“Are you a relative of Mr. Crane’s?”
“I’m his daughter.”
“The good news is that he was just malnourished,” he said, leading her away from Crane’s bed as they talked. “He’s getting some fluids now, and I expect he’ll have some strength back before too long.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“I understand that your father has elected to stop treatment for his cancer.”
“Yes,” she said. “To be honest, I just found this out myself. We’re not really…”
But it had not been a question.
“These end-of-life issues are very difficult, Miss Crane. I don’t blame him for making the decision. But the man hasn’t eaten in two days. The kind of pain he’s been in is entirely unnecessary. I’d recommend you get him into hospice after he’s discharged.”
“He doesn’t want to go to hospice.”
“I don’t doubt that,” the doctor said. “But if his family—if you—are going to leave him to starve in his apartment, then there aren’t a lot of good options. Some palliative measures need to be taken. He can’t be on his own at this point. And we can’t keep him here if he doesn’t want to be treated.”
“My husband and I will take care of him.”
“You’re sure? It’s going to be demanding.”
“We’re happy to do it. We didn’t know how serious his condition was.”
“All right. We’ll move him upstairs in a few hours, but he should be up and about within a day or two. You can take him home then. We can have a hospital bed delivered. Insurance should cover that. And I can write some prescriptions for his pain. The most important thing is to make it as easy as possible.”
He took Sophie’s number and left her to wander back to where Crane lay sleeping. She sat down in the chair beside his bed. The pale green hospital gown had fallen from his shoulders, leaving his bony chest uncovered, and she saw the burn for the first time. It might have been two days old, instead of two decades. She reached to pull the gown over it, and it seemed fresh and warm to the touch. She felt the throb of blood, the struggle to live.
She could muster no outrage, even on Tom’s behalf, only sadness as she thought of all that had been taken from him. He was her character now, and she looked upon him as God looks upon all the benighted. She imagined him writing letters to his son, letters never opened, pulled from between two bills in the mail pile and discarded by Beth before Tom ever saw them. She didn’t know why she imagined this, since Beth was far too honest for such a thing. There had been no letters. But now there would be letters, for now it was up to her. She moved her hand from his burnt chest to his thin fingers, took them in her own, and cried. Anyone walking by would have thought them the dying father and grieving daughter she’d claimed them to be.
If Tom refused to take Bill in, she would stay downtown with him. But it wouldn’t come to that. In the end, she was certain of Tom’s goodness. She relied on it. Once he understood how helpless his father was, he would want to do this.
“Do you think he’ll wake up soon?” Sophie asked a passing nurse.
“They’re giving him something right now,” the nurse said, glancing at his chart. She gestured to one of the two IV drips running into his arms. “He’s going to be out for the rest of the day by the looks of it.”
She might have left him there, taking the afternoon to make plans for bringing him home. But he had been entrusted to her. She bowed her head and prayed that he was not beyond saving.
His hand was still in hers when the darkness came, like a message announced. A full minute passed before the light returned with a loud hum and a commotion on the other side of the curtain that separated them from the world. Sophie stepped outside, where a nurse was calling the waiting room to attention.
“There’s been an outage,” she said. “The hospital is running on an emergency generator, and patient services shouldn’t be affected. First of all, I need everyone to stay calm. In order to avoid confusion, we’re asking that visitors say their good-byes and slowly make their way out to the street.”
Sophie had no good-byes to say, so she left immediately. Outside in the early summer evening, with the sun still shining, it was difficult to tell that the power was gone until she saw the blank traffic lights and the pedestrians out in the street, directing cars while cabs on Seventh Avenue honked their horns.
She remembered blackouts from her childhood. They usually came after falling trees took down wires, and so coincided with violent storms. They were exciting, pitting her family against the elements without the usual advantage of technology. There was the romance of inhabiting a distant, candlelit time, summoning the natural resources of humanity. Their house was an old colonial in which every board squeaked, and on those evenings it seemed especially haunted by the past.
But now there had been no storm, and this wasn’t supposed to happen in New York. Her parents had lived in the city during the blackout of the late seventies, before she was born. They had described it as a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Then again, their lifetimes had passed.
“Do you think?” a woman standing near Sophie asked, hinting at another attack on the still-raw city.
“No,” the man beside her said. “Just an act of God.”
When Sophie called Tom, a message told her that all circuits were busy. She thought of that morning two years earlier, struggling desperately for some contact with him. She tried again and received the same message. Then she headed uptown.
The lights were out in the storefronts along the avenue, and what shops had still been open were now closing. Everyone had left work, and the sidewalks were full. Some people seemed scared, but most already understood that nothing serious had happened. Two boys had climbed a streetlight on the corner, and they were perched together on it precariously, watching the chaos just below. People were already constructing the stories they would tell about the night of the big blackout. They started singing and celebrating, as if to live up to tomorrow’s legend.
Sophie practiced the speech she would make to Tom that night. She wouldn’t say anything about saving his father’s soul. She would just say that they had an obligation. Tom understood well the language of oughts. She might add that caring for the man would be a way of proving that his father had no hold over him, that he had control over what kind of person he was.
The walk from the hospital took two hours, and night fell before she arrived home. Then came the walk up twenty-eight flights. Candles had been set down on every landing, bathing the stairwell in uneven light. Sophie thought again of the blackouts at home, remembering the bad storms, when days might pass before the lights went back on. She remembered how quickly it all became tiresome. You wanted to watch TV, to use appliances, to open the fridge. You wanted the ghosts to go away.
She opened the door and found Tom. He’d bought candles, which she hadn’t thought to do, and set them along the kitchen counter and around the living room. Most remained unlit.
“I thought you’d be here,” he said, when she walked in. Sophie tried to determine, in the flickering light, if there was a look of relief on his face.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Indeed, she was sorry. She was happy to see her husband, and she stepped over to him, putting her arms around his neck while he remained unmoving.
“Are you ever here when you say you are during the day?”
She hadn’t told him anything yet, but he knew enough to be angry. Things were already out of her control.
“Of course I’m here. Where would I be?”
Then she saw her notebook in his hand, being waved like a weapon.
“With him.”
“None of that came from him,” she said. “I made all that up.”
She knew this wouldn’t help.
“So you were writing a story about it?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I was really going to show it to anyone. This was just my way of making s
ense of things. You have to trust me.”
“Then where were you today?”
Now she swept into action, sharing with him their new burden, which she’d carried all these blocks uptown.
“I got a call from the hospital, and I didn’t have any choice. He’s very sick. He can’t live on his own anymore. What he did to you was terrible, maybe unforgivable. But you don’t have to forgive him to help him. We’re the only family he has, and he needs us very badly. So I told the doctors we would take care of him. He only has a few weeks to live, I think. And I know you’ll feel better for having done this. Although you won’t really have to do anything. You just need to let me do it.”
She continued on like this, not sure where the words were coming from. None of it bore any relation to the measured speech she’d prepared on her walk uptown. That script had been lost. Finally, she stopped and waited for something to register on Tom’s blank face.
“You were with him today?”
He was no longer angry. He seemed confused, almost deflated.
“You never answer the phone,” he said. “You’re not here when you say you’ll be.”
As he spoke, it came to her.
“Why did you go through my notebook? You’ve never done that before in all these years.”
He looked at it in his hands as if unsure how it had arrived there. Then he set it down on her desk like something fragile.
“I thought you’d started seeing someone.”
She almost laughed in relief. It would all be so simple to clear up.
“Oh, Tom. But that’s silly. I would never.”
“It’s not silly,” he said. “People do it all the time.”
How badly they had misunderstood each other, perhaps from the very beginning.
She was a summer at the firm. In a few more weeks she’d be returning to Charlottesville to finish law school. He wasn’t sure that they would be together when she came back to New York in the spring, but she’d made him realize that he needed to live on his own for a while.
“I guess I’ve never really done that,” he said, as if Sophie had deprived him of the chance.
“All right,” Sophie said.
“All right?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I thought you might raise your voice for once.”
“Fuck you.” She said it quietly. Not out of spite—it was just the way she talked.
A bag had been packed. How far in advance this had been done was not disclosed. Tom didn’t say he was going to stay with the girl, but he didn’t say otherwise. He might already have had an apartment somewhere.
“You owe me more than just walking out like this,” Sophie said, though she wasn’t sure he owed her anything. Anyway she didn’t want him to stay and explain himself. If he was going, she wanted him to leave. There would be time for endless talk if talk was deemed necessary. All of that could come later. She had walked a long way, and she was exhausted now.
When she looked him over, duffel bag in hand, standing proud and afraid like a child, a great surprising store of love and goodwill and pity took over her heart. She thought of him waiting all day with this news in his gut, wondering where she was.
After he was gone, she lit the rest of the candles, turning the kitchen counter into an altar. Sister Dymphna, the nun who ran the classes for initiates, had said that God was like electricity. We couldn’t see Him, most of us couldn’t understand Him, but we knew we needed Him and we knew—indirectly, from His works—that He was always there.
When the urge for a cigarette came, she walked instinctively out on the deck, though now there was nothing stopping her from smoking inside. The only lights she saw below were from the cars. Sophie imagined living according to the rhythms of natural light. When the sun set, the day was done. Such a time seemed very far away. She looked up, expecting to see the usual empty New York sky. Instead she saw stars, and she thought of home. She thought of the Old Manse. The heavens were full of light, and seeing it she was herself illuminated by a shiver of dumb wonder.
7
THE NEXT MORNING The Third Man was back on the screen, and Max was back on the couch. Beside the overfilled ashtray on the table in front of him sat a cocktail glass whose contents might have been Max’s breakfast or left over from the night before.
“You’re making progress,” I said.
“Progress is a self-serving bourgeois myth.”
We were quiet then, watching Harry Lime run through the Viennese sewers.
“The cuckoo clock,” I said eventually.
“The cuckoo clock,” Max agreed.
Sophie had always been an early riser, and she’d gone to bed hours before we had, but the morning was mostly over before she came down. She still looked tired, standing beside the couch, smoking one of Max’s cigarettes and reconciling herself to the new day.
“Hungry?” she asked me eventually.
We left Max with his movie and walked together to a diner on Waverly, where Sophie slumped across from me in the booth. Some unraveling had taken place since her arrival, or else she had all along been unraveled and I was only gradually recognizing it.
“I’m not sure I’m cut out for this lifestyle of yours,” she said.
“Me neither,” I told her. “No one is, really.”
When we’d finished our lunch, Sophie led us west on Waverly toward Christopher, away from the house.
“You don’t mind?” she asked. “I don’t want to keep you from your writing.”
She seemed to know well enough that she wasn’t keeping me from anything. I hadn’t done any work on the follow-up in weeks. It was tough to say what I’d been doing with my time before Sophie’s arrival. I didn’t even take these long walks anymore. Everything I passed on the street conspired to make my life inconsequential. Whatever reinvigorating force I needed couldn’t be found there. Whenever I joked with Max about some bit of pop culture detritus that he had addressed with professional seriousness in the pages of his magazine, he quoted Schiller: A man must be a good citizen of his age, as well as of his country. I wasn’t much of a citizen of either. In fact, it had become difficult even to step outside without a high-grade case of the late-capitalist heebie-jeebies. But as I turned up Seventh Avenue with Sophie, I didn’t feel so ill-suited to the world.
“This is where I was when the lights went out,” she said at Twelfth Street.
“At the hospital?”
“Getting Crane.”
The blackout had happened only a few months before. I hadn’t really placed Crane’s story in time and it unsettled me to feel it creeping up on us. Sophie described that day as we continued uptown from St. Vincent’s. We were in Chelsea before I realized that we were retracing the walk to her apartment. We crossed town along the bottom of Central Park, where the sidewalk was crowded with vendors, caricaturists, street-corner singers, and the tourists for whom they all existed.
This was near the neighborhood where I’d grown up, where my mother still lived. I’d known that Sophie was living there, that she’d been going to the church my family had once attended. But I wasn’t sure exactly where her apartment was, so I didn’t know how far from it we were when I spotted Tom. He was half a block away and heading toward us. I hadn’t seen him for years, and to my eyes he had grown fat and satisfied. He had his arm around a small, smiling blonde, the kind of cute New Hampton girl he should have been with all along. If this was the girl, she would have gone back to law school by then, which meant that she had come up to visit him. Otherwise Tom was already on to someone else, exercising his new freedom.
I noticed him before Sophie did, and I had time to say something or gracefully guide us across the street. But I did nothing. I wanted Tom to see us together. I liked the symmetry of the four of us coming face to face. It put me in the same category as this girl who’d broken up their marriage. And I thought it might be good for Sophie to have me there when she encountered Tom, as she would have to eventually.
; The girl looked up at us, and she knew. Somehow, through a whispered word or a stiffening of her body, she communicated the knowledge to Tom, who also looked up the block. Only Sophie remained unaware of what was coming.
“Tom,” I said quietly when they were about ten feet away, as much warning Sophie as greeting him.
“Charlie Blakeman,” Tom said suspiciously, as though I were an old friend whose sudden appearance with his estranged wife constituted a betrayal. I was reminded how little I actually knew Tom. We’d spoken only a few times in four years of college together, and after that he was just the boyfriend, and then the husband, of the girl I loved. I’d known nothing before that week of the details of his life, the circumstances of his childhood. Now that I did, I wasn’t sure what to do with these facts. Nothing about his appearance had ever seemed informed by tragedy. I felt something I hadn’t felt even after first discovering that Sophie had chosen him: I hated Tom. It was a relief to see that he and Sophie couldn’t even look at each other.
“What brings you to this neighborhood?” he asked, as though the answer weren’t standing next to me.
“Just on a walk,” I said. “This may be the last good walking day we’ll get for a while.”
“You never know,” Tom answered. “Some things hang around longer than we expect.”
We all waited for him to introduce the girl. When he didn’t, she offered her hand to me and said, “I’m Willa.”
“I’m Charlie. I went to college with Tom.”
She turned to Sophie, who had been watching all this without a word but now extended her hand and smiled.
“I’m Sophie,” she said. “I’m your boyfriend’s wife.”
“We have to run,” Tom said then, still addressing only me. “I’m sorry to be rude, but we’re in a rush.”
Then they were gone. The whole thing had taken only a moment. I waited to see what Sophie would make of this encounter.
“After he left,” she said, “I went out on the deck and looked up at the stars. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them.”
What Happened to Sophie Wilder Page 11