“Maybe I’ll call Helen, see if she wants to come up and stay awhile.”
“That’s a good idea.”
The expense of the trip will make the situation even more tense if Frank doesn’t manage to find work soon. He has little hope left that she will become pregnant, though he’d never suggest she stop trying. Just as he spared her from his needing time away, he could never visit the finality of failure upon her.
“Vacation?” the shop owner now asks as he makes change for the books.
Frank is startled from his thoughts. “Hmm?”
“You have the furrowed brow of the tourist. I’ve always found it funny that the creases tend to follow the patterns of the subway system.”
“Aha. No, here for work.”
“Where’re you from?”
“Memphis.”
“He comes in here, you know.”
“Sorry?”
“Auster. He stops in from time to time.”
“What’s he like?”
“Tall. He’s very tall.”
2.
Agnes has been in and out of hospitals since her late teens. They all look the same to her; the first one had had the same color scheme and sterile smell as the one she sits in now. The touch of a stethoscope and the darkness of an MRI were to her rites of passage as common as a driver’s license or the first taste of beer to other teenagers. She’d had her first taste of beer around then, too, in a parked car on the banks of the Hatchie River. When the tremor started, in fact, she thought it might be due to the one beer she’d had, and she confided as much to the nurse at Methodist North, who told her to forget all that thinking. A no-nonsense woman in her fifties with close-cropped bleached hair, the nurse told her that she’d be drinking a whole lot more beer in her lifetime and her mama and daddy were worried enough already without thinking their daughter might turn to alcohol.
After that trip to Methodist, and the inconclusive scans and blood work, her daddy took her to the West Tennessee Children’s Hospital. He marched her right in the front door and up to reception, where Agnes stood nervously watching a little bald-headed boy—he was off to one side in the lobby, tethered to a tank of oxygen as he played with Legos. They didn’t have an appointment but that hadn’t stopped her daddy, dressed in his coveralls for work, stripes of grease and paint across the belly and a slight yellowing under the arms. He just wanted one of them doctors to look at his little girl, he explained, just to know what it was, and then maybe they could fix it from there—her daddy, always the handyman, everything fixable with the right tools and know-how.
The receptionist made a call and had a nice woman in a smart suit with identification badges around her neck come and take Agnes and her father into a small meeting room. The woman, Jean was her name, gave him some coffee and Agnes some juice, both in WTCH coffee mugs, and explained to him that his little girl just wasn’t little enough, that the West Tennessee Children’s Hospital was just that, a place for children. Jean had a soothing voice and even patted his arm as she told them there were capable neurologists everywhere for adults, especially in Memphis, and said that she’d give him a list of recommendations.
He thanked her when it was over, and told her he understood. Looking at his boots, caked with mud that flaked in specks of brown on the white tiled floor as he shuffled them back and forth, he explained he “needed to try, at least, because he’d heard this hospital was the best there was and, you know, free.” She understood that, too, she said, and let Agnes and her daddy keep those coffee mugs.
Back out at reception Jean said something to the receptionist, who went back to her computer and started typing. The little boy was still there, playing with the Legos and not distracted in the least by his bald head or the mask covering his nose and mouth, or by his mother, who sat a few feet away with a magazine open in her lap, though keeping her eyes on her son. The woman looked tired.
Agnes wonders now what is in store for her and whether she will ever become as comfortable with whatever is happening inside her body as that boy was with his own sick little self, and she wonders at the fact that Jean had called her an adult that day. It was the first time that Agnes, all of sixteen at the time, had ever thought of herself as such. It was how she would think of herself from then on.
The receptionist had taken a sheet of paper from her printer and handed it to Agnes’s daddy, who shook Jean’s hand and thanked her. Jean squeezed Agnes’s arm, told her to take care, and gave her a look that an adult might give a sick child.
Now at Mount Sinai, when the doctor comes in, Agnes is wearing a hospital gown and only her underwear. “You can strip down to your bra and underwear and put this gown on, please,” the nurse had told her.
“I don’t wear a bra,” Agnes had said. “My titties are too small.”
The nurse left the room laughing.
The doctor is a large man with a dark complexion and heavy black beard, wearing a white turban that matches his doctor’s coat. In all of Landon’s talk about his doctor in New York City, he never mentioned a turban. It doesn’t bother Agnes; she just thinks a turban is the sort of thing a person ought to have mentioned. Dr. Mundra rolls a steel stool from the corner until he’s sitting at Agnes’s knees, having to look up at her to speak. He puts his clipboard and Agnes’s file—that file is as thick as the Tipton County phone book—down on the sink counter and takes her trembling left hand in his right.
“Agnes, please tell me what is wrong,” he says in a thick Indian accent. The man’s eyes, as he looks up at Agnes, are full of kindness.
And then, for reasons Agnes doesn’t understand, she starts crying. It is something she hasn’t done, hasn’t allowed herself, since that day she and her daddy visited the children’s hospital back home. After they’d left and were sitting in the cab of the pickup truck driving down North Parkway, she’d thought of that boy who didn’t care about anything but his Lego tower; Agnes thought about his mother sitting so close by and not caring about anything in the world but her little boy. She knew her daddy, in the seat beside her, didn’t care about anything right then but her, and she realized how scared he must be. More scared, even, than she was. And as she cried that day, her daddy, staring straight ahead at the road they were on, took her left hand in his right, just as this doctor does now.
Dr. Mundra waits and watches her.
“It’s all in that file there,” she manages between sobs.
“I know, but I want you to tell me. When you’re ready, Agnes; we have time.”
Time is something Oliver thinks a lot about these days as another year winds down. Winter has always been a contemplative time for him and is even more so this year as he brings his career and his life in New York to a formal end.
The apartment he’s lived in for more than forty years is a time capsule; the walls long ago ceased caring about whatever year it might be outside. Outside started changing years ago, too, with the petty crime and poverty creeping into his neighborhood like mold, like the kudzu he knew as a child. Francesca had been so proud of this place she’d chosen to raise her family, of the neighbors and the Pleasants’ station in life. He could hear it in her voice when she gave their address to someone over the telephone, the way she would hold for a beat right at the end before saying, “Harlem.” It had been like punctuation at the end of a sentence.
Coming back around these days, though. Make Francesca proud to see young couples walking around, pushing baby strollers, sitting outside at cafés. This is the neighborhood she’d known once again, and Oliver is sorry to have to miss it all.
Oliver pads around, looking at the same photos, the same knickknacks, and sitting on the same furniture his wife picked out so long before. It’s cluttered and could use a good cleaning. After his morning walks, though, once he’s stopped to pick up the papers or some magazines from a stand at the West 116th Street subway stop, he’s too tired to straighten up. H
e reads, naps, and saves the piles of paper, full ashtrays, and dirty teacups for another time. But the sitting room is a comfortable place and he moves around it with the same ease he moves around in his clothes or inside his own mind. He should be packing up all of these lamps and candy dishes and ashtrays, he thinks, or throwing much of it out. He should have begun that weeks ago. He’s meant to, just as he means to now, but instead he ends up looking in awe at the shelves full of books that Francesca amassed over the years. It’s daunting to look up at so many stories unread by him. He always said he would read them to know what Francesca saw in them, to know the same characters like friends, as she had. But he hasn’t. One more thing he hasn’t done in a long life of familial regrets whitewashed with professional success and acclaim.
With its random gaps, the bookcase looks like a child’s mouth grinning for the camera; volumes are missing, loosened teeth in the canon of Francesca’s literature. Charlene took crates of books out of the house when her mother died, the very day she died, if Oliver remembers correctly. “She wants something of her mother close to her,” he’d told himself as he tried to sleep on the sofa that first night. He’d tossed and turned, the missing books enforcing his sense of loss. Charlene must have known they’d go unread, he’d told himself. He wouldn’t have minded her taking them all in due time, and he’d suggested it to her, happy to know that they’d have a home and be enjoyed as much as Francesca had enjoyed them. But she’d been selective and now he has to contend with those left behind. He’ll have to ask her if she wants them now, or he’ll have them boxed up and carted off. Maybe the school where Francesca taught for so many years will want them, or Oliver can find the old bookstore she used to shop in and see if they’ll take them off his hands.
A giveaway calendar from the American Federation of Musicians hangs on a nail beside the bookcase among plaques and framed photos. The calendar is still turned to July 31, 1952, the day his oldest daughter was due. She would arrive two days later.
Where have the years gone? Oliver wonders for not the first time today.
It is the time away from Francesca that he wishes he could get back. Maybe he’d do things differently, he thinks. Maybe not—he really can’t know. He was trying to make a career then, support himself and Francesca and, eventually, three children. But it wasn’t all about sending money back home. It was also about the road and the records and the audiences as much as it was any family responsibility. It was about playing a little bit better than he did the night before and a whole lot better than anybody else out there trying to make a dollar doing the same thing. There was the fear of the future and the unknown—the kid in his mama’s pantry right then, or onstage at a school talent show down south who, though he didn’t even know it yet, was after Oliver’s job. These were the reasons Oliver took to the road, sometimes ten or eleven months out of the year: fear, a fear for his very life. These are the reasons he couldn’t explain in letters home, written on quiet nights in a train car moving through California or from a dingy hotel room in Berlin.
He sent money so Francesca could buy this apartment she’d chosen without him and a wall of books to read during nights alone on this furniture she chose. He sent gifts to his family, too, and took more pleasure from that—the latest Paris fashions, hand-carved dolls from Italy for his daughter, pocket trumpets found in a pawnshop in New Orleans for his boys. He was the doting father from a thousand miles away. And once home, he lavished souvenirs on Francesca and the kids, and woke early to cook eggs and flapjacks, flipping them high in the air to squeals of delight from the children.
His first day back was always a holiday for the family. No matter what they had going on at school or work, they took the day off and Oliver would take them to the park; to the Met, where he’d search out paintings of places he’d just visited; and out for ice-cream sundaes for lunch. They called those Ollie’s Days, and the kids, worn numb by an afternoon of activity and movement, would fall fast asleep in the evenings, leaving time for Oliver and Francesca to reunite, to explore each other the way Oliver had just explored half the world and Francesca book after book.
He believed then that those hours made up for the weeks and months away. Yet it was only a matter of days until Oliver was back to work, only instead of hopping a steamer for Europe, he was on the Lexington Local to the Village. There, he’d spend nights playing clubs, at late-night recording sessions, or in strange women’s beds.
“New York is where it is, baby; I got to keep my chops in my own city,” he’d say.
“I thought Los Angeles is where it’s at, or Kansas City, or Madrid,” Francesca would counter. “Where’s it going to be next week, Ollie? Near or far, or does it even matter?”
And then he’d leave, first kissing the tops of the kids’ heads while they still sat eating their supper.
These days, he walks around his quiet apartment that Francesca always kept so tidy, looking at family pictures and Francesca’s great wall of books. He realizes that even if he had that time back in his pocket, he doesn’t know what he’d change, even with the advantage of hindsight. The music and emotions of being onstage had coursed through his veins, and it was a force that was not easily tamed. We all make our beds, he’d often said, and then we’re told to lie down on them.
Oliver goes back to the bedroom he’d shared with Francesca, though not for many years now, and lies down on his side of it for a nap before his second night of shows.
When Agnes leaves Mount Sinai, all she can think of is a shower. As sterile as the rooms she’d just left were, all she wants to do now is wash. Instead of her hotel shower, though, she finds herself walking south along the park, allowing the rushing, swirling air from passing traffic and bodies to brush against her and scour away the past hours. At the bottom of Central Park, she descends underground for the Lexington Local to Greenwich Village. Standing on the platform, she’s amazed there are no barriers between the waiting crowd and the gully where the tracks lie. She fantasizes about stepping off, considers an end to the pain and the tremors—dreams of an end to the unknown, just as she had while leaning against the glass of her hotel window the night before. How satisfying it would be to know, to be absolutely certain of when and how her life might end. She longs to meet that train head-on. The fantasy tugs at her and she steps toward an onrush of air as a horn blasts and light appears around the tiled curve to her left. She closes her eyes, brings her hand to her face, and feels the numbed fingers tremble against her cheek.
Emerging from below, going from the gleaming glass of Midtown Manhattan to the low brick and crooked valley of the Village, is like traveling into the past. Though the handbills are only weeks old, the sense of time and place, she imagines, is half a century earlier. She listens to the voices around her, the languages of the city and of cities throughout the world. She has the sudden urge to travel and see all of those cities before it is too late. The realization of time escaping leaves her breathless for a moment and she stops to lean against a lamppost. The picture windows nearby offer food, furniture from decades before, and clothing and eyeglasses at the height of fashion. A tobacco store shows off boxes of highly polished wood and gleaming lacquer, and through the windows of a barbershop she watches a black man having a pattern shaved into the hair over his ear. A café spills its mismatched tables and chairs out onto the sidewalk, where several patrons huddle together against the cold and blow steam from oversized mugs. She closes her eyes for just a moment as she had in the subway and listens. The electricity in the air is thrumming and she can feel it against her and all around her. The city is alive and will be this way long after she is gone.
The bookshop, tucked in between a Laundromat and a store devoted to chess sets, is deep and narrow with a high ceiling and shelves that strain to reach it. Before she even realizes she’s stepped in out of the brisk air, she is standing in fiction and inhaling the musty scent of old leather and yellowing pages. She thinks the bookstore might be a more be
neficial environment than the hospitals she’s spent so much time in.
She walks around the store beneath towering shelves and peruses titles. She isn’t looking for anything, but likes the familiarity she finds in any bookshop anywhere.
The man behind this counter in New York is old and white haired and reminds Agnes of the piano tuner her father used to hire to tend to the family’s antique upright. The bookseller had greeted her when she entered with little more than a nod and a look in his eyes—over his small, rimless glasses—that said, “Let me know if I can help you with anything.” Other customers come in, the bell over the door announcing each arrival, and the old man calls many by name. Some pick up prepackaged parcels at the counter while others browse as Agnes is doing. Agnes has always heard terrible stories about brusque and rude northerners, but she is finding just the opposite to be true.
She wanders through a section on architecture and picks her way among oversized coffee-table books with beautiful photos of buildings found around the world. Her hand lands on a small volume with a brown paper jacket and line drawing of the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a book of architectural drawings, elevations, and blueprints of well-known structures in New York. Agnes thinks of her mother, an artist, though not in any professional sense—she simply loves to create. From as early as Agnes can recall, she has kept a series of sketchbooks close at hand, filling them with landscapes and people, capturing a moment on paper the way some might with a camera. When she fills one, she puts it on a shelf with the others, a small library of her memories as seen through her eyes and rendered in her own hand. She always has a pencil or two with her, stuck in the crease of a novel, in a Moleskine notebook, or in the knot of hair rolled onto the back of her head.
When Agnes was a little girl, she loved to watch her mother lose herself in her drawings. Back then, they just seemed to capture minor details of her life, mundane subjects such as the family cat lounging on the arm of a couch, the eaves of their house covered in snow, or Agnes sitting and watching television. The simplicity and narrow focus of the individual drawings, though, take on a grander scope when she thinks of entire books filled with those views, and whole shelves filled with books. Drawings of family reunions or her father’s back as he sat at his piano were the stuff of family albums, everyday moments of life, though without the glare of a lens or the harshness of a camera’s flash. Each sketch became a foundation of a book, of a year, of a decade.
Five Night Stand: A Novel Page 6