Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  The only person she seriously considered calling was her granddaughter. She had no idea why. It wasn’t as if Emily were that impressive. She was all too obviously a member of her generation, with one eye on the world and one eye on her fucking smartphone. Emily had a lot going for her, but she also had a lot going against her, and there was no reason to think that her promise would win out over the impairments she’d suffered as a result of having been born in a certain time and place.

  “Nope,” Florence said. “I can get home on my own. There’s no reason to dramatize things.”

  He wouldn’t let it go, though.

  “What’ll it cost you if you ask somebody to help you out?”

  “Mind your own business, young man,” she said, in a tone that she hoped sounded at least somewhat playful.

  “Lone wolf, are you?” he said. “Well, all right. Your life.”

  “Indeed it is,” she said, and instantly regretted the fusty “indeed.”

  The young man turned back to the unit, smiling and shaking his head.

  78

  On Friday, Florence’s doctor called. This time it wasn’t his secretary, calling on his behalf; this time it was Noah himself.

  “So what’s up?” she said.

  She tried to make her voice steely and ready for anything, in the hope that this would help her feel steely and ready for anything.

  “Got your test results. Still nothing definitive. But you should come in, so we can talk about our next few moves.”

  “Can’t we just talk on the phone, Noah?”

  “I want to see you. I want to get your blood pressure, take some blood, maybe tweak your meds a little bit.”

  She didn’t believe this. He’d taken blood a few months ago, and the only medication she took hadn’t needed “tweaking” in years. She knew that he had bad news to give her and that he didn’t want to give it over the phone. But finally she acquiesced to the fiction that he wanted to see her for reasons that were more routine.

  She walked to Noah’s office. It was an unseasonably chilly day in the middle of August; a thin, ungenerous rain kept spritzing from the sky. It was a perfect day to stay home and read and write. But here she was.

  Now that her ankle was better, she was more aware than ever that there was something wrong with her left foot. She wasn’t sure it was anything that anyone would notice, but when she was walking, it was as if her left foot didn’t want to come along.

  When she got to his office, she wasn’t asked to wait in an examining room. This was a first. She was shown into his office, where he was sitting behind his desk.

  “I’ve been looking over your results,” he said.

  He seemed as matter-of-fact as ever, and she had a little flare of hope. Maybe he asked me here because he likes to give good news in person.

  “There are a lot of things we can eliminate at this point,” he said.

  “Hangnails?” she said. “Hangovers?”

  “Yes. That’s right. It’s not a hangover. We can rule that out.”

  “I’m so relieved.”

  “Seriously. It isn’t a nerve problem. We can be pretty sure of that. And it isn’t MS. MS can be pretty bad. And I don’t see anything that makes me wonder if you had a stroke.”

  She imagined him patiently, matter-of-factly eliminating a thousand things, and finally, at midnight, telling her she had a brain tumor and would be dead by dawn.

  “So what are the possibilities?”

  “There are still a lot of possibilities, Florence.”

  “What are the probabilities.”

  “Even there, I’m not sure I’d put it that way. When you’re a doctor, you don’t want to shotgun it; you want to ballpark it, so to speak.”

  “Noah.”

  “I just don’t want you to think—”

  Her dignity had always been her most effective tool. She drew herself up in her chair and, with what she hoped was a tone of starchy imperiousness, said, “Noah. I’m a busy woman. I don’t have time for all this beating around the bush. You have to be direct with me.”

  She consciously rejected the phrase “I need you to be direct with me,” a phrase that, to her mind, would have been both groveling and manipulative. Better to demand than to plead.

  “We still can’t be sure of anything,” Noah said. “We’ll need to do a lot more tests. And it still might turn out to be something entirely transitory and benign. But right now the most likely thing we’re looking at is ALS.”

  She took a moment to try to absorb this.

  She was struck by how odd it was that she hadn’t thought of the possibility before. But then again, she hadn’t thought of anything before. She’d assumed that whatever she had was trivial. It was as if she thought she’d been taking these tests as a sort of masquerade. It was as if she’d retained her twelve-year-old’s belief that she and she alone would never die.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  “I’m thinking about a writer named Tony Judt. He was diagnosed a year ago and he’s still going strong.”

  Tony Judt: the historian who, universally considered an arrogant pain in the ass during his healthy years, had become an inspiration to everyone who knew of him after he was diagnosed with ALS. Unable during recent years to press his fingers down on a keyboard or hold a pen, he was said to be dictating two books, the first a polemic in favor of social democracy, the second a collection of autobiographical sketches. By dint of sheer willpower and unstinting hard work he’d turned himself into a symbol, a reminder that if you have enough courage you can find a way to triumph, spiritually speaking, over anything.

  “I’m almost looking forward to it,” she said. “Wasn’t it Lenin who said that a spell in prison is indispensable to an intellectual career? A little bout of ALS is probably the best thing that could happen to me.”

  “That’s the spirit. But don’t get your hopes too high. It may turn out not to be ALS after all.”

  They talked about the further tests she’d have to take, and then he stood up.

  “You all right to get home? Anybody you want to call?”

  What the hell was this? All of a sudden everybody was acting as if she couldn’t make her way home without calling someone. She lived six blocks away.

  “Oh, please, Noah. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  He led her toward the door, and they awkwardly paused there. Then she reached for the knob and turned it.

  She could feel how relieved he was—at least she thought she could feel it: how relieved he was to be getting rid of her without having to hug her.

  If she had seemed to need comforting, he would have tried to comfort her, but he must have been glad that she didn’t.

  After she left the office, she reflected that if she did have ALS, her life from here on in was going to consist of one performance after another. She was determined to play the role of the brave woman. However terrified she might feel, she was determined not to let anyone see it. I’ll make them forget Tony Judt, those fuckers, she thought, though she wasn’t sure who she was referring to.

  If she did turn out to have the disease, the conversation in Noah’s office would turn out to have been the first such performance, and she concluded with satisfaction that she could give herself a passing grade.

  79

  At home she went online, went to feministing.com, logged in to the Comments section, and started vigorously correcting the errors of the young. For a while she felt alive—not just alive, but unconquerable.

  But after half an hour or so, she felt tired. She lay on her couch and fell asleep, woke at midnight, and couldn’t get to sleep again.

  She tried hard not to think about ALS. There would be time to think about it later, if this was what her affliction turned out to be. She had a conference to attend the next day—the symposium at NYU on the women’s movement, which was going to include a tribute to her from Martha Nussbaum—and she wanted to make a good showing. She wanted to sail through it with the same apl
omb that she had summoned in her doctor’s office. She wanted to comport herself in such a way that no one would suspect that anything was wrong. But it would have been easier if she could have gotten back to sleep.

  At two in the morning she’d felt jittery and overstimulated, but by daybreak she felt benumbed. Not the best frame of mind in which to attend an event at which she needed to have her wits about her.

  Her buzzer sounded and she wondered what fresh nuisance this could be. She pressed her intercom and asked who was there. It was her granddaughter.

  She buzzed her in. As she waited, she was surprised by how happy it made her to know that Emily was here. But she was damned if she was going to let Emily see that.

  80

  One of the things that Emily had discovered about herself in the last year was that she might not be as stable as she’d thought she was. In high school she had watched friends and acquaintances go through theatrical breakdowns—because of drugs, because of homesickness, because of heartbreak—and she had always “been there” for them. She was the person you called if your drug experience went bad. She was the person you went to for advice, because she was the only person who didn’t give any: she would listen and ask questions, and from your answers you’d discover what you wanted to do. She was the rock in other people’s lives, and she’d always enjoyed being the rock in other people’s lives.

  At Oberlin last fall, once she’d started to feel sure that it wasn’t the right place for her, she was surprised by how quickly she went from unhappiness to misery. She knew her parents would have been happier if she’d stuck it out for the full year and then switched schools in an orderly fashion, without falling a semester behind, but she’d seen two girls in her hall come apart completely during her first year, and she had no reason to believe that she was any stronger than they were.

  Lately Justin had been pressuring her to visit him again, and when she tried to put him off, he’d started to sound like he was disintegrating.

  He was still sending her little videos of toys he’d made, robots and Jedi and goblins. But now the videos were sadder. The robots were frightened of the goblins; the Jedi were wandering lost in the dark.

  He’d also started sending videos of himself. One of them was funny: Justin accompanying himself on the dulcimer, singing about how he missed her. One of them made her uncomfortable: Justin singing about how he couldn’t live without her. And one of them scared her: toy robots carrying razor blades, which were almost as big as they were, and advancing toward a sleeping Justin. She didn’t know anything about making videos, so she didn’t know how he managed to make it look so real.

  At the end of the video, a robot pushed the tip of his blade against Justin’s neck, and a spot of blood emerged. Then the robot’s head swiveled toward the camera, and, in a deep, creepy, mechanical voice, he said, “If you don’t visit us soon, the kid gets it.”

  Since when did boys cut themselves? She hadn’t thought that that was something boys do.

  When she talked to him that night, he said it was just a joke, but it didn’t feel like a joke.

  She knew she was in over her head, and she didn’t know what to do.

  And on top of all this, her parents had gotten strange. It was the worst possible time for that to happen. She needed them to be solid right now.

  She couldn’t figure out what was going on with them, and she didn’t want to try. She just wanted them to go back to normal.

  So when she went to her grandmother’s on Saturday morning, she went there in a needy frame of mind. But all she really needed was for her grandmother to be herself. She didn’t want her grandmother to offer her any particular kindness. She didn’t want her grandmother to listen to her talk about her problems. All she wanted was her normal presence—acerbic, impatient, semi-annoyed.

  When she got to Florence’s apartment, Florence was standing at the open door.

  “What are you doing here?” Florence said, which made Emily happy.

  81

  “I’m going to the conference with you.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever. Since last week. We talked about this.”

  “We did? Well, all right. Come in.”

  Florence was moving slowly. She didn’t seem like herself.

  Not you too.

  “I need to get myself together,” Florence said, and went into her bedroom, and closed the door. When she emerged, she was Florence again, brittle and curt.

  “Make yourself some of that weak tea you like,” Florence said. “I’ll be ready to go in a few minutes.”

  “Don’t insult my tea,” Emily said, smiling.

  82

  Florence was a rock star. When they got to the Skirball Center, women kept coming up to her to tell her how much her work had meant to them. Florence responded graciously to all of them, which Emily found surprising. It was easier to imagine her grandmother barking at them all, telling them they were praising her for the wrong reasons.

  The conference was a daylong event on the topic “The Women’s Movement: Then and Now.” There were many panels, half of which had titles Emily didn’t understand. “Different Shades of Différence: French Feminism(s) in the Era(s) of Post-Subalternity,” for example, was one she thought she could skip.

  Florence was scheduled to give a lecture in the early afternoon. The last talk of the day was to be given by Martha Nussbaum, the philosopher who’d feted Florence in the Times; it was going to be about Florence’s contribution to feminist thought.

  One of the organizers of the conference, a woman named Elba, came lumbering up and gave Florence a hug; Emily could see Florence backing away while Elba’s arms were still around her. Elba even hugged Emily, who wondered if someone watching them might find her to be backing away too. The three of them proceeded toward the part of the building where the morning panels were taking place, and Elba kept stopping to make introductions. At first it seemed as if everyone was equally excited to meet Florence, but little by little, Emily could see that it wasn’t so. The oldest and the youngest women seemed to regard Florence with something like awe, but Emily noticed one or two women in the middle generation who seemed blasé, even rude, when they were introduced to her.

  Emily started to try to construct a theory out of this, but then, remembering a statistics class she’d had to take in high school, she reasoned that this was too small a sample size to justify a theory.

  Emily heard Florence saying, “That’s too bad.”

  “What’s too bad?” Emily said, after Florence rejoined her.

  “Martha Nussbaum isn’t coming. Supposedly she has the flu.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “Well, you know. Martha Nussbaum. She must’ve had an idea for a new book while she was brushing her teeth. She’s putting the finishing touches on it now.”

  Emily spaced out through the morning session. She attended two panels and didn’t take in a word. Instead, she was thinking about Justin. She was worried about him, and she was worried about herself.

  There was a luncheon, during which many women competed for Florence’s attention.

  At lunch, Elba leaned over toward Florence and said, “We’re in luck! You’ll never guess who we got to step in for Nussbaum.”

  “Who?”

  “Willa Ruth Stone.”

  “Really?” Emily said.

  “Who?” Florence said.

  “She’s a famous blogger,” Emily said.

  Florence raised an eyebrow at this, but didn’t say anything.

  Emily had read Willa Ruth Stone all through high school, in places like Jezebel and The Awl. In the last year or two she’d gone on to other venues, and Emily had stopped following her work. She didn’t seem like the obvious person to give a talk here—she was sort of a snark artist—but if someone as hip as that was a fan of Florence’s, Florence was even more of a rock star than Emily had realized.

  “She said she’s really excited,” Elba said. “She said she’s always wanted to
get the chance to honor you.”

  After lunch, Florence gave her talk: “Mary Datchet at Ninety,” a meditation on the state of feminism today in the light of its early-twentieth-century aspirations.

  Florence read from her notes without looking up. Emily had seen her grandmother speak in public several times now, and this was the only performance she would have described as uninspired.

  Emily recognized traces of some of the research she’d done: Florence quoted from the letters of Mary Gawthorpe to Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis—letters that Emily had copied out by hand, because the paper they’d been written on was now too fragile to be pressed against a photocopier. Emily kept wondering if Florence was going to mention her by name, and then kept telling herself that her wish to be acknowledged showed how childish she was. But that didn’t stop her from feeling disappointed when Florence finished without acknowledging her.

  After the talk, there was more milling around, more sitting through panel discussions, more worrying about Justin, and then there was the last event of the day.

  The auditorium was packed—entirely with women; Emily hadn’t seen more than a couple of men all day. Looking over the audience, Emily guessed that a lot of the women there had come just to hear Willa Ruth Stone. They looked stylish and fresh, not like people who’d been listening to lectures all day.

  Amazing how fast word gets around. Emily had grown up in the age of social media, but it still felt amazing to her.

  Elba reminded everyone that they’d rented a room in the Kronstadt Bar on Thompson Street, that it would be open as soon as the symposium ended, and that drinks would be half price. Then she made way for the keynote speaker.

  Willa Ruth Stone was lithe, blond, beautiful—not movie-star beautiful, but beautiful for a writer. Everyone else who’d spoken that day had sat behind a microphone, but she had a wireless mike clipped to her shirt, so she could glide around the stage.