In the car I didn’t speak. What was there to say? If anything, I had only criticisms, and though I chose not to air them I was feeling edgy all the same, driving brusquely, speeding and changing lanes without signaling. Sunny didn’t seem to notice, swaying on each turn, unseatbelted as always, and suddenly I was furious with her. How could she get herself into such a predicament? How long did she believe she could delay? Where now was her “lover,” whom she always talked of being so genuine and serious and gentle? Perhaps he had made a few recordings some time ago, but did he even own his trumpet anymore, or was it pawned for a few weeks’ phantom pleasure and delirium? And glancing over at her I felt my fury redouble, seeing that she had little need to apologize or excuse or otherwise explain, and I thought—darkly, for a bare millisecond—that I could unbuckle myself now, too, and let the car’s momentum carry us straight through the approaching sharp turn, into the stone farmer’s wall that bounded the old suburban roadway. I wanted an end to us, inglorious and swift, just another unfortunate accident on Route 9, to leave a few lines hardly noticed in the local paper concerning a longtime Bedley Run resident and his daughter, with no survivors.
And yet what did I do but nothing unusual, save elicit a sighing murmur from the tires as I wheeled us wickedly around that bend, the same one that I would grimly consider on countless future occasions, and that one rainy night years later my friend Anne Hickey would not survive. If only once I could cease imagining the various motions, and instead of conjurings and dummy musings that leave one subtly affected, take hold of some moment and fully acquit myself to it, whether decently or ignobly. This is not to say I wish I had smashed us into the wall, but that I might have at least stopped the car along the road and turned squarely and given her every last angry bit and piece of my mind. But what happened of course was that I drove home and let her inside the house where we separated until the appointed exam, Sunny upstairs in her old room stripped of everything but the bed, and I down in the family room, listening to the records of Chopin and Mozart I had bought for her to use as models and inspiration. And while I listened to those stirring, ambling notes I might have realized how frightening all this was to her, how overwhelming and awful, but I sensed instead only the imminent disgrace and embarrassment that would hang about the house like banners of our mutual failure.
At six o’clock I went up and had to rouse her. Her eyes were puffed and red; perhaps she had fallen asleep crying. I told her to come down to the car, and she said weakly she didn’t want to go to the doctor that night, asking if I could take her the next day. I reminded her that it was the waiting that had placed her in such trouble, that it was only an examination and she could talk to Dr. Anastasia about whatever she wished. Then she said she wasn’t sure anymore about going ahead. I didn’t protest; I only repeated that it was an examination and that nothing was yet determined. She finally nodded, still groggy, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. I fully noticed then the change in her as she walked down the upstairs hall, the outwardness of her feet, the slightest waddle to her gait. To remember that now makes me feel the way I should have felt, to brim at such a sight with sober pride and happiness, a grandparental glow, though then it was, I must recall, a most sickening vision to me, being the clearest picture of my defeats, familial and otherwise.
We arrived at the clinic well after dark, a few minutes before Dr. Anastasia. We waited in silence. When he drove up he got out of his car quickly and went straight to the doors, his keys out. He nodded at us and let us in and locked the doors behind us. I’d known him only casually; he was one of many obstetricians with privileges at the county hospital, but the only one I knew of who also worked at such a clinic. He was older than I, and not originally from this country, and he always seemed utterly purposeful and competent if not always warm, the sort of professional one could admire for his straightforward nature and his efficiency. I believe he sensed my appreciation and so obliged my request for an after-hours appointment. But when we were gathered in the brightly lighted waiting room, he looked somewhat put out, disturbed. I didn’t offer anything and then he asked Sunny if she was ready to be examined. They went into the next room. After a mere five minutes Sunny came out, and Dr. Anastasia called me in. Sunny walked past me and sat on the waiting room sofa.
When he closed the door the doctor said, “What are we doing here, Mr. Hata?”
“Excuse me, Doctor?”
“You told me she was around twenty-eight weeks. Are you mad? But then you, especially, should know better, being in your profession.”
“She was unsure of her dates.”
“Notwithstanding,” he said, thoroughly annoyed. “It’s not possible now. She’s no doubt past an acceptable point.”
“But you hardly examined her.”
“I didn’t have to,” he said. “Anyone with eyes can tell what’s the case. She has no option left but to carry to term.”
“I tell you she does not want it.”
“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Hata….”
“Let me speak, please, Doctor. I tell you she cannot have it. There are many unhappy reasons. She barely finished high school last spring and doesn’t have a job. The father is somewhere in Washington Heights, and he has practically abandoned her. He is a longtime drug addict besides. I’m afraid she has also begun taking the drugs with him. You well know there’s a chance the fetus may have grave injuries as a result, if not certain mental deficiencies. I’m here now to help her but I’ve run out of patience and willingness. I am sorry and ashamed to say that this is the last effort I have for her. But I will do this. So I’m asking you to help because of who you are and your experience and skills, so that she won’t go to someone else, which she will, and no doubt suffer terrible injuries. You will be preventing further trauma. I apologize for not being more forthright on the telephone, but you see I had to speak to you in person. I feel I must convince you.”
“I do not involve myself in the lives of my patients, Mr. Hata. I attend to them after they have made decisions. But this decision comes far too late.”
“It’s not too late,” I told him. “There can be medical necessities, as I have mentioned. I understand these operations can be very complicated, particularly at this stage, and much more costly than usual. I am willing to do everything I can to have you help my daughter. This is not to insult your professionalism but only to make clear how resolved I am. And I am resolved. We are desperate, sir, and I will do all I can to get her out of this trouble.”
He was quiet for a moment, and then said, “I have done them this late but not in this country. There are different standards.”
“Yes.”
“She appears unsure as well.”
“Perhaps she is,” I answered. “She’s naturally fearful, as I am. But she has confided in me, and I tell you she is ready. We are ready even tonight, if it’s possible.”
“My nurse won’t come here now,” Anastasia said. “I can anesthetize her, but I need my nurse to attend me. I believe, however, that she would likely not agree to assist such a procedure.”
I told him, “I’ll stand in for her.”
“You?”
“I was trained, once, in surgical methods and nursing. A long time ago, during the world war. I’m sure all you in fact need is another set of hands, to give you instruments and such.”
“This is mostly true….”
“I can do that for you. I’m willing to do that.”
“Yes, but Mr. Hata,” he said, considering me grimly. He spoke slowly and resonantly. “You understand what you will have to see. What you will look at. This will be an indelicate action, which I would not wish upon anyone.”
“I understand, Doctor,” I said. “I’ve witnessed such things. Similar things.”
“Perhaps you have. But she is your daughter, Mr. Hata. It will be different.”
I said to him, “I understand.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes, I do,” I said to him, as unwaveringly as
I could utter the words, enough so that I was quite convinced myself. He took me at my word, and within an hour she was in her gown and he had given something to relax her. All I had asked of him was that she be heavily sedated, even before being administered the numbing spinal, so that she wouldn’t realize I was there, or much remember anything of what was done, which he did for me, and with success.
The following evening, in fact, when she was recuperating in her bedroom, she would ask if I had come into the operating room, and I told her that I had done so only briefly at the end, as she had called for me. This was true, for she did say, “Poppa,” out of the blue, and I had held her hand for some moments, patting her fingers gently to try to comfort her. It was the first time since she was quite young that I had caressed her so, and the final time, too—still right up to now—for she would leave again just as quickly as she arrived, having a taxi come to the house and take her to the train station for the first express of the morning. She didn’t know that I had been awake all night, or that I’d heard her walk down the hall and slip a note under my door, which read, “Sorry for all my trouble to you. Goodbye.” I almost went to her then, to plead that she remain, but I saw a beam of headlights sweeping up the drive, and before I could even pull slippers on my feet she was quickly down the stairs and outside, closing the cab door behind her.
If Sunny were to ask me now, I would not tell her I was in the operating room throughout the procedure. I would have to lie. For it was much more difficult than even Dr. Anastasia expected, and owing to his skill and great care he didn’t injure her at all, Thomas being proof enough of that. And so I remain grateful to the doctor, for the force of his patience and focus, as it was obvious how much heed he gave to each operation and step. I watched his face and the movements of his hands, his concentration and purpose astounding to me. Once he began he never showed even a shade of consternation, comporting himself with utter professionalism, as though it no longer mattered how much I would pay him (which I did, overgenerously), nor that she was much too far into her term. Sunny was eerily quiet while he worked, her eyes glassy and unfixed, though every so often she would gaze up at me almost searchingly, as though I were some faraway figure in her dreaming, this dimmed man in the distance, made of twilight and fog.
The doctor was right about my presence and participation. For what I saw that evening at the clinic endures, remaining unaltered, preserved. And if in my life I’ve witnessed the most terrible of things, if I’ve seen what no decent being should ever look upon and have to hold in close remembrance, perhaps it means I should be left to the cold device of history, my likeness festooning the ramparts of every house and town and district of man.
But it is not. And I do not live in broad infamy, nor hide from righteous pursuers or seekers of the truth. I do not mask my face or screen my doings of each day. I have not yet been banished from this earth. And though nearly every soul I’ve closely known has come to some dread or grave misfortune, I instead persist, with warmth and privilege accruing to me unabated, ever securing my good station here, the last place I will belong.
17
MARY BURNS once said to me, “You’re truly an unexpected sort, Franklin Hata. Like no one I’ve ever known.”
I’ve been reflecting on those words in recent days, as I’ve not felt like swimming much, opting instead to walk longer than usual, my new route taking me past her old house twice, coming and going. It was her compliment to me, spoken early in our friendship, in those heady though still reposeful weeks after we had become physically intimate with each other, if not yet as lovers. Later on she said something quite similar to me by the poolside, but of course it was meant then as a sober appraisal of our all-but-dissipated relationship, which was as critical as Mary Burns could ever be of me. I remember that day as being just as it is now, late one afternoon near the end of the season. She sat in the teak deck chair with a towel tied around her waist, her navy blue one-piece still wet from her twenty laps. When a chilly wind swept through she pulled on the rumpled white men’s dress shirt she often used as a wrap, her silver-golden hair swept back neatly with a velvety black band, the cast of her eyes opaquely shaded behind the large ovals of her sunglasses.
She was particularly laconic that weekend, for she’d had a most unpleasant phone conversation with her eldest daughter some days before. The young woman had been asking about her mother’s will for some time; she and her husband were apparently a high-earning couple who somehow still lived beyond their means and were constantly in debt. For several months once, Mary Burns had to make the mortgage payments on their Manhattan apartment, lest they lose it to the bank. Her daughter had called that week not because they were in trouble again, but rather because they were “looking ahead,” and wanted to know exactly how much Mary Burns would be leaving to them in stocks and bonds and cash, as well as whatever interest she could expect in the Mountview house and a large bungalow with acreage on Fisher Island. They wanted a financial picture for themselves, she told her mother, in order to plan their lives accordingly.
I was visiting at her house that day when she received the call. When she hung up she returned to the living room where we’d been reading together after lunch, and though I hadn’t heard her speak any way but placably to her daughter, I could clearly see that she was distracted. She sat down at the other end of the long sofa, and when I asked she briefly recounted to me what her daughter had wanted.
After a while I said, “I hope she was satisfied with what you’re leaving her.”
“What?”
“Her inheritance.”
“I don’t know,” she said, suddenly looking at me, stunned. “I don’t know how much it is.”
“Oh, you couldn’t tell her anything?”
“No,” she answered, with great somberness. “I never knew she thought about me that way.”
“Well, surely she will be pleased,” I said, something in me trying now to put the subject to rest, “no matter the amount.”
Mary Burns was silent, and despite the fact that for the rest of the afternoon we didn’t converse much at all, everything seemed mostly fine. She offered me as she always did a thick slice of her homemade marble pound cake to go with my tea, and when it was time for me to leave she let me peck her on the cheek. I felt all was well again, or at least as well as it had been during that last month, which I see now was a period of the most agreeable passivity, an inert state that neither of us—being alike in many ways—was willing to disturb. And yet the differences were crucial, too, for while Mary Burns was just the kind of woman I could have befriended and come to love, being exactly partnered for someone like me, for her I was perfectly wrong. Better for Mary Burns that I should be a man who could set her afire like a bowl in a kiln, better that I could so frustrate and anger her that I’d breach the thick jacket of her grace and unleash her woman’s fury, to make her finally crack, or splinter, or explode.
The next morning she came by to swim as she did most Sundays. She would simply walk around the side of the house and begin her laps while I was still in the kitchen preparing breakfast. She liked a plain meal of oatmeal porridge with diced apples and a cup of black coffee, and I was more than happy to make it that morning, seeing her there leaning on the curved stainless steel ladder as she tucked her hair inside her swimming cap. Her body was trim and fit, her longish legs tanned, and from where I stood she could have been a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, not yet even in the prime of her life. I was amazed and humbled. She looked toward the patio and the kitchen but didn’t wave back at me, and I thought the reflection of the sun against the panes of glass must be blocking her vision. The next I saw she was gone, the surface of the water gently rippling with the wake of a neat dive. I watched from the stove for her to reappear. When she didn’t I thought I had miss-seen her go in and quickly surveyed the rest of the property, and when again I didn’t find her I stepped out through the French doors onto the patio. The water was astonishingly calm. I kept searching th
e far end of the dark pool for the bob of her head, and yet nothing would rise. The seconds passed. A bubble of panic came up in my chest. I knew I should run and dive in but another feeling was holding me back, like tethered weights on my legs, this pulling-down horror of what I might see.
But with a great gasp she rose, like a shot, by the near edge of the pool. She had gone the whole length and back. She leaned over onto the slate surround, hacking and coughing terribly. I rushed to her but she said weakly, “Something’s burning,” and I realized the porridge was probably boiling over onto the coils.
“Are you all right?” I asked her, and she nodded. I rushed back to the kitchen and took the pot off the burner, though by the time I returned to her she was sitting in the deck chair as I’ve described, with nothing so unusual about her except the slightest tinge of blue in her neck and face. And we sat that way for a while, neither of us having anything to eat or drink, just sitting and listening to the westerly breezes filtering through the first dry-edged leaves of the treetops.
At some point she said, “I suppose you’ll be leaving all of this to Sunny.”
“Yes,” I quickly replied, though of course I hadn’t really considered such things yet, as she was only fifteen at the time. But almost immediately the notion seemed more complicated than I expected, as my trouble with Sunny was deepening by the day, enough so that I’d begun to wonder whether she and I would have any relationship at all in the future, or if we did, what kind of feeling she would have for me when both of us were old. It was then I understood better what had upset Mary Burns about her daughter’s phone call. There is a need for the belief—even if illusory—that despite the ever-obvious evidence of familial messiness and complication, one’s child will always hold the most unconditional regard for her parent, the same one no doubt that Mary Burns felt her heart spill over with when she was handed her newborn daughter, and which I am sure washes over me whenever Thomas tugs my hand. We wish it somehow pure, this thing, we wish it unmixed, unalloyed with human hope or piety or fear or maybe even love. For we wish it not to be ornate.
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