After the War (29 page)

It did not look good. It was a tumor, advanced and inoperable, metastasized to her liver, and so as soon as she was able to travel Jimmy took her home to Pinehill. To their pretty long-shared bedroom with its lovely garden views. To a fulltime nurse and a new live-in maid. To visits from their anxious daughters, and (occasionally) from friends.

“A lot of people seem to think I’m contagious,” Esther remarked. “Well, for all we know it is. Doctors seem to know little enough. So maybe they’re right. Can’t you just see the headlines? ‘Dying Jewish woman located as source of cancer outbreak in Pinehill.’ Maybe it’s a Jewish disease? After all, Freud had it. And what would I have to say to any of them,
anyway? I’ve run out of small talk. Poor Jimmy, all this stuff you have to listen to.”

Poor dearest darling Esther, is what Jimmy thought, and later wondered if he should have said. But Esther fought off sympathy. She woke from her rounds of drugs at intervals, angrily, and she glared about, she spoke in savage and sometimes incomprehensible bursts. She raged at everything in the world except her illness.

She looked extremely beautiful, which was another thing that Jimmy thought and did not say. And the phrase “extremely beautiful” was accurate. She had achieved, or reached (God knows through no conscious effort of her own) an extreme of beauty, with her almost translucent white skin stretched taut over beautiful high strong bones, and her burning huge dark eyes.

Some friends came by, but they mostly left their gifts of flowers and cake and homemade jams and jellies and even handkerchiefs, even books—these offerings were usually left at the door with the maid. Or, sometimes, the presents were just left on the doorstep, with scribbled notes: “Hope you’re feeling so much better. Don’t want to disturb you. Thought you might be asleep. Hope you’re feeling better. See you real soon … feeling better …”

In any case, Esther’s perception that people avoided seeing and being with her seemed well-founded.

Curiously, the person who came almost every day, sometimes bearing gifts, as often not, was Dolly Bigelow. She came and talked and listened, and she stayed. And came back for more. She was lively and malicious, affectionate and often funny. She provided a much needed buffer, or neutral zone, for Esther and Jimmy, who had been thrust by this dire illness
into an intensity of intimacy with each other that neither could easily bear. If they were, either of them, conscious of this function of Dolly’s presence, they did not say so.

What they did remark on was the surprise of being so cheered and warmed and cosseted by Dolly Bigelow—“of all people.”

“But I’ve noticed this before, or I think I have,” said Esther, talking to Jimmy over her nighttime dinner tray, prepared by the maid, nice cold pretty suppers of aspic and roast chicken and biscuits and gift desserts. “Though,” Esther continued, “I couldn’t tell you the circumstances when I found this out. But at real bad times it’s often the sort of minor characters in your life who come forth and help the most. While you wonder where your so-called best friends are. Oh, I do remember, it was like that when my daddy died, and the person who really helped us the most was this woman who’d just moved in across the street. She came from South Carolina, and she seemed to be just doing what she thought was right. Of course she was Jewish, that may have had something to do with it. But I mean, for instance, where is that Cynthia Baird?”

Although she had not of course heard the question, it was Dolly who answered it. “I guess our Cynthia’s got her hands full with those colored people staying with her,” Dolly said. “That Harvard football player boy and his momma. It was sure real kind and Christian of her to take them in, but I don’t know, I don’t like to think I’m a prejudiced person, but Negro guests in anyone’s house is just something I never heard about before, though I reckon it’s something they do up North all the time. But that boy being a friend of Abby’s, of course, and Cynthia knew him when he was a little kid, of
course that makes all the difference. I wonder how Odessa feels about it, waiting on people her own color? Well, you can bet your last dollar we’ll never know, Miss Odessa won’t be telling anybody anything, she never has.”

“She just goes on and on like this little stream,” Esther told Jimmy, with an almost happy small laugh. “I think sometimes I sort of drop off for a while. But she doesn’t ask for much by way of response. And I’m seeing so much of her, it’s interesting. What she said about not being prejudiced. You know, in a way that’s true. There is an enormous gap between the prejudice of Dolly Bigelow and the Ku Klux Klan and lynch mobs. Not to mention concentration camps. She’s essentially harmless, I guess is what I’m saying.”

There was something not entirely right about that argument, Jimmy felt, but he was in no mood to argue, to find intellectual fault, as he might have before she got sick. Now, if Esther felt warmly, gratefully toward Dolly, and was even—often!—amused, well, so very much the better. And much better for Esther to listen to Dolly than to newscasts that described more and more horrifying disclosures from Germany and Poland: the camps, trenches, decomposed bodies in piles. Teeth. It was more than he, than anyone could stand. But especially Esther.

Esther’s illness was more than he could stand.

“Well, seems like Miss Melanctha’s found herself a job,” announced Dolly. “Over to the Bairds’ most every day, helping out with the invalid since his momma’s gone back up to Connecticut. You-all don’t see her going by on account of she uses that back road, road where I think in olden days Russ
and Deirdre used to have their clandestines.” (Dolly accented the last syllable, making it
clandestines
, as though French, and somehow more vivid.) “Road goes from up in the woods past Russ’s house, up to behind the post office. Easy to get from there to Cynthia’s house, as I guess Russ knew when he bought that house for Deirdre. You-all remember? Seems so long ago now, like history. But anyways, like I was saying, there’s Melanctha over to the Bairds’ house just about every day. With her dog. Reckon that colored boy likes dogs? Lots of them don’t, and it’s mutual—some dogs just growl and bark at the scent of colored. But I guess it’s different with Harvard and all. I don’t know what Russ would have made of all that. I reckon he’d feel just like the rest of us, he’d wonder what she does over there all day. Esther, honey, you sure I can’t make you some fresh tea?”

“You know what I think?” began Esther. “I’ll just bet Germany recovers and rebuilds itself into another big strong terrible country. They’ll never go away, those people, they’ll come back like mean tough old weeds. And poor old England and France will take much longer and not do so well. They weren’t punished near enough, those Germans.

“Does it seem to you that Dolly takes a sort of special interest in Melanctha and the Bairds? I can’t quite describe what I mean, it’s just that whenever she mentions any of them, her tone sort of picks up. Quickens.

“Oh, poor darling Jimmy, all this must be true hell for you. You sit there listening to me rant. Watching me die.”

• • •

Gradually, day by day, Esther was given more sedation. She was almost always asleep, but still Jimmy spent most of his time by her side. And Dolly still came over. There were, increasingly, nights when Esther wanted simply to doze off alone; she would signal this to Jimmy and to Dolly, if she was there, by a nod, a tiny hand gesture, a sort of wave. And by then closing her eyes.

And, sometimes, Dolly and Jimmy then went on downstairs for a nightcap, or whatever.

“I ran into Miss Melanctha at the post office today,” Dolly told him. “My, something has sure cheered up that little girl. Well, not so little, that … front on her she’s got, the dead spit of her momma’s, SallyJane’s, poor dear sad lady.” Dolly sighed piously for the dead (as Jimmy had a terrible foretaste of just how she would sigh for Esther, not long from now). “Anyway, Melanctha not only looked real happy herself, along with that dog, that scamp of a River, she told me that Graham’s really liking it at Harvard now. Liking it a real lot. They surely do go to extremes in that family, don’t they now? Hating it somewhere, then the next day before you know it they’re in love, with wherever. Seems like that Graham has some friend, some other boy, I don’t mean a girlfriend, unfortunately, but some young fellow coming down to visit this summer, Melanctha says. Jimmy, do you reckon that Graham—I mean, do you ever think that he could be … like that—a boy liking boys more than girls? Oh, that would be something that Russ, that Russ just couldn’t—oh, I know he’s dead, but still—”

And she burst, literally burst into tears, terrible shoulder-jolting sobs, her hands flung over her face. Jimmy gently patted her back, since that was the part of her nearest him.

He had no idea what to say, and he just kept on patting until the gesture seemed futile, ridiculous, even.

Very slowly, gradually, her shoulders slowed, and her sobs thinned out, and Dolly began to tell him, “I just can’t stand it, so much dying. Course I shouldn’t say that to you, with Esther—so sick. But Clifton, you know we never did anything much, just a bunch of petting in the car, but I liked old Clifton, I really did. But Russ, would you believe me if I told you that I really loved that man—that true great poet of ours? I did most truly love him, and we did—we went upstairs one night and—we did it, did everything, I was genuinely in love. But don’t you think all of us were in love with Russ, one way or another? Though I’m not at all sure he loved us back, and most probably not. I think he loved Deirdre a long time ago, and I guess SallyJane even longer ago than that, though from what I heard it was mostly her idea, and her daddy’s, their getting married. And I reckon he loved that Cynthia, Russ did, at least for a while. The way those two used to carry on! But I loved him, in the worst kind of a way.”

She had begun to cry again, so that Jimmy could barely make out the next thing that she said, which was, “Russ was in love with your Esther, you know, though she would never give him the time of day. But I reckon that’s why, probably. The rest of us were too easy.”

Jimmy could not really believe anything that Dolly said. Russ taking Dolly to bed? Doing “everything”? Ridiculous. And Russ in love with Esther, his Esther? Preposterous.

“Well, I’d better go fix my face afore I go on home,” Dolly told him, still sniffling. “Else old Willard will really get the wrong idea.”

• • •

Going upstairs, Jimmy decided not to repeat any of this to Esther; whatever for? Although she might have got some kick out of the sheer ludicrousness of Dolly’s inflamed imagination.

“You know what I’m really glad about?” Esther asked him.

At the moment, Jimmy could think of nothing and so he only smiled, and took her hand.

“I’m really glad you never took on that Los Alamos screenplay project. Way things have turned out, using that murder bomb not once but twice, it would have been a whole lot worse than tacky. Like a dance of Dachau.” She laughed, a small croaking sound that was horrible (for Jimmy) to hear. She added, “I don’t think Russ would have done it either, finally. Do you?”

“No, of course not,” Jimmy lied. Russ had apparently been fairly excited about the project, seeing it as a way of getting back into the swim of things, of proving he was not old, and nowhere near retired.

On a beautiful, dew-sparkling early June morning soon after that, the maid came into Esther’s bedroom with the pretty, useless breakfast tray, and found her dead.

Esther had been clear on several final things: she wanted a service in a synagogue, and she wanted to be buried in sacred Jewish ground. None of which was available in Pinehill, and so arrangements were made for Esther to go to Hilton. For good.

The synagogue in Hilton was a quite small new building,
not much frequented by the Jewish students, mostly from New York, for whose use it had been donated by one of their fathers.

To Dolly, the music seemed weird and strange. So emotional, not at all like what you hear in an ordinary church. And no familiar words. The strangeness of it all made Dolly feel even worse, as though after all Esther had been some alien person, not just a friend from Oklahoma who was really just like everybody else, just talked different. It made Esther even more dead, and Dolly found herself crying uncontrollably, crying for all the dead. For Esther, and for Russ. For Franklin Roosevelt, and for Eleanor too, who would probably be the next to go, thought Dolly.

26

D
EREK McFall and Deirdre Byrd were in the living room of the Byrd house; Melanctha and River in the study, adjacent. Melanctha had been dozing in what had been Russ’s old very comfortable big leather chair, and River slept at, or rather, across her feet; he snored very mildly. This was after dinner one summer night, a dinner at which both Deirdre and Derek had drunk a lot of cold white wine. Melanctha, scared by a couple of drinking-too-much occasions, most memorably at the Deke House, in Hilton, with Archer Bigelow—ugh!—after getting sick that time, she had decided to take care how much she drank. Easy enough, since she didn’t really like the taste.

Derek and Deirdre were speaking more loudly than they realized, and Melanctha woke up from her doze to hear: “I don’t fall in love. I just never do, it’s not my style.” (Derek)

“Oh, is that so. You, big old famous you,
you
don’t fall in love. I’ll bet you don’t, I’ll just bet. Just what is it makes you think you’re so almighty different from the rest of us poor mortal folk who do fall in love? Can you answer me that?”

There followed what Melanctha, listening, heard as a very long pause. Were they facing each other, touching? She could not imagine.

And then she heard the deep, practiced laugh of Derek McFall, who said, “You’re some girl, you know that? Southern women are not supposed to talk back, no one ever told you?”

“Lord no, I always gave as good as I got, and I intend to keep it that way.”

Melanctha knew this to be untrue. Deirdre had really let Russ push her around, had seemed to encourage it, even. But then Russ was somebody famous, and Deirdre was a lot younger. Derek was pretty famous too, come to think of it. Maybe Deirdre had just had time to figure men out, in the course of getting older? She knew what they wanted?