The Unfortunates (44 page)
Today, when Esme comes to wake her, to go see George before visiting hours expire (it takes them a good hour and forty minutes to make it through the prison’s three security checks), CeCe does not get out of bed. Esme calls the doctor. The doctor comes. The doctor calls Pat and Lotta. They fly in two days later. They drive straight to the hospital. The stay at the hospital is short. The pneumonia has returned, fiercer. Pat and Lotta and Esme and the giant nurse bring her home, her head on her chest, her eyes not quite closed but closed. “Oh, Esme,” Pat cries, “I don’t think she can hear us anymore!”
For many days, Lotta keeps Douglas out of the house with elaborate excursions around the lawn. Douglas, almost two, totters speedily through the cool grass in a tiny Windbreaker, his fists full of vegetation, while Pat remains inside. They call Iris. She finally calls them back. She’s moved again. It would be a long trip. She isn’t sure if she can come. But she’ll e-mail more pictures of the baby. They offer to send the dog. She says she can’t keep a dog where she is living, not yet anyway. She’s sorry, she’s so sorry, she says, and abruptly hangs up. Later in the week, Lotta hands Douglas to Pat, and Pat holds the boy up to CeCe, hoping he might wake her. Later still, they hold up the photographs of Iris’s baby that they’ve printed from the laptop on CeCe’s desk. They say,
Can you see
?
Do you see her? She’s beautiful, take a look.
They hold photographs of CeCe’s garden in high summer, bright smears of color, right up to her eyes. They say the names of the flowers and point to the ocean behind the flowers and Pat tells her mother the stories she can remember from her childhood that include the flowers and the ocean.
On a soft October day, there is a service in the churchyard in town.
A public memorial will be held some weeks hence in the city, where the mourners will fill the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—so many beneficiaries of Cecilia’s generous endeavors—and afterward spill out onto Amsterdam Avenue, to shake hands and take out their phones. But here, at the churchyard, the orange and yellow leaves still in the trees, there’s only Pat, and Lotta, Esme and Javier and Yasser, the rest of the staff, and the friends Esme instructed Pat to invite. Nan Porter and Annie Mason and Clifton Franks sit in the front row beside the family. Dana Barnes is there, and the Rhavs and the Bakers and the Becks and the Conrads and a tall man with white hair from Arizona whom no one knows. Esme said she was certain they should invite him. George, beside Pat, only just released. Thinner and harder, with the unexpected posture of a soldier, his hair cut close, the guests trying not to look at him too much or not enough, having heard that somehow he was already again engaged. They wondered if it indicated his general malevolence that throughout the service he did not cry, until the moment he bent his head and could not stop.
During the service, 3D lies on the grass at Esme’s feet. His neck flat to the earth, his ears flat to his head. Douglas alternately sits and lies on the dog, sinking his fists into the red fur, slap-patting at the dog’s back with both hands.
Dog! Dog! Dog!
he says, tugging 3D’s ear, which 3D endures. Lotta crouches down and says,
Shhh
.
Where Iris lived was by then known to them, though they could not persuade her to come to the funeral. The private investigator Pat hired, for reasons of dispensation of inheritance, found her in less than an afternoon. She was living once again in Nova Scotia, with an aunt of advanced age, her father’s oldest and last remaining sister, in a town called Great Village, which, the investigator said, at the 2010 census, claimed five hundred inhabitants. The residence was listed as a bed-and-breakfast. They imagined she might be helping the aunt run it.
But they couldn’t know what in those last days came to CeCe’s mind. Shut away from sight and sound, in the first vanishing that is the vanishing of time, in the dream that is not a dream, CeCe was sitting under the willow, and why are you looking over here? Why are you looking at me? I’m sitting, is all. Entertain yourself somewhere else, please. I own this land. I sit where I please. I sit under my tree. I am sitting under my tree and it was hard to get down here. The trunk caught my sweater. Sweater, I need to visit George. Caught on sweater is the woods. The woods, a poor man’s overcoat, and cleverness is cheap is what I think of that. I am in the woods, and in the story the witch says don’t go into the woods and in the story the mother says you must journey though the woods. Mother says you can’t stay where you are forever and the story says that too. Tell me, lesser sex, how was your day? Tell me, what do you like? What matters to you? Dragged myself down the trunk of the tree like a bear with an itch so I may sit my bony in the copper leaves and feel the leaves mulching as I sit them, black and soft. I see my house. Over there is my lovely white house. Rain or yesterday’s rain gusting off the leaves. Rain, rain. Run is shouted when a girl. I was a lucky person never on a dark street, never under the hand behind the wall across the bed never anyone the boss of me I am I was always tempted but never the car going anywhere they wouldn’t wait, knees together under trees girls I do remember picking up a black button from the lawn it had rained or there was dew and then it was my button that I had lost so long before. I was picking up the button and my heel sank in the earth. Strange word. Earth, earth, what does it mean? Once when George was a boy he was confused he said sprawled eagle and I laughed he can laugh at me now if he wants maybe he will laugh his wish at me. Did he mean spread or bald? No one knew because no one was listening to what he was saying and then he ran away? My heel sank in the dirt and made a little hole like a golf tee very short heels as we had then and the feeling is satisfying in a way but I complain to the woman who is with me having tea with lemon slices and I complain to the man who once loved me and I say my heel is ruined so she can say yes yes yes you are right and he can say I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, everyone’s missed you, and missing is without a friend and poor Cecilia does not deserve to be called poor and I am missing something like a button, not a button, some convenience that one forgets one is missing until it is needed something nagging something at the back of my head where I can’t turn to see it that I can’t quite remember but there are those fine many days one million thousand days with the sun and that woman bending crooked over me and over me, close and closer until I cannot see the house can only see her face and will it, be—
Dear CeCe,
the letter began.
Dear CeCe,
Pat read again.
Last week we visited Great Village. It reminded me of running out of Stockport and of how hard that time was. When I lived in Great Village and my mind was still full of George and you and everything that happened, once or twice a day I would say to myself, I’ll write CeCe, but I never could.
I applied to college. Can you believe it? I’m in my junior year.
I think you would like it how Cecilia pretends to study with me. We make piles of books side by side. When I pick up my pen, she picks up her crayons. The house is filling up with books for both of us. We have a garden. It’s kind of a mess. Mostly vegetables. C likes to help by dragging the basket and by bothering poor 3D, who is old and puts up with her. Last spring, I made a secret winding path through the part of the garden where the plants are taller than she is. When she disappears inside the plants I pretend I can’t find her and then I find her, that oldest game of mothers and children. We are alone, but we aren’t lonely. It is because of you, what we have. I think about that all the time. She’s five. When did that happen? Old enough to know where she gets her name.
Love,
Iris
“I don’t understand. Why write a letter to a dead person?” Pat says, frowning at the postmark, flipping over the envelope that Esme forwarded to her, that the post office at Stockport had forwarded to Esme. “To a house nobody lives at anymore?” And because she wasn’t sure what to do with it, she folded it back up and left it on the table.
My love and gratitude to the McManuses: Deborah, Jason, Alan, and Mage. Mattie Miller, I love you. Bridget Forster and Eleanor Murphy, always.
Bill Clegg invented this book twice, first with editorial vision and then by finding it a home. He took extraordinary care, every step of the way. Thank you to Shaun Dolan, William Morris Endeavor, and Chris Clemans.
Courtney Hodell edited
The Unfortunates
three comprehensive and compassionate times. Her standards were higher and her perceptions keener than mine. It is how it is because of her brilliance. Thank you also to Mark Krotov.
My heartfelt thanks to Eric Chinski for his generous and wise care in guiding
The Unfortunates
to print. Thank you to Peng Shepherd for her excellent and tireless help and direction. Thank you to Lenni Wolff and Steve Boldt for making an elegant book out of a stack of pages. Thank you to Rodrigo Corral and Emily Bell for this most brilliant cover. Thank you to Katie Kurtzman. Sarita Varma, I’m very lucky it’s you taking her out the door. Thank you to Ken Holland and Steven Pfau.
Advice from kind and gifted readers is woven though each page of this book: Thank you to Peter Cameron, Sarah Dohrmann, Fredi Friedman, Elaine Kim, Valerie Martin, Leslie York, and my fellow writers at Sarah Lawrence’s MFA program. Josh Henkin read the first eight pages of
The Unfortunates
and suggested it might be a novel. He read the rest ten years later. My deepest gratitude to Sam Leader. Thank you to the genius and generous Amanda Coplin, Jaimy Gordon, and Christine Schutt. Thank you to Janet Benton, who helped me learn how to be. Emma Ortega, thank you for your love and care.
For their advice and expertise on various matters of law, finance, and business, I am indebted to Marshall Beil, Elizabeth Egan, Micah Kelber, and Alexa Kolbi-Molinas. Special thanks to Alex Chachkes for his illuminating e-mails about drug development. I am grateful to Steve Almond for lending his beautiful line about why we need books to Victor, unattributed on page 53. Thank you to Kyle Smith, of whose style I made inferior imitation in the form of a fake
New York Post
article. Bradford Louryk loaned me his scarf.
Multiple system atrophy is a disorder I learned about while writing
The Unfortunates
. I took narrative liberty with its symptoms. I thank anyone who reads this book and suffers from MSA for tolerating my interpretation of the experience. I am grateful to the MSA Coalition for their informational video
Sophie’s Search for a Cure
. Learn more at
www.multiplesystematrophy.org
.
I owe a turn of plot each to
Howards End
, by E. M. Forster, and
The House of Mirth
, by Edith Wharton. For the customs and tribulations specific to an American industrialist dynasty, I am indebted to
Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach
, by Meryl Gordon, and to Gloria Vanderbilt’s works, particularly
It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir.
My life was forever changed by the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Thank you to Elizabeth McCracken for extending my time there. Thank you, Roger Skillings. Washashores make the greatest captains. I am grateful to the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Jentel Foundation for time and space to write early on.
Salvatore Scibona, I learned more from you about how to write in five hours at a pizza place than I did in the preceding ten years. For that, and for the many other good and bighearted turns you’ve done this book and writer, thank you.
Rob Strauss, dear friend. Thank you for so much, going way back and forward. This book wouldn’t exist without you.
Jason Mones, life of my life, maker of days. You made it so I could make it. All thanks and all love. You too, sweet V.
Sophie McManus
was born in New York City and received her MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Jentel Foundation. Her work has appeared in
American Short Fiction
and
Tin House
, among other publications.
The Unfortunates
is her first book. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
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