Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  We are nearly back to the hospital lawn. The old, settling houses up above the sidewalk behind aged hickories and oaks seem less decrepit now for having been viewed twice in different moods and lights. (A cornerstone principle for your hard-to-sell listing: make ’em see it twice. Things can look better.) I turn and gaze back down the hill and over town. Oneonta seems like a sweet and homey place—admittedly not a place I’d want to sell real estate, but still a fine place to live once your family has gone off and left you to your own devices for combating loneliness. The gulls I’ve seen have suddenly vanished, and the afternoon air above the treetops is now swept through by evening swifts, taking insects and filling the sky like motes. (I should call the Markhams, as well as Sally, but these needs recede, each as they are counted.)

  “Any of that stick to your wall?” Irv says earnestly, knowing he’s blathered on like a mental patient and I’ve said zilch, except it’s allowable now since we’re brothers.

  “All of it does, Irv.” I smile, hands down deep in my pockets, letting the warm breeze lave me before I turn back toward the hospital. Naturally, I’ve felt what Irv is feeling five hundred times over and have no single solution to offer, only the general remedies of persistence, jettisoning, common sense, resilience, good cheer—all tenets of the Existence Period—leaving out the physical isolation and emotional disengagement parts, which cause trouble equal to or greater than the problems they ostensibly solve.

  Someone from a passing pickup, a tee-shirted white kid with a mean red mouth and a plump, sneering girlie with her hands parked behind her head, shouts out his window something that sounds like honi soit que mal y pense but isn’t, then floors it, laughing. I wave at him good-naturedly, though Irv is captained by his probs.

  “I guess I’m sort of surprised to hear you say all that, Irv,” I resume, to try and be a help. “But I think a small act of heroism might be to go ahead and try saying yes to Erma. Even if you get whacked. You’ll get over it, just like you got over the kibbutz.” (I’m a big talker when it’s somebody else getting whacked.) “How long ago were you over there, by the way?”

  “Fifteen years ago. It left a major impression. But that’s interesting for the future,” Irv says, nodding, and meaning again that it’s not interesting at all but the goddamn craziest thing he’s ever heard of, though he’ll pretend it isn’t because he feels sorry for me. (I’d have thought the kibbutz experience was last September, not 1973!) Irv sniffs the air, as if seeking a fragrance he recognizes. “Now’s maybe not the time to take that kind of chance, Frank. I’m thinking about the continuity I was boring you with, about getting a clearer sense of where I’ve come from before I try to find out where I’m going. Just take the pressure off the moment, if you see my point.” He looks at me, nodding judiciously.

  “How’re you going to do that? Get some genealogical charts made up?”

  “Well, for instance, today—this afternoon—this has meant something to me along those lines.”

  “Me too.” Though again I’m not completely sure what. Possibly it’s something on the order of what Sally said about not ever getting to see Wally and having to get used to it, only in reverse: I am getting to see Irv, and I like it, but it doesn’t have a profound effect.

  “But that’s a good sign, isn’t it? Someplace in the Torah it says something about beginning to understand long before you know you understand.”

  “I think that’s in Miracle on 34th Street,” I say, and smile again at Irv, who is kind but goofy from too much simulation and continuity. “I’m pretty sure it says it in The Prophet too.”

  “Never read it,” he says gravely. “But let me just show you something, Frank. This’ll surprise you.” Irv goes groping in his sweatpants’ back pocket and comes out with a tiny wafer wallet that probably cost five hundred dollars. Concentrating downward, he thumbs through his credit cards and papers, then fingers out something that appears softened by time. “Take a look at that,” he says, handing it forward. “I’ve carried that for years. Five years now. Tell me why.”

  I turn the card and hold it so the daylight’s behind me. (Irv has gone to the trouble of laminating it as a seal of its importance.) And it’s not a card at all but a photograph, black and white, encased in layers and re-layers of plastic and for that reason is fogged and dim as memory. Here are four humans in a stately family pose, two parents, two adolescent boys, standing out on some front porch steps, squinting-smiling apprehensively at the camera and into a long-ago patch of light that brightens their faces. Who are these? Where are they? When? Though in a moment I see it’s Irv’s once-nuclear family in the greenage days in Skokie, when times were sweet and nothing needed simulating.

  “Pretty great, Irv.” I look up at him, then admire the photo again for politeness’ sake and hand it back, ready to re-commence my own parenting tasks, put the pressure back on the moment.

  Not far off I hear the wet thwop-thwop-thwop and realize the hospital has a helipad for such emergencies as Paul’s, and that this is Ann arriving.

  “It’s us, Frank,” Irv says, and looks at me amazed. “It’s you and Jake and your mom and me, in Skokie, in 1963. You can see how pretty your mom is, though she looks thin already. We’re all there on the porch. Do you even remember it?” Irv stares at me, damp-lipped and happy behind his glasses, holding his precious artifact out for me to see once more.

  “I guess I don’t.” I look again reluctantly at this little pinch-hole window to my long-gone past, feel a quickening torque of heart pain—unexceptional, nothing like Irv’s catch of dread—and once again proffer it back. I’m a man who wouldn’t recognize his own mother. Possibly I should be in politics.

  “Me either really.” Irv looks appreciatively down at himself for the eight jillionth time, trying to leech some wafting synchronicity out of his image, then shakes his head and re-snugs it among his other wallet votives and crams it all back into his pocket, where it belongs.

  I survey the sky again for a sight of the chopper but see nothing, not even the swifts.

  “I mean, no great big deal, of course.” Irv is squaring up his expectations to my rather insufficient response.

  “Irv, I better get inside now. I’m pretty sure I hear my wife’s helicopter arriving.” (Is this a sentence one usually says? Or is it me? Or the day?)

  “Hey, don’t be crazy.” Irv’s heavy hand is again right up on my shoulder like a gangplank. (My heart has in fact gone rapid with its own thwopetty-thwop.) “I wanted to show you what I meant about continuity. It’s nothing dangerous. We don’t have to cut our arms and mingle blood or anything.”

  “I might not agree with you about everything, Irv, but I—“ and then for an instant I lose my breath entirely and almost gasp, which makes me panic that I’m choking and need a quick Heimlich (if Irv knows how and would oblige). I’ve done wrong by taking this Dairy Queen walk and letting myself be hoodwinked just like Paul, by cozy, small-town plenitude, lured to think I can float free again against all evidence of real gravity. “But I want you to know,” I say just before a second, less terrifying gullet stop, “that I respect how you see the world, and I think you’re a great guy.” (When in doubt fall back on the old Sigma Chi formula: Ornstein = Great Guy. Let’s pledge him, even if he is a Hebe.)

  “I don’t think I’ve miscalculated you, Frank,” Irv says. He is the stalwart project leader over in the yaw-pitch-and-roll lab now: always flying level even if the rest of us aren’t. Though I’ve been him (more than once) and won’t be caught again. Irv is entering his own Existence Period, complete with all the good and not-so-good trimmings, just as it seems I’m exiting it in a pitch-and-tumble mode. We have passed in daylight; we have interfaced, given each other good and earnest feedback. But ours is not life coterminous, though I like him fine.

  I start off then toward the hospital doors, my heart popping, my jaw going stiff as an andiron, leaving Irv with my best words for our future as friends. “We’ll try to go fishing sometime.” I l
ook around for emphasis. He is poised, one long, sandaled foot on the edge of the grass, one off, his bright cardigan catching the sunlight. He is, I know, silently wishing us both clear sailing toward the next horizon.

  12

  Ann is standing in the emergency room lobby all alone, in her buttoned-up tan trench coat, bare-legged, wearing worn white running shoes. She looks as if her mind is full of worries, none of which can be solved by seeing me.

  “I’ve been standing here watching you through those doors as you crossed the lawn. And it wasn’t until you got to the door that I realized it was you.” She smiles at me in a daunted way, takes her hands out of her trench coat pockets, holds my arm and gives me a small kiss, which makes me feel a small bit better (though not actually good). We are less joined than ever now, so much that a kiss can’t matter. “I brought Henry Burris with me. That’s why I’m so late,” she says, immediately all business. “He’s already looked at Paul and his chart, and he thinks we ought to fly him down to Yale right away.”

  I simply stare at her in confoundment. I have indeed missed everything important: her arrival, a new examination, a revised prognosis. “How?” I say, looking hopelessly around the apple-green-and-salmon waiting room walls, as if to say, Well, you can see what I bring to the table: Oneonta. It may be a funny name, it may not even be the best, but by God, it’s reliable and it’s where we are.

  “We’ve already got another helicopter coming that can transport him. It’s maybe already here.” She looks at me sympathetically.

  Behind the admissions desk there is a new crew: two tiny, neat-as-pins Korean girls in high Catholic-nursing-school caps, working over charts like actuaries, plus a listless young blond (a local), engrossed by her computer monitor. None of these knows of my case. It would encourage me to have Irv waltz in, take a seat in the back row and be my ally.

  “What does Dr. Tisaris say?” I’m wondering where she is, wishing she would get in on this powwow. Though possibly Ann has already dismissed her and Dr. Rotollo both, put her own surgical team in place while I was out having my “dip.” I’ll need to apologize to her for a lack of faith.

  “She’s fine about releasing him,” Ann says, “especially to Yale. We just sign a form. I’ve already signed one. She’s very professional. She knows Henry from her residency” (natch). Ann is nodding. Suddenly, though, she peers directly up at my eyes, her gray, flecked irises gone perfectly round and large, shining with straight-ahead imploring. She is not wearing her wedding ring (possibly for the wit’s-end, nerves-stripped-bare look). “Frank, I’d just like to do this, okay? So we can get him down to New Haven in fifty minutes? Everything’s all set there. It’s a half hour to get him prepped and an hour or so in surgery. Henry’ll supervise it. Then the best that can happen will.” She blinks at me dark-eyed, not wanting to say more, having played the big card first—though she can’t help herself. “Or he can be operated on in Oneonta by Dr. Tisaris or whoever, and she may be fine.”

  “I understand,” I say. “What’s the risk to him of flying?”

  “Smaller than the risk, in Henry’s opinion, of doing retinal surgery here.” Her features soften and relax. “Henry’s done two thousand of these.”

  “That oughta be enough,” I say. “Is he a classmate of Charley’s?”

  “No. He’s older,” she says curtly and then is silent. Possibly Henry’s our mystery mister; they almost always fill innocent roles as cover. Older, in this case; experienced in treating the ravaged victims of human suffering (such as Ann); uncannily bears Ann’s father’s name as a karmic asset. Plus, once he saves Paul’s vision (days of soulful waiting for the bandages to be removed and sight to re-dawn), it’ll be a snap to lay it all out to Charley, who’ll wryly, maybe even gratefully, stand aside, outmaneuvered round the final buoy. Charley’s a sport, if nothing else. I am much less of one.

  “Do you want to know what happened?” I say.

  “He got hit with a batting cage, you said.” Ann produces a business-size envelope from her trench coat pocket and moves back a step toward the admissions desk, indicating I should come with her. It is another release form. I am releasing my son into the world. Too early.

  “He got hit with a baseball, in a batting cage,” I say.

  Ann says nothing, just looks at me as if I’m being overly fastidious about these large-scale events. “Wasn’t he wearing a helmet of some kind?” she says, inching back, drawing me on.

  “No. He got mad at me and just ran in the cage, and stood there for a couple of pitches, then he just let one hit him in the face. I put the money in for him.” I feel my eyes, for the third time in less than twenty-four hours, cloud with hot tears I don’t want to be there.

  “Oh,” Ann says, her envelope in her left hand. One of the Oriental micro-nurses looks up at me in a nose-high, nearsighted way, then goes back to charting. Tears mean nothing in the emergency room.

  “I don’t think he wanted to put his eye out,” I say, my eyes brimming. “But he may have wanted to get whacked. To see what it felt like. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”

  “No,” Ann says, and shakes her head, staring at me.

  “Well, I have, and I wasn’t crazy.” I say this much too loudly. “When Ralph died. And after you and I got divorced. I’d have been happy to take a hard one in the eye. It would’ve been easier than what I was doing. I just don’t want you to think he’s nuts. He’s not.”

  “It was probably just an accident,” she says imploringly. “It isn’t your fault.” Though she is meticulous, her own eyes go shiny against all effort and instinct. I am not supposed to see her cry, remember? It violates the divorce’s creed.

  “It is my fault. Sure it is,” I say, terribly. “You even dreamed about it. He should’ve been wearing protective eye covering and a suit of armor and a crash helmet. You weren’t there.”

  “Don’t feel that way,” Ann says and actually smiles, though bleakly. I shake my head and wipe my left eye, where there seem to be too many tears. Her seeing me cry is not an issue in my code of conduct. There is no issue between us. Which is the issue.

  Ann takes a deep unassured breath, then shakes her head as a signal of what I’m not supposed to do now: make things worse. Her left, ringless hand rises as if by itself and places the envelope on the green plastic admissions counter. “I don’t think he’s crazy. He just may need some assistance right now. He was probably trying to make you notice him.”

  “We all need assistance. I was just trying to make him do something.” I am suddenly angry with her for knowing but knowing wrongly what everybody’s supposed to do and how and why. “And I will feel this way. When your dog gets run over, it’s your fault. When your kid gets his eye busted, that’s your fault. I was supposed to help manage his risks.”

  “Okay.” She lowers her head, then steps to me and takes one sleeve again as she did when she gave me one small kiss and talked me into agreeing for my son to fly to Yale. She lets her face go sideways against my chest, her body relaxed as a way for me to know she’s trying—trying to slip back between the walls of years and words and events, and listen to my heartbeat as a surety that we are both now alive, if we’re nothing else, together. “Don’t just be mad,” she says in a whisper. “Don’t be so mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you.” I am whispering too, into her dark hair. “I’m just so something else. I don’t think I know the word. There’s not a word for it, maybe.”

  “That’s what you like, though. Isn’t it?” She’s holding my arm now, though not too tight, as the nurses behind us politely turn their faces.

  “Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes it is. Just not now. I’d like to have a word now. I’m in between words, I guess.”

  “That’s okay.” I feel her body grow taut and begin to pull away. She would have a word for it. It’s her precise way of truth. “Sign this paper now, won’t you? So we can get things going? Get him all fixed up?”

  “Sure,” I say, letting go
. “I’ll be glad to.”

  And of course, finally, I am.

  Henry Burris is a dapper, white-thatched, small-handed, ruddy-cheeked little medico in white duck pants, more expensive deck shoes than mine and a pink knit shirt straight—in all probability—from Thomas Pink. He is sixty, has the palest, clearest limestone-blue eyes and when he talks does so in a close, confidential South Carolina low-country drawl, while keeping a light grip on my wrist as he tells me everything’s going to be all right with my son. (Zero chance, I now believe, that he and Ann are playing sexual shenanigans, owing chiefly to his height, but also because Henry is famously attached to a highly prized, implausibly leggy and also rich wife named Jonnee Lee Burris, heiress to a gypsum fortune.) Ann has in fact told me, while we waited together like old friends in an airport, that the Burrises are the touchstones for everyone’s glowingest marital aspirations there in otherwise divorce-happy Deep River; and likewise in New Haven, where Henry runs Yale-Bunker Eye Clinic, having given up Nobel Prize-caliber research in favor of selfless humanitarian service and family time—not an obvious candidate for a roll in the hay, though who’s ever not a candidate?

  “Now, Frank, lemme tell ya, I once had to perform a procedure just like the one I’m going to do on young Paul when I was down at Duke twelve years ago. Visiting Professor of Ophthalmology.” Henry has already drawn me an impressive freehand picture of Paul’s eye but is spindling it now like an unwanted grocery store circular while he’s talking (secretly condescending, of course, since I’m his friend’s second wife’s first husband and probably a goofball with no Yale connections). “It was on a big fat black lady who’d somehow been hit in the eye by some damn kids throwing horse apples right out in her yard. Black kids too, now, not a racial matter.”

  We are on the back lawn of the hospital, out beside the blue-and-white square landing pad, where a large red Sikorsky from Connecticut Air Ambulance is resting on its sleds, its rotor gliding leisurely around. From out here, a modest hilltop and perfect setting for a picnic, I can see the shaded Catskills, their hazy runnels plowing south to blue sky and, in the intermediate distance below, a fenced cube of public tennis courts, all in use, beyond which I-88 leads to Binghamton and back up to Albany. I can hear no traffic noise, so that the effect on me is actually pleasant.