Dr. Lowe, in green scrubs, a mask dangling around his neck, sat at a desk thumbing through papers. He stood to shake Harley’s hand. “Little problem here. Please sit down.”
Harley felt a weak sinking sensation. “Problem?”
“Nothing to worry about, really, but we need your permission to do a sectional.”
“A what?”
“A cesarean sectional, a surgical incision through the abdomen.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not uncommon, especially in a young girl with a narrow pelvis like that. We need you to sign a release.” Harley stared at the paper. Dr. Lowe continued. “I’ve already consulted with Dr. Vincent and Dr. Marsh. The sooner we get on with it, the better.”
Harley picked up the pen. He felt as though he were holding Sherylynne’s very life in his hand. “You think this is really necessary, huh?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
Harley looked at the paper, then signed his name on the designated line. Dr. Lowe stood up and put his hand on Harley’s shoulder. “Nothing to worry about. Routine.”
Harley went back through the reception area, and down to the business office. Accounting was reluctant to tell him how much Whitehead had paid on the bill, even after he explained who he was, and that he wanted to repay him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take that up with him,” the clerk said.
“Oh, you can bet I will!”
A half hour passed. Harley walked the floor. He watched the clock, and fumed over Whitehead and the bill. He supposed Whitehead thought he was “being good” to him and Sherylynne, but Harley was having none of it: Not only was he going to write Whitehead a check as soon as possible, he had to figure some polite way to tell him and Mavis to stay out of his business, regardless of their good intentions.
A nurse in green scrubs with a surgical mask dangling around her neck burst through the double doors. “Mr. Buchanan,” she said brightly, “you have a six-pound, seven-ounce girl!”
Chapter 23
M. D. Anderson
SHERYLYNNE CAME OUT of the house with Leah in her arms and stepped off the porch to meet Harley as he brought the pickup to a stop next to their old Chevy. He was always impressed by the way Sherylynne moved in space, as though she were swimming.
He kissed her on the cheek, and handed her his lunch bucket in exchange for Leah, a year old now. Sherylynne held her hand against the small of his back, her thigh swinging against his as they went into the house. The fact of a perfect wife and perfect baby daughter continued to soften the disappointment of studying in New York.
Sherylynne poured two coffees in the kitchen and followed him outside to the lawn chairs. She placed his coffee on the little cast-iron table beside his chair. He held Leah. Leah, watching him with her big amber eyes, her toothless smile, her little hand fumbling to touch his face.
“Wendell says Mavis wants you to come see her.”
“Oh?”
“He says she’s never gonna leave that clinic.”
He cradled Leah in his left arm, picked his cup up with his right hand. “I never understood what she saw in him.”
“He knows how to make money.”
“She probably has more money than he does.”
“Just think how much he’s gonna have, once she’s gone.”
He glanced up. “That’s an odd thing to say.”
“Odd? Why?”
He set the cup back on the table, lifted Leah and made baby sounds to her.
THE NEXT DAY Harley packed a bag and stowed it in the cab of the company pickup. Álvaro would cover for him.
He and Sherylynne had lunched earlier and now, just before leaving, he sat with her in the aluminum lawn chairs in the thin shade of the mesquite. Sherylynne held Leah, Leah taking her bottle.
Harley wore pressed jeans and a Western-style shirt with snaps up the sleeves. He also wore the ostrich skin boots that Mavis had had made for him at M. L. Lettys for his twenty-first birthday in February. Whitehead called them “wart boots” because of the big wartlike bumps where the quills had been. Harley had tried to protest the gift without hurting Mavis’s feelings, but knew he had failed when she said, “Harley, you must learn to accept graciously. Accepting is an art, just like giving.”
“That Mavis, she sure is crazy about you,” Sherylynne said. “Calling you to come down there and see her. Just like family.”
“We can blow the whole world all to hell, but we can’t cure cancer or the common cold.”
“Wendell says they don’t want to. Says they couldn’t make money off it if they cured it.”
“He’s full of it.”
“He’s gonna be lost without Mavis, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, prob’ly.”
“What is it now…nearly three years since Buddy got blowed up?” Sherylynne shook her head. “And now this.”
“Some families don’t have any luck.”
Sherylynne frowned. “Don’t say that.”
Harley gazed across the empty plains toward Odessa. Leah sucked at the bottle and watched him, her big amber eyes full of light.
“They’d treat us like family if you’d just let them.”
“They treat us like family whether we let them or not.”
“She likes your paintings. She’d have bought those two paintings if you’d just let her. She wouldn’t say so because she knew you’d try to give them to her. Shoot, you should take the money. It’s nothing to her.”
He gazed into the distance.
“Mavis just wants somebody to spoil,” Sherylynne said. “Somebody to treat good.”
“She’s got Whitehead to treat good.”
“You think she can baby him?”
Harley gave her a look. “So, she can’t baby him, but she can me?”
Sherylynne looked away. “I guess she won’t be babying anybody. Not now.”
Harley stood up with Leah. “We’d better go.”
They got in the pickup and Sherylynne drove him to the Midland-Odessa airport. He got out and placed Leah in a nest of blankets in the floorboard, then leaned across and kissed Sherylynne on the lips.
Sherylynne took an envelope from her bag. “Give Mavis my love. And give her these pitchers. She’ll want a see these pitchers of little Leah.”
“I’ll call you,” he said.
He watched her drive off, and then went in and got his seat assignment on the Trans-Texas flight to Houston.
ABOVE THE HOUSTON skyline, the sun, a quivering red disk, pulsed on a flat purple sky. The captain announced that the temperature was a hundred and three Fahrenheit, the humidity ninety-eight percent. The runways looked sticky. The smell of refineries and petrochemical plants seemed to give extra weight to the humid air.
Harley flagged a cab and headed downtown to a bookstore. He browsed through dozens of art books and chose Modern Art Since 1900, a book with good color reproductions. Mavis was familiar with these paintings and it was something she could enjoy, bedridden. He had it gift-wrapped, then bought a book on art criticism for himself: The Anxious Object by Harold Rosenberg. He felt a rush of euphoria, something he couldn’t put his finger on, something to do with the city, with Sidney and conversations about art. He thought of how animals must feel when let out of a cage back into their natural habitat. Even Crump appeared as a well of warmth in a landscape sucked dry of soul.
He took a cab to a Holiday Inn.
When he entered the motel room, his eyes were drawn immediately to a print of a clown with a big tear on his cheek, the kind of sentimental crap the comedian Red Skelton painted. There were walls and walls—millions and millions of walls—all over the world supporting the worst kind of cheap, maudlin art. One had to go to a museum or a bookstore to find anything fit to look at. There was something immoral about it. Worse than daytime television. He grinned a little, wondering if he might be an art snob. Ironic, considering.
THE HOSPITAL WAS a sprawling maze of long white corridors smelling of illness, medications, disi
nfectant. He recalled Sherylynne in her candy stripes, the stolen moments in his room. He picked up a visitor’s pass and a nurse led him to Mavis’s room in one of the cancer wings. The nurse knocked and opened the door a crack.
“Mrs. Whitehead? Visitor.” The nurse stepped back, gave him a quick sympathetic smile, then turned and left.
He stepped inside, then hesitated, jolted. Mavis lay back in her bed, arms disappearing like papier-mâché sticks into the sleeves of a shapeless rose-colored dressing gown. Her eyes were remote, gazing out from her wasted face. She watched him dreamily, almost without recognition as he approached her bedside. He only hoped the shock he felt didn’t show.
“Mavis.”
“It was good of you to come.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Better than I look.”
“No, no,” he said, too quickly. “You look good.”
Medical equipment surrounded her bed. On the little crank-up utility table were boxes of tissue, paper cups, The Wall Street Journal.
“Harley, dear, I look absolutely horrendous.” Her voice was weak, a low, rasping whisper.
“Brought you something,” he said, handing her the book.
“Oh?” She gazed at the beautifully wrapped present, and then let her shrunken smile linger on him a moment before fumbling with the bow.
“Here, want me to do that?”
“You’re a dear.”
The paper made a lot of noise.
Her eyes brightened. “Oh… Thank you. It’s perfect.” He realized she was too weak to hold it.
He took it, laid it aside and reached in his shirt pocket. “Sherylynne asked me to give you these pictures of Leah.”
Mavis took the envelope and let it lie in her hand, limp on the bed, her eyes clouding into the distance.
“She sends her love,” he added.
Mavis’s eyes shifted to him, lingering, vaguely unfocused. She took a pinch of her dressing gown between her fingers and held it up. “What do you think of this color?”
“What? That gown? Nice.”
“I’m having an awful time. It seems everything I wear looks like… Well, it makes the ill look even more so.”
“No, no, Mavis—”
“I’ve tried blue, green, lavender, this rose, they…they only make me look worse. My skin amplifies the color…and vice versa.” Her breath was short, catching in the middle of sentences.
“No, no,” he said quickly, not daring to focus on the greenish hue of her waxlike flesh. “Really, you’d look good in anything.”
Her gaze rested on him, gentle. “It isn’t the dying that’s so dreadful, but the indignities that…that go with it.”
He forced a smile. “Mavis, you couldn’t be undignified if you tried.”
Her face softened. “You’re a dear, Harley.”
He lowered his gaze, unable to bear how much she looked like one of Edvard Munch’s death-figures.
“Harley,” she said, “I had a reason for asking you here. It wasn’t only…that I wished to see you.”
“I tried to come before.”
“I know. It’s odd…you can only have visitors after…after they’ve given up on you.”
“Nobody’s giving up on you.”
She turned toward the window. Harley took the envelope with the photos from her hand, laid it on the utility table, and cupped her little bird-feet fingers in his. Without turning from the window, she said. “I asked you to come…to beg your forgiveness.”
“What?” he muttered with surprise.
“I have been so very selfish.”
He stared. “Selfish?”
“All this time…you’ve wanted to study in New York, I…I never encouraged you.”
“Mavis, you’ve always encouraged me.”
“I let you spend money you needed because…because I wanted you close by…to…to fill the emptiness in my life.”
“Mavis…”
Her eyes filled. “It was wrong of me.”
“Nobody makes me do anything. You know that.”
“No. I don’t know that…and you don’t know it, either. Wendell and I—and yes, Sherylynne, too…we’ve all used you…in that we’ve only thought of ourselves. Selfish.”
His brain scrambled, at a loss. “If anyone’s selfish, it’s me, always trying to get off to New York, regardless of what Sherylynne or anyone else wants.”
“You’re obsessed, yes. But any artist worth his salt is single-minded to a fault. They must be. The truth is, I simply didn’t want you to leave.”
He thought of Sidney, Sidney’s self-serving mono vision. That might work for Sidney, but that wasn’t who he, Harley Jay Buchanan, was.
“Pride. That’s your trouble, Harley. Pride. A man’s greatest assets are also his greatest weaknesses…because he does them to excess. You have no money because…because you insist on being independent…paying your own way. You take Sherylynne to expensive places in order to keep up with Wendell and me, and…and you simply don’t have the resources. I’ve known this and yet I let myself be a part of it. I’ve…asked you down here so…so I can ask your forgiveness…to tell you I’m so very, very sorry.”
“Mavis, you don’t have to apologize to me for anything. My life’s been so much better, just knowing you.”
“You heap coals of fire upon my head with kindness.”
“Listen, I don’t regret one minute I’ve spent with you.”
A shadow flickered behind the wet light in her sunken eyes. “I–I’m afraid for you. My heart aches for you.”
“Afraid?”
“There’s something I must tell you…b–before I die.”
“No, no, you’re not going to die.”
“Please…don’t be upset. I’ve grown accustomed to…to the idea. It’s perfectly all right.”
He hesitated. “Does Wendell know?”
“Yes. Of course.” She gazed at him, her eyes two pools of black water. “There’s…something else…” Struggling upright onto one elbow, she pushed the tissue box aside and took a slip of paper from underneath. “Harley…I–I don’t…” She fumbled the paper, then collapsed as he put his arm under her and let her back down on the pillow.
“Mavis…? You okay?”
“Y–you go on to New York,” she whispered, lifting the slip of paper toward him with trembling hands. “You hear? Don’t you listen to…to Wendell Whitehead and…and don’t you listen to Sherylynne, either. You don’t owe them anything. They owe you…they owe you!”
He took the slip of paper in numb bewilderment. “Owe me? What do you mean?”
She covered her face with veined, feeble hands.
“Mavis? You okay?”
She nodded weakly toward the paper pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “She’s a…a dear friend…Frankie Mussette. Her name…her number…in New York.”
He glanced at the paper, perplexed.
“She’s expecting you to…to call. She’ll help…get…get you settled…”
“Mavis, you know I can’t do that. Ask somebody I don’t even know for help?”
A hint of light brightened in the sunken depths of her eyes, a touch of a smile at the corners of her shriveled mouth. “Willful pride…a-again.”
He tucked the scrap of paper in his shirt pocket, a concession to Mavis, knowing he’d never use it.
“There’s so much I…I want to say…but…but I…I tire…so…so easily.”
“I’ve exhausted you. I should go and let you rest.”
“No…I’m sorry. But yes…I…I…”
“Mavis, I’m going to let you rest, but first I want you to know I wouldn’t trade my time with you for any art school anywhere.” He bent, carefully placed both arms around her frail little body and gently pressed his face against hers, and for that moment he tried to be Buddy for her—was Buddy, the only thing he could give this dear, lonely woman. “You’ve been like a mother to me,” he said earnestly. “Thank you, Mavis. Thank you.”
He rose
then and went out without looking back.
He turned into a telephone booth in the hallway just off the waiting room, pulled the door closed and stayed until he was able to control the convulsive shaking wracking his body.
HE SAT IN a molded plastic chair in his motel room and stared unseeing at the clown painting. Mavis had asked him down here to tell him something. But what? That she was sorry she had helped keep him from going to New York? Was that it? That he should go ahead now and not listen to Sherylynne or anybody else? That’s what she’d said. He removed the slip of paper from his shirt pocket: Frankalena Mussette, 21 West 54th St., New York, NY 10019, 212 555-9400. Mavis had called her “Frankie.” He started to trash the little scrap, but that seemed disrespectful to Mavis. He tucked it behind his driver license in his wallet.
He felt wired under the skin, as if he were about to explode. He loved Mavis. He would never see her again.
He leaped out of the chair, tore the clown off the wall and beat it to pieces on the back of the chair.
THE NEXT MORNING he turned the key in at the motel desk, paid his bill with his BankAmericard and laid twenty-five dollars cash on the counter. “For the frame,” he said, and left the registrar staring after him as he exited through the double doors.
He took a cab to Bergdorf Goodman where he picked out a white dressing gown and had it gift-wrapped. He wrote a note to go with it:
Dear Mavis,
White. It goes with holy people
and represents purity.
God chose it for the angels.
Love always, Harley
He decided the note was corny and overly sentimental.
He sent it anyway.
Chapter 24
The Work
THEY TOOK COFFEE out to the backyard and drank it under the mesquite as they did each evening, sitting at right angles in the aluminum lawn chairs. Leah sat swaddled in her playpen, happily gumming the nose on a teddy bear.
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