And how further depleted might he appear with his mother now gone? I wonder if he even knows. If I were Mr. Hickey, I wouldn’t tell him, I couldn’t tell him, I’d say his mother had to take a trip, that her old friend across the ocean had died. I’d keep up a lie for as long as he could bear. I’d tell him whatever story he would hope for and believe. I would pool about him a whole history of her absence, too wide to cross and too deep to plumb: a dusky, flooding water in which he might forever gently tread.
I watched yesterday, as she was interred in one of the two small cemeteries in town. I waited outside the chapel in my car and then followed the procession along Church Street and then up past Boling Street and McKinley, to the large memorial grounds where many years ago I purchased my own plot, and one for Sunny as well. It was a day when one suddenly thinks one should prepare for such a thing, automatically and immediately. And it was an unusual decision as well, I realize, to buy one for such a little girl, but I wasn’t married or expecting to be—the other plot one buys being normally for a spouse—and I thought that it would be something like insurance, that we would always have a place for ourselves in the end, which no one could encroach or buy back or take away. But I never told her about it, feeling it was morbid; and then later, when we were having so many difficulties in our relationship, it seemed inappropriate to mention, too easy for her to misinterpret or misunderstand.
Once there I parked just inside the entrance and let the hearse and the long line of cars wend their way to the burial plot; I didn’t want Mr. Hickey to have to see me or acknowledge me or have to consider my presence in any way, and so I walked slowly toward the site, keeping an eye on him so that I might turn or step away whenever he looked up from the ground. Of course he would have noticed me immediately, had he gazed about. But he didn’t. In the warm, slanting light of the autumn morning he appeared still quite pale, moon-faced, his dark suit rumpled at the armpits and shoulders, one collar point lifting. His son was not there, of course, and so Mr. Hickey appeared that much more alone, standing as he was some steps away from the other family mourners, upright in an almost military style, his feet set apart, his hands clasped behind him. He wasn’t angry-looking, as I selfishly expected; he was bewildered, as everyone there was, though his body seemed not to wish to know it, not bent over and miserable but unmoving, completely still.
The minister was speaking in a broad, calling tone, and though I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I felt sure from the waves of sound that his sermon was deeply and earnestly uttered and thus worthy of Anne Hickey, who was nothing but kind and straightforward and estimably ardent, the sort of woman I might wish for if ever I would enjoy the company of someone again, the sort of woman Mary Burns was to the core and that I’d always hoped Sunny would someday become, and perhaps is now.
The minister ended with a long prayer, and then he motioned to the undertaker and his assistants (they were no doubt his sons, from the facial resemblance) to lower the casket into the ground. He began speaking again, perhaps a final consecration, when Mr. Hickey broke from the rank and began walking away, down the hill, in my general direction. This is not acceptable, his body was saying, This is not something for me. Everyone turned to watch him, the minister and others feebly waving for him to come back. Then Mr. Hickey began to jog, then run, almost coming in a sprint down the grassy incline, his suit jacket still buttoned. He passed by quickly, and he must have noticed me, for he glanced back over his shoulder, and it was then his footing slipped on the dry sod, causing him to fall in an awkward, tumbling heap. Several mourners had rushed down to him, and when I reached him I could see that his leg was traumatically fractured at mid-calf, the splintered tip of the bone poking out through the bloody material. He was sitting up and gripping his thigh, puffing furiously through his teeth, and I thought he would soon pass out. An older man, whom I recognized as a retired physician from the county hospital, was urging him to lie back, to hold still so he could make certain the main artery hadn’t been severed, but Mr. Hickey saw me then and tried to rise, reaching out toward me, moaning, “Don’t anyone touch me! Don’t touch me. I want him to help me….”
Then he lost consciousness, and everyone was staring, wondering if I had even been part of the gathering, or if Mr. Hickey had momentarily lost his mind. They seemed to pause, so that I might actually do something, but the retired doctor had been regarding me most skeptically and then purposefully set about his business, asking someone else to run and call for an ambulance.
Under sedation, Mr. Hickey was transported to this very hospital, and one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the area, a Dr. Peter Milhoos, set the leg. I had followed in my car and informed the nurse at the admitting desk that I would cover all the expenses of his stay, writing a large check as a deposit. She thought it suspicious, but on calling the billing office she mentioned my name and Ryka Murnow remembered me and it was approved. I waited until the procedure was finished, and instead of going home I felt I should stay close by. Sometime late in the night, with a key Liv had given me, I came here to rest a moment and somehow fell asleep until morning in Renny’s wide, soft-seated leather chair.
I had dreams, many of them, all pressed upon one another like bits of photographs in a child’s scrapbook. And they were vivid to the extent that although I don’t remember their particular images or events—for I very rarely do—I still even now have the pulsing feeling in my head of near-exhaustion from the force of what must have been their great number and intensity. What is unsettling is that for so long a time my days and years flowed by with an estimable grace, the most apparent processionals of conduct and commerce, and yet in the last weeks the gradual downflow has loosed into a sheer cascade, an avalanching force that has caught me deep and sure.
And I think that like Mr. Hickey, I can hardly bear to be a witness anymore. I couldn’t watch for long as his wife’s casket was slowly cranked down into the earth, the ending-ness and rank finality brutally apparent, the nothing-more of that lowering. It wasn’t only poor Anne Hickey I felt going down into the ground, but her husband, and Patrick, and the mourners who stood there decently and stiffly over the fresh hole (if preternaturally leaning back), and then myself as well, who is afraid not of death but of the death of yet another living chance through whom I might reconsider, and duly reckon.
It seems in kind then that I am developing a quick nerve for whatever I happen to see, like the girl and her brother at the Ebbington Mall. It strikes me as almost pathological that I should be this low about Anne Hickey, whom in most every way I hardly knew, when in the past I could shed loss and leaving like any passing cloud of rain. I’m nearly afraid to leave this tiny office, for fear of what else I might see, what else might ensue, like any boy who is sure his very observation and presence makes the world hitch and turn; but in my case those turns are real and have come too ponderously, bearing ever heavily on my minor realm. Too much now I’m at the vortex of bad happenings, and I am almost sure I ought to festoon the facade of my house and the bumpers of my car and then garland my shoulders with immense black flags of warning, to let every soul know they must steer clear of this man, not to wave greetings or small-talk with him or do anything to provoke the hand of his agreeable, gentle-faced hubris. Now I finally think how much sense it made years ago, when perhaps without exactly knowing it herself, Sunny was doing all she could do to escape my too-grateful, too-satisfied umbra, to get out from its steadily infecting shade and accept any difficult and even detrimental path so long as it led far from me.
Now of course I fear darker chance lies ahead for her and Thomas if I don’t soon retract myself from their lives, that something terrible and final will befall them as did Anne Hickey, smash them without any sign of admonition. Even the thought of this makes my heart leap and hurdle, and I can say once and for all that if a guarantor came forward and promised their lives would be good and full and only sporadically miserable in exchange for mine, I’d tie a twenty-five-pound bag of driveway salt onto each of
my wrists and ankles and fall one last time into the pool. One might argue that this would be no sacrifice to me at all, and yet I must confess as well to a strangely timed current of happiness, despite what traumas have just occurred and are occurring, and say that I have never before quite felt the kind of modest, pure joy that comes from something like simply holding Thomas’s hand as he leads us through some mall, or watching as he and Sunny orchestrate the pulling of a T-shirt over his head, his sturdy little arms stuck for a moment, wiggling with half-panic and half-delight. And it’s not just these sightings, of course, that elevate me, but the naturally attendant hope of a familial continuation, an unpredictable, richly evolving to be. For what else but this sort of complication will prove my actually having been here, or there? What else will mark me, besides the never-to-be-known annals of the rest?
There’s a knock at the door and to my great surprise it’s Sunny, holding a white paper bag of deli sandwiches and a cardboard tray with two cups of tea. It’s a little lunch for us, she says, stepping inside the cramped space. There’s only one other chair for her to sit in, and she sits in it, across Renny’s desk from me. She’s neatly dressed again, in business clothes, though I know she’s already stopped going to work at the mall.
“The nurse said I could find you here. I kept calling the house but no one ever picked up. I was starting to get worried. You ought to get an answering machine, you know.”
“I often mean to, but I never do,” I say. “I like to answer the phone in person, as I always did at the shop. Where is Thomas?”
“I left him with the neighbor.”
“He didn’t want to come along?”
“Of course he did,” she says. “But I think he’s a little frightened of hospitals. Like his mother, I guess.”
“You?” I say, accepting one of the turkey sandwiches from the deli I used to frequent. “You never told me this. All the times I brought us here when you were younger, while I was doing business, and you never let on.”
“That’s why I didn’t like being around the store, either,” she answers, almost smiling. “All those depressing devices. Before I came to you they had me in a place like this, but much worse, of course. I know they told you I was at a Christian orphanage, but really it was like a halfway house, I guess. I wasn’t put up for adoption. I was abandoned. I can’t believe you’re surprised. Did you really believe they would give you a wanted child?”
I answer, “They said I would be an ideal candidate, if it weren’t for the fact I wasn’t married. But they were convinced of my intentions, and so sent you to me anyway.”
But I feel myself addressing her in the lawyerly and justifying way I always employed when she was growing up, and I am quite sure I should stop speaking now, or at least speaking like this, and I suddenly say, “You probably wish you had never had to come live with me.”
Sunny looks down, slowly unwrapping the white butcher paper from her sandwich. Her short dark hair is combed back neatly, away from her temples and eyes, the soft, maturing shape of her ever-beautiful face.
She says, “I don’t wish that anymore. I used to. And I used to wish I had never been born. But all that’s natural, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Right. But with you, I just didn’t understand. I thought this even when I was very young, why you would ever want a child, me or anyone else. You seemed to prefer being alone, in the house you so carefully set up, your yard and your pool. You could have married someone nice, like Mary Burns. You could have had an instant, solid family, in your fine neighborhood, in your fine town. But you didn’t. You just had me. And I always wondered why. I always thought it was you who wished I had never come, that you had never chosen to send for me.”
“I never once thought that,” I tell her, “not for one moment.”
“It doesn’t matter if you did,” she says, with a gentle equanimity. “We’re here, aren’t we? Whatever has happened.”
I let the notion suspend, and even happily, for I’ve long wished to taste the plain and decent flavor of being with someone who is likewise content to be with me. It’s a feeling not necessarily happy or thrilling or joyful but roundly pleasing, one that I am sure most people in the world know well, and others, like Sunny and me, both orphans of a sort, must slowly discover, come to learn for ourselves.
“How is Renny, by the way? Was he awake?”
“He was,” Sunny replies. “We talked for a little while. He was very tired, and I wanted to leave him alone, but he kept asking me questions.”
“About what?”
“Guess.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose Renny was curious about you being my daughter.”
She carefully peels the tops from the cups of tea. She hands me one. “I think he knows you adopted me. But he wasn’t so interested in that. He wanted to know what it was like, having you as a father. Growing up together in the house.”
I tell her, “You don’t have to tell me what you said to him. I don’t mind.”
“How are you so sure you don’t want to hear it?” she answers. “You think I would say something bad?”
“No, I don’t,” I say, trying not to sound pleading. “It’s just that I see no reason to put you in a funny position now, when it was probably awkward enough with Renny. I know this will sound terrible, given what’s happened in the last few days, but I’m almost grateful for the way things have gone of late, by which I mean between you and Thomas and me. It’s certainly strange and unexplainable, but I can’t think of another time in my life that I have been as hopeful as I am now, and I am sure it is because you have come back here with your son. I will take that over everything else. So you see how you could have told Renny whatever you wished or felt compelled to, and it would be all right with me. With the misery that has come, there is some fortune. Perhaps even for me.”
Sunny says, “You’re not someone I ever think has had too little fortune in his life.”
I don’t answer, though I glance at her somberly, to try to tell her somehow that she’s both absolutely wrong, and right.
“I think that’s why Renny likes you so much,” she speaks up. “You’re a charm to him. He looks up to you. He’s obviously a nice man, too, and I could never tell him anything bad about you.”
“But you very well could.”
“I could,” she tells me straight, but without any malice in her eyes. “I could. I guess I could have told him a thousand things about you and about me, none of them alone so terrible and damning but taken altogether.”
“But there is that one thing….”
She lowers her eyes.
“I’ve been wishing it never happened.”
“Yes,” she very firmly and quietly says. “But we’ve talked about that already, haven’t we? I don’t want to bring it up again. Please.”
“Okay,” I say to her, though somehow I feel an impulse to lead us to some brink. So I say, “But in fact everything with Dr. Anastasia was all my fault. It was.”
Sunny doesn’t answer. There’s a cross wrinkle in her brow, but she somehow sloughs off my likely ruinous charge and asks instead if the turkey sandwich is all right for me. I can only answer that it is. Before I know it we’re on to something else entirely, namely, her round of interviews in Connecticut, and while she’s telling me how it doesn’t look promising that she’ll get the job or really want it if she does (the store being somewhere in northern Arizona), I see how far past those events and times my daughter is, how (whether psychologically healthful or not) she’s for the present moment put it well away, just a box in a trunk in an upstairs garret closet, this for her sake and Thomas’s and maybe even for mine.
We finish up with lunch and drink our tepid tea. We don’t say much of anything more, except to laugh about Thomas a little bit, as she tells me of his renewed love for all things on dry land. When she leaves I decide to go out of the hospital with her and escort her to her car, which she lets me do without a word. And I think a simple thought, that we can wa
lk like this across wide parking lots, we can have a lunch together in a tiny basement room, and leave off mostly decent and all right.
I’m heartened on my own drive home, and yet I can’t seem to shake what I thought I had put well past me. For it was not in the hospital but in an affiliated clinic that I had arranged for Sunny to take care of her difficulty. She had returned once more to the house, after having been away for nearly a year. She was barely eighteen years old. She had been living with her friend Lincoln in a tenement apartment somewhere in Upper Manhattan. One evening as I was reading in bed the telephone rang and it was Sunny on the line. Her voice was very quiet and shallow, and for a few seconds I thought it was someone else, a prank caller of some kind. But then it was unmistakably Sunny, the reserve of her coming through even the anxiousness in her voice. Of course she would not say a word of how scared she was. But I listened and did not try to interrupt, and by the end of the conversation I told her I was glad that she decided not to go to one of the crowded, dirty clinics where she was living, and that she had nothing to be concerned with anymore. When I awoke I made several discreet contacts and by the afternoon the procedure was arranged and scheduled for the following Monday. Sunny would take the train up to Bedley Run on Sunday and I would meet her at the station and take us to the private clinic for an examination, which the doctor insisted upon before any procedure the next morning.
When I saw her step out onto the platform I was taken aback by the broad, curving shape of her. Her face was full. She hadn’t said how far the pregnancy had gone, and I had assumed it was but a few weeks past her date, perhaps a month or two, no more. Anyone else would have thought that she was too long with the child, that it was much too late, that there was nothing left to do. She was indeed quite near full-term. But when she came out of the train the first thought that came to me was that it was a Sunday and quiet, when there was hardly anyone about, and that I ought to spirit her to the private clinic and to Dr. Anastasia as quickly as possible.
A Gesture Life Page 31