I join Simon at the dining room table, where he’s doing his accounts.
“Today I got Fowler a neck brace and head support. I’m not sure he can manage much more by himself.”
“Of course he can’t.” Simon records some numbers on a slip of paper, accounts he’ll enter into his computer later.
“I may have to stay there.”
Simon puts the pen down. “We spoke about that.”
“Yes, but under the circumstances,” I begin.
“There are no circumstances that dictate your living with him. Bring him here if you have to. We’ll set him up on the porch. We know it can’t be forever.”
“That’s insane. That’s a totally bizarre idea.”
“Leigh, we’re not dealing with ideas here. A lot of this, for me anyway, has become a matter of function.”
“So you’re telling me it’s okay to bring him here.”
“I’m telling you that is the only way for you to continue to help him and stay married to me. You are my family, not his. You live with me, and when he dies you stay with me. Wherever your mind is most of the time, your body lives here. There’s no other way I can look at any of this and stomach it.”
“Fowler says that I’m a lucky woman.”
“He was probably referring to your good fortune in having known him.”
We stop at this. The past tense, creeping into his speech like that, stops us.
“Talk to the children,” he says. “And it may be time to reintroduce yourself to those enormously helpful parents of his who seem to think nothing of luxuriating in Southern splendor while their son fades out in a cold climate.”
“I love you.”
“I know you do. I keep praying that will be enough.”
He takes his bath and goes to bed, and I look over his books. He’s been making money. I spend it on bridge tolls and take-out for Fowler, on books, clothes, and sundries for the children, groceries for the household, and Simon rakes it in, privately, seeing that there’s enough for me to spend. Hadewijch writes: When Love first spoke to me of love—How I laughed at her in return! There’s a love of happening, of connection, of image, of learning that Simon is asking me to notice and heed instead of the love of Fowler, the love of myself with Fowler. He is giving me what I’ve been asking from him since Fowler came back, what I’d begun to doubt: a request that I stay. An unabashed statement of need.
• • •
The following Wednesday, Eliot and I have dinner in a coffee shop across the street from the building where Fowler holds his class.
“You always take me to the most elegant places,” Eliot moans as we pore over the menus. “You’ll forever remind me of hamburgers.”
“You love hamburgers.”
“You look fabulous,” Eliot tells me. “Whatever misery you’re laying claim to, it suits you. You’re so svelte, and that is not a word I lavish often on people of your height. The man must keep you jumping, chair and all.”
“What about you?” I ask. “Is there anyone?”
“I’m keeping quiet, for the present.”
“The present is lasting awhile.”
“Suitable mourning has not been concluded,” he says.
I ask who it was, when mourning commenced. I’m anticipating, trying to learn what will be required of me, what limits I can reasonably impose on grief.
“He was Michael Peter Osborne, of Stratford, England. He was a dilettante with an inheritance. He died in his sleep in our apartment two years ago, at the age of forty-nine. He believed in nothing except me, and the same was true for me.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m keeping quiet, as I said.”
“Are you waiting for someone else?”
Eliot rests his head on the heel of one hand. “There isn’t anybody else.”
“Nonsense,” I quip, as my grandmother Pussy did in response to any unbearable notion. “What about Travis.”
“Too old and too married. Who’s the stiff anyway? Could we get a haircut?”
He refers to Garland so hatefully, I think he must be interested in Travis. “You let me know if you want me to have another barbecue. In the meantime, Fowler is coming to live with us.”
“Oh?” Eliot says, still in the realm of the dead Michael Peter Osborne. “I thought he already was.”
• • •
I wait outside the classroom to collect Fowler and drive him back to his apartment. Again my mind is on the details—on the outfitting we’ve done for the place, only to find it wasn’t enough, on the commuting and the storage and the informing we’ll have to do, on all the sorting and rerigging that will have to go on chez nous.
I hear the respectful tones of serious discussion, the occasional polite laughter that occurs in professional exchange. I peer through a murky window at the faces of his few students, poised in a semicircle around his chair. I want to know what he’s saying, how he’s engaging them, charging them to be more honest, more raw, less vitriolic and didactic. There’s a girl in the middle who doesn’t take her eyes off him. She’s not stunning looking, just put together, short brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses, a button-down man’s shirt, blue jeans, and boots, a yellow sweater thrown over the shoulders. Minus the boots, she looks a little like my mother did in a photograph taken of her when she was an undergraduate at Smith. But my mother was always laughing, or on the verge of doing so, in those pictures. This girl looks suspicious, not entirely willing to go Fowler’s distance, believe what he says. Still, there’s no denying fascination and surprise. She uncrosses her thin legs and bends over a notebook to jot something down. Were I this girl I’d wonder how it is that a man in a wheelchair can pull me in like this, whether it’s the strength of mere words that draws me, whether there’s wisdom in them, and what has gone on in this man’s life to get him here? I’d stare too, at the inscrutable tension in his face, and want to be closer, to have him trust me, only me, with his story, and look at me with mutual fear and longing.
Suddenly the girl looks up and catches me looking at her. She levels her intelligent gaze on me, angry at the intrusion. I gasp, recede quickly into the shadows of this wide, empty hall, a hall where, quite frankly, rape wouldn’t be out of the question. How dare I presume to know what this girl is thinking? Perhaps she is even bored by what Fowler is telling them in his new, halting way. Perhaps she was jotting down a grocery list or notes for her own work, which she might consider far superior to any that has been submitted.
I suppose I want to continue to see Fowler as a man whom no woman can resist because it keeps him further from death and closer to me. And because, naturally, I don’t want him to be so sick and to need me so much that I cease to be the lover and become the nurse, the mother, the friend.
But these are selfish musings, and when the students finally file out and I walk in and start taking things up for him and he watches me, his head at an angle in its stiff brace, I realize I am all of those things and that in his gray, frightened eyes is more love than I’ve ever thought him capable of having for me. For the second time in half an hour I’m mortified. Fowler loves me, he actually does love me, and it isn’t a response I’ve procured by design. It just happens that over time and distance Fowler has had one woman in his heart, and she’s been me.
I gather their work, slide it into his worn leather case that has been everywhere. Then I lay it in his lap, slowly, lovingly, like an offering.
• • •
“I thought I’d write to Evelyn and tell her you’ll be staying with us for a while,” I say, facing him, lying close on the couch.
“I called her today. I told her.”
“She still doesn’t know it’s me, does she?”
“She will,” he says. His fingers slide along the inside of my arm. “She will.”
• • •
We decide on Rosh Hashanah for Fowler’s arrival.
“Why not?” Simon said. “Start him off on the new year.”
I pick Mother up at t
he train station. I’ve been up since four writing and cleaning and drinking far too much coffee, and I may very well have forgotten to brush my teeth.
“Heavens,” Mother says when she gets a look at me.
“Sorry. I’ve been cleaning. I’ve never seen so much dirt.”
Fowler might say I’ve inherited some of Mother’s resourcefulness.
“Can I do some of it for you?” she suggests.
“No, you just watch the kids. You can take them out for breakfast.”
“On Rosh Hashanah? Your father wouldn’t hear of it!”
“He won’t know. Please take them. They’re bored out of their minds. Daisy loves IHOP—you can take them there.”
“Fine. And is there any shopping I can do for you? Do you need anything?”
“We have most of the stuff he needs at the apartment. We had to get a hospital bed for the porch—don’t be horrified.”
Lord, but I’m reeling from the coffee and the fact of his coming.
“You’re sure of all this, dear?” Mother asks gently. “I mean, you know where it’s leading and you still want to do it?”
I haven’t really thought about wanting to do it.
“I’m sure.”
“You’re very brave, you know.”
I clench the steering wheel, unable to understand why such a comment might cause me to cry. But I don’t cry. I’m too busy, too wired.
“What time is dinner?”
“You should ask such a question?” my mother teases, inflecting as my father does, as if she comes from the Old World too and can target such foolishness the way he does.
“Okay. Sundown. And he knows Fowler’s coming?”
“He knows,” she says. “How is Isaac?”
“He’s wonderful.” I say.
“Really.”
She doesn’t believe me. She’s disapproved of the reunion from the start. But she will see the change in him, the new purpose, the possessiveness and pride in every gesture.
“He’s finally got his father,” I tell her. “It’s what he’s always wanted.”
In the driveway she waits to get out.
“I just hope he can bear to have had a father for such a short time.”
“I don’t expect him to bear it,” I assure her.
“Always with the answer,” she says, again mimicking Daddy. “You sound so old sometimes, I can’t get over it.”
“Someone’s got to be old, Mother. Someone’s got to manage. I don’t have points glamorous to run to when it all comes crashing down. I don’t have my own apartment to hide in.”
“Oh really, Leigh, if you only knew how unfair that is.”
“Why don’t you tell me how unfair it is? I grew up when I was ten, when you and Daddy decided you needed two playgrounds because you didn’t like to share.”
“I didn’t go to the Vineyard to escape,” she explains. “I went to say good-bye to an old friend.”
“An old boyfriend, Mother. Let’s be precise.”
“As you wish. An old, gay boyfriend who’s had a stroke and can’t talk or feed or clean himself. I may not always say exactly what you want me to say or be exactly where you want me to be, but I’m here now, so don’t accuse me of frolicking while the world around me falls on its ass.”
She settles back into the seat from which she’s come unglued while raving.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was that sick.”
“No one know how sick anyone is until they start living with them. Now let’s go in. They’ll think we’re having an argument.”
“We are having an argument, Ma,” I say.
“Thank you for telling me.” She gets out.
The minute they see Grandma the children leave off with their morning bickering. We announce the IHOP plan.
“Are you letting Grandma drive?” Isaac says.
“I’m the only one who’s old enough,” my mother says. “And I’m a damn good driver.”
“But you never drive,” he argues.
“You’ll have your license soon enough,” she says. “Then we’ll buy you that Miata or whatever it is.”
He raises his fists high above him, in rigorous approval of the idea. “You may not need to,” he says, grinning. “And I want a Porsche.”
The boy has such faith! He believes that a girl he hasn’t heard from in six weeks still has him in mind, that she’ll someday just give him her car.
“Go,” I say. “There’s always a line there on a Saturday.”
After they drive off, I do the floors under the couches and the windowsills and then go out to make up the hospital bed we rented from Sherman. It’s got an awful mint-green mattress that’s creased from use, even when flat. I plug it in to test its various functions. Then I lie down to feel it peak at my knees and collapse, raise the head for an imaginary feeding, level the thing, then lower and elevate it as I lie flat, as if my arms, legs, and head can no longer move. I make myself stay flat like this for several minutes, wanting to scream, wanting to pray, but I don’t know whom to scream for or pray to. I’ve got no notion of God, and this frightens me. Without God I am just something on a bed, something that can make noise and not be heard.
“What are you doing?”
Simon stands in the doorway, at the end of patience.
I sit up, embarrassed. “I don’t know. I suppose I’m getting ready.”
• • •
Simon and I drop Mother and the kids, all scrubbed and changed into holiday best, outside Daddy’s building. They go in empty-handed—Daddy said he’s always taken care of the holiday food, why should things change now? Simon insists on coming inside with me at Fowler’s. On the stoop I stumble and fall, tearing my dress and stockings at one knee. Simon pulls me up with one hand.
“Get ahold of yourself,” he says sternly.
I use the set of keys I had made for myself and Isaac a month ago, when it became clear that Fowler couldn’t answer the door, and let us in. Fowler’s waiting in the living room, a packed bag on either side of the chair, his tweed jacket over his knees.
“Hello, couple.”
“Hi, Jim,” Simon says gruffly. I can only think that Simon’s instant offer to check around for anything left unlocked or untidy is nervous compensation for his horror at seeing Fowler so shrunken, a concave man with a lolling head. I get Fowler in the car while Simon loads the trunk.
“We can always come back if you need anything,” I say. As the apartment is not sublet, the furniture and books stay.
“Everyone in?” Simon asks, out of habit.
“Fine. Thank you,” Fowler says, with his verbal leisure. He’s in front, where there’s more legroom, and I’m shoved in between Daisy’s car seat and the folded chair. Somehow we’ll get the chair in the trunk so we can all fit in for the ride home.
• • •
Mother does her big-deal greeting, somehow making sure that Fowler feels he’s forgiven although this is not necessarily the case. She takes over the wheelchair and brings him in to reintroduce him to Daddy, who’s got Daisy on his lap with some playing cards, trying to teach her her numbers.
Daddy puts Daisy aside and stands reverently, his hands clasped, as if in the presence of an esteemed scholar.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he says, touching Fowler’s arm. “Come. I’ll explain the dinner. It isn’t religious. I consider myself a cultural Jew—”
“Blah, blah, blah,” my mother whispers to me.
“Isn’t it terrific the way he can move that chair on his own?” she says aloud.
“Of course he can!” Isaac snaps. “He can do pretty much everything.”
Mother shoots me a look, in gratitude for such treatment. “I have a few things left to learn about all of this,” she says. “You’ll do me the favor of indulging me my ignorance.”
I join Daddy at the table where he’s pointing out the chopped liver, stuffed eggs, apples, and honey.
“You eat the apple with the honey so you should have a sweet ye
ar,” he says.
Fowler smiles wryly. “The year is almost over.”
“Not for the Jews,” my father continues. “This is the start of a new year, thus the celebration.”
“I like that idea,” Fowler says.
“Come. Look,” Daddy says. He takes a slice of apple, dips it in the honey, and brings it, cupped with the other hand so it won’t spill on Fowler’s trousers, and he feeds it to Fowler, who accepts it and nods several times after swallowing.
“L’chaim,” my father says, turning tearfully to all of us who have gathered around the table.
“L’chaim,” we echo.
chapter twelve
Adrienne has begun calling our home “the hospital.”
“It’s horrible here now, Mom,” Jane says. “No one will come here.”
“No one ever comes here,” I say carelessly, desperate for levity.
“Adrienne said to only call her after he dies.”
“I think that gives you a lifelong excuse not to bother with Adrienne. Don’t you think she’s mean, Jane?”
“You’re mean, Mom. For making us live with him. He should be in a hospital.”
“According to Adrienne, he is.”
She storms out of the bathroom, slamming the door so its wind rips through my bubbles, decreasing them by half.
It’s a duration we are living, a dark period that will blend in with others long after it is over. Over? I prevent it’s being over, delay his dying by having him here. And he lets me do it.
I haven’t had time to see Kirsten, despite requests to meet here and there, at the local eateries, so she can hear what’s really going on in the hospital and not depend on the vicious speculation of her daughter. I have volunteered, on the telephone, that we are frantically busy trying to make Fowler comfortable, to get him to his doctors and his classes and to places he can enjoy with Isaac, movies mostly, an occasional trip to a museum.