Broken Vessels Read online

  In late spring of 1987 Cadence talked me into her room, in my wheelchair; I had not been able to do it till then, but she encouraged and directed me through the series of movements, forward and back and short turns, then I was there, beside her bed on the floor. After that I could go in and read to her. One night, still in the spring, I went into her room, where she sat on the bed. I looked at her face just below mine and said: “I want to tell you something. You’re a very brave and strong girl. Not many four-year-olds have had the kind of year you’ve had. Some children have to be lied to sometimes, but Mommy and I never had to lie to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We could always tell you the truth. We could tell you they were going to cut off my leg, and that the right one wouldn’t be good, and you understood everything, and when you felt happy you were happy, and when you felt sad, you cried. You always let us know how you felt and what was wrong. You didn’t see Mommy much for two months while I was in the hospital, and then she was gone for a week to have Madeleine and you only saw her for a couple of minutes at the hospital till the nurse saw your chicken pox and said you had to leave. Then Mommy came home with a baby sister. Most little girls don’t go through all of that. All this year has been harder on you than on anybody else, and when you grow up, somebody will have to work awfully hard to make you unhappy, because you’re going to be a brave, strong woman.”

  Tears flowed down her cheeks, but she was quiet and her eyes were shining, and her face was like a woman’s receiving love and praise.

  Then in the summer and early fall of 1987, we did lie to her, but she knew the truth anyway, or the part of it that gave her pain and demanded, again, resilience; and she brought to my bed only the two bears, the father and the daughter; and her days must have drained her: she woke with the fear of kindergarten and the other fear and sorrow she must have escaped only in sleep and with new children and work at kindergarten, and with familiar friends at play school, in the same way adults are absorbed long enough by certain people and actions to gain respite from some deep fear or pain at the center of their lives. I could no longer work. When the house was empty I phoned Jack at the Phoenix Bookstore and asked for his prayers and counsel and comfort, and I went to physical therapy three times a week, going there and back in a wheelchair van, three hours each session with Mrs. T, and the physical work and pain gave me relief, and I prayed for patience and strength and love, and played with Cadence and Madeleine, and waited for the end.

  The girls’ mother left on the eighth of November, a Sunday night; and people who love us helped me care for my girls until after dark, around six o’clock, on Friday the thirteenth, when she came with the court order and the Haverhill police officer. That afternoon Cadence and I were lying on my bed. Beside her was her pincher, a strip of grey cloth from the apron of her first Raggedy Ann doll, before she was a year old. She goes to sleep with it held in her fist, her thumb in her mouth. When she is tired or sad she holds it and sucks her thumb, or simply holds it; and she holds it too when she rides in a car or watches cartoons. She held it that afternoon after my lawyer phoned; his name is Scotty, he is an old friend, and he was surprised and sad as he told me of my wife’s lawyer calling from the courthouse, to say my wife was coming for my daughters. I wheeled from the kitchen phone, down the short hall to my bedroom where Cadence and I had been playing, where for nearly a year we had played with stuffed animals. I also played the giant who lay on his back, and had lost a leg, and his right one was in a cast. The giant has a deep voice, and he loves animals. Cadence is the red-haired giant, but we usually talk about her in the third person, the animals and I, for Cadence is the hearts and voices of animals with the giant; when Madeleine could sit up and be with me, she became the baby giant, cradled in my arm. Most days in the first year Cadence brought to the games an animal with a missing or wounded limb, an animal who needed healing and our love.

  Next to the bed I braked the wheelchair and moved from it to my place beside Cadence. She was sitting. I sat close to her and put my left arm around her and told her that judges were people who made sure everyone was protected by the law, even little children, and Mommy had gone to see one because she believed it was better for Cadence and Madeleine not to be with me, and Mommy was coming now with a policeman, to take her and Madeleine. I told her Mommy was not doing anything wrong, she was doing what she felt was right, like a good Momma Bear. Cadence held her pincher and looked straight ahead and was quiet. Her body was taut.

  “I don’t want to go in the car with them.”

  “Who’s them, sweetie?”

  “The judge and the police.”

  “No, darling. The judge won’t be in the car. Neither will the policeman. It’ll just be Mommy.”

  One of our animals we had played with since I came home from the hospital on the seventeenth of September 1986 is Oatmeal, a blond stuffed bear with pink ears and touches of pink on his cheeks and the top of his head and the back of his neck. On my birthday on the eleventh of August 1987, Cadence gave me shells and seaweed from the beach, and a prayer for a Japanese gingko tree she gave me with her mother, and Oatmeal. I am his voice; it is high. I am also the voice of his wife, Koala Bear; but after the marriage ended, Cadence stopped bringing Koala Bear to our games, save for one final night in December, while Madeleine was asleep and Cadence and I were playing in the dining room, and she said Oatmeal and Koala Bear were breaking up but maybe if Koala Bear had a baby they would love each other again; then she got a small bear from her room and put it with Koala Bear and Oatmeal and said they had a baby now and loved each other again. Then we watched Harry Dean Stanton as an angel in One Magic Christmas. After my birthday I kept Oatmeal on my bed; Cadence and I understand that he is a sign from her to me, when she is not here.

  That afternoon she gazed in front of her; then quickly she moved: her face and upper body turned to me, her eyes darkly bright with grief and anger; and her arms and hands moved, one hand holding the pincher still, and she picked up Oatmeal and swung him backhanded into my lap. Then she turned away from me and was off the bed, circling its foot, and I watched the pallid right side of her face. When she turned at the bed’s end and walked toward the hall, I saw her entire face, her right thumb in her mouth, the grey pincher hanging, moving with her strides; and in her eyes were tears. Her room is adjacent to mine, where I had slept with her mother, where I had watched all the seasons through the glass sliding door that faced northwest. Cadence walked past me, out my door, and into hers. She closed it.

  My friend Joe Hurka and my oldest daughter Suzanne were in the house; Joe had been with us all week, driving back and forth, an hour and ten minutes each way, to his job in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I called to Cadence: “Sweetie? Do you want me in your room with you?”

  I had never heard her voice from behind a door and a wall as well; always her door was open. Her voice was too old, too sorrowful for five; it was soft because she is a child, but its sound was that of a woman, suffering alone: “No.”

  I moved onto the wheelchair and turned it toward the door, the hall, her room. I wheeled at an angle through her doorway: she lay above me in her bunk on the left side of the room. She was on her back and sucking her right thumb and holding the pincher in her fist; she looked straight above her, and if she saw anything palpable it was the ceiling. She was pale, and tears were in her right eye, but not on her cheek. I moved to the bunk and looked up at her.

  The bunk was only a few months old and, before that, she had a low bed and when she lay on it at night and I sat above her in my chair, she could not see the pictures in the books I read aloud. So we lay on my bed to read. But from the bunk she could look down over my shoulder at the pictures. She climbed a slanted wooden ladder to get on it, and I had told Mrs. T I wanted to learn to climb that ladder. Not yet, Mr. Andre, she had said; not yet. In that moment in Cadence’s room, looking at her face, I said in my heart: Fuck this cripple shit, and I pushed the two levers that brake the wheels, and with m
y left hand I reached up and held the wooden side of the bunk and with my right I pushed up from the arm of the chair. I had learned from Mrs. T not to think about a new movement, but simply to do it. I rose, my extended right arm taking my weight on the padded arm of the chair, and my left trying to straighten, to lift my body up and to pivot onto the mattress beside Cadence. I called Joe and he came quickly down the hall and, standing behind me, he held me under my arms and lifted, and I was on the bunk. Cadence was sitting now, and blood colored her face; her wet eyes shone, and she was grinning.

  “Daddy. You got up here.”

  Joe left us, and I lay beside her, watching her face, listening to her voice raised by excitement, talking about me on the bunk. I said now we knew I could lie on the bunk at night and read to her. She crawled to the foot of the bed and faced me. Beyond her, two windows showed the grey sky in the southeast and the greyish white trunks of poplars without leaves. Cadence lowered her head and somersaulted, and her long bent legs arced above us, her feet struck the mattress, and her arms rose toward me, ahead of her face and chest. Her eyes were bright and dry, looking into mine, and she was laughing.

  We were on the bunk for an hour or more. We did not talk about our sorrow, but Cadence’s face paled, while Suzanne and Joe waited with Madeleine in the dining room for the car to come. When it did, Suzanne called me, and Joe came and stood behind the wheelchair and held my upper body as I moved down from the bunk. In the dining room Madeleine was in her high chair; Suzanne was feeding her cottage cheese. I talked with the young police officer, then hugged and kissed Madeleine and Cadence goodbye.

  In Salem District Court I got shared but not physical custody. The girls would be with me two weekends a month, Thursday afternoons and alternate Monday afternoons through dinner, half a week during the week-long vacations from school, and two weeks in summer. That’s a lot of time, people say. Until I tell them it is four nights a month with my two daughters, except for the two weeks in summer, and ask them if their own fathers spent only four nights a month with them when they were children (of course many say yes, or even less); or until I tell them that if I were making a living by traveling and earning a hundred thousand a year and spent only four nights a month with my family I would not be a good father. The family court system in Massachusetts appears to define a father as a sperm bank with a checkbook. But that is simply the way they make a father feel, and implicit in their dealings is an admonishment to the father to be grateful for any time at all with his children. The truth is that families are asunder, so the country is too, and no one knows what to do about this, or even why it is so. When the court receives one of these tragedies it naturally assigns the children to the mother’s house, and makes the father’s house a place for the children to visit. This is not fatherhood. My own view is that one house is not a home; our home has now become two houses.

  On the tenth of January 1988, Madeleine was a year old. It was a Sunday, and one of my weekends with the girls, and we had balloons and a cake and small presents, and Cadence blew out the candle for her sister. During that time in winter I was still watching Cadence for signs of pain, as Suzanne and Andre and Jack were, and Marian and David Novak, and Joe Hurka and Tom. Madeleine was sometimes confused or frightened in her crib at night, but never for long. She is a happy little girl, and Cadence and Suzanne and Jack and I learned during the days of Christmas that “Silent Night” soothes her, and I sing it to her still, we all do, when she is troubled; and she stops crying. Usually she starts singing at holy night, all is calm, not with words but with the melody, and once this summer she sang the melody to Cadence when she was crying. We all knew that Madeleine, only ten months old when the family separated, was least touched, was the more fortunate of the children, if indeed anything about this can be fortunate for one of the children. So we watched Cadence, and let her be sad or angry, and talked with her; and we hugged and kissed Madeleine, and played with her, fed her, taught her words, and sang her to sleep.

  The fifth of February was a Friday in 1988, and the first night of a weekend with the girls. Suzanne brought them into the house shortly after six o’clock in the evening; I was in the shower, sitting on the stool, and she brought them to the bathroom door to greet me. When I wheeled out of the bathroom into the dining room, a towel covering my lap, Cadence was in the living room, pedaling my exercise bicycle. A kind woman had given it to me when she saw me working on one at physical therapy, and learned from Mrs. T that I did not have the money to buy one. With my foot held by the pedal strap I could push the pedal down and pull it up, but my knee would not bend enough for me to push the wheel in a circle. In February I did not have the long ramp to the living room, against its rear wall, but a short steep one going straight down from the dining room, and I could not climb or descend it alone, because my chair would turn over. Madeleine was in the dining room, crawling, and Suzanne stood behind me, in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen, talking on the phone and looking at the girls. I was near the ramp, and Cadence was saying: Watch this, Daddy, and was standing on the right pedal with her right foot, stretching her left leg up behind her, holding with both hands the grip on the right end of the handlebar, and pushing the pedal around and around.

  Then she was sitting on the seat and pedaling and Madeleine crawled down the ramp and toward her and the bicycle, and Cadence said: Madeleine, no, as Madeleine reached with her right hand to the chain guard at the wheel and her index finger went into a notch I had never seen, and a tooth of the sprocket cut her with a sound distinct among those of the moving chain and spinning wheel and Suzanne’s voice: a thunk, followed at once by the sound of Madeleine’s head striking the floor as she fell back from the pain, and screamed. She did not stop. Cadence’s face was pale and frightened and ashamed, and I said: She’ll be all right, darling. Is it her head or her finger? and Cadence said: It’s her finger and it’s bleeding, and Suzanne was there, bending for Madeleine, reaching for her, saying: It is her finger and it’s cut off. Three of my four daughters, and I see their faces now: the oldest bravely grieving, the youngest red with the screams that were as long as her breathing allowed, and above them the five-year-old, pale with the horror of the bleeding stump she saw and the belief that she alone was responsible.

  Then Suzanne was rising with Madeleine in her arms and saying: I have to find the finger; they can sew it back on, and bringing Madeleine up the ramp to me. She was screaming and kicking and writhing and I held her and looked at her tiny index and middle fingers of her right hand: the top knuckle of her index finger was severed, and so was the inside tip of her middle finger, at an angle going up and across her fingernail. In months, that part of her middle finger would grow back. Suzanne told Cadence to stop the chain because Madeleine’s finger could be stuck in it, and she dialed 911, and the police officer told her to put the dismembered piece in ice. Cadence came up the ramp; I was frightened of bleeding and shock, and had only a towel, which does not stop bleeding. I said to Cadence: Go get me a bandana. She turned and sprinted down the hall toward my room, and I called after her: In the second drawer of my chest, and she ran back with a clean bandana she held out to me. Suzanne was searching the bicycle chain and the living room, and Cadence watched me wrap Madeleine’s fingers. I held her kicking legs up but she did not go into shock and she did not stop screaming, while Suzanne found the rest of her finger lying on the floor, and wrapped it in ice and put it in the refrigerator, and twice I told Cadence it was not her fault and she must never think it was.

  But she did not hear me. I imagine she heard very little but Madeleine’s screaming, and perhaps her own voice saying Madeleine, no, before either Suzanne or I could see what was about to happen, an instant before that sound of the sprocket tooth cutting through flesh and bone; and she probably saw, besides her sister’s screaming and tearful face and bandaged bleeding hand, and the blood on Madeleine’s clothes and on the towel and chair and me, her own images: her minutes of pleasure on the bicycle before Madeleine crawled do
wn the ramp toward her and then once again, and so quickly again, her life became fear and pain and sorrow, already and again demanding of her resilience and resolve. When a police officer and two paramedics arrived, she said she wanted to go in the ambulance with Madeleine and Suzanne.

  By then Tom and Jack were there, and I was drying and dressing. The police officer found the small piece of Madeleine’s middle finger in the chain and ran outside with it, and gave it to the paramedics before they drove to Lawrence General Hospital, because Hale Hospital has no trauma center. I asked Jack to phone David Novak, and by the time I dressed and gave the officer what he needed for his report, David was in the house. I phoned Andre at work and Jeb at home, then David and Tom and Jack and I drove in David’s Bronco to the hospital, twenty-five minutes away. I had put into my knapsack what I would need to spend the night in the hospital with Madeleine. Her mother was in Vermont, to ski. But in the car, talking to David, I knew that Cadence would need me more.

  In the ambulance Madeleine stopped screaming, and began the sounds she made that winter when she was near sleep: ah ah ah ah… At the hospital she cried steadily, because of the pain, but now she was afraid too and that was in her voice, even more than pain. A nurse gave her to me and I held her cheek to mine and sang “Silent Night,” then Jeb was there. At Lawrence General they could not work on Madeleine’s finger; they phoned Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, then took her there. Suzanne rode with her, and Jeb and Tom followed. Suzanne dealt with the surgeons and, on the phone, reported to me; I talked to the girls’ mother in Vermont; and Suzanne and Jeb and Tom stayed at the hospital until the operation was over, and Madeleine was asleep in bed. The surgeon could not sew on the part of Madeleine’s finger, because of the angle of its amputation. Early next morning her mother drove to the hospital and brought her to my house; her hand was bandaged and she felt no pain; her mother had asked on the phone in Vermont if she could spend the weekend with Madeleine, and Cadence went with them for the afternoon, then in the evening her mother brought her back to me for the rest of the weekend.