A Watershed Year (7 page)

On the way back to the nursing home, Mavis fell asleep, slumping against Lucy’s arm as she drove. It reminded her of Mavis’s
one hundredth birthday party, an absurdly elaborate affair at the Sheraton. Mavis’s hair had been teased into a froth infused with tiny sparkles. Her nails had been painted bright red, and she wore a purple satin pantsuit Rosalee had purchased in Macy’s preteen department. The band played Sicilian folk songs, and the mayor of Towson danced with the children.

But before the cake had been cut, Mavis fell asleep in her wheelchair and missed all the speeches. Rosalee and Bertie had to wheel her back to the hotel kitchen because Molly had cried, thinking she was dead. Harlan was at the party too, just after his first round of chemotherapy. He spent most of the evening talking sports with her uncles. He still had most of his hair then—though he kept touching his head as though he thought it might fall out publicly and all at once—but he didn’t have the energy to dance.

four

L
ucy had been waiting for Harlan’s e-mail, anticipating it for days, and yet when it came, she still felt a chill at seeing his name appear in her in-box as she ate an English muffin and drank her coffee before class.

Dear Lucy,

I don’t know about you, but February was always one of the hardest months for me. The holidays are long past; it’s drab and gray, with spring still months away. Back in my teaching assistant days at Rutgers, the students would get into a funk where they started debating every grade. “But according to the rubric, this is really a B-minus, not a C-plus.”

February was also the month my father died, and I get a little melancholy when I imagine how my life would have been different if an eighty-five-year-old driver hadn’t crossed the center line. I was only twelve, and I had to watch my mom turn into a basket case as Dad’s coma stretched on for weeks. I wish I could say that I grew up then, matured enough to care for my mom, but I didn’t. I just resented her for losing it, because I was only a kid who didn’t want anything to change.

Did I ever tell you what I was thinking when you rammed me in the parking lot at Rutgers? I glanced into my rearview mirror and saw this terrified woman with her hand over her mouth, her crazy hair filling up the rest of the mirror, and I wanted to kick you into next week. Careless
driving, for good reason, is a pet peeve of mine. I don’t even turn on the radio when I drive because I’m afraid I’ll become distracted and cause the same kind of accident that took my father from me.

But when I got out of the car and saw how sorry you were, it all disappeared. You were going on about insurance and how you’d never hit anything before, and all I could see was your absolute sincerity. It’s there in your face, along with your intelligence, and you can’t do anything to hide it. I knew you would be part of my life. I knew it with absolute certainty, the way you know right away which students will get A’s as soon as you meet them. I just didn’t know how important you would become.

Sylvie didn’t like you, although you probably knew that. When I look back, I realize that she redoubled her efforts to get me to set a date soon after I mentioned your name. When you and I both got hired at Ellsworth, she would show up for the weekend with her plans and her presents and her paint-by-number canvas of our future together. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t sure any of it mattered, because that long, untroubled road I assumed I had ahead of me suddenly turned into an intersection with a stop sign, and I didn’t know if or when I’d be allowed to continue.

The doctors really tried to provide a future for me; I want you to know that. They even talked to me about infertility before my treatments started, but I didn’t see any reason to bring children into a world that allowed such suffering. I almost laugh when I think about it now, because my suffering had only begun. That was right around the time of your great-grandmother’s one hundredth birthday party, which had a strange effect on me. I started to think that maybe I was the lucky one, that maybe it would be better to die than to see what other torture life had in store for me, or to live to the point where I didn’t recognize my own relatives or my own face in the mirror.

I tried to hide it from you, though. I didn’t want you to know that I sometimes succumbed to my own drowning thoughts, when you were trying so hard to keep me on the surface. It’s funny, but I’ve heard you complain about your own mother’s relentless cheerfulness and how
annoying it can be, and yet you
are
cast in her mold, showing up with your Junior Mints and your clipped-out comics and your forced smile. But when that first depression lifted, I loved you for it. I knew you wouldn’t let me sink all the way to the bottom, and that’s what kept me going as they stuck me with needles and took my blood and scanned me and probed me and pumped me full of toxic chemicals. It kept me from ending it back then, when I first thought about it.

I find myself hoping that you’ve started a new life, one that involves less sacrifice and more joy. Take a few moments this month to do something for yourself. Don’t get me wrong, teaching overprivileged teenagers about religion and philosophy is important, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get tenure. Maybe it’s just not worth it if it means confining yourself to a library carrel for months at a time.

It’s hard for me to remember what it feels like to wake up without pain, but I know I’d appreciate it in a completely different way now. So maybe you can do that for me; appreciate what you have every right to take for granted.

Love,

Harlan

Lucy’s coffee grew cold as she read the e-mail over and over, floored by her own ignorance. Of course he had been depressed, for legitimate reason, and yet she had tried to talk him out of it, to pretend it wasn’t happening. Had she hauled a drowning man to shore, over and over, when he didn’t want to be saved?

His comments about his father and mother surprised her as well. He had rarely talked about his family, and she had never really stopped to think about how lonely he must have been as a child. On the outside, he had been so outgoing, so well adjusted, but his losses weren’t your everyday losses. His mother had never been able to cope with his illness, just as she had apparently abandoned him after his father’s death. Lucy had projected the warmth of her own family onto Harlan’s, almost unable to imagine a childhood devoid of tender care.

What struck her, finally, were his revelations about Sylvie, and strangely, the fact that Sylvie hadn’t liked her.
Who wouldn’t like me?
she thought, before acknowledging some small satisfaction that Sylvie had seen her as a threat after all.

She wondered, then, about her great-grandmother and tried to imagine herself in Harlan’s place. Would she want to live more than one hundred years if ten or fifteen of them were spent in a cloud of confusion? Would it be better to have only fifty, if every day were appreciated in the way Harlan was talking about? It was a good thing, she decided, that few people were given a choice.

A FEW DAYS after Harlan’s February e-mail, Lucy checked her phone messages and found one from the faculty housing department telling her she could move into the two-bedroom duplex on March 1, much sooner than she had hoped. This is what Harlan wanted, wasn’t it? She was taking charge, moving ahead with the adoption in the name of love and life, and putting her work second. She only wished she could tell him she was listening.

She took stock of her place and realized she could pack and move most of it herself, with the exception of Harlan’s rosewood dining table, which she would have to pay to have moved for a second time. She would start her packing with the saints.

Lucy picked up Saint Gregory the Great, the patron of teachers and students, who had been pope in the sixth century and had founded a number of monasteries. She had called upon Saint Gregory a few times during her first few classes, when the students had looked at her as if she were an abstract painting, squinting their eyes and tilting their heads in an effort to gain perspective. Back then, she had a tendency to begin a sentence without knowing where it was going, and her lectures, she told herself gently, were a little bumpy. Now she looked at Saint Gregory, the plaster chipped from the end of his nose,
and wondered how she would explain her fascination with the saints to a child. To her son.

She couldn’t convey in words why she had connected more with the saints themselves than with the Catholicism in which she had been raised. She had always been drawn to the saints—how they lived up to impossible standards in ways that most humans couldn’t fathom—and by the specific needs each had come to shelter. Maybe it was even more basic than that. Categories had always made her happy, from the time she was in preschool, grouping the blocks in descending order of size. And wasn’t it nice to know there was a saint who looked after fugitives, and one who might help if your contacts felt too dry?

There were saints for accountants, knife grinders, longshoremen, circus workers, and lighthouse keepers; others who might protect you from kidney stones, procrastination, shipwrecks, or rheumatism; some took care of whole towns or countries, while others focused on particular situations, such as parents separated from children or crop failures. Thousands of categories. She liked to think of it as a vast coatroom with outerwear to cover any and all suffering. Whether or not she actually benefited from saintly intercession seemed less important than the comfort of knowing where to ask for it in an emergency, like having a doctor in the family.

She had put down Saint Gregory and had decided instead to start with her many unused kitchen gadgets—all gifts from her sister-in-law—when her doorbell rang. She assumed it was her neighbor Louis, since he was the only person who came to visit without calling first, now that Harlan was gone. She was right.

“I’m deep into Aquinas today,” Louis said, following her into the small kitchen and sitting on a stool. “I really need your take on the five ways to prove the existence of God.”

“Sorry, I can’t today,” she said. “Want to help me pack? I’m moving into a two bedroom in a couple weeks. I’m adopting.”

“It’s not one of those freshmen boys in your Bible course, is it? They’d love for you to adopt them.”

“No,” she said, laughing. “It’s a four-year-old boy. From Russia.” She felt a surge of affection for Louis, not having laughed out loud for some time.

“A four-year-old.” Louis whistled, replicating the sound of a bomb being dropped in the distance. “That’s a huge commitment. When does he get here?”

“If everything goes well, I’ll go to Russia this summer to pick him up.”

Louis picked up Saint Gregory from the kitchen counter. Lucy set down a box holding a never-used apple-peeler-corer-slicer and stood next to Louis. The statue had come from one of her favorite gift shops in Rome, near the Vatican. It sold only plaster pieces with hand-painted details.

“Saint Gregory kept getting drawn into all these ecclesiastical disputes,” she said, rubbing her finger along the chip in the statue’s nose. “But all he really wanted to do was stay in the monastery and write.”

“I can relate,” Louis said. “I had a chance to go out Saturday, and I stayed in to read
Summa Theologica
. So, what’s his name? This four-year-old.”

“I’m calling him Mat.” She showed Louis the worn photograph.

“Is the dean giving you some time off? I asked him for a day off about a month ago, and he told me PhD students are indentured servants who don’t get paid to take vacations.”

She moved a few kitchen gadgets into a box and realized that she hadn’t really thought any of this through: how she would care for a child and continue working full time; whether or not she could expect to get tenure; if she would ever again open the musty pages of a book in some half-forgotten monastery.

“I’ll work it out,” she told Louis, who had hopped off the stool to go. She admired the way his limbs moved. There was something athletic about him, though she had never seen him exercising.

“I have no doubt,” he said on his way out the door. “You’re just one of those people.”

“One of what people?”

“You know. The ones who take care of sick people, adopt orphans from Russia. The rest of us just want to know when it’s time for dinner.”