You know your mama
Was born to die
He was pronounced dead as evening came quickly on, the darkest time of the year. They passed the city limits, the streets numbered neatly in the hundreds but really just straight roads through the brown cornfields where the crows were arising: you could watch them make for the naked willow grove.
How could this be given to them, how could it, had they deserved it by not knowing that it could be? The farmhouses and garages and flat-roofed split-levels were turning on their lights sadder than darkness.
They came into the city. Kit had laughed, telling Fran she would show her the sights, the high school from which she’d graduated, the church where she was confirmed, the house where she was deflowered. But she found she remembered nothing, it was all black streets and the lights of cars and stores, like everywhere.
They found a phone booth and Fran called the theater where the play was, Camelot for God’s sake, and after a couple of dimes reached the hotel and her friend. Kit watched from the car as Fran talked, her head lowered and unsmiling, and she almost wept again.
“She can’t come out,” Fran told her, returning. “Nobody can leave the hotel tonight. Not chorus people anyway. It’s a rule.”
They sat in the Buick watching the streetlight change.
“I’ve got to make a call too,” Kit said.
She found the number in the phone book after studying all the Eggerts and trying to remember the car dealer’s name. Carl. What would he sell now that there weren’t going to be any Studebakers? A woman answered after a couple of rings.
“Hi,” Kit said. “Is Burke there?”
There was a little pause; it seemed filled with tears too. “Burke doesn’t live here anymore,” the voice said, hurt or maybe cautious.
“Oh. Well. I’m, I knew him in high school, and well I was passing through.”
“No. He’s got a place of his own now. Over there on Sunset. With Mary Jo and the baby.”
“Oh.”
“They don’t have a phone yet.”
“Oh.”
“So.”
“Okay. Okay, thanks.”
“Well you’re very welcome,” the voice said, brightening strangely at the last.
“Okay,” Fran said when Kit came back. “Okay, I need a drink.”
Nowhere in that state in that year could Kit or Fran drink, but they stopped at a liquor store whose bright sign was reflected upside down in the wet pavement, and Fran turned up the collar of her raincoat and lit a Camel. She went in and in a moment came back, cigarette in the corner of her big mouth and her hands in her pockets.
“No luck,” Kit guessed.
Fran pulled out a flat clear bottle: a pint of vodka. “First thing I saw,” she said. “It helps if you grab something quick.” She uncapped it, drank, shuddered in disgust, gave it to Kit.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Kit said.
“Well. I think I like her a lot more than she likes me. You know.”
“I know.”
“Who was that you called?”
“A guy. The first guy I, you know, made love with.”
“Oh yes?”
Kit thought: Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
There was nothing to do then but go back along the way they came, and they did that, driving south between fields black and limitless on either side, now and then passing the bottle. All along the road the bars and restaurants were closed, or had filled their changeable signs with new messages:
NO MUSIC TONITE GOD BLESS HIM
“What should we do?” Kit asked desperately. “There should be something we should do now. We can’t just go on, just living, can we?”
Fran shook her head, she didn’t know.
“Should we join the Peace Corps?” Kit cried. “Is that it? Is that what we’re supposed to think of?” She had taken his hand once, she had, and he had said something to her—yes, he had said Falin’s name to her. He had said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. She had spoken of it in a poem, a poem she had burned with the rest.
Now he was gone too, turned away, lost to her and to everyone. She had lost everything she loved, everything that made her herself, and now she was to lose all that she shared with everyone else as well.
A being such as that couldn’t die all in a day and be gone, it would take far longer, wouldn’t it? There would be things he would have to do, to tell us. We, the rest of us, can’t turn back after we have turned to go, but surely he could, for a time. Oh turn back, she thought, turn back, make this not to have happened all in a day forever.
But if he could turn back, if he were able, then she wouldn’t feel this grief, it would be grave and sad but it wouldn’t be this riving grief, and it was. It was no different from any grief: for Ben, for the dead child she had seen for only a moment. They couldn’t and he couldn’t either. And she could speak of none of it, did not dare to call them back because they would not turn, nor would she be able to bear their faces if they did.
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
She thought: O my dead. If you return, O my dead. The road, blurry with rain and tears and drink, turned softly to recross the river.
She would have to learn. It’s what she was made to do and was all she was asked to do. She would have to learn as he had done, learn to speak: to learn again, as though for the first time, a tongue: though if she began, she knew she would never be done, not ever.
“Yes,” she said to her father. “Yes I remember.”
Before she left Washington to go home where her husband and her youngest daughter awaited her, Kit went down to the Mall on the wonderful new pharaonic subway of the city, and walked to the Vietnam War Memorial.
After her mother died and she began coming often to be with George, she used to walk the white city in the afternoons, sometimes for miles, while George drowsed in his armchair. And once she came upon this memorial, finished not long before: came upon it without knowing she would, a secret place, an underworld, passage to the land of the dead. She’d heard a lot about it, and yet she was still surprised by how moving it was, not only in itself but because it suggested that we had come at last to know how to remember war. She saw that people touched the glassy stone where the names seemed to float as in a pool, and touched at the same time the fingers of their own hands, saw their own faces reflected within.
Ben’s name wasn’t there. George had already told her it wasn’t. He wasn’t really Vietnam-era, he’d said. Not really.
Sleepy-warm in the late sun then, as it was now. She had sat there a long time, and she had come back often again. She was then writing—not on paper yet—the poem that would become the title poem of Ghost Comedies, and her sitting here and thinking of it would become part of the poem, though she didn’t know that then. Then it was mostly about Marion; mostly it was to make Ben smile.
If you return, O my dead, and you will, from your ashes and earth,
Return if you can as the ghosts in ghost comedies do:
Unwounded, unrotted, not limbless or eyeless (though fleshless,
Invisible till you take form, just a drape or a candle-flame fluttering,
A wineglass that rises and empties itself in the air);
Come walking through walls in your nice clothes and your uniforms, smiling,
Not to warn or dismay, not with news or reproaches or tears,
But only to visit; play tricks if you want to, make love to me, dance…