GLORIA by John Picard
Ours was a household of raw, unprocessed grief. My mother and father embodied the two reactions to tragedy, anger and depression. Most marriages don’t survive the death of a child, and my parents’ marriage was no exception. They might have lived under the same roof, they might have produced two more children, but whatever their marriage was before the loss of their first-born daughter, it was forever changed afterwards.
Marcy and I were young children when my mother directed us into the master bedroom and shut the door. Our father was out of the house and wouldn’t be back for hours. Even so, my mother’s attitude was furtive, even transgressive.
“These were taken at Gloria’s funeral,” she said.
We leaned in as our mother showed us photograph after photograph, in full color, of our sister in her coffin, the sister we never knew, the sister who died in an automobile accident when she was only eight. Ever since I’d learned the identity of the little girl in the family albums, posing with my parents, my grandparents, her little friends, her dog Zero, I’d been fascinated by Gloria’s image. I could discern both of my parents in her features, my father’s dark hair and complexion, my mother’s deep-set eyes. She looked sad in most of the photographs, her thin lips in a pout, her head tilted forlornly to one side, which seemed fitting for someone who had such a short life and such a violent death. I’d examined every picture of my sister a hundred times but I’d never seen the ones my mother was flipping past my and Marcy’s startled eyes.
Afterwards, I retained a blurred mental snapshot of Gloria’s dead face: bloated and scarred, mangled-looking. I felt even then that what my mother had done was inappropriate. I would always give her credit for being frank and open about my sister’s death, unlike my father who never spoke of it, who never mentioned Gloria’s name. But here she went too far.
“Your Uncle Nolan took these,” she explained. “Since we couldn’t be at the funeral.”
My mother couldn’t be at the funeral because she was in a hospital in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where she would remain for a month, recuperating from the accident that nearly took her life and that of her unborn child, me. My father was there with her, so devastated he couldn’t or wouldn’t eat. Five days before, on April 10, 1949, just after dark, he had tried to pass a car and collided head-on with a drunk driver who didn’t have his lights on. My sister was thrown through the windshield.
I don’t know how young I was when my mother gave me the full story. It went like this: At a rest stop on the second evening of the family’s drive from Washington, D.C. to my father’s parents in Campi, Louisiana, my sister asked if she could ride in the passenger seat, next to her Daddy. My pregnant mother moved to the back seat, my sister to the front. Fifteen minutes later my sister was dying by the side of the road, my mother was critically injured, and my father was staggering around in the dark.
I was born a little over four months later, on my mother’s thirtieth birthday. “I think God may have a special purpose for you,” she would tell me when I was a boy. This was part of her program to understand Gloria’s death, the program that began in that Vicksburg hospital, when she chose between hating God and loving Him. God had called her daughter home for a purpose; after all, God did everything with a purpose. When her son’s true calling was revealed (missionary? preacher? the next Billy Graham?), it would begin to make sense.
Despite my potentially redemptive role in my mother’s struggle to understand God’s ways, she often seemed to hate me. I spent my entire childhood trying to escape her anger, an anger that was seldom directed at my sister and never at my father. Her rage toward me was a bewildering constant that only got worse when I was eighteen and rebelled against my strict religious upbringing, my mother’s belief in my glorious future beginning to crumble. She warned me repeatedly and fiercely that God would allow something terrible to happen to me if I continued to stray from the path of righteousness; He would permit me to suffer whatever horror it took to return me to the straight and narrow.
It had always seemed like an odd thing for a mother to say, until it occurred to me that she believed that was what happened to her. God had taken her child from her for her own good. It was the only way He could get her attention, make her turn from her earthly concerns to those of her heavenly father’s.
My mother’s threats of divine retribution were unavailing. I didn’t regret giving up the faith she clung to, since I’d never had it. I’d doubted what I’d been taught about God and the Bible from the beginning, if only subconsciously. What I did regret, what I did miss about a world without design, was that I could not pretend I was fated to redeem my sister’s death. Her death wasn’t a sacrifice; it wasn’t part of a universal plan. It was just a death, and what I made of it was up to me.
Throughout my youth, my parents would take me and Marcy to Cedar Hill Cemetery in Southeast D.C., where Gloria was buried. The family plot rests on the side of a hill, opposite a duck pond with a stone bridge across it. There is no headstone marking her grave, only a brass plaque among other brass plaques. I went there by myself when I was twenty-one and have continued to do so about every five years.
The last time I went I couldn’t find her grave. The hillside was overgrown, the plaques hidden under a solid pelt of grass. I went to the grave keeper’s office and studied a map of the cemetery in order to locate the family plot. I returned to the hillside and walked off the distance from the sidewalk. My sister’s plaque was completely covered over, which added to my survivor’s guilt. But, much more than survivor’s guilt, I felt her absence. I missed her. I’d always missed her. I’d missed her my whole life.
Growing up, Marcy and I were never close. As we grew older, she moved toward our mother’s evangelical worldview just as I moved away from it. The gulf between us made me feel like an only child. In my solitude, I entertained myself by imagining Gloria as the ideal sibling, the perfect sister who was sensitive to her younger brother’s needs, supportive of his dreams (“What have you been writing? Can I see it?”), a sort of second mother, one not angry and punitive but warm and nurturing.
I got down on my knees. It had rained recently and I muddied my hands as I tore at the grass and the roots, revealing more and more of the brass underneath. Her name and dates became visible. I smoothed away the remaining dirt. My hands filthy, my knees damp, I stood and looked down at the plaque, restored to near pristine condition.
Not many years after this I was at my parents’ for Christmas when Marcy pulled me aside and revealed that in late 1949 Uncle Nolan had compiled for my grieving mother and father a short, sixteen millimeter tape of all our sister’s appearances in his home movies. For reasons still unclear to me, the tape hadn’t surfaced until now and, presumably, had never been viewed. I asked my mother’s permission to have the tape transferred to a video cassette, in order to preserve it. When I explained that the transfer would allow her to watch it on her VCR, she said she didn’t want to see it. After a pause, she added in a tone uncharacteristically wistful for my tragedy-hardened mother, “She was such a sweet girl.”
The tape, it turned out, was nothing like the photographs I’d been pouring over for fifty years. Animated now, Gloria’s impish personality – she waves and smiles and sticks her tongue out at the camera – came through. No wonder my mother didn’t want to see it. The static image is more easily assimilated, even in a coffin, than a kinetic one which defies efforts to reduce it to an object, a keepsake, a memory. Toward the end of the tape there are fifteen seconds of Gloria and my mother together. Acting silly, lightly shoving each other aside, they laugh and play before my uncle’s camera.
The final clip shows Gloria in a snow suit, the bulky, one-piece get-up into which post-war parents stuffed their young children during the winter months. She is four or five, standing at the edge of someone’s front yard, the ground covered with snow. She tilts her head and grins, her tiny face barely visible inside the hooded snow suit. There the tape ends. Technically, it doesn’t, of course. It continues to roll, the images replaced by a screen full of static. The clips from my uncle’s home movies take up only three minutes of a tape with the capacity to record for a hundred and twenty minutes. I fancied this was something else my mother wanted to avoid. Not just seeing Gloria alive and happy, or herself once again in her daughter’s presence, but removing the tape from the VCR and noting, as I did, how much of it was unused.
It was shortly after the discovery of the tape that the pictures of Gloria in her coffin began to nag at me, to insist in some way that I give them another chance. At my parents’ for my annual mid-summer visit, I went in search of them. It took me a while since I was looking for something that didn’t exist. As I recalled that long-ago afternoon in my mother’s bedroom, she’d showed us eight-by-ten photographs neatly arranged, one to a page, in a plush, lavender-colored photo album.
In actuality, the photographs were crammed inside a small brown envelope on the top shelf of the guest room closet. They weren’t much bigger than ordinary photographs, and it was the inside of her coffin, not the photo album, that was plush and lavender-colored. The face I remembered as bruised and disfigured, as grotesque, didn’t exist either. The child I was then had invented it. There was nothing abnormal about Gloria’s face. In fact, she looked as pretty, if not prettier, than she did in her living photographs. The shock of seeing her dead in her coffin had distorted her image. When I’d been asked to look at her, I couldn’t, not directly. My eyes had slid off her face, skewing her features. While it produced a false memory of what I saw, it left an accurate one of what I’d felt.
In his later years my father, who is normally silent, has shown himself capable of some quite startling pronouncements.
While we were talking about depression one day (who had it and for how long), he said, “That’s nothing. I’ve been depressed for 49 years,” pinpointing the origin of his perpetual gloom.
“If I’d known your mother was going to get so religious,” he offered on another occasion, “I never would have married her.”
On the day of his fiftieth wedding anniversary, he told me, “Never get married. It’s a trap.”
This was all said during the prolonged bickering stage of my parents’ marriage, when my mother’s health was beginning to deteriorate and my mother and father spent most of every day sitting in front of the television and squabbling. They didn’t fight. They’d never fought. A fight would have cleared the air. The air was never cleared.
“I never said that, Monroe.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“No, I didn’t. I know what I said and I didn’t say it. How would you even know, your hearing like it is?”
“I know what I hear. I remember what I hear.”
They were impossible.
Then, after a series of strokes and the onset of dementia, my mother could no longer care for herself and my father became her round-the-clock, live-in nurse. At eighty-five he was trapped as never before, but now he didn’t complain. At ninety-two he was still lifting her, still changing her diaper, and nothing my sister and I said could convince him to get outside help. “I can do it,” he insisted.
But he hadn’t expected to do it for so long. My mother had come close to dying so many times (she also had congestive heart failure) that he assumed he’d put in a few years of care-giving, completing his obligation to the marriage, then go on alone.
I visited them last July, the first time since Christmas. As he routinely did when he knew I was scheduled to arrive, my father left the garage door open so I could enter the house through the kitchen. Coming through the door, I found my mother seated at the kitchen table in her wheelchair and my father standing at the counter, cutting a piece of coconut cream pie. He glanced at me but that was all. Prying the pie wedge out, he dropped it onto a plate, shuffled over to the table and placed it before my mother. Now, I thought, he would turn to me with a wan smile and extend tentatively, awkwardly, his right hand. Instead, he proceeded to cut a piece for himself. My father, I saw, was not the same man he was six months ago. He was exhausted, overwhelmed, with no time for pleasantries. His ninety-plus years had caught up with him at last. The burden of caring for my mother had taken its toll; so much so that the assumption that my father would outlive my mother was thrown into serious doubt. Marcy and I agreed, he could go first.
In this deep, covert way, the dynamic that emerged after my sister’s death continued to play itself out, with the difference that my mother’s anger had found its real target, and a beautifully simple method of expressing it – staying alive. She’d been exacting payment all along, of course, by wrapping herself in a religiosity that distanced and repelled her husband. But this was a much more condign punishment, a life for a life. My father, for his part, accepted these terms. He refused to put her in a nursing home, refused to spare himself. He had it coming.
Recently Marcy left a message on my answering machine, saying that Daddy had just called her in tears. Your mother isn’t doing well, he’d told her, and asked her to drive over and spend the night. I got home late and didn’t speak with my sister until the next morning. Daddy panicked, she said, when Mama’s heart began beating irregularly.
But it wasn’t only my mother’s heart, which soon stabilized, that led him to ask for Marcy’s company, that brought on the tears. Though increasingly rare, my mother had semi-lucid moments. The previous night she’d asked my father to get into bed with her. He told Marcy he’d almost fallen twice trying to slip in beside her. When he’d finally situated himself, my mother took hold of his hand and asked him how he was doing. He answered honestly that he was tired from lack of sleep, that his sinuses were killing him, that his right eye was still hurting, despite two trips to the doctor. When he fell silent, she said, “If love could cure, you’d already be healed.”
It was then he broke down.
I was astonished at this, my mother’s only known moment of tenderness, and my father’s response to it.
Was this a species of dementia or grace? Was it somehow both? Was something shared that, just for that moment, resurrected their old, lost love? My father seemed to think so.
In his masterpiece, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote famously invented a form of literature whose popularity is still cresting. Less famous but well documented is Truman’s admission that he invented the last scene of what he called his nonfiction novel. Truman already had his ending, but only his first ending. Every novel, every story for that matter, has two endings: the slam-bang finish and the encore clincher. Who knows when he thought of his second ending. Perhaps it was during the four years he had to wait before Perry Smith and Richard Hickock were executed and Truman could finally describe their deaths, giving the book the resolution it desperately needed. Truman’s second ending occurs when the detective who investigated the Clutter murders and a family friend accidentally meet at the Clutter’s grave site. It’s the perfect second ending, the world-weary detective and the young girl – so like the one who was murdered along with her brother and parents – caught in a moment of reflection in this touching, life-goes-on denouement. My theory is that Truman had other endings available to him, things that actually happened, but that nothing wrapped up the story as neatly, as satisfyingly, as the ending he invented.
I had always thought of the car that plowed into ours in 1949 as an instrument of fate, as a bolt from the blue – an external force. I had never fully registered or recognized that there was a man driving that car. If anything, I had thought of him as a kind of mythological figure sent down to earth by the gods to wreak havoc. But no, one day it came to me. He and I occupied the same planet. We were citizens of the same country. We were contemporaries. The idea shocked me, as mundane as it was.
It was a short step from seeing him as a flesh and blood person to wanting to know his name. I had once known it. It must have been my Uncle Nolan who cut out the article about the accident from the local Mississippi newspaper and gave it to my parents. The next time I was at their house I looked for it in every drawer and closet. No luck.
The article, I determined, had most likely appeared in the Vicksburg Evening Post, the city’s major newspaper. I turned to the Internet and Googled “Vicksburg, Mississippi,” and “newspapers.” Nothing. Because I worked in a library I knew that one of the local universities would have the Post’s entire archive on microfilm. I filled out the library’s online interlibrary loan form and a week later I received from the University of Southern Mississippi a roll of microfilm covering April through June of 1949.
On the front page of the April 11th edition was this headline:
Child is Dead
Mother Injured
At Delta Point
There was no mention of my mother being pregnant, only that she was in serious condition with a fractured pelvis, fractured ribs, and a broken collarbone. The paragraph ends with this gem: “Physicians said Mr. Picard escaped with shock and minor injuries.”
Ha!
But I found what I was looking for in the next paragraph.
Their car [my parents’] collided with an east-bound vehicle driven by Sterns Bast of Ramey, Sheriff Hester said.
Back to Google. I put quotes around Sterns Bast and entered. I was lucky in that it was an unusual name, perhaps unique. There weren’t many hits but they were credible. I found an entry from a veterans’ blog that said Sterns Bast had served during World War II as a ball turret gunner. It was the right time frame. It had to be him. Was Sterns Bast a war hero? Had his war record helped him escape prosecution? I discovered he was a pilot by profession. He appeared on a list of crop dusters who’d worked in the Ramey area. My mother had told me that the driver of the death car was part of a prominent local family. I found some evidence for that. In 1985 Sterns Bast had been one of the pallbearers for a former mayor of Ramey, a man who had been mayor for twenty-six years.
I started looking for one of those “Find People” search engines. In minutes I discovered there was a Sterns Bast somewhere in the United States as well as a Sterns-Edwards Bast. Were they the same person? It would cost $9.95 to find out. I got out the Master Card. In seconds I knew that Sterns-Edwards Bast lived in Galveston, Texas. He was 44 years old. Sterns Bast lived in Ramey, Louisiana. He was 86. Gotcha.
The older Bast had a Ramey, Louisiana address. The younger had two addresses, the same one as his father’s in Ramey and a more recent one in Galveston, Texas. Unlike his father, he was all over the Internet. A professional classical musician, Sterns-Edwards was currently principal keyboardist for the Galveston Symphony Orchestra. He was a tall, rather handsome man with short dark hair and large features. It was entirely possible the Ramey address was that of his boyhood home, the home his parents still occupied. I downloaded Google Earth. After a few key strokes, I was hovering over the southern United States. With a few more I was swooping down with ball-turret-gunner precision on my target, a barely visible black roof amid a cluster of trees.
Reconstructing events, I determined that Sterns Bast was 27 at the time of the accident, seven years younger than my father. The newspaper article says the accident occurred “late Sunday” when “Mr. Bast, member of a Ramey family, was en route to Hollendale, where he is employed.” Mapquest calculates that trip at ninety miles, or one hour and forty-six minutes. In other words, he spent the weekend in his home town with his parents in what could be the very same house I found on Google Earth, the house he left some time after dinner on April 10, 1949 (Was alcohol served? How much?) in order to return to Hollendale where he lived to be ready for work Monday morning. The article ends, “Gloria Jean’s body is at the Fisher Funeral Home awaiting arrangements for the funeral.” There is nothing about drunkenness or headlights not being on. Was this an oversight or part of a cover-up already under way?
There was still so much I didn’t know. I decided to write him. The letter went through several drafts. The following is an excerpt from the final version.
I know how the accident affected me and my family, of course, but that, I realize, is not the whole story. An important part of it belongs to you. Would you be willing to share that part with me? Was the accident something you thought about a lot afterwards? Did it “haunt” you or were you able “to put it behind you,” or something in between? How has it shaped your life – if at all? I would be interested to know anything you could tell me from your point of view, anything that could provide some closure on that long-ago tragedy.
I mailed it and waited. And waited. Weeks, months passed. Like Truman Capote I waited for life to provide me with the resolution to my story. I don’t know how Truman bided his time before he could start writing again, but I know how I bided mine.
I was on the Internet, learning all I could about Sterns-Edwards Bast, son of just plain Sterns Bast. In addition to being the principal keyboardist for the Galveston orchestra for twenty years, as well as the host of its preconcert lecture series since 1993, he’d appeared as a soloist with other important orchestras around the country including the Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra. I found pictures of him judging piano competitions, standing around at fancy-dress parties, posing with famous musicians like Van Cliburn and Yo Yo Ma. He was an artsy type like me, but with much more to show for it.
Also like me, he was a bachelor. In no picture is he wearing a wedding ring and in his biography on the Galveston Orchestra website there is no mention of a wife and children, as there is in the bios of the other members of the orchestra. This brought up the question of sexual orientation. He could be gay, and not just because he was single. More than a few pictures caught him in the middle of gestures and grimaces that most straight men, confined physically as well as emotionally to a narrow range of expression, wouldn’t normally initiate.
I was starting to run out of hits for Sterns-Edwards when I discovered he had a nickname: Buddy. Buddy Bast. I Googled it. Instantly, I had a fresh array of hits. I went down the screen, clicking on each one. I’d been going along for an hour when I came to this:
Buddy says that Jeffrey was a true friend, the first one at the hospital when he had his car accident and the first one at his door when his father died.
Slam. Bang. I checked the date on the entry: Winter, 2007. Sterns Bast had been dead for at least a year. I read the sentence again, as if to confirm its veracity, then shut down the computer.
So I had my first ending: Sterns Bast’s sudden (to me) death. It certainly wasn’t the one I wanted, but there is no accounting for reality. It would have to do. I still needed a second ending, which was also a second chance. Like Truman, I would make the best of it.
From his window seat (he always got the window seat) he could see all the way to the ground: emerald baseball diamonds, turquoise swimming pools, long stretches of multi-lane highway. He was looking for other planes. Since the war he couldn’t fly without scanning the sky for aircraft. It had been decades but he’d still know what to do if he were magically transported back to 1944, swiveling in the turret ball, sighting an FW-190 or Me-110, squeezing off round after round. No one had a better view of an air fight than the ball turret gunner. He knew of several who’d cracked up after they witnessed German crews struggling to escape from their burning planes, or worse, their blown-apart bodies falling bit by bit through space. He was made of stronger stuff, he supposed. And for him, at least, there had been an element of play in being a ball turret gunner. Lingering at video arcades to watch some kid shoot down Zeros or Migs, frantically punch levers and buttons to rack up a big score, he would be reminded that there was something sporting about what he did in the war. Not fun. Every moment under fire was harrowing. But it did involve a high level of skill and the kind of payoff that boys crave: explosions, fire, noise. Most boys.
“Bud?” Kate was nudging him. “The seatbelt sign is on.”
He buckled up.
“How are you doing?”
He shrugged.
She put her hand on his forearm. “He’s going to be fine.”
He’d been watching a talk show when they got word. Hearing Kate’s agitated voice on the phone, he knew something was wrong and was half way to the kitchen when she ran out.
“Buddy’s been in an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
Of course he knew. Put that way, there was only one kind it could be.
She explained as she wiped away tears that he had been hit on the driver’s side by someone who ran a red light. He was wearing his seat belt, thank God, but he had just gone into surgery with a broken arm and a concussion.
“How bad a concussion?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“Who? Ask who?”
“Jeffrey. He’s at the hospital.”
“I’ll call the travel agent,” he said. “You pack. Was he drunk?”
“Was who drunk?”
“The other driver.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask.”
Bud would never determine how long he’d remained in the car after the collision. It could have been five seconds or five minutes. What he remembered was pushing the car door open and, after he stepped out, putting his hand on the hood for balance. He saw the other car resting on its side in a narrow ditch, its high beams punching tunnels of light into the darkness. A man – balding, broad-shouldered, medium height – was standing on the far side of the ditch, staring into space. The ambulances started arriving and at some point Bud was taken to the hospital, treated for a mild concussion and cracked ribs and released the next morning.
The plane was descending. It passed over a field of oil derricks, then a series of subdivisions.
“I’m just glad Jeffrey’s there with him,” Kate said.
Jeffrey was his son’s friend and sometime partner. He’d visited at Christmas three or four years back. Twenty, even ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable, Buddy and one of his “friends” spending the night under the parental roof. Kate accused him of mellowing, and perhaps he had if that meant his love for his son won out over his disapproval. Why not admit it? His disgust. He didn’t know Buddy was gay until he started college, though he probably should have guessed. As a boy, Buddy had shown no interest in sports; he didn’t care to play them or see them. The one time Bud took him hunting he cried. When it came to anything military, he couldn’t have been less interested. He spent all of his free time playing the piano and listening to music. “He’s a sweet boy.” That’s what everyone told him, told him for much too long, as if a father wanted to hear that about his son after the age of four or five. But he did hear it, and overhear it.
He regretted what he’d done, of course, in his own accident. He took full responsibility for it, while never being totally convinced he could drive all the way from the tavern, nearly two miles, without his lights on. He’d had a bad spell afterwards (depression, insomnia), but part of that was due to talk of criminal charges. Once that was taken care of he’d snapped out of it. He went on with his life. He got his pilot’s license, set up his crop dusting business and settled down to start a family.
Whenever they attended one of Buddy’s performances, they would always go backstage afterwards. Bud would stand to one side as Kate gushed over their son. Bud would shake his hand and say “I enjoyed it,” but nothing else. He could see Buddy wanting more from him but he wouldn’t give it. At the time his attitude was, “My father didn’t make a fuss over me and I turned out all right; better than all right.” It had just made him work harder to win the old man’s approval, even if it was only his silent approval. Back then he’d blamed himself for failing to raise a real son, a man. He’d known there was something shameful in this way of thinking and he never mentioned it to Kate, but she knew, just as she knew how much withholding his praise was hurting both him and Buddy.
“He needs to hear it from you,” she’d said. “Why does that scare you?”
“It doesn’t scare me.”
Soon after this conversation, they attended a chamber music concert. While shaking Buddy’s hand following the performance, he said his customary, “I enjoyed it,” and then added, as planned, “Good job,” and added further, (which wasn’t planned and was, indeed, scary), “I’m proud of you.”
What he saw in his son’s face was almost unbearable, but he knew he wanted to see it again. After all, he was proud of him. Buddy had been only twenty-four when he was hired by a major symphony orchestra. That was like being signed out of high school to play for the Yankees. He was a tremendous success; more important, he was a good man. Bud was reminded of that every time he attended the annual concert series Buddy hosted for young people, introducing them to classical music in a humorous, down-to-earth way. Bud was never more proud than when he watched these children mesmerized by his son’s words.
When they emerged from baggage claim, a foreign-looking gentleman in a dark suit was holding up a piece of cardboard with their last name on it. He ushered them outside, put their one suitcase in the trunk, then helped them into the back seat of a white limousine.
“I didn’t expect this,” Bud said.
“Jeffrey must have arranged it. He’s a concierge, you know.”
They pulled away from the curb and entered the flow of traffic exiting the airport.
“Where’s he taking us?” Bud said.
Kate leaned forward and spoke briefly with the chauffeur.
“We’re going to the Hilton first,” she told Bud. “Jeffrey’s Hilton, then to the hospital. Is that all right?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think we should eat something first? You know how you get when you don’t eat.”
“I can’t.”
“Maybe we can grab a bite at the hotel.” She squeezed his arm. “He’s fine.”
While the chauffeur waited in the limo they dropped the suitcase off in their suite and then found the coffee shop. But moments after sitting down Bud closed his menu.
“If you’re worried about the limo driver,” Kate said, “he’s paid to wait.”
“It’s not that.” He stood up.
They left the coffee shop.
At John Sealy Hospital Kate gave their son’s name to the young woman at the information desk.
“Intensive care is on the third floor,” she said.
“He’s in intensive care?”
“Yes, ma’am. The elevator is straight down the hall on your left.”
Kate said on the way up, “Jeffrey didn’t say he was calling from intensive care.”
They stepped out into the corridor and looked to their right where some people had gathered. Jeffrey waved and walked over. He looked stricken, his face drawn, his eyes red and watery.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
“How’s Buddy?” Kate said.
“He’s still in surgery.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“I thought about leaving you a message at the hotel but decided it would be better to tell you face-to-face.”
“Tell what?”
“There was some kind of miscommunication with the emergency room people. It turns out it’s more serious than a concussion. We didn’t find out until after I called you. I know this must – ”
“More serious how?”
“He has a head injury, which we now know is not the same as a concussion. A head injury involves actual swelling.”
“Of what? Swelling of what?”
“The brain.”
“Oh God.”
Jeffrey put out his hand and touched her sleeve. “The doctors are doing everything they can. They’ve put him on a respirator and he’s getting some really powerful medications.”
“Can we see him?’
“I don’t know. The surgeon is supposed to update us pretty soon. There’s a waiting room around the corner. I’ll let you know when he comes out.”
Jeffrey excused himself and rejoined his friends.
“What’s happening to our boy?” Kate said.
Bud didn’t answer, though he knew exactly what was happening. He had a friend who crashed his plane and died a week later from a head injury. Buddy’s brain was pressing against its skull case and if the pressure wasn’t soon relieved it would kill him or leave him brain-damaged. Sitting in that drab room with the TV anchored high up on the wall and the plastic seats and the magazines with their ripped covers, he felt the onset – the swelling – of an emotion, an emotion as common in combat as it was rare in civilian life: terror – utter helplessness in the face of imminent peril. There was nothing he could do for his only child. If he were a praying man he would have beseeched the Almighty, as his wife was no doubt doing. But he wasn’t – any faith he had was gone by the end of the war – and all he could do was try to be strong for her. But he wasn’t feeling strong. He felt old. He felt needy. Kate held his limp hand between both of hers as a mother might a child’s, protectively, a little desperately, as if nothing worse could happen as long as she didn’t let go.
“We can’t know until we talk to the doctor,” he finally said. So much time had passed since Kate’s question that she gave him a puzzled look.
The surgeon’s arms were heavily muscled. His short-sleeved shirt made it look like he was showing them off. He was no more than forty and over six feet tall. He looked like that TV doctor from the sixties, the one with all the chest hair. He told them a device had been inserted into the skull to monitor the pressure on the brain, a common practice in cases of edema; also, that a tube called a shunt had been inserted to prevent blockage and drain off the fluid that had built up inside the brain.
Bud asked, “What are his chances of a complete recovery?”
“That depends on how he responds to the medications. Every patient is different, every brain. For head injuries the first few hours are the most critical. If swelling can be arrested in that time the patient stands a good chance of survival with minimum or no damage. Longer than that and there could be complications. I know that’s not much comfort but it’s all I can tell you at the moment.”
“Can we see him?”
“I’ll get one of nurses to take you down.”
A few minutes later they entered a room at the end of a long corridor where they found Buddy hooked up to what seemed a dozen machines. His head was bandaged. His arms were rigid against his legs, as if he were lying at attention. As Bud struggled for self-control, he saw with perfect clarity the man standing in the high weeds beside the shallow ditch. It was then he knew his son would die.
“Can we touch him?” Kate asked the nurse.
They took turns holding his hand. It felt clammy to Bud. Kate didn’t seem to notice and he wasn’t about to say anything. What she also failed to realize, what not even the straight-talking doctor dared to mention, was that their boy was in a coma. He wasn’t taking a post-operative nap. He was unconscious. He had been unconscious since the terrible thing happened. And he was never going to wake up.
They returned to the waiting room where Jeffrey soon came looking for them, asking if there was anything they needed. He brought back sandwiches and coffee on an orange tray.
An unwrapped sandwich lay on Bud’s lap. Kate could eat because she had hope. If he took a bite he knew he’d be sick. He’d thrown up in the turret ball more than once. Since he was sometimes in it for up to twelve hours, when and how much to eat was always tricky. Most of the time he had to force something down, just to keep his strength up.
“I’ll save it for later,” she said, putting his sandwich back in the brown paper bag.
A young mother and two little girls were sitting across from them. The younger one stood under the television, craning up at the screen. The other girl was asleep in her mother’s lap. He tried to watch the TV but it was some silly man and woman sitting on bar stools and talking to guests who also sat on a bar stool, all of them looking uncomfortable. After what seemed an endless number of commercials, a soap opera came on. He watched all of that without understanding anything that was said. By now both little girls were sitting on either side of their mother. He watched them swinging their legs and pulling each other’s hair and making faces, all the things little girls do when they were bored. All at once he felt light-headed. The next thing he knew he was being helped out of his chair and taken down a hallway, a nurse on each arm. They brought him to a small room, eased him onto a bed and removed his shoes. Kate stood over him. Jeffrey appeared and held out a large cup.
“Drink this,” Kate said, putting the straw up to his lips.
He sipped what turned out to be a vanilla milkshake.
If he’d never told anyone, it was because it didn’t seem to belong to him. It was like it happened to someone else. And he was afraid he’d fail to show the proper remorse. People might think him callous and uncaring. They would think he had gotten away with something, and he supposed he had, until now. He turned on his side, facing the wall. Whenever he thought about it he always called him “the man beside the ditch” or “the other driver,” never what he was, a father. He always pictured the man standing perfectly still, as if he were too stunned to move, as if he’d stopped in the high weeds after wandering about. But that wasn’t right, that wasn’t accurate. He wasn’t staring into the darkness. He was looking down at the broken body of his child. He was waiting for help which never seemed to come.
“How’s he doing?”
He felt a hand on his arm. Kate said, “You awake? The nurse wants to know how you’re feeling.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll check back later,” the nurse said.
There was something else he didn’t often dwell on. Three ambulances came to the accident, the first one arriving five minutes before the other two. After one of the two emergency medics on the first ambulance determined that Bud had no life-threatening injuries, he’d joined his partner on the opposite side of the ditch. Barely out of their teens, they wore white jackets and white pants that there were too big for them. They were a couple of skinny, gawky kids dressed like milkmen. Down on their knees, they hunched over the body. They seemed too young for such serious work, so when it happened, when one of the medics lifted the body off the ground and onto the stretcher, Bud was more shocked than surprised. If there was one thing he knew, it was you never disturb a body until a trained physician has examined it for internal injuries. The girl’s chances of surviving had just been reduced. The father watched the medics move his daughter into the back of the ambulance. The other two ambulances had arrived by then and the woman was put on a stretcher. The man joined her in the back of the ambulance. Just before he ducked inside he looked toward the road where Bud’s car rested on the shoulder. Bud was standing in total darkness, but the man seemed to be searching anyway, trying to find him up there.
“The doctor’s here,” Kate said.
The surgeon was still in his green cap and gown. “The swelling’s stopped,” he said. “He’s waking up.”
“Thank the Lord.”
“What did he say?” Bud asked.
“Buddy’s waking up! He’s all right!”
“You can see him any time you like. He’s not fully awake. He’ll be in and out of consciousness for the next twenty-four hours. That’s normal.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Kate said. “Thank you so much.”
Bud was sitting on the edge of the bed and staring at the spot where the surgeon had been standing.
“You’re not dizzy again, are you?”
He shook his head.
When she moved to help him down he was too fast for her, sliding off the bed and grabbing up his shoes. He shoved his feet in, jerked the laces into bows.
They sat beside their son’s bed for half an hour before he opened his eyes.
“You were in an accident,” Kate told him. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me, darling?”
“Of course I can hear you,” he said in a weak voice and smiled. “Hey, Dad.” Buddy extended a shaky hand.
Without knowing what he was going to do, Bud took it and brought it to his lips.
Back at the Hilton, they changed clothes before eating in the hotel’s fancy dining room. Kate talked on and on in a way she only did when she was happy. They returned to their room and, exhausted, went straight to bed. As tired as he was, Bud lay awake for an hour or more. He was thinking about turning on the television and watching with the volume down when he drifted off. He dreamed he was at the scene of the accident, watching the medics in their baggy white suits as they kneeled over the body of the girl. Seeing what was about to happen, he cupped his hands and shouted at them. They couldn’t hear him. He was too far away. He started down the embankment, but he hadn’t gotten far when his legs stopped working. It felt like he was floating; he couldn’t get traction. He looked on helplessly as one of the medics worked his arms under the body. But it wasn’t the body of a girl anymore; it was the body of a man. It was his son’s body.
“No!”
The medic arched his back in preparation for standing with it.
“Stop! Stop!”
“Bud. Bud. Bud.”
He awoke in the semi-darkness, crying.
“Bud?” He could feel Kate sitting up in the bed, as if to get a better look at him. “What is it, Bud?”
He covered his eyes with his arm.
“Were you having a bad dream?”
He opened his mouth, but the emotion strangled his voice.
“Was it Buddy? Was it a nightmare about Buddy?”
He nodded.
She got out of bed and came back. “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” he managed.
Gently, she lowered his arm and dabbed at his face with a tissue. “I’m sorry about your dream. But it was only a dream. It wasn’t real.” She placed her hand on his shoulder. “What’s real is God’s mercy. God answers prayer. He answered mine. Buddy’s fine. Everything is fine.”
John Picard is the author of the story collection Little Lives (Mint Hill Books, 2007). “Gloria” is a hybrid work in two parts. The first section is memoir and the second section is a work of imagination.