Eden had met Hector a long time ago. A time when Patrick still lived. The two of them, Patrick, and she, had been so footloose then, with that mad commitment in their eyes, and heart. Now she wasn’t sure about what. About a free, equal world? A world where there would be no wars, no nuclear tests, no thalidomide babies, no rich and poor? And things had happened without their doing anything. Or maybe, as she sometimes thought, they had done a bit too much: Too many protests, not enough organizing. They marched out holding flags, but hated sitting behind a desk, doing the paperwork. All they had was their anger, their ideals that everyone else laughed at, that everyone else gave up at the first easy successes or prosperity.
Patrick had introduced her to Hector, who turned up one evening at their apartment on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It was on the 10th floor with a good view of the city’s art district. It was a pity the museum always closed early, for she longed to take a long leisurely look inside, instead of the quick tour Patrick had given her in their early days. “It reeks of privilege,” he had scoffed, looking at the Rubens, and the Van Dykes. “And all these artists with their rich patrons. You do know how they made their money.”
Eden loved the Philly apartment and did it up as best as she could, with colorful Indian fabrics for the two sofas bought at a yard sale, the old blue streaked cabinet, the threadbare carpet that she felt had character, and then the foldable beds picked up from a Ghanaian diplomat who was returning to his home country. Patrick had not wanted to take it for free, though the man had been insistent. “These are of no use to me. I would have left it here, anyway.” Patrick had pulled out some dollars, and the diplomat shook his head again, laughing as he shook their hands. Eden had been so embarrassed.
“It’s a poor nation, so exploited,” Patrick said on their way back. “And we have so much to atone for. Just so much.” Every time he spoke this way he would sink into one of his weird bouts of silence, his guilt about the world like a thick cloak wrapped around him. After six months of living together, she knew these silent spells lasted for a week, and if they were lucky, for three-four days. Eden waited for Patrick to get over it. They did not know then that there was a term for it. Eden did not realize, until much later that Patrick perhaps never wanted to get over it.
Hector came one sudden rainy afternoon, his shoes making a squelchy sound on the stone floor, and he burst out laughing. “You are bang in the lap of luxury, my friend.”
Patrick flushed, and Eden had replied, startled by this stranger who had suddenly filled up their apartment. “It helps us keep the city in mind always.”
She pointed to the city outside, turning gray in twilight. “There’s Fairmont Park,” and moving her hand a bit to the right, she indicated Girard College. “It’s right in the middle of history, you might say.”
Hector began dropping in on them, especially the nights he worked late at the NAACP office. He came with books and old yellowing magazines and sat on the couch, working long hours on some write-up, some pamphlet or the other. Sometimes Patrick worked with him, but he would always get impatient. “We must act, not sit around, writing nice stuff no one will read.” and with that, he would up and leave.
He always came back, his face pale, eyes red-rimmed. His hands shook as he talked late into the night about all that needed to be done with the world. His words melded into each other, every sentence sounding the same as the one before. His voice was like a moan, like a constant buzz in her head. She invariably fell asleep, right there on the low couch, not hearing Hector’s even breathing two chairs away. One morning, she found Hector stretched out, positioned half on the couch, the rest of him on the floor, his long legs bent at the knee. He rubbed his eyes, shook the sleep out of his hair and said in a low voice,
“This work will never be over. It’s not meant to get over.”
His unwashed, sweaty smell lingered on that couch long after he left, and after a while Eden gave up worrying about it. There were big and small things she soon stopped worrying about. She was tired of scrimping and saving, of always doing some kind of mental arithmetic in her head over everyday costs, the savings needed till the next pay check came, the constant lookout for discounts. She didn’t want to ask Patrick for help. The apartment was his, leased with money from his father, who owned large amounts of real estate and was into construction. Patrick always said it was a loan, but he acted as if the loan sat on his head like an unbearable burden. He spoke about it in the same low tone he adopted when faced with the ills and problems of the world. Some days, he skimped on things, ate little, dressed in things bought at Goodwill store. He scoured the Friday farmers’ market for fresh-grown veggies, untouched by pesticides. He wore frayed jeans, patched chambray shirts, and had a forever unwashed smell about him.
She found it unsettling, for his fads, like his moods, never lasted. On a whim, he would go off to Macy’s and buy himself new clothes, for a sum that left Eden shocked. “A whole month’s groceries,” she made the mistake of saying once, making Patrick glower. “Well, it’s nothing out of your pocket,” he said. She swallowed back her humiliation. At that moment, she had nowhere else to go. Nor did she know what it was she really wanted; trying to know Patrick left her with a cloud-sized confusion.
Maybe that was why she had warmed to the cat so readily and easily. It was but a small kitten the day she first saw it, on the ledge just over the entrance door, and she held out her arms long enough for the animal to jump onto her. For some weeks, Patrick too had liked it. Later, Eden thought it was because she too had been something like the cat when they had first met. A homeless, loveless person, drifting, waiting for something, for someone to take her in.
***
She was on the staff of the Democrat senator, Walter Mondale, when she first met Patrick. Like her, he was part of the publicity campaign, writing up notices and briefings the papers would carry the next day. Patrick, of the long hair, loose-fitting jeans and colorful shirts, was popular with women. One late evening, when just a skeletal staff remained in the office, they began talking. He missed the bagel place back home, he said, though he was otherwise tired of his huge family home in upstate NY.
“The best sesame bagels with honey and cheese,” he said. Sometimes when his mother was travelling, and their father too not around—which was mostly the case—his older brother, William, would get them bagels from that shop. Patrick told Eden how he had once eaten his way half through his bagel despite its very strange taste, before his brother, nearly choking on his laughter, admitted rolling it in the grass before repacking it. “The taste of nature,’ Patrick said ruefully, ‘I was sick and had to be taken to hospital.” He chewed on something before adding, “For my brother, the rest of us could be like animals to be tested. You know what I mean…?”
Eden didn’t but she hoped that soon she would know a lot more; she would understand the meaning of life, and what it held for her. That summer of 1984, Eden visited San Francisco for the first time. It was the venue of the Democrat Convention, and there was every expectation that the man she worked for, Walter Mondale would be nominated the party’s presidential candidate. For her, the city in those days had been the nearest thing to heaven. Even Patrick felt the same way.
The senator was finicky and demanding. She felt his attention to small details gave away his nervousness. He had come this far, and now he did not want to be President, let alone stand for elections. Ronald Reagan, the sitting president had a clear head-start. He was popular and had a distinct message. Reagan came on television with his cowboy smile and witty one-liners. Mondale, by contrast, appeared outthought, outsmarted, outdone. So many times, Eden had seen him looking out of the window, his hand on the telephone, a moue on his lips. He was always finding more and more mistakes in her drafts. By the end of the third evening, she was frazzled, feeling out of sorts, as she was sure Mondale was too. But she never said this aloud.
If she did, she felt she would rupture the atmosphere of bonhomie, of wild, riotous fun that prevailed in the convention. So many of them, like-minded people – senators, their assistants, the reporters, and volunteers—had descended on the city. It was heady, the sense of equality, and overwhelming love that loomed everywhere. People walking in groups, arms around each other, open in their love. And Patrick was always there: ready with a warm hug, a peck on the cheek. He was ready to cry and laugh with anyone who had anything to share. There was music on every street, and the late afternoon breeze was heady. All these sensations gushed into Eden, though she was rushed off her feet with work, producing one similar looking draft after another. Sometimes, across many tables, she exchanged tired, rueful smiles with Patrick. That smile fitted in with everything else she came to love about the city: its sunniness, its freedom, the love everywhere. It was just like her love for Patrick.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson made a rousing speech as he announced his withdrawal, but spoke for a world where everyone, of color, of gender, gay and lesbians, was equal and free to love. There was nothing to fear but ignorance itself. Those words sent a hush through the crowd. It was so quiet Eden felt she could hear the buzz of faraway insects, and even the slow blinking of stars through the thick glass dome. The next moment, there was thunderous clapping, unending and forceful, like something had broken, and no one knew when to stop. It was the first time those words, spoken in quiet tones, about people whom all blamed for the disease now killing young people, and for which there was no cure yet, had been uttered aloud. Everyone rose, still clapping, even after the chairperson asked for silence.
In waves they raised their arms, united in all the motions suggested and then passed. One after another, senators and delegates came up and made their speeches. All she had to do was hold up the banner, right where the television cameras could see it. It got monotonous after a while. She could sink into a meaningless quilt of comfort and bonhomie and lose all sense of thought.
When it was all over, she looked for Patrick everywhere. Couples hung around the rapidly emptying venue, with its upturned chairs, torn flags, streamers, and banners, muddied and trampled over. People lolled on the ground, wrapped in each other, inseparable, their limbs entwined, and Eden felt that a giant spider-like thing or even an octopus had taken over the place, claimed it entirely. A multi-limbed creature that, while softly whispering words of love, had swallowed everyone up, even Patrick.
She caught herself peering into the face of every man she passed on her way out, even the few stretched out in exhaustion on the plastic chairs. Outside, it was a clear quiet night, where the homeless were already settling themselves on the benches, and a couple of lovers stood by the curb, kissing each other. She stopped when she saw two men holding each other desperately tight at a drugstore doorway. They split apart as she neared, and she hastened past, remembering another speech she had just heard. Bobbi Campbell, frail and barely able to make himself heard despite the microphone, who spoke about AIDS, this fearful new disease with no known cure, pleading for more understanding and love. Love was beautiful, she thought then, but was it enough?
She sat with her coffee in a still open café on Howard street and watched a homeless man trying to make a bed for himself with newspapers that crackled and fluttered every time the wind came racing from the corners. As he clamped down on one end, another end of the paper lifted itself up in another corner. He made her laugh, for he kept changing position. He plonked himself down in one corner and stretched out to secure the other, but a third corner would soon lift itself. He moved around all corners, stashing himself down triumphant one moment, doleful another, as he saw a bit of paper rise behind him, flapping wildly and urgently. He tried everything. Falling flat to hold onto one end, then rotating himself a full circle, stretching out a leg, both legs, then his hands. At last, he lay spent, utterly exhausted. It was like a comic film. The man lay stretched on the ground, his face now turned toward her, his eyes focused on her as she sat at a window table, under a lone light.
She rose, bought a croissant, wrapped it carefully and ran out with it. To her horror and shame, he shook his head and turned away from her.
***
The cat was with them a good six months. Terry, Eden called it, but she was always giving it new names. “As if you can’t make up your mind about him,” Patrick would say.
“I like things to be a bit uncertain,” she responded, trying to figure out a smart reply. “A name grants ownership. Does this cat really want to be owned?”
Patrick shook his head. She was becoming soft-headed, he said. “That’s the danger, my brother says. Too much activism, and you will become indecisive, uncertain, not even able to tell good from bad, black from white.”
One day, the cat vanished. It wasn’t there in the evening when she came home. There was no brush of fur against her bare legs when she turned in at the front door. No soft purring, or a quick nimble jump from the kitchen cabinet. And Patrick too wasn’t home.
She waited for the cat, half in fear and half in expectation. Every time she heard a padding, she thought it was the cat back after a forage somewhere and looked back hopefully, but it was nothing, someone else going past in the hallway, or a drumming sound somewhere. She called for it with every name she could think of. Even Patrick.
At night, feeling the walls of the apartment close in on her, and the emptiness like a deep well, she knew she couldn’t stay on. She grabbed a coat, a flashlight and went looking for the cat. The doorman asked her in a kind tone what the cat’s name was, and she reeled off all the names she had called it by, never realizing the strange look he gave her.
Her steps took her all the way to her office at Arch Street. She now worked for the Philadelphia social services monitoring foster families and the children in their care. It was dreary work; most times she was rewriting reports or checking up on errant parents who couldn’t look after their own children. It was a sad, weary-looking place, with the smell of old paper, and typewriter’s ink. She thought she would complete some work, and began looking over the old files, of children gone missing, the accidental death of a child in an old well, and thinking that a similar fate might have befallen Terry/ George/ Sultan/ Raja/ Shah, all the names she called him by, she burst out crying.
***
Thirty years later, Eden met Hector again at the Buddha Bar on Chestnut Street. He held her hand in his and told her how sorry he was about Patrick. It was thirty years too late, she thought.
“Patrick…but I really don’t know,” he was saying against her ear as they walked toward the bar. “He thought you needed help, that you took things too seriously. He was afraid for you.”
“It was Patrick who died, remember?”
The bar was filling up, and the lights were a dim red, and purple. Eden knew they could never have a serious conversation here. She was glad. She didn’t want to talk of Patrick any more.
“Do you remember the cat?”
She looked up startled. The cat she had gone looking for had never come back. She had spent days in the office, and there was always more work to catch up on. A woman called Roxanne rang her at 2 a.m., to report that her husband had abducted their child, and two hours later, someone from the police came to ask about the two children who had driven away in their grandfather’s car. It seemed monstrous to worry over a cat in these circumstances.
After a week, Patrick himself came by. It seemed to her he was trying hard to place her, that it had taken him considerable effort to even remember her name. He was leaner than before, and she felt with a pang that he looked wasted, just with waiting and looking for her. But he called a cab, and on the way home, he murmured things into her ear, calling her his waif, his lost Eden. ‘You went looking for the cat,’ he said, after she had been silent for too long, ‘I went looking for you, and no one will ever come looking for me.’ Eden felt his bony shoulders against her own, saw his fingernails chipped and broken against her skirt, and smiled tiredly, wishing for things to return to what they had once been.
Patrick talked of getting her another cat, of wanting to travel. He found the city stifling, and he had had too much of the apartment, he said. He talked of visiting Kerala, Venice, and Singapore. The world was like a hopscotch board, one could just step on it to be transported somewhere else.
‘Patrick wanted me to take away the cat,’ Hector now said. ‘He said you were much too attached to it. He wanted to be the only one for you. But he couldn’t bring himself to be selfish. All that free spirit, free love, the hippieness, Patrick didn’t want to be a hypocrite. Love, of all things, couldn’t be possessive.’
‘Forgive me,’ Hector said, moments later, as he saw her stunned face, ‘I have been thinking of those years too. I wonder about what we did, if we achieved anything. Did we even understand what we wanted, or what others wanted of us?’
***
When the cat had been gone for three months, and she knew it was never coming back, she traveled with Patrick to his family home in Albany. It was Thanksgiving time. They took the train to Penn station, and then the bus up to Voorheesville. Patrick was already looking drained and spent, and she had to lug their two rucksacks out of the baggage bin. “Knowing William, he will be late,” said Patrick dolefully as they waited for his brother.
He had stretched out, right on the grass, his cap over his head. He looked thin, his ribs visible under the thin cotton of his shirt, his face falling into the hollows of his cheeks. She felt a dread then, knowing for certain where he disappeared for hours on end, the time he spent in the bathroom, his distracted behavior, but they were already drifting apart by then. He wanted her attention; she had nothing to give any more.
Patrick was wrong about his brother. Barely had she wandered away a few meters, when she heard the screech of a Corvette close by. It was William. He smiled as he jumped out. “You must be Eden.”
He had the same easy smile as Patrick, but his eyes were more calculating. They roved over her red flared pants, her pale blue shirt, her hair done up in ringlets. She saw herself as a cheap floozie and stared back, defiant. He smiled and looked away first, bending down to shake Patrick awake.
Eden saw the gray stonewalled house as the driveway, a half mile long, dipped over a hill. The trellised balconies covering the entire length of the second floor came into view, the large bay windows with the light of the early sun, and the elm trees looming on either side. “The stone keeps the house cool in summer,” William said, catching her eye in the rearview mirror. “In winter, we go down to the Capes in Florida, and then the dear house gets quite gloomy, like a batty old cave. The wind howls through the exposed attic and Patrick, at one time, would get scared.”
Patrick smiled vacantly, but his eyes lit up when his mother appeared. Marge held herself straight, with her hawk nose, her thin square glasses, and elegantly coiffured silver hair. Her face broke into crinkles as Patrick rushed to embrace her. Her eyes as she looked at Eden, from over Patrick’ bent shoulder, were appraising but warm and curious.
It was William who introduced her, and Marge, for she insisted that was how Eden must call her, said she had heard about Eden. “It’s good to finally meet. Patrick hardly comes home.”
“Since Dad died, two years ago,” offered William helpfully.
Eden tried not to show her shock. That was around the time she had first met Patrick, and he had not mentioned this to her. “I am sorry,” she said.
Marge drew her into a hug. “He was old and suffering, and he went in peace. Patrick said he was happy with you.”
Eden flushed for she caught William staring at her.
The one week she spent at the house in Voorheesville was the most luxurious one in her life, and also unnerving. Marge was involved in various things, in the local art committee, in organizing the book festival. She was on committees that met once a month in New York to help differently abled and impaired children in education, and she was also editor-at-large for a magazine run by the New York Buddhist Society. Her busyness was enviable, like the way she would excuse herself every morning after breakfast to sit in her office, a pentagonal shaped room with a huge Georgian desk and landscape paintings on every wall.
“Done by my husband,” Marge told her during a tour of the house. It was then that Eden noticed the spherical white protuberances that hung over the paintings. A small green light blinked repeatedly, as if winking at Eden’s prolonged stare. “Don’t let that worry you, my dear,” Marge said, drawing Eden away. “William has had those installed. His security gadgets, he tells me, to keep me safe. He’s at the other end of the house, with his own set-up, all these machines he works on.”
Eden nodded, shy of this immensely busy woman who still had time to talk to her, make her feel so welcome. “I will leave you to work then,” she said.
“Very well, my dear. You might like to see our local museum or take a walk to the village. Visitors here say it’s very charming.”
***
Eden wanted to model herself as a social worker in Marge’s mold, with that genteel dignity, and her insistence on some time for herself. It was easy, Eden thought, especially if one had a house like this. She liked the library, its well displayed books, and bric-a-brac, including Chinese lacquerware, Japanese calligraphy hangings and photographs of illustrious ancestors. They were venerable looking judges, and legislators, all of whom had done more to enshrine privilege, just by denying rights to others. This was what Patrick told her one evening, when he had finally shed his lassitude and come down early for dinner.
Marge had smiled, “They were men of their generation, and they did what they could.” William looked up from the top of his glasses and said laconically. “Clearly you are not doing much to right it.” Eden caught the frown on his mother’s face as Patrick replied, “It does make me sick. I want to get away.”
He sat morose all through dinner, while his mother tried to make small talk, slipping in the occasional gossip, and joke, and William looked at her in the way he had, all-assessing and amused. It made her gather courage to ask him about his work.
“A tech firm, all very secret,” he said laughing. “We are developing cameras and x-ray imagery to understand a city’s terrain, its topological maps.”
He wiped his lips quickly on his napkin before going on, “Excuse me please, I will try and explain it simply. So, we train our equipment over the city, on satellites, and hope to study its underground terrain. It’s pretty useful to study water systems, rock formations, and maybe vulnerable areas too.”
Patrick spoke up then, “The Saudis are particularly interested in it too. That is why Will’s so excited.”
“If it helps keep an eye on suspicious things, if it stops people from doing harmful things, I’d think we are doing a great human service. Don’t you realize that, dear brother?”
He spoke slowly, too casually, and Eden knew he was a man not to be crossed. But she became more careful. She saw the cameras almost everywhere. The sleek pen holders in the hallway, a rounded object on a stand, almost like a table lamp in the library, the headlight shaped ones in the hallway to the kitchen. It unnerved her, and for the rest of her stay in the house, she switched off the light every time she entered the bathroom.
On the way back, she told Patrick she had really enjoyed her time at his house. “I’d have liked it,’ Patrick said, ‘had my brother not been there.”
And Eden knew it was true. William scared her, as did his cameras. “His cameras,” Patrick said, as if he was answering her, “he says they are for security. But there’s no privacy. No wonder governments seem especially interested in them.”
Years after his death she would understand how prescient he had been. Patrick had seen so far ahead, and he was already in deep despair. Maybe that was why he had given up.
A year later, when Patrick died of that illness that no one understood then, Hector drove her to the airport. She had received the news midway through a conference in Atlanta. Her colleagues, and the other attendees were all very sympathetic. She had driven straight to the hospital. The family, the nurse told her, had already left for their hotel, the funeral was the next day. Would Eden like to see him, she asked gently.
Eden looked dazed. The nurse, holding her hand, drew her forward. Patrick looked ravaged, his eyes in hollows, the fluffed purple area around his eyes, his sunken cheeks. She brushed his hair away from his forehead, and heard the nurse say from behind her. “His mother wanted him in his graduation suit.”
Eden looked at the nurse, a middle-aged woman in her neat blue uniform, her hands clasped below her waist as she stood by Patrick. “The family couldn’t take it. But it’s nice of you to come. It is this time when the soul needs reassuring, whoever that is crossing over needs to be watched over.” Eden licked away her tears, and following the nurse’s example, she bent to her knees and prayed for Patrick.
Over the next few days, with William, she managed the funeral, and later, the memorial service in their plush lawns attended by almost the entire village, family friends, Marge’s social work associates, and some of William’s colleagues. It was quiet, sad, and peaceful. No one really needed to say much. Patrick had been very ordinary, and nice. People came up and spoke of his helpful nature. His errands as a newspaper boy and then a delivery store guy. No one wanted to dwell on the more unpleasant things. The drugs, the hippie living. The majesty of death had erased it all. She remembered what William said, for he spoke last of all. His brother had always been a lost soul, but he had been loved and had found love in the end. “Love of a sort,” he said, his face deliberately turned away from Eden.
She thought always of how gently the women bit into their sandwiches and stirred their coffee. And talked of death. Later, as she threw herself into caring for the dead, preparing their bodies, and their families, for the great journey beyond, she found the calm she had been looking for. The prayers read at farewell ceremonies, the songs that were sung, the fragrance that blew from the incense sticks, and over the mourners, everything was gentle and forgiving. She would invite those gathered to sing along, songs she had learnt at a vigil for a Buddhist monk, and to meditate for a few moments. Later they would tell her how their spines had tingled, of the prick of their gooseflesh, and she tried to answer their fears. That it was okay to be frightened. The soul was part of the universe, and the universe was huge, and ever expanding. One had to let go of life in absolute peace, to allow the soul to lose itself in the universal soul that was everywhere.
But the truth of course was that she was still trying to understand what Death was all about. Or that she was trying to atone for the one death she could never explain, even to herself. Patrick’s. All that happened later was an atonement of sorts.
Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash
