“I don’t understand.”
“Yale’s mom.”
“Okay. Yale? You did what?”
“I sent—at the very end. I was there, and you had to be in California.”
“Yes. Fiona, you can’t—”
“No, listen. You had to be in California, which wasn’t your fault, and I was pregnant with Claire.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. Okay, so I had power of attorney. And this was when he was—all the lung stuff was going on at the same time.”
“It was terrible,” Cecily said, more like she was affirming Fiona’s memory than reliving it herself. “I remember he could barely get two words out. And the indecipherable handwriting. It bothered me; his handwriting had always been so tidy. And he’d write those notes, and I couldn’t—”
“There were some better days too.” Fiona felt bad interrupting but she needed to get this out while she had momentum. “At the end, and maybe this was when you were gone, it seemed like the treatments were suddenly working for some of the lung stuff, and he could talk, he really could. But then his kidneys went, from all the drugs they were pumping in, and the fluids were building up—I can’t even remember, but then it was his heart. He drowned. I said that to the doctors and they said, no, that wasn’t quite it, but I know what I saw. He drowned.”
Cecily said, “You handled it all so beautifully. I can’t imagine what you went through, but it was the right decision, keeping him off the ventilator. It was what he wanted.”
Nicolette had quit the slide and was making a careful pile of small dried leaves. Fiona breathed in as deeply as she could, tried to start again. “I count it as two whole years,” she said, “that he was really sick.” Yale had first gotten pneumonia in the spring of 1990, after that stupid fucking cracked rib at the medical protest. It had cleared up, but not really; he had asthma to begin with, and so the pneumonia weakened him more than it otherwise would have. Another issue followed, and another, until he joked that his body was a nightclub for opportunistic infections, joked that he’d named his last remaining T cells after the Cubs’ lineup. “And then at the end—Okay.” She put her hands on her knees, arms stiff. “Four days before he died, his mother showed up at the hospital.”
Cecily’s face went still.
“I knew who she was, because she’d been in this Tylenol commercial, and every time it came on I’d stare at her face and try to figure her out. I guess his father—you remember his father came down a couple times, but he just kind of stood around and it was so awkward.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, he did, and Yale hadn’t thought he was really in contact with the mom, but apparently he was, or he figured out how to reach her, and she showed up. She was wearing this yellow sundress, and she looked so nervous. It was at night. He was asleep.”
Her expression had been so much like the one Yale made when he was anxious—a look that had always reminded Fiona of a rabbit. It might have made Fiona love this woman, just as she loved Yale, but instead she resented her even more. That one of her favorite things about Yale came from someone who’d abandoned him.
“And you sent her away.”
Fiona let out a sob that made Nicolette look up from her leaves. Her hair translucent in the sunlight.
“I wasn’t a mother yet, not really. I—all I could think was it might upset him to see her. But I was being possessive, too, I know that now. He was mine, and here this woman came, and I didn’t think about what she was going through. Or what it had taken for her to walk in there. I thought it would kill him. I thought he’d be so upset, and I imagined her messing up the treatment, trying to take charge the way my parents had with Nico. And I hated my own mother so much. I walked her to the elevator and I pressed the button for her, and I told her he’d specifically said he didn’t want to see her.”
“Was that true?”
“Yes, actually. Yes. It was one of the things we’d gone over. But I could have told him when he was awake. I could have asked what he wanted to do. And I never did. I was going to tell him. I kept being about to tell him.”
She’d gone into labor, is what happened, and then when that went horribly awry, she’d had her C-section, been tethered to the bed with IVs and drugs and pain right upstairs from him but unable to get herself down the hall and to the elevator. When Cecily wasn’t back yet, and Asher was in New York, and there was really no one left to stay by his bedside. She’d thought of calling casual acquaintances and asking them to check on him, but he was closer with the nurses than with random old neighbors, and these nurses knew what they were doing; they’d held hands for hours with many men dying alone. Besides which, Fiona just needed to recover and then she could get back down there to the third floor, take care of him again.
But meanwhile Yale fell into deep unconsciousness, and Fiona had to make the medical decisions over the phone, the maternity nurses looking on with concern. She’d send Damian down again and again with messages for Yale, despite the fact that he likely couldn’t hear a thing, and when he came back up she’d make him tell her what Yale looked like. “He’s got so many tubes coming out of him,” he said. “He’s the wrong color. Fiona, I don’t know. I’m so tired. I’ll go back again if you need, but every time I’m in there I think I’ll pass out.” Yale’s old friend Gloria and her girlfriend did some shifts, but only in the afternoons. When Nico had died, there were too many people wanting to be in the room, jockeying for position, vying for the roles of caretaker and hand-holder and chief mourner. And now there was no one. Yale had been there for Nico, and Terrence, and even fucking Charlie, and there was no one left for him, not really, and it killed her.
Claire was thirty-six hours old and nursing wasn’t working, and Fiona, who’d been prepared for the tearing of a natural birth, was in disbelief at the howling pain that ran through her entire body when she tried to adjust her torso, tried to sit up on her own just the slightest bit. She’d go light-headed and collapse back, blind. In the five minutes the Lamaze instructor had devoted to C-sections, she’d never mentioned the pain, the crippling. Fiona made it to the bathroom on the arm of the nurse, and nearly fainted. She asked if they could take her down to the AIDS unit in a wheelchair, and the first nurse said she’d have to ask the doctor, but then she never came back. The second nurse said it could be done in the morning. Fiona might have fought harder, but the pain was too much, and the drugs were closing her eyes, and in the morning everything would be easier.
Claire stayed in the nursery all night that night, and Fiona slept late. She woke to Dr. Cheng’s face. He’d come all the way upstairs. When his expression came into focus she screamed so primally, so loudly, that if she’d been anywhere other than a maternity ward, everyone would have come running.
It was early this morning, Dr. Cheng said. Debbie the charge nurse had been with him.
But that wasn’t enough.
And if Fiona hadn’t sent his mother away, he might have heard her voice through the haze. He might have been comforted on the deepest childhood level.
Nicolette had come to the bench and was opening her little bag of crackers. Cecily patted the bench and she climbed up, sat with her legs swinging off the edge.
Fiona touched the blonde curls, unimaginably soft.
She said, “It was the biggest mistake of my life, Cecily. I think I’m being punished for it now. I shut my own mother out and I sent Yale’s mother away, and it all boomeranged and hit me in the face.”
Nicolette said, “Do you live in America?”
Fiona dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Yes. Did you know that I’m your mama’s mama? And Cecily is your daddy’s mama.”
Nicolette looked back and forth between them as if a great joke were being played, as if they’d told her one was the Easter Bunny and the other was the Tooth Fairy.
“Your mama came out of my tummy, and yo
ur daddy came out of Cecily’s tummy.”
“Show me,” Nicolette said, and Fiona lifted up her sweater and pointed at the pale line of scar.
“Right there,” she said, and Nicolette nodded.
“But it didn’t ouch?” Nicolette asked.
“Not a bit.”
Nicolette chewed her cracker, and Cecily said to Fiona, “I don’t know if this is helpful, but whenever I felt guilty about something when I was young, my mother would say, “How do you make up for it? What’s a thing you could do that would make you feel better?” It sounds like Mr. Rogers, I know, but it’s always grounded me when I’m upset.”
“I could move to Paris,” Fiona said, and she was joking until she heard it and realized she wasn’t.
Nicolette wanted her books now. Cecily pulled her onto her lap and read to her about Pénélope, about the game she and her animal friends played with their trunk of colored clothes.
1991
Fiona was waiting for them right inside the Brigg’s front door. She said, “Rescue me from my family!”
“Help us first,” Cecily said. There was a ramp, but the rubber strip right in the doorway was catching Yale’s wheels, and so Cecily had to rock him back while Fiona grabbed the armrests and pulled forward, and Yale held tight and tried to lean back so he wouldn’t fall forward when they put him down again.
The landing jarred him, knocked the oxygen tank into his spine. But they were in. Fiona helped him pull his coat off.
Cecily said, “We have exactly one hour.”
“I actually have two hours of oxygen,” Yale said. “She’s being conservative.”
“Well she’s right!” Fiona said. “What if there’s a traffic jam on the way back? I can’t believe they let you out.”
“For the record,” Yale said as they wheeled him down the hall toward the gallery, “if you’re ever questioned in a court of law, they did not let me out, and Dr. Cheng definitely did not help us steal the oxygen or the chair.”
“Of course not.”
“He says hi.”
* * *
—
The gallery was already full. Yale was vastly underdressed—every other man wore a tie, and he wore an old sweater that used to fit snugly and now hung like a tent—but his clothes weren’t what anyone would be looking at, anyway.
There was Warner Bates from ARTnews, waving, pointing him out to someone else. Warner had come to interview him last fall right after Gloria’s initial Trib feature appeared. He’d brought along a photographer who’d shot Yale sitting on his own couch, laughing with Fiona. Yale was embarrassed by the attention, by the focus on his role. Gloria’s story had been about the collection itself. “After Seventy Years,” the headline read, “an Artist Claims His Prize.” It included plenty of helpful quotes from an unwitting Bill Lindsey, who didn’t realize the focus would be Ranko Novak. The article wasn’t dishonest; it never stated directly that Novak’s pieces would be in the show. But in talking at length about Novak’s pieces, as well as his life and death, it implied as much. “She wanted him to have his due,” it quoted Yale as saying. “She wanted him hanging next to Modigliani.” That article itself might not have been enough to force Bill’s hand, but the half-dozen more pieces it spawned in the art press were. And suddenly Ranko’s name was all over the gallery’s own press for the show.
Yale glimpsed Bill standing a few yards ahead of him in the gallery, and Bill, when he noticed Yale, looked terrified. He spun toward the woman he’d just said goodbye to, asked her something, led her quickly in the other direction. Bill didn’t look sick. Cecily had told him as much, updated him every few months almost apologetically, as if Yale would want Bill to have it.
One thing about being in the chair: From behind people, Yale couldn’t see anything yet. He recognized a corner of the Hébuterne bedroom.
He’d imagined, once upon a time, wheeling Nora in here to see the show. He’d imagined pushing her in front of the crowds.
Here were the Sharps, weaving their way to him. Esmé reached down to envelop him awkwardly in her thin arms. Esmé and Allen had been saints, kept calling to ask if he had everything he needed. For his first long hospital stay, Esmé had brought him a stack of novels. They would never be close friends, would never gossip over brunch, but they’d volunteered themselves to form a safety net below him.
“Shall we take you around?” Esmé said.
So while Fiona was shanghaied by a man who wanted to explain to her in great detail how he’d known Nora’s husband, Cecily and the Sharps took him around, asked people to let him through.
The exhibit was set up on a small labyrinth of walls, with the pieces hung artist by artist in rough chronological order, and Cecily proposed starting at the end of the circuit. There was a great deal of written explanation for each grouping. Framed letters and notes surrounded the write-up on Foujita. Here, against the snowy field of the gallery wall, was his ink drawing of Nora in the green dress.
In the years since Yale had seen the pieces, they’d taken on the aura of famous works of art. Important because you’d seen them before, and your brain already had a slot for them. An old friend met years later on the street corner. Your high school history textbook found again and, through its distant familiarity, made holy.
Esmé wheeled him by a group that included Fiona’s parents, who didn’t glance his way, and Debra, who did. She looked at him with utter blankness, though, and Yale wondered if she recognized him. She looked different herself—rounder, a little brighter. According to Fiona, she was dating an investment banker in Green Bay. Not the life of wild adventure Yale would have wished for her, but it was something.
Warner Bates from ARTnews was above him suddenly, blocking his view, introducing him to an elderly couple who looked at Yale with undisguised horror. He didn’t hold out his hand to shake; he wouldn’t do that to them. Warner said, “This is a triumph, Yale! You should feel very happy!”
“I do. I can’t believe it’s really up.”
“This is all your doing, you know.” Warner turned to the couple. “This is the guy who made it happen.”
They wound their way to the start of the exhibit. There was Ranko’s section, at last: the two paintings, the three cow sketches. Fiona, who had rejoined them, squeezed his hand, and Esmé said, “Well, there it is.”
He wished it were more spectacular to look at, but things had been nicely framed and the informational plaques on Ranko distracted nicely from the blandness of the cows. The painting of Nora as a sad little girl had been brightened up by restoration, and her dress was now a much more interesting shade of blue than Yale had remembered.
And finally, there was Ranko in the argyle vest. Yale hadn’t seen it in person since he learned it was Ranko, since he learned Nora had held the brush herself. It was labeled Self-Portrait; Yale had passed along that much information, at least. It really did look like the same artist’s hand, at least to Yale, but maybe, now that he really looked, there was something more hesitant in the lines; it was the work of someone desperate to get something right. This one, too, was crisper after its restoration. He hadn’t realized what bad shape the paintings originally must have been in. Yale noticed a spark of silver in Ranko’s nest of curly hair. He wheeled himself closer, which didn’t work, and so he wheeled himself back instead.
He wasn’t crazy: It was a paper clip. Not the first thing you’d notice, but now that he was looking, yes, and there was another, too, closer to his brow. The shapes were distinct, and she’d accomplished something very much like a glint of light off each. Had they been her idea, or Ranko’s? Had he worn his crown again that day, as he posed? Had she added them after he died? How odd, how inexplicably devastating: paper clips.
He wanted to laugh, to shout it to the gallery, to explain—but he could only ever tell Fiona. To Esmé he just said, “That one’s my favorite.”
A man beside Y
ale’s chair said to his wife, “I heard they had to include everything, it was part of the lady’s will.” But here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well—of a hopeless, doomed, selfish, ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?
* * *
—
It had been an hour and five minutes, and Cecily ran out to start her car. Esmé wheeled Yale backward to the exit, and he had one last chance to look down the gallery. The people in their beautiful clothes, the edges and corners of paintings and sketches.
Esmé said, “Oh, tar, it’s snowed!”
There was a good half inch on the ground; Cecily’s shoes had made soft prints on their way to her car.
Yale hugged Fiona goodbye, told her to look closely at Ranko’s self-portrait. He said to Allen Sharp, “If her parents come near her, pretend you’re having a seizure or something.”
Allen ran ahead, scraping the snow out of the wheelchair’s path with his dress shoes.
Allen and Esmé lifted him together into the passenger seat, got the oxygen tank between his legs. Cecily said, “It’s a quarter after. Yale, I hate this.”
It was already dark out. Cecily drove up Sheridan Road far too fast, illuminated snowflakes shooting past them. “Slow down,” he said. “It’s not worth a crash.”
“If we crash,” she said, “they’ll take us where we’re going anyway. And faster.”
“We’ll be fine,” Yale said. “It was worth it.”
“Was it? Are you happy?” She checked his face. “I liked Ranko’s stuff. I really did.”
“She loved him,” Yale said instead of contradicting her, instead of saying it was okay if she hadn’t liked it at all. “Even if she shouldn’t have. I think it was one of those things where you can’t let go of how you first saw the person.”
“We never let go of that,” Cecily said. “I mean, even for parents—that’s never not your baby, you know?”
“I think you’re right.” As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people—of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.
The Great Believers Page 47