Once that summer I dreamed of my father. He was paddling a canoe down a brisk little bubbling river. He wore a soft shapeless felt hat with fishing lures pinned to the crown, and although I stood anxiously waiting upon the riverbank, he went calmly sailing by me with a fixed cheerful stare, the stare of death.
Rationally, I understood these dreams. They showed me how terrified I was of my mother’s dying, and how my father’s false cheer, his absolute denial of my terror, felt to me as if he were already dead. He was so carefully distanced, so artfully bland that after five minutes of his evasions, I’d feel a fit of rage coming on and hang up the telephone in abrupt disgust.
While she was in the hospital, he’d gone in to see my mother a couple of times (since, as she said sarcastically, he seemed to be there anyway), visits she described with a snort as “ludicrous.” “He comes in here with his bedside manner and booming paternal voice. Who is it he thinks I am, Miss Pernella Dogbrain?”
The zing of her irony was modified by the volume of her voice. These days she could hardly talk above a whisper, not because of any damage to her vocal chords, but because of general debilitation. Although the heart surgery had been a “success,” the patient seemed dazed and lethargic.
The day she was discharged from the hospital, I drove down from the country to bring her home and to see about getting some part-time nursing care. And then there was the problem of my brother, who at this point was still in Greystone. Social workers had been calling my mother even while she was in the hospital, asking when she could take John home. This seemed callous to me, but she pointed out that their job was to get the patient discharged as soon as possible.
In New Jersey at that time, the state hospitals were grim, gloomy and understaffed—not on the crest of a treatment wave. With one psychiatrist in charge of some two hundred patients, the medication of choice (which the patients joked came in by tank truck) was Haldol. John had said to me, on one of his better days (in which he resembled the brother I used to have), “Haldol solves everybody’s problems; we call it the universal solvent.” More often, when I visited, he was goofily silent, and so we would sit, looking out of the visiting room’s long greasy windows into what presumably were the woods that surrounded the hospital buildings, and he would smile his balmy smile and smoke the cigarettes I had brought him. Other patients would come lurching by (“the Haldol shuffle” John called it), and say, “Hey, man, you got a spare butt?”
The TV was always on, but mainly the patients walked. They walked and walked, up and down and around. This was the Admitting Ward and the attendants sat near the door. I thought whenever I came in what a stunning photograph they would make, the black attendants in their white uniforms sitting on wooden chairs tipped against the white-tiled wall, looking out upon the ward with their dark, doleful eyes. They had rich deep voices and from time to time would call out to the patients by name: “Now you quit it, Patrick, you hear? Leave Mon-roe alone.”
All the time I went to Greystone to visit John, I never once saw his doctor, but that, a woman told me, was how it always was. Anyway, she said wearily as we went out of the front door together, “This place is better, much better, than Marlboro. Nobody gets better at Marlboro.”
A week after my mother got out of the hospital, I went down to visit her again. It was the end of June now, and she lay on her bed in a pink striped flannel nightgown, with fluffy white scuffs on her feet. She reclined on three pillows with her arms limp at her sides and her feet turned out so that you could see the tiny purple veins in her instep. She kept her gaze fixed on the window which I had lifted. A little June breeze would rush into the room, flicking aside the ruffle of the white window curtain before rushing out again.
“Where were you Friday?” she whispered. “I called. Nobody knew where you’d gone.”
I told her that I’d been in New York talking to Louise Gannet about John and the clinic. “But our insurance is used up, right? And this clinic, of course, is not giving scholarships. So it looks as if we can’t get him in.”
She lay immobile, staring out past the white curtain. A red rambler rose outside the window occasionally nodded into view. I said irrelevantly, wistfully, “You know, up where we are the fencerows are full of wild roses.”
She signed and chewed her lip. “Will you call your father?”
I said, irritated, “About what? I mean, what do I say? He always says the same thing: ‘Sorry, I have to go now.’”
“Dammit,” she uttered. “This time he’s got to take John. I can’t, I really can’t.” She shut her eyes and opened them again. Tears slipped out and down her cheeks.
“Mom,” I said. I put my hand on hers.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.
“Neither do I. What’ll happen if we don’t take him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll let him stay longer. He sounds all right, but I’ve been through this before. Home for two weeks and it’s a disaster. I can’t go through it again. I don’t have the strength.”
“I know.”
“One thing I’ve figured out, he’s not going to get all better. For a long time I kept hoping. Now I know how it’s going to be. He’s going to get a little better, but he’ll never be himself again.” She closed her eyes.
I said, “Do you want to sleep?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
I pulled the blue blanket out from under her feet, unfolded it, covered her gently. I went into the kitchen and washed up some of the luncheon dishes I’d left standing on the pink formica countertop. Silly color. Worse, when you opened the cabinet doors you saw the cute pink rick-rack shelf edging. The kitchen had last been remodeled in the nineteen-fifties when pink was a major color. Pink and gray, pink and black. I thought that suitable for the Fifties with its curious mixture of cynicism and naiveté. I thought of the Seventies as green, a bright roistering green, but couldn’t focus on what the Sixties had been. For example, what was I wearing when I’d met Skip? I couldn’t remember. I remembered going to the party in D.C.—Eileen’s orange minidress and tall zippered black suede boots.
I opened my mother’s refrigerator and broke off a green grape from a bunch in a small white bowl. I put it into my mouth, but then ended up swallowing it whole, and I couldn’t tell the grape from the lump in my throat. I felt terrible. I didn’t know what to do about anything. With Leonard in New York on Friday, I’d wanted to say to him, Thank you. Thank you for … What? For asking me, ‘What’s wrong?’ For wanting to listen? For not shutting me up? I was astonished, and yet not. I always felt that underneath you were decent and kind. You who are always so brusque.
When I left him, I’d felt frightened because I didn’t want to leave him, but I’d walked away quickly, thinking: No sense courting disaster. Driving home, my mood changed. I got angry. I thought, Why, he was making love to me! And at the Ridge, his wife is in the next room, carrying his child.
And then, still later, at twilight, driving up the dirt road to the house, I knew I had misinterpreted. I thought, For heaven’s sakes, he doesn’t care for you. He was only being kind.
The next morning when he came down to breakfast, I scrutinized his face. He was as cold and surly as ever, and although at first I was disappointed, later, given the complications, I felt relieved.
V
LEONARD IN LOVE
1.
In May, Leonard’s grandmother had had a stroke, a major stroke after a series of small ones. Although she hadn’t regained her speech, in other ways her recovery seemed to be progressing well until one day, a month after the vascular accident, instead of sitting up in her bed and trying to talk (a moment Leonard found distressing, her ice blue eyes starting, her thin mouth and jaw spasmodically working, and a dribble of spit falling out of one side of her mouth), she’d refused to sit up. She lay there obstinately looking at the bedroom ceiling. When they bent to talk to her, she’d shut her eyes. Leonard, who knew her awful, indomitable pride, felt that she had made a decision
not to be ill; instead, she would die.
After a few days, she was taken back to the hospital and when she refused food, they fed her intravenously. On the bright June day that Leonard arrived at the hospital, a nurse was heatedly telling his Aunt Louise she’d have to get private duty nurses—the old lady had jerked the IV tube out of her arm. The nurse left the room in a crackle of starched white skirt and his aunt rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Merde,” she said, out of the corner of her mouth.
“How’s she doing?” Leonard asked.
“Why, she’s making them miserable,” Louis said cheerfully. “In other words, she’s not dead yet.”
They looked at each other and smiled and then Louise bent her head and frowned at her lifted wrist. “Must go. I’ve got an appointment downstairs, right now.”
“Here?” Leonard asked, startled.
“Yes, but it won’t take long. Just a few questions about a possible patient. Your mother went out for lunch. She should be back soon.”
“How is she?”
“Oh, you know. Worried about your brother. She hasn’t heard from him. She think he’s based in Vietnam and flying into Cambodia. Here. Stand right here. If your grandmother opens her eyes she’ll see you immediately. That will make her happy. She always loved you a lot.” Leonard glanced at his aunt and reflexively winced: her green eyes were coated with tears. She lowered her eyes and within the confines of her short, bell-shaped green dress gave an abrupt little shrug.
Louise clicked out of the room in her white high heels, and looking after her, Leonard thought how the short dress suited her. Her legs were long and a little heavy but well-shaped, providing an interesting sensuous contrast to her slim body with its small waist and small breasts. Why was it she’d never (his mother’s phrase) “found the right person”? She was endlessly attracted to needy selfish neurotics, and they, of course, to her. Did the therapist’s nurturing gifts extend into the personal life? Her relationships always drained her strength, exhausted her. Or was this (as in his own case) only the usual course of sexual love?
In all of his life, there were few women Leonard had found as interesting as his aunt, his mother, and his grandmother. His grandmother’s mind had seemed to him to have a special clarity—it was as sharp and refractory as glass. (Of course she tended to see things in black or white, ja oder nein, not always an advantage in a world full of gray areas.) His mother, on the other hand, was eminently practical, a sorter of information who found an applied use for whatever she knew or read. And then there was Louise, who knew so much, but her intelligence showed itself nonchalantly, often in the aptness of a seemingly chance remark, and yet, beyond the lightness of the words themselves you felt all sorts of possibilities, a mental landscape of challenging mountains and spacious plains.
Then there was Alice. But he’d mistaken her anger (which was personal) for passionate social conscience.
He looked down. His grandmother’s head upon the pillow already seemed lifeless, marmoreal. She’d never been anything but thin, and since the stroke she had lost so much weight that her features—nose, chin—seemed to be protruding upward out of flaccid, disintegrating layers. Looking at her, with her white hair flung back exposing her knobby temples, Leonard felt as if he could lift the papery flesh and look into the grinning face of death itself.
His mother came in, a nurse followed, and the room was all at once aflutter with a busy manufactured cheer. Leonard kissed his mother hello. “Louise says you haven’t heard from Bill?”
His mother’s dark eyes were bleak. She sat down on a chair and fixed her arms across her stomach, as if she had pains.
“No, and I’m worried he’s going …” The sentence trailed vaguely off. She looked quite ill. She had never dressed well; the blouse she wore was too tight and too young for her—it looked like the kind of shirt girls wore to gym class. This and the confusion in her eyes made her seem for a moment helpless and much younger and he felt he ought to say something reassuring. But what was there to say? No doubt his brother would be sent to fly over Cambodia. Bill had left college—he’d been a junior at Colgate—and joined the air force. It was what he wanted. Why, then, should Leonard feel that he ought to apologize to his mother, as if he’d failed her? Because he was older, and all of his life, from the time Bill was born, he’d been charged with Bill’s care.
He sighed. “I’ve got to go now,” he told his mother.
“Oh?” she said. “Already? I thought maybe we’d have dinner.”
“I can’t, Ma, I’m sorry.”
“Leonard …”
“Huh?”
“How’s it going? I mean, how’s it really going?”
“You mean the paper? It’s going all right. Some weeks we break even, even.”
“Ever thought of getting a paying job?”
“It would be so dull.”
“There’s a comfort to having money in the bank. Not that you’d understand.”
“I understand. It’s just not currently feasible.”
“It’s not too late for medical school. We could help.”
“Ma. Let up, okay?”
“I worry about you. And what’s going on with your wife? I mean, you don’t say, but I sense something. It’s crazy. First she leaves, then she comes back, but not to you. And she’s living in the room next to yours? I don’t know, it’s not healthy.”
“It wasn’t really up to me.”
“You don’t have to stay there.”
“I want to stay.”
“But why?”
“I like the place. I’m doing something I enjoy. I like the people.”
“Your friend’s got a plan of some kind. A plot. What’s his shtick anyway? Skip’s somebody I can’t figure, and when I can’t figure somebody I don’t trust them. I mean, now he’s all of a sudden working as a lawyer in a regular law firm? No more marches, no more good deeds? So why doesn’t he take his wife and move out? Why live together with you bunch of hippies?”
“Skip likes us,” Leonard said indifferently. “He’s saving his money.”
“Oh-ho. He’s always so high-minded but what I see is, he’s got a different story for everybody.”
“Anyway, we’re not really hippies. Look at my hair, nice and short, right? I don’t wear sandals, I don’t wear beads, I don’t even meditate.”
“You should, it would do you good. You look worried.”
“Why not? Everybody’s got worries. I’m not crazy about having Alice back, but sometimes I wonder if she’s the problem. Maybe I’m the problem.” He smiled wearily. “I always was kind of difficult.”
“Leonard, dear. Do you know the word meshhuggah? In my opinion …” His mother slowly shook her head and her double-chin wobbled every so slightly.
Leonard laughed. “You think I’m meshuggah?”
“You? Of course not. But that girl, your wife, she’s crazy.”
“I don’t know what she is, Ma,” he said. He bent and kissed her cheek. Just as he was going out the door, his Aunt Louise came hurrying in. When he spoke to her, she absentmindedly nodded, and he thought how tired she looked, and that there were violet circles under her dark green eyes.
The hospital, Beth Israel, was next to a small fenced city park full of Catalpa trees. At the park’s gate, Leonard bought a chocolate-almond Good Humor bar and ate it as he strolled under the fragrant pink and white blossoms, glancing at the brownstone facade of a church, St. George’s, and then at the faded pinkish brick of the building across the way—the old Friends’ School. Slowly, he ambled around the park again. Its walks were paved with Belgian block, all strewn with the drifting petals. He hated it, her dying. He knew she was old, that she had lived her life, all the usual trite things people say, but his head felt empty and his large bones felt both heavy and hollow. There was a drag on his system; it was hard to move. He sat down on a bench with his legs stuck out and one arm up on the bench back. His plaid jacket he knew had a tear in the underarm seam but the tear had been there
since last summer. Or was it the summer before? The jacket was old, he’d had it since senior year of high school.
Two old ladies passed him, talking in Yiddish. They wore spring dresses and leaned on their canes but occasionally one or the other would stab the air with a cane to make a point. Two little girls in jeans and long dark hair slowly rollerskated by, lifting and dropping their skates with a languor of movement that Leonard remembered in his ankles—the downward pull of the skates, so heavy, and therefore such a surprise when the wheels took off. A young man with long Botticelli hair came along with a short-haired dog. His grandmother had hated dogs, an anomaly among Germans who so often preferred dogs to human beings. No. Let’s not do that. Why be angry with her because she’s dying? There, crossing the street in front of the church, was a girl in a bright green dress who resembled Liz. But of course it couldn’t be Liz.
Now. What should he do? It was two p.m., he hadn’t had lunch. He had lied, he didn’t have to rush back, he’d needed to get out. He could go to a movie or drop by a bookstore. What he really wanted was music. Lately, he’d begun to crave music, as if the emptiness in his head were a more visceral hunger, a hunger he could satisfy.
He got up and started strolling toward Sixteenth Street. He would walk over to Fifth and then uptown, to The Record Hunter.
He crossed Rutherford Place and saw that the girl in the green dress was walking ahead of him, halfway up the block. She was walking slowly, introspectively, and the short bright skirt showed the backs of her long tanned legs. He walked a little faster. Her brown hair, touched at the crown and sides with glints of gold, flowed musically down her back. She carried a shoulder bag like a square white envelope. Of course it wasn’t Liz, why would Liz be here, today, in New York City? She never came into the city.
On the other hand, he’d always found it fascinating how members of his species were so deeply individual that you could recognize a person a block away, just from her walk. Now she was standing at the corner of Third Avenue and Sixteenth Street with her head turned to the left, calmly surveying the approaching charge of northbound traffic. Her sunglasses seemed too heavy for her thin straight nose. She had a long pretty neck.
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