Ain't That a Shame

 

The Prologue

“You made me cry when you said goodbye
Ain't that a shame
My tears fell like rain
Ain't that a shame
You're the one to blame”
                        (Fats Domino – Ain’t That a Shame)

 

Part 1 - The Beginning

Hoffman knew monogamy was not a natural state for a man. He had known too many mistresses for that to be true and he had been proficient at keeping each of them secret. His ability to conceal was so good, even his wife Imelda considered their fifty-two years together to be a model of fidelity. Looking at her now, a frail and withered scrap of parchment in the hospital bed, Hoffman was glad his wife believed such a thing and was relieved the need for his deceptions would soon be over.

He sat on the hard, uncomfortable chair the nurse had brought him and considered his wife’s wrinkled head resting on the pillow.  They had taken her dentures away, allowing her face to collapse like a decaying apple. There could be no grace in a geriatric ward he thought, only the slow gradual creeping of death. At least the nurse had been kind, bringing him a cup of lukewarm overly sweet tea that he would normally have described as gnat’s piss but accepted graciously anyway. He turned down the offer of toast. He was a little hungry but his own dentures were no longer a good fit and were making his gums sore.

Despite his constant desire for other women throughout his life, Hoffman maintained his marriage to Imelda had been a good one. He had never once felt disappointed with her and he was sure Imelda had never once felt disappointed with him. He did not look upon his philandering as cheating so much as satisfying a natural need. Only Hoffman and his mistresses knew the truth. No one had been hurt. Consequently, there was no guilt to bear so far as he could see.

The nurse came, patted down his wife’s blankets, ticked the chart hanging from the foot of her bed and took away his empty cup.

‘Do you want me to pull the curtains round, give you a bit of privacy?’ she asked.

Hoffman declined. Soon enough Imelda would be taken from him. There would be time enough then for loneliness but for now, much as he hated hospitals, shutting himself off from the rest of the ward made the thought of that loneliness even worse. He looked around the ward, from bed to bed wondering how many of their withered occupants would see out the night. It was then he became aware of the woman in the next bed staring at him.

He smiled back nervously in embarrassment but before he could look away she raised a frail arm and beckoned him over.  Somewhat tentatively he rose from his seat. He had been sitting for so long that his joints had grown stiff. He shuffled over to the woman’s bed. She looked as close to the end as his own Imelda. They are like brittle brown leaves weathering back into the soil he thought. Her face was the colour of a tobacco stained oil painting though her eyes he noted were still a rich cinnamon.

‘Can I get you anything?’ Hoffman asked quietly, stooping gently over her.

Her lips moved but he could not make out what she was saying. He bent closer and as he did so he felt her hand tugging at his jacket lapel, pulling him closer until he could feel her breath on his cheek and he caught the smell of steamed vegetables.

‘You don’t remember me, Daniel Hoffman,’ she whispered.

The sound of his own name issuing from the old woman’s dry lips surprised him. He took a few moments for his composure to return before pulling slowly back from the woman. Her grip on his lapel released. Her frail arm fell back onto the sheets.

He looked more closely at her features, but age had removed any resemblance to what she might have looked like. Whoever she was, the woman was right; he did not recognise her at all. As he scanned her features her eyes squeezed shut, a thin thread of glistening spittle fell from one corner of her mouth and she began to convulse. Shocked by this sudden onset, Hoffman reached over to press the alarm button above her bed but felt her grip pulling once more on his jacket in feeble restraint. He looked again at the wizened face and realised she was not entering the final throes of death at all. She was laughing.

For a moment, Hoffmann thought the woman must be quite mad but then, how could she have known his name. He waited for her to be still.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘My memory isn’t what it was.’

She beckoned him closer again. ‘Look in the drawer,’ she whispered, turning her head towards the cabinet by her bed.

Hoffman pulled the drawer open slowly. The contents where not remarkable. A pair of glasses, a packet of tissues, some keys and a small book, bound in faded brown leather.

He felt her palm rest on his sleeve. ‘Look in the book,’ she whispered.

It was a book of poems. He lifted it carefully. The cover was worn and faded with use, the pages tattered and loose. As he held it in his palm it fell open where a bus ticket had been used as a bookmark.  The ticket was old, Hoffman noted, long and narrow, ragged at the end where it had been torn from a dispenser in the days when buses had conductors in caps and uniforms.

Hoffman lifted the yellowing ticket and examined it more closely, turning it gently in his fingers, almost as if he expected it to crumble when touched. Then he looked at the old woman.

‘Do you remember me now, Daniel Hoffman,’ she asked.

Part 2 - The Middle

By the window of Sam’s coffee bar two figures sit, hunched towards each other over the formica top, listening to Fats Domino on the jukebox. Outside, the rain clatters down on the glistening pavements and umbrellas drift by the steamed up window like leaves on a stream.

‘Do you remember when you pushed me into Long Lane ditch?’ the girl asks and the boy laughs.

‘I didn’t push you. You slipped,’ he says. He is young, slim, hair black as a raven’s wing, still glistening with raindrops. The shoulders of his jacket have been stained dark by the downpour.

The girl’s eyes, cinnamon and clear, open wide in mock incredulity and the dark locks, falling around her face in tight ringlets, tremble with her laughter.

‘You liar,’ she squeals. ‘You pushed me in the ditch because you didn’t like me following you around.’

The boy smiles. ‘We were only six.’

‘Seven,’ the girl corrects him. ‘It was the day after my birthday.’

‘You said you’d tell on me if I didn’t kiss you in front of the other boys.’

Now they both laugh. She grabs his hands.

‘My mum still thinks I slipped.’

A momentary silence falls between them, broken in the end by the boy

‘We could just go,’ he says, awkward now, as if he knows his case is lost. ‘You know, elope.’ His intensity makes the girl laugh again, only this time nervously.

‘Don’t be daft. It’s not like I’m pregnant or anything.’

‘It’s not like it’s illegal,’ the boy presses. ‘We’re both sixteen.’

‘And it’s not like we’re breaking up,’ she says. ‘Two months. Just until the exams are over.’

The boy slumps back in his chair pulling his hands from hers.

‘Exams. What d’you want with those things. I can get work. I can get you all the things you want.’

The desperation in his voice seems to temper the girls response. Her face softens.

‘It’s not like that,’ she says. ‘There’s things I want for myself. I need to do something with my life.’

The boy shrugs. ‘So this is it then.’

‘This is what?’ she asks.

‘You do your exams. Then what? University? That’s more than two months. We’ll never see each other again.’

Now it is the girl’s turn to be intense. She reaches out quickly, snatching his hands and holding on tightly when he tries to pull them away. When she speaks again her voice is firm.

‘Listen to me. You are the only person in this world that I will ever want. I will always follow you around. I can’t even imagine wanting anyone else.’ She feels his hands relax.

‘I suppose two months isn’t that long,’ he concedes.

‘Let’s make a promise,’ she says, excited now. ‘Let’s promise to meet here, eight Saturdays from now.’

The boy looks happier. ‘I promise,’ he says. ‘Eight Saturdays. You’d better be here or I’ll push you back into that ditch.’

At the end of the day, he walks her to the bus stop. It is still raining so he holds his jacket over her head and she walks holding on to him with both arms around his waist.

At the bus stop, she continues to lean into him. They kiss. Not until her bus finally arrives do they reluctantly part but even then the boy is not prepared to let go completely. He steps onto the bus with her.

‘What are you doing,’ she asks. ‘I have to get home.’

‘I’m making sure you keep your promise,’ the boy says. He hands the conductor a handful of change. ‘This is for her fare home.’ He turns to the girl, placing the ticket in her hand. ‘See. Now you have to be there in eight weeks. You owe me.’

And then he was gone.

***

Part 3 - The End

‘You didn’t keep our promise,’ the old woman said, her eyes fixed firmly on his. The shock of recognition had removed Hoffman’s ability to find any words with which to respond. He stood motionless, his face frozen in surprise, the worn bus ticket trembling in his hand, his racing heart refusing to settle.

‘I went back week after week thinking you had got the days wrong,’ she said.

Hoffman felt a weakness in his legs and sat carefully on the edge of her bed. He found it difficult to catch his breath and when he spoke the words came with difficulty.

‘I thought…maybe…I wasn’t good enough for you. You…you had your heart set on your education. What would you want with someone like me? What…what could I ever have given you?’

Her arm stretched along the covers and he felt her hand rest on his.

‘I called at your house,’ she said. ‘Your parents said you’d joined the navy.’

‘They never told me you called.’

‘I made them promise not to.’

‘Why?’ Hoffman asked in disbelief.  ‘Why would you do that?’

‘I thought you’d left because you didn’t want me,’

Hoffman reached over with his free hand so that he now clasped hers within his.

‘I left because I thought I’d lost you because you wanted something that I couldn’t give you. I needed to get away from all the places we used to go. All the places that would never stop reminding me of you.’

For a while they remained motionless, their words used up.

‘Is that your wife,’ she asked after a while. Hoffman nodded. ‘If she is dying you should be with her.’

Hoffman looked over at Imelda long enough to note the stillness of her face and to be sure he could detect the faint rise and fall of her chest.

‘She is sleeping,’ he said. ‘And you, do you have no-one…’

 ‘I never married,’ the old woman said. ‘You where the only one I ever wanted. And yours, has it been a good marriage?’

The words slammed into him like a hail of bullets.

In an instant he understood his need for all the lovers and mistresses that punctuated his marriage to Imelda, and he understood Imelda herself. Every single liaison had been part of the same quest. He had been searching all his life for the girl he had lost on a rainy Saturday morning in a deserted coffee bar and he had not found her, not even in Imelda. His marriage had been little more than a sham. He fought back the watery mist that stung his eyes and held down the sob rising in his throat. After all this time, the answer could only be no, it had not been a good marriage. He could never have loved Imelda as she had loved him. He could never love anyone other than the woman now lying in the hospital bed before him.

‘As good as any marriage could be,’ he said.

The old woman smiled. ‘My mother used to say that what’s for you won’t pass you by. Do you believe that?’

Hoffman shook his head.

‘I believe we can lose things, precious things, even when they are meant for us.’

He felt her hand squeeze his.

‘Now, I am tired,’ she rasped. ‘You must go and sit with your wife a while before it is too late.’

Hoffman leaned forward and kissed her gently on the forehead then he rose and went back to the uncomfortable chair by his wife’s bed. Now, all the guilt that until this moment he had never felt, descended upon him like a giant boulder placed on his shoulders. He felt all the cheating, all the deceptions, every infidelity, tugging and gnawing at his soul like a pack of hyenas. Even now, as his wife’s spark was slowly fading his thoughts were elsewhere, with another woman; the only woman, he knew now, he had ever loved or been capable of loving. He closed his eyes and if anyone had been watching they would have seen his shoulders quivering as he sobbed quietly to himself.

***

‘Mr Hoffman.’ A hand on his shoulder was gently shaking him awake. He opened his eyes. It was the nurse who had brought him the cup of tea when they had first arrived. The curtains had been drawn round the bed and through them he could sense the early morning light spilling onto the ward. Even though she could see he was awake, the nurse continued to rest her hand on his shoulder.

‘I’m so sorry Mr Hoffman but I’m afraid your wife has gone. She passed away in her sleep. It would have been very peaceful.’ She handed him some tissues. ‘I’ll leave you alone with her for a while,’ she said softly.

Alone with his wife, Hoffman knelt by her bed, rested his head on her chest and asked her forgiveness. He had thought her passing would release him from the guilt of his infidelity. Only now did he understand that the guilt he felt would remain with him until the end of days. There had been another woman in his life, and always had been but he had been too much of a coward to admit it, even to himself. Having asked forgiveness of Imelda he knew he must also ask forgiveness of the one woman he had ever loved. Perhaps too, in their final days they could ease each other’s loneliness.

He rose and pulled aside the curtain. The next bed was empty and stripped bare.

A nurse he did not recognise was gathering the contents of the bedside cabinet.

‘She went during the night too,’ the nurse said when she saw him staring at the empty bed. ‘I’m really sorry. The nurse on night duty said you sat with her for a while during the night. That was really kind of you. She didn’t get any visitors. Did you know her? I always think it’s so sad when people have to die alone, don’t you?’

Hoffman felt a sudden tightening of his chest and the ward began rotating slowly around him. He threw out an arm to steady himself but there was nothing there and he felt himself falling.

***

Epilogue

Now the nurse is kneeling beside him, cradling his head. Her lips move but he cannot hear her voice. The light grows dim and somewhere Hoffman hears a jukebox playing.

“You made me cry when you said goodbye
Ain't that a shame
My tears fell like rain
Ain't that a shame
You're the one to blame”