The Maytrees: A Novel

by Annie Dillard

  When had scruples not hobbled or wrecked love or affection? He could have won Marie Koday several years earlier, years in which he so cautiously refrained even from saying hello that she finally had to kiss him. She met the boat and kissed him. His blood bolted and his town cap dropped. Their life began. Scrupulously not rattling his father’s presumed privacy or indifference, he had wasted more stupid years.

  Deary tried to show him down their polished hall. She looked like summer people—gold bracelet, earrings, tailored skirt, lipstick. He remembered her tatterdemalion. Still striking, she was newly a limping matron. A bit far between, the curls at her crown. Her eyebrows barely traced their ruts. Deary’s eye area, he guessed, opened a vertical third of her face. Good looks at any age required only big eyes under high brows.

  She was sixty-seven. Maytree helped her show Pete down the hall. —Remember, Deary said. She winked across his father’s potbelly no bigger than a chowder bowl. Promise me. When I die I want to go out like a gypsy queen. Big smile, great false teeth. Burn my carriage with me inside it, she said. In Provincetown.

  —You bet, Pete said. Consider it remembered. Burn in carriage, Provincetown.

  —Where are you keeping your carriage these days?

  —He’s humoring me!

  —Actually, Maytree said, I am. At the kitchen sink later he told Pete that two years ago he had tricked Deary into letting the town’s tall white-haired physician, whom Maytree now referred to as Dr. Eminent, check her. Speaking to Maytree, Dr. Eminent implied that everything was all in Deary’s dimply head, likely because she never had a baby. —Find another doctor, Pete had said.

  —They’re all quacks! Deary squeaked from the porch. The cure is lost in a jungle! Her hearing was excellent.

  Pete stayed four days in Camden, shoulders on walls (his friends called him Eileen), while the boatyard waited for parts. During breakfast daily, a broad-hipped, plaid-clad young woman named Sarah Smither let herself in. Maytree had already told Pete that Sarah’s Irish-immigrant parents had so many children that he and Deary privately called the offspring, collectively, Smithereens. Sarah joined them in the dining room. His father said Sarah looked after things. Later Sarah filled a thermos jug with coffee, helped Deary to her office, and put away dishes within earshot of Deary’s bronze handbell.

  The first full day, he saw his father and Deary were partners. —I’ve come up in the world, Deary said. —Isn’t that the point? Recently she sited a house on a once-wooded lakeshore. She drew plans and elevations to the last spec. Her architectural weeks on this project were ending if clients approved. Maytree and men would stick-build the house, roof it, and dry it in. Deary got permits. Before her vitality waned, she had risen early to chase forestry crews, haulers, suppliers, the furnace installer, plumbers, electricians, the insulation people, the plasterer, and the stonemason. She had accounted, billed, and paid.

  Near Deary at the oak kitchen table, Pete peeled the potatoes she washed. She told him old Provincetown stories in her familiar, if aerated, high voice. He picked up potatoes she dropped. He wished she knew his childhood less and his manhood more. But how? He could have let them know him, any time.

  —Marie Koday? She spent all one summer upside down with her head in the water, walking on her hands. Adorable child. Was she not considerably older than you?

  —Not now.

  Deary wanted to play spit, double Canfield, and slapjack. She insisted he grab hard and slap fast. She lost her breath. Her hands whirred and her rings clobbered. She laughed. Evenings after coffee, Maytree rubbed her shoulders. She kept her chin raised, as Pete had noticed in Boston that only beautiful women do. His father cleaned up.

  —Are you writing poetry?

  —Maybe over next winter. They say Georges Bank is over-fished—that right?

  —They have never been there.

  —So you fish the Gulf of Maine?

  —Sometimes. We keep an eye on both cod stocks.

  Deary double-shuffled. Ventrally, her hands were yellow except between the bones, where they were blue. He never imagined coming here to slap her around.

  Here in his father’s Camden house, Pete had his own head. Its window looked into what his father told him was a maple. Thinly in the maple he saw his own mirrored face that boughs scratched. He missed Marie.

  “What we have together,” Pete and Marie called it to themselves, for want of a single noun. While both sets of parents, when very young, had coupled for certain once, or in Marie’s parents’ unthinkable case thrice, those parents’ matter-of-fact ways, like everyone else’s, showed they never suspected, and must be shielded from, the secret and unearthly properties of what we have together. A good man like his father—he always heard his father was once a good man—could go bad and run off?

  Obviously his father and mother never had anything together. But what about his father and Deary, twenty years ago? His father would have been forty-four then: twelve years older than Pete now, but of course much older inside, as befits a parent. At that age, couples patted the remains of each other’s hands on porches. Deary was even older now than Marie’s coal-tar-dyed mother who still plunked herself on the old man’s knees after ice cream. Grotesque, all of it.

  The maple outside and his own face showed equally in the window. As a boy, Pete noticed that old people like Reevadare Weaver and Cornelius Blue could horrifyingly persist in oldness for decade after decade, no end in sight, without shame. Old people were those who lacked will to leave, or tact to know, when their party was over. At thirty-two he had begun the rocketry recalibration of what constitutes old people—whose merry ranks he did not plan, in any case, to join. Drowning at sea was a likely option. Better, when the time came, was shooting himself. This was America.

  Once a day either Pete or his father wondered why they waited so long. —Men! Deary said, but she had not contacted him, either. Still, no use wasting time regretting time they’d already lost. That now he made his father happy with a few words—come see your grandson—shamed Pete for once begrudging them.

  On their final morning when Marie would launch again, Pete watched fog pool up the street. A sprucey scarf of fog entered with Sarah Smither. Her eyeglasses’ frames were plaid.

  —I like the fog, Deary said, except when it catches in trees.

  —You like the fog, Sarah replied, except when it catches in trees.

  Sarah was studying clinical psychology. Maytree told Pete he wondered whether to strangle her or give her a cracker. He gave her a raise. What would they do when her school started? On the stone steps the men pounded each other’s shoulders. Deary tried to squeeze Pete, wept brightly, and said, Don’t be a stranger. Again his gaze met his father’s over her head.

  DR. COBO, CARDIOLOGIST, KEPT offices in his house’s basement. As a young man board-certified in both cardiology and internal medicine, Dr. Cobo had immigrated from Cuba and had to undergo recertification as though Cuba’s were the lesser health-care system.

  Granite steps delved from a Main Street sidewalk to Dr. Cobo’s door. Maytree carried Deary down the steps’ pitch.

  —A heart murmur, Dr. Cobo said. Tests. Her leaking mitral valve lost to backwash more than it pumped. —Congestive heart failure, Dr. Cobo said, addressing Deary.

  —We can try to get you into Texas transplant trials, he said. In the meantime, we’ll monitor you in the hospital. A ventilator will help you breathe easily. Deary half closed her eyes and bestowed her lipsticky smile. —I’d rather die.

  Maytree settled her in the car. She would refuse any treatment, let alone any physician or hospital. —I could get roller skates, Deary said as he carried her in their front door. —I love old ladies who roller-skate.

  An hour later: —They even admit they don’t know everything! Look on their licenses, O ye mighty, and drop dead! Almost everyone they knew who went to a hospital, or consulted physicians, or submitted to surgery, died in pain. Post hoc non ergo propter hoc, Maytree thought.

  In the kitchen he cupped a
pinna against her sternum. Murmur! The backwash of her heart’s pump sloshed. The mitral valve was no seal but a rubber pet door that flapped both ways.

  Maytree set up a bed in their living room by the wheelchair. He moved tables. Deary called for her hairdresser to come once a week. She gave Maytree instructions for gardener, cleaner, and florist. Happily in bed she named another dozen people who had surgery and died in pain. They filled the cemetery.

  Dr. Cobo had asked Maytree to stop by later. Then he told him that cardiology could only palliate. Deary’s heart muscle had swelled and thinned past saving. In any case she would not suffer. He made sure Maytree understood he was no prophet. —Soon, he said. Pressed, he said, Maybe many months, maybe fewer. Maytree hoped Deary would not get pious on him, and she did not.

  —You took her to Dr. Eminent before? his painter friend asked from the porch. He tells women it’s all in their heads.

  Maytree quit work and handed others both his projects to finish. He bought robes. He learned “Black Watch plaid” and “chenille.” Their friends the painter and his wife visited self-consciously. Maytree loved this guy but knew their friendship was not intimate. When they came, he turned off the television. As its screen darkened, it contracted to a dot of light that snapped out.

  Deary let only Sarah Smither visit what she called her crypt. Sarah Smither read orange-bound children’s biographies aloud. Wrapped in blossom-print silk, Deary smiled when Abe Lincoln played a trick: he lifted and flipped a local boy who tracked muddy footprints on a friend’s ceiling.

  When the wheelchair or bed tired her, Maytree carried her like a doll. She raised her palm before his eyes while he bore her to the bathroom.

  —Look at my lifeline. What does it tell you?

  —That I can’t see where we’re going.

  For dying, she was ready as for any other party. —Messages for anyone dead? she asked Sarah Smither and the scared mailman. Her eyes half closed. She could no longer belt her exhilarating favorite, “Antonio Spangonio (the Bum Toreador).” Maytree joined her. —When I catch that blighter I’ll kill him, I will…I’ll cut out his heart with a dagger, I will. One morning Maytree heard the song’s finale, —He shall die! he shall die! when I plant an onion on his Spanish bunion, when I catch Antonio—tonight! Pause.

  —You forgot the boom boom! Maytree said. —No, you. Meaning, you sing the boom boom! because I can’t.–Boom boom!

  One morning after a December snowstorm he slipped on ice and dropped her. Rather, he threw her—just a lob.

  He was carrying her down to Dr. Cobo, the sight of whose Castilian face soothed them. It was voodoo after all.

  The day he dropped her, he was bearing forward like a tray. She weighed ninety pounds. He felt his foot slip on iced stone. In that instant he tossed her in the fresh snowbank by the steps. At the toss he recoiled, and his slip became a wreck.

  —Honey? she whispered. She usually called him Maytree.

  —Are you all right?

  —Are you?

  She told him later she, too, heard his bones snap like carrots. Nothing hurt for almost an hour.

  In the strictly-for-profit hospital, professionals did their best shorthanded. They let him wait behind curtains on a bed. Deary, unhurt, waited, too. Someone glanced at Deary and ran out. Someone else listened to Deary’s heart.

  —I’m just taking her vitals, the emergency-room nurse told Maytree.

  —No, he said. You emphatically are not.

  Deary refused admission, stonewalling ever-higher-ups, and signed a hundred release forms. She held the pen among blue fingernails. She sat on a wheeled steel stool until she slipped and the stool bowled into the nurses’ station. Then Sarah Smither’s mother appeared carrying Deary’s oxygen-tube stand—she refused it—and her pillow. This worthy, who made squash doughnuts, held Deary on her lap to balance and warm her. Maytree watched her slip a fingerful of petroleum inside Deary’s nostrils. He wished she would shoot them both.

  Much later he learned that he had broken his left humerus just above the elbow. He broke his left clavicle. He broke his right radius twice. He broke his right wrist and thumb; he snapped his right ulna in two at the elbow. One lumbar vertebra cracked—the crucial one, he felt, that every twitch cracked anew. Without puncturing his lungs, his fourth and fifth ribs sustained greenstick fractures dorsally. Far from “sustaining” anything, he thought, his bones broke. The orthopedist reduced Maytree’s four arm fractures in memorable jerks, and unrolled wet plaster casts over both his arms, one high, one low.

  He pictured his fall down those six stone steps as so spectacular he chose not to picture it again. His X-rays looked like the Tunguska event, the Siberian forest after a meteorite hit. An old woman entered and taped his broken ribs as if they might flee. She tucked his right cast under her arm, eyeballed his thumb to align it with his invisible wrist, and splinted it. On doctor’s orders she gave him only acetaminophen—as he learned later from the itemized bill. We Americans possibly enjoyed a right to suffer needlessly that lesser peoples miss.

  Mrs. Smither, driving them home, wore a green felt hat. He addressed her hat from the backseat as loudly as he could. —Mrs. Smither. I know you both work hard. I wonder. His ribs broke again every time he breathed. His vertebra halves ground like floes. His two broken arms. His head lay on his coat folded on Deary’s lap. All day since he fell, or since he pitched her on the snow, she seemed dumbstruck. No choices for them or even chances presented, if he could not carry her and wait on her. She knew it, too.

  He had no one to turn to. Under tires dry snow yelped. His bones jolted as if the car had triangular wheels. Moving to Provincetown for now would content Deary and keep his word. Since he botched life with Lou twenty years ago, he honored his every word sometimes to absurdity, like skating with friends after his viral pneumonia had turned to lobar pneumonia.

  —If you, or if Sarah…If we offer you twice whatever you earn…Could you help us out for a few months while I mend? In Provincetown on Cape Cod, some nice house? Or (this in a rush) do you think Sarah would help us now and postpone graduation? Has she ever seen Cape Cod? She would have her own room and no other duties. Whether he could use his arms or not, Deary was still dying. Why had they not moved to Provincetown yesterday?

  Sarah, Mrs. Smither said, was starting in June as a counselor for the county. Nor could Mrs. Smither herself leave her squash doughnut supervisor post.

  Could Pete take care of them? Good Pete would never spring this family of strangers for weeks on his wife. They had their baby boy and only two rooms.

  That night Maytree drank vodka from its bottle as Deary gasped beside him in their bed. Their walkway lamps below the window yellowed the iced maple’s glaze. Deary’s breathing stopped sometimes, as always, and resumed with a snort.

  What had they injected him with, hummingbird feed? Had none of them ever broken a bone? How about half a lethal injection? At least in capital cases they treated the whole person.

  He could buy Pete and Marie a house of any size—but Pete would not accept. He still had his young pride. How could they move when she had just had a baby? He and Sooner could hoist Pete’s house to a wide flatbed…No, Sooner had gone back to Missouri for the winter, and he could hoist nothing. That was the point.

  He reminded himself that perhaps a billion people like him worldwide were lying awake in pain now and at their wits’ end. In Provincetown he could rent a place off-season, for Deary and him and a live-in helper or two, if Deary could stand strangers whose accents and clothes betrayed sloppy families. For what purpose had he amassed so much money if it was useless? Well, for three private nurses in eight-hour shifts, if there were any nurses. And again, if Deary would permit as witnesses strangers who would misplace everything in a twinkling, and pat her head. Reportedly Cornelius Blue and Jane lived in separate dune shacks and separate places in town; they visited. With Jane lived a bundled baby, Tandy. Cornelius’s town room! It was one room. If the old bachelor would not tend one sack of
helplessness in the form of Tandy, he would not tend three.

  Reevadare took in strays, of which Deary had been many. Reevadare also loved throwing parties, loved being waited on herself, and talked too much. He rejected the Manor—the nursing home. Now what to hope? For he had known all day he would appeal to Lou. He knew it as he fell.

  If he could flex his elbows, he would hide his face. Practiced—he was at least practiced—he faced his embarrassment down. The iced maple trunk near the windows had a translucent double. He would slither back so his real wife could carry Deary from bed to bath till she died. Lou had kept his name. And she would take them. He would welcome them in her place, and he knew her spirit to be generous. Not because troubles whipped him and he had no one else to appeal to, though troubles certainly whipped him and he had no one else to appeal to, but because Lou might actually help them, pronto.

  And forgiveness had nothing to do with it. They were both whole people, he and Lou. Whole old people. At their age forgiveness could be child’s play if you knew the ropes, and so could be the nod that accepted forgiveness of course and moved on. Young, he would have thought any end, even dying, beat being forgiven, let alone by a woman, and beat asking for help, too, let alone asking the wife he left for help. Now he and Lou—if Lou was like Pete, whom he more wronged—could meet as equals. His asking would honor her goodness. His willingness to ask was part of what he now knew best: to think well of those you have wronged, let alone those who have wronged you. He hoped Lou’s thinking had brought her there, too. He really hoped. Just till Deary died.

  Mrs. Smither would drive Deary and him to Provincetown tomorrow in her car. If Lou refused them, she would at least help him think what else to try. Would he and Lou even recognize each other? She kept inviting them to visit—but she was kidding herself. No, no possible course could be worse. They would leave early. He sprang to life. He fell asleep.