He put his arm around my shoulder and drew me to the group in the sitting area, and said, “Well, I don’t think we’re going to lose him for a while after all. His vitals are much more stable all of a sudden, and he’s breathing on his own, and his EKG is nearly normal again. He’s still profoundly paralyzed; I don’t think that’s going to change, though I can’t say for sure at this point. He could fool us; he sure has me, tonight. But unless he has another massive stroke—and that’s always possible, of course, especially now—I think he’s going to make it. This time.”
Lucy began to cry in earnest, and I handed her over to Jack, who put his arm around her and drew her over to the window with him, away from the group. Dorothy and Ben Cameron smiled and stood and stretched, and Dorothy kissed me and Ben gave me a small, stiff, wordless hug, and my aunt Willa rose and came over to me and kissed my cheek as if we did that sort of thing routinely, and said, in the candied voice that had long since replaced her wire-grass cat’s squall, “Hello, Shep dear. What good news, isn’t it? You brought him luck. I’ll go call Olivia right now, and then you must go on home and see her. She’s wanted nobody but you since this happened.”
“I’ll go home in a little while, Aunt Willa,” I said. “I want to see Dad first, if I can.” I looked questioningly at Hub Dorsey, and he nodded.
“For a minute. I’ll go back in with you.”
I walked over to Sarah then, and stood before her with absolutely no idea what I was going to say. I had not seen her since her marriage, indeed, not since that terrible night at the beginning of the summer, at the Plaza, and no words formed in my brain or on my lips. I simply looked at her. It seemed to me that she was much thinner than when I had last seen her; a thinness that seemed more an atrophy of her fine, taut swimmer’s muscles than any loss of flesh. Her faint year-round tan had faded to a sallowness I had never seen before, and the circles under her amber eyes were a deep saffron. Her thick, dark brows were untidy. I wondered if she had been ill. She put her hand up, tentatively, and touched my cheek, and I noticed, over the trip hammering of my heart, that it was as cold as Lucy’s, and that for the first time since I had known her, there were no faint half-moons of paint under her nails. I covered her hand with my own and said, “Hello, Sarah. It was good of you to come.”
“Oh, Shep,” she said, and the rich voice was the same, warming my heart even as it smote it, “of course I came. How could I not? This is my day for the mail cart, and I stayed on till you came. I wanted to see you before I went home.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “Is Charlie around?”
She laughed, and the laugh was the same, too, simply Sarah’s and no other.
“No, he’s at the office again for the third time this week. Mr. Woodruff has a new project going, and everybody’s hopping to over there. He says to give you his love and he’ll see you tomorrow, and he especially says to get you over to the house for dinner as soon as you can come.”
“Where do you live?” I said. It seemed an insane thing to ask, but I realized that I did not know.
“We have a little house on Greystone, about a block down from Ben and Julia,” she said. “I think Ben hates having his little sister right under his nose, but he can’t say so. They’re having a baby just any minute now—did anybody tell you? Everybody you know lives in Collier Hills, Shep, or nearby. Snake and Lelia are one street over on Meredith, and Pres and Sarton are looking at a house on Walthall, and Tom and Freddie are in Colonial Homes, just a minute away. When Christmas is over and things have calmed down for you a little, I want to get us all together at a little party for you….”
“I’d like that,” I said, knowing that I could not bear it, but secure in the knowledge that I would be two thousand miles away in Vermont before she could possibly put a party together. “You look fine, Sarah….”
“I look like twelve miles of bad road, and you know it,” she said, grinning. “But it’s temporary. Well. Go on in and see your dad. I don’t have to tell you how glad we are that he’s getting better.”
“Me, too,” I said, and kissed her cheek, which was as cold as her hands. The light, lemony Ma Griffe that she loved met and enfolded me. I turned to Hub Dorsey.
“Let’s go,” he said.
We walked through the swinging doors and down the hall toward the nurses’ station, the smell of illness and its electronic heartbeat filling my nose and ears. Mortality winked on overhead screens; death dodged somewhere just out of my sight, starched and antisepticized almost into respectability, but still there, and stinking.
“You said you think he’s going to make it,” I said. “Is that the lowdown, or was that for Lucy and Aunt Willa’s sake?”
“No,” he said. “I think he probably will make it. I also think he’ll probably be sorry he did…if he’s able to think anything at all. There’s no way of telling now what kind of brain damage we’re talking about, and there won’t be, for some time. He could be relatively clear, or simply a vegetable. And as I said, the physical trauma is massive. He can move one hand and the toes of one foot, and he can turn his head from side to side. He can’t, of course, speak, and I very much doubt that he ever will be able to. But as I say, he could fool us all. He must have the constitution of a mastodon.”
My father looked so much like a wax dummy hooked up, for teaching purposes, to an astonishing array of machines and monitors that his plight simply did not seem real to me, and so, standing at the side of his criblike bed and staring down at him, I felt nothing at all except a kind of mild wonder that he looked so small. In the ghastly green half-light from the dials and screens, shrouded in his white hospital gown, wires snaking off and out of him, I thought that he looked like nothing so much as one of the hapless insects who blunder into the webs of the beautiful big autumn writing spiders we have in the South, the Argiope, and are immediately mummified in white silk and sucked to papery husks. He was breathing on his own, a thin, peevish wheezing that moved his chest up and down, and one eye was open, blue and furious, focused on the ceiling. The other was closed, and his half-closed mouth was twisted as if in suppressed laughter, or the beginnings of tears. His arms were pinioned to his sides with straps, and he was strapped into the bed, too.
“Why is he strapped in like that if he can’t move?” I said. “I don’t see how he could get over those side rails even if he could.”
“Another stroke could convulse him so it would pitch him right out of there,” Hub Dorsey said. “I heard the one he had almost doubled him up in a backward somersault on the golf course.”
The image of my father flopping gymnastically on the velvety green at Brookhaven was both terrible and funny, and I swallowed hard to suppress the crazy, forbidden laughter that bubbled in my chest.
“Another stroke…could he have another one?”
“He almost certainly will have another one,” Hub said. “If not now, sooner or later. It’s what will kill him, most likely, if he doesn’t go into pneumonia from this one. It could be tonight or ten years from now, or even twenty. Most likely he’ll have a series of small strokes, so tiny that you may not be aware he’s having them; transient ischemic attacks, we call them. They can go on for a very long time. Or as I say, another big one could come along and that will be it.”
“Ten years,” I said, looking at the intubated corpus of my father but seeing the red and blond giant who bulked over my childhood. “Or twenty…”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s why I said he’ll probably be sorry if he makes it, and you all will come to be sorry, too. It’s no kind of life, Shep. I vote for the pneumonia, myself. Any doctor would. We don’t call it the old man’s friend for nothing. All things considered, it’s a good way to go out.”
“Christ,” I said under my breath. How could he stand here beside this wrecked man, clinging so hideously and wonderfully to his ruined life, and speak of good ways to go out?
He put his arm around me again. “No doctor is reconciled to death, Shep, but we’re ev
en less reconciled to what can be its alternative. That is not your father and my friend there, strapped in that crib like a deformed old baby. That’s a mutant and an embarrassment. An accident. That was meant to die. The man did die, two days ago on the golf course. You’re going to have no joy in what’s left, I can assure you. Olivia is going to have even less. I ask you now, if pneumonia does set in, to let me leave orders that no life-sustaining measures be taken. And I advise you now that if he does linger on to put him in a nursing home as soon as he leaves the hospital. If he can be rehabilitated, they can do it better than we or anybody else can. If he can’t, at least there will be a chance of a life for Olivia and you.”
“I don’t know what Mother will want to do….” I began.
“She wants to do what you want. She’s already told me that you will make whatever decisions have to be made. I think she just wants to have it over, Shep, and believe me, the best thing is to let him go if he possibly can, and to put him in a home if he can’t.”
An endless white fatigue washed over me, so powerful that I almost buckled under it. My knees shook, and my head began a long, slow spin. He saw it, and took me by the arm and steered me out of the room.
“Let’s go get some coffee and maybe a bite to eat,” he said. “The cafeteria’s open, or the drugstore across the street. Or we can run on up to Biuso’s. I bet you drove straight through. When did you last eat?”
“No, I had a lot of sleep last night, and a good lunch,” I said. The dizziness was ebbing. “I think I’ll go on home now. Is my mother all right? Aunt Willa said she wasn’t able to come to the hospital.”
“She’s all right now, I think,” he said. “She was pretty hysterical when it first happened. I’ve kept her fairly well sedated. But right at first…I don’t know. Crying, and laughing…I’ve never seen her like that. I didn’t think it of her, somehow. It must have been a closer relationship than I thought it was, if you’ll forgive me for saying so….”
I raised my hand. I didn’t blame him for thinking it. I was surprised at my mother’s reaction, too. I would have said that practically nothing but proximity and long habit and the complex family real estate holdings were left of whatever ties had originally bound them. But then, I thought, I was the last person in the world to qualify as an expert on the relationships of others. I did not think that I would ever again be surprised at another man’s love. Or another woman’s.
“I’ll think about the nursing home,” I said. “Meanwhile, if it should come to that, no machines and no respirators, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Good boy. Good man. I’m really sorry about this, Shep. It’s tough on an only son when he stands to lose his dad.”
“Thanks, Hub,” I said. “I’ll be okay. It’s Mother I’m worried about.” I turned away so he could not see my face, read there the traitorous absence of grief.
“She’ll be all right now that you’re home,” he said. “She’s asked for you constantly for the past two days. You’re going to be just what she needs to get her through this.”
I thought of the white hills of Vermont, the old pile of brown Gothic bricks waiting for me at Haddonfield, the slow, deep, sweet new measure of time and days that would be mine to slip into. I was more determined than ever not to miss the beginning of the new term. I had already decided what I would do: I would find a good nursing home for my father, instruct Tom Carmichael, my father’s corporate attorney, to find a good business manager as soon as possible, break the news of these decisions to my mother and leave again before the new year dawned on the city. I knew it could all be done, even on the shortest of notice, even at Christmas, simply because I knew what the sort of money my father commanded could do. If necessary, I knew that Ben Cameron would help me. All the newly powerful men of Buckhead would. If my mother objected, I realized that I was quite capable of stealing silently out of the summerhouse with my bags in the dawn before she was awake. I would do what had to be done, and I would do it fast, and then I would be gone. I had known at the first sight of Sarah’s pinched white face that I could not stay here.
I got the U-Haul out of the parking lot and drove back north on Peachtree Road. It was nearly ten o’clock in the evening now, but the river of automobile lights and the glare of neon on the road limned the landscape as clearly as at sunset. I realized, suddenly, that those lights had not been here when I left Atlanta for Princeton. This stretch of Peachtree Road had been dark then, except for streetlights and a few pale smears of neon where an occasional unprepossessing restaurant, Johnny Escoe’s or Rusty’s or Vittorio’s, crouched among the big old houses and dense trees. Now many of the small forests were gone, and raw, square new two-and three-story commercial buildings shouldered in among the offended houses, and many of the houses themselves wore the discreet signage of businesses: insurance companies, law and dentist’s offices, regional or branch or sales offices of national concerns. Filling stations and dry cleaners and liquor stores winked their availability at this holiday season, and a madly improbable Polynesian restaurant with a thatched roof and a listing, enormous outrigger canoe occupied the curve across from the hospital. Its sign proclaimed it the Kon Tiki, and someone had—whimsically, I hoped—set up a manager scene and crèche on its minuscule lawn, beside the outrigger. One great, yawing plastic camel seemed in the act of planting a splayed foot in the canoe. Once again I bit back the madman’s urge to laugh aloud. I thought that once I got started, there was no power on earth that could stop me, and I knew that it would never do to walk into the beautiful house at 2500 Peachtree Road, now a house of sorrow, braying my laughter like an infidel.
Always, as long as I could remember, the great, fan-lighted white front door of 2500 had worn, at Christmas, a simple green boxwood wreath with a red velvet bow, fashioned at my mother’s direction by Weinstock’s Florist over on Roswell Road. Shem Cater put up the spotlight that showcased it the week before each Christmas, and with the austere grace of the Federal door itself and the fan- and sidelights and the slender Ionic columns of the portico, it was as dignified and lovely a Christmas door as there was in Atlanta, far more so than the cheerful, rococo and more approachable excesses of Ansley Park and Garden Hills and the Governor’s Mansion. It suited the simple American Georgian lines of the house and the ornate, symmetrical iron fence surrounding it, as exquisitely as everything else my mother set her hand to. The sight of it now, gleaming out of the cold mist, touched my heart with a jet of warmth and peace, and I instinctively pulled the U-Haul around back to the stable-garages, rather than leave it, blotlike, on the semicircular front drive. Shem Cater must have been looking out for me, because he was at the back door of the little latticed summer porch before I could reach for the knob. For once, Martha was beside him. He pumped my hand and said, “Glad you’s home, Mr. Shep, glad to see you,” and old Martha gave me a fierce, brief hug and said, “It about time, Shep. Git in here out’n the cold fo’ you freezes us out.” Martha never had, in all her life or mine, called me Mr. Shep. The dark, intricate, clean-ash smell of them enfolded me and I was, vividly and inalterably, home.
My mother was waiting for me, not in the little glassed sun porch that was our winter sitting room, or in her and my father’s upstairs bedroom, but in the living room. I could not ever remember my parents’ sitting there when there was not company in the house, and I felt, walking into the vast room with its apricot-washed plaster walls and its distinctive ivory wood moldings, like an intruder, a Vandal or a Visigoth come to sack and plunder. I was very conscious, all of a sudden, of my travel-stained clothing and the fact that I had not had a bath since I left New York. My beard stubble was blond and invisible, but in that cold, beautiful blue, apricot and cream room, it felt as though it brushed my knees, rank and Hasidic.
My mother sat on one of the pair of satin brocade sofas flanking the great gray Italian marble fireplace and mantel. The enormous baroque wood overmantel and chimney piece gave the room its focus, and my mother, in a dark red velvet robe which echoed th
e darkest of the faded colors in the old Oriental rugs, looked like a medieval duchess, or like Guinevere receiving the prisoners her husband’s knights brought back from their quests for her dispensation. The enormous decorated Fraser fir that shone before the curtained Palladian windows, a twin to the one in the hall rotunda, and the light from the leaping fire were the sole sources of illumination in the room, and she needed only a small Italian greyhound curled at her feet to complete the picture of somber medieval splendor. The smell of the fire’s heat on the drying needles of the tree, and the fragrant pine and smilax garlands on the mantel and the stair in the rotunda, and my mother’s bittersweet perfume seemed somehow heavier and more piercing in the vast, warm, fire-leaping semidarkness.
“Shep, darling,” she said softly, not rising, but holding out both hands to me. I went and sat beside her on the sofa and took them, and she laid her forehead lightly on my shoulder and sat there, still and quiet, so that I finally had no recourse but to put my arm around her shoulders and hold her. For what seemed a very long time, we sat so, not moving, neither of us speaking, I because I could not think of anything to say and her musk and nearness dried my mouth, she because of whatever obscure mother-son game she was playing. On the whole, I did not mind the silence and stillness so much. It was better than the hysterical laughter and tears Hub Dorsey had spoken of.
She raised her head and looked at me, and I saw that her dark sloe eyes were perfectly made up, and had the flat, high glitter of fever in them. Two hectic spots of color burned in her white face, and she had put on lipstick that matched perfectly the supple fall of silk velvet that she wore. Her lightless black hair was pulled back into a severe bun on her neck; she had worn it so since the war, and in a world gone bulbous with Jackie Kennedy bouffants and beehives, she looked sinuous and Art Deco-ish, an elegant thirties blacksnake in a flock of peeping golden biddies. The look suited her; it always had. Creamy freshwater pearl buttons gleamed at her fleshy little ears, but other than those and her wedding rings, she wore no jewelry.
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