Equal Affections (28 page)

Now the pants and top hung in her closet, among all her other clothes. Sorting through them was something he'd never imagined having to do, he had taken it so for granted that he'd go first. Well, April would help him. But what would they do with all the clothes? April would never wear them, goodness knows; they were too small and certainly not her style. They would fit Lillian. A terrible thought. Throw it out. Yet Lillian—he closed his eyes, made a small fist. A bud of
happiness, a tiny marble of happiness he could roll in his palm, and no one would know. What a terror, and what a delight, that no one knew what he was thinking. And lucky. Would Danny understand? Would Eleanor? Would Joyce Rosen, or even Stan Rosen? How could he explain to any of them the secret, wide-eyed joy that had, at this moment, stolen into him; how could he explain it, or make them understand that it in no way mitigated his grief, his terror at the prospect of losing Louise? They would say, “You're a shit, Nat. You're a self-deluding, lying shit.” But he knew. And as quickly as it had come, the seizure of joy passed. He slumped back in his chair, watched his wife.

Would he know when she died? Would the machine tell him? Perhaps she was dead now. He ran his fingers over her bandaged palm, the lines there so familiar to him, after more than forty years. The skin is what you get to know best; even damaged, he recognized the little lump below the knuckle of her forefinger, and the slightly discolored band where she'd worn her wedding ring all these years. The wedding ring, on the bedside table now; it had gotten too uncomfortable to keep on.

She shifted slightly, moved her head. Eyes fluttering, then settling back. “Louisy?” he said, suddenly hopeful. “Louisy?” but he already knew it was just her body, already knew she wasn't coming back. He ran the fingers of his right hand up her bandaged, needled arm, and in the meantime his left hand, dropped below the bed now, rolled the secret marble back and forth, back and forth.

___________

“A slow, slow winding down,” Dr. Thayer said. “Each breath just a little less powerful than the one before.”

He was standing with Nat, Danny, and April around Louise's bed. All of them were waiting for her to die, now that it was clearly a matter of minutes—at most, hours.

“I think she expected a lingering death,” April said. “Wasting away and all. She hated that idea so much too.”

“She was never fond of attention,” Danny said, “particularly when she was weak. She got embarrassed easily. She wanted to be left alone.”

“Once, she told me she'd kill herself before having to have her friends parading before her, saying good-bye,” Nat said. “With pills, of course. Well, she didn't need to, as it turned out.”

“Perhaps it's better this way,” Danny said. “I mean, if this hadn't happened—well, a lingering death from cancer would have been what she'd have had to face, wouldn't it?”

“And yet,” April said, “I can't help but wonder if she longed for a slow death this last week—all that time to get used to it, to make bequests, tie up loose ends. There really just wasn't enough time for her, or for any of us. She must have had to deal with so much so quickly.”

“There really is no moment of death in cases like these,” Dr. Thayer said. “It's like Zeno's paradox. She's half alive, then a quarter alive, then an eighth alive, then a sixteenth alive. At some point you just have to decide. And”—here Dr. Thayer turned his head to examine the blue lines on the machine next to the bed—“I think we are well past the one-sixteenth point now.” He coughed, looked at his watch, and turned to Nat.

“So,” he said. “It's now two twenty-four. For the death certificate, shall we make it, say, two twenty-five? That's—forty-two seconds from now.”

Nat nodded.

“All right,” Dr. Thayer said. He kept his eyes on his watch. Next to the bed the respirator breathed.

“Ten seconds—five—two twenty-five.” He put his wrist down, looked at Nat, and said, “That's it.”

Danny blinked. He stepped back and stared down at his mother, but she looked the same now, dead, as she had a second ago, alive.

Wasn't death supposed to be final, recognizable? A hand closing the eyes, a face going white, a sheet pulled over the head?

None of these things had happened. There was no high-pitched scream from the machine, no shift in its charting of her body's decay. Dr. Thayer was moving toward the door; Nat had a hand on April's back, he was talking cremation, he was talking effects and insurance.

“Wait,” Danny called.

They turned and looked at him.

“What is it?” Dr. Thayer said.

“Yes, what is it, Danny?”

He opened his mouth to speak. How could he explain that he wanted
back that wink of an eye, that instant? If only Dr. Thayer could turn back the hands of his watch, then, perhaps, he could not blink and would witness the precise instant she crossed over.

“Never mind,” Danny said. “Sorry.”

“Well, I'll leave you alone for a few minutes,” Dr. Thayer said, and went out.

Nat was standing by the bed. On the night table was the misshapen heart from the night before. He picked it up. He took off his glasses. He put two fingers on the bridge of his nose.

“Daddy,” April said. She put an arm around his arm and led him toward the door. Danny looked once more at his mother—his mother's body, now. And suddenly he imagined her somewhere else, perhaps trapped, like Charlie Chaplin, between the moving hands of Dr. Thayer's watch as it decided the moment of her death.

“Well, I guess there's no point in waiting around here anymore, is there?” Nat said. He shook his head. “I guess not.”

He headed out of the room then, so that only Danny was left, April holding the door. Danny turned one last time to look at his mother. “Well, good-bye,” he said, as if he were speaking to her by telephone. “Talk to you soon. Or not. I guess not.” He breathed once, deeply, and said, “Good-bye, Mama.” Then he pulled off, for the last time, the hideous flowered cap, and even though he knew he would never, ever see her again, he didn't turn around.

T
here was no funeral. “Louise wouldn't have wanted it,” Nat said as they got into the car. “She never did have any patience for ceremony.”

“How quickly we've slipped into talking this way,” April said. “As if she's been gone a hundred years, and everything difficult, everything that was messy and hard to interpret about her, we can just wrap up in little packages. ‘She never did like ceremony.' ‘She always was partial to a clean kitchen.' I assumed that at least it would take a couple of months, at least some time would pass before we started talking that way.”

“Well,” Nat said, and coughed. “Anyway, I
was
thinking of maybe a party tomorrow, a sort of paying-respects party, you might say. Nothing formal. So that Louise's friends can—what was the word that social worker used, Danny?”

“Seal.”

“Yes. So her friends can seal. A sealing party. I like the sound of that. With coffee, maybe cookies and cake. No speeches, like I said, nothing formal. Does that sound okay with you?”

April and Danny nodded. Each of them was holding a small plastic bag inside of which was a single object—Danny had Louise's eyeglasses, April her toothbrush, Nat her wedding ring—and as they got into the car, they clutched these bags to their laps like children with favors from a birthday party. Walter had Nat's suitcase. She had been
dead—Danny checked his watch—forty-seven minutes: half an hour to settle the bill, another ten minutes waiting for the effects to be sterilized and brought out from the burn unit, plus good-byes. Everyone—Dr. Thayer, the nurses, Jesus and Dorell—had taken a long time saying good-bye.

Now that they were all seat-belted, Nat turned the key in the ignition, and for the last time they coasted out of the hospital parking lot and onto the freeway. It was a beautiful day. The city dissipated, fragmented, until the occasional clumps of green hillside interrupting the houses became countryside, and it was the clumps of houses that were the interruption. April had opened her window and, like a child, was extending her hand, feeling for the round ball of the wind.

“Music?” Nat said.

“Sure,” said Danny.

Nat pushed a cassette of
Man of La Mancha
—it was the only one he owned—into the mouth of the tape deck.

I was spawned in a ditch by a mother who left me there,
Naked and cold and too hungry to cry.
I never knew her, I'm sure she left hoping
That I'd have the good sense to die.…

“And by the way,” Nat said, “about the food, I don't think there should be anything too fancy. Cookies, coffee cake. That's all.”

“Fine,” April said. The capacious highway glided between the humps of mountains. Then they were all silent, listening carefully to Aldonza's lament, and April faintly humming along.

___________

At home, lights snapped on, televisions. Clara had come twice during the week, so the rooms felt vast and cool—an enormous relief after the cramped corridors of the hospital. As soon as they were inside, April immediately set herself to baking. There was a banging of pots and pans in the kitchen; sugar and flour canisters were taken out of the pantry and opened. The weatherman on the local news was describing
the progress of a hurricane that was in the process of devastating South Carolina; it was called, by some astonishing coincidence, Louise. “Not only is there fear of serious property damage to the Carolina coastal region, there's even some suspicion that Louise might hit the New York City area or Long Island.” An image came on the screen of torrential rains, half-drowned houses, children maneuvering through suburban neighborhoods in rowboats.

“I can't believe it,” Danny said. “I can't believe what I'm hearing.”

“Change the channel,” April said. “
People's Court
should be on.” Obediently Danny switched. A woman claimed her neighbor's dog had killed two rabbits plus a chicken; she pushed her child forward to describe the rabbits' remains, while the neighbor, stoic, stroked repeatedly the smooth brown head of the dog in question, a nervous-looking spaniel that at one point barked unexpectedly, much to the amusement of the courtroom audience. “How would you feel about tollhouse cookies?” April asked Danny, who was sitting at Louise's desk. “Or maybe that really rich chocolate peanut butter cake I made last summer. We're having a party tomorrow, after all; we need food.”

“Dad said nothing too fancy,” Danny reminded her.

“What's fancy about chocolate peanut butter cake? Now a proper gâteau with butter cream and maybe ground walnuts and meringue—that's fancy.”

“I guess,” Danny said. Cautiously he surveyed the kitchen. What they had been afraid of most—finding things—was already happening: a shopping list on the table, for instance—bran, chicken parts, skim milk, margarine—not to mention last week's
Times
crossword puzzle, lying on the shelf by the living room sofa. It was only half finished, the handwriting faint and slightly jagged, as if she had had trouble holding the pencil. Right now the house was clogged with Louise, bits of hair in the shower and on the roller head of the deodorant canister, fragments of skin and dried blood, but these things would break apart, disintegrate, just as her smell would fade from the closet. No, what lasted was handwriting, it was the only preservable thing that is unique to each of us, and so Danny wondered if he should save the shopping list, save the crossword puzzle, those shadowy aspects of herself his mother had sloughed off before the ambulance took the rest of her away.

In the kitchen Danny studied the crossword puzzle. No one in the family except Louise had ever gone in much for puzzles, probably
because each of them was in his own way afraid of challenging her assumed superior skill at them; puzzles were the one thing in the world she felt she truly did best. Danny wasn't sure if he was as inept at puzzles as he pretended to be, or simply afraid to intrude upon this area in which his mother felt so proud. When Sunday had rolled around, and that magically thick paper from the other, better coast arrived on the doorstep, it was understood that you were to leave the magazine section for Louise. Once April asked if she might give the puzzle a try and then erase her answers, but only once.

And so sometime in those last days or hours, Louise had sat down, as always, to do the puzzle. Perhaps this was out of stoic devotion to her routines, a stubborn refusal to give in to illness. Or perhaps she had steadied her gaze on the cool black-and-white grid in the hope that it would distract her from fear, or pain, or both. It didn't matter, because at some point she had had to throw the puzzle aside, at some point the pain or the fear got too bad for ordinary antidotes. It would have to have been a severe circumstance; she had never not finished a crossword puzzle in her life.

On the television, Judge Wapner delivered his grave and sensible verdict. Danny took a sharpened pencil from the ceramic blue jar on his mother's desk and pulled himself upright in his chair. “Twenty-seven down: The muse of history,” he read aloud. “April, who was the muse of history?”

“Beats me,” April said.

“Clio,” Danny said. “I think it was Clio. Yes, that fits. Now—thirty-two across: Tone, combinative form. Oh, what the hell is ‘combinative form' anyway? You know, I meant to ask Mom. For years I meant to call her up and ask her what the hell ‘combinative form' was anyway.”

“I think it just means the form you use when you put a word together with another word,” April said.

“Combinative form,” Danny muttered. He sat back, trying to remember, but was distracted by the familiar array of objects on his mother's desk, each shivering with significance and melancholy: the ragged, paper-clipped stack of coupons, added to and subtracted from since Danny's infancy; the white cube with its cargo of stamps; the calendar filled with appointments—mostly doctors' and dentists' appointments—stretching out into the next month; the pile of unopened mail. There was a pad of paper hand-stamped with her name
by Cousin Markie in his junior high school printshop; a magnetized paper clip holder April had given as a birthday present years ago; a ceramic pillbox Nat bought her once, with the words “Within you see what pleases me” laced around the edge. When you opened it, there was a mirror. Even the mail had a timeless feel: bills, bills, flyers from department stores, get-well cards in thick ivory envelopes embossed with the never-changing names of her friends: Jack and Myra Eber, Sherrye's Hair Design Studio, Joyce P. Rosen.