A Widow’s Story: A Memoir. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ that Ray is still at the hospital, in the hospital bed where I’d left him. In my vision of Ray he is always, forever, in the hospital bed in room 539 of the Princeton Medical Center, he is “sleeping”—he is “at peace”—his eyes are closed, his face unlined and smooth shaven, he is very still, I am leaning over him to kiss him—and so when Betty informs me that “your husband’s remains” are in an adjoining room and will have to be identified, I am taken by surprise; I am stunned; I am utterly shocked.

      Of course I must know—I know—that Ray’s body was picked up this morning at the medical center by a driver for the Pennington funeral home. I know this, since I arranged for it. I know that Ray’s body was delivered in a coffin, transported in an inconspicuous vehicle to the rear of 21 North Main Street, Pennington, in order to be “identified.”

      All this I know, yet somehow I have forgotten.

      All this I know, yet somehow I am overwhelmed by the fact that Ray is in the next room. Ray is dead, Ray is in the next room. Ray is here . . .

      Until now I have been behaving normally—I think. I have been talking—even smiling—in the company of Betty Davis, Jeanne and Jane—but now I begin to panic, to hyperventilate; I am light-headed, terrified. Quickly Jeanne says that she and Jane will identify Ray. “You stay here.”

      I am too weak to protest. I am too frightened. I can’t bear the thought of seeing Ray now. Why this is, I don’t know. I will regret this moment. I will regret this decision. I will never understand why at this crucial moment I behave in so childish a way, as if my husband whom I love has become physically repulsive to me.

      How ashamed I will be, at this decision! Like a child shrinking away, hiding her eyes.

      Always I will think: as I’d exercised such poor judgment, bringing Ray to the regional Princeton hospital, and keeping him there when he would surely have received superior treatment elsewhere, so my judgment is faulty now, inexplicable.

      “You don’t have to see Ray now,” Jeanne tells me. “You saw him last night. You’ve said good-bye.”

      The Widow has entered the stage of primitive thinking in which she imagines that some small, trivial gesture of hers might have meaning in relationship to her husband’s death. As if being “good”—“responsible”—she might undo her personal catastrophe. She will come slowly to realize that there is nothing to be done now.

      “Identifying” her husband’s body, or not—seeing his body one final time, or not—none of this will make the slightest difference. Her husband has died, he has gone and is not coming back.

       Chapter 21 Double Plot

      What my friend Jeanne has said is both true and not-true.

      You don’t really—ever—say good-bye.

      In the Pennington Cemetery at the intersection of Delaware Avenue and Main Street, a short distance behind the Pennington Presbyterian Church, there is a relatively new, grassy section in which, in a space identified as #551 West Center, a small marker reads

      RAYMOND J. SMITH, JR.

      1930–2008

      Oddly, there are few other grave markers in this section. Except, a near-neighbor, an attractive large grave marker made of granite—KATHERINE GREEF AUSTIN 1944–1997, WILLIAM J. O’CONNELL 1944–1996. I stare at these words, these numerals, and conclude—A widow, who died of grief.

      The contingencies of death have made SMITH and O’CONNELL neighbors, who had not known each other in life.

      How strange it is, to see Ray’s name in such a place! It’s very difficult for me to comprehend that, in the most literal way, the “remains” of the individual who’d been Raymond J. Smith are buried, in an urn, beneath the surface of the earth here.

      “Oh honey! What has happened. . . .”

      In dreams sometimes it is revealed that what you’d believed to be so is not so after all. In life it is not often revealed that what you’d believed to be so is not so after all—yet there is always the possibility, the hope.

      Because my mind is not functioning normally every moment is predicated upon the infantile hope This is not-right. But maybe it will become right if I am good.

      No one is visiting the cemetery this morning except me. This is a relief! Though I am anxious when I am alone, yet I yearn to be alone; the empty house is terrifying to me yet when I am away from it, I yearn to return to it. Except now, in the cemetery where my husband’s remains—“cremains” (hideous word)—are buried, I am both alone and not-alone.

      I am almost late for an appointment, I think. Maybe it’s probate court—Jeanne will be taking me—since Ray’s death my life has become a concatenation of appointments, duties—“death-duties”—making of each day a Sahara stretching to the horizon, and beyond—a robot-life, a zombie-life—from which (this is my most delicious thought, when I am alone) I am thinking of departing. When I have time.

      Where some may be frightened by the thought, the temptation, of suicide, the widow is consoled by the temptation of suicide. For suicide promises A good night’s sleep—with no interruptions! And no next-day.

      “I shouldn’t have left you. I’m so sorry . . .”

      It’s a sunny-gusty day. Snow lies in part-melted skeins and heaps amid the grave markers which are of very different sizes. How terrible it is, Ray is here—it seems incomprehensible, here.

      I tell myself with childish logic that if Ray were alive but not with me, that absence would be identical with this absence.

      Which day this is, how many hours after Ray’s death, I am not sure—much of my mental effort is taken up with such pointless calculations—it is a mental effort exerted against the ceaseless buzz of word-incursions—fragments of music, songs—how best to describe my mind, perhaps it’s the quintessential novelist’s mind, other than a drain that has captured all variety of rubble—when my life is most shaken, the drain is heaped with rubble as after a rainstorm—there is little distinction between anything in the drain except most of it is to no purpose, futile and exhausting; nothing of what I “hear” is exactly audible, as it would be, I assume, in a person afflicted with schizophrenia; these distractions are merely annoying, when not cruelly mocking.

      There once was a ship . . .

      The name of our ship was

      The Golden Vanity.

      Like a metronome set at too quick a rhythm a pulse begins to beat in my head. It’s the beat, beat, beat of mockery—a sense that our life together was in vain—now it has ended—sunken into the Low-Land Sea as in the ballad’s melancholy refrain.

      Most of the words of the ballad are lost to me. Only a few words recur with maddening frequency.

      Sometimes seeing Ray with a faraway or a distracted look in his eye I would ask him what he was thinking and Ray would reply Nothing.

      But how can you be thinking about nothing?

      I don’t know. But I was.

      How funny Ray could be! Though there was always this other side of him, СКАЧАТЬ