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| The City Mouse |
Her friendship, but not the friend, died about a year ago
today.
The City Mouse knew her twenty year old friendship was over
and, now it was over, she was having some difficulty imagining how it had
begun.
The brief note she had received from her former friend was
the coffin in which their once vibrant friendship lay lifeless. She knew it.
She knew she could not answer her friend, although she had prepared in her
throbbing brain a point by point response that would have satisfied the most exacting
prosecutor.
No, there could be no answer. Let the dead bury their dead;
life belongs to the living.
“I wish,” she thought of answering, “we had thrashed all
this out face to face. Because then, if you had seen my face as you said these
things, you would have seen in my eyes how unjust they were. Letters are blind;
they have no eyes. We might have smiled at each other, laughed even, and gone
our different ways, our friendship intact, remembered fondly over the taking of a toast and tea. But now...”
She wrote the answer, redrafted it twice, and sealed it in
an envelope where it remains today unposted.
At sixty-five, the City Mouse had begun to feel the weight
of her years. Age came suddenly once she had retired. She felt its presence in
her muscles, in her worsening sight, in her accursed forgetfulness, in the
emptiness of days.
She needed friends and, at the same time, despised the need. Legally blind from birth, her whole life had been an arduous struggle for independence. In this struggle, her most faithful ally had been her mother, apparently operating on the assumption that if she treated the City Mouse in no wise different than her other children – twin girls and a boy who, in his teens and later, bore a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley – her path through life would be smoothed and, to a degree, unhobbled by obstacles.
The stratagem worked, until it didn’t work.
When the City Mouse was fifty five, her father died. Ten
years later, following a serious bought of senility -- but not, her mother
insisted before her memory of things past drifted away like an unmoored boat,
Alzheimer’s -- her mother passed on, leaving her bereft.
In the watches of sleepless night, she whispered to her,
convinced that somewhere motherly kindness lived. Beauty and love cannot die. She
sought both in the dark heavens above when she took her guide dog out at night
to do his nocturnal duty. To remember one who has
died is a prayer, and here in the holy embrace of a whispering darkness, she
prayed her mother would console her. Both were women of strong and
fierce loyalty. Her mother too had been an orphan in the world, like her, but
strong, determined and brave – as she was. This bravery though was in some
respects a false front overlaying deep fears. But she understood that without
fear there can be no courage, only a stupid, self-destructive bravado, for
courage is not fearlessness but the overcoming of fear. Her blindness had made her goal oriented.
When she set her mind to do a thing, and the thing was done splendidly, she
felt liberated.
When the City Mouse married, during her last year in college in the merry month of May, her father took her husband aside and said, “I know
you will love and take care of my daughter.” And he did but, after a joyful marriage of nearly a half century, her husband died and, for the
first time in her life, she began to feel her vaunted independence as crutch
and a lament.
What little money they had been able to save was spend on foreign travel. Before her sight
failed altogether, she wanted to see and taste the world. Their first trip was
to Rome, Florence, Sienna and Venice, truly a wonder, a woman’s city said her
husband.
While there, her husband read to her Thomas Mann’s Death in
Venice. She bought a rosary from a sun-stained man outside St. Mark’s Basilica.
Inside the Basilica, its ancient walls plated in shimmering gold and iconic mosaics,
her head dutifully covered with a black lace scarf, she confessed to a priest
who spoke English haltingly and who was, she told her husband, deeply impressed
by her sincerity. Indeed, her husband was impressed by her sobriety, at the
bottom of which, he thought, lay a tremulous fear, undeniably there always, but
overmastered, asleep with a dagger in its hands.
One day the two had a discussion about it.
“Are you fearful?” he asked.
“Always,” she answered.
“And yet you seem so courageous and adventuresome. Me, I’m a
stay at home, but you are fearlessly out and about in the world.”
At first, she explained, there is an abundance of
courage. But then on second thought, "the bogles stream from under the bed.” And
she recited from memory a line he had read to her from a book of English Fairy
Tales: “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest the marrow of your bones run
cold.”
The lack of one sense, sight, augmented others. Falling
asleep at bedtime, she could hear in the kitchen the wings of a dragonfly beating the
air. One night, at three o’clock in the morning, she poked her husband awake
and said to him, “There’s a mouse in the kitchen.”
He begged her to go back to sleep, but she persisted. Waking
from a half sleep at the sound of scraping, he slowly opened their bathroom
door – truly a Hitchcockian moment – and saw her in a blinding light, a kitchen
knife in her hand, about to stab the radiator.
“The mouse,” she whispered.
He caught the live and bewildered mouse in his hand and
dumped it outside.
She was able to imitate voices of all kinds and sing
beautifully songs she had heard but once. Her memory was capacious and precise,
and she had little problem reading between the lines of a text. Once having
seen a person’s silhouette – details were beyond her ken – she could
identify him or her at a distance by the way the person moved. Others sense intentionality in faces and eyes, she deduced intentions through a tone of
voice or its subtle modulations. Thunder, hard rain showers and arguments terrified
her.
Years before her husband died, he had procured for her a
guide dog, Jake, with which she had established a binding affinity, because the dog
was startled by lightning and thunder. A regal German shepherd, he like her,
appeared to be fearful of nothing. But at the first clap of thunder, he would
begin to shiver all over, like jelly on a plate, she said.
And she would begin to sing a smiling song:
“If I could shimmy like my sister Kate
Shake it like a bowl of jelly on a plate
My momma wanted to know last night
How sister Kate could do it, oh so nice…”
The City Mouse does not know how I know these things. I’m
the tree she sits under in the spring, shading her. Immovable, I wait, spread
my boughs silently over her, and I know – I know – I know.
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