I sat down in front of the computer and opened my email, and there was a message announcing the memorial in the campus chapel.
Dear friends:
I write to share some very sad news. Ida Brown passed away earlier this week. There will be a memorial service this Thursday, 3/22, at 1:30 p.m. in the Presbyterian Church on campus.
Best,
Don D’Amato.
Passed away: she had gone far away, moved on to a better life. In that moment I lost control and broke down. Oh yes… I stayed in my office. The light through the window. The books. Was it possible? I couldn’t imagine her injured body. Her scorched hand, the skin of her neck, oh yes, the swans in the night…
I locked my office, crossed the hallway, and went down the staircase that led to the Department of Classical Languages. The day was bright and sunny, one of those winter afternoons after a storm when the air seems to light up. I walked across campus toward the woods. I had to pass a few tennis courts with pretty girls dressed in white, wearing miniskirts and wool stockings. I don’t know if it’s possible to know (or claim to know) a woman after spending a few nights with her, but I did know Ida’s intensity, and that was everything. The will to go toward some place without thinking of the way back or the consequences. She would never be able to finish her projects; everything was suddenly cut short. She was so young, too, and that made it sadder still. There should be some mark to identify the ones who die before they can grow old. I sat down on a bench under an oak tree. Suddenly I recalled a movement of her hands, a tiny gesture, her fingers on the table, barely anything at all, her fingertips making a fragile, mechanical gesture when she was restless, and I was filled with pain and closed my eyes. She had very slender hands, I thought, and felt my tears freezing in the icy air. Was I crying? The kids playing tennis paused to look at me. Then they hit their racket strings against their fists, shouted a few times to work up their energy, and resumed the match. The yellow ball shot through the air, they moved with ease. How many years had it been since I’d cried? Overhead, a crow was perched like a dark sign on the branches, a black point in the transparent whiteness of the afternoon. And then the crow shook its wings, and the snowflakes falling softly on my face filled me with new spirit, as though rescuing me—or consoling me—in a day of grief. It was not Poe’s raven, it was Frost’s crow. It’s impossible to make sense of suffering, but the rhymes and the peaceful scansion of the verses as I began to recall them allowed me to breathe calmly once more.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
I couldn’t think about her with words of my own. The snow / Has given my heart / A change of mood.
I left campus, going along the edge of the Mexican ghetto, which had once been a Black ghetto, and before that an Italian one and before that Irish. The houses are beautiful and traditional, with open verandas and large picture windows. Some older African American people still live there, but very few; most have left, and now there are Guatemalan, Dominican, and Puerto Rican immigrants living there too, and the local church even has its posters announcing services written in Spanish, and the hymns and prayers there are intoned with Mexican accents. Oh María, madre mía. I entered the chapel and knelt to pray. Hail Mary, full of grace. Three morena women, sitting on the wooden pews to one side, were reciting the rosary in low voices as if it was a funeral dirge. The Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women. The musical sound of the prayers calmed me. One of the women recited a fragment of the Hail Mary and the other two answered her in chorus. It had the same structure as a tragedy: a speaker and a chorus. What relationship did the rite of Mass have with the Eucharist and the tradition of Greek tragedy? That was the only way I could think, as though I were a man wounded in war, now unable to talk about himself. The altar was humble, a wooden Christ at the top and an embroidered white cloth over the iron table. I stood up and returned to the light of day.
A few meters away was Pelusa Travel, a Mexican company for wiring money to Central America where they sold long-distance phone cards and photos of Maradona at the 1986 World Cup. A young pachuco was talking to a girl. He was wearing baggy pants very far below the waist, black Clippers sunglasses, and a New York Yankees baseball cap, and she—with her hair up in a red Mohawk, dressed in cowboy boots and a yellow cloth cape, tied with a bow—was laughing in a lopsided way and making giggly remarks, and her soft tone reminded me of Ida’s voice. The first thing forgotten and lost after a person is gone is the sound of her voice, and that afternoon I called several times from the public phone just to listen to her voice on the answering machine. “It’s Ida Brown. We’re away right now and I can’t answer the phone. Leave a message or call again later.” I liked the plural and then the transition to first person (I can’t answer). The voice went on like that, and I wished I could program it with some phrase meant for me, a goodbye, a final greeting on the answering machine that would respond eternally to the calls of anyone who wanted her.
One
