“Get a phone number and I’ll call him back.” Robert was not letting a stranger in just because he said he was her doctor. Where was Bruno? Why had he not visited? Where were her parents? Why had she come to Boston? He felt as if he were losing his mind.
And then on the last night in April, a Thursday, Robert was sitting in the living room watching the news on television when Gwendolyn appeared, still in her pajamas.
“What is it, sweetheart?” he asked. She sat down next to him on the couch just as President Nixon came on to announce that he’d be sending troops into Cambodia. Robert put his arm around her protectively, wondering if she should even be watching this, but he could not be her censor, was relieved, too, that something had finally gotten her out of bed. More troops to Cambodia would mean more numbers called up. How many numbers? By summer he could be on the move. What would happen to her then?
On Friday morning she got up early, taking a shower for the first time in almost two months. She asked him to cut her hair, which was long and dead at the ends, and he trimmed it in the bathroom with newspaper under her chair to catch the pieces that fell away. They made eggs and sat at the table eating together. “Why don’t we go on a vacation this summer?” he asked, taking her hand. “I have some savings and Hank could cover my shifts; he’s always looking for more work. We could go to the beach. Or rent a car and drive across country? You haven’t seen much of the United States, and neither have I, really.” He’d leaned on her too much, he thought, and she’d broken. They were coming through a terrible struggle that he didn’t fully understand, the same one she’d had before he took her to his parents. It was connected to the news, somehow, or brought on by it. She was sensitive. But she had healed a year ago and would do so again.
Despite his feelings about the news, he could not dissuade her from watching the television on Monday night. Four students had been shot dead at a college in Ohio. The networks replayed the blurry images over and over again. A boy hit by a bullet crumpled to the ground; phalanxes of troops holding rifles marched across the campus as if it were a battlefield; a girl knelt by her dead friend, screaming. The high-pitched sound of girls screaming, that’s what he would always remember.
“I can’t take the screaming,” Gwendolyn said. “I wish it would go away.”
“Please, let’s turn off the TV,” he said gently, getting up to do just that.
“I’m not talking about the television,” she said, staring at him oddly. “Let’s go to bed.”
He followed her into the bedroom. The windows were open, and the place smelled of Dana’s special cleaners, as if it, too, had come out of a long, musty siege. The bed was made, and they stripped off their clothes, got under the cold sheets, pulled the blanket around themselves. He held her and she took his hand and told him that she loved him. She had not said that to him in so very long. “I love you too, baby,” he said, his heart lifting in the darkness.
“I was thinking about that time when I fell on you at the concert.”
“That was the best afternoon of my life, Gwendolyn.”
“Me too. Me too,” she said. “I think you’re right about going away.”
“Anyplace you like. I can arrange everything. We need to enjoy ourselves.” He buried his face in her hair. “We’re young and it’s been so long since we enjoyed ourselves.” He kissed her and kissed her, pausing only to say that when all this was over, they’d get married. After August, he would know. In August the last numbers of the year would be released. Maybe he’d be free. Thinking about a future for them beyond the draft and the war made him feel wonderful, if only in the moment. He kissed her again, running his hand up her side, feeling the slight curve of her hip. They hadn’t touched each other like this in months. He heard her respond, and he kissed her again, cupped her breast in his hand, his mouth moving down her body, taking the hard nipple in his mouth, hearing her moan. They made love slowly, and he stopped periodically, pulled out to prolong the pleasure. When he came deep inside her, heard her scream in climax, he thought, in a split second, of the young girl on the television, screaming as she knelt over the body of the dead young man. The two sounds were remarkably similar, as if Gwendolyn were unburdening herself of some mysterious terror. Laying back on the blankets, his arms around her in the darkness, he felt afraid again.
The next day, at four, Dana came to stay with Gwendolyn as usual. She had to leave a little early, she said; her husband couldn’t pick her up and he didn’t like her getting on the trains so late. “Sure,” Robert said casually, grabbing his keys. “Leave whenever.” The patient was out of bed, dressed. Dana and Gwendolyn were going to bake some brownies that afternoon. He’d have a treat, Dana said, when he returned from work. “What would we have done these weeks without you?” Robert asked, and shoved some money into her hand, extra on top of her salary. He was in such a good mood that he’d have given money to strangers on the street if he could. Dana smiled and told him to have a good night.
He got home at eleven. The television was on in the empty living room. The bed was made, the kitchen spotless. He smelled chocolate—the brownies. He called out her name over and over, getting no response, but she was there. In the hour between when Dana had left and Robert had come home, Gwendolyn had hanged herself from an overhead pipe in the bathroom.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aftermath
She had showered beforehand, and when he cut down her body, removed the drapery cord from around her neck, her hair was still damp, and he could smell the lavender scent of her shampoo. The body felt warm to him, and there was still color in her cheeks, though she had no pulse. Robert had seen a demonstration of mouth-to-mouth breathing on a local TV channel, and he pinched her nose and put his lips to her mouth, trying to imitate what he’d seen, but he didn’t have much lung capacity and soon began to cough, then feared he was wasting time when the emergency workers might be able to do more. He carried her into the bedroom, laid her on the bed and called the operator, who connected him to emergency services. He gave the information and hung up, then sat in the dark bedroom, stroking her dark hair, willing the ambulance to come faster.
When the emergency workers arrived, two guys around his same age, they took her pulse and shook their heads. But Robert yelled at them, pacing the room, his eyes wild as he insisted that her body had felt warm to him just moments earlier. He could see that the two young men were shaken—they rarely saw someone this young, unless it was an overdose, and never this beautiful. And because of this, because they felt sorry for him, they, too, breathed into her mouth, their actions a kind of performance that all involved understood, until finally they looked at him pleadingly and said that she was dead, had been dead for some time, and it was undignified to go on. The warmth he’d felt from her flesh, the pinkness of her cheeks, one of the men told him, was likely from the steam of the shower.
He had been just that close. Had he come home minutes earlier, he might have found a pulse, called faster, saved her. After the workers removed her body, he wandered into the kitchen, not sure what to do with himself. The floor lamp in the living room shed a weak, orangey glare into the back of the apartment, and he sat at the kitchen table bathed in that eerie semidarkness, mentally retracing his steps home. Where had he been when she stopped breathing? In the lobby, where he’d paused to chat with Tommy about the Red Sox? Helping that old lady down from the T? What could he remove from his day that would get him home in time? He would torture himself with that thought for years.
On the table was a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass with a bit still left at the bottom. She had needed courage; the thought was almost too much for him, but then he heard a sound, the opening of the door. Who had a key? Someone else was in the apartment. He was shaking, and now Tommy came up behind him, put a blanket around his shoulders. Doormen knew everything that happened in a building, didn’t they? An older neighbor came in, too—she’d heard the commotion—but Tommy told her to go home. It was just past 1:00 a.m., Tommy said. He’d
have come up sooner but he had to wait for his shift to end and lock up for the night.
“She liked you,” Robert said.
“Who didn’t she like, exactly?” Tommy replied. He had found a can of coffee above the sink, and now he was filling the bottom of the percolator with water.
“She liked how you turned your head to listen to her. She said you listened very intently.”
“Actually, I’m deaf in one ear,” he said. “Got me out of the draft.”
Soon the pot was hissing a comforting hiss. She had never liked coffee—the electric percolator was his, one of the few things he owned here—and so he did not associate that smell or sound with her so much as with his parents, Barry, Disston Street. When the coffee was done, Tommy poured him a cup and added some of the whiskey, then did the same for himself. They sat in the darkness and said nothing, drinking their coffee and whiskey, listening to the clock tick. At 6:00 a.m., as the apartment began to lighten, Tommy lit a cigarette. Then he made some toast, which Robert quietly refused. Tommy, his doorman, had stayed up with him all night, giving up sleep and precious hours off. Robert wanted to thank him, but he couldn’t seem to find words. He could only sit at the kitchen table and try to keep breathing, taking the occasional sip of coffee, aware that he was still alive, and that with living came responsibilities to the dead that he neither wanted nor could bear.
Others did for him what he could not do himself; it was that kind of building. The management company had a PO box and the name of a lawyer on file, and two days later the lawyer called Robert to collect the details. Three days after that, Robert went to meet Gerald and Alice Smythe, Gwendolyn’s parents, at the Ritz-Carlton on the Common.
They had flown in from London to have the body cremated and would return home with the ashes, which now sat in an urn in their hotel suite. The idea made him feel vaguely sick. His own family did not cremate; it was against the religion. But when he saw Gwendolyn’s father, he immediately knew that he was Jewish, in the way that Jews recognize each other, as if with a sixth sense. Mr. Smythe was olive skinned, balding, trim; his eyes were honey colored like Gwendolyn’s, and his hair, what there was of it, was dark like hers, too. He wore an expensive-looking suit, but then his father had been a tailor (Gwendolyn had once mentioned this), and so he would care about his clothes. His accent was hard to discern; Robert imagined he had altered it. The mother was certainly born in England; she sounded like one of the announcers on the BBC, was tiny, wore a beige dress, and her blond hair was short and stylishly cut. Her eyes were ice blue.
No wonder Gwendolyn had loved his parents so. Compared to these two, Stacia was a slobbering cocker spaniel. They did not move a muscle, or seem even to blink as they told him that Gwendolyn was no student and never had been. She was not twenty-three, but rather past thirty, though young-looking for her age, naïve like a child. She was a graduate, not of an American university or a Swiss boarding school, but rather of several of the world’s most sophisticated and forward-thinking asylums, starting at age fifteen, when the troubles, as they called them, had begun. Robert met her after she’d done two years of inpatient at McLean, Harvard Medical School’s booby hatch for the rich and famous, and “they’d handled her well,” was how the father put it, so well that she was able, for the first time ever, to do outpatient therapy, to hold down a job and live on her own. “A little bookstore. Several other patients worked there as well. A charitable owner, I suppose,” the mother said.
How had he not seen that part? The first time he laid eyes on Bruno?
The mother cleared her throat. “She got awfully caught up with American politics,” she said. “It wasn’t good for her.” She looked him over, from head to toe: his hair needed to be cut, his clothes were wrinkled—he’d slept in them, or rather, tried to sleep—and he had the beginnings of a beard. “I warned her father, when we saw all those children on the news, screaming and carrying on. ‘This,’ I said, ‘will be our undoing.’”
Had they known of his existence? He had barely known of theirs.
“We knew of you from her letters,” the father said. “They were more rational than in years. She said she was in love. She said she was happy. At first we wondered if she hadn’t made you up.” She withheld things, he said, from her parents, from her psychiatrists. These doctors in Boston had been better at getting her to keep appointments. “She was prone to embellish,” he added. “She was charming. She was beautiful. People believe those who are beautiful. They credit them with all sorts of qualities.”
“She may have been unbalanced,” the mother said, “but she was clever. And she could be devious.” Then she added, “Her IQ was quite high, you know.”
Robert could tell by her tone that she’d clung to that piece of information all her daughter’s life. At least if she’d given birth to a mental case, Gwendolyn wasn’t a stupid one. “I don’t give a shit about her IQ,” he said.
“Mind your tone,” Mr. Smythe said calmly. “She assured us you were taking care of her.”
Robert felt as if he’d been slapped. “Her fiancé would have taken care of her,” he added, his voice high, in danger any moment of breaking, “if he’d known what, exactly, he was supposed to take care of. If anyone, say her parents, or her doctor, had picked up the goddamned phone, just once, and clued him in —”
He wished that they’d break down. He’d have been happy with even the smallest show of emotion. They’d left their only child in the hands of psychiatrists and barely participated in her life at all. The father said that Robert didn’t understand how trying, how frustrating it could be, to have a daughter with such problems. Long periods of depression, she’d been that way for much of her teens, and then long stretches of mania in her twenties. There had been periodic suicide attempts. One doctor had thrown in schizophrenia, too, but there was never a consensus on that diagnosis. No medication under the sun did a thing.
Her money had to be handled; an employee dealt with Gwendolyn’s finances and bills in America; the girl could not be trusted with a nickel, was known for wild spending sprees, for writing huge checks to scam artists, or giving away hundred-dollar bills to beggars on the street. “She gave herself,” the mother said, looking him in the eye, “to all kinds of horrid people.”
The father, suddenly more accommodating, putting his hand on Robert’s shoulder, said, “One can feel so very alone with it all.”
What kind of parents, with all the money in the world, did not insist on visiting? Or were they just so happy to get her off their hands? Yes, they had done with her long ago, did their duty but nothing more. He would not let them off so easily. They would damn well feel something. He stood up, shook his fist like some street-corner evangelist and told them not to put this on him, because he could see it coming. “I loved her!” he said. “I was there, which is more than I can say for either of you!”
They rose to leave, saying not a word as they walked toward the elevators.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Chelsea
By now it was the middle of May. Men came to pack up her belongings and take out the furniture. The lease, conveniently, was up in June. The letter had come to him from the management company, asking if he would be renewing. But he could not afford this apartment, and wouldn’t have stayed even if he could. For two weeks after her death, he slept on the floor, in a sleeping bag that had belonged to her and been left behind. At the restaurant, people were covering for him. He’d told his boss that he needed two weeks, but he knew that when the time was over, he wouldn’t return.
For the past two years, he’d holed up with his beautiful Gwendolyn on this top floor of this luxury building and shut the world out; consequently, the world was not there for him. He still had his family, his brother, but he could not disappoint them with this news, not when they’d loved and valued her so much. In the beginning, his and Gwendolyn’s isolation had been about the selfishness of love, but then it had turned into something else—he’d become afraid. Certainly there were det
ails that did not match up. But he could not have admitted that such details pointed to a desperate situation, and so, to protect them, and because it was easier, he became like her, like a rich person, depending on strangers to provide services that he had always gotten from friends and family, isolating himself until he had no one to ask the favor of a couch to sleep on until he got himself together, no one who might steer him toward a cheap sublet. He was utterly alone.
It was Tommy who offered him a place to live in East Boston, really just a room, on the top floor of a building owned by his brother. The room had its own bathroom but no kitchen, just a refrigerator and a hot plate. The rent was only eighty-five dollars a month. Tommy had stayed there before he got married, and still did occasionally, when he and Esme had a fight. Robert had not even known Tommy was married. He’d walked past him so many times in the lobby, exchanging meaningless chatter, and never asked the man a single personal detail, hardly imagining he had a personal life. Another sin he’d committed, one more on the endless pile for which he must atone.
Tommy took out his wallet and proudly showed him a picture of a round-faced young woman with black hair, pale skin, and small, dark eyes that were ever-so-slightly crossed. A man his own age, married and saving for a home, working full-time and going to school part-time to become an accountant. He’d be taking the CPA exam in a few weeks, and then it was no more holding doors for him. Robert had forgotten, somehow, that the country was filled with such men, a parallel universe of the useful. The times did not rile them, the draft did not change them; even the president, to them, was trying his best. Tommy would have gone to Vietnam, he said, had it not been for his hearing, though he was relieved that he had an out. Robert took the apartment, gratefully, and sight unseen.
“John has to live in Chelsea,” Tommy explained, “because he’s the alderman.”
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