Again and Again Throughout the Long Night
Again and Again Throughout the Long Night
a short story
Copyright © 2016 by Malcolm R. Campbell
He got a call from Mrs. Jones.
“David, I’m so sorry to tell this. Your mother died this morning.”
He thought she was calling about his father. That’s what his mother often predicted.
“What happened?”
“She collapsed in the front room. They think she had a heart attack. They think it happened quickly, David, that she was gone before she fell on the sofa. Can you come here soon? Robert doesn’t know. He’s in bed as always listening to Édith Piaf recordings. He knows Édith’s gone, but he doesn’t know Peggy’s gone.”
“I’ll tell him.”
A former newspaperman for a Missoula newspaper, Robert S. Ward seldom remembered he was a former newspaperman for a Missoula newspaper. Multiple strokes kept him confined to a hospital bed in the room he once shared with his wife. Alzheimer’s kept his mind confined to places long ago and far away. When present moments occurred, they were short, far between, and oddly linked.
Édith, his Little Sparrow, was already there when David arrived. He heard the words from “Les Trois Cloches” when he opened the front door: “Dieu vous fera signe un jour.” (God will beckon to you one day.) She sang that song on her first U.S. tour in 1945, and Robert S. Ward was there to cover it and interview her, and yes, he remembered that like it was yesterday which in many ways it was.
“David!”
For once, he knew him. He hugged the ephemeral old man and that seemed to confuse him.
“The Little Sparrow sounds better than ever today,” David said.
“Always,” he said. “What brings you here?”
“Mrs. Jones called me.”
“Who?”
“The home health care worker.”
“Of course.”
“She told me that mother died of a heart attack this morning.”
“Did God beckon my Peggy Belle?”
“Yes.”
“Oh David, that’s news unfit to print. She worked too hard. She needed to rest. I told her this. I heard noises in the house earlier this morning. I didn’t know what they were. Have they already taken her away?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Without goodbyes.” He sighed and stared at the vintage tape recorder (or was it Édith standing there?), lost to old memories, to the old familiar places where he sought refuge, where he was young again and interviewing Édith Piaf in New York, where he was young again and courting Margaret Belle (“Peggy”) Gordon in Butte, where the future was still “La Vie En Rose” and long forevers.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“I need to talk to Édith about this. You must be starved. Ask the health care lady to warm up some of Peggy Belle’s last pot of chicken soup. Oddly, she made it for me.”
David sat at the kitchen table with Mrs. Jones and they ate soup.
“Needs salt,” she said.
“Was she seeing a heart specialist?”
“If so, he hid it well.”
“I think she was. That’s why the soup needs salt.”
Mrs. Jones shrugged. “La Vie En Rose” filled the house.
Later that day, Mrs. Jones found him in the den going through his mother’s papers. She had been seeing a specialist, opting to keep quiet about it while she cut back on the salt but not her workload. There were days when Mrs. Jones had nothing to do.
“He’s asking for her, David,” she said.
When David went into the bedroom, his father asked if Peggy Belle had served up several bowls of her famous chicken soup.
“It was very good,” said David.
“Needed salt,” his father said. “I haven’t seen her all day. I want to ask her if we’ve run out of salt. Is that why you came to visit?”
Édith was mercifully silent on the matter.
“No, Mrs. Jones called me.”
“Who?”
“The home health care worker.”
“Of course.”
“She told me that mother died of a heart attack this morning.”
“Did God beckon my Peggy Belle?”
“Yes,” and apparently only by the wind grieved, he thought.
“Oh David, that breaks my heart. Have they already taken her away?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“They should have let me see her.”
“Mrs. Jones says you did see her?”
“It must have been too short and too dear a moment to recall.”
“You’ll see her again soon, Dad, at the memorial service.”
“It won’t be Peggy Belle then, will it? My friends will say ‘doesn’t she look good?’ and I’ll lie to them and say that she does.”
“I’ll help you through the service, Dad.”
“I know, I know. For now, look in the pantry and see if we’re out of salt.”
Later that day, Mrs. Jones found David looking through a file labeled “Memorial Service Wishes.” In her scrunched handwriting, his mother had written a note to the current pastor of the Presbyterian Church requesting that he use as many of their proposed hymns and responsive readings as possible. Based on her tone, she expected Robert to go before she did and even included songs by the Little Sparrow.
“David, your father wants to talk to Peggy about the salt.”
He went into his father’s bedroom for the third time that day to tell he fragile, grey-haired man once again that his wife had died. He suspected he would have to break the news again and again throughout the long night and that each time he did so he’d be wounding his father new and fresh out of the long shadows.
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