Living Room (34 page)

Fuck necessity
she thought, and realized she had said it loud enough to startle Julie, who had been asleep.

“It’s okay, darling,” she said, “we’re almost there.”

And they were. She spotted the sign she was to look for, made the right turn, swung through the stone gates, and pulled up in front to what must have once been a magnificent private residence.

Julie seemed pleased when she recognized Meadowbrook, as if she were arriving home.

Inside, Shirley explained about Al’s illness to the plumpish woman who greeted her, asked if she might wring out her clothes in the bathroom and then call Al collect.

She said goodbye to Julie. The girl did not respond.

“That’s all right,” said the plumpish woman, who took her away.

In the bathroom, Shirley put her panties on the radiator to try to dry them off. She made the best of her drenched clothes, tried to fix her hair a bit when she saw how disheveled she appeared in the mirror, then went to call Al.

The phone rang for a long time. The telephone was right beside his bed. Then he answered. “Sorry,” said an unrecognizable, hoarse voice, “I was in the john.”

“Will you accept the charge?” asked the operator.

“Yed, sure. Shirley, where are you?”

She explained they had arrived late at Meadowbrook, and with the storm not letting up, it might take just as long getting back. She decided to save the story about running out of gas.

“Twitchy called, said Mrs. Bialek phoned again.”

“Is that all she said?”

“Yed. Listen, Shirley, if it’s bad, pull up at a motel, Swedish one
I’ve stayed at three miles away. Instead of driving in this rain.”

“I can’t. My head is running away with me.”

“You’re coming back here?”

“Yes.”

A moment of silence, wanting an affectionate word that came from neither of them.

She hung up, clicked the receiver till the operator came on again. She gave her father’s number, waited. Finally she could hear the number in the distant Bronx ringing.

It rang for a long time. No answer.

She could call Twitchy and say if Mrs. Bialek called again, oh it was too complicated. If it had been important, Mrs. Bialek would have left a number if she weren’t home. Or would she not on purpose, to torment her?

Shirley went back to the bathroom. Her panties had almost dried. At least they were warm from the radiator. She slipped them on. The elastic was still damp.

Back to the front lines, she thought.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

DARK HAD COME during daylight hours. She hated night driving; this was the same. The downpour came in gusts. She could feel the blasts of wind affecting her control of the wheel. The window, lowered a bit to keep her awake, now let in rain, drenching her left shoulder. She rolled it up, keeping her eyes on the wet road, then tried the radio; the reception was bad. She clicked the radio off. The monotonous squeal-slick of the wipers brought torpor on. Watch the small limbs littering the road, she told herself. Stay awake.

She darted a glance at the odometer. Only twelve miles from Meadowbrook, it seemed fifty. Hunched over the wheel, she peered ahead, her shoulders ached, fighting sleep. Suddenly a red light caught her eye, not a traffic light, a turning light atop a car, a state police car she now saw, closer than she had thought. She jammed the brake, felt the back of the car fishtail, swung the wheel wildly, forgetting what she was supposed to do, her heart racing, came to an angled stop just short of the trooper flagging her down. The wind whipped at the broad-brimmed hat tied under chin. He was shaking his head. She rolled the window down, and the rain blasted in again as he yelled to her, pointing up and ahead. None of
it made sense. He came close enough for her to hear the words. “Wires down. Turn back!”

Oh no, she was escaping from Meadowbrook, putting miles between her and it, and now to turn back…

“Just a mile and a half,” the trooper yelled. He .explained the detour to her with his hands. It joined up with the same road further on, past where the doomed wires were. Shielding his wind-whipped face with his arm, he seemed to be wishing her off the earth.

“I’m trying to turn around,” she shouted, though her car had not yet moved.

He shook his head.

She backed, turned, found the bypass, then, seeing three or four cars in her rear-view mirror, realized she was driving slowly, holding them up, they couldn’t pass, speeded up a bit on a straight stretch, when suddenly she heard a terrible ripping sound and, her face close to the windshield, she looked up to see a huge limb parting from a roadside tree, tearing the bark as it broke, crashing down in her path as she jammed the brake, the seat belt cutting into her hips, hoping, skidding, slithering to a sideways stop right up against the limb, which was the size of a small tree and would surely have killed her had it hit the car.

She was crying when the people pounded on the window, motioning for her to unlock her door, which she did, and a big man swung the door open, saying “Are you all right, lady?” and several others in the background peered over his shoulder in the hope of seeing what? They were circling the car now, shaking their heads, and she said to the big one, “I think I’m okay.” Others were pointing to the far side of Al’s car, up against the tree limb, and she got out into the whipping rain, which woke her, and went around to see the long scrape against the entire right side.

The men from the cars behind her were testing the field at the side of the road with their feet.

“Sure you’re all right, lady?” the big one said, and she nodded.

One car tried it first, onto the field, the driver careful to keep moving so as not to get mired in the mud, and then, when he made it back onto the road on the other side of the fallen limb, the caravan of others, Shirley trailing, went the same way. Back on the road, the rage of wind making her grip the wheel with both white-knuckled hands, she thought of the hours of driving still to come, the wires that were waiting to fall, the tree limbs reaching like arms over the road, ready to strike.

Her tense shoulders were searing with pain when, hours later, at very long last, she pulled into the driveway in front of Al’s house. Her coming into the bedroom awakened Al.

“How are you?” she asked.

“How
are
you
?”

“Wet. Tired. Scraped the whole side of the car. Nearly got hit by a falling tree. Want to change.”

But before she could slip out of her damp clothes, the phone rang. “It’s for you,” Al said.

It was Mrs. Bialek. “Your secretary gave me this number. Shirley, I’ve been trying to get you at the office all day.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You have a problem.”

Was Mrs. Bialek asking a question or telling her something.

“Your father is sick.”

“Oh no! What’s wrong?”

“I’m at the hospital.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“It’s not a heart attack.”

“Don’t tell me what it’s not. What is it?”

But Mrs. Bialek was crying.

“Please, Mrs. Bialek, tell me.”

Mrs. Bialek heaving her uncontrolled lament. If a Jew, thought Shirley, can weep for ten, Mrs. Bialek can weep for ten Jews.
You bitch,
she wanted to say,
tell me what’s wrong or I’ll cut your heart out.

“You know what a stroke is, they say it’s a stroke.”

Shirley felt as she always did at the news of an irreversible fact. The blow was expected, prepared for, even in childhood she had imagined such announcements to be preparations for her own death.

“How serious is it?” Shirley asked. “Can I talk to the doctor?”

“The doctor went home already,” Mrs. Bialek snuffled. “Home, God, God, God!”

“Find someone, a nurse, please, someone who knows about his case.”

“Why aren’t you here?” Mrs. Bialek finally said. “It shouldn’t all be on my shoulders!”

The operator cut in, asking Mrs. Bialek to deposit another fifteen cents. She didn’t have the change.

“Operator,” Shirley intervened, “please reverse the charges. The number here…” And she gave it, and then Mrs. Bialek was back on, saying, “The nurse says you should come down, you can come down.”

“Let me speak to her.”

“Why should she talk to you, a daughter who isn’t even at her father’s bedside at a time like this? I’ll tell him you’re too busy!”

Mrs. Bialek, I’ll wring your throat with my own hands!

Biting her lips inward, Shirley said, “What exactly is wrong with him?”

“He can’t talk.”

“At all?”

“Finished. Your own father!”

“What’s the name of the hospital.”

“Montefiore. It’s—”

“I know where it is. I’m coming down.”

Shirley hung up.

“I have to get down there somehow,” she said to Al. She glanced at her watch. “Is there a train that stops in the Bronx?”

“There’s a local that stops in Riverdale.”

“That’s nowhere near Montefiore. I could take a cab from there.”

Al was studying the train schedule. “Hour and forty minutes till the next one.”

“I don’t know if I could stay awake that long.”

Al was dialing a number. “I’m trying the local taxi service. They go into New York sometimes.”

Shirley got into dry clothes. Al was arguing with the taxi people. He hung up, angry.

“They’ve still got commuter trains to meet from the city. Regular customers, he said, can’t let them down, live miles from the station, blah, blah, blah. They probably just don’t want to drive into the city in this weather. Why don’t you take the car?”

“I’d fall asleep at the wheel. Al, call this number.” She gave him the number of the limousine service she always used. They’d get a car up here. And they’d wait for her at the hospital, bring her back.

“Busy circuit,” said Al.

“Try again. Please,” she said, her eyes pasting together.

He did. “Still busy.”

“Again.”

His eyes showed hope, then dismay. He imitated the recording. “The number you have reached is not a working number.”

“I’m sure it’s their number. I used it all the time.”

Al dialed the operator, gave her the number to try.

“She says there’s something wrong with their phone.”

Shirley stared at the windowful of relentless rain. Pregnant Margaret driving into the wall on Fifty-second Street. Shoulders a mass of pain, she sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Rub my shoulders, Al.”

Al looked like he wanted to say something to her through his fever. She leaned back against him and closed her eyes as he kneaded the flesh between her aching shoulder blades. The state trooper shaking his head at her. Her father unable to speak to her? All through her girlhood, her father’s advice, instruction, warnings, chastisements had come at her and she had used every wile not to hear, or if she heard not to pay attention, and if she paid attention not to heed, as if the thrust of her independence was to escape her father’s advice above all others! Yet now, when she wanted him to talk, he could not. What kind of cat-and-mouse was life playing with her?

Shirley saw herself asking her father questions. Hartman’s eyebrows, those of a great actor, would be able to signal yes and no, and how much yes, and how much no, God counseling Eve on everything. When that woman fled paradise, did she, even for a time, hear His voice in the back of her head? Was her disappointment that Adam was a boy and God had been a real man?

All that rain. You get on like a submarine guiding itself through the depths by the ping of its sonar, the only sound he can make with the cords in his throat.

Silent.

Al didn’t have the heart to wake her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

SHIRLEY SLEPT till four a.m. Turning on the bed lamp on her side, she could see that Al’s high color had subsided. In the outside dark, it had stopped raining. She slipped from bed, got dressed, and phoned the hospital from the living room.

The night-duty nurse said Mr. Hartman was asleep, no change reported in his condition, she could see him at ten a.m. Not before?

Not before. Shirley envisioned herself barging into the hospital, shaking off attendants trying to restrain her, propelling her way to the duty nurse on his floor, demanding to see him.

Pointless.

She decided to drive into town before the traffic started. When Al awoke, he would find a note at his bedside.
“I think I may like you. No response required. Don’t do anything courteous. P.S. This is not a legal document. Destroy after reading. P.P.S. Borrowed your battered car.”

The drive into town was fast and effortless. Any driving would seem easy after yesterday. She stopped at home to change her clothes, parked in a twenty-four-hour garage near the office, signed in at the night-watchman’s desk. To keep busy, she realized an ambition, went through everything on her desk, marked things for filing, dictated answers she’d been postponing to letters she didn’t want to write, threw into the wastebasket stuff that should have been thrown in months ago. Her desk was bare when she heard stirrings in the hall outside. Twitchy, one of the first arrivals, was startled to find her.