by Richard Ford
Riding through Riverdale where he’d once hoped to buy a grand house and make her deliriously happy, Charlotte talked about whatever popped into her head. Not one shred of awkwardness after the full year of silence. Charlotte felt completely happy around him. She was wearing the same wafer-thin blue sandals she’d been wearing outside the movie, though this time she had on what she called “my peasant outfit”—beige with fine red stitching, showing her slim, bare shoulders and tanned legs. Charlotte asked about Jonathan’s health. She thought he’d had an operation, which was the one he’d had when they were married. She pointed out he’d lost some weight, and was wearing jeans, which he hadn’t before, but she thought was a good choice—though his seemed baggy and ought to be, she said, traded in for nicer ones. Charlotte told him that visiting her mother was something of a burden and she’d started taking a friend with her. Though now, since she had so few friends, she’d used them all up. She said her mother suffered congestive heart failure and was retaining sodium. She also had uremia, which made her have amazing waking dreams and say hilarious things—which she might do today, and he should not be bothered. Charlotte said this probably meant kidney failure and wasn’t a good sign. There was also a “laundry list of other ailments,” too, which signaled her mother wouldn’t be around much longer. One cure cancels out another cure. Her mother didn’t want to be “fixed,” anyway, and had proclaimed she was looking forward to a long blissful period of being dead. Charlotte also talked about her sister, who’d visited but now was gone, which Charlotte said was a relief because she didn’t like her sister, who had recently “gone forward” with shaving her head bald and begun intensive training to become a spiritualist. Nika had caused a lot of trouble in the hospice wing, before getting on a plane and going home. Nika had explained to anyone that when someone dies the room fills with pressure—the nurses denied this—and that she (Nika), due to her training could feel pressure already building in her mother’s room. Charlotte thought Nika was irresponsible and should just grow her hair back.
Charlotte told Jonathan she had experienced a “few setbacks” recently, though she didn’t say what these were. He thought possibly a breakup, possibly with the raptor-ish lawyer, or conceivably that she wasn’t selling her quota high-end properties. She said she had gone on medication and was feeling better about things. Indeed, she said, her life would soon be empowered “to move outside usual contexts” and that she would then “allow certain things to rise up while permitting other things to recede and vanish.” She didn’t say what any of these things were, and Jonathan didn’t care to ask.
Jonathan noticed as they drove that Charlotte wasn’t wearing the three thin silver bracelets she’d previously worn all the time and that showed off her pretty wrists. She was wearing a big emerald-cut emerald ring as green as a traffic light—a gift, he supposed, from an admirer. Though possibly her mother had given it to her, in the run-up to a dignified death. When he commented on the ring and its brilliance, Charlotte looked over at Jonathan and smiled a teasing, equally brilliant smile and said she’d sold the diamond earrings he had bought her at Harry Winston, during the time of their courtship. She wasn’t really the diamond earring type, she (now) told him, though she’d said before that she adored them. She told him she loved the emerald ring—an antique—and he (Jonathan) should think of it as being an indirect present from him, which was how she thought of it.
Jonathan watched the emerald ring sway back and forth on top of the steering wheel as Charlotte drove up the Saw Mill, left, then right in the mid-day traffic. He pictured the twin diamonds in their blue-leather HW box, remembered his infectious, reckless feeling when he’d had the box in his coat pocket on a cold November evening in 2002, when he’d walked up to Sixty-Seventh to give the earrings to Charlotte at dinner. If he’d ever given Mary Linn a pair of diamond earrings—and he had given her an almost-as-lovely dinner solo (not from Harry Winston, it was true)—she’d have worn them in her coffin. Which she did with the dinner ring. She’d asked Jonathan to put it on her finger if she should suddenly die. Good as his word, he’d slipped it on just before the coffin lid was closed.
This, like everything else with Charlotte, was not expectable. New rules of behavior. Gestures not retaining the original significance. Promises implying different outcomes from the historical norm. He thought a moment about Charlotte’s practical provisos for a second marriage—to get whatever good was left—and how easy it still was to be with her, even now. How little unhappiness she occasioned. He didn’t care about the goddamned emerald—which was a revelation in itself. Though what he did care about was still not easy to put into words, but wasn’t nothing. This was what he’d wanted to ask her other husband Dolan but could only muddle around with words that humiliated himself. He didn’t care a fart about what he—the first husband—felt about Charlotte. He cared about what he himself felt. But that required a language he hadn’t yet mastered. Though she was not insubstantial. He was sure of that. When Charlotte had told him, sitting on the seawall, a year and a half ago, that their marriage wasn’t working, what she seemed to want was for them to become much better accommodated to each other—accommodated in a way marriage wouldn’t permit. For her, at least. She might’ve thought Jonathan would never be able to do that, though she didn’t seem to fault him. Only now, Jonathan thought, he was able. He was accommodated to Charlotte and their situation. Totally. He felt, in fact, as empty of unexpressed desire for Charlotte as she apparently felt for him. Which, he guessed, was the idea.
“You’re cross at me, aren’t you, Mr. B?” Charlotte said, driving and smiling.
“No,” Jonathan said.
“You got pretty quiet for a minute. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings about the earrings.” She put her hand, the one with the jawbreaker emerald, lightly over onto his that held his bulky class ring.
“You didn’t,” Jonathan said.
“But you have to tell me if I ever do,” Charlotte said brightly. “I apparently do it to people without knowing. Is that a deal? I intend to know you for a long time.”
“It’s a deal,” Jonathan said. Then he added, “I hope you know me.”
“There’s no hoping about it,” Charlotte said. “No hoping at all.”
RIVER MANSIONS WAS NOT A MANSION AT ALL, BUT A BOXWOOD-hedged, ’40s-era redbrick, medium-low-rise apartment rectangle that had once been a place where citizens who weren’t old and dying lived normal lives. Scrubby, third-growth trees blocked any view of the river, and across a wide boulevard, Yonkers carried forward its normal industry of dispensing acetylene products, selling custom plumbing fittings, making burglar alarms, and the development of solvents for resolving toxic accidents. Charlotte’s mother hadn’t liked the Mansions when Charlotte moved her out of Alpine and across. “It’s a dry dock for old wrecks,” she said, then added, “Not that I’m not one. I was certainly married to one.”
Charlotte’s father had been a mid-level patronage appointee in the city of Paterson—a mild, reliable man who did things in the comptroller’s office and wanted sons instead of two beautiful daughters. Charlotte’s mother—who was Romanian—had been, she said of herself, “the gypsy spirit in their union.” A small-time theatrical agent who loved actors and escapades, who drank and smoked and cracked jokes and paid little or no attention to her family, her mother had encouraged Charlotte and her sister to quit high school and tour Europe—to learn. But they’d each gone to NYU and chosen to learn nothing instead. Charlotte’s sister had tried for a while to be an actress but failed.
Since it was Labor Day, families were arriving at the Mansions to visit their impossible, aging relatives—bringing flowers, cards, magazines, jigsaw puzzles, baby photos, and candies the elderly shouldn’t eat, all to celebrate with a declining loved one a long life of toil on earth. Jonathan had brought a potted blue hydrangea plant because it seemed to match Charlotte’s mother’s exuberant personality—even in hospice. Though Charlotte said on the way in that Beezy might not notice
his gift, and he shouldn’t feel bad. She would’ve adored it earlier. Charlotte had brought nothing with her but Jonathan.
Charlotte’s mother was propped up in her adjustable bed, wearing a curly champagne-colored wig and a pink short-sleeved T-shirt that had WILD THING . . . I THINK I LOVE YOU and a little cartoon devil printed on its front. Her small brown BB eyes moved toward them when Jonathan and Charlotte slipped in the room, the single window of which gave down three floors to the River Mansions campus lawn, where patients and their families were having holiday outings on the grass. Yellow flowers outlined the entire grounds. Across the wide boulevard a small refinery installation you didn’t see when you drove in had its escape flame flickering into the Monday sky. A sign on Beezy’s door read OXYGEN IN USE, but Beezy wasn’t wearing her nosepiece, and there were no monitors or cylinders or wall outlets to suggest she should. Beezy was possibly past these. A young priest wearing a cranberry-red collar and a short-sleeved black shirt sat at the foot of Beezy’s bed, holding a guitar he’d just been playing. On the covers was a booklet that said Life—A Staging Ground on its front. The priest had brought along a silver Mylar balloon with the words Up, Up & Away printed on it, also in pink, and which he’d tethered to the head of Beezy’s bed. It was all part of his priest kit.
“She likes torch songs,” the young priest said smiling, standing to leave. “Or she did when she got here. She doesn’t enjoy much of anything now.” He looked dotingly at Charlotte’s mother, who was now asleep, or at least her eyes were closed. The priest’s plastic name tag said he was Father Ray, SJ. “Do you?” he said to Charlotte’s mother.
“No,” Charlotte’s mother said emphatically. And surprisingly. Her eyes snapped open at the sound of her own voice. Charlotte gave first the priest and then her mother her most appreciative smile but seemed at a loss to say something. Charlotte’s mother was attached to a drip sac, the tube of which disappeared ominously underneath her T-shirt. Her right arm now sported a green plaster cast with yellow smiley-face stickers all over and a lot of people’s Magic Marker signatures. Jonathan saw that Beezy’s flesh, above the cast and below, was yellow and blue and scrunched. She’d suffered a fall (at some time), which everyone knew meant the end was probably near.
“Charlotte’s so lucky to be married to you,” Beezy said either to Jonathan or the priest. Her small head was sunk into her pillow like a bird’s. “Her last husband was a shitty Mick nobody liked.”
“That’s not true, my darling,” Charlotte said. “His children loved him. Still love him.” Father Ray was nodding and smiling, not wanting to say more, just leave. Charlotte’s mother had no idea who he was. Charlotte took possession of Jonathan’s hydrangea, moved to the far side of her mother’s bed, set the plant on the bedside table and began gathering up tissues that had accumulated and putting them into a shiny metal waste can. She pulled the curtains farther open for better light. “We thought you’d be sleeping,” she said. “Jonathan brought you this nice plant.”
“My eyes are open,” Beezy said. “If I’m asleep, they’re closed.”
“I’m the same way,” Charlotte said cheerfully. She picked up the plant again and put it in the middle of the window ledge, where it looked more cheerful though not exactly pretty.
“What is that?” Charlotte’s mother said, her eyes tracking the plant’s movement. “Is it a big zinnia? I don’t like ’em. They stink.”
“It’s a blue hydrangea,” Charlotte said gaily. “Which you do like. Supposedly.” She began smoothing the surface of the white hospital blanket, glancing up at the wall TV. Sound was off, but Oprah’s big shining face filled its screen. Jonathan hadn’t come completely in, but thought the room needed to be disinfected. He unconsciously for an instant pinched his nostrils closed.
“Back when I was alive I did,” Charlotte’s mother said, relative to her taste in flowers.
“That’s right,” Charlotte said and looked to Jonathan and smiled. “You’re dead now. I don’t know why we even come to visit you.”
“Your sister liked Dr. Kamasutra,” Charlotte’s mother said weakly. “I think the bald pate might’ve queered that deal, though.” Beezy wheezed, and Jonathan heard the clatter of her breathing. Tussive, slow, strained, contained within. Breathing that had nothing much to do with anything going on inside her body.
“Mom calls her doctor Dr. Matsui, Dr. Kamasutra,” Charlotte said, still peeking at Oprah. “Nika liked him, apparently.”
“Apparently,” her mother said.
Jonathan felt too large inside this room, and too male, as if some male odor were emanating off him. He wanted to speak; to insert a positive word into the awful goings-on. However, Charlotte and her mother were an entity that didn’t really require him to speak. Charlotte’s mother was completely different from when he saw her a year ago. What she seemed now, in this room where she was soon to die, was definitely human but unsustainable, as if right in front of him she was growing smaller at a rate Jonathan—large, bulky, towering over her—could actually see. Like a balloon deflating. Could this be pressure filling the room? Someone had applied rouge to Beezy’s cheeks. But her skin was more the color of her pillows, her champagne-bonneted head ready to disappear into their plush. It struck Jonathan to silence. He was relieved he’d never had to see Mary Linn in such a condition. Seeing her dead was bad enough. This, though, was worse.
Beezy was now staring straight at him. Her mouth had pinched up tight and inward and frowning, as if she was experiencing a terrible effort to express something. Jonathan wondered what Beezy was seeing. “So. What do you have to say for yourself, Varney,” Beezy said. Her tiny eyes blinked, then blinked again. “You’re never overestimated by people who know you, are you?” She smiled a pitiless smile for whoever Varney was. Charlotte could smile in this very way. Beezy took a deep, difficult breath. Then her mouth gapped and went down, and her face relaxed from smiling and looked lopsided, as if the vitality that made it a face had subsided. Her eyes were still darting, but then they, too, closed as if a cloud had paused above them. Below the green cast of her wounded left arm, her fingers were working, working.
The room smelled sour but also sweet at the same time. Jonathan heard what sounded like a jackhammer juddering somewhere deep in the old building’s works. He’d said nothing, had been asked nothing since he’d arrived—except as Varney. They hadn’t been here long.
There was a soft knock then the hiss of the door opening. A woman’s smiling face appeared. A nurse. She leaned into the space. Crisp white cap. Her nose pointy, her eyes blinking, her mouth red with fresh lipstick and big. She looked at Jonathan and then at Beezy and then at Charlotte.
“How’re we doin’,” she said. “Do we need anything?” She had an accent.
“We’re doing well.” Charlotte spoke on Beezy’s behalf. “Thank you.”
The nurse smiled her significant smile. “And how are you,” she said this to Charlotte. “Are you doing well, too?” They knew each other. The nurse advanced, exchanged a fresh water beaker for the one on the bed table and started out again.
“Yes,” Charlotte said, wishing to be engaging. “I’m doing just fine too.”
“O-kay.” The door slid smoothly back and closed.
LABOR DAY VISITORS TO THE MANSIONS WERE NOW FILTERING BACK to their cars in the late-summer warmth. Elderly inhabitants stood at their windows, watching. Some waved or wept, others just stood. The warm lush grass had a fresh chemical odor, though you could smell the river close-by. It was ninety out.
They’d stayed in the room for a while, saying little, Charlotte occasionally looking at TV. They were not waiting for anything. Jonathan went to the window and studied the streets. Yonkers. Was it a city? He’d heard about it but never been to it. It was some man’s name. Yonkers. A Dutchman. Beezy’s breathing evened out in time and was calm. She said things in her dreams. “Well, if I did that, I’d be crazy. Wouldn’t I?” Charlotte had answered to make her not be lonely. “No, Mother, you wouldn’t.” Another t
ime, but less clearly, Beezy said, “Yes, Tom. Yes, Tom. Yes.” Tom had been her husband, the girls’ father.
Charlotte, for a while, leafed through Life—A Staging Ground, which the priest had left. She read something out loud to Jonathan—softly, so as not to wake her mother. “The new millennium, lashed by winds, etched in blood.” She looked at Jonathan who was across the room. “What is it that’s ‘etched’?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Jonathan answered.
“That’s very strange, isn’t it?” she said. “Etched in blood.”
After a while the nurse made another appearance, all shiny face, clean-smelling, crisp. She was bringing something for Beezy. Yellow custard. She went to her bedside, put her hand on Beezy’s wrist, waited as if listening, then said. “Well, then.” She must’ve been Swedish. Lutheran. “I believe she’s left us all behind now.”
“Oh!” Charlotte said and seemed very surprised. “My goodness. I really wanted to be here.”
“Well, you are here, dear,” the nurse said, beginning to straighten Beezy’s covers. “You’re right here. I’m so glad.”
THERE WERE ALL THE THINGS TO BE DONE, AND THE RIVER MANSIONS people were there to do them efficiently. Arrangements had long been agreed to. It was not an uncomfortable time. Charlotte turned off the television, then made an effort to cross her mother’s hands. But the plaster cast was bulky and made it not easy. And there was the drip, which eventually was removed by someone. In time, two black men in blue scrubs came with a gurney and clean sheets. One, an older man, seemed very solemn. The other, who was younger, was not solemn at all. “She peaceful now,” the younger man said.
Then it was time to go. Nothing else needed supervising.