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I said, “Oh, we've passed the place.” He had been talking, growling, for blocks. “I might as well go with you to pick up the dog, and get out on the way back.” He replied with his groaning sigh.

The house was hidden from the street by a dense laurel hedge. It was dark now but not raining, and if you turned back at the top
of the steep walk you saw a drop-off with the dark lake spread out below, so unexpected it could have sprung right out of a rock.

A weightless feeling comes over me whenever I look down on water from high up on land. Seeing it I felt a certainty that I was not sick, I was well. Instead of the sensation of being subtly awry I had the feeling I was in the midst of a normal life.

But now I was very hungry. This looked like the sort of house where fruit would be set out in a bowl from which you could help yourself.

The locks had not been changed after all. In the front hall there was no bowl of fruit but a crystal dish of sourballs. I stopped to take a cherry one, and he grimly swept the whole lot into his pocket. I unwrapped mine and dropped the paper on the floor. He offered no apologies for the size of the house or the fussy luxury of its furnishings, but made straight for the kitchen in the back.

Sure enough there was a dog, asleep in the shut-up kitchen without even a rug. It was a damaged version of a collie dog, thin, with an awful coat, and it scrambled up guiltily when we opened the kitchen door, like an old man pretending he hadn't been asleep in his chair. The dog had a smell, a putrid steam, which came up and surrounded us. When it began an agonized wagging and scooting toward him, he fell to his knees.

He knelt and pardoned the dog's appearance and smell and used a voice to convince it it was something besides these things, something an animal might not suspect itself to be. And he picked it up. It should have weighed too much for that but it didn't. Without speaking, he indicated the keys he had put down on the counter. I locked the door behind us, and he lugged the dog down the steps and through the hedge, eased it into the back seat, and got in with it. I thought he was going to get back out but he kept stroking and soothing the dog, which was panting unhealthily.

I had the keys. I got into the driver's seat. Nothing happened so I started the car. I said, “You can't take a dog like that into a downtown hotel, now can you.” He didn't answer; he was in a
reverie petting the awful-smelling dog, like a schoolboy with his thoughts in his hands. In the rearview mirror I could see them both with their eyes shut.

“So if I took him to my house,” I said after a while, “you would have to come every day to take care of him.”

“Her. She'll die without me. Look how sick she is now. Good dog. Good dog.” He sat for blocks stroking the dog, as the fumes from its coat rose and banked in the car.

“In that case you would have to come with her,” I said finally. I had seen the girl tell him what to do. I had seen the whole thing. I pushed all the buttons in the fancy armrest to open the windows. By now it was dark and cold, and the cold air, still wet, whirled in the car. The dog raised its nose to sniff.

He said, “I would have to get my things.”

I turned to go downtown, where the hotel was. After a time he said, “Some of my things are at the office. I shuttle back and forth.” So I doubled back. When he got out of the car the dog shut its eyes again, hopelessly. We hurried in. Angelique was alone, tilted back in the chair in her cubicle, studying her Spanish book. She had her shoes off and there was a run in her tights.

“Well, look who's here,” she said in a lonely voice. “I heard you in the hall. I hoped it was you and not a rapist.” I looked down at her. For all her rudeness she was a hopeful girl, thinly dressed below the funny hair, and ill-fed. With some care she could be the daughter I never had.

The Magic Pebble

T
HE
flight to Lourdes was open to the whole archdiocese. Huge widebody, full. I was in the middle of coach in a row of five, in the middle seat.

All right, I'll make the best of it. I have my little Sony, I'll turn it on when they say we can and talk to two people, and that will be the program: me, the dressed-up old fellow on my left, and the woman on my right with a nun in charge of stuffing her bag into the overhead bin and getting the seat belt out from under her. At first I thought the woman was blind but she was just slow, in a daze. The nun had a broad pink face, heavily and dramatically wrinkled considering its resigned expression.

I have become aware of resignation in others. By the time you reach the third chemo, one of the things you notice is that the people around you accept death, your death. It happened with my radio show; during my last sick leave, friends from the station kept telling me how well the show was doing on reruns, how I didn't need to feel I had to hurry back to it.

I'm back, though. Now I can ask for anything. My boss Charlie always did give me free rein, but the station manager has taken to sending me complimentary memos not unlike greeting cards. To the manager's way of thinking, according to Charlie, my illness drops a fringed scarf over the rummage-sale nature of the show, lends it a dimly glowing aura of the endangered, the
soon-to-be-archival: items veined and burnished and distressed now, like fake antiques, by my attention. As for me, I have finished with the disappearance of the tiger and the frog from the earth, and with the university hospital where patients were secretly injected with plutonium. Away with reproach. On to Inventions and Patents! The Sightings of the Ark! Birds in History!

If you write a noun, any noun, on a piece of paper and slap it down on Charlie's desk he grins, the radio snaps on in his mind. He remembers “satellite” new on everyone's lips. He is happy with his throwback job; he's a gray-haired, loping man who could easily have a beer with the campus agitator he was thirty years ago; he has his own tattered copy of the Port Huron Statement. He remembers “pacification,” newborn “fluorocarbon,” reborn “terrorist.” He charts the passage of world figures in the press, from “madman” to “strongman” to “leader.”

“I'm beyond all that. I've given up,” I tell Charlie.

“OK,” he says.

“I'm going for the fun factual or the seriously miraculous.”

“OK.”

This trip I am taking springs directly out of
The Song of Bernadette
.

By the time we made our high school graduation retreat the decline in vocations was serious and the hopeful sisters were showing this movie. How beautiful and good the curious tapered face of Jennifer Jones was, so sad-mouthed, in that movie. Even so, we snickered at her dull wits, her inability to speak up for herself when she was the one, after all, to whom Our Lady had stepped out of rock, clothed in white and a blue beyond blue, with yellow roses on her feet—as we seniors of Holy Names knew despite the black-and-white of the movie. No human: a statue come to life, shining with unearthly glamour, melting with bridal politeness. An invisible power filled the air but the girl could not stretch out her hands to determine the source of it. Much was offered, but touch remained in the realm of the unpermitted.

“From the remotest times, out of child-sacrifice to water, out of rainmaking and ceremonial cleansing, from sacred well, holy pool, fountain in oak tree—the
spring
has been thought to possess a miraculous power.”

For music maybe somebody blowing into a bottle.

“Unorthodox”—or maybe I should say “orthodox”—“as such a trip seemed when it first occurred to me at the end of chemo, I saw it as something that would perhaps . . .” “Perhaps” is a little clothespin not really sturdy enough, I'm afraid, for the vast wet sheet of the possible that I have to hang from it. Halfway through I'll break in with passages from novels, pro and con. “That world of hallucinated believers,” Zola called Lourdes—which won't be my position; I won't presume to judge. At the station they'll say, “This was her best show, she left her shtick at home, she was honest for a change.” Because they know I'm always feigning interest. Even when it's one of my causes, in which I have the most intense interest privately, I slip into this broadminded radio-interest. Whereas the mark of real interest would be silence, like that preserved by my boss Charlie at my bedside. “Saline infusion,” I'll read him, “followed by the nitrogen
mustard
. . .” He'll wrinkle his forehead, squint, and then I'll laugh and he'll laugh. I can tell he would like to do a show on chemo.

My husband, with his inborn, unfailing sense of the thing to say to a person in chemo with tufts of her former self in her hands, says irritably, “What's so funny all the time? He's got a crush on you. Charlie. I'm serious, he does.”

This trip to Lourdes is the second trip I've taken since then. First we went—the three of us, my husband and I and our son—to Lake Powell.

The hospital doors sighed open and my little boy wheeled me across the rubber divide to the car all packed and waiting. “Southward ho!” my husband said, as I waved up to the smoked glass of Oncology. My son was marching stiff-necked with the thrill of missing a week of kindergarten and Rafe. For him kindergarten has been embodied from the start in the narrow-headed little boy
with the buzz cut who glared at him from the next chair. Some of the mothers say the haircut was a practical measure. Rafe's own mother was afraid to wash his hair. She is his stepmother, actually, and she can't stand him, it is said. All she wanted was the father. I don't want to think about this. Stepmothers.

Rafe, a name breathed every night at our dinner table: one of those children who start school already old in the ways of power. After difficulties in another kindergarten he came to St. Joseph's three days into the first week. Not a bully, exactly. His crimes were against property, a dogged wrecking of the bright room, or his part of it, the part where he lurked like a rook—the border, the lanes between respectful groups.

“Rafe,” my son ventures, “cut the cat's ear with scissors,” looking away in case our faces confirm his suspicions about the place where he lives his days.

At the hospital there was a party for the two of us who had completed our treatment. We were all saying good-bye at the nursing station when a cart rolled down the hall, with an ice swan on a bed of ferns. “From your sweeties!” the nurses chorused, calling the husbands out of hiding in the railed bathroom where so recently my roommate Tracey and I had been sliding down the wall in a sweat.

“She thought you meant
Charlie
,” my husband grumbled to the nurses, who had been making much of his jealousy of my boss.

This was the end of chemo for both Tracey and me—whatever happened after this, chemo was, as they said, no longer an option. The swan was in honor of the Birds in History show I had finished taping just before I came in. The nurses ate the delicacies and we all admired the magnificent glistening bird being trundled up and down by Tracey's twins, three-year-olds who got their fingers and tongues stuck on the ice while my son watched.

My husband had gone to a lot of trouble to find a maker of ice swans. It wasn't just a shape, the feathers were etched in perfectly, the eye was an elongated half-closed Buddha-eye, sleepy and benevolent, and the beak had a little nostril. It was a pleasure to
see this life-size, realistic bird, after all the angels. Angel cards and angel calendars and angel balloons festooned the whole hospital. When people look back, these huge broody men-women will be the macramé of this period, says Charlie. “Looks like the millennium in here,” he says, batting a string of them out of the way. “Never, never will we do a show on angels.” Of course there have been requests. He found me Nabokov's story in which a huge moulting angel, all brown fur and steaming chicken-flesh, flies through a window and crashes in a hotel room. To mark its place he stuck in a card showing an angel on a rotisserie. “Like rattlesnake,” the man with the baster is saying.

Tracey was way ahead of me in the chemo protocol and that is not good unless you are getting well. When we met we lifted up our gowns and compared our scars. There are good scars and bad scars: hers was bad, formed of shiny blebs as if a red-hot choke-chain had been slung at her chest and fused with the skin. Her disease was bilateral and had reached her bones; she had lost her body fat and was down to membranes and big fruit-bat eyes, a praying, drifting, cloud-woman of the New Age, whose palm was always blossoming open to show me a pink crystal, a vial of aromatic oil, a spirit stone. She was twenty-seven; everybody loved her and her bearded husband and her curly-headed twins, who burst out of the elevator every afternoon and campaigned down our ward scattering action figures and jouncing the vials on trolleys.