I had thought that my own halting descriptions and Clementine’s imagination had provided for her a familiar, companionate image of Miriam. (“Did Mom look like me, minus you?”) Did it never occur to me that she would also harbor a darker image, the image of Miriam after she had died? Her curiosity had always had a forensic edge. She had asked me, and I had described to her the events following a catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage: the accelerating cascade of pain, double vision, nausea, disorientation, loss of consciousness, seizures, coma, death. She’d asked me what Miriam had looked like afterward. Here my professional knowledge would be no help to me. Tired. I said she looked very tired, but also somehow relieved. Clementine said nothing. I tried to change the subject. The nurses told me (I said) how overjoyed Miriam had been, just an hour earlier, when the doctor had finally lifted a beautiful, healthy baby girl up onto her chest! Labor, after all, had been long and more difficult than expected.
Had Clementine wondered how, precisely, Miriam’s head had looked on the pillow, how, precisely, someone had withdrawn the intravenous lines from her veins, sponged the crust of froth from around her lips, or lifted her onto a gurney to take her away? Had she imagined Miriam’s eyes closed, or open, fixed now on an impossible distance? Had Clementine wondered what Miriam beheld then, no longer blinking? Had she imagined that Miriam watched, somewhere in that impossible distance, her beautiful newborn grown now to a gangly girl, now to a young woman? Did Clementine imagine that she could feel that look, had perhaps felt it often, had known it perhaps forever? Perhaps she had encountered it in a certain slant of light, in a particular oblique melancholy, a heavenly hurt dispatched to her as a kind of communication—not as an intelligible message, but as a signal nonetheless, sustained and unignorable, a wail, a keening….
—
At home I place the tube on my desk, this desk I have cleared of all distractions. I unroll a black-and-white print, enlarged so that the face it reveals appears exactly life-size. It is in that face that I see it, know it, the look of death that Clementine must have so often contemplated: lips slightly parted, brow not furrowed but drawn, eyes open but hooded, as though in concentration, as though straining to peer through the camera’s lens.
Were it not for the moonstone pallor of the skin, you would think Miriam was about to speak. The way her lips are parted, tip of her tongue just visible, you would think she was waiting for the right moment, letting someone else have his say before saying what she has been waiting to say. She has been waiting in the cold, with her shoulders bare, her damp hair smoothed back from her forehead. She seems not to have noticed the cold, or not to care. Neither does she seem troubled by the contusion darkening the right side of her neck, nor by the two descending incisions, beginning at each collarbone, passing at an angle above her nipples to converge midsternum, incisions closed up now with an even whipstitch. You would think she looks straight at you, or rather, straight through you. She knows what she has to say, and she knows she will say it, however long she must wait. Eyes hooded, slightly open, lips parted, she has waited now for eighteen years. In eighteen years Miriam has grown expert in waiting.
—
On the back of the photograph, in the same block print, the final stanza has been pared down to six lines:
Away with us he’s going.
Sing peace into his breast,
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I wonder today, as I have before: Do you pray for me? What prayers are to be offered up for such a man as I? And such a man as I, who is that? An addled man, no doubt, a tormented man. How mistaken you must think me to believe that I caused a death, Miriam’s death, that her death was not a suicide but my crime. You will think it no crime at all—a disaster certainly, a tragedy, and not least for me and Clementine, but certainly not a crime. Do you pray that I come to accept a judgment more merciful than my own?
Do you pray that such a man might be made to see how life has been given back to him, not only his own life but also his daughter’s? If it is true that he betrayed his pregnant lover, surely he was not the first to do such a thing. He had not even known she was pregnant. And should that woman return home, to the city of Nevers, to give birth there, doomed by an old despair, surely he had not been the one to acquaint her with that despair in the first place. He was not her executioner, but merely a stand-in, a stay. Before he had met her, she had made her rendezvous.
Knowing what I have told you, you will say that from the moment of her birth, the infant’s needs should have trumped all other considerations. What need was more peremptory than for a parent’s love and care, and to Clementine only one parent remained. My duty was clear, and I dispatched it with honor: the child acknowledged and fought for,
