Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  Would he know when she died? Would the machine tell him? Perhaps she was dead now. He ran his fingers over her bandaged palm, the lines there so familiar to him, after more than forty years. The skin is what you get to know best; even damaged, he recognized the little lump below the knuckle of her forefinger, and the slightly discolored band where she’d worn her wedding ring all these years. The wedding ring, on the bedside table now; it had gotten too uncomfortable to keep on.

  She shifted slightly, moved her head. Eyes fluttering, then settling back. “Louisy?” he said, suddenly hopeful. “Louisy?” but he already knew it was just her body, already knew she wasn’t coming back. He ran the fingers of his right hand up her bandaged, needled arm, and in the meantime his left hand, dropped below the bed now, rolled the secret marble back and forth, back and forth.

  ___________

  “A slow, slow winding down,” Dr. Thayer said. “Each breath just a little less powerful than the one before.”

  He was standing with Nat, Danny, and April around Louise’s bed. All of them were waiting for her to die, now that it was clearly a matter of minutes—at most, hours.

  “I think she expected a lingering death,” April said. “Wasting away and all. She hated that idea so much too.”

  “She was never fond of attention,” Danny said, “particularly when she was weak. She got embarrassed easily. She wanted to be left alone.”

  “Once, she told me she’d kill herself before having to have her friends parading before her, saying good-bye,” Nat said. “With pills, of course. Well, she didn’t need to, as it turned out.”

  “Perhaps it’s better this way,” Danny said. “I mean, if this hadn’t happened—well, a lingering death from cancer would have been what she’d have had to face, wouldn’t it?”

  “And yet,” April said, “I can’t help but wonder if she longed for a slow death this last week—all that time to get used to it, to make bequests, tie up loose ends. There really just wasn’t enough time for her, or for any of us. She must have had to deal with so much so quickly.”

  “There really is no moment of death in cases like these,” Dr. Thayer said. “It’s like Zeno’s paradox. She’s half alive, then a quarter alive, then an eighth alive, then a sixteenth alive. At some point you just have to decide. And”—here Dr. Thayer turned his head to examine the blue lines on the machine next to the bed—“I think we are well past the one-sixteenth point now.” He coughed, looked at his watch, and turned to Nat.

  “So,” he said. “It’s now two twenty-four. For the death certificate, shall we make it, say, two twenty-five? That’s—forty-two seconds from now.”

  Nat nodded.

  “All right,” Dr. Thayer said. He kept his eyes on his watch. Next to the bed the respirator breathed.

  “Ten seconds—five—two twenty-five.” He put his wrist down, looked at Nat, and said, “That’s it.”

  Danny blinked. He stepped back and stared down at his mother, but she looked the same now, dead, as she had a second ago, alive.

  Wasn’t death supposed to be final, recognizable? A hand closing the eyes, a face going white, a sheet pulled over the head?

  None of these things had happened. There was no high-pitched scream from the machine, no shift in its charting of her body’s decay. Dr. Thayer was moving toward the door; Nat had a hand on April’s back, he was talking cremation, he was talking effects and insurance.

  “Wait,” Danny called.

  They turned and looked at him.

  “What is it?” Dr. Thayer said.

  “Yes, what is it, Danny?”

  He opened his mouth to speak. How could he explain that he wanted back that wink of an eye, that instant? If only Dr. Thayer could turn back the hands of his watch, then, perhaps, he could not blink and would witness the precise instant she crossed over.

  “Never mind,” Danny said. “Sorry.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes,” Dr. Thayer said, and went out.

  Nat was standing by the bed. On the night table was the misshapen heart from the night before. He picked it up. He took off his glasses. He put two fingers on the bridge of his nose.

  “Daddy,” April said. She put an arm around his arm and led him toward the door. Danny looked once more at his mother—his mother’s body, now. And suddenly he imagined her somewhere else, perhaps trapped, like Charlie Chaplin, between the moving hands of Dr. Thayer’s watch as it decided the moment of her death.

  “Well, I guess there’s no point in waiting around here anymore, is there?” Nat said. He shook his head. “I guess not.”

  He headed out of the room then, so that only Danny was left, April holding the door. Danny turned one last time to look at his mother. “Well, good-bye,” he said, as if he were speaking to her by telephone. “Talk to you soon. Or not. I guess not.” He breathed once, deeply, and said, “Good-bye, Mama.” Then he pulled off, for the last time, the hideous flowered cap, and even though he knew he would never, ever see her again, he didn’t turn around.

  Chapter 20

  There was no funeral. “Louise wouldn’t have wanted it,” Nat said as they got into the car. “She never did have any patience for ceremony.”

  “How quickly we’ve slipped into talking this way,” April said. “As if she’s been gone a hundred years, and everything difficult, everything that was messy and hard to interpret about her, we can just wrap up in little packages. ‘She never did like ceremony.’ ‘She always was partial to a clean kitchen.’ I assumed that at least it would take a couple of months, at least some time would pass before we started talking that way.”

  “Well,” Nat said, and coughed. “Anyway, I was thinking of maybe a party tomorrow, a sort of paying-respects party, you might say. Nothing formal. So that Louise’s friends can—what was the word that social worker used, Danny?”

  “Seal.”

  “Yes. So her friends can seal. A sealing party. I like the sound of that. With coffee, maybe cookies and cake. No speeches, like I said, nothing formal. Does that sound okay with you?”

  April and Danny nodded. Each of them was holding a small plastic bag inside of which was a single object—Danny had Louise’s eyeglasses, April her toothbrush, Nat her wedding ring—and as they got into the car, they clutched these bags to their laps like children with favors from a birthday party. Walter had Nat’s suitcase. She had been dead—Danny checked his watch—forty-seven minutes: half an hour to settle the bill, another ten minutes waiting for the effects to be sterilized and brought out from the burn unit, plus good-byes. Everyone—Dr. Thayer, the nurses, Jesus and Dorell—had taken a long time saying good-bye.

  Now that they were all seat-belted, Nat turned the key in the ignition, and for the last time they coasted out of the hospital parking lot and onto the freeway. It was a beautiful day. The city dissipated, fragmented, until the occasional clumps of green hillside interrupting the houses became countryside, and it was the clumps of houses that were the interruption. April had opened her window and, like a child, was extending her hand, feeling for the round ball of the wind.

  “Music?” Nat said.

  “Sure,” said Danny.

  Nat pushed a cassette of Man of La Mancha—it was the only one he owned—into the mouth of the tape deck.

  I was spawned in a ditch by a mother who left me there,

  Naked and cold and too hungry to cry.

  I never knew her, I’m sure she left hoping

  That I’d have the good sense to die.…

  “And by the way,” Nat said, “about the food, I don’t think there should be anything too fancy. Cookies, coffee cake. That’s all.”

  “Fine,” April said. The capacious highway glided between the humps of mountains. Then they were all silent, listening carefully to Aldonza’s lament, and April faintly humming along.

  ___________

  At home, lights snapped on, televisions. Clara had come twice during the week, so the rooms felt vast and cool—an enormous relief after the cramp
ed corridors of the hospital. As soon as they were inside, April immediately set herself to baking. There was a banging of pots and pans in the kitchen; sugar and flour canisters were taken out of the pantry and opened. The weatherman on the local news was describing the progress of a hurricane that was in the process of devastating South Carolina; it was called, by some astonishing coincidence, Louise. “Not only is there fear of serious property damage to the Carolina coastal region, there’s even some suspicion that Louise might hit the New York City area or Long Island.” An image came on the screen of torrential rains, half-drowned houses, children maneuvering through suburban neighborhoods in rowboats.

  “I can’t believe it,” Danny said. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

  “Change the channel,” April said. “People’s Court should be on.” Obediently Danny switched. A woman claimed her neighbor’s dog had killed two rabbits plus a chicken; she pushed her child forward to describe the rabbits’ remains, while the neighbor, stoic, stroked repeatedly the smooth brown head of the dog in question, a nervous-looking spaniel that at one point barked unexpectedly, much to the amusement of the courtroom audience. “How would you feel about tollhouse cookies?” April asked Danny, who was sitting at Louise’s desk. “Or maybe that really rich chocolate peanut butter cake I made last summer. We’re having a party tomorrow, after all; we need food.”

  “Dad said nothing too fancy,” Danny reminded her.

  “What’s fancy about chocolate peanut butter cake? Now a proper gâteau with butter cream and maybe ground walnuts and meringue—that’s fancy.”

  “I guess,” Danny said. Cautiously he surveyed the kitchen. What they had been afraid of most—finding things—was already happening: a shopping list on the table, for instance—bran, chicken parts, skim milk, margarine—not to mention last week’s Times crossword puzzle, lying on the shelf by the living room sofa. It was only half finished, the handwriting faint and slightly jagged, as if she had had trouble holding the pencil. Right now the house was clogged with Louise, bits of hair in the shower and on the roller head of the deodorant canister, fragments of skin and dried blood, but these things would break apart, disintegrate, just as her smell would fade from the closet. No, what lasted was handwriting, it was the only preservable thing that is unique to each of us, and so Danny wondered if he should save the shopping list, save the crossword puzzle, those shadowy aspects of herself his mother had sloughed off before the ambulance took the rest of her away.

  In the kitchen Danny studied the crossword puzzle. No one in the family except Louise had ever gone in much for puzzles, probably because each of them was in his own way afraid of challenging her assumed superior skill at them; puzzles were the one thing in the world she felt she truly did best. Danny wasn’t sure if he was as inept at puzzles as he pretended to be, or simply afraid to intrude upon this area in which his mother felt so proud. When Sunday had rolled around, and that magically thick paper from the other, better coast arrived on the doorstep, it was understood that you were to leave the magazine section for Louise. Once April asked if she might give the puzzle a try and then erase her answers, but only once.

  And so sometime in those last days or hours, Louise had sat down, as always, to do the puzzle. Perhaps this was out of stoic devotion to her routines, a stubborn refusal to give in to illness. Or perhaps she had steadied her gaze on the cool black-and-white grid in the hope that it would distract her from fear, or pain, or both. It didn’t matter, because at some point she had had to throw the puzzle aside, at some point the pain or the fear got too bad for ordinary antidotes. It would have to have been a severe circumstance; she had never not finished a crossword puzzle in her life.

  On the television, Judge Wapner delivered his grave and sensible verdict. Danny took a sharpened pencil from the ceramic blue jar on his mother’s desk and pulled himself upright in his chair. “Twenty-seven down: The muse of history,” he read aloud. “April, who was the muse of history?”

  “Beats me,” April said.

  “Clio,” Danny said. “I think it was Clio. Yes, that fits. Now—thirty-two across: Tone, combinative form. Oh, what the hell is ‘combinative form’ anyway? You know, I meant to ask Mom. For years I meant to call her up and ask her what the hell ‘combinative form’ was anyway.”

  “I think it just means the form you use when you put a word together with another word,” April said.

  “Combinative form,” Danny muttered. He sat back, trying to remember, but was distracted by the familiar array of objects on his mother’s desk, each shivering with significance and melancholy: the ragged, paper-clipped stack of coupons, added to and subtracted from since Danny’s infancy; the white cube with its cargo of stamps; the calendar filled with appointments—mostly doctors’ and dentists’ appointments—stretching out into the next month; the pile of unopened mail. There was a pad of paper hand-stamped with her name by Cousin Markie in his junior high school printshop; a magnetized paper clip holder April had given as a birthday present years ago; a ceramic pillbox Nat bought her once, with the words “Within you see what pleases me” laced around the edge. When you opened it, there was a mirror. Even the mail had a timeless feel: bills, bills, flyers from department stores, get-well cards in thick ivory envelopes embossed with the never-changing names of her friends: Jack and Myra Eber, Sherrye’s Hair Design Studio, Joyce P. Rosen.

  The house was quiet, except for the sound of beaters, as April whipped egg whites into a froth. From Nat’s bedroom, the faint voice of a television. (April had shut The People’s Court off.) Then Walter calling: “Danny.”

  April turned the beaters off, held them in midair, dripping foam.

  “What is it, Walt?”

  “Could you come here? To the living room?”

  “Okay!” Danny got up, and April, wiping flour onto the thighs of her jeans, followed him. Walter was sitting on the living room sofa, Louise’s knitting bag between his knees.

  “Walt, what’s wrong?” Danny asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Walter said. “I know I shouldn’t have been snooping in your mother’s knitting bag, and there’s no excuse for it, but I found something I thought you’d want to see.”

  “What?”

  He reached into the bag and pulled from it a yellow baby bootie patterned with ducks. “I guess she hadn’t finished them, because—here’s the other one.” He fished out a second bootie, still intricately webbed to the needles, like an embryo born before its time.

  “Let me see it,” April said impatiently, and Walter handed her the finished bootie.

  Nat came in, buttoning his pants. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “We found this in Mama’s knitting bag,” Danny said, handing the half-finished bootie to Nat.

  “Oh,” Nat said. “Oh.”

  “Do you know who she was making them for?” April asked.

  Nat shook his head.

  “Well, could it be possible they were for me? I mean, don’t you think that’s possible?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think probably she was.”

  April scrutinized the half-finished bootie, then handed it back to Danny, who put it on the table. No one seemed to be able to hold it for very long.

  “She was always knitting things for people,” Nat said. “So many sweaters. You know, she gave Rose Henninger a cardigan in exchange for piano lessons. She was always making bargains like that. I can bet you, half the people tomorrow will be wearing something Louisy knit for them.”

  “I left mine in New Jersey,” Walter said, blowing his nose.

  “I’d like to finish it,” April said. “The bootie, I mean.”

  “You don’t knit, April,” said Danny.

  “Then I’ll learn,” April said.

  ___________

  That night there was more news of Hurricane Louise. The threat to the East Coast was becoming more serious. Danny and Walter sat at the foot of Nat’s bed, watching as, on the screen, a computer image of the storm menaci
ngly stalked the sleeping heart of Manhattan.

  “I hope our house will be okay,” Danny said.

  “Don’t worry,” Walter said, “my mother will batten down the hatches if she has to. Anyway, it’s only supposed to graze New Jersey in the coastal areas, and even if it does pass over New York, it’ll be pretty much weakened by then. Just a storm.”

  “So why is everyone making such a big deal out of it?”

  “Because it was a huge hurricane. Hurricanes almost never get that far north in any version.”

  “The word in New York now is this,” the weatherman said. “Louise is coming and she’s mad as hell. Over to you, Chuck.”

  Nat, who was lying sprawled over his half of the big bed, in boxer shorts, aimed his remote control at the television and switched the channel. On the screen now, the drones of a termite colony marched silently to satisfy their enormous, pregnant queen; then Wheel of Fortune came on; then a talk show, on which a woman with streaked red hair was crying; then The Flintstones. “Not much to choose from,” Nat said, returning to the termite colony, and Danny and Walter settled, stretched, getting comfortable as Danny and April had gotten comfortable all through their childhoods, to watch the meticulous activity of the insect world.

  But in the kitchen April stirred and mixed and beat. Bowls dripped batter onto the countertops, spatulas and whisks filled the sink, flour dusted the stove and floor. Any minute Louise might have come through the door from the grocery store, crossed her arms over her chest, and asked April just what on earth she thought she was doing, but she did not; neither did she pull rubber gloves onto her hands and start filling the sink with water, or go into the bedroom to ride the exercycle, or settle down on the living room sofa with a book and her knitting. She did not answer the phone, and she did not vacuum the rug. She did not dunk her hands in wax. She did not watch the news.