So Much for That (27 page)

The picture was romantic. “If you get back to work,” he proposed shyly, “I wonder if you’d consider doing another fountain. With me. Not like the goofy ones I knock up, but classy, like the Wedding Fountain. We haven’t collaborated since.”

“Mmm…Maybe for the dining table? at could be fun. That’s a great idea. Because I’m aching to make up for lost time.”

In truth, her “lost time” in metalsmithing comprised not only the last six months, but most of her married life. The only sign Shep gave of this indiscreet observation was to rue, “I wish you’d never wasted whole afternoons making chocolate bunny rabbits.”

“That was the point.”

“You wasted your time on chocolate bunny rabbits to prove to me that you shouldn’t be wasting your time on chocolate bunny rabbits.”

“That’s about the sum of it. Or to put it another way, I wanted you to see that your resentment over the fact that I didn’t bring in much money was nothing in comparison to my resentment if you forced me to earn it.”

“I never forced you to earn it, or resented that you didn’t.”

“Bullshit.”

“Tell me some more. About your ideas for flatware.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Yes.” Dipping his jumbo shrimp into cocktail sauce, Shep hazarded the kind of thought from which he had protected her for months. Her delicacy was physical. Maybe he needn’t treat her with kid gloves in every other regard. “If the situation were reversed, would you have worked to support me, and the whole family, while I stayed home pursuing my passion? Fountains, for example? Willingly. Without a word of protest.”

“You’d never have been able to stand that.”

“Dodge. The question was, could you?”

“Honestly? No. I wouldn’t support you while you made fountains. Women…Well, we’re not raised to expect that.”

“Is that fair?”

“Fair?” She laughed. “Who said anything about fair? Of course it’s not fair!”

Glynis was in such fine form that Shep could have wept. She finished the crab cakes; she finished her lemon sole. She ate the parsleyed potatoes and two slices of bread. She was kind enough not to mention that the chic seafood was lost on her dulled palate. Instead she quietly drowned both courses in Tabasco to get them to taste of anything but that tongue-curling taint of nickel, which contaminated everything from crab to kisses. Conversational strictures seeming to have loosened, they finally talked about the fact that Amelia had made herself so scarce. Their daughter had driven up to Elmsford only once this spring, excusing herself after a single hour lest her mother grow “too tired.”

“I’m too close,” Glynis speculated. “She looks at me and sees herself with cancer, and she can’t bear it.”

“But she isn’t the one with cancer,” said Shep.

“She’s afraid.”

“I don’t mind her being afraid
for
you. I do mind her being afraid
of
you.”

“She’s young,” countered Glynis, who’d not made such an effort to project herself into someone else’s head since this whole awfulness began. “She’s not in control of herself. I bet she’s not even aware of what she’s doing.”

“Which is?”

“Avoiding me, of course. If you pointed out that she’s only visited once, I bet she’d be shocked. I bet she imagines she’s been up loads of times. I bet that when she finally makes herself call me on the phone? And she’s thought time and again about phoning and then something mysteriously always comes up and she puts it off til tomorrow? I bet that happens so often, if not almost every day, that she thinks she’s been calling all the time.”

“I worry that Amelia could feel bad, later—” Shep stopped himself. That was the old thinking, based on the old assumptions. The ones from previous to seven o’clock this evening.

“About what?”

He curved the thought. “Once you’re well again. She could look back and realize how inconsiderate she was. How uninvolved in such
a big crisis in your life. She could feel guilty; you could justifiably bear her a grudge. I’d like her to get her act together, in the interests of your relationship out the other end. Maybe I should say something.”

“Don’t you dare. She should see me because she wants to, not because Dad gave her a hard time. Anyway,” Glynis continued with a sip of champagne, “That least Amelia’s shown up more often than
Beryl
. By threatening your sister with the specter of one person she has to feel more sorry for than herself, I may have single-handedly driven her to New Hampshire.”

“You don’t want to see Beryl anyway. And now, out of sheer cheapness, she’s cornered herself into taking some responsibility for my father. Couldn’t have worked out better. Might even build her character.”

“With her raw materials, your sister building character is like you constructing a bookcase out of cardboard.”

With disingenuous idleness, Shep raised over their cheesecake: “Now that the prognosis is looking bright, do you still want to go ahead with this asbestos suit?”

“Absolutely! I may be pulling through this, but I’ll still have endured agony in the process. The people who did this to me should have to pay.”

“Well, they’ll not be the same people…” he said dubiously. “In the thirty years since you were in art school, the corporate higher-ups at Forge Craft would have turned over two or three generations.”

“They’re still drawing salaries from a company that’s profited from
evil
. Best of all, now that I’m getting better I’ll have the energy to give that deposition, and to stand up under cross-examination, too. I’ll be able to take the heat if the suit goes to trial.”

Shep’s heart sank. He was desperate to escape the litigation. “Okay.” He shrugged. “If you say so. I have another appointment with that attorney Rick Mystic next week.”

He was careful to curl the conversation back to her metalwork over coffee and mint tea, thus ending the night on a high note. In the car, he suggested they schedule a dinner with Carol and Jackson to celebrate the scan. “A themed evening,” she agreed. “We could serve CAT food.”

S
hep was pleased to catch Zach in the kitchen, whether or not his son was pleased to be caught. The boy was so intent on disappearing himself that for a moment he froze with no acknowledgment of his parents’ entrance, as if they might walk right through him. His posture had further deteriorated. But Shep was relieved to come home and for once not start abjuring the boy that if he couldn’t chip in by doing his laundry he could at least match his own socks, or chiding the kid to please turn down the music because his mother wasn’t feeling well. (“What else is new?”) Shep couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to deliver glad tidings, and the overpriced Mountain Dew at dinner had juiced his mood.

“Yo, I’m glad you’re underfoot, sport,” said Shep. Zach received the companionable clap on his shoulder grimly, as if withstanding a hard right punch. “We got some terrific news about your mother at Columbia-Presbyterian tonight.”

Zach flinched. He didn’t look like a boy about to receive good news. And he protected his Turkey sandwich as if they’d caught him at something naughty. The boy was scrawny and still growing; why would he act guilty about a sandwich? “So what’s up?” he asked glumly.

Shep detailed the CAT scan results, describing the diminutions of the two cowering patches of foulness; since he omitted mention of the “stubborn” biphasic presentation altogether, he might rightly have been accused of the very rounding up he had feared from Philip Goldman. But there was nothing wrong with emphasizing the positive, especially with a sixteen-year-old kid who’d had to weather plenty dire turns of the wheel with little help from his distracted, harried father.

“Uh-huh.”

Shep kept waiting for the boy to have a reaction, until he resigned himself that this slumping, passive, unaltered will to vanish was his son’s reaction. “Maybe you don’t understand the full implications of this. It means your mother’s getting better. That the chemo is working. That we’re beating this thing.”

“Uh-huh.” Zach raised his gaze from his favorite middle distance and looked his father in the eye. Sorrowful and pitying, the boy’s soft brown unbroken stare made Shep feel suddenly the younger of the two. Their son rotated toward Glynis, who was sitting at the table, and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder to give it a squeeze; his motions were jagged and halting, as if he were operating his arm by remote control. “That’s great, Mom,” he said leadenly. “I’m real glad things are looking up.” The gesture seemed to cost him, and he trailed exhaustedly upstairs.

Shep was about to mumble, “What was that about?” when the phone rang. It was late for a call. He had a queer premonition that he should let it go to voice mail. He and Glynis had not had such a fine night on the town together for the last year or more, and the interruption was unwelcome. He couldn’t think of anyone to whom he wanted to speak right now besides his wife, now restored to him in all her former dryness, perception, and good humor, a miraculous resurrection courtesy of the Church of Philip Goldman. He didn’t want to burst his own champagne bubble, and the night’s magic felt fragile.

His “hello?” was wary.

As the call proceeded Shep said little, asking a few questions, ambling to the porch. It was still a beautiful evening—Elmsford was far enough from the city that you could see the stars—but it felt less idyllic now. He should have let the damn phone ring.

D
riving up to Berlin on what was, catastrophically, the Fourth of July weekend, Shep thought about his father. With the man’s professional devotion to more elevated matters, it had taken him years to notice that Gabriel Knacker was indeed concerned with money, which, when you kept track, consumed an astonishing proportion of the good reverend’s conversation. He’d long preached about turning off lights, not because he wanted to save the planet but because he was cheap. Back when he’d run a parish, the minister had been every bit as grasping as any CEO, shamelessly squeezing his strapped parishioners for fatter fistfuls in the offering plate in order to refit the quaint clapboard church
with somewhat less quaint plumbing. In fact, the budget clash between rising costs and a dwindling congregation had dominated the majority of Sunday dinners when Shep was a kid. His father would be mortified by the inference, but in the minister’s scathing about wealthy mill owners, their second homes and sports cars, Shep had learned to detect a trace, just a trace, of ordinary envy.

In addition to some bashes and bruises, Dad had broken his left femur. He’d been buried in a Walter Mosley novel while walking downstairs. In point of fact, the accident was of a sort that any detective fiction fan might have suffered even at a younger age, and at least it wasn’t his hip, but any broken bone at eighty was serious. Fortunately, Beryl had been around at the time. Unfortunately, her immediate ministrations had quickly drained her wading pool of Clara-Barton altruism; or, as Glynis might say, the cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain. Any further wrangling with paperwork, bills, and the logistics of a disabled elderly parent—dealing with whether Dad could go home, and if not where—was now Shep’s problem. Honestly, talking to his sister last night, you’d think she was the taxi driver who’d dropped this geezer off at the hospital and wanted somebody to cover the fare.

He would have liked to wax sentimental. But like any sane modern-day American in the face of medical calamity, he could not afford to squander his energies on mere affection, mere concern. The costs of his father’s immediate crisis would be picked up by Medicare, but only 80 percent; Shep kicked himself for not buying his dad a supplemental Medigap policy when he’d had the chance. The greater anxiety was after the crisis had passed. In the face of a home aide’s salary or retirement community fees, it went without saying that Beryl would chip in her two cents solely in the figurative sense of the expression.

Rising on the river shore, the austere façade of St. Anne’s hove into view, the severe vertical lines of red brick bespeaking rectitude and a stinting forbearance. With the elongated point of its left-hand steeple rising asymmetrically higher than the right, the signal Berlin landmark had always put him in mind of a prim, upright spinster brandishing her
umbrella. In the context of the disheveled housing stock rising behind it, the cathedral’s haughty grandeur looked out of place. For as the town’s fortunes had foundered, the fact that it was located at the confluence of the Dead and Androscoggin rivers had grown more fitting. Berlin may not have been literally a dead end, but it was at the end of the Dead.

Opposite St. Anne’s rose Berlin’s last standing smokestacks. Rumor had it that Fraser Paper was doomed. (God help his hometown should its survival depend on the proposed park for all-terrain vehicles. Whiny kids on whiny carts that sounded collectively like a swarm of mosquitoes: it wasn’t respectable adult salvation.) Sure, the soot-stained brick stacks of his childhood had pumped a hazy white stench into the atmosphere. Pulp workers had high rates of gut cancer and leukemia. In strictly environmental terms, maybe it was healthier for Berlin that most of the mills had closed. Still, he missed them. The poking skyline had been distinctive. During his boyhood, the fact that tourists heading for the White Mountains held their noses as they passed his hometown had been a perverse point of pride. The clattering, cavernous mills to which his classes had made awed pilgrimages in primary school had always been the real cathedrals of Berlin, New Hampshire. Besides, Shep had always appreciated coming from a place that made something tangible that you could hold and fold and write on. He didn’t care for towns whose economies were based on ephemeral “services” or elusive ingenuity like software. Shep didn’t really belong in this century, and he knew it.

When he’d first moved to New York, Shep had felt self-conscious about hailing from the boondocks, and had taught himself to say “tuna” instead of “tuner,” “color” instead of “coluh.” He’d practiced pronouncing the
r
in
start
, the
l
in
palm
, and had learned that
caught
was not strictly a homonym of
cot.
After only a few weeks, he was ordering “milkshakes” rather than “frappes,” “sodas” rather than “tonics.” But the shame had long ago worn off. It was interesting to be from somewhere so particular. Anyone who’d emigrated from a burg of only ten thousand souls was a scarce commodity; lots of people were from New York. He owed this bleak northerly outpost for a hardiness in cold weather. Slogging to school in three feet of snow, the driving sleet needling his
cheeks and collecting in his lashes. The feeling in his feet already fading after the first two streets—how’s
that
for peripheral neuropathy, Glynis? Keeping his head down, brow to the wind, concentrating only on the next step and then the next…Well, the same grit instilled in his boyhood had come to his aid these last six months: how to knuckle down in the face of hardship, refrain from complaint, and hunker into a small, core, preservative self when hostile forces lambasted from the outside.