Ariana

by Edward Stewart

Fran could feel it the minute she walked into the apartment: the silence, the anger, the ice-cold machine working in the head of the stranger who stood staring out the window at Washington Square arch.

  “Okay,” she sighed. “Tell me.”

  Ames turned. “Point one,” he said, “Maria Bartholomew’s hospice has a ten-year lease on prime Greenwich Village real estate. Point two, the City Council is ramming through zoning changes in the area. Point three, Fairchild Development, who owns the ground under and around the hospice, has filed plans to rip it down and erect a thirty-story high-rise. It goes without saying they gave heavy financial support to the mayor’s last election campaign and the governor’s. Point four, Fairchild Development is a client of Cudahy Crewell and point five, as of this afternoon I’m off the Bartholomew case.”

  Fran sank into a chair. “Those are quite a few points.”

  “Where did I take a wrong turn, Fran? I set out to work for the good guys and here I am being a gofer for the bad guys.”

  “And Maria Bartholomew’s a good guy?”

  “The best. That old man’s death was accidental and the DA’s under orders to crucify Bartholomew so the city can decertify the hospice and some fat-cat can put up a high-rise.”

  He was enraged, stirred, alive. She liked him this way.

  “Maybe…” she said carefully, “maybe you should quit the firm and work for Maria Bartholomew.”

  “I’m resigning, sir,” Ames told Crewell.

  Crewell nodded as though nothing in the world had the power to surprise him. “Why don’t we view it as a well-earned leave of absence—with pay.”

  “Frankly, sir, I’d prefer to keep it a simple resignation.”

  That afternoon Ames went to the women’s house of detention on Rikers Island. He asked to see Maria Bartholomew.

  “Are you a reporter?” the warden asked. She was a flat-eyed, tough-looking woman with a half-inch scar on her jaw that makeup couldn’t quite disguise.

  “I’m her attorney.”

  “Then I’m surprised you don’t know. Maria Bartholomew died three days ago.”

  “Cancer.” Ames pounded a fist into the dining table and Fran’s pot roast jumped two inches off the platter. “She’d been getting treatment at the hospice for two years.”

  A line of perplexity ran between Fran’s eyebrows. “But why didn’t she get treatment in the prison?”

  “Because no one in the prison knew. She wanted it that way.”

  “She wanted to die?”

  “She was ready to die.”

  “But why?”

  Ames was silent a moment. “I have my theory.”

  Fran folded her arms. “I’d like to hear that theory.”

  For the next two hours Ames told her what he thought had happened and why. She listened. She heard anger and outrage and above all she heard caring. She knew exactly what had to be done. She pushed aside the dinner plates and got her portable Olivetti typewriter and a stack of blank typing paper.

  Ames stared. “What’s that, dessert?”

  “Write down every word you just told me,” she said. “It’s a hell of a story and what’s more it’s very probably the truth. Nail those bastards. Fictionalize it, make it a novel, stay just this side of libel. Ames, you have to!”

  “And in the meantime, how do we live?”

  “I have my job at the Manhattan School of Music—and Crewell did say leave of absence with pay, didn’t he?”

  For seven crazed months Ames banged typewriter keys. He dissected the tangle of social and financial interests in a city like New York, showed how they strangled the sick and the poor and the powerless. His main character was a dying ex-nun fighting for the right to dignity in life and in death, fighting not just for herself but for those around her.

  And losing. But in losing, winning.

  He called the finished manuscript The Fortress. New York was the fortress, unbreachable, unyielding. And so was the ex-nun’s faith and her final act, a gift of silence to a cacophonous world.

  He stared at the stack of 560 pages and realized that somehow he had gotten the hurt out of himself and onto that paper. It felt good not to hurt.

  He smiled at Fran. “All right, doctor, now what?”

  “Now we take a two-week break and go to London and Paris and revisit Fontainebleau.”

  “We can’t afford it.”

  “Our American Express card can afford it.”

  “Fran, those bills have to be paid.”

  Fran wouldn’t take no for an answer. For the next two days she sent Ames off to museums and movies. She made travel arrangements and took Ames’s manuscript to the Madison Avenue office of an agent she had read about in that morning’s paper, an old gent (very dapper in his photograph) by the name of Horatio Charles who had just pulled off what the New York Times called the most spectacular multibook deal of the decade.

  A male secretary accepted the manuscript and assured her it would be quite some time before Mr. Charles could get to it.

  “Tell him he has two weeks,” she said.

  Ames and Fran saw London, which was drizzly. They saw Paris, which was hazy. They saw Fontainebleau, which was hazy-bright and blessedly unchanged from seven years ago, and then they saw the Bordeau country, which was gloriously sunny.

  When they returned to New York there was a letter from Horatio Charles in the mailbox: Please phone me immediately.

  Life rapidly became unreal.

  Everything that could happen to a book happened: hardcover, paperback, book clubs, foreign sales, TV miniseries. Which didn’t do a hell of a lot for Nurse Maria Bartholomew but which made a lot of things possible for Ames Rutherford: never having to negotiate another corporate merger in his life, a house in the Hamptons, a little co-op in Manhattan, days spent sitting in front of a typewriter wondering what the hell to write about next.

  He began drinking more heavily. There was no reason not to—he was free of nine to five forever—and, after a day spent trying to pull prose out of his head he enjoyed the buzz.

  From enjoying the buzz he progressed to needing the buzz.

  Operationally speaking, there wasn’t much difference. Vodka or Scotch, a buzz was a buzz was a buzz.

  “Ames, is it me? This thing that’s happening between us or not happening or whatever the hell’s going on?” She was sitting up now, one foot dangling over the edge of the mattress. “Maybe I don’t excite you anymore?”

  In answer he took her hand and placed it over his erection.

  She pulled back but not quite away. “Ames, this is serious.”

  He grinned lecherously. “So’s this.”

  “Don’t you understand? I want to help.”

  He could feel the moment turning heavy, serious, turning into more than he could cope with.

  “Then, my darling”—he smiled—“I suggest this is an excellent opportunity for us both to shut up.”

  He kissed her—a nice, wet, let’s-get-back-to-it kiss. And then he made the best love to her they’d had in a year.

  Afterward she was still looking at him that way.

  There was nothing he could say, nothing he could do. She was right to look at him, right to wonder. Because he had everything in the world and something was still missing.

  There was not a day when Ricarda DiScelta did not dread the idea that her life’s work would almost certainly go unfinished. But she resigned herself. The Lord had His reasons. The matter was no longer in her hands.

  She spent her mornings with her three remaining pupils—they were good, not gifted, but she needed to feel useful—and afternoons as a volunteer at the Hospital for Special Surgery, pushing a cart of fruit juice through the wards.

  There was very little more to her life than that.

  But December 19, 1978, was different. On that day Ricarda DiScelta died.

  She got up early but felt strangely lethargic. She saw her pupils, saw her patients, and that evening she went to the Metropolitan Opera and watched a new Bulgarian sopr
ano sing Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.

  The performance affected her vision in a peculiar way. She caught herself at one point imagining she was watching Jeritza and, at another, Callas. The illusion was strangely complete, because she seemed to hear their voices as well.

  She had to remind herself that Jeritza and Callas were in the other world now, waiting for her and perhaps praying for her.

  During Act Three a trembling broke out over her shoulders and down her spine. I’m coming down with flu, she thought. Though she had rarely in her life walked out on a performance, she thought it best to leave before Act Four.

  She asked her driver if he would mind going out of the way. She wanted to look at the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.

  She stared at the magnificent Norwegian pine a long while, lost in remembering all the Christmases in her life.

  A strange thought came to her. I wonder if I did the right thing separating Ariana from Mark Rutherford?

  She asked the driver to take her home. She went to bed, and still the thought was there.

  Did I do the right thing?

  It was her last thought. When the housekeeper found her in the morning, her heart had stopped.

  Ariana was with the patients in the television room when the evening news reported Ricarda DiScelta’s death. She screamed. Two orderlies had to help her to her room.

  Dr. Meehan visited Ariana after his evening rounds. She was sitting huddled and wraithlike in her rocker.

  “You look sad, Ariana. Would you like to tell me why?”

  He sensed she wasn’t seeing him at all. Her gaze was fixed on some horizon far beyond the walls of the room.

  “Ricarda DiScelta taught me everything. And I betrayed her.”

  “How did you betray her?”

  “I never believed her. I never believed she would die. I never saw that she had the same hopes and sufferings and fears as the rest of us.”

  “Tell me about Ricarda’s fears.”

  “She feared what we all fear: life ending too soon, before we’ve had a chance to do our work.”

  “And what was her work?”

  Ariana buried her face in her hands. “Ti kano edho? Panagia mou, ti kano edho?”

  “Ariana,” the doctor said firmly, not about to let her lapse into a language he did not understand, “what was her work?”

  Slowly, Ariana raised her head. “To teach me.”

  “Then she finished her work, didn’t she?”

  “She finished. But I didn’t.” Ariana gazed at the doctor. Sweat beaded her forehead. She was shivering. Her voice came in a whisper, as though she were afraid the walls might overhear. “I don’t want to go to hell!”

  She bent forward, coughing, and blood exploded in gobbets onto the floor of the room.

  In the hospital surgeons slid a tiny balloon into Ariana’s throat and blew it up, stanching the flow from the ruptured veins of the esophagus. Nothing could be done about the lungs except to administer clotting agents and give transfusions to replace the blood lost.

  It was eight days before she was well enough to return to the clinic.

  Christmas had come and gone. It was almost the New Year.

  She knew she was dying. She shut the door of her room and slid to her knees.

  “Dear God, I of all sinners have no right to ask You anything. You showed me the right road and I chose the wrong. I betrayed my teacher. I betrayed my pupil. Only You know what sufferings they are now enduring because of me. But I beg You, hear one last prayer. Add to the few days left me. Give me time to make amends to those I have hurt. Dear God, help me to keep my promise.”

  Mark let the book drop to the desk. He held his breath, listening, wondering if at age fifty-eight he was developing hearing problems.

  The only sounds in the study were a faint hissing from the hearth, the soft recurring ticktock of the grandfather clock, the occasional rattle of wind in the raised blinds.

  He glanced toward the window.

  He didn’t know how long he stared at the torn newspapers swirling in the wind through the courtyard. But he realized it had grown darker. The fire hissed and the clock ticked and the wind rattled and then he heard that other sound again, clearer this time.

  Someone was calling his name. The voice reached him in tatters, as if across an ocean of time.

  He had trouble pushing himself up. His legs had gone to sleep and he could hardly feel them crossing the carpet. All his efforts had the dreamlike heaviness of pushing himself through water.

  The window was an indistinct blur. He leaned out into the night.

  “Who’s there?”

  And suddenly, without her even having to say, he knew.

  “Ariana?” Harry Forbes’s eyes crinkled in remembered pleasure. “After all these years? You saw her?”

  Mark was thoughtful a moment. “No. I only heard her.”

  For almost thirty-two years Mark and Harry Forbes had been meeting once a month at the Knickerbocker Club, taking their port on the sofa in front of the huge fireplace. It was wintry today, and the steward had lit a fire. Shadows danced across the Christmas tree and bookshelves with their bound sets of Churchill and Galsworthy.

  Mark sighted the flames through his port. “I heard her say ‘Help me.’”

  “Help her? Why? What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know.” Mark sat twisting the stem of his glass. “Harry, this is very hard for me to put into words. I’ve never discussed it with anyone before, and if you repeat a syllable—”

  “You have my word of honor,” Harry said.

  Mark was silent, gathering his thoughts. “Since we separated thirty years ago, I’ve been with her two times. Three, counting last night. The first time was in Mexico, twenty-nine years ago. At the opera. She was in some sort of despair and I had to be there. Just to let her see me, to let her know someone cared. We didn’t talk. But she saw me, and she got through her performance. Later, when Stratiotis left her, she cut her wrists. I made her phone the doctor. And last night—from wherever she was—she called me for help.”

  “Just a minute. You said she was at the window of your study.”

  “No. I heard her, but there was no one there. And I wasn’t in Mexico the night of her Rigoletto, and I wasn’t in her bathroom when she cut her wrists. I haven’t been in the same room with her since we separated. Those were dreams, Harry, half-waking dreams so real that reality is dim and dead by comparison. It was only in those dreams that I…lived. The rest of my life has been one long sleep.”

  “Come on, Mark. You’re being a tad hyperbolic.” Harry unobtrusively signaled the steward for refills.

  The two old friends were silent a moment, and then Harry asked, “Did Ariana really sing Rigoletto in Mexico City?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Did she ever attempt suicide?”

  “I have no way of knowing.”

  “Then maybe the things you call ‘half-waking dreams’ were her way of contacting you.”

  “What would you call that, Harry, ESP? Telepathy?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Have you ever experienced anything similar?”

  “I’ve had experiences. Like everyone else.”

  Harry touched his glass to his pale lips and Mark realized how very little, outside of these monthly get-togethers, he really knew about his old classmate. There was a thriving office on Broad Street and an impressive, lonely house on Beekman Place; there’d been a number of affairs down through the years, several with other men’s wives, and Mark knew the names of more than a few of the women; but there had never been talk of marriage or even of a real love affair. It was all surface with Harry, all charm and port, and that was the way Harry seemed to want it.

  Mark sighed. “Something tells me she needs me and I should go to her. But I’m hoping you’ll tell me I’m a fool and should drop it.”

  Harry shook his head. “Still the same old Mark. I’d be on the next plane to her. Where’s she living these day
s?”

  “I hear she’s spent the last seven years in a clinic in Connecticut.”

  “Sometimes the sick enjoy visits, you know.”

  “She vanished eight days ago.” There was a hint of defensiveness in Dr. Meehan’s manner. “At night the gates are locked, but during the day our patients are free to come and go. Last Monday Ariana Kavalaris chose to go.”

  “Do you have any idea where?”

  “None. Her brother hasn’t heard from her. The police haven’t turned up anything. You’re a friend, Mr. Rutherford?”

  “I knew her thirty years ago.”

  “Are you aware that she’s dying?”

  The word had the finality of a slammed door.

  “She has advanced tubercular lesions of both lungs. Wherever she’s decided to go, I hope to God she’s getting treatment.”

  33

  “I’D LIKE YOU TO find someone for me.”

  “Who’d you have in mind?”

  Mark told him.

  The detective whistled. A well-made man in his middle forties, he had thinning black hair and the shoulders of a football player. “I still play her album of Puccini heroines. ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ always breaks me up.”

  “Me too,” Mark said softly. He looked up hopefully. “Captain Terhune recommended you.”

  “Al Terhune—New London?”

  “He said you had experience tracing runaways from the clinic.” Mark had checked the agency’s ad in the Yellow Pages. Joseph Connors. Confidential investigations. Fast, precise, discreet. He wanted to believe the fast and the discreet.

  The detective prepared to make ballpoint scribbles on a yellow pad. “Okay, I’ll need some details.”

  “Mr. Connors phoned again,” Nita said at dinner. “He always seems to phone Friday—four-thirty.”

  Mark looked at her. Nothing was volunteered.

  “Mark, is there anything we ought to talk about?”

  He began talking about the vestry committee. In his eyes she saw something unspoken, something echoing the void beneath the heart of her own life.

  “The Brussels sprouts are delicious,” he said. “Are they fresh?”

  Mr. Connors phoned every Friday, and then one Wednesday evening a stranger rang the doorbell and tipped his hat to Nita. The gesture charmed her, as though he had kissed her hand.