Clare.
Wednesday, November 26, 1998 (Clare is 27, Henry is 35)
Clare: Mama's room is white and bare. All the medical paraphernalia is gone. The
bed is stripped down to the mattress, which is stained and ugly in the clean
room. I'm standing in front of Mama's desk. It's a heavy white Formica desk,
modern and strange in an otherwise feminine and delicate room full of antique
French furniture. Mama's desk stands in a little bay, windows embrace it,
morning light washes across its empty surface. The desk is locked. I have spent
an hour looking for the key, with no luck. I lean my elbows on the back of
Mama's swivel chair, and stare at the desk. Finally, I go downstairs. The living
room and dining room are empty. I hear laughter in the kitchen, so I push the
door open. Henry and Nell are huddled over a cluster of bowls and a pastry
cloth and a rolling pin.
"Easy, boy, easy! You gonna toughen 'em up, you go at 'em like that. You
need a light touch, Henry, or they gonna have a texture like bubble gum."
"Sorry sorry sorry. I will be light, just don't whack me like that. Hey, Clare."
Henry turns around smiling and I see that he is covered with flour.
"What are you making?"
"Croissants. I have sworn to master the art of folding pastry dough or perish
in the attempt."
"Rest in peace, son," says Nell, grinning.
"What's up?" Henry asks as Nell efficiently rolls out a ball of dough and folds
it and cuts it and wraps it in waxed paper.
"I need to borrow Henry for a couple of minutes, Nell." Nell nods and points
her rolling pin at Henry. "Come back in fifteen minutes and we'll start the
marinade."
"Yes'm."
Henry follows me upstairs. We stand in front of Mama's desk.
"I want to open it and I can't find the keys."
"Ah." He darts a look at me, so quick I can't read it. "Well, that's easy." Henry
leaves the room and is back in minutes. He sits on the floor in front of Mama's
desk, straightening out two large paper clips. He starts with the bottom left
drawer, carefully probing and turning one paper clip, and then sticks the other
one in after it. " Voila" he says, pulling on the drawer. It's bursting with paper.
Henry opens the other four drawers without any fuss. Soon they are all gaping,
their contents exposed: notebooks, loose-leaf papers, gardening catalogs, seed
packets, pens and short pencils, a checkbook, a Hershey's candy bar, a tape
measure, and a number of other small items that now seem forlorn and shy in the
daylight. Henry hasn't touched anything in the drawers. He looks at me; I glance
at the door almost involuntarily and Henry takes the hint. I turn to Mama's desk.
The papers are in no order at all. I sit on the floor and pile the contents of a
drawer in front of me. Everything with her handwriting on it I smooth and pile on
my left. Some of it is lists, and notes to herself: Do not ask P about S. Or: Remind
Etta dinner B's Friday. There are pages and pages of doodles, spirals and
squiggles, black circles, marks like the feet of birds. Some of these have a
sentence or a phrase embedded in them. To part her hair with a knife. And: couldn't
couldn't do it. And: 7/7 am quiet it will pass me by. Some sheets are poems so heavily
marked and crossed out that very little remains, like fragments of Sappho:
Like old meat, relaxed and tender
no air XXXXXXX she said yes
she said XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Or:
his hand XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
in extreme XXXXXXXXXX
Some poems have been typed:
At the moment
all hope is weak
and small.
Music and beauty
are salt in my sadness;
a white void rips through my ice.
Who could have said
that the angel of sex
was so sad?
or known desire
would melt this vast
winter night into
a flood of darkness.
1/23/79
The spring garden:
a ship of summer
swimming through
my winter vision.
4/6/79
1979 was the year Mama lost the baby and tried to kill herself. My stomach
aches and my eyes blur. I know now how it was with her then. I take all of those
papers and put them aside without reading any more. In another drawer I find
more recent poems. And then I find a poem addressed to me:
The Garden Under Snow
for clare
now the garden is under snow
a blank page our footprints write o n
clare who was never mine
but always belonged to herself
Sleeping Beauty
a crystalline blanket
she waits
this is her spring
this is her sleeping/awakening
she is waiting
everything is waiting
for a kiss
the improbable shapes of tubers roots
I-never thought
my baby
her almost face
a garden, waiting
Henry: It's almost dinner time and I'm in Nell's way, so when she says, "Shouldn't
you go see what your woman is up to?" it seems like a good idea to go and find
out.
Clare is sitting on the floor in front of her mother's desk surrounded by white
and yellow papers. The desk lamp throws a pool of light around her, but her face
is in shadow; her hair a flaming copper aura. She looks up at me, holds out a
piece of paper, and says, "Look, Henry, she wrote me a poem." As I sit beside
Clare and read the poem I forgive Lucille, a little, for her colossal selfishness and
her monstrous dying, and I look up at Clare. "It's beautiful," I say, and she nods,
satisfied, for a moment, that her mother really did love her. I think about my
mother singing lieder after lunch on a summer afternoon, smiling at our reflection
in a shop window, twirling in a blue dress across the floor of her dressing room.
She loved me. I never questioned her love. Lucille was changeable as wind. The
poem Clare holds is evidence, immutable, undeniable, a snapshot of an emotion.
I look around at the pools of paper on the floor and I am relieved that something
in this mess has risen to the surface to be Clare's lifeboat.
"She wrote me a poem," Clare says, again, in wonder. Tears are streaking
down her cheeks. I put my arms around her, and she's back, my wife, Clare, safe
and sound, on the shore at last after the shipwreck, weeping like a little girl
whose mother is waving to her from the deck of the foundering boat.
NEW YEAR'S EVE, ONE
Friday, December 31, 1999, 11:55p.m. (Henry is 36, Clare is 28)
Henry: Clare and I are standing on a rooftop in Wicker Park with a multitude of
other hardy souls, awaiting the turn of the so-called millennium. It's a clear night,
and not that cold; I can see my breath, and my ears and nose are a bit numb. Clare
is all muffled up in her big black scarf and her face is startlingly white in the
moon/street light. The rooftop belongs to a couple of Clare's artist friends.
Gomez and Charisse are nearby, slow-dancing in parkas and mittens to music
only they can hear. Everyone around us is drunkenly bantering about the canned
goods they nave stockpiled, the heroic measures they have taken to protect their
computers from meltdown. I smile to myself, knowing that all this millennial
nonsense will be completely forgotten by the time the Christmas trees are Picked
up off the curbs by Streets and San.
We are waiting for the fireworks to begin. Clare and I lean against the
waist-high false front of the building and survey the City of Chicago. We are
facing east, looking toward Lake Michigan. "Hello, everybody" Clare says,
waving her mitten at the lake, at South Haven, Michigan. "It's funny,"
she says to me. "It's already the new year there. I'm sure they're all in bed."
We are six stories up, and I am surprised by how much I can see from here. Our
house, in Lincoln Square, is somewhere to the north and west of here; our
neighborhood is quiet and dark. Downtown, to the southeast, is sparkling. Some
of the huge buildings are decorated for Christmas, sporting green and red lights
in their windows. The Sears and The Hancock stare at each other like giant robots
over the heads of lesser skyscrapers. I can almost see the building I lived in when
I met Clare, on North Dearborn, but it's obscured by the taller, uglier building
they put up a few years ago next to it. Chicago has so much excellent architecture
that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible
buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff. There isn't much traffic;
everyone wants to be somewhere at midnight, not on the road. I can hear bursts
of firecrackers here and there, punctuated occasionally with gunfire from the
morons who seem to forget that guns do more than make loud noises. Clare says,
"I'm freezing" and looks at her watch. "Two more minutes." Bursts of celebration
around the neighborhood indicate that some people's watches are fast.
I think about Chicago in the next century. More people, many more.
Ridiculous traffic, but fewer potholes. There will be a hideous building that
looks like an exploding Coke can in Grant Park; the West Side will slowly rise
out of poverty and the South Side will continue to decay. They will finally tear
down Wrigley Field and build an ugly megastadium, but for now it stands
blazing with light in the Northeast.
Gomez begins the countdown: "Ten, nine, eight..." and we all take it up:
"seven, six, five, four, THREE! TWO! ONE! Happy New Year!" Champagne corks
pop, fireworks ignite and streak across the sky, and Clare and I dive into each
other's arms. Time stands still, and I hope for better things to come.
THREE
Saturday, March 13, 1999 (Henry is 35, Clare is 27)
Henry: Charisse and Gomez have just had their third child, Rosa Evangeline
Gomolinski. We allow a week to pass, then descend on them with presents and
food.
Gomez answers the door. Maximilian, three years old, is clinging to his leg,
and hides his face behind Gomez's knee when we say "Hi Max!" Joseph, more
extroverted at one, races up to Clare babbling "Ba ba ba" and burps loudly as she
picks him up. Gomez rolls his eyes, and Clare laughs, and Joe laughs, and even I
have to laugh at the complete chaos. Their house looks as though a glacier with a
Toys "R" Us store inside it has moved through, leaving pools 