“Pop’s fine,” Jimmy said scornfully to Eleanor.
“I know he’s fine. But what if he had a heart attack or a stroke? Or fell overboard? Mother wouldn’t know how to get home, she couldn’t use the ship-to-shore, they’d be off to the Azores.”
“Hey, look, I took care of the Marlon deal. Over to you.”
Eleanor waited for Monica to arrive in Dundee, and they faced their father together.
He listened to them quietly. Then they all stared at each other. Finally he said, “Thank you, girls. I appreciate your concern.”
There was another pause.
“But?”
“But what?”
“You appreciate it, but what are you going to do?”
“Think about it,” he said. And he got up and went upstairs.
Next Eleanor and Monica took their husbands out to dinner and explained their fears. The husbands looked at each other.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Talk to him. You have penises and deep male voices.”
“I wouldn’t want my children telling me what I can and can’t do,” said Bobby.
“I wouldn’t, either, but we’ve probably all got a lot of things in front of us we aren’t going to like.”
“What if they—”
“Okay,” said Bobby. “When he wants to go out, I’ll go with him.”
Eleanor and Monica looked at each other. Neither one of them had thought of this, and it wasn’t what they’d planned at all. It meant Bobby would be off attending to Laurus and Sydney at all kinds of moments when they would rather he were doing things they wanted him to do. Or else he wouldn’t really do it, and Laurus would fall overboard and their mother would be found weeks later on the high seas in a horrible state and they’d be criticized. And they’d be sad about their father. “Nonsense,” said the husbands. “He’d be delighted to go that way.”
June 30, 1996
The attic hot-water heater tank leaked and flooded into the blue guest room. Total renovation has been supervised by Shirley and Marlon. New wall-paper and furniture (Eleanor chose) are all in place, and all was covered by insurance. New tiles in the bathroom very fancy. (Laurus’s hand.)
“Welcome back, Mr. Moss,” said Shirley Eaton. She was standing in her white uniform on the back porch of Leeway as the station wagon pulled in, loaded with all the strange gear the Mosses were accustomed to drag back and forth with them, framed pictures and waffle irons and doormats and you never knew what. Marlon York had gone down by bus to drive them to Dundee. Not that Mr. Moss couldn’t, he drove everywhere at home; it just seemed better, even to him, that he not drive such a long way.
Laurus seemed to have shrunk over the winter. He was always a lean man but now he seemed actually diminutive. But spry and cheerful. Sydney was plump and her hair had gone white. She looked up the porch steps at Shirley and smiled and waved. She inhaled the air and looked around her as if she’d been in a time machine or space capsule and emerged to find herself in the most beloved place in the world. It pleased Shirley to see it.
Mrs. Moss greeted Shirley with a hug and kiss, then Laurus led her up to view the new arrangements where the flood had been. Shirley knew that in the old days there would have been an explosion right about the time she reached the top of the stairs. Paint not right, wallpaper imperfectly hung, tiles not the shade she liked. But instead she came downstairs beaming, after a thorough inspection, and said it was just lovely, how lucky she was, how thankful that they had taken it all in hand. Everything was perfect.
Eleanor came over as soon as Shirley called to say they’d arrived. She stopped in the kitchen to discuss the situation with Shirley, whom her children referred to as “the white army.”
“Drive went all right?”
“Seems so.”
“How’d she like the upstairs?”
“Seemed pleased as punch,” said Shirley. “I’ve never known her so cheerful.” Shirley, like anyone who had worked for Sydney, had had her share of fang marks to show for her trouble.
“Yeah, well. They may have finally gotten her meds right,” said Eleanor.
July 2, 1998
We made very good time getting here. Shirley and her helpers have everything ready and Sydney has gone straight down to the garden to commune with nature. Porch has been repainted. Everything else is the same. Glad to be here. (Laurus’s hand. A little more spidery than formerly.)
Sydney had gone straight down to the garden, marveling. The colors and shapes of the flowers seemed like exotic jewels, surprising and new, and yet also, somehow, like very old friends. She no longer remembered how many thousands of hours she’d spent in these rows, pruning and cutting and weeding, giving orders in the fall for things to be separated, fed, or rooted out, cutting flowers for the house in midsummer, arranging them at her worktable on the side porch. But she found the residual feelings from those hours waiting for her, of peace and pleasure and usefulness and belonging. Unfortunately, after reveling in these, she forgot to come back up to the house. Shirley realized it before Mr. Moss, and went down to find her, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds, as Sydney had sat down on the grass path between the iris beds to wait for the situation to clarify. She smiled sweetly when Shirley appeared. The new gardener had watered that morning, and Mrs. Moss’s skirt was quite wet, which she didn’t seem to mind or notice. It was something of a job to get her onto her feet. Shirley was glad it wasn’t Mr. Moss trying to lift her.
As they made their way back to the house, Sydney heard Laurus playing the piano and knew to go toward that.
Laurus looked up as they came into the great room. “The piano is in beautiful tune, Shirley. Thank you for having it done.”
“I know it pains you if it isn’t right. Now, I think Mrs. Moss may want to change her…”
He got up and came to them. “Yes, I see. I’ll take care of it. Thank you.”
Eleanor and Bobby drove up while the elder Mosses were upstairs. They went in through the kitchen to talk with Shirley, who told about the excursion to the garden. “No harm done, but…”
“We’ll talk to Daddy,” said Eleanor. At home, the cook lived in the house, but in Dundee no one had done this since the year Ellen Chatto was getting divorced. Shirley thought it wasn’t right for the Mosses to be alone in the house at night. It worried Eleanor, too, although she recognized that in Connecticut, in case of fire or flood, Laurus would have to rescue Sydney and the cook, who was almost as old as he was and in far worse shape.
Her parents came down, bathed and polished and dressed for the evening, her mother in bright nautical red, white, and blue and a string of white beads—she had started wearing costume jewelry years ago when she traveled, and had gradually forgotten she had anything else. Laurus was wearing a blazer and an ancient pink oxford-cloth shirt which he left here in his summer closet, spotless white slacks, and a pair of boating shoes that had to be forty years old. Eleanor felt a rush of love for them both, as they stood there all shiny and pleased, looking forward to the evening and the summer.
They all said good night to Shirley and went out through the kitchen and gingerly down the back stairs to where the station wagon was waiting. Marlon had unpacked it and swept it out and taken it into the village to fill the gas tank before the station closed for the evening. Mr. Moss liked to keep the tank topped up. (In case of what? Indian attack?) He took very good care of his belongings, disliking change or fecklessness or lack of method. He polished his own shoes, sewed on his own buttons, and put name tapes in his clothes, as he had begun doing during his war. He meticulously met every service recommendation for his cars, his lawnmower, his boat, and his pianos. He loved taking care of things.
On this beautiful lavender evening, smelling of fir trees and wood smoke, Eleanor and Bobby Applegate, both over fifty, climbed into the backseat of the station wagon like children while Laurus installed Sydney in the front, fastened her seat belt, walked around the rear of the car (as he had taught them to do as children,
so as not to be run over should the car suddenly start up), got himself in behind the wheel, and fastened his own seat belt. He adjusted the seat, adjusted the mirrors, and finally, as if enjoying every familiar gesture and action, ceremoniously started the engine and inched off down the familiar driveway, on the way to yet another welcome dinner with their best friends, at the start of yet another Dundee summer.
“How are they?” asked Monica on the phone. She was not coming until August and then it would have to be for a short visit, as her widowed mother-in-law was having a health crisis, and Monica’s husband was an only child. There was no one but themselves to see to her, and they’d been at it all spring with no end in sight.
“It’s like living underwater,” said Eleanor. “They—do—every— thing—like—this…” She spoke at the retarded speed at which her parents seemed to her to move. “You take them to the club for lunch, you run up the stairs to get them a porch table, you move it into the shade, you get a pillow for Mother’s chair, you go to the loo, you run back out to see if they’re coming, and they’re still getting out of the car.” Far away, Monica laughed.
The Rolling Stone was in the water, on its usual mooring. One of Eleanor’s sons was the designated boat boy, whose summer job, not that Laurus knew it, was to make sure that Granddad never went out alone. The boy would telephone Leeway every morning and confer with Laurus about the weather. Once in a while they’d agree that it would be a fine day to run down to Camden to look at the hills, or do what Laurus called “going to look for buffalo,” which meant just puttering along the coast, poking into little harbors, and nosing about deserted islands. More often they would agree that for one reason or another, the day was not auspicious for boating after all. They’d usually go out in the dinghy anyway and spend a little time aboard, polishing the fittings or fooling with the charts, plotting the best courses for cruises they would take when the time was right. Which it never would be.
On Thursday nights, when Laurus went to his poker game, Eleanor had her mother to dinner. In past years this had been very hard on her children, since Mommy Syd asked the same questions over and over; but sometimes her mother would surprise Eleanor with a story she’d never heard before, a memory that emerged undamaged by long submersion and uncorrupted by retelling. (Sydney, like so many others, believed implicitly in the last version of any story she’d told. Once she’d started telling it a certain way, not to mention embroidering for better effect, she had no idea what parts she knew and which she’d invented.) This year the dinners were actually easier, since Sydney had stopped using language much at all. Instead she hummed in a musical approximation of the rhythms of speech. It was rather comforting.
“Your halo is bright in heaven,” said Monica on the phone, when Eleanor described it.
“Well, Daddy needs the break,” said Eleanor.
“Don’t I know it. I suppose Jimmy has been very very helpful?”
“Oh, please.” Jimmy was living near San Jose, very involved with a software gaming company that was just inches, he said, inches, from going public and making his fortune. He didn’t think he could get east this summer at all.
Bobby, who was a venture-capital guy, had been shown the beta version of the company’s flagship product. He said, “Trust Jimmy to find a way to make hay out of ten years on psychedelic drugs.”
“He called me the other day,” said Monica.
“Jimmy?”
“To explain that he doesn’t call Mother more often because when he does, Shirley lectures him about not calling enough.”
“What’d you say?”
“Get over it.”
It was hard to make Eleanor even cross, let alone angry, but she did resent Jimmy’s inattention, especially to their mother. It was pathetic, the worshipful way Sydney lit up when she heard from him. Or even of him. Still, it wasn’t Sydney who worried them these days. It was their father’s inexplicable (to them) insistence on doing so much—really, everything—with Sydney and for her. He was eighty-four himself and should have been relishing the time on earth that he had left, not living like a prisoner.
On a Thursday morning in August, Monica and Eleanor sent their mother off to the hair parlor with Marlon at the wheel, and cornered their father in the study where he was paying bills.
He beamed when they came in and, ever courtly, left the desk and sat down in a chair facing them.
“Well, it’s so nice to see you.”
“You, too.”
“What are your plans for the day?” he asked happily. “Would you like to get out on the water? We could take a picnic.”
“That sounds lovely, but Dad, could we talk about something?”
Suddenly wary, he said, “All right,” and sat looking at them.
The two women looked at each other. You go. No, you.
Eleanor started. “We’re worried about you and Mother. We’re worried about how much you have to do for her…”
“I am doing exactly what I want to do,” he said, his voice and face both quiet and neutrally pleasant.
“We understand that.”
“And we love that you want to do it.”
“But we’re worried about what could happen.”
“Like what?”
There was a little silence.
“Suppose somebody broke into the house. What would you do?”
“I’d do exactly what you’d do. Call the police.”
“A fire, then,” said Monica, knowing this wasn’t what she meant at all.
“Dad, what if you fell. Or had a heart attack, or…you know. What if the two of you were alone and something happened to you?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re driving at?”
“We’d feel better if someone was in the house with you at night.”
“Or if you’d consider—”
“No.”
This stopped them. They were prepared for questions, they had plans in mind. They hadn’t anticipated flat refusal.
“I do not care to discuss this any further. If you’ll excuse me, I have things to do here.” And he got up and sat back down at his desk. He sat there perfectly still with his back to them until they left the room.
Neither sister spoke until they were out of the house.
“I guess we’re not going on a picnic,” said Monica. They were both so upset that they went and told Bobby. He took them into the village where a new bistro had opened in the former blacksmith shop, and made them drink wine with lunch.
“Well, that’s over,” said Jimmy on the phone. Eleanor and Monica were on separate phones at Eleanor’s house.
“Oh, come on, Jimmy. This isn’t safe. If something happened to him, Mother wouldn’t know what to do—”
“Why is this our business?”
“Jimmy! Use your head.”
“Monica! Don’t lecture me!”
“Could we stick to the point here?” This was Eleanor.
Silence.
“All right, Jimmy. You tell us. What should we do?”
“Nothing.”
“You know, Uncle Neville and Aunt Gladdy are totally happy in that what-d’you-call-it—”
“Death camp,” said Jimmy.
“—Rosemont place. Totally happy. They have their own apartment, their own furniture, there’s tennis and bridge, they like the food, they have new friends, they have buses to take them to concerts and movies—”
“Eleanor.”
“What?”
“It sounds lovely. If you want to move there, you move there. But this is not your life.”
“I know that! I’m just—”Suddenly Eleanor was very near tears.
“Did you like it when you were engaged to Bobby and Big Syd thought it was her wedding?”
“I wasn’t even engaged and she—”
“Did you like it?”
“No.”
“How is this different?”
“You know how it’s different!”
“No I don’t,” said Jimmy.
By this time Monica, who was on the cordless phone from the kitchen, had come up to Eleanor’s bedroom and was sitting on the bed beside her, holding the receiver to her ear.
“The difference,” said Monica, “is that they’re old. They’re fragile—”
“Not that fragile. They’re both in good health. Dad’s of sound mind. He’s perfectly able to choose what risks he wants to run.”
“Jimmy, you’re saying that because you don’t want to have to come here and help us deal with it.”
“Monica, someday you are going to be sorry you said that.”
“I’m sorry already,” she said, and began to cry.
“I can’t take much more of this,” said Eleanor.
“Neither can I,” said Jimmy.
The three sat for about a minute, just breathing into their telephones. Finally Jimmy said, “I know what you’re afraid of. But if Dad isn’t afraid of it, then you’ll just have to live with it. It isn’t your life.”
“But it is. It affects us all.”
“I didn’t say it doesn’t affect us. But it’s his choice.”
“What about Mother? She can’t choose.”
“She has chosen. She wants what he wants.”
“You don’t think Dad would mind if he fell down a flight of stairs and lay there all night? Or died?”
“You may be afraid of his death. But he isn’t. I think he gets up in the morning and says, ‘This is the day the Lord has made,’ and if it’s his last, well then he’s looking forward to seeing his movie.”