A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [21]
At the hospital, Theresa’s oldest sister organized the family so that there were always six or seven people in the prayer circle. Those off duty brought food and pillows, shuttled Grandma to and fro, gave back rubs, and made phone calls to relatives out of state. Theresa’s youngest sister cried outside of room 309, not for Lizzy at that moment, but because at nineteen she was still the baby and couldn’t do anything right. She had brought the wrong order from the Chinese restaurant: one grease-stained shopping bag with twelve cartons of sweet and sour pork, six cartons of rice, and twenty-four fortune cookies. The girl had so much misery in her face, her mascaraed tears running into her mouth, that Howard had taken off to the end of the hall to look out the window at the heating plant.
Hour after hour I sat, confessing my fundamental unworthiness to God. I was going to try to do much better, was going to put all my strength into forcing love into my heart. If only I had more Shakespeare on my tongue, more than a few lines knocking around; if only I could rise up, climb on the end table and with nothing but verbal wizardry rout the angels from their warrens. I had so little, no complete poems or Bible verses lounging in my brain like firemen on cots, waiting for the disaster. I could only get as far as, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.”
The only thing I had that was close to religion was the weekly pilgrimage Aunt Kate and I used to make to the international folk-dance group in Hyde Park, at first glance, nowhere near the Judeo-Christian path to the divine. Much as I tried to concentrate on Lizzy, what was not only her bone and flesh, but also what was the pure stuff of her soul, I couldn’t help drifting, occasionally, going back to Hyde Park, dancing, swirling around and around with my Aunt Kate. Every Friday night the oddest assortment of people gathered in Ida Noyes Hall and executed dances from the world over. The leader pulled out meticulously catalogued records from pink metal boxes and carefully guided the needle to the chosen band. That was our church, our communion. My Aunt Kate tried in vain to teach me to forgive the men in their thirties still fighting acne, who stepped on my feet and were always popping up to ask for the next dance. Most of them had spent far too long in a lab, feeding, I thought, out of their Petri dishes instead of eating a decent meal now and again. Aunt Kate used to answer my complaints about so and so’s bad breath by saying, “Yes, my dear, it’s dreadful, like an old goat—but be kind, be merciful.”
“Have you been praying?” I asked Howard, as we were adjusting the pillows on the hospital sofa. We were preparing to rest in the lounge again, for the second night. I wouldn’t go home, couldn’t bear the thought of Nellie’s inquisition, couldn’t stand the idea of waiting in the midst of everyday life. It was one thing to wait stubbornly, to hold out in the rarefied atmosphere of the hospital lounge, a place where, like purgatory, we accounted for our sins and hoped for mercy. I needed to devote myself to the waiting; I had no interest in trying to pass the time with mindless chores and food and people. Howard had only just returned from the farm. It was past ten o’clock and everyone else had pulled up stakes and gone to sleep in their own beds.
“Have I been saying what?” he said, trying a position flat on his back, finding it unsatisfactory, and turning over. He twisted his mouth to one side and felt his bristly cheek. “What if Lizzy doesn’t get better?”
“What?” I said.