“You know”—Eddie gulps hard and dry and thin—“all this shit you think you can’t live with. Colostomy bag. Vegetative state. Commandant at Bergen-Belsen. You can live with anything. The mind just goes back to a previous state.”
“Maybe that’s enough clarity,” I say, beside his bed.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Eddie breathes again almost easily. For a moment, he seems less under subversive attack, as if his brain had struck a truce with his body’s assailants. Maybe my being here is a benefaction. A very bad smell now escapes from under Eddie’s covers. No telling what. “What I can’t live with—it’s awful to say. Awful to know. I realize I won’t ever pass a woman in a revolving door and have her look at me in that way. You know? That’s over. It’s shameful to say that. Every productive thing I ever did came from that feeling. I know it about myself.” Eddie fiddles up under his sheet with the hand not tubed up to the drip bag. “Ohhhh,” he moans and averts his face in recognition of whatever he’s come into contact with down there. A catheter or some equally monstrous intrusion on his person. So many things can go wrong, it’s strange any go right. I’m thinking maybe two miniature Vietnamese masseuses—a mercy flight from KumWow—might offer Eddie a better send-off than I’m managing; affirm his faith that life happens ’til it doesn’t. Finesse wouldn’t mind.
“It’s not shameful, Eddie,” I say, relative to the origin of his species. “Everything comes from someplace.”
“I have to tell you something, Frank,” Eddie says quickly, his chest expanding under his blue sheet, as if he’s trying to suppress a new onslaught.
“That’s what I’m here for.” Not literally true. Eddie may mistake me for the angel of death, and this moment his last try at coherence. Death makes of everything in life a dream.
“I have to get this out of my head. I don’t want to die being driven crazy by it. I might as well not die.”
“Give me your worst, Eddie.” Wise to keep all responses to a minimum. Locate my Default Self. It doesn’t matter what I say anyway. Eddie and I are of one mind—life is a matter of subtractions.
Finesse again leans into the doorway, gives us another look of worried but mock disapproval. “Y’all ain’t no fun.” She fattens her cheeks as if she’s disgusted. Eddie and I might as well be one person.
“I fucked Ann.” Eddie’s staring straight up—fiercely—out of his vanquished, soon-to-be-untenanted body, his ghastly beady eyes unblinking behind his specs, in their hollow, bony sockets, the tops of which have black hair-dye encroaching.
At least, I believe that’s what Eddie’s just said. His stricken face indicates he thinks he said something important.
“What?” I could’ve heard him wrong. Neither of us is talking very loud. Then in case I’m right, I say, “When?”
Eddie lets go with an immense cough—a bottom scraper. This time he covers his mouth and emits a groan. For a moment he seems incapable of speaking and purses his gunked lips like a zipper.
“What?” I say again, still not very loud, but pushing in a little closer.
Eddie clears his throat and makes an awful gasping-gurgling noise, then very fast says, “You-were-away-teaching-someplace-in-Mass. It-wasn’t-that-long-after-your-son-died-she-was-alone—Jalina-had-left. Uhhhhgh. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I was careless.”
“What?” I say a third time. “When I was . . . teaching? You fucked Ann?” A pause. “My Ann?” Another pause. “Why’d you do that?”
It isn’t so much I’m saying these words as much as they’re being vocalized through me. I hear them when Eddie does.
“I can’t put the genie back in the bottle now, Frank.” Eddie gulps, then gurgles, then averts his head as if he wants to recede into the deathly air, like the specter he’ll soon be. Outside, the Skillman Oil truck’s commencing its large liquid infusion. Durning, durning, durning, through the house pipes, into a cast receptacle. “I fell in love with her, Frank,” Eddie’s strangled voice manages, his monkey face still staring away. “I wanted her to live with me in France. In Deauville. Take her on my boat. She said no. She loved you. I don’t want to die with that deception as my legacy. I’m so sorry.” Eddie heaves. Pain, sob—what’s the difference?
“Why . . .” I’m about to say something I’m not really sure about the nature of. Why have you told me this? Why should I believe you? Why would this come up now—when your last breaths are prizable and should be saved for prizable utterances? Why would I want to hear this? I’m looking down at poor Eddie. What my face portrays I don’t know. What should it portray? It’s possible I have no words or feelings for what Eddie’s just told me. Which is satisfactory.
“You-two-were-almost-divorced, Frank,” Eddie says speedily, as if my hands were around his neck. They aren’t.
“Well,” I say, and pause and think a moment, back through the years. “That’s not exactly true, Eddie.” I am immensely, imperturbably calm. A calm with few words. “We did get divorced. That’s true. But we weren’t almost divorced. We were married. That’s the wrong order. Time goes the other way. Or it used to.”
“I know,” Eddie croaks. “You and I didn’t know each other that well, Frank.” Again, the clattery, clunking fireplace-grate noises deep in Eddie’s breathing machinery—unidentifiable except as fatal.
“No,” I say. No, that’s right. No, you’re wrong. No, perhaps now’s the time for your last breath.
I have recently developed a tiny groove in the rear of my lower right canine, something my night guard should protect me against but of course doesn’t. My tongue finds it now and scours it until there’s a leakage of rich tongue blood I can taste. I also feel slight pelvic-pain heat below-decks. I’d like to get the fuck out of here; maybe stand outside and have a word in the driveway with Ezekiel Lewis, driver of the Skillman truck and scion of a long line of Haddam Lewises, stretching beyond last century’s mists, when their great-great-grandfather Stand-Off Lewis came up from Dixie accompanying a stalwart young white seminarian as his valet. And, naturally, stayed. I once employed Ezekiel’s father, Wardell, when I was in the realty business. They are our heritage here. We are their spoiled legacy. If I had one black friend in town, him or her I’d keep. There’d be plenty of laughing involved. Not this kind of tired, tiresome, unhappy, deathbed shit I’m putting up with at the moment. White people’s shit. No wonder we’re disappearing. We’re over-bred. Our genie’s out of its bottle.
“Tell me what you think of me, Frank.” Eddie’s regard wants to come back to me, but gets claimed by the two TVs high on the wall. Fox has loser Romney, addressing a convention of habited nuns, beaming as if he’d just won something. CNN has a smiling Andy Williams, who, it seems, has sadly died. Both—dead and alive—seek our approval.
But is this all that life comes down to when you take away damn near everything? What do you think of me? Tell me, tell me, tell me! My wife said the same thing to me just days ago. It must be grief not to know.
“It doesn’t change anything, Olive,” I say, not sure what I could mean by that. It’s just the truest thing I can say. Maybe Eddie would like me to give him a punch in the nose on his deathbed. (What would Finesse think of that?) But I’m not mad—at anyone. A wound you don’t feel is not a wound. Time fixes things, mostly.
“I’m an insomniac, Frank,” Eddie says and coughs shallowly, fading eyes still on the TVs—which one I can’t be sure. Mitt or Andy. “Things get in my head and won’t go away.”
“Most insomniacs sleep more than they think they do, Eddie.” I take a step back from his bed. I’m departing. We both are.
Eddie’s cell phone on the bed starts ringing with a tune. What good is sit-ting a-lone in your room, come hear the muuusic play . . .
“I’m dying and the fucking phone rings,” Eddie says, his wraith’s hand clutching, fumbling through the bedclothes. He smiles at me gratefully, venomously. “Lemme get this. If I can. Sorry.” He gasps and squeezes his weary eyes shut to be able to speak.
“Go for it, Olive.” I
raise my hand like an Indian brave.
“Eddie Medley,” I hear him say, hoarse, high-pitched, evanescent. “Who’s this? Hello!”
Start by ad-mit-ting from crad-le to tomb is-n’t that long a stay . . .
I’m gone.
OUTSIDE, IN LATE-DECEMBER LATE-MORNING SPRING, it’s hard to believe that in one day’s time all will be white and Christmas-y, and I will be on a sentimental journey to the nation’s midsection. My son and I will have some laughs, crack some corny jokes, see a great river and the Great Plains’ commencement, eat some top KC sirloin, possibly visit Hallmark and the house of Thomas Hart Benton (a favorite of mine), and talk long into the night about rent-to-own. If I can only get there.
The two scolding crows have exited their branch in the beech tree. I hear them not far away in another yard, other things on their minds. Given all, I’m feeling surprisingly good about this day, with much of it still to come. The taste of blood in my mouth has vanished.
“All right now, all right . . .” A voice I know—Ezekiel’s—coming round the side of Eddie’s deteriorating house, ready to slide the fuel bill under the door, as he does at my house. “. . . Christmas gift!” he sings out and smiles at me as if I’m a fixture out here on the pea gravel, no different from the Henry Moore bronze.
“Christmas gift,” I say back in the old southern way. Though he’s as Jersey as they come. Ezekiel is a strapping, smiling, shaved-head, spiritual dynamo in his green Skillman jumpsuit. We “go back” without having to know each other all that well or be friends. White southerners all think we “know” Negroes better than we do or could. They may think they know us, too—with better reason. Ezekiel, though, is good on any scale of human goodness. He is thirty-nine, attends the AME Tabernacle over in the black trace, coaches wrestling at the Y, teaches Sunday School, volunteers at the food bank. His wife, Be’ahtrice, teaches high school math and knows the universal sign language. He is bedrock. The best we have to offer.
Off, streets away, I hear again the bells of St. Leo gong-gonging out carols for the spiritually wavering. “Doesn’t feel much like Christmas,” I say.
“If you don’t like the weather . . .” Ezekiel’s going past me, smiling as if he has a secret.
“. . . just wait ten minutes,” I say. He is as fully expressed as anyone I know. “Are you heading for a big holiday, Mr. Lewis?” I say, standing by my still-warm car, taking him admiringly in.
“Oh, yeah. Count my blessings.” He’s bending to slip the yellow card under the door bottom. Eddie will never see it. Ezekiel is a huge man, though dainty in his practiced movements. “Our church’s taking a panel truck of food and whatever over to those people sufferin’ on The Shore. Cain’t do that much. But I’m here. So I cain’t do nothin’.” He’s headed back toward me in the sunny morning.
“That’s right,” I say. It is. I will think on it more. Time fixes things, but it is also short, and precious.
“I started taking Spanish lessons at the Y,” Ezekiel says. A trace of heating oil scent accompanies him, his big, soiled workman’s gloves in his hand. “Be’ahtrice and I are both doin’ it. There’s a church over in Asbury. A lot of ’em don’t even speak our language. How they gon’ make out?” He’s nodding, his cheeks partly inflated by thought. Christmas is serious to him. An opportunity. Heating oil is secondary.
We’re unexpectedly, then, trapped in the instant—too much sudden seriousness. We fall silent. Though he smiles at me in recognition. I smile back. It becomes for us a moment to know the expanding largeness of it all.
“How’s your son Ralph, Mr. Bascombe?” He means my son Paul. They knew each other long ago in school. It is a sweetness that brings tears to my eyes.
“He’s fine, Ezekiel. He’s just fine. I’ll tell him you asked.”
“Is he still . . .” Ezekiel looks at me oddly. He’s sensed his mistake and is transfixed. It is the finest of fine with me.
“He is,” I say. “He’s still in Kansas City. He runs a garden supply out there.” I touch my fingertip to my eye’s corner.
“He was always good with that,” Ezekiel says,
“He was,” I lie.
“All right then.” Ezekiel’s moving. “Santa’s gotta get on back to his sleigh and be flyin’.”
“You do that,” I say. He shakes my hand in his large, amazingly soft one. That is what we have a chance to say to each other on Christmas Eve. A few good words.
Then he goes. And I go. The day we have briefly shared is saved.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to my great friend Daniel Halpern for encouraging the writing of this book. My thanks to my dear one Amanda Urban for being this book’s advocate, and mine. My thanks, as well, to the wonderful Dale Rohrbaugh for invaluable and resourceful help. My thanks, also, to Laurie McGee, the best copy editor a boy could have. And thanks to Eleanor Kriseman for precious assistance in many phases of this book’s life.
My thanks to Janet Henderson for long conversations over time, which vitally informed one of the stories here. My thanks to the Gros Morne Summer Music artists for playing Copland for me in Newfoundland. My thanks to my friend Philip Levine for his knowledge of obdurate pigs.
Several friends who inspired and affected this book’s origins have sadly departed and are sorely missed: Holly Eley, whom I thank for her great wit; Jeff Levin, whom I thank for his refinements, humor, and ingenuity; Bill Wyman, for his dear affection.
I also thank my lifelong friend Charlie Scott for being exemplary in life. And I thank most of all Kristina Ford for her countless grace notes.
—RF
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph © by Greta Rybus
RICHARD FORD is the author of the Bascombe novels, which include The Sportswriter and its sequels—Independence Day, the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Lay of the Land—as well as the New York Times bestselling novel Canada and the short story collections Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, Kristina Ford.
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ALSO BY RICHARD FORD
A Piece of My Heart (1976)
The Ultimate Good Luck (1981)
The Sportswriter (1986)
Rock Springs (1987)
Wildlife (1990)
Independence Day (1995)
Women With Men: Three Stories (1997)
A Multitude of Sins (2002)
The Lay of the Land (2006)
Canada (2012)
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY ALLISON SALTZMAN
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY ROB LYBECK
COPYRIGHT
LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU. Copyright © 2014 by Richard Ford. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-169206-2
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2014 ISBN 9780062341631
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Richard Ford, Let Me Be Frank With You
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