The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  “Oh, dear.” Paulette didn’t catch what the something was; she was looking at her son. He had always favored the McKotch side, not the Drews; his features weren’t as fine as Billy’s, but somehow this made him more attractive. He had the kind of blunt, masculine good looks Frank had, minus the luxuriant hair. In recent years she’d noticed Scott’s hairline receding, which saddened her. Perhaps to hide his bald spot, he’d grown his hair long and shaggy. She guessed he hadn’t had a haircut in months.

  “It happened back on the pike. We’re lucky we made it.” He bent to kiss her cheek. A stiff wind blew through the open doorway.

  “Oh dear,” she said again, eyeing the flowers on the hall table. The icy wind could be devastating to her orchids. “That’s unfortunate. But, darling, you need to close the door.”

  “Just a sec. Guys, are you coming?” he shouted out to the van. “Grandma wants to close the door.” He turned to his mother. “Where’s Bill?”

  Paulette and Gwen exchanged glances.

  “Your brother’s running late,” said Paulette. She was certain it had been Billy’s car they’d spotted. Why on earth had he run away?

  PAULETTE BROUGHT out platters of oysters and laid them on the table. At the center of the table was the steaming soup tureen and the pink poinsettia (its plastic pot covered in purple foil) that Scott’s wife had brought. Paulette had accepted it graciously, moving aside the nineteenth-century Scroddleware pitcher and bowl that usually occupied its place.

  The family assembled around the table: Billy at the head and Paulette at the foot, the children and Gwen on one side and Scott and Penny on the other. “Heavens, you look chilly,” Paulette said to her daughter-in-law, who invariably showed up in a summer blouse; after three years in Connecticut, the girl still didn’t own a sweater.

  Billy rose to fill their glasses with a lovely pinot gris he’d picked up at the wine shop in town. So that’s where you ran off to, Paulette said when he explained. Your father was so disappointed.

  Sorry I missed him, said Billy. Maybe next time.

  “This is delicious, Mother,” he said, and everyone agreed. Sabrina, uncommonly helpful, cleared the soup bowls while Paulette brought in the goose she’d stuffed that morning. She did not explain that the rest of the meal—the gingered carrot soup, roasted vegetables, a nice crusty bread—had come from a gourmet shop in town. Years ago such cheating would have been unimaginable. Paulette was an excellent cook, and during her marriage she’d entertained a great deal. Her grandmother’s table seated eight comfortably—ten if Frank, amid much cursing, put in the extra leaf. Now, cooking for a crowd was out of the question. Scott’s children were picky eaters, and Gwen, as always, ate like a bird. Both her sons loved her cooking, but could polish off a meal—an entire day’s work—in ten minutes. Altogether it seemed more trouble than it was worth.

  “You’ll never guess whom I saw at the symphony,” she told Billy as he cut into the Yule log. “Your old friend Lauren McGregor.”

  Billy handed Scott a slice of cake. “No kidding. She’s in Boston?” He blinked twice, rapidly, but his face was impassive. Billy never lost his composure, but Paulette knew her son.

  “Andover, I believe. Her husband works downtown. He’s a banker of some kind.”

  “I didn’t know she was married.”

  Paulette eyed him intently, surprised by the shift in his voice. “Oh, yes. And they have two children.”

  “No kidding,” Billy said again.

  “I wish you could have seen her,” Paulette added impulsively. “Really, she hasn’t aged a day. She was always a beautiful girl.” Why was it so easy, now, to say this? Because it was all in the past, the girl safely married to someone else?

  “She was hot,” Scott agreed. “You blew that one, Bill.”

  “I suppose I did,” Billy said mildly, unflappable to the end. “Well, good for Lauren.” He nodded across the table to Gwen. “What happened to your glasses?”

  “Your sister had her vision corrected,” Paulette said. “Doesn’t she look wonderful?”

  “Wow,” Billy said. “What prompted that?”

  “I’m taking a trip,” Gwen said. “To Saint Raphael.”

  Paulette looked at her, flabbergasted. “Gwen, that’s marvelous. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Mother, I just got here.” Gwen turned her attention to her plate, picking at her cake.

  Paulette chose to ignore her surly tone. It was just like Gwen to bore them with talk about work when something truly interesting was about to happen. She couldn’t decide whether Gwen did this on purpose, or simply couldn’t help it. Maybe she truly didn’t know what was interesting and what was not. It made Paulette wonder what else Gwen wasn’t telling.

  “There’s great scuba diving down there,” said Scott, his mouth full. Since marrying Penny, his table manners had degenerated gravely. Paulette couldn’t understand it, particularly since Penny’s, surprisingly, weren’t all that bad.

  “That’s why I’m going,” said Gwen.

  Paulette frowned. Gwen’s interest in scuba diving had always alarmed her. She blamed it entirely on Frank, who for Gwen’s eighteenth birthday had paid for scuba classes at the YMCA. She loves the water, he’d told Paulette, by way of justification. Jesus Christ, Paulette. It’s the only thing she loves.

  “You’re diving without me?” said Billy.

  “What am I supposed to do, wait until you retire?”

  For several years Gwen and Billy had taken an annual dive trip together, giving Paulette nightmares. She’d been relieved when Billy, busy with his practice, discontinued the tradition. If God had meant her children to breathe underwater, he’d have given them gills.

  “Goodness, how adventurous,” she said lightly. “And you’ll be traveling with…?”

  “Nobody,” Gwen said. “I’m going alone.”

  Paulette set down her fork. “Do you think that’s wise?”

  Gwen shrugged. “I have a week of vacation coming. Use it or lose it. It expires March first.”

  “But, dear.” Paulette forced herself to smile. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to take a girlfriend along?”

  Gwen seemed to consider this seriously. “I don’t think so,” she said finally. “I think I’d have a better time by myself.”

  “Well, I just don’t think it’s safe,” said Paulette. “Scuba diving alone!”

  “I wouldn’t be alone.” Gwen spoke extra slowly, as though Paulette were a cretin. “There’s a whole group, and a dive master.”

  “What in heaven’s name is that?”

  “An instructor, Mom. Geez. You act like I’m going up on the space shuttle.”

  Her grandson laughed. Dishes were passed.

  The scene at the table seemed eternal: each in his usual chair, Grandmother Drew’s silver and china. The wineglasses had been a wedding present. Like the platters, the soup tureen, they’d outlasted the marriage they were meant to commemorate. As they raised their glasses to toast the season, it struck Paulette that she had been divorced for twenty years.

  The thought returned to her later as she rinsed the glasses at the sink. A strange feeling gripped her. Her heart raced; for just a moment the lights seemed to dim. She thought of her own life slipping away, her family dissolving and disappearing; little Gwen carried off, swallowed up; the sharks and octopi surrounding her, humans who resembled them waiting on shore.

  Paulette closed her eyes. She’d experienced such spells before. Her doctor called them panic attacks, though Paulette wasn’t so sure. The night before her father died, she’d felt a premonition not unlike this one; she’d known with a deep certainty that the end was near. Her father had been old and sickly, and there was nothing to be done; but this case, surely, was different. She ought to take action. She ought to call someone. She thought, irrationally, of the carpenter Gil Pyle, whose business was fixing things. Perhaps he would know what to do.

  It’s Christmas Eve, she told herself. Reasonable people were occupied with their fami
lies. Besides, what on earth would she say?

  Gwen is going to the Caribbean all by herself. Something terrible is going to happen.

  Breathing deeply seemed to help, and in a few minutes the feeling passed. When it did, she dialed Frank’s number. Gwen had always—well, sometimes—listened to her father. Predictably, there was no answer. She supposed he was spending the night elsewhere. Or entertaining a woman at home, too busy to pick up the phone.

  GIL PYLE could fix things.

  Of the Battle Road reenactors—the lawyers and schoolteachers and history buffs—Pyle alone looked convincing in his costume. He was a lean, wiry man, with a scruffy blond beard and work-scarred hands. In his breeches and rough coat, he seemed battered by the long Colonial winters, but determined to endure. He’s a miracle worker, said Barbara Marsh next door, who’d hired him to redo her clapboards. The Marshes’ house was even older than Paulette’s; without Pyle’s repeated interventions, Barbara claimed, it would long ago have crumbled to the ground.

  Paulette had hired him to save her kitchen, the floor that listed alarmingly downward; more and more, she felt as though she were cooking in the galley of a boat. The job would take a few weeks, Pyle told her, a month at the outside. The prospect alarmed her. She dreaded the disruption, the inevitable noise and dust. The presence of a stranger in her house.

  Pyle’s truck had arrived each morning at dawn. Paulette dragged herself out of bed, muzzy and disoriented, to open the back door—her hair disheveled, her unmoisturized face puffy from sleep. She would marvel, later, that she’d allowed him to see her in this condition, but at the time she’d been too groggy to care. She went back to bed, but Pyle’s boots were loud, his radio audible through the floorboards. When she appeared later, dressed and groomed, he called her into the kitchen often, handed her a tape measure or instructed her to hold a board in place. My helper quit on me, he explained. I need an extra pair of hands.

  She stood there awkwardly, watching Pyle heft and hammer. His plaid shirts were frayed at the cuffs and spattered with paint. She remembered how, as a teenager, her son Scott had bought brand-new dungarees with designer holes in the knees, a look she deplored. But Gil Pyle’s clothing was battered by work, and this made its condition honorable. Made it, even, attractive.

  As he worked, Pyle asked questions. How long had she lived in the house? From whom had she bought it? Did she know what year it was built? Paulette did know, naturally; she told him about Josiah Hobhouse, the Concord abolitionists, the Hobhouse descendants who’d inhabited the place ever since. You know your stuff, Pyle said, and asked more questions. She found herself talking about her childhood home in Newton, the long-lost Drew properties in Truro and New Bedford. Talking, for some reason, about the Mount Washington Glass Company, the exquisite urns and pitchers she’d purchased; the elusive other pieces—the Scroddleware and Hall—she coveted but had yet to find.

  Let’s see them, Pyle said, a request that astonished her. Not now, but when I’m done. And at four o’clock, when he’d finished for the day, they sat on the floor of the back bedroom as Paulette took vases and pitchers from their boxes.

  You could use some shelves in here, Pyle said. I could line the floor with cork, in case you drop something. To cushion the fall.

  I never drop anything, she said seriously. She hadn’t meant to be coquettish, but Pyle broke into a grin.

  I’ll bet you don’t, he said.

  His concern for her treasures touched her profoundly. She wouldn’t have expected a man like Pyle to care about antiques. In this way they were startlingly similar: they saw value in the past, in what had come before. Pyle spoke lovingly of the houses he’d restored, the vast cottages in Newport, the summer places on the Vineyard and the Cape. He’d spent years in the Army and had traveled widely in Germany, Belgium, France especially. To see the churches, he said. I like the way they’re built.

  Then it was Paulette’s turn to ask questions. She learned that Pyle had backpacked through Vietnam and Thailand, slept on Turkish beaches, driven a dilapidated Jeep around the horn of Africa. It dawned on her then, how much of the world she would never see, how many places were off-limits to a solitary woman. The thought filled her with sadness. Not necessarily, Pyle said when she expressed this. You just need someone to travel with.

  He worked at her house through the summer: the kitchen, the cork flooring, the shelves. His tools and scrap lumber took up residence in her backyard, terminally covered with a layer of sawdust. Then, in September, he told her he’d be leaving in two weeks: he spent winters in Florida, he explained, to be near his children. The boys’ mother was a woman he’d never married, a woman he described fondly: Sharon’s terrific. We’re still close.

  The name—Sharon—affected Paulette strangely. She took offense. Suddenly Gil Pyle’s past seemed crowded with women, the ex-wives and girlfriends he mentioned casually, frequently, as though Paulette were an army pal or a drinking buddy. Wrinkled, sexless, all but irrelevant. A former woman, neutered by age.

  “What’s the matter?” Pyle asked, sensing her upset. And to her surprise, he took her hands in his.

  In that moment a door opened, and Paulette glimpsed what lay behind it. She might have said anything, done anything; she might easily have walked through. Instead reason overcame her. Gil Pyle was a drifter, rootless, nearly homeless; he lived outdoors, in his truck, on other people’s floors and couches. And he was only a few years older than her son Billy. Gil Pyle was young.

  “Not a thing,” she said briskly, meeting his eyes. “I appreciate the notice. I assume you’ll finish building the shelves before you go?”

  “Sure.” Pyle frowned, blinked, released her hands. Abruptly the door closed.

  Now months had passed, with no word from him. She had no reason to expect otherwise. Yet when panic squeezed her heart and choked her throat, it was Gil Pyle’s hands she remembered. Why this should be, Paulette did not know.

  In Cambridge, snow blanketed the sidewalk. Frank drove in second gear. Whether because of the snow or the holiday, the streets were nearly empty. A single car passed his, its headlights bright. Judging by the sky, it could have been midnight, or three in the morning. His watch said 5:15.

  At certain times in his life, he had loved the early dark. When he and Paulette were newlyweds, it had simply meant more nighttime; when he came home from the lab they went directly to bed. More recently, he’d come home to find the windows bright, music blasting, Deena Maddux barefoot in the kitchen, singing and cooking dinner. Without her he found the dark evenings depressing, his few entertainments—TV, reading, booze—inadequate distractions. Most nights he fled the house to meet Margit for a movie. But he had seen everything playing at the Kendall. And Margit was on a plane to Stockholm, to spend Christmas with her children.

  He drove slowly through Harvard Square. He considered ducking into the Harvard Book Store to warm himself, spend half an hour browsing through the used books downstairs. But the store, when he passed it, was closed, security lights glowing in the windows. Out of Town News was shuttered, its corrugated doors pulled shut. The Harvard Coop was dark; so were the cafés, the trendy clothing stores with unisex mannequins in the windows. A feeling of panic washed over him. For the next thirty-six hours, all his usual haunts would be closed. There was nowhere to go but home.

  He parked on the street opposite his house, eyeing the dark windows, the front steps buried in snow. Last winter, he’d been fined twice by the city of Cambridge for failing to clear the sidewalk. He climbed the stairs and turned his key in the lock. Since Deena’s departure, the living room had become an extension of his office. Books overflowed the shelves; he’d begun stacking them on end tables, the floor, the stairs. There were piles of scientific journals, notebooks, and manuscript pages; a year’s worth of Time and Newsweek, and the dull, edifying magazines—The Economist, Atlantic Monthly—he subscribed to but did not read.

  He flicked on a lamp and moved a pile of journals from his favorite chair. On top, a ba
ttered copy of Endocrinology—he’d subscribed for years, ever since Gwen was diagnosed. Oh, hell: He’d meant to find out—delicately, of course—whether she was seeing a doctor, taking the all-important estrogen. Neil Windsor was right. Estrogen was crucial for preserving bone density, for heart health. Not to mention the unmentionables: to keep vaginal tissue healthy, elastic and lubricated. Was this a part of her body Gwen even thought about? His daughter was thirty-four years old, yet to his knowledge, she’d never had a boyfriend.

  Was it possible that she was still a virgin?

  Was it possible that she was not?

  Both scenarios were hard to imagine—in fact, equally so. Yet one of them, necessarily, was true.

  For a time, when Gwen was in her teens, he’d been closely involved in her treatment. He’d had her enrolled in a clinical trial of oxandrolone, an anabolic steroid they hoped would stimulate growth. When that proved unsuccessful, he got her started on estrogen. They’d waited until she was sixteen—the eleventh hour—to give the oxandrolone time to work; once a girl started estrogen, gains in height were impossible. They had gambled and lost. The steroid had had no effect.

  The decision haunted him. He had kept up with the literature; he knew that the protocols had changed. Now estrogen was started earlier, at twelve or thirteen. This helped build bone density in the early teens, a crucial moment in skeletal development. Had they done Gwen a disservice by waiting so long? Had they endangered her tiny bones? He imagined his daughter many years hence, hunched and fragile from osteoporosis. Had his decision put her in jeopardy? It was too terrible to contemplate. And Frank would by dead by then. He would never know.

  He set aside the Endocrinology and tossed another stack of magazines into the recycling bin—since Deena’s departure, it had taken up residence in the middle of the living room. Early estrogen had other benefits. It improved social maturation, which had clearly been delayed in Gwen’s case. She’d been a child at sixteen: unnaturally attached to her mother, afraid of the entire world. Paulette had aggravated the problem by treating Gwen according to her size, not her age, a common mistake. The estrogen hadn’t changed her much physically, not in any visible way. It was her attitude that changed. Frank had never seen a more cogent illustration of the power of endocrinology. Not immediately, but slowly, Gwen seemed to take charge of her life: changing schools, moving far away from Concord, demanding that Frank teach her to drive.