The Waters & the Wild Read online

“Yes,” she said with a flush of what might have been impatience, “but that’s just how you address a lawyer or a jurist. ‘Maître,’ it begins—” she said, then recommenced her fluent rendering of the French, pausing now and again, waiting for a satisfactory English expression to present itself, the legal phrases coming obediently to her (he thought afterward), as they might to one already well acquainted with the wishes of the dead.

  “ ‘I, the undersigned,’ ” she read, “ ‘currently residing at 152 West Seventy-ninth Street, Apartment 8A, New York, New York, do hereby declare this to be the codicil to my last will and testament. As the habitation—’

  “No, that’s wrong,” she said, “not habitation—dwelling, maybe—domicile…

  “ ‘As the domicile I shared with my daughter throughout the period of her minority shall forthwith be vacated and sold, I do hereby authorize and direct that following…’ ” She paused again. “ ‘That pursuant to the settling of my estate all future correspondence concerning said estate be forwarded to my one child and only inheritor—’

  “No, not only, not inheritor—heir, sole heir is better.

  “ ‘To my sole heir at the following address.’

  “That’s this address,” she said, turning the sheet toward him so that he could read it himself.

  Miss Clementine Abend

  c/o the Reverend Nelson Spurlock, Rector

  The Church of the Incarnation

  New York City, NY, USA

  “Which is this church, right?”

  He nodded, but she had already begun to translate the two remaining sentences on the sheet: “ ‘Except for the limited provision stated herewith, I confirm and republish my last will and testament duly witnessed and signed 15 August 2008, on file at the law offices of Crulwich, Labrie, and Steiner. I pray you to accept, Master, my most respectful salutations. 29 August 2008.’

  “That’s the end of it,” she said. “He didn’t even sign it.”

  “I am Nelson Spurlock,” Spurlock heard himself say, unnerved to see his name on a page written hardly two weeks ago, snared in a stranger’s handwriting, in a language he could not read.

  “So, anything that would have been sent would have been sent to you.”

  “Is that what it says?” said Spurlock.

  “You haven’t received anything?”

  “Received?” he repeated, as though that word too were in another language.

  “In the mail, like it says, anytime in the past month or so?”

  “No, although—no—perhaps my secretary—” Spurlock stammered, as though any piece of mail could possibly arrive without Mrs. Nickerson opening it immediately. “No,” he said finally. “I haven’t seen anything.”

  “No letter? No package?”

  “Nothing,” he said, surprised by how it pained him to say so. But why should it hurt him to disappoint her, this stranger little more than half his age?

  “I am sorry, Miss Abend,” he said. “But if you could write down your own address, and your phone number too, I promise I’ll let you know if something appears. When something appears. Right away.”

  It was then, at that precise instant, that something in her countenance changed. Suddenly she was looking at him as though he were the one speaking an incomprehensible language. “I give you my word,” he said. “If the address on the will, Clemen—Miss Abend—if the address written there—the one on the Upper West Side—if it’s no longer good,” he blundered on, “is there a better one where I can reach you?”

  “What?”

  “If this address—if another one is better—one way or another, Miss Abend, I promise you—” Spurlock said, forcing back the certainty that he was speaking to himself only.

  “Clementine Abend—” she said, but broke off.

  “Yes, Clementine, if I could,” he said, unnerved by the insistence in his own voice, “all I would need—” He’d taken a pen from his pocket and, realizing he had no paper, began to write her name on the palm of his hand. “Clementine—Abend,” he said, pronouncing the name slowly as he wrote it out. But after muttering something about having to go, the girl had retreated from the counter toward her table under the Noah window and in what seemed like a single swift movement had shouldered her bag and passed out onto the street. The gimlet eye of the stained-glass crow met Spurlock’s. “What now, Father?” the crow seemed to ask.

  * * *

  —

  That had been three weeks ago. For days afterward he would find himself wondering if Clementine Abend would appear again, to inquire once more if anything had been sent to her, in his care.

  In his care, Spurlock thought.

  Abend, thought Spurlock. The name had meant nothing to him.

  He had consulted the parish records and had found no one by the name of Abend. He had even flipped through the parish visitors’ book to the day of Jessica Burke’s funeral three years earlier. Abend. Abend. But again, nothing, and he was confident in his memory for names and faces, whether of parishioners or visitors. If something did arrive, how would he find her? She had left nothing behind. He would simply have to continue to wait for her to appear again, though there had been no sign of her. The disquiet he felt, did it stem from the sight of his name, caught in the indecipherable toil of a stranger’s writing? Or was its origin—as he began to suspect—something quite different: the thought that he would not see that face, her face, ever again?

  Three uneasy weeks had passed. She had not appeared. Nothing had arrived. Nothing until today. Spurlock blinked, willing himself awake. If this was sleep, he wanted none of it, this awful weight bearing down on him, cold and rigid, measuring its length to his. If he could just dislodge it, if he could rise from his cot, he could prove that the weight was not a weight. He could grope his way up to the church office, to his desk, where he would see that the package resting on it was still only a package, still was what it had been before he had, thinking of something else, torn open the seal. It was just another piece of the day’s mail, just another envelope on his desk, a package like any other sent by accountants, tax attorneys, auditors, or the diocesan offices, packages Mrs. Nickerson would date-stamp and shunt to the appropriate file or vestry committee. So what if this envelope, a slick, striated paper stamped with foreign postage, proved unshuntable, marked as it was PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL in painstaking block capitals? Were he to open it again, he would see that the envelope contained just a stack of pages, each one a weightless sheet of onionskin. Maybe he would discover that he had not in fact read them through in a single, paralyzed sitting, that they too were the tatters of a dream he’d shaken off and discarded. Maybe he would find himself once more a stranger to the voice that those pages relayed: rapt, patient, heated, and tempered, insistent as the bit of a rock drill drilling a rock face.

  Father, you will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.

  A cry jerked him to his senses. Had it been his, or a cry from one of the sleepers? He tried to fasten his gaze to something, anything, in the darkness swirling above him, but he found no purchase in it, in the particular, total blackness of stained glass at night, the panes lightless now as the webs of lead they’d been set in, every figure as black now as Noah’s crow. He could hear, beyond the breath and rustle of the sleepers, the restless avenue (after all, the night could not be so far gone), but the black of the windows insisted that the church, like a cavern or coal-gallery, had no exterior.

  I believe you may have something—something my father sent you—

  —she had said, her face no longer the severe, etched profile but facing him as she spoke, as it faced him now, a perfect oval, the eyes a flat-bright nickel gray, with somewhere the glint of gold piercing her, because (Spurlock thought) the beauty of the young was intolerable to them—

  —something for a Clementine Abend.

  No, it wa
s obvious she was no longer a girl, however clear the gray of her eye, however smooth the curve of her cheek. Something or someone had drawn down over that face an invisible, perpetual veil of care.

  I believe you have something, something my father sent you—

  He’d had nothing for her when she came three weeks ago, but then in this morning’s mail it had arrived, the heavy envelope containing that stack of weightless pages:

  You will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.

  He had read it, bent over his desk, oblivious of Mrs. Nickerson’s departure, of the window’s failing light at his back, the world itself falling away and with it the substance of his own body, Spurlock a mere shadow bent over the stack of lamplit pages, each sheet weightless but tight-peened with type, as though the words themselves had invested the stack with its intractable mass, the mass that now bore down upon him.

  She had not returned. A certainty, at once unwarranted and undeniable, filled him: he would never see Clementine Abend again.

  So sleep at last dismantled the troubled spirit of Father Spurlock, but even as that darkness without exterior closed around him, he felt the blackness shiver and crack, a network of fissures feathered out in a blizzard of fragments, flocked up and on the wing, a cloud of agitations collecting its formlessness to a shape at first spheroid and revolving, then conic, vortical, funneling itself into his chest—as when, in autumn, at nightfall, a blackout of blackbirds drains into a single tree.

  ONE

  Father, you will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.

  Even if you have seen my face, it was only one among the many faces gathered at the funeral of Jessica Burke, and that was three years ago, almost to the day. You do remember Jessica Burke—do you not?—dead of an overdose, the daughter, I believe, of a woman in your congregation. I had not attended your church, nor any church for that matter, in many years. No special claim to grieve had brought me there, beyond the bond between a psychoanalyst and his patient, that unequal, equivocal hold that also holds at bay.

  For two years she had been my patient, my analysand, so I had seen her four times a week, five times even, at the beginning of the treatment. During those years, I had listened to Jessica Burke longer and more attentively than I listened to my daughter, Clementine, suddenly hidden from me in the maelstrom of her adolescence. I believed I knew Jessica Burke well, as well as I knew any of my patients. I believed as many at the funeral seemed also to have believed that she had come to flourish, that she had indeed found a new life. What is more, I am convinced she believed this as well and credited me with having helped her in this. After several failed attempts, Jessica had finally kicked free of the heroin. She had begun to “make art,” as she put it, had reenrolled in a life-drawing class she’d stormed out of a year before. She had made an appeal to be reinstated at her college and had begun attending night school courses. She had repaired severed relations with family. I believed she was better, believed she had eluded a danger, and because I believed these things, the news of her death came as something more than a shock.

  I have lost patients before, sometimes gradually, to illness or age, sometimes suddenly, and a young one more than once or twice. And I have known that deep, narrow grief any analyst knows, having peered so long into a soul freed from its contexts, unfolding and growing under the lamp of his attention—only to have the lid shut, the lamp blown out. They say psychoanalysis is a school of limits: the session must end, the treatment must end, because childhood must end, and life. Perhaps so. Even with my youngest patients, I have never felt it impossible that they could die.

  And yet for Jessica I had thought it so, or felt it, even to the moment of taking my seat in a pew, alongside old Itzal, the doorman from my building, whom she had befriended. I had felt it simply, merely, impossible that she could have died—Jessica Burke!—whom I had seen as recently as the previous Friday, who remarked on her new boots as she settled herself on the couch in my office, crossing her ankles as she always did. They were motorcycle boots, the leather stiff and uncreased, so new I could smell it, tannic and fishy, as the session progressed. “I’ll have to walk a million blocks,” she’d said, “before they stop hurting me.” It had been the first time in she didn’t know how long she’d gone out and bought new shoes, and where could she walk a million blocks except in the future, a future crowded with plans and appointments, a bustling territory claimed as her own?

  I said that the news of her death had come as something more than a shock. I should have said that it came as something less than one: the shock had yet to arrive. Something detained it, held it in abeyance, perhaps out of pity for me, perhaps savoring in anticipation the bitterness of comprehension once it arrived.

  After the ceremony, three years ago, I had thought to write you, to send you a note. In fact, I went so far as to find your address at the church. What would I have said? That I was grateful, for her sake, that someone intelligent and articulate and without illusion had spoken? That you had helped us to bid farewell, without falsifying the pain of her life, her perennial suffering, the frequent dissipation and final annihilation of her potential? Even now I remember with gratitude how you began your eulogy. An overdose! Too much. More than a body can handle. More than anybody can handle. We had lost our friend, our daughter, Jessica, to an overdose. Yes, and that alone was too much, but in another way, in our grief, we were all overwhelmed in the flood of death, the waters rising up to our necks. I remember thinking that you must have children. That perhaps you too have a daughter, as I do, perhaps a troubled daughter, or lost. That the death of Jessica Burke had struck you deeply as well. We were all in over our heads, you said. Everything was too much, our lives were too much. Too many temptations, allurements, false starts, false promises. Too much pain. Too much grief. And there was nothing to be said about this: some griefs, you said, outstripped all consolation.

  As for explanations, we would never be satisfied. That is what I remember you saying: that the world is more full of weeping than we can understand. I had never heard at a funeral, certainly not from a priest, comfort held in such disdain, and I wanted to thank you for that. If I had written, or rather, if I had written before now, that is what I should have said.

  The purpose of your sermon, you said, was to set us a challenge. The first part of the challenge was for us to make an admission: that Jessica Burke had taken with her the possibility of consolation, the possibility of satisfactory explanations, that she had abandoned us on a hard, unmarked terrain. The second part was to make a leap of faith, not faith in the providence or wisdom of God (because that would merely be another consolation), but faith that her own journey, every bit as solitary, every bit as hard, was now over. What we must begin anew each day, each one of us alone, was now for her completed. For her, something entirely new has begun. Jessica Burke is not who is lost, you said. The faith you wanted us to have that day was the faith that we were the lost.

  You went on to say more, but by then my mind had withdrawn into itself, its cloud of memories, among them the memory of what a police officer had said to me afterward, after he had asked what he called “his routine slate” of questions. “It must be hard for you guys,” he said, “when you lose one like this.” It moved me how he had said it, his grave and serious “you guys.” “Yes, it is,” I had replied. He had been right, as you had been—the hard, unmarked terrain. But against that hardness, that flinty ground, something had kindled itself in me (or so I felt in the pew), something that could never go out, a grief making itself known like a dim but unkillable flame. Unkillable! Good God, how gratified I was by the thought, by the satisfactory phrase, as though the words alone could feed her unappeasable memory—or mine. And so I wept, without shame, as though it were my due. Hiding my face in my hands, old Itzal’s impassive form beside me, I wept.

  Had I written you, perhaps that is what I would have told you, how satisfied I had been by the fu
neral. I must admit it: what I felt then was a kind of happiness, as though a slaking grief, sweet and unkillable, were my compensation and inalienable right, as though that moment were not the last happiness I was to feel, the last of my life’s allotment, as though the death of Jessica Burke were not for me the end of all satisfactions—all, that is, but the very last.

  * * *

  —

  There: I have made a beginning to it, this confession. Will you hear it? Will you hear it even though I believe nothing, even though I cannot say whether it is a confession of guilt or a confession of sin, or whether it is a confession at all? I tell you I believe nothing. I do not offer it in hope of forgiveness, much less of absolution or redemption. What is more, when I tell you that it is I, that I am the one who caused the death of Jessica Burke, you will not believe me. You will think there is nothing to forgive, that what I need is not forgiveness but help. That is what you will believe right until the end, until my story forces its conclusion on us both. Then you will see how the man I was is beyond all forgiveness.

  TWO

  But know this, Father: I never laid violent hands on Jessica Burke. In fact, after shaking hands in our first consultation, I never touched her at all. I knew she lived just six blocks from my building, but I never saw her on the street or in the neighborhood. Even in all the hours she spent in my office, how fleetingly her face turned toward me. Only for an instant at the end of the session, as she rose from the couch, would she lift her eyes to meet mine, and always as though she had forced herself to do it, just as she seemed to force herself to say, So long.

  I believed I had done my part, that without reproach I had safeguarded the integrity of the analysis, revealing nothing of myself, interpreting each instance of transference, defense, or resistance with equanimity and objectivity, as professional obligation required. I believed then that she had come to appreciate, as patients often do, this neutrality, this bland and studied featurelessness in her analyst. Is it horrible that I don’t know more about you? she had asked once. Is it horrible that I don’t want to know more?