From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 21

THE SUN ROSE above clouds, above fog, and with the gray day came a silver drizzle. The city was lanced by needles of rain, and filth drained from it, swelling the gutters with a poisonous flood.

St. Mary's social workers did not arrive with dawn, so Celestina was given the privacy of one of their offices, where the wet face of the morning pressed blurrily at the windows, and where she phoned her parents with the terrible news. From here, too, she arranged with a mortician to collect Phimie's body from the cold-storage locker in the hospital morgue, embalm it, and have it flown home to Oregon.

Her mother and father wept bitterly, but Celestina remained composed. She had-much to do, many decisions to make, before she accompanied her sister's body on the flight out of San Francisco. When finally her obligations were met, she would allow herself to feel the loss, the misery against which she was now armored. Phimie deserved dignity in this final journey to her northern grave.

When Celestina had no further calls left to make, Dr. Lipscomb came to her.

He was no longer in his scrubs, but wore gray wool slacks and a blue cashmere sweater over a white shirt. Face somber, he looked less like an obstetrician engaged in the business of life than like a professor of philosophy forever pondering the inevitability of death.

She started to get up from the chair behind the desk, but he encouraged her to stay seated.

He stood at a window, staring down into the street, his profile to her, and in his silence he searched for the words to describe the “something extraordinary” that he had mentioned earlier.

Droplets of rain shimmered on the glass and tracked downward.

Reflections of those tracks appeared as stigmatic tears on the long face of the physician.

When at last he spoke, real grief, quiet but profound, softened his voice: “March first, three years ago, my wife and two sons-Danny and Harry, both seven, twins-were coming home from visiting her parents in New York. Shortly after takeoff ... their plane went down."

Having been so wounded by one death, Celestina could not imagine how Lipscomb could have survived the loss of his entire family. Pity knotted her heart and cinched her throat so that she spoke in little more than a whisper: “Was that the American Airlines. . ."

He nodded.

Mysteriously, on the first day of sunny weather in weeks, the 707 had crashed into Jamaica Bay, Queens, killing everyone aboard. Now, in 1965, it remained the worst commercial-aviation disaster in the nation's history, and because of the unprecedented dramatic television coverage, the story was a permanent scar in Celestina's memory, although she had been living a continent away at the time.

'Miss White,” he continued, still facing the window, “not long before you arrived in surgery this morning, your sister died on the table. We hadn't delivered the baby yet, and perhaps couldn't have done so, by cesarean, in time to prevent brain damage, so for both the sake of the mother and child, heroic efforts were made to bring Phimie back and ensure continued circulation to the fetus until we could extract it."

The sudden change of subject, from the airliner crash to Phimie, confused Celestina.

Lipscomb shifted his gaze from the street below to the source of the rain. “Phimie was not gone long, perhaps a minute-a minute and ten seconds at most-and when she was with us again, it was clear from her condition that the cardiac arrest was most likely secondary to a massive cerebral incident. She was disoriented, paralysis on the right side ... with the distortion of the facial muscles that you saw. Her speech was slurred at first, but then something strange happened. . .

Phimie's speech had been slurred later, as well, immediately following the birth of the baby, when she had struggled to convey her desire to name her daughter Angel.

An affecting but difficult-to-define note in Dr. Lipscomb's voice brought Celestina slowly out of the office chair, to her feet. Perhaps it was wonder. Or fear. Or reverence. Perhaps all three.

For a moment,” Lipscomb continued, “her voice became clear, no longer slurred. She raised her head from the pillow, and her eyes fixed on me, all the confusion gone. She was so ... intense. She said ... she said, 'Rowena loves you.'

A shiver of awe traveled Celestina's spine, because she knew what the physician's next words would surely be.

“Rowena,” he said, confirming her intuition, “was my wife."

As if a door had briefly opened between this windless day and another world, a single gust rattled rain against the windows.

Lipscomb turned to Celestina. “Before lapsing into semicoherence again, your sister said, 'Beezil and Feezil are safe with her,' which may sound less than coherent to you, but not to me."

She waited expectantly.

“Those were Rowena's affectionate names for the boys when they were babies. Her private nonsense names for them, because she said they were like two beautiful little elves and ought to have elfin names."

“Phimie couldn't have known."

“No. Rowena dropped those names after the twins' first year. She and I were the only ones who ever used them. Our private little joke. Even the boys wouldn't have remembered."

In the physician's eyes, a yearning to believe. In his face, a squint of skepticism.

He was a man of medicine and science, who had been served well by hard logic and by an unwavering commitment to reason. He wasn't prepared easily to accept the notion that logic and reason, while essential tools to anyone hoping to lead a full and happy life, were nevertheless sufficient to describe either the physical world or the human experience.

Celestina was better equipped to embrace this transcendental experience for what it appeared to be. She was not one of those artists who celebrated chaos and disorder, or who found inspiration in pessimism and despair. Wherever her eyes came to rest, she saw order, purpose, exquisite design, and either the pale flicker or the fierce blaze of a humbling beauty. She perceived the uncanny not merely in old houses where ghosts were said to roam or in eerie experiences like the one Lipscomb had described, but every day in the pattern of a tree's branches, in the rapturous play of a dog with a tennis ball, in the white whirling currents of a snowstorm-in every aspect of the natural world in which insoluble mystery was as fundamental a component as light and darkness, as matter and energy, as time and space.

“Did your sister have other curious experiences?” Lipscomb asked.

“Nothing like this."

“Was she lucky at cards?"

“No luckier than me."

“Premonitions?"

No.

“Psychic ability-"

“She didn't have any."

— might one day be scientifically verifiable."

“Unlike life after death?” she asked.

Hope, on many wings, hovered all around the physician, but he was afraid to let it roost.

Celestina said, “Phimie wasn't a mind reader. That's science fiction, Dr. Lipscomb."

He met her stare. He had no response.

'She didn't reach into your thoughts and pluck out the name Rowena. Or Beezil or Feezil.'

As though frightened of the gentle certainty in Celestina's eyes, the doctor turned away from he, and toward the window once more.

She moved beside him. “For one minute, after her heart stopped the first time, she wasn't here in St. Mary's, was she? Her body, yes, that was still here, but not Phimie."

Dr. Lipscomb brought his hands to his face, covering his nose and mouth as earlier they had been covered with a surgical mask, as though he were in danger of drawing in, with his breath, an idea that would forever change him.

“If Phimie wasn't here,” Celestina said, “and then she came back, she was somewhere during that minute, wasn't she?"

Beyond the window, behind veils of rain and fog, the metropolis appeared to be more enigmatic than Stonehenge, as unknowable as any city in our dreams.

Behind his masking hands, the physician let out a thin sound, as though he were trying to pull from his heart an anguish that was embedded like a bur with countless sharp, hooked thorns.

Celestina hesitated, feeling awkward, unsure.

As always in uncertainty, she asked herself what her mother would do in this situation. Grace, of infinite grace, unfailingly did precisely the needed thing, knew exactly the right words to console, to enlighten, to charm a smile out of even the miserable. Often, however, the needed thing involved no words, because in our journey we so often feel abandoned, and we need only to be reassured that we are not alone.

She placed her right hand on his shoulder.

At her touch, she felt a tension go out of the doctor. His hands slipped from his face, and he turned to her, shuddering not with fear but with what might have been relief.

He tried to speak, and when he could not, Celestina put her arms around him.

She was not yet twenty-one, and he was at least twice her age, but he leaned like a small child against her, and like a mother she comforted him.