But if I didn’t believe in my work, how could I expect anyone else to?
I pulled the coffin photo from my refrigerator—not the one of just me, but the one of all of us—and I set it in a splash of moonlight on the coffee table. I clicked on the lamp and began making notes in my journal: What is Risa most embarrassed about or ashamed of? What little gesture does she make frequently, and does she realize it, and would she stop doing it if she did? What one thing about her seems to contradict everything else? And why in the world is she out poking into the disappearance of a nun rather than, say, living in a nice home in Palo Alto with two children and a husband, friends she meets every Wednesday in the park—or the early sixteenth-century Roman equivalent?
Because the dead nun was one of Risa’s closest friends, that was the answer, of course. A friend who would have done anything for her. One who, if she had given her promise not to talk of a thing, would not go back on it even in the name of trying to help.
In the dark of the night, I made twelve pages of character sketch: what Risa did when she awoke in the morning, her favorite food, what her ideal man looked like, what made her laugh and what her laughter sounded like, which was very like Kath’s most uninhibited laugh, and whether she, like me, sometimes laughed so hard she had to cross her legs lest she wet herself. I cut out magazine pictures to help me imagine what she looked like—dark hair like this picture, like Ally’s; eyes shaped like this woman’s, but the same green as mine; trim and petite like Brett, but with stocky hands and sturdy wrists; freckles on her nose like Brett, too, when the beauty standards of the time demanded none. Then I turned to Risa’s friend, the nun, finding no need of magazine photos to imagine her: her face was there in my mind, her eyes the sea blue of Sister Josephine’s, the brows above them as straight and expressive as Linda’s, the brows of a woman who would put herself smack-dab in the middle of the worst poverty, doing all she could to ease the pain of strangers that Risa, sequestered in her comfortable villa, couldn’t imagine how to help. And when I’d finished with the nun, I slid clean paper and carbons into the typewriter carriage, and I typed at the top of the first page “Chapter 1.”
That’s where I was—sitting with my old manuscript and my scribbles of character sketches, scraping the carbon copies of a misspelled word with a razor to avoid retyping the whole page—when I looked up and saw Danny standing in the doorway, watching me. The sun was coming up already. I’d been working all night.
I looked down at my writing, stark black letters on white. At the coffin photo beside my typewriter, me in my glasses, though usually I took them off the moment I saw a camera.
“I . . . I’m writing,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and I saw in his expression that he’d stood here before, watching me so lost in what I was writing that I didn’t even know he was there.
He smiled slightly. “In that first little apartment back in Chicago, you always sat in my seat, where the edge of the card table was peeling. I thought you’d given it up, though, before we moved here.”
He didn’t ask why I’d never told him, didn’t put me on the spot. He only looked at me like I was a gift he’d just opened, the surprise he’d known was there all along under the wrapping and the bow, but that didn’t matter because it was exactly what he wanted. “And what, pray tell, are you writing?” he asked. “If you’re willing to tell?”
I didn’t say it was my gift to Linda, my prayer for her; I’m not sure I even saw at the time that it was, that the nun had become more and more like Linda in my notes, that I was trying to capture Linda’s frankness and her generosity and her fear. But I told him the gist of the story, bungling the description badly. Still, Danny said he couldn’t wait to read it. I would let him read it, wouldn’t I? And while I was worrying that one—Would he like it? Would he see himself in any of it?—he called me “the future famous novelist, Frankie O’Mara.” It was like when I’d told Bob about my novel at the holiday party, only better, and I wondered if this was something Danny had learned from watching Bob, from admiring him, or if he’d always been like this.
I told Danny I wanted to publish under Mary Frances, my way of saying that was my dream, to be published, without having to say it directly. He responded with an easy “What about M.F.? Or M. Frances? Men won’t realize you’re a woman. You’ll get more male readers that way.”
Readers. A word Bob had used, too, in that Christmas-party conversation: “Will you meet your readers, or will you be one of these famous recluses people want so badly to know?”
“It’s the weirdest thing,” I said, and I hadn’t planned to tell Danny this any more than I’d planned to spill my dreams to Bob at that party, but I wanted him to know suddenly, I didn’t want to have anything to hide from him. “The first time I met Bob, last December? I told him I was writing. I don’t even know why.”
“Bob?”
“Bob Noyce.”
Danny laughed uneasily, with the oddest expression behind his black-rimmed glasses, an expression that looked so like Maggie when she was about to cry. He focused on my page in the typewriter, the carbons flopped forward where I’d been correcting my mistake.
“Bob has that effect on people,” he said, light words, but something in the hesitation before he spoke left me thinking of Bob and his mask designer, the Purple-Jesus-cocktails-and-airplane-views gal. I wondered if she’d fallen in love with Bob, or if it was the image of herself she saw in his mind that had turned her head. I wondered if she was married, if her husband had seen them together. I imagined her husband feeling betrayed by the simple act of his wife having a conversation with Bob, across the room. I wondered if he’d asked what they had talked about, and if she’d answered, and if her husband, seeing how she felt with Bob even if she’d never slept with him, even if she never imagined she would, had gathered his pride and left her, without warning, maybe, without any idea at all why he’d left.
LINDA WAS THE LAST of us to arrive the following Wednesday, and she looked awful. As little as I’d slept that week, she must have slept even less. We all wanted to say something about it, you could see that by the glances we threw each other, but we had promised Linda we wouldn’t, and it was one thing to break that promise among ourselves and quite another to do it in front of her.
No one else had written a word that week. “
Okay, we’ll read Frankie’s, then,” Brett said. Kath, as always, seemed most to have the pulse of what I was trying to do. “I love the nun,” she said. “She just springs to life. She breathes on the page.”
The other Wednesday Sisters agreed, although Linda did say, “She’s awfully frank, though, isn’t she? Is anyone really that frank?”
Kath suppressed a smile. “I like the theme that’s developing here, too, Frankie,” she said. “How the Catholic Church shapes its congregants, especially women. How it herds women down this narrow little path, ties their corsets so tightly they can’t catch a breath.”
I nodded as if I had any idea I’d written that.
“And I like Risa, too. I really do,” Kath said, her insistence betraying that she did not like Risa one little bit. “But . . . God knows we all wail the wide Mississippi over the wrongs our men do us—look at me, of course—but I’m not sure about the business with the beau. And her friendship with the nun—”
“You call that friendship?” Linda flung her pen on the table. “She’s not the nun’s friend at all! She doesn’t do anything to prevent her dying. She doesn’t even call her, not once!”
“Doesn’t telephone?” Ally said in her hushed voice. “But they didn’t have—” Then, “Oh.” Followed by, “But you told us not to, Linda.”
Before anyone could respond, little Carrie ran up to Ally, incensed beyond consolation. J.J. had taken a shovel from her and said it was his and she couldn’t use it. “It’s my shovel,” she wailed—taking us all aback because Carrie rarely said a word, and even when she did it was in the same you-could-barely-hear-her voice Ally had. Then, with a goo
d foot stomp for emphasis, she insisted, “It is, Aunt Ally, it is.”
Silence around the table. Even Linda seemed to have forgotten herself.
Ally inhaled once, deeply, then reached down and tucked Carrie’s dark hair gently behind her ears. “It’s not your shovel really, honey,” she said, focusing on the girl’s long-lashed, uncertain eyes, not meeting any of ours. “We didn’t bring any shovels, remember? Your mommy accidentally left your shovels at the beach last weekend. But there are lots of shovels. Look, there’s a blue one just sitting there, by Arselia.”
Carrie, though, wanted the red shovel. No other would do. Even if it wasn’t hers, she’d been playing with it and she’d just set it down and J.J. took it. He hadn’t taken it from her hand, no. But she’d still meant to be using it.
Ally pulled the girl to her, hugged her, but Carrie, not to be deterred, wriggled from her embrace.
“I’ll tell you what, Carrie,” Linda said so gently you could not imagine that just a moment before she’d been ready to bludgeon us.
“J.J.’s favorite color is blue, so why don’t you do this?” She leaned closer to Carrie, her voice an emotional whisper. “You go pick up that blue shovel and start playing with it, and just mention how much bigger it is than the red shovel, how much more sand it can pick up. See if J.J. doesn’t offer to trade.”
“It is bigger!” Carrie said. “I want the blue shovel!”
“Well then go get it, honey,” Linda said. “And be real quiet about how much bigger it is.”
Carrie ran off, leaving the rest of us to our awkward silence.
Ally pressed her palms together, looked up at the sky—a deep blue that day. Not a cloud anywhere in sight. No filmy sliver of moon.
“I used to watch you through my window, before Frankie moved here,” she said, “when you two”—Linda and Kath—“used to come and talk together, and watch your children. When I was pregnant, I’d watch you. Then I’d lose the baby and I couldn’t watch for a while.” Her face clouded over, and I was about to say something, but then she went on. “But I’d always be drawn back to the window. And then Frankie started joining you, and even Brett—” She stopped herself, but it was clear what she meant, that even this weird woman who wore the gloves could find friends in this park, so why not her? “But I didn’t have a baby. I kept thinking I would. I’d get pregnant and I’d take every bit of the medicine my doctor gave me to keep from losing the baby, but . . . Then the day Robert Kennedy was shot, I just thought no one would notice. I just thought everyone would be caught up in that and I could bring out tea and say hello and no one would notice I didn’t have a child, no one would wonder what I was doing coming to the park alone.
“I even picked out a child to pretend was mine that first day,” she said. “I picked a little boy in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt at first, but then there was this girl with loose, dark curls, like my hair was when I was a toddler, like I imagine my baby’s hair will be when I allow myself to imagine. Then no one asked, which was a blessing, because what if I’d pointed to that curly-haired girl and she’d gone running off to her real mother?”
There was a low murmur of sympathy from around the table.
“That girl, she seemed almost like a sign that morning.” Ally tilted her pale face toward the splintered table. “My babies,” she whispered, “they’ve all been sons.”
Kath put her arm around Ally, then, and we all leaned in closer, as if to share our warmth.
“My mother always wanted a son,” she said. “I sometimes think if I could have a son, a grandson for her, she and my father both might . . .” She looked again to the sky, to the sharp blue that looked solid and impenetrable hanging over the mansion.
“That first day I just waited till you all left,” she said. “It was nice being in the park, even when it was empty. I almost couldn’t bear to leave. I think it was only realizing about Carrie that got me up off that bench.”
She’d gone home and called her sister, who was delighted at the idea of having one morning a week to herself, without Carrie. Wednesday morning.
“But why didn’t you just tell us she was your niece, honey?” Kath said.
“We all have our secrets to hide,” Brett said quietly, and we turned to see her looking down at her gloves, at the hands underneath that none of us had ever seen. “‘Every man is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.’”
Linda, frowning at Brett, adjusted her Stanford cap. I wondered if she was thinking of the scar she would have on her breast by the end of the next day, if she still had a breast, or if she was wondering about Brett’s hands, or thinking about something else entirely, some secret she hadn’t yet shared.
“But there’s nothing wrong with bringing your niece to the park, Ally,” Brett said. “You know we wouldn’t have cared.”
Ally tucked her hair behind her ears as she’d done with Carrie just minutes before, her eyes as vulnerable as her niece’s had been. “I did try to tell you, Brett. You and Frankie. When it seemed nothing would matter ever again anyway.”
I took Ally’s hand. “She did,” I said. “She tried to tell us, but we misunderstood, we thought she was saying her sister was taking care of Carrie for her.”
It had been impossible to question her about it that morning in her chalky-blue bedroom, with all those tissues scattered across the floor.
I wondered if I’d have told the others if I had been surer of what I’d heard that morning in Ally’s bedroom, if it hadn’t been so clear that Brett had heard something else. I thought probably I wouldn’t have anyway. I thought probably I’d have let Ally come to telling us herself, in her own time.
“It’s just that people ask, you know?” Ally said. “‘Are you planning on having children of your own?’ And I don’t know what to say because I’ve had three babies, three who’ve died, but people don’t understand that, they think a baby who isn’t born alive was never a baby, that I shouldn’t grieve.” She looked across to the mansion, blinking, whispering, “It was comforting even though it wasn’t real, to have one morning every week when I could seem like a mom with a living child.”
And Linda, who hadn’t said a word—had hardly moved since she’d watched Carrie head for that blue shovel—said, “Would you bring my children to the park, too, Ally? If anything happened to me?”
Kath moved closer to Linda, took her hand.
“I felt like I never had a friend in the world after my mom got sick,” Linda said.
“You’re going to be fine, Linda,” Kath said softly. “You’ll be fixin’ to kick up a ruckus before the sun sets tomorrow, I know you will.”
“I can bear anything but the thought of Jamie and Julie and J.J. having to endure that kind of loneliness,” Linda said, and you could hear in her voice the child who had not been invited to birthdayparties or sleepovers or afternoons of play, you could hear the rustle of skirts as neighborhood mothers leaned down to their daughters, their gentle voices saying Linda’s mommy probably wanted her at home today, how about Mary or Joan or Beth? You could see the Linda who’d settled herself on a tree branch where no one could see her and tried to spin for herself a web of imaginary friendships, a world of Charlottes and Ferns and Wilburs. The child who built I-don’t-care-if-I-offend-you walls, who decided she didn’t want friends other than the ones she found in books.
I knew then something I could do for Linda.
“Maggie will always be there for Julie and Jamie, Linda,” I said. “And Davy will always be there for J.J.”
And as Kath and Brett echoed me, I wondered if Linda hadn’t spoken to me that first morning in the park even though I read mysteries because my children were the same age as her children, because I might be someone who kept friends for a lifetime, and my children might be, too.
Not that it mattered. It only mattered that she had told me I was staring or asked what I was reading, whichever it was she’d said first, and that Kath had joined us, and then Brett, and then Ally, too.
LINDA HAD SAID that she couldn’t bear to be put under anesthesia knowing she might wake without a breast, with her arm swollen and hideous. But she did bear it. She hugged her children good-bye—telling them only that she was going on a short trip; she didn’t believe it was cancer; it couldn’t be—and she went to the hospital and signed the consent form in a shaky hand. When the time came, she climbed onto the gurney and Jeff kissed her and told her he would always love her, no matter what, and she almost believed him, she really did.
It was only when they first put the mask over her face that she realized she was making the same mistake her own mother had. She hadn’t told Jamie and Julie and J.J. the truth.
She held her breath against the anesthetic gas, imagining her mother must have felt this, too: the dread of letting go.
She didn’t know what happened after that, but Jeff did. No, he wasn’t allowed inside the operating room even though he was a doctor, even though he was sure he wanted to be there. He sat in the waiting room like any other husband, and Brett and I sat with him while Kath and Ally took the children to the park. He sat with an untouched cup of coffee, flipping through a stale magazine that neither Brett nor I had the heart to point out was upside down.
“They’ll be started now,” he told us at 8:06. Not 8:00 or 8:10, but 8:06. He knew exactly what time they were scheduled for the operating room, exactly how long it would take for the anesthesia to put her to sleep. He knew too much for a husband whose wife had to go through this. He knew how sharp the scalpel was and how thick the skin was, how long the incision would be. What a breast looked like with the skin pulled back. What a lump that was not supposed to be there looked like, nestled in healthy tissue, and being cut away. He could almost see the clot of bloody tissue in its sterile container being hurried to the lab. He could imagine every moment: the tissue being spread on a lens, the pathologist leaning his eye to the microscope, peering. They ought to have let him observe, they really ought to have, because he was driving himself crazy, imagining them finding a wide swath of disease lodged in Linda’s breastbone, scattered into her lymph nodes, making its way throughout her body to lodge in her liver, her bones, her brain. But there was Brett, armed with the facts: 75 percent of breast lumps are benign; 60 percent of cancers are in women over forty. Statistics that, surprisingly, soothed Jeff in a way that facts had failed to soothe Ally or Linda, even though Brett wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.
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