A WHISPER FROM THE GRASS

On the night of her husband’s death, Solitaire sat on a Chinese bench beneath an orange tree in her garden.  It was the 6th of April 2009, nearing midnight.  She breathed in the dizzying fragrance of the blossoms on the boughs, the climbing roses and jasmine.  She heard the night music of the Sonoran desert:  the reedy hoot of the horned owl, the yip of coyotes hunting with their pups in the moonlight, the giddy aria of a nightingale.  The air was heavy and still.  The pale leaves of the honey mesquite trembled, but no breeze stirred.  She felt that she was suffocating, her breath shallow, panting, heart fluttering, face wet with tears.  Her husband, Em, had been dead since two o’clock that morning and she wept in the knowledge that they would never again, together, hear the nightingale sing.  Never would they lie on the grass and watch for shooting stars.  Never would they navigate the constellations, steering from Sagittarius to Cepheus and on to Cassiopeia.   

She looks overhead.  A quilted cloud layer is creeping up the sky;  the eerie, flaming pink and orange undersides smolder like a bed of burning coals.  Black plumes trail across the moon, reducing it to an anemic wax-white eye dimly peering through its tattered veil.  A ghoulish Gothic-novel sky.  




                                                                               
 Is it a sign from the dead?  The obverse of the Underworld?  Ridiculous!  On the other side of the garden wall is a narrow dirt path choked with weeds -- mallows and grasses and wild sumac.  She hears a sound beyond the wall – a footfall? a whisper? a sigh? -- and jumping to her feet, peers into the shadows, but sees nothing.  Her skin crawls, the hair rises on the back of her neck.  She calls her two small dogs and not daring to look back, hurries inside. 

Once in the house, she goes to her dressing room and with her hand on the door knob, freezes.  She has a sudden premonition that Em is on the other side of that closed door.  Why would he be in her dressing room?  He was never there when he was alive, why now?  And what if he should appear to her?  What then?  In what horrifying rebarbative guise would his shade present itself? 

What age would he be?  Would he look as he looked at the hour of his death?  Or at the hour of their wedding?  Would he be healed in death?  What would he be wearing?  A hospital gown with embedded chest catheter and trailing tubes?  A pin-striped suit?  The evolution of ghostly apparel is in itself an interesting study. In Elizabethan times, male ghosts like Hamlet's father trod the boards in clanking suits of armor.  In ancient Egypt,  dog-headed guides led kings in winding sheets down to the Underworld.  Biblical shades wore shrouds. Jesus, we are told, left his shroud behind when He went missing from the tomb.  Victorian vampires sported opera capes and female wraiths reverted to gauzy gowns floating in dusky groves of yew and myrtle.   Nowadays, ghosts wear chinos and polo shirts, slow-dance with their winsome widows, and give them tips on their stock portfolios.  Others flop about in bed sheets like Caspar-the-Friendly Ghost.  


What would Em say?  Would he exhort her in sepulchral tones to “Remember me ...”?  Would he lure her to her death like Peter Quint?  Claw like Catherine Earnshawe at her bedroom window?  Would he stare at her  accusingly like poor bloodied Banquo?  Or would he merely ask her to take his blood pressure… fetch him a popsicle… a pill … a bed pan?

Solitaire has read somewhere that 80% of Americans believe in paranormal phenomena.  Also, specifically, that some 50% of widows say they have seen, heard or felt the immediate presence of a recently deceased loved-one.  Solitaire, herself, does not really believe in ghosts; on the other hand, she doesn't not believe in them.  In some obscure, occultish cul-de-sac of her consciousness she rather hopes that Em is nearby and watching her, that he knows how much she misses him and how bereft her life has instantly become without him.  She is prepared to accept that the Dead, or Undead, may be all around her, but she does not believe they have been in contact with her --- with one possible, olfactory, exception.  

Some years ago, she and Em lived in a 17th century farmhouse in Rhode Island. Occasionally, during the summer months, Solitaire, a vegetarian, smelled the unmistakable odors of roast beef and frying bacon rising from her kitchen. Admittedly intrigued, she eventually concluded that as the sun warmed the house, the old pine boards and horsehair insulation expanded, releasing the vapors of ancient sides of beef, joints of mutton, slabs of bacon.   The scent of perfume, however, a musky fragrance that was not hers and that wafted on occasion round the guest bedroom when there were no guests was less easily explained away.  


Perhaps, she thinks, the dead inhabit a parallel universe.  Perhaps Dark Energy is composed of dead souls.  

Solitaire cannot sleep.  Em’s side of the bed is smooth, the pillows undented, as they have been ever since he entered the hospital nearly two months earlier.  She and the dogs huddle together on her side of the king-size bed.  They never cross that invisible fence; the dogs seem to understand this.

It is generally believed that cats and dogs can sense the presence of the dead.  She thinks there might be something in this, to the extent that if anyone can commune with the other world, it is more likely to be canines or felines than humans, whose noisy need to communicate has all but nullified their ability to commune.  She looks at her two shih-tzus for a sign:  are their ears pricked, their eyes dilated, their whiskers quivering, their hackles raised?   No.  They are splayed on the coverlet like carelessly dropped dust mops and one of them is actually on his back, legs in the air and snoring.  She turns on the white noise machine, and lies in the dark listening to a combination of Hawaiian Surf and Snoring Shih-tzu, then gives up the ghost, as it were, and decides to take an ambien, hoping she will not find herself an hour later devouring the contents of her fridge or cruising around the desert in her convertible.

She goes into Em’s bathroom for a glass of water and as she turns to leave, comes face to face with the his dressing gown hanging on the door.  It is a blue cotton dressing gown from the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok.  She recalls with heart-wrenching clarity the enchantment of their visits there.  Seized with a spasm of grief, she leans into the door, enfolds the robe in her embrace, and hugs it close. 

Barefoot, wrapped in Em's robe, she wanders out onto the terrace.  The sky has cleared, the full moon shines, the nightingale still sings..  She remembers other nights, other nightingales… a shabby hotel overlooking a garden in Paris…A pre-dawn walk in London, along the canal in Little Venice… Yet another night, another nightingale, beneath a flowering quince in Salamanca. 


 "... Not for the towering dead with their nightingales and psalms, but for the lovers..."

 These are the true ghosts, the ghosts of memory.  Ghosts of the past.  The ghosts within us. Ibsen  had it right.  We are the ghosts.

"I almost think we are all of us Ghosts…

There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea."

1. IS THIS THE WIDOW?

Imagine a woman – blonde, slender, not young -- sitting at a writing table in her bedroom.  It is five-thirty in the morning and she is in her dressing gown, straight-backed, head canted, looking down in a pool of lamp light at the telephone in her hand.  She eyes the phone warily.

She is waiting for something.  While she waits, she jots some notes on a pad of paper.  Then she raises her eyes and through the open shutters, sees in dawn's first light the familiar muted shapes of the trees in her garden:  the gnarled, supplicating limbs of an old mesquite, the skirted fronds of a pepper tree sweeping the grass, the quivering fans of Mexican palms.  An Inca dove sings her sad little two-note tune -- "no hope!  no hope!" -- as she picks her way through a bougainvillea vine along the top of a whitewashed wall.  Beyond the wall rears a ragged range of mountains, bisected in the foreground by a tall aleppo pine.  A piercing shriek shatters the silence, a shadow plunges; there's a clatter of palms, a blur of bougainvillea … and the dove is gone, borne to her death in the talons of a Harris hawk, whose chicks clamor from their nest in the pine.  Death by predator is hardly a novelty in this southwest desert town where gunslingers prevail, coyotes on two legs or four roam the roads, and rattlers coil at the front door.  Nevertheless, she freezes, shudders at the casual cruelty of nature or fate, the gods or God, call it what you will, shrugs a shawl more closely round her shoulders, and, crumpling, begins to cry.  She knows her tears are not simply for the little dove, but for herself.

On the stroke of six, she makes her call.  In Washington, DC, it is nine o’clock.  In the personnel office of the State Department, a man’s voice answers and she says in a whisper as if she were afraid of waking someone (but who is there to wake?), “ I want to report a death.”

The personnel officer takes the relevant information:  name; age; date of birth; Social Security number; cause of death.  There is a pause while he enters these statistics into his computer, then poses a question.

“Is this the widow?”

Widow?

Surprised, she finds herself unable to answer.

Is this the widow?  Is this the widow? It is not merely the word that startles her, but what she reads in his tone.  His voice is uninflected, dispassionate, yet the sibilants seem to her to hiss through the silence with insidious condescension.  Why should this be?  Should her unsought status not elicit compassion rather than contempt?

Several seconds elapse as she considers his question and in that lacuna passes a lifetime.

Her marital history, as it happens, falls quite neatly into two parts:  unwed/wed.  No serial marriages, no stormy separations, no children, no messy divorces.  For the last thirty-five years she has been married to one man – let us call him “Em” – her mate-for-life.  His life, as it turns out.  Now, at six o’clock on a spring morning in April 2009, the disembodied, seemingly bored, satellite-borne voice of the State Department has laconically articulated what is said to be the most harrowing passage of one’s life, short of death itself – the death of a spouse.  The Voice of the Department has redefined her role, changed her label.  Moreover, it has, without license or leave, performed grammatical surgery on her identity – excising the pronominal “you” and inserting the objective “this.”  Is this the widow?  She has become an object. The marriage that took 35 years to construct has been razed.  In the missed beat of a heart, Em's heart, she has morphed from “wife” to “widow," from “you” to “this”...  from relict to relic.

 “Widow.” She hates the very sound of it.  The roots are as hardy as the word is wooden, thrusting back through Old Frisian (widwe), Old Saxon (widowa), Old High German (wituwa), Gothic (widuwo), reaching further back and farther afield to Sanskrit (vidhava), to Latin (viduus)... meaning void.  The label is one of historic derogation, of literary belittlement, connoting dependency, meagerness, penury, parsimony, impecuniousness (“widow’s mite”).  Visually, it calls forth bleak or satirical images … “widow’s peak” … “widow’s weeds”… those bows and bonnets and bolts of black bombazine shrouding Queen Victoria ( "The Widow of Windsor"), who for forty years after Albert's untimely demise, sartorially enforced her hysterical mourning on two generations of female subjects.

The word summons up sad visions of banishment:   to towers , to harems, to nunneries, to the purdah of worlds without men. The stereotypes (fashioned, often, by men) are sufficiently well-known:  The Rapacious Widow (Gertrude lusting after Claudius); the Avaricious widow (even Jackie Kennedy, so movingly elegant in her grief, was castigated for overweening greed when she married Onassis); the Mad Widow (poor deranged Mrs. Lincoln, whose sin was to grieve too much).  Then there are the Meddlesome Widows, Lady Auld Reekie and all the other old busy-bodies who trip and troop through the pages of Trollope; the Wily Widow, the Worldly Widow, (Madame Max Goesler, who is a bit too ambitious until brought to heel), not to mention the toothless Dickensian grannies drooling by the fire, the Dotty Widows, the Comical Widows, the Wicked Widows scheming to defraud the virtuous (see Mrs. Clenham in Little Dorritt).   Lastly, let us not forget the Constant Widow devotedly keeping her late husband's flame alight, and the Declining Widow, who, though she no longer commits suttee, withdraws from life, figuratively flinging herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband.  All these images crowd the New Widow's mind … flashing upon that inward eye which is the hell of solitude

Is she merely projecting her own weaknesses and insecurities?  Perhaps.  And do these thoughts not sow the seeds of a poisonous self-pity?  Probably.  But how to stave off such thoughts?  These are among the many questions that cannot be answered today, or tomorrow, or next week.  For thirty-five years, her roles have been largely defined by Em,  by his career and by his disease.  Now she has been cut adrift by death.  So be it.  She will honor him, love him, mourn and miss him to the end of her days, but she can not be defined by her dead husband, no matter how beloved, nor can she live as half of a defunct couple.  She will not wear the Black "W."  She is nobody's dead dove, yet.

But she can hardly enter into a philosophical dialogue with the Department.  “Yes,” she says, “I am the widow.”

Now what?

It is twenty past six and the sun is rising over the desert.  She hears the call of a quail and smells the sharp-sweet scents of wild creosote and citrus blossoms.   She opens the door, whistles up the dogs and walks out into the morning.