The Maytrees (10 page)

D
R
. C
OBO, CARDIOLOGIST, KEPT
offices in his house’s basement. As a young man board-certified in both cardiology and internal medicine, Dr. Cobo had immigrated from Cuba and had to undergo recertification as though Cuba’s were the lesser health-care system.

Granite steps delved from a Main Street sidewalk to Dr. Cobo’s door. Maytree carried Deary down the steps’ pitch.

—A heart murmur, Dr. Cobo said. Tests. Her leaking mitral valve lost to backwash more than it pumped. —Congestive heart failure, Dr. Cobo said, addressing Deary.

—We can try to get you into Texas transplant trials, he said. In the meantime, we’ll monitor you in the hospital. A ventilator will help you breathe easily. Deary half closed her eyes and bestowed her lipsticky smile. —I’d rather die.

Maytree settled her in the car. She would refuse any treatment, let alone any physician or hospital. —I could get roller skates, Deary said as he carried her in their front door. —I love old ladies who roller-skate.

An hour later: —They even admit they don’t know everything! Look on their licenses, O ye mighty, and drop dead! Almost everyone they knew who went to a hospital, or con
sulted physicians, or submitted to surgery, died in pain.
Post hoc non ergo propter hoc,
Maytree thought.

In the kitchen he cupped a pinna against her sternum. Murmur! The backwash of her heart’s pump sloshed. The mitral valve was no seal but a rubber pet door that flapped both ways.

Maytree set up a bed in their living room by the wheelchair. He moved tables. Deary called for her hairdresser to come once a week. She gave Maytree instructions for gardener, cleaner, and florist. Happily in bed she named another dozen people who had surgery and died in pain. They filled the cemetery.

Dr. Cobo had asked Maytree to stop by later. Then he told him that cardiology could only palliate. Deary’s heart muscle had swelled and thinned past saving. In any case she would not suffer. He made sure Maytree understood he was no prophet. —Soon, he said. Pressed, he said, Maybe many months, maybe fewer. Maytree hoped Deary would not get pious on him, and she did not.

—You took her to Dr. Eminent before? his painter friend asked from the porch. He tells women it’s all in their heads.

Maytree quit work and handed others both his projects to finish. He bought robes. He learned “Black Watch plaid” and “chenille.” Their friends the painter and his wife visited self-consciously. Maytree loved this guy but knew their friendship was not intimate. When they came, he turned off the television. As its screen darkened, it contracted to a dot of light that snapped out.

Deary let only Sarah Smither visit what she called her
crypt. Sarah Smither read orange-bound children’s biographies aloud. Wrapped in blossom-print silk, Deary smiled when Abe Lincoln played a trick: he lifted and flipped a local boy who tracked muddy footprints on a friend’s ceiling.

When the wheelchair or bed tired her, Maytree carried her like a doll. She raised her palm before his eyes while he bore her to the bathroom.

—Look at my lifeline. What does it tell you?

—That I can’t see where we’re going.

For dying, she was ready as for any other party. —Messages for anyone dead? she asked Sarah Smither and the scared mailman. Her eyes half closed. She could no longer belt her exhilarating favorite, “Antonio Spangonio (the Bum Toreador).” Maytree joined her. —
When I catch that blighter I’ll kill him, I will…I’ll cut out his heart with a dagger, I will.
One morning Maytree heard the song’s finale,
—He shall die! he shall die! when I plant an onion on his Spanish bunion, when I catch Antonio—tonight!
Pause.

—You forgot the
boom boom!
Maytree said. —No, you. Meaning, you sing the
boom boom!
because I can’t.–Boom boom!

One morning after a December snowstorm he slipped on ice and dropped her. Rather, he threw her—just a lob.

He was carrying her down to Dr. Cobo, the sight of whose Castilian face soothed them. It was voodoo after all.

The day he dropped her, he was bearing forward like a tray. She weighed ninety pounds. He felt his foot slip on iced stone. In that instant he tossed her in the fresh snowbank
by the steps. At the toss he recoiled, and his slip became a wreck.

—Honey? she whispered. She usually called him Maytree.

—Are you all right?

—Are you?

She told him later she, too, heard his bones snap like carrots. Nothing hurt for almost an hour.

In the strictly-for-profit hospital, professionals did their best shorthanded. They let him wait behind curtains on a bed. Deary, unhurt, waited, too. Someone glanced at Deary and ran out. Someone else listened to Deary’s heart.

—I’m just taking her vitals, the emergency-room nurse told Maytree.

—No, he said. You emphatically are not.

Deary refused admission, stonewalling ever-higher-ups, and signed a hundred release forms. She held the pen among blue fingernails. She sat on a wheeled steel stool until she slipped and the stool bowled into the nurses’ station. Then Sarah Smither’s mother appeared carrying Deary’s oxygen-tube stand—she refused it—and her pillow. This worthy, who made squash doughnuts, held Deary on her lap to balance and warm her. Maytree watched her slip a fingerful of petroleum inside Deary’s nostrils. He wished she would shoot them both.

Much later he learned that he had broken his left humerus just above the elbow. He broke his left clavicle. He broke his right radius twice. He broke his right wrist and thumb; he snapped his right ulna in two at the elbow. One lumbar vertebra cracked—the crucial one, he felt, that every twitch
cracked anew. Without puncturing his lungs, his fourth and fifth ribs sustained greenstick fractures dorsally. Far from “sustaining” anything, he thought, his bones broke. The orthopedist reduced Maytree’s four arm fractures in memorable jerks, and unrolled wet plaster casts over both his arms, one high, one low.

He pictured his fall down those six stone steps as so spectacular he chose not to picture it again. His X-rays looked like the Tunguska event, the Siberian forest after a meteorite hit. An old woman entered and taped his broken ribs as if they might flee. She tucked his right cast under her arm, eyeballed his thumb to align it with his invisible wrist, and splinted it. On doctor’s orders she gave him only acetaminophen—as he learned later from the itemized bill. We Americans possibly enjoyed a right to suffer needlessly that lesser peoples miss.

Mrs. Smither, driving them home, wore a green felt hat. He addressed her hat from the backseat as loudly as he could. —Mrs. Smither. I know you both work hard. I wonder. His ribs broke again every time he breathed. His vertebra halves ground like floes. His two broken arms. His head lay on his coat folded on Deary’s lap. All day since he fell, or since he pitched her on the snow, she seemed dumbstruck. No choices for them or even chances presented, if he could not carry her and wait on her. She knew it, too.

He had no one to turn to. Under tires dry snow yelped. His bones jolted as if the car had triangular wheels. Moving to Provincetown for now would content Deary and keep his word. Since he botched life with Lou twenty years ago, he honored his every word sometimes to absurdity, like skating
with friends after his viral pneumonia had turned to lobar pneumonia.

—If you, or if Sarah…If we offer you twice whatever you earn…Could you help us out for a few months while I mend? In Provincetown on Cape Cod, some nice house? Or (this in a rush) do you think Sarah would help us now and postpone graduation? Has she ever seen Cape Cod? She would have her own room and no other duties. Whether he could use his arms or not, Deary was still dying. Why had they not moved to Provincetown yesterday?

Sarah, Mrs. Smither said, was starting in June as a counselor for the county. Nor could Mrs. Smither herself leave her squash doughnut supervisor post.

Could Pete take care of them? Good Pete would never spring this family of strangers for weeks on his wife. They had their baby boy and only two rooms.

That night Maytree drank vodka from its bottle as Deary gasped beside him in their bed. Their walkway lamps below the window yellowed the iced maple’s glaze. Deary’s breathing stopped sometimes, as always, and resumed with a snort.

What had they injected him with, hummingbird feed? Had none of them ever broken a bone? How about half a lethal injection? At least in capital cases they treated the whole person.

He could buy Pete and Marie a house of any size—but Pete would not accept. He still had his young pride. How could they move when she had just had a baby? He and Sooner could hoist Pete’s house to a wide flatbed…No, Sooner had gone
back to Missouri for the winter, and he could hoist nothing. That was the point.

He reminded himself that perhaps a billion people like him worldwide were lying awake in pain now and at their wits’ end. In Provincetown he could rent a place off-season, for Deary and him and a live-in helper or two, if Deary could stand strangers whose accents and clothes betrayed sloppy families. For what purpose had he amassed so much money if it was useless? Well, for three private nurses in eight-hour shifts, if there were any nurses. And again, if Deary would permit as witnesses strangers who would misplace everything in a twinkling, and pat her head. Reportedly Cornelius Blue and Jane lived in separate dune shacks and separate places in town; they visited. With Jane lived a bundled baby, Tandy. Cornelius’s town room! It was one room. If the old bachelor would not tend one sack of helplessness in the form of Tandy, he would not tend three.

Reevadare took in strays, of which Deary had been many. Reevadare also loved throwing parties, loved being waited on herself, and talked too much. He rejected the Manor—the nursing home. Now what to hope? For he had known all day he would appeal to Lou. He knew it as he fell.

If he could flex his elbows, he would hide his face. Practiced—he was at least practiced—he faced his embarrassment down. The iced maple trunk near the windows had a translucent double. He would slither back so his real wife could carry Deary from bed to bath till she died. Lou had kept his name. And she would take them. He would welcome
them in her place, and he knew her spirit to be generous. Not because troubles whipped him and he had no one else to appeal to, though troubles certainly whipped him and he had no one else to appeal to, but because Lou might actually help them, pronto.

And forgiveness had nothing to do with it. They were both whole people, he and Lou. Whole old people. At their age forgiveness could be child’s play if you knew the ropes, and so could be the nod that accepted forgiveness of course and moved on. Young, he would have thought any end, even dying, beat being forgiven, let alone by a woman, and beat asking for help, too, let alone asking the wife he left for help. Now he and Lou—if Lou was like Pete, whom he more wronged—could meet as equals. His asking would honor her goodness. His willingness to ask was part of what he now knew best: to think well of those you have wronged, let alone those who have wronged you. He hoped Lou’s thinking had brought her there, too. He really hoped. Just till Deary died.

Mrs. Smither would drive Deary and him to Provincetown tomorrow in her car. If Lou refused them, she would at least help him think what else to try. Would he and Lou even recognize each other? She kept inviting them to visit—but she was kidding herself. No, no possible course could be worse. They would leave early. He sprang to life. He fell asleep.

I
T WAS AFTER TWO
o’clock the next day that they hazarded the Orleans rotary. He sat by Mrs. Smither while Deary dozed and jerked in back. The Cape land was flimsy; it lacked stones. If Nausets discovered a glacial erratic, they wore paths to it to grind corn; later surveyors reckoned by it. Maytree saw gaudy roadside shops clear to Eastham. A gas-station map showed that the green-tinted National Seashore takings, which they had all fought, had saved the lower Cape. They passed dead Pilgrim Lake. Ahead a moving dune was crossing the road footfirst like a snail. He saw half a dozen highway employees (convicts?) trying to sweep the dune back with brooms. Left toward the bay. Pulling up to his own old house, Mrs. Smither found no parking space. Town had shrunk and multiplied walls as crystals form facets in vials. They parked back on Bradford. He asked Mrs. Smither to leave the ignition on so the heater worked. His hip hit the car door shut. He would walk. His jacket hung open over his casts and slings.

How would he start? He had outgrown eloquence. He started the first time by introducing himself. Lou might well
not be amused. He needed more air. He would be able to tell from her face.

On the top step he knew she was gone. He rang the bell, waited, walked into the house that smelled like sea and her skin, and called. The empty house where they had lived still seemed hospitable. Back in the car he told Mrs. Smither how to find Pete’s.

Pete’s Marie opened the door where the outside stairs ended. Maytree identified himself. She held the door for him. Marie stood taller than Pete, slim-faced and exuberant. Her laughing chatter was either her habit, or, more likely, extra happiness. She displayed for him, in her thrust arms, black-eyed baby Manuel who stared at air. The baby had more eyebrows than Cary Grant. Braced to confront Lou, Maytree found himself undone by this in-the-translucent-flesh grandson who set him blinking. Pete’s boat was due in after sunset, Marie said as if she had known Maytree all her life. He sat and knocked back a beer. His bones’ pain was a siren in his ears. It wore him out all over every instant, and he could barely strain to take in the world behind the blare. Marie said Pete’s mother was out closing the shack. In December? Bowing, Maytree left. He had to walk to her there before dark.

There was a new motel off-street on Bradford. —Where are we? Deary whispered when the car stopped. Oh, look, it’s Provincetown. The lives we live! She reached in her bag for a mirror. Last week she almost stopped eating. She was shutting down one tube at a time. In the motel lobby Maytree checked them in. From the bed Deary could watch sky stir over the bay. Maytree’s broken bones registered each wave’s break as
a bomb. Mrs. Smither handed him water to drink. She buttoned his jacket over his casts and pulled his watch cap over his ears. He set out north for the dunes.

When Maytree was young, men, women, and children found their way in starlight alone. When clouds covered the night sky, as now, the whole Cape knew it: Dark night! they said, in a greeting then as common, and almost as frequent, as—Fine day! The answer was, Sure is, or Real dark night. Night was their familiar parlor, a scented time all its own. Now that electric lights wrecked the night sky, he mourned as if the great universe had died within his own lifetime. People forgot to look up. Maytree knew his remembering starry nights dated him as the war did. Except that the war, unlike humans’ sight of stars, had lasted fewer than ten years.

Dark would catch him somewhere in the dunes. At this thought he turned back and kicked his motel door politely. Mrs. Smither obliged him by removing his shoes so he could feel his way. Deary smiled. He wondered if she remembered the dunes.