The Oriental Wife (28 page)

“Did I tell you about the big fat slob I saw yesterday, hon? Eating doughnuts in the coffee shop? You’d think they’d be embarrassed, eating that kind of shit in front of people when they’re fat as a horse already.” But her voice trailed off uncertainly. Turning to Emma, she gave a long, quivering sigh. “Okay. That’s it for now. I’ve got to go eat something. Why don’t you take over for a while? You haven’t exactly been the life of the party.” She thrust the newspaper at her. “Here. In case you run out of inspiration. If it’s not highbrow enough for you, too damn bad.”

Emma stared down at the headlines: “Four Arrested on Drug Charges.” “Factory Closure Expected.” “Employees Rescue Injured Hawk.” She listened to Connie’s high heels tapping their way down the hall. Then she went and shut the door as noiselessly as she could. When she turned back into the room, she suddenly felt her father’s presence as powerfully as a taste, a smell—just as, when she was a child, waking from a nap, she had always known, even in the dark, if he was there with her.

Some time in the past few days, his face had become another man’s, a cardinal’s in a Renaissance portrait, all hollows and sharp angles, the mouth a thin slash, the nose a waxy slice of bone. Yet there he was, filling the space around him with his presence. His hand too, when she touched it, was still his own: warm and fleshy, pouched around the knuckles, the same hand that had been her safety when she was a child. She raised it to her face in a sudden spasm of remorse, pressing it against her cheek. “Daddy,” she said, the old word, feeling, like a tremor in the air, the ache of his sadness, a soundless vibration she had been listening to all her life.

She had thought that when he was dying all those words they had never spoken would be said at last, all that tangled freight of blame and rage and hurt that had pressed down for years would dissolve. Now it was too late. Only her mother, in all that time, had ever cried, had ever spoken of something as simple as love. “I saw Mother the other day,” she said, too loudly. “I told her you were dying, Daddy, I had to tell her. She sends you her love.”

His breathing shifted, caught on a rasp, lightened. For a moment, as his eyelids flickered open, she was hurled back to childhood, expecting the stern voice in which he had told her that the principal had phoned to complain about her misconduct at school, or Connie had reported that she’d slammed the door in her face.
Do you know what happens to girls who cannot control their tempers?

But no. Instead he said faintly, “You have nice eyes.” His own had a stricken, pleading look that made her feel, as so often, that she had failed him. But she was still holding his hand against her face. Stiffly now, self-consciously, she turned it over and kissed it, and then she was back in the orchard in Bucks Harbor, with the smell of grass and rotting apples, the sun beating down on her head.

She was three years old; she and Aunt May had gone to Aunt May’s house in Maine for the summer, to escape the heat of the city. There was no electricity in the house, so they went to bed when it was dark and woke when the sun came in the round windows of the upstairs bedrooms. There was no plumbing, either; Emma never quite conquered her fear of the outhouse, with its cobwebs and old birds’ nests and eternal clouds of flies, but she had her own little seat there, the
smallest of the row of three; Aunt May’s husband had built it for their children when they were boys. On Sundays Aunt May went to the Baptist church down in Bucks Harbor, and Emma attended the Sunday school upstairs; she sang “Jesus Is My Sunshine,” holding hands with the minister’s daughter, and “Jesus Loves Me” as she and Aunt May walked back home along the cliff road. Seagulls circled over their heads; sometimes a gull strayed into the orchard; she could hear it screeching from her bedroom.

Twice Aunt May’s new boyfriend, Enoch, who never spoke much, took them out in his boat, where Emma was not allowed to speak either; it would disturb the fish. She liked it better when Enoch came to the house and Aunt May made blueberry pancakes for supper, or he brought a batch of jelly doughnuts he had purchased in Cherryfield. Once they all made molasses taffy together in the kitchen; another time he fed Emma sips of his whiskey and she got up and danced on the table; Aunt May laughed so much she said she like to’ve peed her pants.

Every morning, Aunt May told her how many days it was before her daddy came to see her. She told all the ladies at church about the long train ride he’d be making, overnight from the city, the hours he would spend in the bus from Cherryfield, just to see his precious little girl. What a good, kind daddy she had, Aunt May said, sending her away for the summer, to escape the heat of the city, and then traveling all that way to see her. They had blueberry jam ready for his breakfast toast, made from berries they’d picked themselves in the marshes. Enoch was going to provide them with a big fat lobster.

And finally the day came; she woke very early, she woke Aunt May and insisted she dress her in her checked red
Sunday school dress and put a ribbon in her hair. It was hours before he’d arrive, Aunt May told her; she would only get dirty before he could see her. But Emma clung to her arm and wailed until she gave in. Once she had gotten her way, though, and she was dressed in her finery, she almost forgot about him. The dog from the house down the road, a brown cocker spaniel named Major, was sniffing around the porch, and she made him follow her to the orchard. They roamed up and down the long rows of trees until her shoes and socks were damp; at one point, out of sheer exuberance, Major jumped up on her and smeared the front of her dress with mud. When she scolded him, he ran away, and she went and sat on the rotting bench at the far end of the orchard, where she often practiced her hymn singing, and fell asleep. When she woke up she was hot and cranky and thirsty; she brushed herself off guiltily and started back to the house, thinking not of her father but of apple juice and blueberry muffins.

But as she reached the orchard gate, there he was, in a brown suit and hat, coming to find her. She ran to him, screaming
Daddy, Daddy
, her heart beating wildly with excitement, but when he lifted her into his arms a shock went through her; she felt as though she was entering another force field, the waves of sadness washing over her, almost knocking her back. Kicking frantically at his stomach, she shrieked to be let down, though once she was back on the ground she clung to his hand, sobbing, turning it over and over, kissing it the way Aunt May kissed hers when she had shut the cupboard door on it. She didn’t want him to think she loved him any less, because it wasn’t true, she loved him more than ever.

That was when she had first seen he was separate from her, there was something in him that had nothing to do with
herself. And now he was retreating from her for good, into some alien majesty; as she listened to the ragged sounds issuing from his throat, a crazy elation rose in her, a thought of heaven, which might be only this, release from pain. His breath came harder and harder, as though he were battling to push all the air from his body, to arrive at the end; the sweat poured down his face, and his hand, when she squeezed it, was clammy and limp. “Sleep now, Daddy,” she whispered, laying it on the sheet. “You really want to sleep.”

Outside the window, the sky was a magnificent pink, a waxy crescent moon was rising over the town. In the corridor, somebody laughed; somebody else walked by on heavy feet; a machine was trundled through a doorway down the hall. But her father’s room was silent except for the ticking of the cheap alarm clock by his bed. The vacant space around her seemed to be expanding minute by minute. She thought about the silence there would be in her apartment that night, when she returned to the city, and in sudden panic reached for the buzzer draped over the bed’s railing, pressing it for a long moment before allowing it to drop.

The minutes piled up, the silence and emptiness swelled larger and larger. There were streaks of silver in the sky, and a dark blue shape like a mountain, with the moon lying over it. But still nobody came. Then the door opened, and Connie walked in.

“What’s going on?” She looked suspiciously from the figure in the bed to Emma and back again. “What’s been happening here?” Emma could not think how to answer her. She stepped aside, and Connie took up her old position, peering down at the bed.

“Did you read to him, like I told you?” But the newspaper was lying on the floor, forgotten; Connie swooped down and picked it up. “You didn’t, did you? I bet you stopped the minute my back was turned.” She thrust her face within inches of his, waving the rolled paper like a fan over his head, then flapping it next to his ear, as though to clear a passage. “Can you hear me, honey? It’s okay. I’m back now. I’m here. Seems like my sister’s kid is going to be a priest, can you believe that? Vinny, you remember him, right? I went home just now and saw we got an invitation for when he’s ordained. Over his mother’s dead body, I bet. Come on, honey, can you hear me now?”

There was a knock on the door, which Connie had left open; a stolid-looking young nurse with mournful brown eyes, whom Emma remembered from previous visits, was standing there. “Did you want something?” she asked, just as Connie flung aside the paper and threw herself across the bed.

“What am I going to do?” she wailed. “How am I going to live without him?”

The young nurse rushed over and picked up his hand, which had been dislodged by Connie’s assault and was dangling over the side of the bed.

“Can you still feel his pulse?” Emma asked her.

“Oh, yes. It’s very weak, but … yes. Please try to stay calm, Mrs. Furchgott,” she said firmly. “You wouldn’t want him to hear you, it might upset him.”

“I can’t help it,” Connie said, on a shriek. “I can’t go on without him, I can’t do it.”

The nurse and Emma exchanged glances; a signal seemed to pass between them then, a flash of understanding that
illuminated whole acres of her father’s marriage. But the moment passed, they dropped their eyes at the same time.

“Do you really think he can hear us?” Emma asked, and the nurse shook her head regretfully.

“Probably not. But hearing is always the last thing to go. If there’s anything you want to say to him …” She hesitated. “It won’t be long now.” She was looking at Emma as though they were alone in the room, as though she were about to tell her something momentous. But all she said was, “He never complained, he never even said he was in pain.” Emma nodded, waiting. “Some people don’t, especially men, but then they don’t talk about anything. He wasn’t like that, he always talked to me, he remembered what courses I was taking and stuff like that. But never anything personal, you know?”

“Yes,” Emma said. “I know.”

“I guess he was real old-fashioned that way.”

Suddenly Connie gave a howl. “Oh my God,” she screamed, jumping up. “Oh Jesus God.”

The nurse hurried to the bed; she felt his pulse again. “He’s gone,” she said to Emma. “I’m so sorry, but he’s gone. I’d better get a doctor.”

“Oh God, oh God, help me God,” Connie sobbed, and then, in something closer to her normal voice, “Fat lot of good a doctor will do him now.”

“It’s the law, ma’am. A doctor has to pronounce him dead.”

Connie slumped in the pink plastic chair near the window, breathing loudly. “Well, then, go ahead. Go on, get out of here.” After the nurse had left, she told Emma to bring her purse, which she’d left on the vestibule floor. She blew her nose loudly, took out a gold compact, powdered her nose,
and applied lipstick. Then, having smacked her lips together, she snapped the compact shut and turned to Emma.

“Have you got a decent black dress for the funeral, madam? Or are you going to show up in some kind of hippie crap?”

“Please,” Emma said, and it came out like a command. “I’d like to be alone with him for a minute.”

Connie’s shoulders twitched; she thrust her chin forward, ready to do battle—to ask Emma who the hell she thought she was, to remind her that she, Connie, was the widow here, thank you very much. But Emma kept staring at her, stony-faced, until she faltered. They were both registering the loss of Connie’s power. Without a word, with only a little snort that failed to convey conviction, she turned and headed for the door.

Emma shut it behind her before approaching the bed.

She bent over swiftly and kissed his forehead—the flesh not cold yet, but faintly rubbery, making her shudder. She wiped his sunken face with a tissue that was lying there, carefully, as though she were performing some ancient rite, but already her mind was splitting in two: thoughts of Khim were flooding in again, those repetitive, consuming thoughts she had held at bay for the past few hours. She had to tell him that her father was dead, and then he would explain it to her, he would make her understand. If she picked up the phone by the bed and dialed his number—she had not tried it for forty-eight hours—he would have to answer.

Only when a sleepy-looking young doctor appeared, wielding a clipboard, and said, “I just spoke to your mother out in the hall,” did she remember Louisa, who would be sitting in the dark, waiting to hear. “As you may know, your father donated his eyes to the eye bank,” the doctor said, “which
means we don’t have much time. Somebody’s on their way to take him downstairs.” For a moment the old anger flared in her again. He had donated his eyes, he had done the correct, the virtuous thing, and yet in all that time, all those months he was dying, he had never mentioned her mother. Not once. He should at least have told her good-bye, she thought. He could have given me a message. She looked down at him for the last time—the doctor was walking toward the bed, there was the rumbling of a gurney in the hall—and felt as though she were falling off the edge of the world. She remembered his breathing, and his hand against her face, and the sun in the orchard. But his face had become something final, unreachable; in the draft that entered when the door was opened again, the room felt empty already.

B
ack at the house, the head of the company’s Brazilian subsidiary was asking Emma about her job, by which he meant her job with Khim. Her father had been most interested in the work she was doing, he said. It was hard to imagine her father discussing her with this man, who looked unnervingly like a flamenco dancer, with his beautifully smooth skin and tiny feet, and kept nodding encouragingly at her, as though pitying her for more than just her bereavement. She could tell that, not having seen her since she was twelve, he was judging her as a woman and finding her wanting: he would require of females that they be confident, alluring, that they carry off all situations, even this one, with poise. He could not know how valiantly she was lying.