Back in March, Deb had been determined that Glynis should find salvation before it was too late. Ruby was committed to getting beyond old rivalries and advancing her relationship with her older sister to a “state of grace.” So Shep had anticipated at the time that his tolerance for his sisters-in-law might, over many months of repeated visits, be put to the test. He’d been prepared for Deb’s piety to wear thin, not to mention her latest fad diet. He knew she’d never stop trying to enlist his secular family in prayer for God’s mercy, or cease badgering his private, inward son to join her in thanksgiving for every extra day that God had granted the boy’s ailing mother. On frequent returns to Elmsford, Ruby’s rigidity might wear as well. He had envisioned getting a shade irked with the way she had to go for a run every single evening, when everyone else was ready to sit down to supper, and he’d sacrificed his own workout yet one more night to prepare it.
Should their visits coincide, he’d foreseen growing weary of watching the sisters vie with each other over who ate less. He was bound to grow impatient with Ruby’s always showing up her plump younger sister by taking only one scrawny drumstick if Deb took two. With Deb’s persistent wistfulness in regard to his wife’s poor appetite, Shep could see himself finally losing his temper—snapping that Glynis’s miserable portions weren’t any mark of superiority, but entailed an inadequate intake of calories, aka starvation, that could eventually kill her if the cancer didn’t. Broadly, he’d been a little worried that, after stays of increasing duration, his sisters-in-law would get on his nerves.
Never in a million years had he expected to be contending with quite the opposite problem: that following that initial rush to his wife’s bedside after her surgery, neither of her sisters would visit again.
All right, both siblings still phoned, but less and less often, and the frequency of these occasional calls had taken an especially sharp nosedive at precisely the point that their sister’s short-lived “recovery” gave way to a resumed deterioration. Meanwhile, at least Hetty continued to call every day, and so reliably at the same witching hour of 10:00 a.m. that you could set your watch by the phone.
In late September, after one call had limped through its fifteen-minute paces with Glynis even more cryptic and sullen than usual, she handed the phone to Shep. “My mother wants to talk to you. Be my guest.”
“Sheppy?” said Hetty, and he cringed. His mother-in-law’s voice had that injured, pouty inflection that Glynis despised, since it sounded more like one of Hetty’s own first-graders unjustly deprived of her lollypop than a retired teacher of seventy-two. In person she was prone to clutch his arm or drape his shoulders, and this puling intonation was the audio equivalent. The fact that she adored “Sheppy” the ideal son-in-law (i.e., that wonderful man who paid for everything) had long driven a wedge between him and Glynis.
“I try so hard to let Glynis know that throughout this time of tribulation I’m there for her. But she can be so—snippy! I know she’s very ill, and I try to take that into account, but …” Hetty began to sniffle. “Just now, she was terribly cruel!”
“You know she doesn’t mean it, Hetty.” Of course Glynis meant it. Whatever she’d said, she meant it and more.
“I’m sorry to have to ask …” He could hear her blowing her nose, could picture one of the ragged reused tissues that populated her housecoats. “But does Glynis want me to call? Does she want to talk to me at all? Because she certainly doesn’t act like it! I don’t want to intrude if my reaching out isn’t welcome.”
Once he’d got his mother-in-law off the phone, Glynis had flown into a fit whose script he knew by heart. “This constant tugging on my sleeve … She’s always trying to get something from me, and I don’t have it! I’ve never had it, and now of all times I really don’t have it! She doesn’t call for me; she calls for herself! I’m supposed to reassure her what a wonderful mother she was, over and over, but she wasn’t, and I won’t and I can’t! I’m supposed to entertain her and comfort her and come up with something to fill all that dead air time day after day after day, and the imposition is outrageous! For pity’s sake, she’s a black hole! Now that for one of the first times in my life, I could actually use a mother! Not another dependent, another problem, another demand, another drain, but a real mother!”
Fortunately flying into a rage had so worn Glynis out that she collapsed on the kitchen love seat and got some sleep. He was glad that she hadn’t pressed him about what Hetty had asked, since he’d not have enjoyed taking the heat for his reply.
Walking with the phone to the back porch, he’d urged Hetty to keep calling. Every day. To not get discouraged, to attribute her daughter’s frequent lashings out to the illness, to absorb all manner of insults and cross remarks and to decline to react. Implicitly, to rise to a level of maturity that she hadn’t a hope in hell of attaining if she was still this far shy at seventy-two. Just who needed whom in that embattled relationship was forever a bone of contention. But the simplest answer was that they needed each other. Glynis hated those phone calls, and actively dreaded them. But if 10:00 a.m. ever came and went without a call from her mother, she would be devastated.
That said? Hetty may have been “there for” her daughter, but she wasn’t here for her daughter. Since that first trip in March, even Glynis’s own mother hadn’t returned to Elmsford. Not once. Shep was incredulous. Moreover, a systematic withdrawal from his wife and her icky might-give-me-cooties cancer was hardly exclusive to her immediate family. It was universal.
Glynis’s cousins, nieces and nephews, neighbors (save the indefatigable Nancy), and most shockingly of all her friends had rung up less and less frequently, speaking more and more briefly. They had all spaced their visits more and more widely, and withstood his wife’s company a steadily shorter period of time.
Shep knew all the standard lines. About not wanting to tax her, or bother her, or interrupt her sleep. About never knowing whether she might be in the hospital, or undergoing chemo, or knocked out from a recent dose. Warned that Glynis was not to be exposed to infections, some friends broke multiple appointments in succession with nagging colds. They were only being considerate. Other excuses were so impressively creative that it would have taken far less effort to skip the arcane explanations to her husband after months of silence than to give the poor woman a buzz.
According to Zach, the Eigers—parents of one of Zach’s regular “hangs,” and Fourth of July barbeque/Christmas Party friends for many years—were so caught up in coaching their older son for the SATs that the exhausting trip from Irvington six miles away was out of the question, though that was a distance Zach regularly traversed on his bike. It went without saying—or at least nobody said it—that these rigorous tutoring sessions by both parents during every available hour of the day must also have precluded so time-consuming and debilitating a gesture as a phone call.
Marion Lott, the owner of Living in Sin with whom Glynis had grown quite chummy while gossiping through her ridiculous employment, had been attentive for a while. Apologizing that Glynis probably wasn’t up for chocolate herself, at first Marion had shown up at the door with a bag of misshapen truffles for Zach and Shep, along with a fruit basket for the patient. But the care packages, and the visits that delivered them, had entirely dribbled off by May. So when in early October Shep ran into Marion at CVS—he was looking for more enema capsules for Glynis—the chocolatier launched into a nervous burble about how busy the shop had become and how they were getting orders now from as far away as Chicago, and then one of her employees got pregnant and had terrible morning sickness, and you know how unpleasant it would be in that case to be around the smell of chocolate, so now she was shorthanded … Oh, and Shep should know the replacement mold-maker had not proven nearly as skillful as Glynis, nor did she have the same sense of line or sense of humor, so he should please tell his marvelous wife how much she was missed … He might have taken pity on the woman and tried to stop her, but pity toward these people didn’t come easily now. Wi
th conscious sadism, he let her go on for what must have been a good five minutes. It was a certain style of excuse, the kitchen-sink style, a messy and exhausting approach generally taken by people who weren’t very good at lying. The verbal incontinence was at least a giveaway that she felt guilty.
By contrast, the Vinzanos opted for the big, clean, sweeping excuse that was at least efficient. Glynis had met Eileen Vinzano back when they were both teaching courses in the Fine Arts Department at Parsons, which dated their friendship with Eileen and her husband Paul back more than twenty years. But Shep couldn’t remember having heard from either of them since he’d phoned to deliver the lowdown on the surgery. Not long after he ran into Marion, Eileen finally placed a hasty call, claiming that she and Paul had been out of the country since June.
The tone in which she asked after his wife’s health was uneasy. She was afraid that she’d called too late. Clearly she was braced for something delicately put like, “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, Eileen, but Glynis passed in September.” (Passed, that’s the idiom she’d expect. As if his wife hadn’t died in agony but had simply walked in front of the house.) He told her instead that Glynis was hanging in there, and explained that they were now on their third cocktail of chemo. But when he offered to put Glynis herself on the phone, Eileen panicked. “No, no, do let her rest!” she’d urged with something close to terror—and what were these people afraid of? “Just please give her my best.”
If one transitive five-minute call since March amounted to Eileen’s “best,” he would hate to see her worst. After all, even for a roving foreign correspondent, five months was a long time to be “out of the country;” Paul was based at ABC in New York. This wasn’t the only dubiously vague explanation Shep was repeatedly offered by “good” friends who had virtually disappeared. Flatly, late on Halloween night he booted his computer solely to copy his medical-update notification list of “Close Friends” and paste it into “Not So Close.” The “Close Friends” file he deleted.
In his more charitable daytime incarnation, Shep conceded that any number of these people had already given emotive testimonies to how important Glynis had been to them. How enormously they admired her work. How much her whole life had been characterized by an elegance and sense of flair. How fondly they remembered this and that event … By delivering impassioned, grandiloquent orations that, as Glynis had noted with such outrage, could have doubled as eulogies, previous visitors had painted themselves into a dramatic corner. It was theatrically unnatural to go from grand proclamations of love and admiration to chitchat about how it looks as if they’re finally going to repave Walnut Street. Multiplied by a factor of ten, the subsequent awkwardness resembled the poor stagecraft of having said florid farewells after a dinner party—flashy, stylish farewells of the kind on which you rather congratulate yourself in the car—only to realize that you’ve left a sweater behind. You have to sheepishly ring the doorbell while your hosts are loading the dishwasher. Voilà, all the stylishness and waggishness and lavish gratitude of your original parting is replaced with a hangdog shuffle in the foyer while they wipe greasy hands on a dish towel and search for your wrap. It was, he supposed, always difficult with the mortally ill to arrange to leave the relationship on a high note. The only gambit that guaranteed a movingly climactic parting was to deliver your tender, tearful, well-rehearsed little speech and then never come back.
Besides, what did you say to Glynis, once medical inquiries were exhausted? She didn’t want to hear about how great your life was, and she was wildly intolerant of complaint. The events of her own life had contracted to the events of the body: inflammations on her arms where the chemo leaked from the cannula and burned her skin; chest drains to suck up the pleural fluid that made it hard for her to breathe; fatigue that got slightly better or paralyzingly worse but never lifted altogether; rashes and swellings and the curious striations in her darkened nails. These were the stories she had to tell, and they were depressing and monotonous to Glynis herself.
Visitors seemed to sense accurately as well that mooting current events—the president’s dubious nomination of his own lawyer to the Supreme Court, the haughty, long-winded speeches that Saddam Hussein was allowed to deliver at his war crimes trial in Iraq—was like bringing up the fascinating configurations of rocks on the moon. Aside from casual schadenfreude in relation to folks who’d also been rained on by a cloud of doom, like the dispossessed in New Orleans, Glynis did not evidence any awareness of the world beyond the confines of their modest house. After all, the average Issue of the Day derived its urgency from the fact that it was really an Issue of Tomorrow: climate change, the degradation of American infrastructure, a rising deficit. You only cared about any of this stuff if you also cared that someday San Francisco could slide into the Pacific, that dozens of cars might before long plummet off a collapsing bridge on I-95, or that your country might soon be owned entirely by China. But Glynis wasn’t troubled by any of these advents. The first two struck her as cheerful. As for the latter stoop sale for the entire United States, well, as far as she was concerned the Chinese could have it.
For the biggest tipoff that she was not in as much denial as she feigned was that Glynis had no interest in the future. That left everyone pretty much stumped. When you weren’t interested in the future you weren’t interested in the present, either. Which left the past, and she really wasn’t interested in that. (The sole exception to this overarching apathy was anything regarding their ongoing case against Forge Craft. The suit always stirred a look in her eyes that Shep recognized from nature shows—when, jaws open and gaze fixed, a panther is poised to pounce on live prey. But Shep avoided raising the subject. His wife’s driving motivator made him queasy: vengeance, and of the most indiscriminate sort.)
Lastly, to be fair—Shep did not feel like being fair, but seeing things from other people’s perspective was a lifelong habit—Glynis was difficult. A variety of subjects was no-go. One subject in particular was circumscribed by heavy red lines, with Do Not Enter signs bristling at every approach. The problem was that under the circumstances this was a big subject, arguably the main subject or even the only subject. As he’d noted at the end of that somewhere between plain failed and outright awful dinner with Carol and Jackson, whenever there was something you weren’t talking about, you couldn’t talk about anything else, either. Thus these visits seemed to skate along on artifice; they did not seem real; they had a pandering quality, a patronizing quality, and, well, a lying quality that was all Glynis’s fault.
But that was as far as his sympathy could extend. Once it stretched this distance it always bungee-corded back to the bleak impression that the duration of his wife’s illness had simply exceeded their compatriots’ famously short attention spans. Mesothelioma having lost its novelty value, she had become one big enough-already. Just as most of them couldn’t run two circuits around a football field without collapsing to the bleachers, their friends and family alike had poor emotional endurance.
Shep was born to a country whose culture had produced the telephone, the flying machine, the assembly line, the Interstate highway, the air-conditioner, and the fiber-optic cable. His people were brilliant with the inanimate—with ions and prions, with titanium and uranium, with plastic that would survive a thousand years. With sentient matter—the kind that can’t help but notice when a confidant suddenly drops off the map the moment the friendship becomes inconvenient, disagreeable, demanding, and incidentally also useful for something at last—his countrymen were inept. It was as if no one had ever sickened before. Ever languished before, ever confronted you-know-what. As if mortality were one of those silly superstitions, like the conviction that one must always drink eight glasses of water a day, that had now been summarily debunked in the Health section of Tuesday’s Science Times.
Because there was no protocol. The bravest face he could put on this baffling social attrition was that these people had never been taught how to behave in relation to a whole side o
f life—the far side—that had been staring them in the face since they had a face. Maybe their mothers had taught them not to eat with their elbows on the table or never to chew with their mouths open. But no parent had ever sat them down to explain that this is what you do and say when someone you at least claim to care about is deathly ill. It wasn’t in the curriculum. Grim solace, many of these shabby specimens of the species would confront the same oops-just-remembered-there’s-somewhere-I-gotta-be when they got sick. But by then they would feel too wretched themselves to spare feeling badly in retrospect about having turned their backs on Glynis Knacker in 2005.
With an acrid taste in his mouth, Shep sometimes recalled the fulsome offers of assistance with which friends and family had met the initial bad news. The Eigers had encouraged him to let them know anything they could do to lighten his load, but had never made an unsolicited gesture of any kind; surely they realized that he would never ask them to escort Glynis to her chemotherapy, to sit with her by the padded armchair for hours. Eileen Vinzano had gone on at length about how she could help Shep keep the house clean. Nothing would be too lowly, she swore, not even toilets or kitchen floors. But that was before the Vinzanos went “out of the country.” Meantime, he’d been obliged to hire a Hispanic girl to come in once a week to do the cleaning he couldn’t keep up with, and Eileen had yet to break a nail on a toilet brush. A former neighbor in Brooklyn, Barbara Richmond, had proposed a regular regime of dropping by whole prepared dinners that had only to be popped into the microwave, a virtually full-time catering service that had reduced in the end to one pie. Glynis’s first cousin Lavinia had declared that she’d be glad to move in for weeks at a time! Just so they had someone on hand to run errands and keep Glynis company. Naturally she had never ensconced herself in Amelia’s room, and she’d been MIA since April. Did these people remember having made those extravagant offers in the first flush of rash compassion? If they did remember, did they imagine that Shep himself had forgotten? He was not by nature a grudge bearer, but he had not forgotten.