A Gesture Life (7 page)

Sunny finally came out the patio doors, dressed in a resplendent swath of white. She and Mary Burns had decided on the outfit together the weekend before, on a shopping junket down to the city. It was a very handsome choice. The dress came just up to her darkly suntanned shoulders, the delicate material clinging to her torso but not so tightly as to be indecent, the handsome drape conveying only the suggestion of the young woman beneath. But the young woman was certainly there, too, the near adultness of her, and the sight of that shape made me realize why she had asked me to remain at home. It wasn’t at all what Sunny had said in the store, about people liking me too much, or (as I had imagined it) her jealousy of Mary Burns, or even what was ventured of how I treated her, which
was probably true enough. It was her bodily presence, the sheer, becoming whiteness of her limbs and skin and face and eyes. She was beautiful, yes. Exceptionally so. But it was also the other character of her beauty, its dark and willful visage, and with it, the growing measure of independence she would exercise over her world and over me, that she had hoped to keep hidden a little longer.

THE CANDY STRIPER
, Veronica, finds me unusually good-natured. Almost everything I say makes her grin, and her full, ruddy face beams and blushes whenever she comes into my room with her cart. Most of the candy stripe girls are outgoing and talkative and even a little waywardly brash, which is naturally why they do the work. But Veronica, shyish and sweet, healthfully ample, with a shockingly full head of tight chestnut-brown curls, is the sort of girl you would wish upon all good people who have mourned the demise of that cardinal generosity of youth.

Veronica, of course, has little care for such things. She is unfretting, unsevere. She understands how to hearten a patient with a wide smile. And now, after two days and nights, she finds me familiar and trustworthy, enough so not to bother to knock on the always open door. She wheels her cart inside the room and then up beside the bed railing, and greets me with cheer.

“Were you able to sleep at all last night, Franklin?” she says, automatically fanning out the selection of magazines and books atop
the cart. We are clearly on a first-name basis. She carries the usual periodicals, creased magazines of home and health and lifestyle, but the books are mostly crime novels and stories of the strange and the occult, all of which soft-spoken Veronica, it seems, has chosen for her selections. “The nurse said you were out of bed a lot, walking the halls.”

“I was sure Dolly didn’t see me,” I tell her. “It looked like she was the one who was getting all the sleep.”

“That’s her job,” Veronica says, and then adds, in a dramatic, mischievous tone: “She’s the nurse of the night.”

“Very true,” I reply, wishing, all of a sudden, that I could change out of my hospital gown and accompany Veronica on her rounds. I say, “It appears she is also the nurse of jelly doughnuts. And perhaps of pastry and pie.”

“Yes,” Veronica cries, almost gleeful with the gossip. “I thought I saw cherry filling on her shoes. I didn’t say anything, but I was half afraid it was blood!”

“How do we know it wasn’t?” I say, knowing what it takes to goad her. “That she’d simply forgotten to hide a crime?”

“Yes, yes,” Veronica cries, half-covering her mouth. “She raids the blood closet in the middle of the night. She’s a ghoul, a vampiress. She needs it to live, but only the blood of young boys and girls, which she can smell through the packets.”

“I hope this means I’m safe.”

“No one is safe,” Veronica states, almost seriously enough to alarm me. “But you, Franklin, you are. Even though you’re young at heart.”

“You think I am? Young, I mean.”

“Definitely,” she tells me, her voice buoyant again, the verve of fourteen. “But in a good way. Not like the boys at school, who are
all incredibly lame and stupid. You’re young like things are always beginning. Which I think is great.”

“I always thought people your age think being grown up is most fashionable.”

“Not me, I guess,” Veronica says, handing me a stack of magazines, a book of word games, and an old jigsaw-puzzle box of the
Mona Lisa,
whose famous mien, I am beginning to think, is the expression of a young woman concealing a pure feeling of joy. “I don’t want to grow up yet. It’s too much trouble. And I don’t care if I’m not cool. I can wait.”

And so this we do, together, in my private room. I’m lucky, for since cable television finally arrived at the hospital, the patients are reading far less, and as they don’t require that the candy stripers come around to them as often with material, I have Veronica’s company for pretty much as long as I (and she) wish. She lives in the town of Ebbington, just east of Bedley Run on the far side of a large county reservoir, beside which the two villages are situated. Though Ebbington is not at all the sort of place Bedley Run is; mostly it’s a working-class suburb of drab, unadorned homes and small motel-style apartment complexes. When you drive through town you notice how the trees hang a bit too closely over the streets, how the bushes and grasses are keenly in need of pruning and edging and clipping, how the main thoroughfare is rife with chain businesses and towering signs that glow and rotate and blink. In the older, quieter part of town, there are what seems a disproportionately high number of auto repair garages and beauty salons and churches and bars, all half-failed and dilapidating in their own fashion, and one’s perception is that whatever uniqueness and charms Ebbington once had are being inexorably absorbed by larger, external presences both unknown and invited.

Veronica’s mother is a Bedley Run police officer, whom I’ve come to know casually in the course of being a village merchant; her father, who used to be an officer himself (and the police chief of Ebbington, in fact), lost his life in a somewhat notorious local incident in which he was caught in a crossfire between his own officers and a group of out-of-town gamblers and loan sharks with whom he was enjoying the evening. I remember in the newspaper articles the mention of his wife and infant daughter, who was Veronica, and the question of whether they would receive his pension benefit, given the unusual circumstances of his death. They did not, and I was one of the few who took an interest in their welfare and wrote and called in support of Veronica’s mother when word got out that she had applied for the officer’s position in Bedley Run (our town’s Chief Hearns being a longtime acquaintance of mine). After she got the job, Officer Como would often double-park her cruiser right in front of Sunny Medical while she got her lunch down the street at the deli or around the corner for takeout chicken, as if she was letting everyone know that she would be extra vigilant over my store, which mostly meant warning off the petty vandals. We rarely exchanged more than a few words, always simply a wave and a greeting, and it wasn’t until Veronica mentioned yesterday what her mother did for a living that I put together who they were.

It particularly heartens me, in light of this, to see how well Veronica has grown up. As we read quietly together here in this sterile, unpapered gray room, me with a gardening magazine and Veronica a pocket murder mystery with gruesome, drippy, raised lettering on its tattered cover, I have to wonder what might have come of her had just one thing turned differently then—say, had her father survived the shooting, or her mother not found a job.

So much of the public debate and discussion these days is about the alarming fragility of a person’s early years, how critically the times and circumstances can affect one’s character and outlook and even actions. So the abiding philosophy is to help a wayward child develop into a productive member of the community, or if ignored, risk allowing someone of essentially decent nature to become an adult whose social interactions are fraught and difficult, or even pathological, criminal. How did Veronica, from the start fatherless, her family stigmatized, grow into her own fine self? What did her mother, Officer Como, do to enlist the native grace and good in her daughter’s heart? Or did it all happen by ordination, by the slight chance of Being, that Veronica and the rest of us have actually one strain of life, and one strain only, and that the seeming variations are but particular contours, the everyday adornments?

Such as, I’m considering now, my being here in the hospital, suffering complications in the aftermath of the smoke inhalation. The fire in the family room was two days ago, and Liv Crawford has called more than a few times to let me know that “her boys” are just about finished with the renovations of the damage, so that the property will be fully “restored” and “secure.” No doubt pristine and purchaser-ready. But then there is my situation. Dr. Weil is sure that I’m recovered, but from what I know and feel, I’m almost certain that I’m pleuritic, as my lungs don’t seem to be improving the way they should. My chest still feels leaden and straitjacketed and generally out of sorts. I’m breathing well enough, but even the light activity of talking with Veronica (as well as my stolen wanderings last night in the corridors) seems to be taking a deep toll on my energy. And then there is the other, unrelated complication that has arisen, one far worse in my mind (and spirit-sapping), which is that I suddenly have an onset of the shingles. There is an almost
caustic discomfort in my lower chest and then down my right arm and right leg, what feels like lines of internal burns that sharply prickle and itch and ache. There is no expression as yet, no outward sign of rashes or blisters, which I wouldn’t be concerned about either way, except that I wouldn’t want Veronica to see them and think it was better to leave me alone, to let me rest.

For being alone is the last thing I would wish for now, which is probably strange, given how I’ve conducted most all the days of my life. Save the time that Sunny spent with me, I’ve known myself best as a solitary person, and although I’ve always been able to enjoy the company of others, I’ve seen myself most clearly when I’m off on my own, without others in the mix. This may seem an obvious mode for most, but I think a surprising number of people prefer to imagine themselves through a filter of associations and links, perhaps Mary Burns being an example of a person who predominantly identified herself in this manner, through the lives of her daughters and her late husband, her country club and her charities, and then, possibly, through her attempted relations with Sunny, and with me. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Indeed, there was a time when I held my own associations quite close to who I was, in the years leading up to and during the Pacific war, when in the course of events one naturally accepted the wartime culture of shared sacrifice and military codes of conduct. But then I eventually relinquished those ties for the relative freedoms of everyday, civilian life, and then finally decided to leave Japan altogether, for the relative—though very different—liberties of America.

Though here, in my town and every town, especially when you reach my age, you sadly find that the most available freedom is to live alone. There is an alarming surplus of the right. And though everyone accepts this, it’s unclear to me whether anyone truly
prefers it so. Few seem satisfied with the familial character of their latter years. Even Mary Burns, who no doubt taught her daughters the value of family, found that they honored her training of them by keeping to themselves, as if her involvement would be an adulteration. They didn’t visit as often as she wished, nor of course did they ever ask if she would like to come live with them after Dr. Burns died, and even after her friendship with me came to its abrupt, unpleasant end. They let her be. Her daughters’ distance was an ever-deepening disappointment to her (even if she never really expected them to be perfectly embracing and filial), and though she rarely spoke of it, I know now it was one of the reasons why she was so willing to spend time with Sunny, and why any time was still better than none.

Veronica, who is now nibbling on her fingernails, one by one, as she flips the pages of her book, has already told me that she wants to live at home as long as possible, through college and beyond, at least until she gets married. She waits in my room for her mother, who will come to pick her up. Veronica’s future husband, who Veronica is certain will be a sculptor or a policeman or both, will have to love Officer Como as much as she does. Veronica herself will be a travel agent and murder mystery writer and the proud mother of seven bright-eyed, immeasurably happy girls. She doesn’t care if they’re not beautiful, in fact hopes that they aren’t, for she has seen already how some of the prettiest girls in her class have become distant and superior and wholly ungenerous, and particularly how the blond, slim, protuberantly endowed Brittany, the self-appointed head of the shrinking cadre of candy stripers, will hardly even look at her, as if doing so would be to invite certain personal doom.

My initial impulse is to tell Veronica how she’s absolutely right,
how in this world (or the one we’ve made) beauty is the scantest blessing, and how, despite the appearance of ever-bestowed glory and celebration, it is mostly malice and misery that are returned to the bearer. I know this now, not from my own appearance, but from dealing with Sunny when she reached a certain maturity. She was beautiful, and in all the complicated ways I’ve already mentioned; Sunny thus educated me. In regard to myself, I’ve often been told I have a youthful, genial appearance, and am even a bit handsome. I remember what Mary Burns once remarked, after the first whole night we spent together. We were in my bedroom, and her spirit was ebullient with the clear light of the morning. She rose on her elbow and stretched, her exposed back still lithe and impressively athletic, and then she lay down and gazed at me from close range, as if she were tracing with her eyes the shape of my lips and nose and brow. I cleared my throat and sat up.

“I’m sorry,” she said, blushing. “I’m being terribly rude. I don’t mean to be odd. You must be wondering.”

So I said, “You’re making sure I’m the man you met last night?”

“No,” she said, smiling easily. “I’m not. It’s just that your face is so unlike my late husband’s, I can’t tell you. Bradley had such severe features, a long, narrow nose and deep-set eyes and a jutting chin. He was aggressive, in appearance. You have a wonderful gentleness to your face. A softer line to everything.” She smiled and lightly kissed my shoulder. “Goodness, listen to me. I’m sorry I’m talking like this. I’m going to scare you away.”

I didn’t, or couldn’t, reply, which wasn’t my intention, as I didn’t mind in the least what she’d said, but I had the urge to get up and dress and begin that Sunday like any other, although I had already slept through my swim time. Sunny had been downstairs for some time, warming up her hands with minor scales, up and down,
in the dizzying series. I pulled on a robe and told Mary that I was going down to put the water on for our tea. I suggested she take a hot, soaking bath. She nodded, and from her weakened expression I could tell she wanted me to stay just a moment longer, that we might complete the conversation. But Sunny had begun playing intently and the night was done, and it seemed clear I should go downstairs and be present for her.

There had been indications that Mary’s ever-increasing presence was disturbing to Sunny, as she had seemed to be practicing more fervently in the preceding weeks, particularly when Mary was over at the house. She took her warm-up exercises at an incredibly fast measure, running through them as though she were attempting to twist up her fingers. The pieces themselves she performed quite rudely, as if she would trounce them. She didn’t miss a note, but the feeling in the playing was utterly perverse to what it should have been, as though she were critiquing rather than exploring the compositions. Mary would comment again how talented and skilled Sunny was, how dexterous and precocious, and I never thought to correct her appraisals, even though the performances were in fact maudlin and probably insulting to her, as they certainly were to me. I found them quite shaming. And as much as I tried, I couldn’t inculcate the same sense in Sunny, as she pretended not to know what I was talking about.