Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (16 page)

Lenny had been a real specimen, Michelangelo’s
David
from the neck down, and good old Lenny Stillmach with a big nose and Groucho Marx eyebrows from the chin up. I loved him dearly. We always had fun. We made love only once. Not another soul knew about it, but yes, Lenny and I had been lovers. Our secret. One night only at the height of that heyday of the blood called youth. The big war was over, and the whole country was still celebrating. We had to do it in a chair because Lenny’s arm was in a sling. Before he returned stateside, a shell had jammed and exploded, spraying friendly-fire shrapnel all over the deck. There was jump music coming in from the ballroom. It was summer, our blood ran hot, and our hearts were strong. As Lenny liked to say, “It was only the once, Sally, but it was for the ages.”

Only the once, and never again. When we chanced to meet afterwards on the peculiar waterways and backwaters of life, he usually had some unsuitable baggage with tinted hair and plucked eyebrows in tow talking about her cat, or I had the insufferably overweening Randall at my side, ever the art history professor, prattling on about the separation of hands in the Ghent Altarpiece, or his latest monograph on the iconography of Hugo van der Goes. At such times, stuck like two rocks in the river of life, Lenny and I used to look across the rushing waters at each other and think:
How did we not end up together? Why are you with that self-absorbed oddball? What is he/she talking about?

Leonard Stephen Stillmach was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on April 13, 1920. When he got out of high school, the Great Depression still held the country in its grip like a bad hangover. Times were tough, no jobs. He worked two years for the Civilian Conservation Corps as a truck driver and bulldozer and grader operator. In 1940, he joined the U.S. Navy for a six-year tour.

After ten weeks’ training at Great Lakes Naval Base, he was assigned to the destroyer USS
Tucker
at Mirror Island, California, and later set sail for Hawaii. On December 7, 1941, Lenny was twenty-one years old and a seaman first class. He manned a deck gun as Japanese torpedo bombers swept down on his ship. He watched comrades die as the USS
Arizona
exploded and sank a hundred yards away.

Later in the war, while on escort duty in the South Pacific, his own ship hit a mine and sank. He was at Okinawa when the war ended.

He saw action again during the Korean War at the 38th parallel just off the Korean coast. He served twenty years in the U.S. Navy before settling again in Lewiston.

I had to laugh at him now. His bushy white head was propped up in bed. His fingers frantically worked the buttons on Casino Queen until the game emitted a series of notes in descending triplets, whereupon he cussed at Casino Queen as if she were a real dealer at the
Scotia Prince
Casino down in Portland, Maine.

Our insane infatuation with each other, our childish enthusiasm for pure fun were never cured by marriage. It was one of those star-crossed calamities of the heart that we did not end up sharing a bed for the fifty years it would have taken us to explore each other’s uncharted interiors.

One night only. For the ages.

When the time came, I was going to cover him in rose petals and kiss him. Dear, sweet Lenny.

He set the game aside and closed his eyes. I held his hand and watched him slip into fitful breathing. Part of me wanted to close my eyes for good and go off with him. The other part wondered what Lenny would see when he left his body. Was there a dark passage waiting for him with a pitiful child crying at the top of it? A bestial figure standing guard?

I was reading a lovely passage of Rilke to Lenny about angels: how they don’t always know if they are moving among the living or the dead; how if the dangerous archangel took one step down toward us from behind the stars, our heartbeats, rising like thunder, would kill us. It’s possible to live a long and fruitful life without poetry. But at the end of our time on earth, everything becomes gigantic. The moments swell and burst the seams of minutes and hours and days. When we are in extremis, words are too big for prose and conversational speech. Only poetry and prayers will do.

For those of us still thrashing about in the hurly-burly predicament called life, it is at tender, introspective moments such as these that one’s relations usually barge in with an urgent reminder that interest rates on fixed-rate mortgages are at a twenty-year low, and did you remember to call the loan officer and lock in? In my case, it was Bobby, who intruded on Lenny and me in our little oasis of time without so much as a by-your-leave. He was pushing a wheelchair with two dusty manila folders crosswise on the seat of it and, on top of those, a little handheld tape recorder. Good boy! The folders gave me hope that he’d finally found some helpful research on the hospital fire. I reached for them, but the impertinent scamp swatted my hand away, as if I were a common brat reaching for boiling water on the stove. His own mother!

I shushed him before he even spoke, because I could see by his bug eves and his quivering lips that he was going to be way too loud. He had the hospital worker’s total disregard for the privacy of others. Not just mine and Lenny’s—he didn’t even glance at the other patients on the ward, all of whom were at life’s end, making peace with themselves and their maker, wasting away and suffering, perhaps already communing with the spirits of loved ones. Bobby didn’t know and didn’t care. He had one thing on his mind: He was angry at me.

“Bobby, I’m reading to Lenny. What is it?”

He parked the wheelchair next to me at Lenny’s bedside and began rubbing his scalp the way he does on those rare occasions when he cares enough about something to be distressed or panicked. A one-handed head rub meant trouble; he was using both hands, which meant
big
trouble. The computer must have crashed and taken Warcraft with it.

“Mum, what have you done?”

“I don’t know, Bobby. I have a feeling you’re about to tell me. Did I turn off the power supply to the computer when I vacuumed?”

“Did you call Peggy Kruger and tell her to go rummaging through her mum’s things looking for suicide notes?”

That was easy. I did no such thing.

“Bobby, I simply asked the woman if there were any papers addressed to me or referencing me that Madeline Kruger would want me to have.”

Bobby paced and tugged at his uncombed hair with both hands, as if he was thinking about yanking it out by the fistful.

“Mum, Ray’s little sister, Peggy Kruger, is a feeb. She’s got the mental operating system of a nine-year-old girl. You’ve gone and set her off, Mum. Ray says Hilda came back from New York and found Peggy banging her head against the floor, sticking herself with forks, crying about some baby that she delivered stillborn at the Kingdom ten years ago. Hilda had hidden a box of papers from her—dark family secrets and such—but Peggy found them because
you
told her to go looking. ”

Oops. Perhaps I had overreached. Just a little.

“Hilda is on the warpath, Mum. She’s talking to lawyers. Peggy’s here in the hospital. That’s right, the psych unit, and if you go
near
that place, I swear to God, Mum, Hilda will call the police and have your meddling bones arrested and thrown in jail! She’s already seeing about a restraining order, because she knows you won’t leave her mum’s death alone.”

I was chagrined, of course, but another part of me blamed Hilda for not giving up the goods weeks ago. Legally I had no right to look at Madeline’s suicide note, but morally it seemed unconscionable that the note referenced me and our shared childhoods and yet was being kept from me. Young people these days simply don’t respect the wish es of their parents. They arrogate to themselves the right to decide what’s best for anybody over sixty-five, as if the elderly are all manifestly incompetent until proven otherwise. Wisdom counts for nothing.

“You just couldn’t let it be, Mum,” said Bobby. “You had to go and pry. Hilda’s here in Kingdom Hospital right now taking care of Peggy, Mum. And she’s looking out for you. You better go back to your room and post a guard. She is a harpy from hell after every hair on your white head, and I can’t say I blame her.”

“What are those old folders you have there, Bobby?” I asked as sweetly as possible.

“Mum, I want you to tell Mr. Stillmach good-bye and come with me, back to your room.”

“If I do, will you tell me what’s in those folders?”

Bobby sighed. “Yes, Mum. Now get in,” he said, shoving the wheelchair at me.

“Bobby, I don’t need a wheelchair.”

“I know you don’t,” he said. Now he was clenching his teeth, fairly snarling at his ailing mum. “But if you are going to hospitalize yourself for dizziness, then the doctors are going to be worried about you falling again and smacking your brainpan on the marble floors. Get in, Mum!”

“Thank you for my tape recorder, Bobby. That’s so nice of you to find one for me.”

I found out later why Bobby was so put out. Having to come fetch me on the sunshine ward was something of a busman’s holiday for him. He was off the clock and had been all set to go home, where he’d have the house all to himself for a nice smoke and a game of Bloodfest, when nurse Howe had called down from the psych unit about the Peggy Kruger affair. Bobby had been wheeling a new batch of auto accident victims around all night—a family of four who came in off of an 1-495 pileup at half past midnight. Nurse Liz Hinton had kidded Bobby about it when he had to stay and look after me: She’d told him that he was off duty as an orderly, but he was still on call as my son.

I could hear him grumbling just behind my head as he wheeled me in my chair past the nurses’ station on the sunshine ward, where I greeted nurse Brick Bannerman, who looked uncommonly frazzled. I later learned that Brick and Liz were both due downstairs in the ER, where it was all hands on deck to receive a new patient, a celebrity artist, Peter Rickman, a first citizen of Maine, who had been struck by a van while walking on route 7 out near Warrington’s Inn. Already, whether by accident or design, the major players in the impending drama were coming together at Kingdom Hospital, like metal filings aligned by invisible magnetic fields.

Let me take pains here to point out that I was of sound mind and body. Except for a little dizziness at times and some tingling in my arm, I was completely copacetic: taking no medications, enjoying lots of meditations.

Other than my arm, all systems were normal, and it was an ordinary sunny day at the Kingdom. I may have been more than cranky with Bobby, but it was in self-defense. He acted as if I’d committed a felony by calling the Kruger household, so I supposed I may have mentioned a few of his shortcomings en route to the elevators: the chewing, his weight, his congenital clumsiness—pick one!—deficiencies of character, habit, and physique that repel all worthwhile feminine companionship, and with them my hopes of ever dandling a grandchild on my poor old rheumatic knees.

He parked my wheelchair in front of the elevator bank by the nurses’ station. A chime sounded over elevator 3, a green light went on above it, and the doors began to open. Out of habit and inertia, Bobby was already edging the wheelchair forward. He wasn’t paying attention, as usual, and I heard him telling nurse Brick (who was behind the console) that he was taking me back to the neurology ward.

I heard others cry out to warn him, of what I did not know, until I looked ahead through the open elevator doors into a scarred shaft of naked concrete, stained cinder blocks, rusty tierods. I knew this place! I had been here before! But where the floor of the elevator car belonged, an abyss opened under my feet. It was as if the skin of the material world had been torn open to reveal bottomless, terrifying, supernatural mysteries plunging away from me in every direction—an open shaft that appeared to drop for miles into the blackness of eternal night,

I felt myself pitch forward in a bout of helpless vertigo, because I knew that shaft. I had seen it almost a year ago while temporarily dead! Near death! December 13, 2002. Full moon Friday the thirteenth!

The elevator car was nowhere to be seen. Stuck up above us being serviced by repairmen, I later learned.

I continued leaning over the dark chasm, because I could not tear my eyes away. I felt Poe’s imp of perversity scaling the frets of my spine, his claws charged with electrical impulses that all said, “Jump, Sally!”
There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge!

I seemed poised on the brink of terror and elation, staring again into the hellish chasm I had visited so many months ago as a fantastical hallucination. Here it was again: a vision out of time in broad daylight. I so vividly imagined myself leaping into what appeared to be an eternity of falling that I wondered if I had indeed already taken that reckless plunge. I was afraid to look up, for fear I would rise again in the dark passage, see that fearsome guardian at his watch, hear the voice ofthat poor girl crying out to me from the realm of perpetual despair.

Before I could summon the courage to lift my eyes, Bobby pulled his mum back from the precipice.

I was trembling from head to foot and craving my notebooks so I could scribble down in graphic detail the revelation that had just opened at my feet. Let the doctors tell me I was beset by some obscure neurochemical imbalance or cerebral contusion, senile dementia or Alzheimer’s; I now
knew
different. The elevator shaft I had just seen was
identical
to the one I’d ascended nearly a year before during my near-death flight, right down to the rusty tie-rods and the stained cinder blocks. I wanted to see it again and compare every blemish and detail with the phantasm that came before it. But I was also still seized by the instinctive desire to go back to the safety of the habitual and the predictable: It could just be a coincidence. I should just chalk it up to septuagenarian daffiness. It was just an elevator shaft, nothing more; they are probably all built with stained cinder blocks and rusty tie-rods. In the end, the delicious exhilaration of confronting the unknown overmastered all.