by Sue Miller
She didn’t know what to say. In some ways, he sounded so much like himself, interested in this new subject he wanted to master.
He had some more tea and set his cup down. “Fascinating, too, in a way, to be on the receiving end of it.”
“Oh, Dad.”
“No, no,” he said. “No pity. You know the Larkin poem.”
“I don’t.”
He laughed, his sudden, gentle apology of a laugh that tilted his head slightly back. “I don’t either anymore, but for a few lines. ‘What do they imagine, the old fools?’ ” He smiled. “That’s me,” he said. “An old fool. Larkin describes the way one thinks as one descends, the way the past and the present become confused. And dreams, in the mix. It’s quite … true, I think.” He sat for a moment, looking at nothing—the table, the teacup: the blank look returned to his face. And then he seemed to gather himself. “The last line answers the question,” he said to her.
“What question?”
“ ‘What do they imagine?’ ” He raised his finger, as he often did, she thought—a gesture she would remember later. “ ‘We shall know.’ ”
She didn’t say anything.
“Your mother and I, we can’t really talk about it. But I want you to know this, that I do understand it. I know what’s happening to me.”
“All right.”
“Sylvia and I …” He trailed off, and shook his head.
He looked up, out the window, where the trees were bending sideways under the sudden audible lashing of the wind. He said softly, “Odd way. To disappear.”
“You’re not disappearing.”
“Oh.” He raised his eyes to her. “Yes. I am. When your brain changes, you become … another. There’s a story, in the book, about a man with a brain injury. A trauma. A sweet man, gentle. Who becomes profane. Lewd. This will happen more slowly to me, and doubtless in a different way. But like him, I will disappear. The consciousness I’ve cultivated with … well, with so much vanity, I suppose”—he lifted his chin and laughed once, lightly—“will go.” He sat, looking at his hands holding his teacup.
After a moment, he said, “It raises the question, doesn’t it: when a person is changing, as I am, at what point are they no longer who they were? The person … the person is partly the structure of the brain, it seems. So, I will be … someone else. I will cross a line. At some point.”
“It will be a long time, Dad. You have lots of time still to be you.” Her voice was flat, defiant.
“I think you’re trying to make me feel better, Frankie.” He smiled and looked utterly like himself. Alfie. Her father.
“Well, why wouldn’t I?” she said.
“Don’t.” His voice was gentle.
After a moment, she said, “All right.”
“What I’m trying to say to you is that it won’t be me it’s happening to anymore. It simply won’t matter, not to me. Not to who … I’ve been, before this, all my life. And that, my dear, is a comfort to me.”
“Cold comfort.” She could hear the anger in her voice.
“But comfort,” he said.
She reached across the table and put her hand on his. He turned his up, underneath hers, and held it. They sat that way for a moment.
Then he released her hand and sat back. They were quiet a minute more. The refrigerator kicked on with its intestinal rumble.
She felt a need to keep him talking, to turn the conversation to anything else, really—but to keep it going. “How is the rest of your reading? Reading for the prize?”
“Ah!” he said. And with pleasure visible in his face and audible in his voice, he launched himself. He spoke of another book he thought might be put forward and the reasons why.
When she had asked the right number of questions, when they’d fallen into a silence she was more comfortable with, she said, “Shall we walk back up together?”
“What a nice offer,” he said.
“I’ll just be a minute.” She went into the bathroom and quickly brushed her hair, which had curled wildly in the humid air. She put on lipstick. Then she went into the bedroom to change out of her work clothes, splattered here and there with dried joint compound. She was quick: she was aware of him, waiting in the kitchen, she worried that he’d get up and leave without her. Which would be fine, except that he’d agreed to wait. And she wasn’t sure he’d remember that.
But he was still sitting at the table when she emerged from the bedroom. My sweet father, she thought, thinking of his bravery in talking to her about his illness, of his elegance in turning then so easily—for her sake, really—back to the prize. She chose not to think, for the moment, of the various ways he’d creeped her out over the last few weeks.
He looked up at her. “I meant to tell you,” he said. “There was a fire.”
“I know, Dad.”
“No, there was another fire. That’s what I came here for—to tell you that.”
She stood there, momentarily speechless. This had moved too quickly for her—his shift from being so present to this, now, which she assumed was old news about one of the fires she already knew of.
But then it occurred to her that there could have been another fire. A fourth fire. Or would it be the fifth? But there was no good way to ascertain that with him, was there? No question that would make it clear.
“That’s just awful news, isn’t it?” she said, hoping she sounded concerned enough.
“Yes, it is,” he said. And got up.
Together they walked slowly up the road to the old farmhouse, chatting about the weather, about Liz’s children, about the first of the wild blueberries, just ripening. A perfectly reasonable conversation. The rain started, lightly, just as they got to the back porch.
Sylvia looked up from her desk in the corner of the living room as they came in from the kitchen. Her eyes tightened, and moved quickly from one of them to the other. “Well, this is an unexpected pleasure.” She set down her pen.
“I would have called, except …” Frankie held her hands up. “No phone.”
“Was Alfie down with you?” Sylvia turned to him. “You went down to visit?” There was something sharp in her tone.
“Yes.” Alfie and Frankie said it together.
Sylvia’s lips pursed. “I wish you’d told me,” she said, after a second or two. She looked at her watch. “Well, may I offer you a drink?” she said to Frankie. She stood up. “It’s almost five. This would be on the up and up.”
“I will if you’ll join me.”
“I certainly will. Alfie? A drink?”
“No, no. I’m going to read for a bit, I think.”
“As you wish.”
Frankie followed her mother into the kitchen and sat down at the small white table. She looked out at the rain, falling gently but steadily now.
Her mother got an ice tray out of the refrigerator and stood at the sink, noisily whacking the cubes out. She fixed each of them a gin and tonic with a wedge of lime. She set out a plate and put crackers on it, and a thick slice of hard cheese. She brought this over to the table and sat down opposite Frankie. She turned on the light hanging on the wall over the table. Harsh lines leaped to her face. “What a gray, unpleasant day it’s turned into,” she said, looking out the window. “Clark and Liz got out just in time.”
Frankie thought what an odd verb choice that was: got out.
“What have you been doing all day?” Sylvia asked.
“Oh, Sheetrocking and rolling.” And then, to her quizzical face, “Applying joint compound to all the Sheetrock seams and the exposed screw heads at Liz’s house.”
“Ah!” she said. “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“It’s something to do. It makes me feel helpful, which I’m grateful for.”
“Yes, I can certainly understand that.”
“Can you?”
“Alfie’s not the only one who retired, you know.”
“Of course. I do know that.” Though she hadn’t given it much thought, her mother�
��s work. What it might have meant to her to give it up. Somehow they’d all always seen her work as primarily utilitarian, a matter of finances—they needed the money. It was Alfie’s work they talked about at the dinner table, Alfie’s work that led them from one home to another. Alfie’s work that was important. “So what do you imagine for yourself, in your retirement?” she asked.
“I suppose I can’t say, really. But something. Something that will let me find a way to feel … at home, here.”
This startled Frankie further, this turn of phrase. “But don’t you feel at home? I mean, it’s been your summer home for so long. And your family’s.”
“That’s so. Of course that’s so. But summer has always been vacation time. Time away from home. No, the only time it was really home was when I lived here through the year, with my grandmother.”
“That’s the time your parents were in South America, right?”
“Yes. They’d taken my brothers, but left me here.” She stopped for a moment, looking out the window as if seeing something there. Then she looked back at Frankie. “But I think in the end what that year made me see was how much it wasn’t my home.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh …” She shook her head, screwed up her face. “I don’t know. I was itchy to get out, that’s all. Everyone’s itchy to get out at that age. You certainly were.”
“And I did, didn’t I?”
“Very thoroughly, I would say.” She sipped at her drink and set it down. “No, the person who feels at home here is Alfie. He loved it from the get-go.”
Sylvia cut herself a slice of cheese and pushed the plate over toward Frankie. Without looking at her daughter, she said, “He just meandered down?”
“Yes. I’m not sure he knew why, exactly.” This was the first time Frankie had acknowledged aloud to her mother that she knew there was something wrong with Alfie.
“Thank you for bringing him back.”
“I’m happy to.” They were quiet a moment.
“I should have kept an eye on him, but I … I just didn’t.” Sylvia sighed.
“Is it Alzheimer’s disease, do you think?” There. She’d said the words, too.
And Sylvia didn’t flinch. “I don’t know,” she said. “He has an appointment in a couple of weeks to see a new doctor here for some tests. I’ve talked to this one ahead of time about my concerns. That was impossible in Bowman because the doctor there had been Alfie’s for so long that he wasn’t willing to discuss Alfie with me behind his back. This time we’re starting out that way—behind his back.” There was a kind of fury in her voice, but Frankie thought it was anger at the situation, at what she was being forced to do, rather than anger at Alfie, so she didn’t respond to it.
Instead she said to her mother, “He thinks it is. Alzheimer’s.”
“What do you mean? Alfie thinks it is?” She sounded incredulous.
“Yes. He’s read about it—well, haven’t we all? But he’s got a book about it, a prize book. Anyway, he was very articulate about it just now. He knows he’s …” She made a face. “Disappearing is the word he used.”
“He said that to you?”
There was something so sharp in her tone that Frankie thought she’d made a mistake—that she shouldn’t have started to talk about this with Sylvia. But she’d launched herself, she couldn’t retreat now. “Yes. I thought he was very brave.”
Sylvia was smiling. A bitter smile. “No doubt.” She had a long swallow of her gin and looked out the window again. “He wouldn’t dream of discussing it with me.”
Frankie was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “I’m sorry, Mother.”
“Oh, God, Frankie, don’t be sorry. It’s just the way it is, isn’t it? You’re his confidante”—she pronounced it in a very French way—“and I’m his warden. And he’s my prisoner.” She laughed quickly. “Unless it’s the other way around: that I’m his prisoner.” She smiled at Frankie, a grim smile. “Either way, it’s no fun, standing guard. Asking him where he’s going every time he leaves.”
Frankie didn’t know what to say. Finally, she offered, “We’re all standing guard, these days.” She shrugged. “It reminds me of Africa, actually. We’re not quite at the razor-wire stage, but one or two more fires and maybe we’ll get there.” She sipped at her drink. Then thought of a change of subject: “Oh, Dad told me there was another fire?”
“There was. The Averys’ place. They came home from a party, I guess, and the house was just about gone. The firemen got there with not much to do.”
“Oh! So they were living there.”
“Yes. They’d been up about a week.”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“Well, this is different, don’t you think? I mean, this is really different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that before, the other houses that burned were empty. Really empty. No one was living in them. It wasn’t only that they were … unoccupied for the evening, like this one. They were still closed up for the season. So this seems scarier. As if he’s no longer being so … careful, I guess you’d have to say. It makes you think that someone might actually be at home next time. Someone could get hurt.”
“ ‘Next time,’ ” Sylvia said, looking out the window and then back at Frankie. “I suppose it will just go on. After all, why stop now?”
After a moment, Frankie said, “I suppose the other possibility is that he’ll be scared off by how defensive everyone is getting, by the alarm systems and the locks and whatnot.”
“Maybe,” Sylvia said. “Are you at all frightened, down at Liz’s, all alone?”
“No,” Frankie said. And then she remembered. “Well, that’s not quite true. I had a little moment of panic when I heard Daddy on the porch, actually. And even for a few seconds when I saw him. Before I recognized him.”
“Nothing like in Africa, though.”
“No.” And it was—nothing like. Still, she had the impulse to defend Africa, to say, I wasn’t truly scared there. But she knew how much being white, being privileged, being an expat, had kept her from needing to feel fear.
They sat in silence for a moment or two. Frankie was aware of the sound of the rain outside in the trees, and of its soft drumming on the roof.
“So,” Sylvia said, “you’re not sure if you’re going back.” Her eyes were suddenly keen on Frankie.
“No.”
“No, you’re not going?”
“No, I’m not sure.”
“Are you just, what?” She lifted her hand. “Tired of it? Worn out?”
“I am tired. Yes. Not so much of it, but tired. Really, really tired.” She had another swig of the gin.
“Was there someone? Someone you were involved with? There?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You seem …” Sylvia frowned. “Sad, in some deep way, I suppose. Not just tired. Sad.”
“I am sad.” Frankie tried smiling at her.
“Then it’s over? Whatever? This other person?”
“Oh, it was over before it began.”
“Oh!” She sounded startled. “Was he … is he, married?”
“No. Or he is, but he and his wife don’t live together. They haven’t, for a long time. She’s in England, anyway. But that’s not the point.”
“Are there children?”
“They’re grown. More or less. He doesn’t see them often.”
“So, he is available, after a fashion.”
“No.” Frankie laughed quickly. “No, he’s not. Available is exactly what he’s not. Or I couldn’t have him, anyway. He wouldn’t …” She drew her breath in sharply. She found herself unable to breathe normally. She realized she was afraid of weeping in front of her mother. But not for Philip, she knew that. For all of it, for everything she couldn’t have in Africa.
Once, in her last days supervising a clinic in Sudan, she had been reviewing the protocols with the staff. There was one nurse whose skills she was sure of,
a woman in her twenties she had deputized, though she knew this was disrespectful of the older women. “Esther will remind you of all this when I leave,” she had said to the group.
One of the older women had spoken then, her voice flat and bitter with anger. “When you go, you will be gone.”
And she had felt it then, again, the way she was forever a mzungu, the way she lived in a different element from them, the way she was always—to them, to herself—going. Because nothing there was hers, it couldn’t be hers.
“He wouldn’t …?” Her mother’s voice was gentle, and it called her back.
He had wept, she was remembering. Philip. He had come and knelt by her chair on the rooftop terrace in Lamu and leaned his head against her bare arm. His breathing had thickened unevenly. She felt his tears on her flesh, and she was startled, unsure of where his sorrow came from, what it meant. She was aware of some sense of obligation to him in that moment, and the simultaneous realization that she might actually be relieved when he was gone. She felt that as a possibility even as she turned to him, reached for him: along with the sadness came the eagerness for solitude.
Now, with her mother, she expelled her breath sharply. “Just, he wouldn’t, I guess. Nor, in fact, would I.” She smiled, what she supposed was a bitter smile. Tired, yes, her mother was right. But as much tired of herself as of anything else. “There was, I guess you’d call it, a built-in impossibility. Neither of us was … home, after all. Neither could, really, beckon the other, into his life, in any sense. ‘What life?’ might have been the operative question. Though I suppose even that wouldn’t have mattered if we’d felt something … Oh, I don’t know.”
“It’s always a mystery, isn’t it?” Sylvia was looking out the window. She’d sat back away from the light, and her face was wistful, Frankie would have said. Almost beautiful.
Frankie was too surprised to speak for a moment. A gift, from her mother. An invitation. “What is?” she said.
“Oh, how anyone musters the will, or the courage, or the foolhardiness, to imagine a lasting thing. And then why that turns out so well for some people and so badly for others.” She shrugged. Outside, the rain was suddenly heavier.
“A refill?” she said. She held up her glass, empty but for the ice cubes and the shredded lime wedge.