Broken Vessels Read online

  Like Boston, New York has beautiful women to look at, though in New York the women, in general, are made up more harshly, and they dress more self-consciously; there is something insular about their cosmetics and clothing, as if they have come to believe that sitting at a mirror with brushes and tubes and vials, and putting on a dress of a certain cut and color starts them on the long march to spiritual fulfillment with a second wind. And in New York the women walk as though in the rain; in Boston many women stroll. But then most New Yorkers walk like people in rain, leaving the stroll to police officers, hookers, beggars and wandering homeless, and teenagers who are yet unharried by whatever preoccupations preoccupy so many from their driving preoccupation with loneliness and death.

  Women were on the Plaza, their pace slower as they neared the building, and looking to my right I saw a lovely one. She could have been thirty, or five years on either side of it. She wore a dark brown miniskirt, or perhaps it was black; I saw it and her strong legs in net stockings for only a moment, because they were in my natural field of vision from my chair. But a woman’s face is what I love. She was in profile and had soft thick brown hair swaying at her shoulders as she strode with purpose but not hurry, only grace. She was about forty feet away, enough distance so that, when I looked up, I saw her face against the sky.

  “Skipper,” I said. “Accidently push me into her.”

  The forward motion of her legs and arms did not pause, but she immediately turned to me and, as immediately, her lips spread in a smile, and her face softened with it, and her eyes did, all at once from a sudden release in her heart that was soft too in her voice: “I heard that.”

  She veered toward me, smiling still, with brightened eyes.

  “It was a compliment,” I said.

  The Skipper was pushing my chair, Philip was beside me, and she was coming closer. Then she said: “I know.”

  She angled back to her first path, as though it were painted there for her to follow, and Philip said: “That never happens in New York.”

  “It’s the wheelchair,” I said. “I’m harmless.”

  But I knew that was not true. There was no time to explain it then, and anyway I wanted to hold her gift for a while before giving it away with words.

  Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound. All of us, from time to time, suffer this crippling. Some suffer it daily and nightly; and while most of us, nearly all of us, have compassion and love in our hearts, we cannot or will not see these barely visible wounds of other human beings, and so cannot or will not pick up the telephone or travel to someone’s home or write a note or make some other seemingly trifling gesture to give to someone what only we, and God, can give: an hour’s respite, or a day’s, or a night’s; and sometimes more than respite: sometimes joy.

  Yet in a city whose very sidewalks show the failure of love, the failure to make agape a bureaucracy, a young woman turned to me with instinctive anger or pride, and seeing me in a wheelchair she at once felt not pity but lighthearted compassion. For seeing one of her kind wounded, she lay down the shield and sword she had learned to carry (I dried my tears/ And armed my fears/ With ten thousand/ shields and spears, William Blake wrote), and with the light of the sun between us, ten or fifteen feet between us, her face and voice embraced me.

  For there is a universality to a wounded person: again and again, for nearly two years, my body has drawn sudden tenderness from men and women I have seen for only those moments in their lives when they helped me with their hands or their whole bodies or only their eyes and lips and tongues. They see, in their short time with me, a man injured, as they could be; a man always needing the care of others, as they could too. Only the children stare with frightened curiosity, as they do at funeral processions and the spoken news of death, for they know in their hearts that they too will die, and they believe they will grow up and marry and have children, but they cannot yet believe they will die.

  But I am a particular kind of cripple. In New York I was not sitting on a sidewalk, my back against a wall, and decades of misfortune and suffering in my heart. I was not wearing dirty clothes on an unwashed body. Philip and the Skipper wore suits and ties. I rode in a nine-hundred-dollar wheelchair, and rolled across the Plaza at Lincoln Center. Yet I do not ask that woman, on seeing my body, to be struck there in the sunlight, to stand absolutely still and silent and hear like rushing tide the voices of all who suffer in body and in spirit and in both, then to turn before my dazzled eyes and go back to her home and begin next morning to live as Mother Teresa, as Dorothy Day. No: she is one of us, and what she said and did on that April evening was, like the warm sunlit sky, enough: for me, for the end of winter, for the infinite possibilities of the human heart.

  1988

  BASTILLE DAY

  EARLY IN THE morning in Louisiana in 1963, on the fourteenth of July, my father died. He left me forks and spoons made in New Orleans of silver coins from the court of the queen who said: Let them eat cake; and a sword an ancestor had worn or wielded or never touched on Bastille Day; and a Colt .41 revolver his own father’s death had released to him; and the watch I slid from his wrist before they came to his house, his bed, and lifted and rolled and drove him away. Years later, someone stole the sword from a house in Massachusetts where my first four children lived with their mother; and later someone stole the Colt from an apartment in Massachusetts where I lived alone. The watch died finally, in 1980, the year my mother did.

  Today is Bastille Day in 1988. Since I was a Marine captain on leave to watch with my father while he died I have lost three wives, and daily and nightly living with six children, and my left leg above the knee and most of the function of my right one. His body was as thin as mine became in 1986, struck by a car on a highway north of Boston, my life and brain and nearly all of me spared. When I came home from the hospital after seven weeks and ten operations, I saw myself in a long mirror above a chest of drawers. My son, Jeb, was pushing me in my wheelchair, down the hall to the bedroom; and I said to him: I look like my father, the day before he died.

  Today a man named Hope phoned from Chicago to set me free with money willed by a man named MacArthur. I see my father leaving his malignant flesh, and peasants throwing over a throne my father’s family served, and I know the very smallness of my needs: the house, and the hired women who keep it and me going. My father sang la Marseillaise. Now I see him assaulting with me the gate, the walls, the prison and armory of our flesh: my father in his final and radiant harmony, and I crippled in my chair: mere men, rushing to grace.

  1988

  HUSBANDS

  ON A SUNLIT December afternoon a UPS man carrying a long, wide package came up the steep hill of my driveway. The width of the package was from his armpit to his hand. I saw him through the glass door in front of my desk, and wheeled to the kitchen door and opened it, and waited for him to come up the series of six connected ramps, four of them long and parallel to each other. One ramp would be too steep; you need one inch of grade for every twelve inches you climb or descend. Turning onto the last ramp he saw me and smiled and asked how I was doing. I see a lot of UPS men. It is a simple way to shop. He had blond hair and a face reddened by the winter sun and wind, and perhaps from climbing the hill. I told him I was fine.

  “That’s an exercise machine,” I said. “How do you feel about putting it in the bedroom?”

  Whenever I ask someone to do something for me, I am saying aloud that I cannot do it, or cannot do it well, or simply, or easily. So I very often ask with odd sentences. In the first year after my injury, with one leg gone above the knee and the other in a cast and usually hurting, I said things like I wonder if there’s any cheese or Does anyone want hot chocolate? I still do.

  “Sure,” the UPS man said. “Where is it?”

  “Down at the end of the hall.”

  I wheeled backward out of the kitchen to get out of his way, made a backward turn in the dini
ng room to let him by, then followed him in the hall, and said: “All this time you’ve been waiting for a young wife to ask you to put it in the bedroom, and you get an old buck in a wheelchair.”

  Still in the hall, he said over his shoulder: “I wish my wife would do that.”

  “Do what?”

  He was in the bedroom, and I was rolling through the door.

  “Tell me to put it in the bedroom,” he said.

  The summer before that, I had a lap pool built in my front yard, so I could have motion out of my chair. A lap pool is three feet deep. Beside mine is a concrete slab level with my chair; from the slab, steps with aluminum railings go to the pool, and by lifting myself on the railings, I can go down and up on my butt. Most of all, the pool is to replace the beach. I love the beach, and probably will always miss it, but I cannot go there anymore without someone to pull my chair backward and tilted, so the small front wheels are above the sand. They are the ones that sink. So now, when my little girls are with me in summer, we play in the pool. My two grown sons and two friends, on payroll, built the ramp to the pool, and, at the top of my driveway, to a built-up rectangle of asphalt with railroad ties as a curb. My driveway is all steep slope, and this flat asphalt allows me to get in and out of my car.

  On a beautiful early summer afternoon my son Jeb and the two friends and I were sitting on the ramp, our shirts off, when the man who delivers for the pharmacy drove up the driveway. He is a short pleasant man, retired from the gas company. He wears thick glasses, always a visored cap, and has grey hair. Reading gas meters taught him to carry dog biscuits; he says they worked better than the spray designed to fend off dogs. Always he brought biscuits for my dog, Luke, a golden retriever. Luke was lying in the shade that day, and went to the man and sat at his feet to be fed. Someone brought the bag of vitamins and medicine inside and fetched my checkbook and I paid. I see this delivery man at least every other week, yet I had forgotten his wedding anniversary. But Bill remembered, and said: “How was the fiftieth wedding anniversary?”

  “Oh, it was something. They picked us up at the house in a limousine, took us to the function room. There was a hundred people there. We had cocktails, prime rib, cake, champagne, the works. I says to the wife, when you’ve had a car this long, it’s time to trade in on a new model. She says I was thinking the same thing. I says I was thinking of trading in for two twenty-five-year-olds. She says they’d kill you.”

  “Fifty years,” Jack said. “That’s something to celebrate. Any marriage is hard.”

  “Oh, sure, it was hard. That first year, back in 1939, I couldn’t get regular work at the shoe factory. For about six months, I couldn’t get a forty-hour week. But after that it was all right.”

  Jeb and Jack and Bill and I looked at each other; only Bill had a girlfriend, his fiancee. We looked back at the delivery man, reaching in his pocket for a dog biscuit.

  “After the dinner and the toasts and everything, they put us in the limousine and took us home. We go upstairs and get into the bed and I says to the wife: You think we ought to try what we tried fifty years ago? She says it’ll cost you money just to touch it. So next morning I go downstairs and I put a dollar bill under her orange juice glass, and I put another one under her cereal bowl, and one under her coffee cup. I put one under the sugar bowl and the salt shaker and the pepper shaker. Then I put one under my glass and bowl and cup, and one under her napkin so she’d get the message. Then I sat down and waited for her.”

  He stood facing us, smiling, petting Luke, putting another bone-shaped biscuit in Luke’s mouth. I said: “Aren’t you going to tell us the end of that story?”

  “That is the end,” he said, smiling, and lifted his hand in a wave, and walked away from us to his car.

  On a warm blue September afternoon I went to see my paraplegic friend. A few years ago he fell off a ladder. I will call him Joe. He works for disabled people, out of an office in a nearby town on the Merrimack River. He taught me to drive with hand controls, but that is not part of his job. He did it one Sunday afternoon, at my house, saving me eight hours of lessons at ten dollars an hour.

  In the parking lot outside his office, Joe was waiting in his chair. He wanted to see my new two-thousand-dollar rig: a steel box on the roof of my car that, with two chains like a bicycle’s and an elongated hook, folds and lifts my chair into it, and lowers it to the ground beside my door. A button inside the car controls it. I parked beside him and opened my door and watched his face as I lowered the chair. He is a lean man with a drooping but trimmed black moustache. As the chair descended, he smiled and shook his head.

  “It’s too easy, Andre. It’s too easy.”

  I had learned to drive in his Cadillac. To remove the wheels from the chair and place them and the seat cushion then the folded chair behind the driver’s seat, you must sit sideways in the car, with your legs outside, so you can pull the seat as far as possible toward the steering wheel. My right knee does not bend enough for me to swing my leg in and out of a car, but in Joe’s Cadillac, I could shift backward to the passenger seat and get my leg inside. In my Toyota Celica the console and handbrake are in my way, and the car’s lack of depth makes this movement difficult. I said: “Nothing is too easy.”

  But he liked the machine. People who like machines admire its simple efficiency. People in parking lots stop to watch it work. Joe wheeled closer to the car to see the cellular phone I had bought the day before. Without a MacArthur Fellowship I would have none of this; and I would not have the car or the two-thousand-dollar wheelchair that is so much more comfortable and mobile and durable than those nine-hundred-dollar blue chairs you see in hospitals. You can go through two of them in a year, if you are active. I got the phone in case of car trouble. Joe wanted to know how the phone worked, and I showed him, and he called his office. Then we went inside and met the people working there. All but one was disabled. There was a blind man, and Joe grinned and asked him if he had read my books. The blind man laughed.

  On our way out Joe introduced me to a quadriplegic, perhaps in his early forties. With him was a pretty blonde woman. Then we went through wide doors that open and close by buttons on the wall beside them, so that if you are in a chair you do not have to pull the door toward you or hold it open while you wheel across its threshold. Outside was a concrete porch and a long L-shaped ramp to the parking lot. We faced the sun and I took off my shirt and watched a black man drive a van into the parking space in front of the porch. He and Joe waved. Joe said he was from Nigeria and had a wife before his accident, a car wreck, but now she was gone. The man put his key ring between his teeth, transferred to his wheelchair on the passenger side, worked a switch there, and behind him a lift came out of the van. He wheeled onto it, worked the switch again, and came down to the asphalt. At the side of the van, he took the keys from his mouth, turned one of them in a switch, and the lift went up and back into the van, whose door closed behind it. Then he put his keys in a bag attached to the back of his chair. He wheeled to our left, to the ramp and up the first leg of it. As he turned up the last leg, facing us now, I said: “Are you having fun?”

  “Oh yes; I am pumping iron.”

  He had a strong torso and his face was broad and young and handsome. Joe introduced us. The Nigerian was lightly sweating, and had a good handshake. I said: “I’m just starting my fourth year. How about you?”

  “Six now,” he said, smiling. “I love it.”

  “That’s right,” Joe said. “The crying days are over.”

  “And who is listening?”

  He is a paraplegic. For a few minutes he and Joe talked about burning themselves, carrying hot coffee and spilling it and not knowing they were being scalded. I said: “So when my leg hurts I should think about you guys, right?”

  “That’s right,” Joe said.

  “I don’t carry coffee anymore,” the Nigerian said.

  Then he went inside. I looked at Joe.

  “You can’t feel anything? From the waist down?”


  “It’s funny. I can feel my left nut. And look: I can move my left leg from side to side.” He moved it a few times. “I can’t feel it but, see, it moves. Everybody’s different. One guy may be able to feel his toe. Just one of them. You know anything about the spine?”

  “No.”

  He clenched a fist, leaving an opening in it.

  “Your spine is like the fucking phone company. There’s all these wires.” He stuck his forefinger into the hole. “It depends on what gets cut.”

  “Did you see Coming Home?”

  “That’s a good movie.”

  “He couldn’t feel her, right?”

  “No.”

  “But you get erections.”

  “Voluntary, and involuntary.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s better. Look, before you get hurt, what do you do? You get on the wife and pump away, then it’s over. Now I take my time. That’s why it’s better. It’s in the brain, Andre. Why do you want to get laid? For your brain, right?”

  “I guess so. Can you have an orgasm?”

  “No. It takes muscles. So what?”

  “I had a problem, my first year. Making love made me think about my legs, and I couldn’t come. Sometimes, but not all the time.”

  “So?”

  “I know. But it got to me. Then in the third year, that lady you met at my house, remember her?”

  “She was nice.”

  “She surely was. She made me feel whole again.”

  Behind us the door opened and the quadriplegic came out in his mechanical chair, the blonde woman behind him. They told me Nice to meet you, we all said goodbye, and Joe and I watched them go down the ramp and across the lot to his van, watched him go up a lift behind the passenger’s seat, then move his chair to the steering wheel. He is able to drive with his hands. She climbed in beside him.

  “Look at him,” Joe said. “A quad. She’s been with him for seven years, after he got fucked up. What do you think he’s got, a seven-inch tongue?”