Walking on Glory

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

Uncle Vanya

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

 

On the night of the Academy Awards

  Glory St. Michael ended her life. A business card with the address and phone number of the In-Touch Center was enclosed inside a sandwich bag and taped to her right ankle. At the bottom of the card was a blank line on which she had written her name, and directly underneath it, one word was engraved in silver letters, Helper, the title given to all In-Touch volunteers. On the back of the card she had written another name and another phone number. The number was that of a crematorium on the west side of Fort Worth, and the name was Stephen Anderson. He will know what to do with me. That was all she had written.

On that same night almost two thousand miles away, Stephen Anderson, who had been one of Glory's closest friends, picked up the telephone to call her. Knowing that she never missed an Oscar telecast, the chances were good that she would be at home, and if not, she would be with Joanna Udahl. He looked up their numbers. Both had been crossed out of his address book but were still legible. One call from him was all it would take for the three of them to be reunited. But he hesitated. "Why start it up again?" he said. Then he disconnected the telephone and sat down at his desk to sign copies of his new collection of stories, Travels with King Arthur. The books had just arrived that day and he had been asked to inscribe copies to all the teachers at his school. “This won’t take long,” he assured himself, but soon he realized he hardly had the concentration to sign his own name. Glory would not leave him alone. He wondered what she was doing, and how she had spent the day?

Several hours before the telecast

  Glory washed a golden rinse into her graying hair. She combed it with her fingers, and plaited it in a single French braid that fell below her shoulders. She had worn her hair in this style most of her life. It was her brother's touch, a mark he had left on her. James was the only truly gifted person she had ever known. Nothing could convince her otherwise. -- Truly, truly gifted, she had reminded herself all too often. -- His eyes and pen had worked together as a camera capturing minute details. But when sketching his sister he had deliberately switched from charcoal to pastels, depicting her not as she appeared, but as he saw her, as he wanted her to be seen. He called her Morning Glory, but no one else did, and in her portraits her golden hair was never loose. It was always tightly braided. Hardly anyone had ever seen it any other way.

"And now," she said, "no one ever will."

  Standing before her closet, she wondered what she should wear? What would be appropriate? How did she wish to be found? After moving from a three story house into an efficiency apartment, she had given away almost all of her clothes. She had eliminated the business suits and the cocktail dresses, the stockings, high heels and hats in favor of blue wormen’s shirts, kakai pants, a few straight skirts, sneakers, rubber sandals and shorts.

  “How do you expect me to be seen with you dressed like that?” Joanna asked. “You used to look so smart, so chic, even with your silly braid.”

  Joanna’s look was just the opposite from Glory’s. Twice a month her hennaed hair was trimmed one inch above her shoulders, and three times a week it was washed, conditioned and combed by a stylist who exposed her high forehead, her ears and neck. Even to the supermarket, she wore expensive jewelry, high heels and designer dresses. With one exception, everything she owned carried a label. The exception was an outfit that she and Glory shared, a red blouse, a black skirt and a silk rose, their Carmen costume. Joanna wore it to masquerade parties, and Glory wore it to attract attention. It, too, was hanging in her closet, but she did not choose it, preferring instead an aviator's jump suit that had once belonged to James. Lightly splattered with paint, it was faded, meticulously laundered and reserved for special occasions.

After dressing she did not look at herself in the mirror; she had already seen enough. And besides, she was late. It was her evening at the In-Touch Center. Help-line volunteers were waiting to be relieved, and she could not let them down. She had made the commitment, and she would honor it one more time.

  "Look at you in your jumpsuit," one of the Helpers said. "What's the occasion?"

  "Around six o'clock, I'm calling Joanna no matter what," Glory said. She took a transistor radio out of her purse, and at six o'clock she turned it on.

  Joanna, an Academy Award winner for her first film, was a local actress and talk-show hostess. In the last thirty minutes of her radio program, she was interviewing Thelma Hanks and John Rainy, a common-law couple in their mid-sixties who preached the benefits of a vegetarian diet. Thelma and John were dietitians as well as organic gardeners. They were employed by a home for the mentally handicapped, and in their spare time they had concocted a shampoo that promised to restore luster to the driest hair and vitality to the dullest mind. Joanna interviewed them for fifteen minutes before turning the questioning over to her radio listeners, among them Glory St. Michael.

  On the air, she assured the radio audience that she had tested the shampoo herself and it would deliver all that its creators had promised. She said that it was free of chemical contaminants, gave off a pleasant aroma without being artificially perfumed and that it had given her a new lease on life. Then she added, "By the way, Joanna, I will not be watching the Oscars with you tonight."

  "But we always watch the Oscars," Joanna said, forgetting that they were still on the air. "What's wrong with you?"

  "That's not what I need to hear," Glory said. Her disappointment was obvious. "That's not what you're suppose to say. Stephen knows what to say to me at a time like this. Where is Stephen?"

  "Glory," Joanna said. "I'm coming over to pick you up. We're going to watch the awards together, just like always."

  "No," Glory said. "It doesn't matter to me who wins anymore." Then she hung up. And they were off the air.

  That was the last time the two women, who had grown up in the same town and had been life-long friends, exchanged words. They had watched the Oscars together since they were school girls. It was their standing date. If one of them happened to be ill or away from home, they called each other just before or just after the important awards.

On Oscar night 

  one year before her death, Glory turned to her best friend accusingly. "Joanna,” she said, “We should be watching you up there. You should have stayed in Hollywood. By now, you would have surely won best actress for something."

  "The fastest way to end a career is to win an Academy Award," Joanna had said in her own defense, "especially if it's for a supporting role and you came out of nowhere to win it."

  That night Stephen Anderson had joined them in Glory's efficiency apartment. They were eating air popped corn, organically grown, and Glory, was savoring one kernel at a time without salt or butter, but Joanna and Stephen were not so delicate.

  Why do they have to be such gluttons, Glory thought. She watched butter dripping down their chins and popcorn falling from their laughing mouths. She tried to understand what they were saying, but all she could hear was the crunching of popcorn and the rattling of ice cubs in tumblers of rum and coke. -- Disgusting, she thought. Disrespectful and rude. -- She did not approve of wine, beer or liquor but tolerated it when she had to. She preferred water, only water, and at room temperature. She didn't even have an ice tray in her refrigerator. Joanna and Stephen had brought their own ice, their own rum, coke, lemon and glasses. -- Pigs, Glory thought. Nothing but pigs. Who but me would put up with such behavior? Are they afraid they won't get enough nourishment, or what? -- She shot them looks of disapproval, but they kept laughing, drinking and eating. -- You don't even know I'm in the room, she tried to say, but the words were stuck inside her head. Maybe I should ask them to leave. Maybe they should know how it feels to be left out.

Suddenly, her heart changed. She wouldn't wish that on anyone. Not even her worst enemy.

  "I'm sorry you had to bring your own butter and salt," she said.

  The nerve of her, Joanna thought. What about everything else we brought? Maybe we should get up and walk out right now. Maybe that would teach her a lesson.

  She stood up to leave but changed her mind: Why hurt her now? After all she's gone through, why even bother?

  Instead of walking out she brushed popcorn off her skirt and sat back down. Glory stared at the kernels on her hardwood floor. She reached to pick them up, but Joanna beat her. "At this point," she said, "I just can't imagine spending an Oscar night with anyone else, Glory. This has been our night for as long as I can remember, no matter what."

  "I can rest assured that one night out of the year you will be forced to think of me," Glory said.

"World without end," Stephen said.

After the interview with Thelma and John.

  Joanna drove to Glory's apartment. The lights were off. Her car was not parked in the driveway, and she did not answer her bell.

  Why didn't she just come right out and tell me that she had someplace else to go? Joanna wondered. What's the big secret anyway? Then she remembered that it was Glory's night to work the Help-line at the In-Touch Center. From her car phone she dialed the center and was told by one of the Helpers that Glory had six calls waiting. “I’ll hold,” Joanna said, but fifteen minutes later she gave up and went home.

Glory was the most requested of all the Helpers. Callers had been known to wait an hour or more to exchange a few words with her, to ask for advice, encouragement, or the interpretation of a bad dream. "There's no such thing as a bad dream," she told one of her last callers. "All dreams are good in that they are trying to tell us something we need to hear. Something that no one else can say or will say."

  What did she mean? Joanna wondered. When she said that only Stephen knows what to say at a time like this, what was she talking about?

  At home her answering machine was flashing. A message from Glory, she thought, hurrying to retrieve it. But the message was not from Glory. It was the hospital calling to say that Joanna's husband was performing an emergency surgery. Disappointed, she hung up the phone.

  The dogs were barking to be fed, but she ignored them to call Glory instead. The phone rang over twenty times before someone picked up, but it was not Glory. She had already left the center. "To go where?" Joanna asked, but no one seemed to know. She waited thirty minutes and dialed Glory's home number again, but again no one answered. "If that's the way she's going to behave," Joanna said, "it's all right with me." She turned on the television and settled in for the night.

  After the best supporting actress was named, she called Glory once more and while the phone rang, she thought of Stephen Anderson. One year earlier the three of them had watched the Oscars in Glory apartment. -- Oh, why did he have to move away and leave us? Joanna wondered. Why didn't he, at least, say good-bye? What did we do to him, anyway? -- After a dozen rings and still no answer, she told herself not to worry, to watch the awards and relax, placating herself with the idea that Glory was involved with urgent business. People called her at all hours, even at home. Most of them wanted to cry with someone. They wanted to talk to about business, about love, about wayward children, the loss of a husband or wife and the fear of dying.

  Since Stephen had left town Glory had made herself available to anyone in need. Sometimes she even visited her callers in their homes, and Mariah often accompanied her. Joanna was sick of Mariah. Mariah took up all of Glory's time. Mariah claimed to have all the answers to the world's greatest problems. Mariah called herself a sensitive and idolized Madam Virginia. “She must be with that Mariah,” Joanna said, slamming down the receiver. “Now there’s a crackpot if there ever was one.”

  She wanted to believe that Mariah and Glory were not together, that they were not even friends that Glory had never become involved with the In-Touch Center, with Madam Virginia and a man called Spirit.

"Crackpots," Joanna said. "All of them." The television set was blaring, all the clocks were striking at once, and the dogs were barking again, but Joanna was oblivious to these things; Glory was too much on her mind. "Wherever she is, she's alone," she said to console herself. "She's making house calls, and she's alone. She'll call me soon."

  After the last award had been presented and still the telephone had not rung, Joanna decided to call Glory's elderly neighbor, Miss Westina Matthews. She was always home and had keys to every apartment.

It was Miss Matthews who found the body.

Two weeks after Glory's death

  Stephen Anderson received a letter that had been forwarded twice. "Darling, I hope this letter finds you wherever you are." Like a stage whisper, Joanna's voice came ripping out of the envelope. "By now you have heard about Glory. The papers simply will not stop rehashing the same lurid details. How much more can I endure, I keep asking myself? As it is, I am reeling from the sheer horror of it. She chose the most violent and brutal way. Please take care of yourself, and let us know what to do from here."

Stephen had no idea what she was talking about. Was it a trick? he wondered. A scheme to get them all back together?

  After deliberating for over an hour, he broke down and dialed Joanna's number. Almost immediately, an answering machine clicked on, and he left a message. "Please let me know what has happened to Glory. Is she all right?"

  The next day Joanna left a message on Stephen's machine.

  "Darling, this is Joanna speaking. How can I be so stupid? I assumed you had heard. I assumed you knew. The reporters simply will not let it die, and only because she was said to be one of the ten richest women in the United States. Money will buy you fame if nothing else. But it will not bring you back. Nothing will ever bring Glory back to us now. I am so sorry to tell you this, but I have no choice." -- Here she inserted a dramatic pause. To Stephen, it was interminable in length. -- "Oh, Stephen," she finally continued. "Glory has ended her life. I am holding her ashes for you. She said you would know what to do with them. At the very last she wanted to talk to you. She said that only you could say what she needed to hear."

  Her voice faded to a whisper. "I cannot tell it all. Not now. Later. Give me time."

  The news did not surprise Stephen. It saddened him. He had anticipated Glory's suicide. He had thought about it often, had even wondered when the hour would come, and if it was possible to prevent the inevitable. So when the news finally reached him, surprise was not his reaction. Sadness was. Sadness sprinkled along a path of guilt that he could not ignore. Glory had adored him, had called him her best friend, and he had pulled away from her, possibly when she needed him the most. But he had not wish to be adored, not by Glory anyway, and even still, almost a year after he had left town, he was alone, happy to be alone and was convinced that he always would be. After Arthur's death there had been no more companions, no more special friends and no more deaths until now. Glory had died. She had taken her own life, and he had not been there for her. He had walked out. Disappeared without a trace. And he was the only person who knew what she needed to hear. But at the same time he also knew that if he had been there to say what she wanted him to say, it would have made little difference in the end. She had already made up her mind. Her fate belonged to no one except herself.

  "She has walked on the edge of many graves,” he once wrote in his journal. There's a certain excitement in that, not just for her but for all of us."

  "To die," she once told him, "has its own strength and validity."

Joanna's second letter

was written in swirling script and green ink. -- Even on paper she is an actress, Stephen thought. But wasn't Glory just the same?

Dearest Stephen,

On the night of the Academy Awards, either just before or just after the best picture of the year, Glory put a pistol to her heart and pulled the trigger. Something told me to go check on her, but I could not pull myself out of the house again, so I called Miss Matthews who lives next door, and I've regretted it ever since. When she found Glory lying on her back she called to ask me what to do. I said, "Dial 911 Miss Matthews. Hang up and dial 911, immediately!" By the time I got there 911 had already arrived, and Miss Matthews, who is a big fan of yours by the way, had gone to pieces, so I insisted that both she and Glory be taken to the hospital in the same ambulance. It was too late for our precious Glory, but we got Miss Matthews to Emergency just in time. She remained in a state of shock for several days, and who wouldn't at her age, but she is recovering in the psychiatric ward where they're taking beautiful care of her. Oh, Darling, it is so, so sad what has happened. So shocking and uncalled for. Please take good care of yourself and call Joanna to express your sorrow. You need someone at a time like this.

  Stephen dialed Joanna's number, but the moment he heard her voice he hung up. The thought of listening to a rehearsed speech was unbearable; Joanna sounded like Glory. They had always spoken with the same inflection, the same phrases and endearments. It was as though they had put their heads together and agreed to be exactly alike in speech as well as gesture. They could have been twins, he thought. Perhaps they should have been.

  He could not remember the last time he had seen Joanna, but the last time he had seen Glory, less than a year from the night of her death, was permanently fixed in his mind. They had just returned from an automobile trip of eight hundred miles. Both were exhausted and out of patience with the other. At Stephen's apartment Glory did not stop the motor or get out of the car. She sat there staring straight ahead, her fingers playing scales on the steering wheel. Finally they exchanged a few words and Glory drove away waving with the back of her hand.

  Watching the Buick disappear down the street, Stephen had promised himself that he would never again have anything else to do with her. The thought of taking another trip together, or even living in the same city, sent him inside to pack his bags. It was the fifteenth of May. The semester was almost over. He gave notice at his school and left town within a week.

  Driving without destination and without a map, he passed through New Orleans, Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston and Baltimore before ending up in New York. "This is it," he said. "No one will bother me here. Here, I can be alone." He took a downtown apartment with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Jehovah's Witness Watchtower. "This," he promised himself, "will be the last stop."

  For the next few months, he thought of Glory often. Before every job interview her heard her telling him how to dress, how to comb his hair and polish his shoes. At every restaurant she spouted opinions on the freshness of the food, the quality of the water, the cleanliness of the kitchen, the floor and the linen. She even told him what to eat, how much to eat and the number of times to chew. But as he settled into his new life, Glory began to fade, and before long he regarded her as a distant acquaintance. He rarely heard her voice exploding inside his head, and when he did he tended to smile or laugh, for she spoke in absolutes and insisted that everyone agree with her. "Distance," he said, "has made her almost bearable."

  With his memory of Glory at rest, Stephen got a new teaching job and a new set of friends. He bought his apartment, took his first trip alone, and rarely gave Glory more than a few passing thoughts until the night of her death.

  Something's wrong, he told himself. He turned the television back on. The Academy Awards were almost over. Somewhere Glory and Joanna were watching. Or were they? He returned to his desk, to the stack of books waiting to be signed, but his hand was shaking and his mind was wandering. "One year ago," he said, "only one year, we were all together."

  For the next two weeks he stayed busy and rarely thought of Glory at all. His students were demanding; his editor, unreasonable; his agent, short of patience. There was so much to think about. So many sentences to correct and papers to read. So many late nights and early mornings. There was no time for Glory, not even for a fleeting thought of her, but when Joanna's message arrived everything stopped. Glory was dead. She had taken her life. And once again she was with him. During every waking moment she was there.

  Over a long weekend he wrote down everything he could remember about her. Everything she had said or done in his presence and all the things he could recall from her newspaper interviews. He even relived their last trip, every minute of it, and when the desire to hear her voice overpowered him, he broke down and called Joanna.

  "Darling, I am prostrate," she said. To Stephen, her voice now seemed more like Glory's than ever. "I can barely stand or traipse the floor and cannot remember the last time I enjoyed food or drink." Here she paused, again interminably. "You must understand," she continued, "it was not Glory's decision to end her life that shocked me, it was her choice of weaponry."

  "What do you mean?"

  "A woman does not use a gun!" Joanna shrieked. "A woman takes poison or pills. A woman will mix up something deadly and swallow it, but a gun? Never. A gun is the most violent and brutal means for a woman to end her life. Oh, Darling, I am reeling over it! And I will go on reeling forever! Nothing will stop me now!"

"It was a natural choice," Stephen said. "She hunted with her brother and father. She grew up with guns. She trusted them."

  "Oh, no Stephen!" Joanna exclaimed. "You are dead wrong about that. I am astonished at your lack of understanding. How can you write all those stories, just churn them out overnight practically, and not know one thing about human nature? A woman does not use a gun to take her life, and that's final."

  "And why do you think she did it?" Stephen asked.

  "She was despondent!" Joanna made the word last as long as possible. "She was distressed, depressed, and deeply, deeply despondent over the loss of her dearest and oldest friends, and yet, she would not answer a letter or return a call. She had withdrawn from everyone who knew her when and would have withdrawn from me, but you see, I did not allow her to do that. I, unlike so many others, did not turn my back on Glory. I am not made that way. My fiber is different; stronger, sturdier and more tolerant. And if I had known what to say to her, Stephen, I would have said it. You can bet your life on that."

  "But what happened..."

  "...to all her money?" Joanna interrupted. "That's what everyone wants to know. There wasn't a cent in any of her accounts. We had to take up a collection to cremate her."