Harbor Lights

by Theodore Weesner

Marian tittered, pleasing him. Beatrice continued driving, and Virgil let his eyes once more take in the women before him, seeing again how he was being cast in the role of father. Not that he minded, because he enjoyed the cards he could play with money and authority without having to assume deep responsibility. Dopey Warren, he thought. He wouldn’t have known what to do even if he’d been ashore and involved all these years, and Virgil pitied the pathetic man—so he told himself. Yet how could Warren have so failed to see, years ago, the prize he’d chanced to win for a wife? Virgil knew he’d given Beatrice more backing than most people could afford, but at least he’d had sense enough to let her guide her own course—like a parent stepping back from a child risking limb, exhilaration, spunk on a two-wheeler—and not insist on keeping his hand on her rear fender. What gifted woman wouldn’t seek to pull away? What reasonable man wouldn’t let her do so? That wasn’t a dirty little secret at all; it was common sense.

  “Dad’s sick, did you know that?” Marian said as her mother entered the parking lot, and Virgil thought, oh, God, that’s what it is, of course. Warren’s sick—they’d known it and, of course, hadn’t known it. Virgil was only sorry—uncomfortable yet in the backseat—that he hadn’t arranged Warren’s movement out of town a long time ago and had him out of their lives.

  “You mean really sick?” Beatrice was saying. “I just saw him, two or three days ago.”

  “Oh, he’s sick—I don’t know how bad. I only know that it’s cancer, and of course he hasn’t told anyone. He has that cough—he’s been coughing for weeks. But you know how he is—I’m not surprised no one knows anything.”

  “You’ve seen him?” Beatrice said. “When I saw him he looked like himself—though he has been coughing, I’ve heard him coughing.”

  “Debbie Savan saw him at the cancer clinic—where I called, but they won’t tell me anything. They said, in his file, it says no family.”

  “Sounds like Warren,” Virgil said. “Can’t get you one way, he’ll try another.”

  “Virgil, please,” Marian said. “What do you expect him to do? He is my father, you know.”

  “Sorry, of course. Sorry—which isn’t to say he hasn’t always been like that.” It had to be the first time Marian had ever dared speak back to him, and Virgil thought, well, she has a point. “This may not be my affair,” he added.

  “Yes, it is, Virgil,” Marian said. “Listen, I’m sorry if I sound hysterical. Of course it’s your affair. When he says no family, he means all of us. You know what his life has been like.”

  “He wants us to leave him alone?” Beatrice said.

  “I’m sure he does,” Marian said. “But the point is, he is sick, and we have to do something—don’t you think? He needs help.”

  “Marian’s right,” Virgil said. “Of course she is. If he’s sick—and I think first of all we should find out how sick he is. Before we fly off the handle. If he’s sick, he certainly doesn’t have anyone to turn to. No family. It’s pathetic, but yes, we should do something.”Virgil feared he had offended Marian yet again, though for the moment no one said anything. Then Beatrice said, “I guess I was afraid of this. It had to happen sometime.”

  Once more they sat in silence, until Virgil said, “Still, you don’t know what his diagnosis is? There are many kinds of cancer, you know, and some are quite treatable.”

  “He has that cough, I’m sure it’s lung cancer,” Marian said.

  “Not with certainty though?” her mother said.

  “Not positively, no.”

  “Well, we’re here for lunch,” Virgil said. “Or would you rather forget lunch?” He knew they wouldn’t, and there followed the exiting of the car. “That’s what you had to tell us—your father’s going to the cancer clinic?” he added as they crossed the parking lot.

  “Something else, which is only partly grim,” Marian said. “Virgil, I wanted to see if you could loan me a hundred thousand dollars. Just kidding, just kidding,” she added.

  Again she had gotten him to laugh, and he said, “Pocket change, my dear. Mere pocket change.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid it’s the pregnancy thing,” Marian announced as they settled into a booth and were in receipt of large menus. “That’s the okay part, I guess.”

  It was a message of delayed joy, and Virgil served as silent witness as Beatrice progressed from surprise to accommodation, to embracing the prospect with happy expectation and teary eyes. “Honey, that’s good news,” she said several times over, and Virgil got in, “Having a baby, it’s one of life’s basic experiences—you’ll make a fine mother, Marian. Congratulations.”

  “A baby!” Beatrice said. “I love babies—a grandchild of my very own!”

  Well, he had the pregnancy part right, Virgil thought, as he sat waiting for still another shoe to fall.

  “We’ll make everything work out at the store,” Beatrice was saying. “You can take time off, do flexible hours, anything you like. We’ll make it work like a dream—anything to have a little baby around!”

  “Okay, what’s the part that isn’t okay?” Virgil said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  There was a pause. Then Marian said, “Oh, it’s Ron, and Dad being sick, too.”

  “Ron doesn’t want the baby?” Beatrice said.

  “As if I tell him anything,” Marian said.

  “You haven’t told him?”

  “Not yet. You know how immature he is. I’m just not sure about him anymore as a husband. That’s the bad part. And this news about Dad. It throws everything out of sync for having a baby. I’m sorry to unload all this on you, but I thought maybe you could help.”

  “Honey, there’re always things to deal with, if you’re having a baby or not,” Beatrice said. “Ron hasn’t actually said anything…”

  Virgil decided it was time to weigh in. “Listen … let’s find out how sick your father is,” he said. “That’ll give us an idea what to do. As for Ron... Marian, you know people make mistakes in marriage all the time. If that’s what has happened, you don’t have to feel unique, or like you’re stuck with it forever. It isn’t like that anymore. He may feel the same way; you don’t really know. The thing for you to understand is that your mother and I support you and will do whatever needs to be done to help you along. Okay? You worry about that baby, and we’ll deal with these other things as we learn more and time goes on. I mean it,” Virgil added.

  Marian’s eyes brimmed, and she checked herself for the moment from trying to speak.

  “We’re on your side,” Virgil said. “The store’s on your side. Don’t underestimate that store. And I always have my finger in a few pots. Call me any time, night or day, and I’ll do whatever has to be done—just so I don’t have to ride in the backseat of small cars! And please cheer up—expectant mothers are supposed to be happy.”

  Virgil had them smiling (liked, in himself, that he possessed authority that could turn things around) and as he squeezed Marian’s hand, Beatrice added her own and both women blinked against misting eyes. He could as well have just sealed key legislation, Virgil thought. “You have your life before you,” he added to Marian. “I love you, you know, like my own daughter, and you’re too young to be unhappy.” They sustained their hand squeeze, and Virgil checked his own eyes against filming over. “Can we get to these menus?” he said. “I’m starving.”

  Warren

  Once when he felt unable to bear it any longer, he shouted at her, “My God, why don’t you leave me? You have your store, your life, you have money—a lot more than I do. Why don’t you go off on your own and file for divorce? Why are you doing this to me?”

  She declined to respond. It had been a low-tide morning, and he was late leaving the house. She regarded his outburst with a smirk, stepped past him on her way upstairs, and he felt caught, as always, in the core of his life’s frustration. Wanting to smash it apart, he cried after her, “Tell me what you want from me! I have a right to know!”

  If she had a reply, it was not forthcoming,
and moments later, returning downstairs, she left the house and drove away. They seldom spoke and fought but rarely, and it was the first time he had called on her to leave him. Her doing so would have destroyed him, he was sure, and was what he feared in his heart he wanted her to do. His notion of Helen at the diner was merely a notion. He’d never be any good with another woman, was certain he would fail if he ever tried. Why Beatrice chose not to leave remained a mystery to him, and one he had no interest in solving.

  Warren lost balance and fell to the bedroom floor while putting on his pants. He had showered and was dressing for the doctor’s appointment when a foot caught—his fall due as much to lightheadedness as to the coupling of pant cuff and toe. He knocked an elbow and twisted knee and ankle going down, and, unless it was in childhood, could not remember the last time he had fallen, not even on his boat when it was smacking high seas and he had to long-step from pilothouse to gunwale and back again. The fall, within his coughing and advancing disorientation, marked his first loss of physical confidence.

  Warren knew what the doctor’s prognosis would be and kept trying to avoid thinking about it. Each cough seemed to leave less space in his lungs, and his body’s response was the dizziness that assisted his fall. His internal system sought pockets of air when he coughed, while he had no wish to be noticed, or pitied, by anyone, least of all by Beatrice. Late evenings recently, when she was home, he had been closing himself into his bedroom and turning up the TV there, not to be heard coughing, wheezing, gasping. She’ll be happy to be done with me, he thought, though he was growing increasingly terrified of dying without settling things between them.

  He could have called the doctor or gone to the emergency room months ago, but had put it off. He had known there was nothing to be done. His lungs had known. His fear all along was of medical people torturing him with chemicals, radiation, tubes, scrambling his mind with drugs and confining him to bed; claustrophobic confinement of that kind felt more threatening than death. He wanted his mind to travel where it would for as long as it might, to visit that which had been meaningful to him. Mindlessness fed by chemicals would not be worth any extra days or weeks. He’d trade half an hour thinking of his boyhood on the water, he thought, for a month of double vision in an overheated room.

  Then, driving to the clinic—his second visit that week—the likelihood of death suddenly swept through him as he gazed through the windshield. That she and Virgil might live on, might joke and laugh, walk together and eat out, might undress and embrace in bed in his own house, made simple breathing difficult to manage. To be a loser unto death confounded his thinking with lapses, small explosions, crazed emotions. He had to make peace with her. He had to.

  In an examination room, stripped to the waist, Warren wondered how Dr. Dawson would say what he had to say. “I’m sorry I have to tell you this.” Or, because he had suggested that he bring his wife or closest relative for the reading of biopsy and CAT scan: “I really wish you weren’t hearing this alone.”

  To Warren it would be just as well if the doctor came right out and said he was doomed, and he was surprised when the white-bearded man, slipping into the room with laptop computer in hand, came close. Sitting in a school-type chair, lifting the computer’s lid, he said, “It’s oat cell—which I’m afraid is not very good news.”

  For a moment Warren returned the doctor’s gaze, before saying, “There’s no hope?”

  The doctor’s eyes held Warren’s for an instant before he began telling of both lungs being afflicted and describing symptoms of double pneumonia. “The chest X rays show metastatic tumors in both lungs,” he said on another direct gaze.

  “They’re malignant?”

  “Multiple sites, I’m sorry to say. And it’s small cell in an advanced stage. It’s fast—”

  “Well, it’s not a surprise,” Warren said.

  “With chemotherapy and radiation—”

  Warren raised a hand. “No need to waste your breath.” He proceeded at once to his feet, started buttoning up. “Treatment’s worse than the cancer, from what I’ve heard,” he said.

  “Oat cell is fast—”

  “Gets real bad I’ll give a call,” Warren said. “How much time? That’s what I need to know. I need to put some things in order.”

  The doctor was also getting to his feet, looking perturbed that his patient was walking out before he’d hardly gotten started.

  “Weeks or months?” Warren said.

  “Without treatment, it’s—”

  “Just tell me the truth.”

  “Without treatment—it progresses quickly,” the doctor said.

  “Weeks?”

  “Oat cell is—”

  “Days?”

  “Mr. Hudon, it depends on the treatment, and on your response to the treatment. There—”

  “I get the message,” Warren said.

  “There are experimental drugs—” the doctor said, but Warren was at the door. Then, in a different voice, the doctor said after him, “Mr. Hudon, listen—you have to come to terms with your life. That’s what you have to do. I’m sorry.”

  Warren paused enough to look back.

  “You asked me to speak candidly,” the doctor said. When Warren did not respond, he added, “Make peace with yourself, Mr. Hudon. That’s the best advice I can give you. Turn to your loved ones. And I know you have a daughter because she called earlier today. Don’t try to do this on your own.”

  In the lobby, as Warren walked through, the receptionist called after him, “Mr. Hudon—you need to make an appointment!”

  “Won’t be coming back,” Warren said and continued into the balmy air, carrying his death sentence like nothing other than a new jacket all at once acquired as a gift. He knew absolutely now, and as he bypassed the reflecting windows of parked cars, deep fulfillment he had not expected was flowing into him.

  His daughter was a loved one, but she, too, was at a distance, and he wanted to go it alone. Being alone all these years had been the true cancer of his life, though now, if only for a moment, he might gain his wife’s attention—the one moment for which he had yet to live.

  Warren found himself doing what he had not done in months: pausing near her store to see if Virgil’s fat Mercedes was parked outside. Spotting Virgil’s various cars had never been easy, for parking was always crowded at the mall leg that contained Maine Authentic. Nor would he mention it to her later if he spotted the killer whale parked nearby. This time, strangely, he wanted it to be there. Nor was he out to catch her, he realized, so much as to gain the psychological leverage Virgil’s presence might provide—a trump card in his psyche with which to counter her authority when the time came.

  He idled at the farthest distance, imagined them in her busy store joking with all those part-time clerks and customers, coming and going from her office in the rear, sitting at the coffee table there and sipping from small glasses. And all at once it came to Warren that before long he would not see Beatrice again. It came to him, as if she were a young girl again wanting only to do well in her life, that he loved her and wanted not to blame her, rather to make peace with her and forgive her. He saw himself as a dog that loved its mistress in spite of being closed into a cellar, a creature helpless against feeling gratitude when she appeared at last and offered a cup of water.

  Forgiving her for his demise was not new to him, but there it was, filling his throat. He would forgive Virgil, too, alas, believing his soul was letting him know, in extremis, that in forgiveness eternal peace might be gained. The race was ending; his desire was to say good-bye and to wish them well. To die with peace in his heart.

  Virgil and Beatrice. They had decades to live, and however strange their presence within him, Warren saw as if in a vision that he loved them both. His resentment was lifting like a cloud, and he loved them above all else. He might gain her respect, her friendship at last. And if there was a hereafter, the two of them might reconcile in time and be together again. Life never unfolded as predicted. Who c
ould say what lay ahead?

  Dear Beatrice. His love for her, from boyhood, from young manhood down through the years, no matter her betrayal, had him gripping his face there in his pickup, wheezing above the truck’s steering wheel. If he could speak to her, he thought, if he could get her to listen, he’d admit at last that in the beginning he had assumed ownership of her—it was true—and doing so had been wrong, especially for a young woman so bright and ambitious. He was sorry for that—if it was what had gotten between them. She and Virgil should have been together from the beginning, for they were a pair to draw to—he’d admit that too.

  Maybe he’d come right out and ask that she forgive him, that she shake hands and let them both correct their sails on the way into whatever lay ahead. Might she not end up at his side—if nature took its course? Virgil, of course, would end up with Abby, and in time no one strolling past their chiseled names would know a thing. Warren, husband/Beatrice, wife. A married couple together again, sailing through timeless time side by side. Otherwise, it was Warren’s wish to be cast out to sea, though he knew no way of saying so without spoiling any last chance with her. Let nature take its course. On a word alone, he thought, she might quell the defeat with which, all these years, he had lived like a dog tied to a leash. He had lost the game of life and would let her go now, would forgive her and wish her well, if only, on a single word, she might allow hope and peace to enter his rattled heart. Of one thing he was certain: he would never harm her, would travel the high road every step of the way.

  Intoxicated with life and death, Warren drove to Narrow Cove for the second time in one day. Sentence delivered, sentence received. Intimations of mortality were all about, and he kept taking them in, gave pause over the bridge and along the waterway like any other terminal geezer giving a read to the scarcity and simplicity of existence. Life had not treated him perfectly, he thought, still he and Beatrice had met, had loved each other, married, and had a child. Nor had love died, not for him. Wasn’t that a credit to take into the unknown? Even the time he succumbed to whiskey and went, aroused, to her bedroom—wasn’t it but an expression of his passion for her? Dear God, he had merely wanted to have his arms around her in her silken nightgown, to join with her, to transport her, to transport them both. The fool he made of himself, shoved into the hall wailing and trying flat out to embrace the surface of her door, staggering off and ejaculating like a crazed animal in his own room, knowing it was that or smashing down her door and forcing her to submit, raping her, perhaps doing more than raping her. Wasn’t it merely passion, the desire any man might know for the woman he had married and adored?