They’d come to this river for the first time when Gary was a newborn. It seemed like a good idea to get away from the city during the heat of the summer, to treat themselves to a vacation after the drama of the birth. Martha’s screams had shocked him. Her pain was so different from his memory of Julia’s, which had been mitigated by the knowledge of what would follow, the gift that would be placed into her arms. Martha was terrified and begged Julia and Burton to stop what was happening to her. They held her hands and smoothed her brow, as they did when she woke from a nightmare.
That first vacation had been a disappointment. The cabin had no electricity, and when Gary slept, Burton, Julia, and Martha sat in the dark in silence, each on a narrow camp bed. Walking in the woods or relaxing by the water made them self-conscious about their new, awkward family. Without the surrounding noise and fuss of their daily lives—his job, Julia’s caretaking duties—their family was simply an anomaly. The roles were out of order—Martha was mother and child, but not really a mother at all. Julia was more mother to the baby than grandmother. His own sense of himself as father or grandfather felt confusing, and he was unsure how to behave. They returned to the city two days earlier than planned. A month passed, and then he moved out.
He’d come back to the Sierras a few years later on a camping trip with some friends and he’d driven to the cabin on a whim. He saw it differently this time, as a place where a boy could explore and play games of pirates, where Gary could yell and march and throw rocks onto other rocks. Now this trip had become a yearly event. Burton rented the cabin for a week and he, Martha, and Gary spent each day by this river. Burton found he could look at the water endlessly, at the way its unified stream separated around jutting rocks, then braided back together. If he stared long enough, the water seemed to take on shapes and forms, only to break apart again into the relentless stream of molecules of which it was made. On very hot days the three of them would sit in fat, black inner tubes and ride the current, letting the wind and the water carry them toward the small town two miles away. There, Burton would treat them all to ice creams from the freezer at the general store while he found a local who would agree to give them a lift back to the cabin. Sometimes the three of them went fishing. Martha in particular had endless patience for this activity, and was usually rewarded for it with a decent catch by the end of a long, indolent afternoon in which the only sounds were the insect-like buzz of her line when she cast it, and the silken uptake of the spool when she reeled it in.
There had been few women in the years since Julia. Burton recognized the perversity of this. The compulsions that drove him toward lovers had disappeared once he’d left home. It was not a late-blooming guilt that kept him from seeking out romance and sex. It was only his sense that a certain way of being was part of the past. Taking up with a woman seemed foolish to him, as if he were an adult who still played with Matchbox cars. He could not explain himself more fully, a fact that caused more than one woman to accuse him of being cold. The freedom of being alone was, of course, illusory. He thought about Julia, Martha, and Gary all the time. He missed them and knew he was missing them in the truest sense. He spent every other weekend with Martha and Gary and this one week each August. He had done the calculations: if he lived to be eighty years old, he would spend only a little more than a thousand days with his daughter and grandson. Martha would think that was a big number. Her eyes would grow wide. Only he and Gary would know that a thousand days was less than three years.
At the river’s edge, Gary was trying to teach Martha how to skip rocks. He placed a smooth, flat stone in her hand, positioning her fingers around it just as Burton had taught him during past summers.
“Now!” he said.
She threw her arm forward but released the stone too late and it flew cockeyed and landed on the ground some yards to her left. “I’m bad at that game, Gary.”
“No you’re not. Let’s try again.”
He found another good stone. This time he held her arm as she threw, instructing her when to release the stone. It sank after hitting the water the first time.
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” Martha said.
“Okay, Mom.”
Gary wandered back to Burton and sat down next to him on a log. The two watched Martha as she pulled her sundress over her head and waded into the river. She wore a navy blue one-piece suit that belonged to Julia. The suit was tight on Martha’s body, making her seem even more voluptuous than she was.
It had been too difficult for him, watching Julia treat Martha as a proper mother, listening as she painstakingly taught Martha how to feed and diaper the baby, how to hold him correctly, as she encouraged Martha to marvel over developmental milestones, many of which Martha herself had arrived at too late or not at all. Gary’s perfection hurt Burton in a physical way. He felt as he did when he watched a theorem unfold seamlessly, the sheer elegance of it almost painful to witness because its presence in the world threw into high relief the incomprehensible mess of his life. When Martha and the baby had come home from the hospital, Burton stared at the infant and could not grasp that this was his grandson, that his blood had contributed to this unblemished thing. And yet there was his wife, swaddling and holding, burping and feeding, reminding him of their life so long ago. When they had brought their own daughter home, Julia had begun to parent instantly and gracefully, as if she’d done it before. She radiated joy. He marveled at the way she held Martha, as if her body had not really been whole until Martha appeared to complete it. And then later, when their situation became clear, Julia’s refusal to mourn and her unwillingness to put words to the loss of an idea they had both shared during the months of the pregnancy unmanned him. He discovered a fierce and protective love for his daughter but the second baby made him doubt himself again. How could he take joy in Gary without admitting to the disappointments of the past? He wanted to love Martha. Only Martha. The new baby was like a potential lover, beckoning him, enticing him with the promise of a free and uncomplicated satisfaction.
“You having fun?” Burton said. Gary was tracing a design in the dirt with a stick.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe tomorrow we’ll rent a couple of kayaks.”
“Okay.”
“I was thinking we’d grill some hot dogs tonight.”
“Sure.”
Gary was a compliant boy. He did his homework without being asked and did well in school. His teachers said that he was quiet, but that other children liked him. Burton knew that Gary had no particular friends. He never invited a playmate over to the house. In the last two years, he had become obsessed with basketball, spending endless hours alone throwing the ball in the hoop Burton had affixed to the garage door. Burton encouraged Gary to join the school team but Burton suspected that Gary did not want his mother coming to his games to cheer him on. When Gary was trying to do his homework, Martha would sing loudly or turn on the television. Burton could visualize exactly what part of Martha’s brain was compromised and what sorts of reasoning were physiologically impossible for her to accomplish. But he couldn’t help feeling that there was an ulterior intention behind her disruptions, and that she meant to distract her son so that he would be no more successful in the world than she. Burton was protective of Gary. He wanted everything for the boy.
“You can say no to hot dogs if you’d rather have something else.”
“I like hot dogs,” Gary said. “She likes them, too.”
“Well, she doesn’t like too many different kinds of food. But you know, you could eat other things.”
Martha waded into the river, her arms stretched out on either side of her, as if she didn’t want to touch the water with her hands.
“Like what? What kind of food?” Gary said.
“Like buffalo burgers. Or frog’s legs. Or snails!”
“I don’t think I want to eat snails,” Gary said, soberly.
“Maybe not. I’m just saying you can eat anything. Just say the word.”
“Hot dogs sound good to me.”
Burton smiled and put his hand on the boy’s head. When Gary was little, he would often slip and call Burton “Dad” instead of “Grandpa.” Burton could not deny that when Gary misspoke, he felt a little thrill. He knew how corrupt the fantasy was. How many of his titles were misnomers? Husband? Father? Lover? Had he ever successfully embodied any of these ideas?
Martha was swimming a fair distance from the shore. She turned to face them and raised her hands above her head. “Dad!” she called.
Gary and Burton waved.
“She loves to swim,” Burton said. Julia had been scared of Martha’s wandering off and falling into one of the neighborhood pools so she had taught Martha to swim early. Martha had become a good swimmer. For a few years, she had even joined a team at the YMCA. Burton had felt superior to the other parents, who were busy coddling their competitive children while his danced and sang by the edge of the pool in her turquoise swim cap.
“Is it cold?” Gary called out.
“Dad?” she repeated, her voice tight and insistent. Her arms went down. Her head disappeared underneath the water.
Gary stood up. “Grandpa,” he said.
Burton stood, a dark realization surging through his body. He kicked off his shoes as he ran to the river’s edge. He continued to run as he entered the water, but his body slowed as he struggled over the rocks. Martha’s head emerged from the water and she moved her hands frantically up and down. He could feel the weight of his soaked pants working against him. When he was far enough from shore that he could no longer touch the bottom, he got caught in the same riptide that held her in its grip. The water moved powerfully downstream and he was trying to cross against it. The current fought him, and every time he tried to take a stroke, he got no closer to her. Martha was plainly terrified, her eyes wide as a rag doll’s, her breath coming in short spurts as if her fear had lodged itself in her throat.
“Daddy?”
“I’m coming, baby. I’m almost there!” Burton said, but his own panic was beginning to defeat him. He was quickly becoming exhausted. His arms were too heavy to pull him forward. A vise seemed to have tightened around his lungs. He knew he could drown. He looked back at Gary standing on the shore, his arms held out in front of him, as if the tragedy unfolding was oncoming traffic that he could stop through sheer will. There was so much Burton had not yet told Gary. About the beauty of numbers, about how easy it was to flee from love, about the disaster of choosing loneliness. Burton knew he could get back to the boy, that the water would not fight him.
“Mommy!” Gary wailed.
The word filled Burton’s ears, making an exact and sudden sense. He turned back to Martha just as her head began to sink below the surface of the water. Her arms were not moving anymore; she had given up. And as she disappeared, he realized that he could not live without her either, could not have lived without her. He lunged for her. His fingers grazed the cold, rubbery skin of her soft shoulder, and he pulled himself to her, so that they were both trapped in the current. She clung to him. The wind whipped her wet hair into his face so that he could not see anything, could only smell the muddy odor of the river trapped in the strands. He held her under her knees and behind her back while he tried to tread water, just as she had held him long ago in the YMCA pool, shrieking with laughter at the idea that she could carry the weight of her father in her arms.
The tide released them two hundred yards downriver, loosening its hold, the river becoming the weak, rambling plaything they had always known it to be. Together, they crawled through the shallows to the shore. He stood and lifted her to her feet. She leaned into him, panting, her body heavy and formless with exhaustion.
Gary ran toward them, his arms pumping, his legs stretching out to cover as much space as they could. He threw himself into his mother, his arms circling her waist. Martha rested her cheek on the top of his head. “Mommy’s here,” she said.
Standing alone, Burton began to shiver. His body pitched and bucked so heavily that he had to wrap his arms around himself. But the shaking did not stop. It was as if there were a prisoner inside him, rattling the bars of his cell to protest his innocence, hoping that someone would hear him and agree that he had been unjustly accused.
Night Train to Frankfurt
THEY WERE GOING TO BOIL DOROTHY’S BLOOD. TAKE IT OUT, heat it, put it back in. The cancer would be gone. Well, that wasn’t exactly it. The treatment had a more formal-sounding name, thermosomethingorother, a word that was both trustworthy (because you recognized the prefix) and lofty, so that you didn’t really question it, knowing you were too thick to understand whatever explanation might be given you. “They’re going to boil my blood” is what it came down to, and this was what Dorothy had told her daughter, Helen, when she called her from New York. There were statistics, affidavits. There was a four-color brochure from the clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, printed in three languages. As they waited for the train in the Munich station, Helen studied the pamphlet’s fonts and graphics. A frequent dupe of advertising herself—how many depilatories and night creams had she bought over the years, and at what expense?—Helen understood the significance behind the choice of peaceful, healing blue over charged, emotional red, the softening elegance of the italicized quotes from Adèle de Chavigny, a woman from Strasbourg who had not only survived having her blood boiled but had gone on to live a life of graceful transcendence. There were no concrete images of the clinic itself, no pictures of whatever this boiling machine might look like. Helen imagined huge vats like those in a brewery—wide, clear tubes with viscous, viral blood moving sluggishly in one direction, while bright, animated, healthy blood rushed eagerly back toward the patient. On the roof of the brewery, she imagined enormous chimneys expelling the sweet-sour-smelling residue of defeated disease into the air. Poof, poof, the smokestacks would go, and all the German townsfolk (yes, in her fantasy they were wearing lederhosen and small peaked caps) would look up, proud to know that, in their town, death had been conquered.
“Fairy stories,” Dorothy would have said dismissively, had Helen shared such an idea with her, as she had so often as a child, forever irritating Dorothy with her impractical mind. Helen had been careful not to lob Dorothy’s criticism back at her when she’d announced this latest and most ridiculous plan to save her life. But Dorothy’s response to her own illness had been perversely uncharacteristic from the start.
Most important, Helen realized, fingering the brochure once they were on the train, their bags stowed away in the racks above them, the pamphlet showed no images of the sick—a choice made, Helen was sure, to deemphasize the questionable science behind the treatment. It would be impossible to look at a photograph of someone as ill as, say, her fifty-seven-year-old mother and think that this faintly medieval idea, one that brought to mind leeches and exorcisms, could succeed where modern medicine had failed, or, in Dorothy’s case, where modern medicine had never been given the chance to go. The brochure talked about “renewal” and “refreshment,” and read like a promotion for an overly expensive spa, the kind that Helen had read about in fashion and travel magazines.
She let the brochure fall to her lap. Her mother was sleeping, lying on her side across the opposite three seats, her knees pulled up to her chest, her child-size feet peeking out from beneath her maroon down coat. It had been a good idea to splurge on the whole compartment, despite Dorothy’s protests about useless expenditure (they had taken the train at Dorothy’s insistence, in order to save money) and her usual vague, disapproving intimations that Helen’s “new” life in California, the one she had been living for ten years, ever since she’d left the conservatory at twenty-two, was somehow profligate. It did Helen no good to explain that her motley collection of jobs—as a low-level administrative staffer and occasional page turner for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a piano teacher to private-school children, and an accompanist on the High Holy Days at Temple Beth Hillel—netted barely enough to cover her expenses in the folly of a
n apartment she’d rented in the Hollywood Hills. This apartment could be accessed only by an elevator tower or by a strenuous hike up a dirt-and-scrub path, and had been featured in a famous movie from the seventies that she could never remember the name of, even when people reminded her of it over and over, exclaiming at her proximity to history as though she were living in a house once occupied by George Washington. The very fact that Helen drove a car, albeit a ten-year-old Nissan, was proof enough to Dorothy that she had embraced an ideological lack of frugality. The few times that Dorothy had allowed Helen to fly her to Los Angeles, Helen had found herself obscuring things from her mother, like the fact that she had, on a whim, reupholstered her living-room couch, although the original material was fine, and certainly not as threadbare as her mother’s valiant collection of chairs and couches, which stood in her New York apartment like the stoic survivors of some rending disaster.
Of course, as a child and even as a teenager, Helen had never noticed the fraying tablecloths or chipped china. She had been comforted by the absolute predictability of her home, by the way The Painted Bird continued to occupy exactly the same place on the bookshelf as it had when she’d first discovered it at age eleven and was troubled and thrilled by the grotesque and vaguely sexual cover art. A button placed in an ashtray when she was seven was sure to be there still when she was eight, nine, ten, adapted to its new habitat, and the ashtray itself adapted to its inhabitant, so that it was now “the place where the red button is” rather than anything useful for smokers. It was only as an adult, returning for visits, that she began to feel quietly dismayed by her mother’s thrift, as if it indicated something disturbing. Was Dorothy refusing the future? Was this the reason that she had forsworn conventional treatment for her disease? Did she mean to die?
Helen looked around the compartment. She had been right to reserve the entire thing without telling her mother. A first-class sleeper would have been too risky; her mother might not have even boarded the train. Helen had hoped that Dorothy, upon entering the second-class accommodations and finding no other passengers there, would simply assume that they were the recipients of a bit of good luck. But, of course, Dorothy figured things out the minute Helen closed the door behind them. The only reason she consented to this act of economic irresponsibility was that she was too ill to fight back.
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