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In all these places where people lived, the lights came on around four in the afternoon, and then the streetlights came on, the lights in the trolley buses came on, and often, too, the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun’s setting-and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of a faintly rosy twilight. People who had been shopping were going home, people at work were thinking about going home, people who had been in the houses all day came out to take a little walk that would make home more appealing. I met women with baby carriages and complaining toddlers and never thought that so soon I’d be in the same shoes. I met old people with their dogs, and other old people, slow moving or in wheelchairs, being propelled by their mates or keepers. I met Mrs. Gorrie pushing Mr. Gorrie. She wore a cape and beret of soft purple wool (I knew by now that she made most of her own clothes) and a lot of rosy face coloring. Mr. Gorrie wore a low cap and a thick scarf wrapped around his neck. Her greeting to me was shrill and proprietary, his nonexistent. He did not look as if he was enjoying the ride. But people in wheelchairs rarely did look anything more than resigned. Some looked affronted or downright mean.
“Now, when we saw you out in the park the other day,” Mrs. Gorrie said, “you weren’t on your way back from looking for a job then, were you?”
“No,” I said, lying. My instinct was to lie to her about anything.
“Oh, good. Because I was just going to say, you know, that if you were out looking for a job you really should fix yourself up a little bit. Well, you know that.”
Yes, I said.
“I can’t understand the way some women go out nowadays. I’d never go out in my flat shoes and no makeup on, even if I was just going to the grocery store. Let alone if I was going to ask somebody to give me a job.”
She knew I was lying. She knew I froze on the other side of the basement door, not answering her knock. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she went through our garbage and discovered and read the messy, crumpled pages on which were spread out my prolix disasters. Why didn’t she give up on me? She couldn’t. I was a job set out for her-maybe my peculiarities, my ineptitude, were in a class with Mr. Gorrie’s damages, and what couldn’t be righted had to be borne.
She came down the stairs one day when I was in the main part of the basement doing our washing. I was allowed to use her wringer-washer and laundry tubs every Tuesday.
“So is there any chance of a job yet?” she said, and on the spur of the moment I said that the library had told me they might have something for me in the future. I thought that I could pretend to be going to work there-I could go and sit there every day at one of the long tables, reading or even trying my writing, as I had done occasionally in the past. Of course, the cat would be out of the bag if Mrs. Gorrie ever went into the library, but she wouldn’t be able to push Mr. Gorrie that far, uphill. Or if she ever mentioned my job to Chess-but I didn’t think that would happen either. She said she was sometimes afraid to say hello to him, he looked so cross.
“Well, maybe in the meantime…,” she said. “It just occurred to me that maybe in the meantime you would like to have a little job sitting in the afternoons with Mr. Gorrie.”
She said that she had been offered a job helping out in the gift shop at St. Paul’s Hospital three or four afternoons a week. “It’s not a paid job or I’d have sent you to ask about it,” she said. “It’s just volunteer work. But the doctor says it’d do me good to get out of the house. ‘You’ll wear yourself out,’ he said. It’s not that I need the money, Ray is so good to us, but just a little volunteer job, I thought-” She looked into the rinse tub and saw Chess’s shirts in the same clear water as my flowered nightgown and our pale-blue sheets.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “You didn’t put the whites and the col-oreds in together?”
“Just the light coloreds,” I said. “They don’t run.”
“Light coloreds are still coloreds,” she said. “You might think the shirts are white that way, but they won’t be as white as they could be.”
I said I would remember next time.
“It’s just the way you take care of your man,” she said, with her little scandalized laugh.
“Chess doesn’t mind,” I said, not realizing how this would become less and less true in the years ahead and how all these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center.
I took the job, sitting with Mr. Gorrie in the afternoons. On one little table beside the green recliner there was spread a hand towel-to catch spills-and on top of it were his pill bottles and liquid medicines and a small clock to tell him the time. The table on the other side was stacked with reading material. The morning paper, last evening’s paper, copies of Life and Look and Maclean’s, which were all big floppy magazines then. On the lower shelf of this table was a pile of scrapbooks-the kind that children use at school, with heavy brownish paper and rough edges. There were bits of newsprint and photographs sticking out of them. These were scrapbooks that Mr. Gorrie had kept over the years, until he had his stroke and couldn’t cut things out anymore. There was a bookcase in the room, but all it held was more magazines and more scrapbooks and a half shelf of high-school textbooks, probably Ray’s.
“I always read him the paper,” Mrs. Gorrie said. “He hasn’t lost his ability, but he can’t manage to hold it up with both hands, and his eyes get tired out.”
So I read to Mr. Gorrie while Mrs. Gorrie, under her flowered umbrella, stepped lightly off to the bus stop. I read him the sports page and the municipal news and the world news and all about murders and robberies and bad weather. I read the letters to the editor and the letters to a doctor who gave medical advice and the letters to A
During the reading of the editorial page or of some long rigmarole about what the Russians said and what the Americans said at the United Nations, his eyelids would droop-or, rather, the eyelid over his better eye would droop almost all the way and the one over his bad, darkened eye would droop slightly-and the movements of his chest would become more noticeable, so that I might pause for a moment to see if he had gone to sleep. And then he would make another sort of noise-a curt and reproving one. As I got used to him, and he got used to me, this noise began to seem less like reproof and more like reassurance. And the reassurance was not just about his not being asleep but about the fact that he was not at that moment dying.
His dying in front of my eyes had been at first a horrible consideration. Why should he not die, when he seemed at least half dead already? His bad eye like a stone under dark water, and that side of his mouth pulled open, showing his original, wicked teeth (most old people then had false teeth) with their dark fillings glowering through the damp enamel. His being alive and in the world seemed to me an error that could be wiped out at any moment. But then, as I said, I got used to him. He was on a grand scale, with his big noble head and wide laboring chest and his powerless right hand lying on his long trousered thigh, invading my sight as I read. Like a relic, he was, an old warrior from barbarous times. Eric Blood-Axe. King Knut.