Winter Birds (9 page)

I think of my parents and the arguments I used to hear before my father died, in which each blamed the other for their financial failures. I had wanted to defend them each to the other, wanted to point out to Daddy that Mother had worked slavishly at keeping up the boardinghouse during all the years he tried to make a success of his small printing company, wanted to remind Mother of all the sacrifices Daddy had made to keep the business going, to publish articles that told the truth, that championed the causes of minorities. But I was timid when it came to standing up to adults. Even when I got to be a young adult myself, I never would have told my parents they were wrong about anything.

I think of the paper on
Troilus and Cressida
that Eliot presented at a national conference a few months after we were married. It was the paper I had been typing for him, in fact, when he slipped up behind me, placed his hands on my shoulders, and said, “I hope you will agree to marry me, Sophia. I believe that it would be a good arrangement for both of us.” I continued typing, not knowing what to say. Thinking me reluctant, he went on at some length to list the many advantages of marriage, promising to make me happy. I cannot recall now what the advantages were or if the word
love
was ever mentioned.

I remember the great irony of the moment, for as he talked, I was typing a quoted passage from the play, in which Cressida scoffs at the things lovers promise when their ardor is new. They always “swear more performance” than they are capable of, she says, “vowing more than the perfection of ten,” yet never delivering a tenth of one part. Though the highest level of mathematics I ever taught was to sixth graders, I can compute this output to be a mere one percent of the vow. If the promise is a dollar, the delivery is a penny. If the lover vows to run one hundred meters, he keels over after the first stride.

I open my eyes and look at my hands, wrinkled and spotted from the toil of eighty years of living. If all ten fingers represent the perfection vowed by a lover, the actual performance doesn’t reach the first knuckle of the smallest finger. Promises are easy to make. I think of the many things two hands can do. They can sculpt something beautiful, then break it to pieces. The same hands that set words onto clean white paper can handle filth. They can touch the shoulders of a woman. They can push love away.

Chapter 7

A Foul and Pestilent Congregation of Vapors

Though the blue jay has earned the reputation of a bully, it also has a kinder, gentler side. Besides its noisy mocking cries, it has a low musical song. While it is often a bossy, greedy eater, it may also patiently labor to bring food to its mate during nesting season
.

In spite of Eliot’s failures, I mourned his loss. I had come to depend upon his companionship. Even during periods when he was unapproachable, I knew he would eventually return. I stored up bits of conversation to share with him, questions to ask. I allowed him to instruct me in all things, counting him stronger and wiser. He did not rule with a heavy hand, and it was my joy to order my days according to his wishes. I suppose some latecomers to marriage may rebel at the sudden restrictions. In my case I translated the restrictions into privileges, giving up what I considered to be little in order to enjoy much.

And I can say this: At least Eliot left me financially comfortable. He had accumulated a great deal more money in his lifetime than I could have guessed. Indeed, this was all I had to console me in the wake of his death, for in one five-minute span of time, thirteen years turned to rubble. After the shooting he lived two months—a dungeon of time, divided neatly into two cells: Before I Knew and After I Knew. Following those two months, there was his funeral, then later the trial of his son, my testimony playing a key role in convicting him.

Alonso and his sister, Portia, had hated me since my marriage to their father, for though they claimed fidelity to the tender memory of their mother, who had died twelve years before, I knew it was their father’s money that fueled their resistance to the marriage. They did not want a widow in the picture when Eliot died. When I married their father, he was already, at sixty, an old man in their eyes. Though only teenagers at the time, they were champing for their inheritance money.

Portia steadfastly refused to “lay eyes on that woman”—that’s what I heard her say one time when Eliot brought me home through the front door of his house and she exited, shrieking, through the back. She left home for Middlebury College in Vermont a week before we married, and she never returned. She studied French, lived in Paris after college, then moved with a Russian man named Slava to New Zealand, where she still lives and hates me from a distance of more than eight thousand miles. I feel no sorrow over her hatred. It is an abstraction. It does not touch me. The planet is round and revolves in an elliptical orbit around the sun. The stars shine. The rain falls. Portia hates me. Man breathes the air threescore years and ten, then dies. I have passed the mark by a decade.

Alonso, finishing high school the year we married, was rarely home. This was not an unhappy situation for me, and in many ways it was also a relief for Eliot, to whom his son was a mystery and an embarrassment. He didn’t know where Alonso slept most of the time. Except for the shaved strip down the middle of his scalp, I would barely have recognized the boy had I passed him on the street. The only time I heard him acknowledge my existence was once when he screamed to Eliot, “She’s a tub of lard! Why don’t you just call her Fat-Soph?”

If Alonso had not been convicted and jailed for life, no doubt he would have threatened and hounded me for his father’s money—money rightfully his, he would say. He surely would have contested the will, which awarded him only five thousand dollars and Portia only ten thousand. The remainder was mine.

Alonso would have stopped at nothing. I have seen and heard Alonso in action. Even now I sometimes imagine him breaking out of jail, tracking me down, and pointing a gun at me. I have awakened at night with his evil face floating above my bed, his small red-rimmed eyes glinting with greed and revenge. I keep my handgun in the drawer of the table beside my bed. I do not know if I could fire it in a crisis, but in its presence is a small measure of security.

I still see the spreading pool of blood on the rug in Eliot’s study, where he fell. I hear the screech of tires as Alonso fled from the scene; I hear the sound of the siren minutes later; I see Eliot’s form in the hospital bed, where he lay for two months in a coma before he died; I see him in the casket, wearing his best gray suit and a necktie for which he had paid eighty-five dollars. I feel the hatred radiating off Alonso’s sinewy body as he stared me down in the courtroom, straining forward as if he’d like to climb over the table and come at my throat. Sometimes in my dreams Alonso is a monkey, nimble and hairy, screeching and gnashing his teeth.

Eliot’s children were named after characters in Shakespearean plays. Growing up, they must have wished for normal names like Bob and Susan. I’ve often wondered if they were somehow set on the path of their hostile behaviors by the names they were given. I have envisioned Alonso slugging Bills and Davids when teased. I have seen Portia kicking and scratching at Janes and Lindas.

I suppose Eliot felt entirely justified in pinning literary names on his children, perhaps even compelled to do so for the sake of family tradition. Eliot himself had been named after George Eliot, whom his father had considered the finest of all English novelists, though Eliot preferred to think of himself as having more in common with T. S. Eliot, the poet and critic. T. S., however, had not yet made his mark in the literary world by the time Eliot was born in 1908. Eliot’s two older brothers were Hugo and Dickens. His father’s first name had been Hawthorne and his grandfather’s Marlowe.

In Eliot’s case, he liked the name Eliot well enough and didn’t object to the fact that George Eliot was actually a woman. He declared her
Middlemarch
to be a masterpiece. As for T. S. Eliot, Eliot ranked “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” just below Shakespeare’s sonnets. He nevertheless felt it was an unfortunate pairing with his last name, Hess, calling to mind Elliot Ness, a name well known in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. At his first teaching job in Indiana, he and a student named Al Caponi were the subject of much teasing.

But concerning Alonso, regardless of any possible role his name could have played in the shaping of his character, the facts of the incident that sent him to prison were inarguable, though he did attempt to argue them. Alonso claimed that Eliot was cleaning the gun, a .22-caliber, when he came to see him that day in his study. The truth was that Alonso took the gun from the bookcase, where he knew his father kept it. I saw this.

He said that his father got angry at his request for money, that he pointed the gun at him and threatened him. Instead, it was Alonso who pointed the gun and shouted—his customary mode of communication with his father—that Eliot give him money, “or else.” This I also witnessed.

From here the story proceeded along predictable lines: When in self-defense Alonso wrenched the gun from Eliot’s hand, a scuffle purportedly ensued, during which the trigger was accidentally pulled. In truth, after he aimed the gun and pulled the trigger himself, Alonso pressed the weapon into Eliot’s hands, then ran from the room. He did not know I was at home, that I had been watching from the doorway behind him. He did not see me flattened against the wall beside the door as he dashed out of the house. If he had, Fat-Soph certainly would not have been alive to testify against him in the courtroom.

The bullet’s trajectory in what Alonso called “the accident” led straight to Eliot’s head, where it lodged against his brain. As he lay unmoving in a hospital bed for two months, the doctors gave me little hope of his recovery. Alonso was held without bond, and when Eliot died, the charge became capital murder. Because I had been standing outside Eliot’s study during the altercation, I was called to the witness stand to tell what I had seen and heard. The jury found no cause for reasonable doubt and judged Alonso guilty after only an hour of deliberation. As he was led out of the courtroom, he flailed and cursed like the wild man that he was.

It is a wonder that I held up under the close scrutiny of cross-examination, for between the shooting and Alonso’s trial, I had walked through a chamber of horrors. By the time of the trial, I was in a daze of compounded grief. But I recalled every detail of the incident and reported it boldly and truthfully, knowing that my life depended on the jury’s belief in my account, knowing that if Alonso were not convicted, another gun would go off, this time directed at my head.

The chamber of horrors of which I speak was located in Eliot’s rolltop desk. Since then the horrors have been transferred to my mind, a large and commodious black screen upon which they are constantly replayed.

I went to Eliot’s study the day after the shooting to look for certain insurance papers in his desk, but it was locked, and I couldn’t find the key. It wasn’t on Eliot’s key ring or in his bureau drawer or any of the other places I looked. The key wasn’t a matter of greatest urgency at first, however, and by means of several telephone calls I was able to provide the proper information to the hospital without producing the actual papers.

For the first several weeks, I was at the hospital every waking hour, hoping against all reason that a miracle would occur, that Eliot would open his eyes, sit up, and say, “Have you got the suitcases packed, Sophia? Did you finish typing the paper? Bring it to me quickly! We need to be on our way to the conference.” I would have to urge him to lie back down, tell him gently there was a bullet in his head. After the excitement of his waking from the coma subsided, I could ask him at some point where the desk key was in case I ever needed it again.

In spite of the doctors’ evasive answers to my questions, those early days were full of hope. I sat by Eliot’s bed for hours on end, my eyes fixed on his face. I wanted to be the first to see him when he awoke. I fed on stories of hope I had heard, of coma victims suddenly waking and talking. Sometimes I sat on the edge of his bed and leaned down close to his face, thinking how happy I would be afterward to hear him tell people, “And when I opened my eyes, there was Sophia’s face not six inches away from mine. She was faithful. She never gave up. It was her courage and hope that snatched me from death.”

And I talked to him. I read sonnets and entire plays. I had never had a good singing voice, but I sang to him. He had always liked Broadway tunes. I sang songs from
South Pacific
and
Camelot
, two of his favorites. If I didn’t know all the words, I made them up. Eliot had always been quick to correct an error. My hope was that he would hear the mistake and wake up to fix it.

Many days passed before it began to sink into my consciousness that Eliot very likely would never come out of the coma. Early one morning, after I had fallen asleep in the chair next to his bed, I woke up, looked at him, and thought,
He will never come home
. He was as pale as a corpse, as my mother was known to say. This is a simile no longer used by the younger generation of funeral goers, those who have grown accustomed to the cosmetic wonders achieved by the modern mortician’s expert application of “peach glow” or “velvet rose.”

That day I rose from beside his hospital bed and went home. I showered, took the phone off the hook, and slept for ten straight hours. I returned to the hospital late that afternoon and sat beside my husband for two hours, during which time I looked at him and thought,
I must start planning a funeral
. He had lost flesh around his face and neck in only a few weeks, the intravenous fluids a poor compensation for the diet of steaks, potatoes, and bread he had always preferred.

I knew that Eliot would never teach again. It was the middle of September now. School had already started, and other professors had been hastily called in to teach our courses. The academic dean had already contacted me about the search for a new professor of Shakespeare. He felt that two or three of the graduate students could cover my freshman grammar and composition classes. “For now” is how he put it, but I heard it for what it was: “From now on.”