The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity. And she needs someone — anyone — to listen.
It’s an indulgence, though, the desire to return to currency all that’s been sampled and stored and dreamed into being. She oughtn’t to carry on the way she does, bending Alice’s ear, boring poor Dr. Riccia to death. She chastises herself; she’s getting as bad as Marian McHenry, always going on and on about her own concerns. Instead of thinking of others. Putting others first.
Little Emma is dead. Or perhaps she has been put into an institution with other Down’s syndrome children. Mongoloids they used to call them back in a crueller time.
No one says a single word to Grandma Flett about Emma for fear of upsetting her, but she knows anyway: here, coming into focus at her bedside, is her son, Warren, and his new wife — whose name Grandma Flett cannot at this moment recall. The room has slipped sideways. The window lies on an angle. Her own tongue is coiled upon itself. She asks for a glass of water, a simple request, a simple phrase, but she can’t get it right. “Mongoloid,” she says instead. Alarm touches Warren’s face and spreads downward through the erect, elastic column of his neck. She would like to comfort him with a look or a tender word, but her body is weighed down with its own confusion. She doesn’t mean to be unkind. She shuts her eyes, concentrating, shutting out her son and his young wife, regarding something infinitely complex printed on the thin skin of her eyelids, a secret, a dream. A kind of movie.
Alice abruptly marries Dr. Riccia. She moves with him to Jamaica where they live in a beautiful bungalow by the ocean. They have a child, a little boy with long curling eyelashes and courtly manners.
No, none of this is true. Old Mrs. Flett is dreaming again.
How do these spurious versions arise?
Think, think, she tells herself. Be reasonable.
Dr. Riccia is already married and the father of two children; Grandma Flett has been shown snapshots of the Riccia family standing in front of their colonial-style house in Kensington Park.
Alice returns to England. The summer is over. Her teaching term begins next week, and she’s already planning a weekend party for a dozen or so friends: Moroccan music, something curried, cold beer, herself loud and ironic in swinging earrings. She’s found a buyer for the condo in Bayside Towers and she’s looked after a number of minor legal matters for her mother, having been granted power of attorney. Papers have been signed. Arrangements made for the future. Alice takes back to rainy Hampstead a gorgeous Florida tan, though everyone, even her mother, warns her that Florida tans don’t last. Never mind, she’ll be back at Christmas. The pattern of her life is unfolding, a long itinerary of revision and accommodation. She’s making it up as she goes along.
This is not how she imagined her middle years, but this is the way it will be.
Something has occurred to her — something transparently simple, something she’s always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we’re still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. A person can go on and on tuned in to the daily music of food and work and weather and speech right up to the last minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.
She is surprisingly heartened by this thought, and can’t help telling her mother how she feels.
Her mother, Daisy Goodwill, is still alive inside her failing body. Up and down, good days, bad days. She’s doing as well as can be expected, that’s what everyone keeps saying. She could go on like this for years.
CHAPTER TEN
Death
DAISY (GOODWILL) FLETT Peacefully, on —, in the month of — in the year 199— at Canary Palms Rest Home, Sarasota, Florida, after a long illness patiently borne.
“Grandma” Flett was predeceased by her husband, Barker Flett, a respected Canadian authority on hybrid grains. She leaves to mourn her daughter Alice Goodwill-Spanner of Hampstead, England, daughter Joan and spouse Ross Taylor of Portland, Oregon, son Warren and wife Peggy of New York City, and grandniece Victoria and spouse Lewis Roy of Toronto. She was the adored grandmother of Benjamin, Judith, Rachel, Rain, Teller, Beth, Lissa, Jilly, and Emma (?), as well as the loving great-grandmother of Madeleine, Andrew, and Mordicai, and the great-aunt of twins Sophie and Hugh.
A memorial service will be held at Canary Palms Chapel, 10:00. Flowers gratefully declined. Interment will follow at Long Key Cemetery.
Flowers gratefully accepted in remembrance of DAISY GOODWILL FLETT who embraced as well as she was able most growing things gardens children balloons of memory though she feared greatly the encircling shadow of solitude and silence which she came to equate with her own life Daisy Daisy Give me your answer true Day’s eye, day’s eye The face in the mirror is you
“It was in her bedside drawer. This little velvet box.”
“What is it? It looks like—”
“That’s what it is. Fingernail clippings. Hers, I assume.”
“Christ.”
Flett, Daisy (née Goodwill), who, due to historical accident, due to carelessness, due to ignorance, due to lack of opportunity and courage, never once in her many years of life experienced the excitement and challenge of oil painting, skiing, sailing, nude bathing, emerald jewelry, cigarettes, oral sex, pierced ears, Swedish clogs, water beds, science fiction, pornographic movies, religious ecstasy, truffles, Kirsch, jalepeño peppers, Peking duck, Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, group therapy, body massage, hunger, distinguished honors, outraged condemnation, who never drove a car, never bought a lottery ticket, never, never (on the other hand)
was struck on the face or body by another being, never once perched her reading glasses (with a sigh) in the crown of her hair, never (for fear of ridicule) investigated the possibilities of plastic surgery or yoga, never gave herself over to the kind of magazine article that tells you to be good to yourself, to believe in yourself and do things for yourself. Nor, though she knew she had been loved in her life, did she ever hear the words “I love you, Daisy” uttered aloud (such a simple phrase), and only during the long, thin, uneventful sleep that preceded her death did she have the wit (and leisure) to ponder the injustice of this.
“A blessing,” exclaims the noted Chekhov scholar Alice Goodwill Spanner when informed of her mother’s death.
“My mother’s quality of life had been hovering at sub-zero for some time,” remarks Warren Flett, musicologist for the Lower Manhattan Public Schools.
“She was worn out,” announces Joan Taylor, the unemployed soon-to-turn-fifty youngest daughter of the Flett family. “Her life wore her out and then her death wore her out.”
“She told me she was ready to go any time,” murmurs the award-winning paleobotanist Victoria Louise Flett-Roy. “But is anyone ever really ready?”
“She had this crazy kind of adjustable intelligence. She could hoist it into view when she wanted to.”
“Egregious. I heard her say that word once, egregious! It just rolled off her tongue.”
“And holy smokes. She used to say holy smokes.”
“Really?”
“And like sometimes she wasn’t quite there. Knock, knock, anyone home?”
“Those clothes! She had this way of dressing so no one knew if she spent too little money or too much. Or if she was four years behind her fashion moment or twenty-four years.”