At Last, You’ve Come

The asylum at Christmas amuses with its small attempts at revelry. The sagging pine, misplaced, like me, out of its element, covered in paper ornaments crafted by lunatic hands, lightless in the corner. The screams instead of carols.  

I see you’re wet from the snow, Mother. How it falls! How it slants, whitening the streets, coating the horses’ manes.

Sit, mother, sit.
The stench of you, dead all these years.

You see, my senses are still quite acute.

I must open the windows, allow the cold air to refresh us both.

Oh but the evil one, Nurse Bell, will alarm like a ghost, close it.

I will endure your odor, Mother, just to be near you.

Ah, your hand, so small, so cold, fits just right in mine.

Your plaintive face is like looking into a mirror.  I have always seen myself in you.

I would get out of the bed to study you more closely but my legs seem to shake.

I see the rope’s red stain still bruising your neck.

May I touch it?

Sit here, Mother, stay, I will tell you how I ended up here, locked up for good, and on Christmas no less.  Are you like Dickens’ ghosts, all three in one?

I will pull the curtain snug. Spies are everywhere, you see.  

My extreme sensitivity, my patience, are exhibited even here. I’m the most careful mouse. I’ve earned their trust, my discharge from isolation.

Oh, they recognize my wit, my  sincerity.

They now allow me to  move about.

I can talk to you, Mother, touch you!

Please, come, lay down with me as I have always imagined.

***

After your death, Father hired a Mrs. Hooper to cook and clean and assume childcare duties. He was never home, spending much of his time out,  presumably at meetings with other doctors, discussing big ideas, restraints and ice baths and electric shock and cutting out wedges of brain like the Christmas goose. (Thankfully, perhaps because of my relation to the late great man, they’ve not done that to me. Yet.) Usually, his presence in the house was known by the sight of his hat and coat in the hall. Sometimes I put my face in his clothes to get a whiff of him. Oh, I was so lonely, Mother.

He kept the house a frightful cold, for health I was told. Even in summer, my breath hung before me at the breakfast table. Most of the rooms were closed off, their furnishings covered in white sheets. So, I spent my hours in a dreary so-called nursery, the kitchen, and outside on the grounds of the house.

Consumption was rife, the dreaded blood coming up into the cloth signaling the fate of the afflicted. That’s what Mrs. Hooper said happened to you, Mother.

I imagined your hack drifting from shadowed closed off corridors. I never knew your voice, so I invented a coughing, dying mother. I prayed  the cough of the consumptive no longer ailed you. Alas, I pictured a bloodstain on your sleeve or on your lace-lined pillow.

I sometimes envied you, being dead. You could come and go from this sad, cold house.

How beautiful you are now, Mother, as beautiful as I dreamt. Your chest is still. Your brown eyes, so deep, so much like mine, such a comfort here.

Let’s not talk about eyes though, that will come later.

***

Of course I loved him, as you did once. What son does not at least try to love his father? When I was seven, enduring a rare meal together, I asked him to tell me about you, Mother. He put his soup spoon down, cleared his throat and then said, quite unforgettably, that my birth caused your weakness and subsequent death and I should never speak your name.

Lenore. Lenore. Lenore. Lenore.

Let me say it and say it, now that you’re here, now that I can.

My twelfth year, a banging on the door disturbed the house’s usual forlorn silence. Two brutish men lugged Father on a stretcher, deposited him in his room like a bag of stones. He’d apparently been found in the street, despondent. Mrs. Hooper wanted nothing to do with illness, so I, a veritable child, was tasked with the burden of care. I barely knew the man before but now emptied his bed pan, blotted sweat from his greasy brow. He too coughed up blood. Day after day I spooned mush into his hanging mouth. He lived in a state of delirium, babbling nonsensical words or sunk in a coma of sleep. Mrs. Hooper made the meals, tidied the kitchen and fled each day.

Meanwhile, I lurked from silent room to silent room. The clocks, long unwound, stared with unquestioning faces. Their pendulums, stilled tongues, hung motionless. They did not accuse, did not torment. With each step I grew more powerful. My house, I said softly, practicing the phrase, my voice growing stronger with each utterance. My house.

 I built fires in the once-locked rooms, raced the hallways. My frequent bursts of laughter giggled away from me, echoing down the corridors. I coerced a stray black alley cat inside, offering milk, allowed it to stay. Soon the house was filled with multitudes of dark, skulking felines. Bowls of milk sat in every corner, upon every surface. The cats weren’t always tidy, so soon Mrs. Hooper quit in disgust. I celebrated her departure. With access to Father’s accounts, I was more than able to pay the grocery bill and cook a roast. The Lord of the Manor, at last.

 

One day, I found the key to Father’s study in his dresser, dashed off immediately to unlock the room. I was thrilled to find the tremendous number of books lining the walls of sturdy shelves. There, my self-education began! I studied his medical and anatomy books, marveling at the human form, all its sinewy connections, its cartilage and bone, and of course its blood. I felt my own blood more keenly, began to respect it. Before, as I said, it was only a dreaded product of illness, decrepitude, encroaching death. Now it was the beautiful, holy stuff of life. I promised myself I would master its form and function.

 

I fell into a routine of caring for Father, reading in the study, and working various chores in and outside the house. I brought his meals, sat beside the bed turning the pages of all the books I’d wanted to read with him as a child. Stevenson’s Treasure Island had just come out and Father and I enjoyed it very much indeed. Eventually, he told me how much he’d always loved me, how difficult it was for him to express his feelings, especially after you died, how well I looked, for I did look well. He smiled and reached out his shaking pale hand from the bed, and I held it, Mother, I did. He thanked me for my care.

 

I grew a robust garden in the back. I purchased chickens, rabbits, a pig. I taught myself how to kill them-the chickens with a snip of the neck, the rabbits with my foot to the rake and the rake to their necks, the pig with a knife through the heart. Every now and then a neighbor would complain about the smells and sounds of livestock, but I’d hand them a big basket of vegetables and they’d scurry off.

I drained the animals of their blood, skinned and prepared them for eating.

I was entirely self-sufficient. Father was completely reliant on my care. I had created a better life for myself, a life of control.

***

For weeks I continued reading in Father’s study, ignoring the solid desk sitting squarely in the middle of the room.  I assumed the drawers were locked and since I possessed no key I paid it no mind. One day I decided to approach, surprised by the easy shift of every drawer. Inside lay multitudes of papers, boring medical case studies, deeds and contracts of business. Perhaps because no one was there to stop me, I studied every word carefully, so carefully. You see Mother, my life was a bottomless pit, a seething, swelling question mark. I knew, the way children always know, that there was some truth from which I had been excluded. 

 

Then, I found it. Your letter. In its sweet, tiny, wavering cursive, ink blotting the page,  you described your own bottomless pit of darkness. You told him of your loneliness, your despair. You said you had asked untold times for his love, his companionship, but he did not respond to your pleas. You told him you saw no way out, no way besides death. My hands shook absorbing your final words.

It was after reading this, learning the truth of your death,  that I no longer saw him as my father, but a pathetic, needy old man.

I no longer read to him, kept our time together short. I assured his colleagues who sometimes appeared on the stoop that he was doing much better. And he was. I permitted him just enough food, water, and sunlight to keep death’s door shut, but I would never allow him the strength to  leave his bed, that room.

***

I’ve told everyone, absolutely everyone, it was the eye, that pale blue filmy right eye, watery, always looking at me. The vulture eye. Perhaps it was infected, I knew not. I did not think the old man wished me ill, but the eye became like a relentless tapping on the window, reminding me of the old man’s failings,  toward me, toward you.

It was so clever, ironic, how I used all the knowledge the old man’s library gave me to sustain myself and our home, and then that knowledge taught me how to kill him, to sever him into little bits.

Oh, Mother, I believed you’d be there in the end, but you did not come, and I felt so weak without you. So weak that when the police came my courage bled from me like the pig I hung from the oak tree last fall.

Now it’s Christmas one year hence. You’ve come too late.

What is that you say, Mother? Speak up!

Coward? Lunatic? Murderer? How can you call me these things, when you, you…

No, no, no, no.

Watch me, Mother! I will pull the curtain, open the shutter, throw open the window, release you out into the cold, dark night.

Nurse Bell be damned!

Fly. Mother! Fly! I have no need of you now. Out into the swirling snow you go, join the church bells, they’re ringing now, clanging, insisting, accusing, replacing, at last, the old man’s lingering heartbeat. I am poised, alert as ever! My blood courses in my veins. The bells, the relentless ringing bells, sustain my eternal wakefulness.

 

 

 

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Jennifer Prochna: A Magical Life