As Alice listens to the phone ring and ring, her smile becomes less and less a smile. Finally it’s not a smile at all. She lays the receiver back down. Here we are.
It’s a thing I try not to dwell on, but at times — talk to myself as I will, pray as I will for understanding — I can see no spiritual significance whatever in my ruin. And let’s for heaven’s sake not be mealy-mouthed about it: I am ruined, in this life. No appeal, no going back. Dragging a half-dead body from room to room, numb lips and steak-thick tongue refusing to move as I command. If I am of use at all anymore, it can only be as an example of patient endurance. Or, more likely, of the perils of cholesterol. Since I was neither a smoker nor (in recent years) a drinker, it keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it? Apparently I’ve thrown away my birthright — the everyday miracle of a functioning human body — for the sake of two eggs, every morning for forty years, over easy. For the sake of two strips of bacon, wet with fat, laid parallel beside the eggs, and the whole thing set before me like the four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. Initially out of love and ignorance, then later, as the magazine articles began to appear, out of love alone.
“He’s saying you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Alice said to Dr. Ngo, translating for me. “He hates the breakfasts.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Ngo. “Two time a week it not hurt him, you understand?”
I understood. This meant: why not pop off a little sooner with a few familiar comforts, since pop off I must?
“I am of more value than my pleasures,” I said, or tried to say What drunken smear of vowels came out I’m unwilling to remember. What I meant was that I mattered and must persist.
“Say that again, dear?” Alice said.
I shook my head no and swatted the air with my good hand: Go away, go away. What I had wanted to say bordered on blasphemy. Had I forgotten that I was to have life everlasting?
But since my purchase on this life (though no one will say so) seems none too certain, it has been decided that we must lose no time in wishing Wylie joy in person. Decided, I need hardly add, by Alice and Wylie. These days I’m doing well to get a What do you think, dear? And since Wylie is not to travel — in fact, must spend much of her time lying down — we are to come to them. So it’s heigh-ho for Seattle. What do you think, dear?
What I think is, I’ll do as I’m bid. If I can be wheeled aboard an airplane, I can certainly sit for six hours. What else do I do? These terrorists hold no terrors for me, not because I’m armed in faith particularly — I wish I could say I was — but because no place seems safer than any other anymore. When we left Woburn there was a bad element moving in. In Florida you have your drug lords, and people shooting at you from the overpasses on I-295. Our problem up here is the roughnecks who ride the back roads in loud cars. They listen to the metal music.
Alice keeps asking, Aren’t you looking forward to seeing Wylie? Her aim is to keep me looking forward. What can I say but yes? Still, much as I love Wylie — and I do look forward — I must admit that she can be trying. She’s become one of those people who put bumper stickers on their automobiles — at one point, I recall, she had replaced VISUALIZE PEACE with TEACH PEACE, which seemed to me at least a small step away from delusion — and who believe we can communicate with the plants and the dolphins. I blame Bard College. And I imagine Jeffrey encourages it. I used to tell her, You’d best forget the dolphins and learn to talk to your Savior. These days I’ve come to accept that these things sink in if and when He wills them to. Now, some Christians — our minister up here is one — will tell you that the whole what they call New Age is of the devil. We’ll know someday: Every man’s work shall be made manifest. But we can be sure today that it’s a distraction and a time-waster, which is spiritual danger enough right there, it seems to me. The night cometh when no man can work. Wylie has told Alice that she’s already begun talking to the baby inside her. I hope it takes what it’s hearing with a good-sized grain of salt! I think Wylie imagines that this visit will have given her child at least this much acquaintance with its grandfather. Covering her bases, don’t you see.
I’m ashamed to say I think about it, too. As if I were clutching at a moving train, crying, At least remember me. (Keep me mindful that another home is prepared for me and that I shall have a new body, incorruptible.) I can remember my own grandfather. Or at least I remember remembering him. He used to talk about the Civil War; he was twelve, I believe, when it ended. Now, his father had become an abolitionist — a Unitarian, he was — and when the news came that President Lincoln was dead, he had all the children dressed up in mourning. And my grandfather had a fistfight with a neighbor boy whose family hated the colored. The Coleys lived in Westerly in those days. And still lived there, in the old house, until my father died in ’41, and we still went to the Unitarian church. You know the saying, how the Unitarians believe in one God at most. Supposed to be a joke. But it chills me now to remember that beautiful white church house from which the Holy Spirit was so resoundingly absent. Back then, of course, I liked the hymn-singing, and that was that.
I thought of my grandfather’s story about President Lincoln the other night when we saw Aretha Franklin on the television, singing a song about the turnpike of love, I think it was, and lifting her fleshy arms above her head. A woman of her age and size ought not to be seen in a sleeveless dress. It seemed impossible that I could have lived so long as to have known someone who’d been alive when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. I don’t know how we came to be watching such a thing; Alice and I used to enjoy Mahalia Jackson, but this one is too screechy. Sometimes we’ll be watching a program and then find ourselves watching the next program and the program after without meaning to. Up here we still get all three networks, naturally. And PBS, if you can put up with their political slant. But those people on the local news programs! So young and so coarse-looking. And so poorly spoken, as if they had all just come out of two-year colleges. That’s unchristian of me, I suppose. My own ruined speech is appropriate chastisement.
Just as my having had no son — I’ve often thought this — may have been chastisement for my pride in family. (There’s only one family: the family of His saints.) Though perhaps it’s another, more malignant form of pride to believe myself singled out for chastisement. But for whatever reason, I am the last of the Coleys. There are other people named Coley, of course, but of our Coleys I am the last. We have become a branch of the family tree of people named Gundersen. Alice and I are often asked — or were, back when we socialized — if Wylie is a family name. I’d always say, Why, how’d you guess? to make light of the unusualness. The Wylies are my mother’s people. (Alice, of course, is a Stannard.) We knew the name might sound awkward with “Coley,” so we gave her the middle name Jane as a sort of buffer. When I was a boy, I knew a Mary Carey who called herself Mary Jane — she hadn’t been so christened — so we thought Wylie Jane Coley would sound all right. Naturally we couldn’t have foreseen that the other children would call her Wylie Coyote and tease her by yelling “Beep beep” and running away from her. (It had to do with some show on the television.) I’m afraid it didn’t mollify her when I told her that one of her Wylie forebears had been at the first Constitutional Convention! She called herself Jane from when she was eight or nine until she went away to college; then she apparently decided that “Wylie” would put her one up on the Wendys and Jennifers.