6
Three times I would be brought into my father's presence, and three times cautioned not to turn to look at him.
Three times I would be brought into the presence of Death, and three times I would escape.
And the white-garbed woman in attendance upon Death assuring me, plucking at my wrist with talon fingers, "The way he is now isn't him. It's what has happened to him. Oh God!"
She never wept in my presence except quick hot startled tears of rage. The tears of one whom life has cheated, how many times!
Strange that, during the seven days I was in Crescent, Utah, and Hildie Pomeroy and I were so much together, she never spoke my name. Even on the telephone, she hadn't called me by name. Often it was dear, as in the Cafe she called customers dear, hon in an airy flirty voice. Often she called me nothing at all. I'd told her my name more than once but she chose not to hear it. For I was a stranger to her, an intruder; a girl with pale worried eyes whose natural response to distress was silence, not chatter; the books I'd brought with me to read and underline, while waiting for what Hildie called the right time to see my father, were books that, when she leafed through them, made her face crinkle in playful derision. "This is never gonna be made into a movie, eh?" Or: "How come nobody talks in these books you read? Just thinking?" Hildie laughed at me, as if to make a joke of me. Or stared at me, in assessment.
I was evidence of the dying man's former life. I was his daughter, I could claim his heart. I'd been named by another woman, long ago. How could Hildie trust me?
Coming to me breathless and urgent where I was sitting on the front steps of the bungalow staring at the beautiful blank pitiless sky-"He's awake, dear! Oh, he's good. His eyes so clear! He wants to see you!" And I dropped the heavy book I was reading and stood, shivering with anticipation. Now Hildie looked at me greedily with her bright, brimming eyes as if I were a gift to be brought to her lover, proof of her devotion.
"Don't be afraid, dear! C'mon"
Hildie Pomeroy suddenly roused to action, brisk and efficient as any nurse in dazzling rayon-white and soundless crepe-soled white shoes, twining her fingers through mine just tightly enough to indicate who was boss. "Remember, dear: keep your head turned. Respect your father's wishes!" Leading me through the shadowy house and to the rear porch where the invalid lay still as Death, and as I stepped across the threshold and into his space my head was turned from what I most yearned to see, in reversal of the fated Eurydice, or Lot 's wife. In her breathy girlish voice Hildie cried, "Here we are, Erich! Here she is."
This second time I was better prepared of course. For the harsh wheezing breath that threatened with each inhalation to cease, and the sweet-rancid odor as of wet, rotted leaves, and the anguished Uh-uhhh-uh like water rushing over pebbles in a shallow stream. I was aware in my confusion that Hildie had sprinkled a flowery cologne around the porch to counteract the odor.
"Daddy? Good m-morning!" A voice cheerful as any TV weather girl's. My smile desperate and girlish though no one saw.
There came then a faint whimpering groan, a squeaking of springs. Hildie translated excitedly, "He says isn't it a nice day? It is!" Strong fingers gripping my shoulders from the back, Hildie sat me in a wicker chair a few feet from the sofa upon which my father lay, and she would remain standing behind me, one hand on my shoulder and the other gripping my father's hand. Hildie was our mediator: we could not communicate without her. Happily she chattered to us, translating. I tried to hear my father's Uh-uhhh as not guttural sounds but individual words; it was painful to think that speech could become so twisted and tortured, yet remain speech of a kind; at times, almost I thought I could understand what he was saying, but the meaning eluded me as in a dream that fades rapidly when you wake. I was staring at a cob webbed corner of the porch ceiling. I was staring at the Japanese screen, and seeing nothing. That hideous sound! The guttural cry of Laocoon in the grip of the sea serpents.
I was in awe of my father's courage. I could not imagine myself so courageous, or so strong. To whom would I struggle so to speak, in such anguish!
"Dear? He says tell him about your life?"
Hildie had leaned over, to murmur seductively in my ear.
"My l-life?"
"Where you live? Back home?"
But I don't live back home. I don't have a home.
My life was transparent to me as water in a glass and of no more interest. I was impatient with my life, it was to me nothing more than a vehicle like the battered little Volkswagen rusted to no-color through whose windows I observed the West. How to speak of what's invisible? "I-I'm-" I was sitting up very straight staring now into the backyard of Hildie's house; at the weedy railroad embankment; I believed I could hear in the distance the rumbling of a train approaching; I was stricken with shyness; foundering about like a big fish tossed gasping onto the ground. "-I'm so happy to be here. I've m-missed you, Daddy. We all did. Hendrick, and Dietrich, and Fritz, and-" How strange to call this stranger Daddy; how perverse, to call Death Daddy; my very voice eager and yearning as a young child's; a child who will utter anything, in order to be loved. I didn't know if what I said was true, probably it wasn't true; for how could you miss a man who had always eluded you; yet it had the plausibility of truth. Inspired by Hildie's commandment to speak, I was able to speak; the train rushed by, a short freight train; I stared at the passing boxcars, seeing SANTA FE SAN DIEGO PHOENIX SALT LAKE CITY BOISE, names I would not have seen on freight cars passing through Strykersville. I waited until the thunderous train passed, grateful for the noise. Deafening! Yet I seemed to understand that Hildie and even my father scarcely heard it.
As, in the West, surrounded by mountains, red-rock canyons and lunar deserts, the inhabitants took their world for granted as one might take for granted any painted backdrop to a play. In a store in Crescent I'd seen a brattish boy of about ten wearing a T-shirt inscribed THE STARS ARE THERE TO SHOW US HOW FAR OUR WISHES CAN GO.
I heard my anxious chattery voice speaking of my brothers, of what I knew of their lives; what I didn't know, I invented; I said they were happy; I said they were working hard; I said they were doing very well; I spoke of my grandparents, who were my father's parents; what quarrels and disappointments and heartbreak between them and my lather, I didn't know; I spoke of these old, deceased individuals with a tenderness
I hadn't felt for either of them in life; nor would they have wished for tenderness from me, the last-born, the girl, the little one who simply by being born had caused my mother's death and expelled my grieving father into the world, to his doom. I spoke not of my grandparents' bitterness in old age or of their grief at their son disappearing from their lives, a grief that was hardened in time to a dull, smoldering resignation you might interpret as Christian acceptance. (The minister of the Strykersville Lutheran church had so interpreted it.) I spoke of their peaceful deaths and of their burial in the church cemetery near my mother; I was conscious of Hildie's sharp nails in my shoulder, and of my father's wheezing breath; this was dangerous territory, I knew, and yet I continued, though I didn't say what I so yearned to say Why did you leave us! We needed you. Wiping at my eyes, for I'd begun without knowing. My father seemed to be thrashing in his bedclothes, in distress, making his choked straining sounds Uhhhh-uh Uhhh and instinctively I began to turn my head but Hildie stopped me, pinioning my head, scolding sharply, "No! You don't. You promised, you would not." How quick and strong, how vigilant Hildie was. That sturdy stunted little body, deft as a girl guard intervening a basketball pass, she'd caught me, caught my head, holding me still. I smelled perfume, and felt the hissing heat of the woman's breath.
Afterward I would think that, in the presence of Death, living beneath a roof with Death, how many days, weeks, months, Hildie Pomeroy had become a little crazy. I didn't blame her, for I was becoming a little crazy myself. Certainly I didn't judge her.
In fact, I was grateful she'd stopped me from seeing whatever it was I was forbidden to see.
7
My seven days in Utah! Driving for hours out into the desert, into red-rock country. Since I could see my father for only short spells, and not every day. He couldn't bear the strain of most visits, Hildie told me. Sometimes he fell asleep while she was feeding him. While she was bathing him. No TV show could keep him conscious for more than a few minutes any longer. "It's a mercy, I suppose," Hildie said grimly, confronted with this truth she'd only now begun to acknowledge, "how a person just slows, stops."
Powerful drugs dulled the pain of terminal cancer, though not totally. You had to pay a price for being awake and conscious and at some point the price just wasn't worth it. Because Ida went before him when they were both young. All his life he's had that pull. To keep from going crazy, unless this was another form of craziness, I drove out into the high desert south of Crescent along a narrow, radiantly glittering highway into the San Rafael Valley. Temple Mountain was the highest peak, to the west. Here there was no human habitation and except for the road, no sign of humanity. I felt such relief! Such freedom. Even in the quavering little car (I'd been warned might overheat). If I remained in Crescent. I would be forced to think of things I didn't want to think about, and which exhausted me; if I didn't think of my father, whose physical predicament seemed to me a nightmare, I thought of my mother who'd died so long ago, you would suppose I'd put that loss behind me forever. But in the open country, these thoughts faded. The vast silent distances of the West. Where individual deaths can't matter. The deaths of entire species can't matter. The only reality is Time: the natural drama of the earth is Time. In civilization, this simple fact is obscured. In the West, you can't escape it. All things are shifting, sinking, eroding. In my life, a single day (a single hour! when I'd been sick with love for Vernor Matheius) had counted for something profound. In the West, a single day was nothing. A year, a lifetime-nothing. The wink of an eye. Nor was there anything to say of the blunt terrifying beauty of the red-rock formations past which I drove, and so I would say nothing about them. My father's death could cast no shadow here. All was erased here as in an overexposure of light.
Could turn off the highway. Drive into the scrubland. If no one sees. No witnesses. Drive and drive in the glaring sunshine until the car runs out of gas. Or breaks down. What better way to make an end to grief. Hildie would have no idea, no one would know. A mercy!
Yet: if my father's dying and my own dying mattered so little, why shouldn't I at least look at the man, before it was too late? The most painful of ironies, that I'd driven so far and wasn't allowed to see my father's face. But I will see him! I will. Like a mutinous child I plotted how it might happen, innocently. Next time Hildie brought me out onto the porch I would sit obediently with my back to my father but suddenly I'd become faint; I'd slump forward in the wicker chair, maybe fall out of it onto the floor; Hildie would try to lift me and in the confusion I'd glance back over my shoulder at my father; or, Hildie might hurry away to get cold water to sprinkle onto my face, and while she was gone I would glance at him. But he'll see me then, he'll know.
No: I couldn't do such a thing. I could not turn my head as Eurydice and Lot 's wife had turned their heads, with such tragic results. If my father's wish was that his daughter not look upon his disfigurement, how could I disobey?
Disfigured by the surgery Hildie had said. There was a horror in such a statement. The jarring word disfigured. For Hildie it was an unusual word, uttered with clinical detachment.
Another day, not long before my father's dying, I was very restless, I drove out to the Green River campground a few miles from Crescent. Here I hiked along a bizarrely striated rock terrain stained to the hue of dried blood; terrain that lifted slantwise from the earth like a humped, hunched shoulder; I followed a deep, narrow gorge; out of the shadowed depths of the gorge a chill, rank, sulphurous odor arose; what horror it would be, to slip and fall into this narrow gorge; though I tried repeatedly, I couldn't see to the bottom. There was some mystery here I felt compelled to explore though I wasn't wearing hiking boots and hadn't remembered to bring along a bottle of water. I'd been warned by Hildie's friends in the Rendezvous Cafe not to go into the canyons alone, but I didn't intend to stay long.
By space the universe encompasses me like an atom; by thought…
I couldn't remember the rest of Pascal's words.
Pascal's boast! For all of philosophy is boastfulness, at bottom. The proclamation of atoms. The stammering of thinking reeds.
And how indifferent it was to such wisdom, the world. The world entering through the eyes, and through feet, fingers, touch. This dry brilliant air. The vast sky overhead. I will remain here in the West. Now he's called me here. It must be for a reason. I wondered if my father had loved the West. Or had he only just fled here out of despair with his life in the East. America was atoms in the void; atoms moving in a continuous stream; touching, and ricocheting; rebounding into space. For much of his life my father had been a laborer. Working with his hands outdoors. I wanted to think such a life had been his choice. As my life, a life of the mind, was my choice. But now his poor body was wearing out, like an old piece of farming equipment. The junked tractor in my grandfather's hay barn, covered in dust.
But only fifty-six. Too young!
In the flatter, less treacherous terrain in which I was now walking, shading my eyes against the glaring sun, vegetation was sepia-colored, bleached like bone; here was sagebrush, a dusty gray-green; the predominant color of the rocky earth was a dull rust-red like the blood-veined interior of the eyelid. I'd begun to feel winded, as if I were hiking up a mountainside. My head ached and swirled but I couldn't turn back just yet: there was such silence here, and such promise; a powerful spirit had taken possession of this space, and I was both fearful and eager to enter. Faint voices called to me comfortingly, unless they were jeering. Now he's summoned you here. Must be for a reason! In this landscape objects had a surreal significance as in a Dali painting. Distances and proportions were confused. I saw a shimmering blue flame on a hillside and when I drew closer, it became a broken jug. I saw a sculpture of pale twisted shapes and when I drew closer, it became the bones of a jackrabbit. I saw a white pony grazing in sagebrush near a dry creek and when I drew closer, it became something manmade like plywood or Styrofoam. I saw the boy in the T-shirt reading the stars are there to show us how far our wishes can go and when I drew closer, it was a confusion of sunlight on rock. Beneath a rock formation was a gorgeous burst of crimson, like peonies, that, when I drew closer, became something cheaply plastic. Human heads and hands that were rocks or debris, rags weirdly puffed up with sand like scarecrows. My vision narrowed as if I were wearing blinders. A pulse beat at my temple. When I saw the rags, I stood for a long time staring; I didn't dare come closer, for fear of seeing something ugly; the previous night at the Cafe, a man who'd come over to sit with Hildie and me had told us of discovering a corpse on his ranch years ago, the mutilated body of a young Ouray Indian girl. There's dead folks all out there. The place to dump 'em. The ones nobody reports missing.
In waves of heat on a bluff there emerged the profile of a female shape like Hildie Pomeroy's; hunched and tense like a bow drawn tight; a deformed human body, yet unmistakably human; when I came nearer, I saw that it was a rock formation at least twenty feet in length. Yet, in my wavering vision, it had seemed the size of a woman. I saw that rock, like sand, and water, was comprised of ripples and waves; I saw that vibratory currents were the fundamental structure of nature; as in sexual passion we're caught up in such currents that beat impersonally through us, using us; using us, and discarding us like husks. Spinoza said we yearn to persist in our being. Yet more powerfully, we yearn to persist in our species' being. Feeling again the excitement of the casual drifting eyes of the man who'd slipped into the booth the night before with Hildie and me. His name was Eli? Unless I'd heard wrong, his name was actually Leo. I'd been so tired, my eyelids heavy, not thinking clearly, and not hearing clearly, for the noise in the Cafe was loud, laughter and raised voices and TV sports and I'd waited hours for Hildie to announce that it was the right time to see my father, except it had not been the right time all that day, he wasn't ever fully conscious and when conscious he'd been hallucinating. In the Cafe, I'd drunk two glasses of beer. I'd eaten barbecued meat and french fries and washed my sticky fingers in the women's room that smelled of backed-up drains. Hildie had asked point-blank if I'd ever been in love and I said yes I had; had I been hurt, Hildie asked, watching my face closely as if to determine if I told the truth, and I said yes, with lowered eyes, yes I'd been hurt. Hildie touched my wrist with her crimson fingernails-"Well, hon, don't let it happen again. The bastards!"
And later there came Eli, or Leo. His drifting assessing eyes. A rancher, Hildie called him. He'd asked me if I would like a ride back to the Economy Motel since he was going in that direction and I thanked him and explained I had my own car. A few minutes after I'd shut and locked my door in the Economy Motel there came a knock at the door and I opened it, though leaving the chain latch on, and it was Eli, or Leo, asking could he come inside, and I told him no; no, that isn't a good idea; asking then could he see me the next night, and politely I told him no; asking when could he see me, he'd like to see me, and quickly I told him no, no I can't, I'm here in Crescent because of my father, my father is dying please understand. After a pause the voice came, embarrassed-"Sure, I understand. I'm sorry."
In Crescent, I could become pregnant. Return to the East and have my father's child. That would balance the injustice, wouldn't it.
The interior of my eyelids throbbed. I hadn't realized my eyes were closed. I was breathing through my mouth like a spent boxer. I wondered if in the sun a blood vessel might swell and burst? An aneurysm? Waves of unreality moved upon me like cartoon clouds. My forehead and the nape of my neck were clammy with sweat. Perplexing unreality: there was a grandiloquent German term for this sensation that Vernor Matheius had once read aloud to me out of Heidegger's cobwebby prose, we'd laughed together at the word. Perplexing unreality! It's all around us, Vernor said, bulging his eyes in a mimicry of paranoia, terror. Vernor had astonished his adoring professors by abandoning his Ph.D. dissertation and quitting philosophy altogether and enrolling in law school at the University of Chicago; we'd lost contact; I wouldn't hear from Vernor for twenty years; by which time he would have become a nationally prominent figure associated with the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. Perplexing unreality! I laughed aloud in this silent stony place, wiping moisture from my eyes. I saw my own bones bleached white in the sun, a shimmering spectacle in the distance like a work of art. I saw my hat, my broken sunglasses, my long-sleeved shirt and shorts puffed with sand. I told myself Turn back now. Don't hurry, and don't panic. You're not lost.
Eventually I found my way back to the striated rock terrain that looked like a humped shoulder. And there was the deep, narrow gorge which I followed back to the campground parking lot. There were two other vehicles parked near my car, both with Utah license plates. As I crossed to the Volkswagen I was panting and swaying and soaked in sweat but I hadn't panicked, and I hadn't gotten lost. Still the strange visual distortions prevailed. I seemed to be staring through a tunnel; I saw near a trash can a tall column of shining light beckoning to me as if with an outstretched hand and when I drew closer, it turned into a four-inch shard of broken mirror.
8
Two days later, Hildie Pomeroy led me into the presence of my father for the last time.
"He's been asking for you, dear. But he isn't sure you're really here. He thinks you've been a dream, I guess! It's like his mind is breaking up into bits."
Hildie hadn't slept much of the night. She'd made up her sallow face hastily and there were flecks of crimson lipstick on her teeth. Her dyed hair looked like a wig, disheveled and needing to be washed. She'd been crying so much, she couldn't apply mascara; her reddened eyes were raw and lashless. The white rayon shirt and pants weren't fresh and an odor of cologne and distress rose from her antic little hunched body. She told me that my father was so weak now he drifted in and out of consciousness; he hadn't eaten for two days and didn't always know where he was, and cursed at phantom enemies. When I'd approached her house at about eight o'clock that morning I could hear her on the telephone talking shrilly; when I knocked hesitantly on the screen door she shouted at me-"Come in! It's time."
Hildie seized my hand; her fingers now were icy-cold, twined tightly through mine. Terrified by what rushed at us with dark beating wings but her terror had turned to bright, scattered energy. "Hurry hurry hurry hurry." As we stepped out onto the porch, Hildie made certain that I'd turned my head; she led me to the chair, forced me down and fairly pinioned my head in her arms. "Now, promise not to turn your head. Promise!" I murmured yes, I promised. "Good girl! Erich, your good girl is here, see her?" I swallowed hard and said, "Daddy? Good morning." The sickish odor of Death was stronger even in the fresh dry air of morning. My father's strangled Uhhhh-uh was "weaker than usual and wholly incomprehensible. Yet Hildie quickly translated, "Oh, he's happy to see you, dear. He thought you'd gone away." Shockingly, Hildie laughed. She stood behind me leaning against me, gripping both my shoulders with her strong talon fingers. "He has his insurance papers. His will. I wasn't ever welcome to see them. I'm not in the family, I guess!" Hildie was panting, laughing quietly. She whispered in my ear, "C'mon, talk. Why you're here, girl. Tell your daddy of-anything. And talk loud." So I began to speak. I spoke of how wonderful it had been, when my father telephoned home; when the phone rang after eleven o'clock, we'd know it would be him; it was like Christmas; it was so exciting; he was working in Alaska, and in Canada, and in the Pacific Northwest; I seemed to recall how my father had spoken to me at such times-"It was so special to hear from you, Daddy. You can't know." Hildie began to relax her grip as I spoke. I'd showered quickly and carelessly that morning in my motel room and my hair was still wet, sticking to my neck; I would discover afterward that I hadn't rinsed the shampoo fully out, and snarls of soap remained; nor had I taken time to dry myself adequately, my underwear clung damp and uncomfortable to my body; I too was panting, as if I'd been running in a desperate race to get here. My father responded only vaguely to what I was saying; yet I believed he was listening; I told him about Hendrick telephoning; me in Vermont; I told him of driving to Utah. "Me! Driving so far alone."
Among my circle of friends and acquaintances I was known for my independence and what they called my not-thereness, meaning presumably my inaccessibility, yet to hear me speak to Daddy you would have thought I was eleven years old. I heard myself describe my car with the deprecatory affection with which people commonly speak of family curiosities, eccentricities. I heard myself say how I'd come to buy the car, with the advance from a publisher for my first book of stories; though I didn't say, for I didn't yet know that this would be so, that I would dedicate this book so precious to me to the loving memory of my parents Ida and Erich.
It seemed to me a childish boast put to a dying man. My first car, my first book. But Hildie said quickly, like a woman plucking at hope, "Oh, a book? Like in a library? A real book not like"-possibly she meant to say paperback-"Mickey Spillane? Tell your father about your book, dear."
"My-book? It's-" A long pause. Every pulse in my head was pounding. I didn't know if I felt shame, or merely embarrassment; or a confused pride; or if something of Hildie's hope had caught at me. "-stories. Set in Strykersville. I mean-not the actual place, Daddy, I call it by another name, but-" But what did I mean? My father continued to breathe hoarsely but he didn't attempt a reply; perhaps he was too exhausted; the effort of breathing was all his failing body could manage. I said, "Daddy, I wanted to make something beautiful," and now tears were stinging my eyes, for was this true? could it be true? what was beauty set beside the harsher requirements of truth? "I wanted to make something that would last a while, I hope s-someday you can see it, Daddy-I mean-" Oh, what did I mean? Saying such things to a dying man? I halfway thought Hildie would reach over and slap me. "My writing isn't my l-life exactly, Daddy, but I-I can't-I couldn't-live without it like-dreaming? Breathing?" My words rose into queries, like balloons.
There I was sitting in my father's presence stammering words I could scarcely comprehend. I was sitting in a wicker chair with a sagging seat, my clothes damp and itchy; sitting straight as if someone were yanking at the hair at the top of my head; since the age of eighteen I'd become one whose posture is ramrod straight out of a terror of fatally slouching, slumping like a jellyfish, no spine at all; as, those terrible times, I'd glimpsed Vernor Matheius slumped at his desk, rubbing his eyes with hurtful thumbs inside the lenses of his smudged glasses; I was sitting straight and tall and staring beyond a tangle of vines and leaves like a curtain growing on Hildie's porch, staring in the direction of the railroad embankment thinking No train will rescue us today. Hildie had stopped translating my father's strangulated sounds even before he'd stopped making them; maybe she no longer understood what they meant, or dared pretend she understood; or maybe she'd become distraught. (Though Hildie had told me many times that no goddam doctors were going to be involved in my father's final hours, I seemed to know that Hildie had been on the phone that morning with a doctor's office, or with a medical clinic.) When I ran out of words, Hildie whispered, "Keep talking! You can't stop now." I thought I will tell Daddy I love him; I will tell Daddy that my writing is about love, because it's about truth. I was preparing to say these difficult words even as I had a premonition that I must not say Daddy I love you for at that instant my father would die.
We were hearing-what?-a ringing telephone. A phone in the house. Hildie dug her nails into my shoulders and warned me not to turn my head while she was gone. "Remember! You promised."
I did not turn my head so much as a fraction of an inch after Hildie hurried to answer the phone; but I'd brought with me that morning, in a shirt pocket, the piece of mirror I'd found in the parking lot; covertly I slipped this out of the pocket and raised it slowly to eye level, in such a position that, even if my father were watching me closely, which I believed he was not, he wouldn't have been suspicious; as I continued to speak, hardly knowing what I said, and aware that my father wasn't listening any longer, I moved the mirror stealthily to the left and saw a sight that I couldn't at first interpret, my vision was blurred and blotched as if I were staring through water. A skeletal figure propped against a filthy pillow. A bald head that looked enlarged or in some way misshapen, and a ravaged face crosshatched with deep lines and veins; the skin was both ashen and reddened, as if it had been boiled; the gaping mouth disappeared into the upper jaw and the lower jaw was hardly more than a flap of lacerated toothless gum; there were welts or burns on the right side of the face and throat, and the throat looked as if it were melting into the shoulder. The eyes! I would not have recognized my father's face except for the eyes. They were deeply recessed and shadowed, with drooping lids; they were enormous staring sightless eyes; yet, as in a dream of horror, as I stared into the little mirror close beside my face, the eyes seemed to shift to mine; the face angrily creased, like a glove being crumpled in a hand; the skeletal body shuddered, and there came a groaning, near-inaudible Uhhhh-uhh of reproach.
A terrible faintness rose in me. My eyes rolled in my head, the sliver of mirror fell from my fingers to the porch floor and shattered into pieces.
9
He didn't see! Couldn't have seen me.
I am to blame. I am the cause of his dying.
No: he couldn't have seen. Not those eyes.
He saw, he'd never forgive.
He saw nothing and there is nothing to forgive.
He saw, and he'd forgive. A dying man forgives.
Even in the confusion of my father's dying, on my hands and knees struggling not to faint I had cunning enough to sweep the mirror-slivers into my hand, and hide them in my shirt pocket.