Long Night Moon (April 9, 2009. New Pink Moon. Issue 3)

The moonlight began where Iva left off.  Emil stood behind her at the bay window, looking up at a full, December moon.  The snow in the pasture had a layer of ice due to heavy wind, and the surface glowed as if from underneath the thin crust.  On nights like these, Iva liked to sit at the window with all the lights out. 

Leaning over to set the teacups on the end table, the book under his arm slipped to the floor with a mild thump.  It was his third go at To The Lighthouse, and at seventy-three, he was determined to get through it once and for all.  His time with Virginia Woolf, he reasoned, was running out.

Iva had insisted that he read it.  “The best writer of our time!” At the age of ninety-four, much of her insistence had abated—especially after the stroke—and her voice had a softness to it that neither of them had ever known.   Her conviction that Virginia Wolf must be read, however, was unyielding.  And so Emil sat beside his mother with the book obediently resting on his lap, and together they looked out the bay window as if at the theater.  When she was ready, she’d ask him to turn on the lamp between them.

Though his father had been the author, Emil’s literary influences mostly came through his mother; Warren Henning died when Emil was very young.  A peculiar levity in Iva’s demeanor permeated the house immediately after what Iva referred to as the bathtub incident.  But one day her mood abruptly changed.  She insisted that her son come with her everywhere, often keeping him out of school for “important errands.”  While his friends attended school, Iva went with her son to the market, the bakery, often spoiling him with caramel rolls and rock candy.  She no longer smiled, not even to feign good humor when her son asked her what was wrong.

Emil assumed that the change in his mother had everything to do with his father’s death.  He thought that she missed him, and Emil thought that maybe he did too.  He knew that it was an accident, just something, in the course of life, that (as his mother put it) merely happens.  At such a young age, how could he not adopt his mother’s views on life and death?  Death is around every corner, so when it comes, and it will, try not to be too surprised.  How could he have known that if she had wanted to she could have pulled him out of the bath?            

His father had been an alcoholic and a writer, extremely successful in regard to both occupations.  He had published four novels and a collection of short stories, and he drank his way through them all.  Although his ritual of cocktail hour began modestly, Warren grew into the habit of scotch with a quiet enthusiasm.  He faded away every night at six o’clock with a lap-full of chapbooks and novellas he was commissioned to review for various publishing houses.  Around seven-thirty, when he poured himself a third, Iva withdrew into the kitchen with her son where they played card games and Chinese checkers.

Occasionally, Warren would mumble something unintelligible to them on route to the liquor cabinet—to himself in particular, to them in general, and since he never alluded to anything outside the confines of his occupation, or so it seemed, not so much as even mentioning the weather—even in the most raging of thunderstorms, it never mattered that they did not understand him.  Iva would shuffle the deck extra loudly, to impress him, Emil thought.  Then she would lift her thumbs in the middle and the cards would make a marvelous bridge.  His mother’s fingers, Emil thought, were beautiful. 

Emil came to know his father by watching him write through a crack in the doorway.  It was from a distance, then, that he came to love a father who ever more receded into his letters and the art of spinning ice in his glass, and he had died before Emil had learned to resent him.

In the top left drawer of Warren’s writing desk was a photograph of twenty-seven children standing beside a train.  They were clean and well packaged, but beneath the bows and brass buttons and starched collars there lies restlessness.  Clearly recognizable despite the graininess of the photograph, their expressions betrayed past neglect and a resignation that, when Emil discovered it a few weeks after his father died, made him shiver.  Their faces told their stories.  Warren Henning only had to put them into words—words that came so effortlessly and were much more real to him than anything else around him.

A year after his death, Iva and Emil rode the train to Madelia to live with her parents.  “It’s time to go home,” she had told her son.

The only thing Emil ever could remember about leaving St. Paul was getting on the train and leaving the only home he had ever known.  They had one suitcase apiece; he never would ask what happened to all of their other belongings.  Iva made it clear that that part of their lives was over, and nothing more need be said about it. 

Emil remembered loading the train—that high first step and how his mother pulled him up by one arm—and then there was the blowing of the whistle and how he and his mother jumped when it sounded.  And he remembered the porcelain face of the moon and how it hung over the rail yard, and he remembered marveling at how it always seemed to follow his mother like a spotlight wherever she went. 

“Men are linear thinkers,” she used to tell him, “and their stories suffer because of it.”  In the end, though Emil never knew it, Warren Henning “suffered” from his linear thinking.

Iva wrote poems.  They were long and rich and, as far as Emil could gather at such an early age (she read them to him when he was very young), they were very good.  And certainly not linear.  He liked to hear her read them.  She sang them, really, and, like most sons, Emil loved it when his mother sang to him.  “Most men forget to write about smells, Emil.  Or taste.  They are much too busy polishing their shit, that they forget that there is more to the world than reflecting light and the gathering clouds.”

She told him that writing was like catching the leaves when they fell.  It was a game they often played together.  See how many they could catch before they hit the ground.  She was very good at it.  “The trick,” she said, “is to stay in one place and let them come to you.”

Emil couldn’t do that.  He was too young.  Too male, Iva concluded, even after all her hard work.  When the wind came up, he would get very excited, and he would race around the park diving for leaves, elusive as birds, that would eventually settle on the ground like words on a page.  Watching her son, Iva shrugged, half marveling his futility, half repulsed by it.

When he turned forty Emil had admitted that he picked up Vita’s copy of To The Lighthouse and found it unbearable.  “An impossible read,” he told his mother.  “Too circuitous.”  He regretted saying this ever since.  Having Emil “access” (Iva’s word) Virginia Woolf became a new obsession for her.  “You need to finish it, Emil.  This is how women think.  Not in straight lines!”

“Yes, I know,” he said.  Another mistake.

“No you do not,” Iva said.  “Relationships are not the product playing dominos.  They are not made by your idea of cause and effect.  If you were a little more honest with yourself, you might see that you aren’t either.”

Regardless of his shortcomings, or, rather, because of them, Virginia Woolf remained a mystery to Emil.  “It’s not that I don’t try,” he added as a means to close the conversation.

“But you don’t try.”  Iva was the one to finish arguments.  “That’s the point.  You are apathetic.  And that’s the worst part about it.”

Although thirty-three years into failing Virginia Woolf, apathy was far from his mind this evening as he watched his mother’s eyes fill with the moon, and saw her breathing shift.  She had been more tired than usual this evening.  “It’s the moon,” she had told him upon his arrival.  And she walked slowly over to her chair by the window where he followed her with a blanket.  Emil saw her chest fill to full capacity, and as she let it go he was startled at how uneven it was.  She did this for a period of time, and Emil grew concerned with the unnaturalness of it all.  Finally, a sound like disappointment came from her throat, and that was it. 

The moon was there, white and cold, and Emil sat beside his mother with his hands folded over his book, certain only of the infallibility of the moon and its unyielding mystery.

If it had the power to push and pull the tides, how much less would it be for it to pull the breath from an old woman basking in its light?