body that she had ever touched, always with surgical gloves.
Shame made me want to wait until McCabe was gone to try the wheelchair, but fear of falling and breaking a bone prevailed. So, I did my trick in front of her, putting the required brave smile on my face after every false start (there were four). When I finally managed to sit on the wheelchair, I almost clapped and barked for my fish.
I spent the rest of November mostly sitting by the window in my wheelchair. The Judge’s studio was on the west side of the house, so I had a view of his rose garden and the rolling meadow that ended abruptly in a one-hundred-foot drop down to the river. If I had pushed McCabe off that edge a remote month ago, I would now be walking the New York City streets, free at last. She would not have put up a fight. None of my flesh, hair, or buttons under her nails or in her stiff, rigor mortised fist, no suspicious scratches or lesions on either one of us. Clean. Perfect. An inexplicably lost opportunity.
I couldn’t remember what had made me run away. So I rewound the scene in my mind, analyzing it frame by frame. Was it McCabe’s usurping the name “Rafael Cohen”? Her snatching Old McCabe from my claws? Both had pushed me to kill, not flee. They now seemed insignificant slights, and my surge of hatred against McCabe a petulant reaction. I found the microscopic trigger on the last frame the twentieth or thirtieth time I scrutinized it. Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms was Bebe at fourteen, when we first met. Same blonde locks, blue eyes evoked by the black and white emulsion, little English-girl face incongruously attached to a coltish American body (tiny breasts, unformed hips, round, high, tight little ass emerging). Lillian Gish had Bebe’s body, but not an ounce of her soul. Bebe was not naturally sweet, pure, and innocent, though she trafficked in all three qualities, a great comedian reprising a classical role. Bebe never would have looked sweetly at the Chinaman. But McCabe did.
17
Domesticity
One morning in late November, the bulky bandages on my feet were replaced by a lighter set. That evening McCabe told me, “You will soon be allowed to walk.” She was sitting next to me by the window, gazing at the sunset sky through the Judge’s binoculars. I asked her what she was looking for, since it was too late in the season for migrating birds. She was looking for laggards, she said, small flocks delayed for whatever reason, perhaps confused by the warm weather. They were rare, but not unheard of. She pulled out her red leather notebook and a pen from her shirt pocket, and wrote something on it. Seen upside down, it appeared to be some kind of shorthand. The Judge’s blooming yellow roses attracted a constant swarm of butterflies. I pointed them out to McCabe. She was afraid of butterflies, she said. I laughed unguardedly, which I regretted immediately. Luckily, she didn’t seem to notice. “Not live ones,” she said. “Dead ones.” Dead butterflies inside the house brought bad luck, she explained. Superstition did not fit in the picture I had been composing of the New McCabe. She didn’t seem to be the type, but then, neither are most serial killers, if you believe what their neighbors say on TV. Old McCabe liked to bellow, “Knock on wood!” and slam the nearest surface at the least provocation. It seemed an assertion of her larger-than-life status more than a superstition, but who knows? I never asked her. Now that I was immobilized, able to study this McCabe from up close, and desperately needing to understand her if I was to carry out the mission that brought us here, I realized how little I knew about Old McCabe. I didn’t regret it that day, watching the butterflies swarm over the yellow roses, and I don’t regret it today. I knew Old McCabe’s broad strokes. She was solid, bursting with life. She was my rival. She got Bebe. What else was there to know? New McCabe, on the other hand, was like a charcoal smudge with a flinty core. I could not imagine her with Bebe, or anyone else.
The array of multicolored pills and syrups I had to swallow each day was cut by one third, and then by a half. I asked to be taken off the ones that made me drowsy. McCabe called the doctor, but he insisted that nothing should be changed. Or so she said: I never saw him after that. I began to keep some of the pills in my mouth, while pretending to swallow them. Then, when McCabe had left the room, I’d spit them out and hide them inside my pillow. I was soon able to identify the narcoleptics. A clearer brain was worth the slightly increased pain.
Now that I could wheel myself to the toilet, McCabe spent less time with me. I could see her walking around the garden in the early morning, even under the drizzle, until the FedEx man drove in with a packet of her overnight letters from New York. He would return at noon to pick up the load she was sending back. This was the busiest time of the year for art merchants, she said, when I asked about the increased activity. She always answered my questions in a clear, concise way. I would even say truthful if I were a jury member, although she rarely initiated a conversation. At first, I was careful not to ask her too many questions, even rhetorical ones, to launch a conversation, because questions are far more revealing than answers. Boredom made me relax my rule, but only after she had pronounced the words “the woods of chance,” and began to shed her Magdalene habit, of which only her nightly bandaging of my feet remained. Any day, I expected her to tell me that she had to go back to New York City. My only hope was to be on my feet at least two days before her (our?) return. I couldn’t think of a way to kill her from a wheelchair.