Sourland

Blindly Adrienne made her halting way through the security checkpoint. What a clamorous place this was, and unheated — overhead a high gray-tinctured ceiling, underfoot an aged and very dirty marble floor. Most of the others shuffling in the line were dark-skinned. Most wore work clothes, or were carelessly or poorly dressed, with sullen or expressionless faces. Adrienne stepped aside to allow a stout middle-aged black woman with an elderly mother to precede her but a security guard intervened speaking sharply: “Ma’am — put your things down here. Step along, ma’am.”

Trying not to think Because I am white. I am the minority here.

It was so: the only other Caucasian in view was a sheriff’s deputy stationed in the inner lobby.

She was not a racist. Yet her hammering heart rebuked her — Now you are helpless, they have you.

Her husband had been an academic, a historian. His field of specialization had been twentieth-century European history, after World War I. Like a time traveler he’d moved deftly from the present into the past — from the past into the present — though he had lived with horrors, he’d seemed to Adrienne curiously untouched by his discoveries, intellectually engaged rather more than emotionally engaged. A historian is a kind of scientist, he’d believed. A historian collects and analyzes data, he must take care not to impose his personal beliefs, his theories of history, upon this data. Adrienne had once entered Tracy’s study when he was assembling a book-length manuscript to send to his editor at Harvard University Press — chapters and loose pages were scattered across his desk and table and she’d had a fleeting glimpse of photographs he’d hidden from her — scenes of Nazi death- camps? Holocaust survivors? — she’d asked what these were and Tracy had said, “You don’t want to know, Adrienne.”

Adrienne had protested, but not strongly. Essentially he’d been right — she had not wanted to know.

How concerned for her Tracy would be, if he could see her here, alone. For why on earth was she here.

Never had they spoken of death-duties. The subject had never arisen — for why should it have arisen? Tracy had not expected to die, not for a long time. He’d been a “fit” man — he exercised, he ate and drank sparingly, he was steeped in the sort of health-knowledge common to people of his education and class. Knowing is a form of immortality. Ignorance is the only weakness, and that can be prevented.

So it had seemed to them. Now Adrienne had lost faith, she’d been staggered, stunned. Her husband’s knowledge had not saved him. No more than a house of ordinary dimensions could withstand a hurricane or an earthquake.

“Ma’am — remove your coat, please. And your boots. Step along.”

Adrienne did as she was told. She placed her things in trays on the conveyer belt to pass through the X-ray machine, as at an airport. Yet there was a harshness here, an air of suspicion on the part of the security staff, she had not experienced while traveling on either domestic or foreign flights. She was told to open her handbag for inspection, in addition to placing it in the tray; as she struggled to open her husband’s heavy leather briefcase, which contained several folders of legal documents, some of these documents fell to the floor. Awkwardly Adrienne stooped, her face warm with embarrassment, and reached for the papers. “Ma’am? You needin some help?” A male guard with skin the color of burnt cork stooped to help her retrieve the papers which had scattered on the damp, dirty floor amid the feet of strangers. How had this happened — these were precious documents! One was a notarized IRS form for the previous year, another was the death certificate issued for Tracy Emmet Myer on stiff gray-green paper resembling the paper used for U.S. currency and stamped with the New Jersey State seal. Somehow, there was Adrienne’s husband’s wallet being handed to her — and his wristwatch — which Adrienne had removed from the hospital room after his death and must have placed inside the briefcase without remembering she’d done so. The wallet was unnervingly light, flat — all the bills, credit cards and other items must have been taken from it — and the wristwatch had a broken face as if it had been stepped on. “This yours, too?” — the guard held out to Adrienne a scrap of paper upon which she saw scribbled handwriting — barely legible except for the oversized schoolgirl signature LEISHA.

Leisha! The aggressive girl in the faux-fur jacket and corn-rowed hair had somehow succeeded in thrusting the note to her lover into Adrienne’s briefcase — how was this possible? Adrienne remembered clearly having refused it, and walking quickly away.

Numbly she took the note from the guard, and the other items, and returned them to the briefcase. Her face throbbed with heat, she was aware of strangers staring at her. How quickly it had happened, Adrienne Myer had become that person, very often a woman, an older woman, who in public places draws the pitying or annoyed stares of others because she has dropped something, or has forgotten something, or has lost something, or has come to the wrong address and is holding up the line… She was fumbling now to put on her boots, and her coat. And where was her glove, had she dropped a glove…The deputy overseeing the checkpoint, a lieutenant, with a dim roughened skin that wasn’t nearly so Caucasian as Adrienne had imagined from a short distance, had come over to see what was wrong. Politely he said, “Ma’am? Where you headed — sur’gate?” When Adrienne stared blankly at him he said: “Office of the Sur’gate? Probate Court?” Bemusedly his eyes moved over her: the black cashmere coat that fell to midcalf, expensive but hastily misbuttoned, the expensive leather boots defaced by salt as by graffiti. “Probate is fifth floor, ma’am. Elevators through that doorway.”

Is it so obvious, Adrienne wondered. Where I am headed, and why.

She thanked the officer. She moved on. She was carrying her handbag and briefcase against her chest, like a refugee; trying not to think that she might have left something behind on the foyer floor — a crucial document — now scuffed and tattered underfoot — someone in the security line or one of the courthouse staff might have pilfered from her. She was not a racist, she was not a white racist yet she had to acknowledge that the color of her skin singled her out as one of the oppressors of the dark-skinned peoples of the world, that was a fact of history, and of fate; nowhere more evident than here in Trenton, the decaying and depopulated capital city of the State of New Jersey. The widow is one who comes swiftly to the knowledge Whatever harm comes to you, you deserve. For you are still alive.

Not when he’d died — she had been too shocked, too stunned to comprehend that he had died, at that moment — but earlier — on the third or fourth day of his hospitalization — when she’d hurried to her husband’s room on the fifth floor of the hospital — “Telemetry” — and had seen an empty bed, a stripped mattress, no human figure in the bed, no surrounding machines — the thought struck her like a knife-blow He has died, they have taken him away — in that instant the floor had swung up toward her face, the floor had somehow come loose and swung up as she’d lost her footing, her balance, blood rushed out of her brain leaving her faint, helpless, utterly weak, broken and weeping — a nurse’s aide had prevented her from falling — “Mrs. Myer! Your husband has been moved just down the hall” — in an instant her life had ended, yet in the next instant her life had been restored to her; all that would happen to her from now on, she understood, would be random, wayward and capricious.

Now it has begun, now there is nothing to stop it.

The elevators were very slow-moving, crowded. Here too Adrienne was made to feel self-conscious, uneasy. After waiting for several minutes she decided to take the stairs. But what a surprise — these were not ordinary functional stairs but an old-fashioned staircase of carved mahogany, broad and sweeping, baronial; clearly the staircase belonged to an older part of the courthouse. Climbing the curving stairs, gripping the railing, Adrienne found herself staring into a shaft, like a deep pit; the courthouse appeared to be hollow at its core, as if receding in time. Adrienne paused to catch her breath, leaning against the railing, gazing down into the pit-like shaft. She thought This is a temptation for those who are not strong. Or for those who are strong. To end it now.

How close she was, to losing her balance, falling…She’d begun to perspire with anxiety, inside her warm clothing.

Since the first day of her husband’s hospitalization — now just nine days ago — she’d been subject to such flurries of anxiety, dread. She had brought her husband to the ER for he was suffering from an erratic heartbeat and a pronounced shortness of breath; his face was flushed, mottled; his eyes were unnaturally dilated. In the ER he’d been “stabilized” — he’d been kept overnight for cardiac tests — moved from the ER not into the general hospital population but to the seventh floor — “Telemetry” — which Adrienne had not wanted to see was adjacent to “Intensive Care” from that point onward her life became a sequence of linked yet seemingly disjointed episodes