All the Lasting Things (4 page)

“Henry,” she called, sliding into her slippers and pulling on a light, flower-printed robe as she approached from behind.

He glared at her over his shoulder, as if she were a stranger interrupting his private business at a public urinal. As she stepped toward him, he gathered into himself, hunching his back like a shy, red-faced boy. Never in their forty-three years of marriage had he lost this comical, almost perverse, sense of modesty. Not that he had anything to be ashamed of. His once daily regimen—a five-mile walk to the Episcopalian cemetery, two hundred push-ups on his office floor—rewarded him with a trim waist and powerful chest, charms that only recently, in the last two or three years, when he could no longer keep count of his exercises or be trusted to find his way home, had begun to fade. But unlike so many men his age, men with sagging breasts and beach ball bellies who took a kind of defiant pride in their bodies (or, at the very least, at the town’s Fourth of July picnic, showed a shirtless indifference to them), never did he flaunt what he had. He stayed fully dressed on the most sweltering days. Emerged from the shower only after snugging a towel around his middle. Refused to pee with her anywhere in the vicinity. The walls she’d encountered in the handsome, promising young writer, despite the corrosives of age and illness and murderous familiarity, still stood strong.

Henry inched into the corner where, like the plunger or the rusty-bristled toilet brush, he could be most inconspicuous, and tucked himself away. “I have to call Roger,” he said, forgetting his own fastidiousness as he bypassed the sink and pushed brusquely past her.

The house had five bedrooms. Henry and Evelyn no longer used the master suite, which took up the entire third floor. As they’d entered stage five, the doctors thought it safer to trim the extra flight of stairs from Henry’s routine, and Evelyn, to be closer to him in the guest bedroom, moved into Claudia’s old room. Claudia, who couldn’t have cared less about the fate of a bedspread she’d left behind twenty-five years ago, nevertheless relished the opportunity to imagine a slight.

“What about Benji’s room?” she asked.

“Your brother’s room is at the other end of the hall.”

“My brother’s room is a shrine.”

Evelyn let this fly buzz about her ears without bothering to swat it.

“What about the
library
?” Now that Claudia equated printed books with an unforgivable assault on trees, on her tenets of urban planning, and so on the planet as a whole, the space the Fishers required to house them had become a fresh source of contention.

“Your father’s office?”

“You say that like it’s inviolable space. Daddy doesn’t work in there anymore.”

Again Evelyn was silent.

“Fine. Then let the library be.”

Into this large room with its salvaged army surplus desk and tufted leather sofa, Evelyn followed her husband. The worn walnut stenographer’s chair in which Henry had written five novels, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays creaked under the familiar weight. His fingers dove into the hooded desk lamp’s pool of light and started racing through his Rolodex.

“Henry,” Evelyn said. Then, sharper: “Henry!”

Without looking up, he snatched a card from the file and began tapping it on the desk. “I have to call Roger.” Between his shoulder and ear he jabbed the handset of a heavy, corded, black rotary phone that neither lit up nor folded into his pocket nor plotted the route to the nearest Walmart. His Rolodex, his phone, his weathered blue Olivetti: long before he’d gotten sick, these museum pieces (as Benji called them) stood like beloved ports in an endless technological storm. Henry had preached sermon after sermon about the evils of the electronic revolution. Since the day he allowed the children their first Commodore 64, he’d been ranting about the dumbing down of an already dumb culture. The death of privacy. The rise of surveillance. And, thanks to every armchair journalist with an unwelcome opinion and a blog, the democratizing and devaluation of the written word. Of course, the children were right: he sounded like a kook, like an angry messenger from the Amish, like a snob, but he preferred living life without a sleek silver laptop, without a promotional video on YouTube or a website for his bio and bibliography, without even so much as an e-mail address. Happily would Henry Fisher die a Luddite.

“You’re not calling Roger.”

He started to dial.

Evelyn followed a worn path across the rug and put her finger on the switch hook. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

He puzzled the darkness in the window, tapping the card faster and faster. “The book is done,” he said emphatically. “He needs to read the book.”

Whether he meant the abandoned manuscript locked in the safe behind him or one of the books he published years ago, Evelyn didn’t know. And better, really, not to ask. She’d learned strategies for getting her husband back to bed, for taking his hand when he got lost in the fog. In the doctor’s office, in the caregiver guides that sat beside her own bed, in her talks with Sandra, the day nurse, these tactics made perfect sense. Speak in a clear, reassuring voice. Respond to the emotion, not the confusion. Never argue. She might have said, “You sound anxious about work.” Or, “Are you missing Roger?” The proper volley was easily imagined, but Evelyn played better in practice than she did in the game.

“Stop being silly. He’s read the books. All the books. Except the one you didn’t finish.”

It took an hour of pulling and corralling and repeating herself to get him out of the room. The more she pressed him to calm down or tried luring him into the sanctuary she’d set up in the living room, the angrier and more agitated he became. He didn’t want to go sit in his chair. He didn’t want to listen to music. He’d sooner drink bathwater than a goddamned cup of chamomile tea. She tried toggling the light, as if it were intermission at the theater and flashes of darkness might quiet the crowd, but Henry and, with him, the specter of Roger Fitch refused to leave. Tonight, it was Roger. But it could have been anyone: Claudia, Benjamin, his mother or father, the sister he’d stopped talking to two decades ago. Even she, Evelyn, thirty years younger, fresh from packing the kids off for school, had haunted Henry’s nights. Only Jane was missing. He had yet to see her, which surprised and, it would be lying to say otherwise, pleased Evelyn deeply.

The hour-long tussle, which ended with Henry throwing his wedding ring in the trash, left them defeated and spent, but Evelyn, with her still-sharp mind and unwavering purpose, emerged the victor every time. She may have been seventy-eight, but other than a touch of arthritis in her hip, she moved like a woman a good deal younger. With bowed head and shuffling feet, Henry followed her downstairs. He allowed her to deposit him in his easy chair. Suffered the radio she’d tuned to Brahms. And there he sat, a frightened boy left to find his way through a dark, dark thicket and reach the clearing (that may or may not exist) on the other side.

Exhausted, Evelyn went into the kitchen. With its white cabinets and white tiles, it struck her as a canvas she’d never gotten around to painting. She’d always intended to add more color, to paint a great garland of flowers that ran around the room rather than the solitary swag with a cabbage and a bird’s nest that decorated the wooden valance above the sink. But then—well, but then: life.

She picked up her husband’s socks where he dropped them, had dinner on the table the same time each night, painted almost every day without a scrap of ambition to have her work seen. She was a certain type of woman who lived a certain type of life that most girls of Claudia’s generation regarded as a disease they’d been lucky or wily or smart enough never to catch. Where Evelyn felt contentment, Claudia felt claustrophobic. Where Evelyn saw a home she could take pride in, Claudia saw a swamp to sink in. Through Claudia’s acrimonious filter, the prioritizing of family became the death of imagination. Care became sacrifice. Fidelity, a chain. But Evelyn
had
wanted a family. More than anything, she
had
wanted children. And it saddened her to no end to think that she and her daughter were at odds over both. Claudia’s approach to marriage had been as slow and trepidatious as her rejection of motherhood had been decisive and swift. They gave to different charities, went to different movies, spoke of the past as though it wasn’t one they shared. Inch by inch the differences added up until the two stood on opposite sides of a great gulf. It broke Evelyn’s heart.

Gathering herself in the kitchen in the dawn’s dove-gray light, Evelyn hit the button on the coffeemaker,
her
coffeemaker, which sat alongside a much larger and more evolved cousin. The cappuccino machine docked like a shiny silver barge on the kitchen counter, ready to brew double shots of espresso or froth milk, should she suddenly, at nearly eighty, develop a taste for lattes. It had arrived on her last birthday, with a card from Claudia and the unwritten purpose, Evelyn believed, of making her feel simple, unsophisticated, less than. Benji, on the other hand, had given her nothing, his usual gift for any giving occasion, and Evelyn couldn’t help wondering (more than once while the morning coffee brewed) whether it was worse to be forgotten or to be so profoundly unknown. She put a kettle on the stove for Henry’s tea—the tea, the chair, the music, all recommended by her piled books—and raided the refrigerator for something to paint. She found a head of Boston lettuce, a few white-tipped radishes, a lemon she decided to halve, and carried what would soon become the day’s composition into her studio. Otherwise known as the mudroom off the kitchen.

With the tea steeped, she brought a mug to Henry and sat beside him, sipping her first cup of coffee. In these quiet hours, they rarely spoke. Speaking, she found, tended to muddy the waters that settled near dawn. A half hour later, before Henry finally dozed off, Evelyn took him by the hand and, with the same assurances she used to whisper to the children after bad dreams shook them, led him back to bed.
You’re fine, you’re fine. I’m right here. Now go to sleep.
She pulled the covers up to Henry’s waist, drew the curtains, and was halfway out the door when she remembered the ring in her pocket. A strip of light from the hallway fell across her husband’s face as she crept back to the bed, but he was already asleep. She had no trouble slipping the heavy gold band onto his finger, where it belonged.

In some people’s books—Dr. Bell’s, for instance, or Claudia’s—Evelyn was a fool for not hiring a night nurse to supplement Sandra’s daytime visits. Worse than a fool, in her daughter’s estimation. Irresponsible. “You’re putting Daddy’s health in jeopardy,” the lecture went, “not to mention your own. You can’t stand guard twenty-four hours a day. I don’t care what you say: you can’t get by on four hours of sleep. You’re wearing yourself out. And then we’re going to have two sick parents to deal with. I know you think you’re being selfless in all of this, in putting Daddy’s needs before your own, but Daddy’s not getting the care he deserves, and neither are you. It’s actually very selfish.”

Evelyn hadn’t the heart or, frankly, the stomach to follow Claudia’s logic, the bread crumb trails whereby every fault led more or less directly to her. And besides, Evelyn didn’t agree. She didn’t agree that a stranger could do better by Henry. They were lucky—
she
was lucky—to have Sandra, yes, but a second aide at this point would have created more problems than it solved. First, Henry wouldn’t accept it. He grew more suspicious, more paranoid of people he’d known for years, most recently accusing Chip Hanehan, their legally blind neighbor of thirty years, of various and random acts of thievery; how could he be expected to open his arms to a complete stranger? Second, another nurse wouldn’t come free, and though they weren’t exactly in financial jeopardy, Benjamin required more pocket money than most forty-year-olds, and Evelyn couldn’t, wouldn’t, no matter how many times Henry called her an
enabler
, let her son starve.

Claudia thought otherwise. But what task did Evelyn have, what was there to safeguard, what was there to hold together, but
this
? Her
family
? She painted, and painting was nice, but it wasn’t her work. Not in the way writing was Henry’s or architecture Claudia’s. They may have thought she’d done a mediocre job (if they thought at all about the job she’d done), but she’d go to the grave swearing she couldn’t have done better. Let them say what they would. In the meantime, she liked retiring to her “studio” after tucking Henry into bed, where she dabbed away at her lettuce and lemons, at the blushing pinks of her radishes until ten o’clock, when Sandra arrived.

It was nine thirty when the phone rang. She rushed for the kitchen extension with brush in hand, incensed that such a careless caller might wake Henry, but paused before answering it. Claudia’s number on the caller ID. Claudia, who imposed uncharitable restrictions on the hours she allowed Evelyn to call her, could apparently phone Evelyn whenever she wished. Evelyn felt a delicious retaliatory impulse to let the call go to voice mail, but picked up the handset before it could ring again.

“Mom?”

Someone, Evelyn thought by her daughter’s tone, is dead. “What’s the matter?”

“Calm, Mom, calm down. I haven’t said anything yet.” Claudia spoke in an unusually soft, coaxing voice that was anything but calming.

“What’s the matter? Where are you?”

“I’m at the hospital.”

“The hospital? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Is Oliver?”

“It’s Benji.”

Evelyn dropped the paintbrush, its moist tip kissing the top of her slippered foot.

“He’s okay. They’re pretty sure he’s going to be okay.”

“Claudia, tell me right now.”

“I can’t tell you if you don’t calm down. And I can’t stay on the phone long.”

Cast helplessly into silence, Evelyn bit into her bottom lip and listened.

“There was an accident. Or. They won’t say it was an accident. But there was a fall.”

“Benji? Benji fell? Where are you? I’m coming.”