Change of Heart (22 page)

Tuesday morning Sharlie waited for Brian to leave for work, and called Queens information for the telephone number of Mrs. M. Udstrom in Elmhurst. She sat for a long time trying to summon the courage to dial. She remembered lying in her hospital bed at Saint Joe's working herself up to call Brian to thank him for saving her life. There was no use speculating what would have happened if she had never made the call. Would the numbers under her fingers at this moment precipitate a comparable upheaval in her life? Unthinkable, change of any kind. And yet not to make the contact left her poised on the edge of something forever unresolved.

The voice at the other end sounded tremulous. Suddenly Sharlie's carefully prepared words fled. She gripped the phone hard and managed to stammer, “Mrs. Udstrom, I'm Charlotte Converse. I mean, Morgan.” She laughed a little with embarrassment and nervousness.

“Yes. I know who you are,” the voice said tonelessly.

“I would like to see you. Meet you,” Sharlie went on.

“Why?” asked Mrs. Udstrom.

“Oh,” Sharlie faltered. “Well, I think it would be nice…” Oh, my God, she thought. The woman's son is dead, and I think it would be “nice.” “What I mean is, I would like to thank you.”

“Not necessary,” said Mrs. Udstrom.

“Oh, but it is,” Sharlie gushed, thankful that videotelephones were not yet the norm. Her face was so crimson and hot that she put her hand against her cheek to cool it down. She took a breath and tried again. “Mrs. Udstrom, I would really like to talk to you. In person. If you think it would be difficult for you, of course I won't impose. But it
is
important to me.”

“All right,” the flat voice replied. They arranged a time, or rather Sharlie arranged and Mrs. Udstrom agreed.

The shabby frame houses on Twenty-sixth Avenue seemed deserted to Sharlie as she walked along the cracked sidewalk. She was grateful that she'd worn a pair of slacks. She shuddered, imagining herself waltzing into one of these sad homes sporting a designer dress whose every thread shrieked “privilege.”

She passed a clump of dusty gray trees surrounded at its base by a bouquet of litter. In front of Number 159, she stopped, staring anxiously at the peeling paint and the cellophane stretched over missing window panes.

Do I
really
want to do this? she asked herself. But Udstrom's heart thumped steadily in her ears. She walked resolutely up the cinder block steps and knocked.

Mrs. Udstrom opened the door so quickly that Sharlie wondered if the woman had been watching out the window as she hesitated on the sidewalk. Sharlie tried to smile, but Mrs. Udstrom's face was expressionless as she stood aside and said, “Come in.”

She led Sharlie to a tiny living room. A tea set had been laid out on the coffee table. The older woman took her seat on a stiff-backed chair and motioned to Sharlie to sit on the couch. Sharlie noticed that Mrs. Udstrom's cup was chipped along the rim.

“Thank you,” Sharlie said, lifting her teacup. She helped herself to sugar, but her fingers had begun to shake, so she set the saucer down and folded her hands in her lap.

“Mrs. Udstrom …” she began tentatively, “I appreciate your letting me come.”

Mrs. Udstrom nodded. She wore a faded-blue dress—to match her faded eyes and faded, peeling house, Sharlie thought. Her face was fined and nearly as gray as her hair. She was a lean, bony woman, and Sharlie thought she must have been quite handsome before poverty and misfortune had worn her down.

“I want to thank you … for your son's … for your son …” Sharlie began to blush. This was much more difficult than she had thought, probably a mistake altogether. How much of her impulse to come here had been the need to express gratitude and how much was a macabre curiosity about the mother of the stranger who had become so significant to her?

Finally Mrs. Udstrom spoke. It was the monotonous, flat voice Sharlie recognized from the telephone.

“I done my Christian duty, that's all.”

“It was a wonderful thing. You saved my life.”

“I done what I had to.”

The statement seemed so final that Sharlie thought she should probably get up and leave, but Mrs. Udstrom sat stirring her tea and regarding her with pale eyes that were filmed with something indefinable. Grief? Exhaustion?

“Could I trouble you for a glass of water, please?” Sharlie asked reluctantly.

Mrs. Udstrom got up without a word and returned a moment later with the drink. Sharlie opened her bag and took out the ten-
A.M.
medication she had prepared before leaving the apartment. With Mrs. Udstrom watching silently, she swallowed nine pills and capsules, crowding as many into her mouth as possible in order to avoid being forced to ask for more water. She set the glass down, and still Mrs. Udstrom stared at her with complete disinterest, as if Sharlie had merely inserted herself temporarily into the woman's sole line of vision.

“I'm sorry … about your son,” Sharlie said finally.

“He got what was coming,” the woman responded curtly. She saw the shock in Sharlie's face and went on. “Giving you his heart's the one decent thing he ever done, and that wasn't none of his doin', was it?”

“He was so troubled?”

Mrs. Udstrom's mouth twitched in what Sharlie presumed to be the bitter remnants of a smile.

“That's what they call it, do they, ‘troubled'? Well, he troubled me all his life. And it wasn't that he didn't get nothin' at home. I sacrificed and worked, two, three jobs, day and night, housework, laundry, and anything so's he got a clean shirt for school and somethin' for lunch in his bag. And to keep this place.”

“His father?” Sharlie asked.

“Run off. Before Martin was born.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.” She hesitated, then asked. “If you were working, what did you do with … your boy?” She couldn't bring herself to say “Martin.”

“When he wasn't in school, he come with me. Or stayed here.”

“By himself?”

“Now, who would I keep him with?” Her voice was tired, resigned. “Anyway, he liked bein' alone. The other kids use to torment him so's he'd shut himself up in his room, and I'd have to whip him to get him to school.”

Sharlie looked stricken, and Mrs. Udstrom continued, still without a trace of emotion in her voice. “He couldn't talk right. Had this stammer. Oh, he didn't say much anyhow, but when he did, it come out all stuttery. The other kids, they'd make fun.”

“How cruel,” Sharlie said.

Mrs. Udstrom shrugged. “That's kids.”

She sat musing for a moment. “Martin, he went for a whole summer once without sayin' more'n a word or two, and them you couldn't hardly figure out.”

Sharlie was beginning to feel ill. Her head ached, and her stomach was queasy. She longed to get out of this shabby room, away from this woman who said such terrible things in a worn voice as if she were reciting her grocery list. Sharlie set her teacup down.

Mrs. Udstrom was gazing off into a dark corner. “But I kept this place. I did that.”

“Yes,” Sharlie said, hoping her urgent compulsion to leave wouldn't come bursting out in a scream. She stood up, forcing her voice to remain level. “Well, thank you for seeing me. And for the tea.”

Mrs. Udstrom rose also. There was nothing in her face to indicate that she cared whether her visitor stayed or left. Sharlie walked deliberately toward the front door, resisting the impulse to run. She stopped at the threshold and tried to smile.

“Well … thank you again,” she said. Mrs. Udstrom nodded wordlessly, and after hesitating for another moment, Sharlie started down the steps. She heard the door click shut behind her and kept her stride under control just in case the woman was watching her. Then, safely around the corner, she began to run. She ran and ran, further and faster than she had ever been able to run in her life. A ten-year-old boy-shadow raced beside her, laughing and jeering and stammering her name.

Despite her exhaustion, she couldn't go straight home. She took a cab to the Metropolitan Museum and spent almost two hours looking at Renaissance paintings, comforting herself with their classic order and their declaration of the civilized nature of humanity. She began to feel less distraught, and was able to think calmly about her interview with Mrs. Udstrom.

One of the astonishing things, she thought, was that the woman had never once inquired how Sharlie was doing. One wouldn't necessarily expect solicitude, but certainly there would be a natural curiosity. After all, it was her own son's heart beating across the teapot. If Sharlie were his mother, she knew she'd be straining all her senses searching for some hint of her child's immortality in the recipient's body. Mrs. Udstrom was a hollow shell, all the color bleached from her life, all vitality abraded away by misery. For such a woman there seemed to be no such instinct as curiosity. Only acceptance, a dull, grinding tolerance of everything that fell into her path.

Sharlie walked slowly through the Medieval Court and sat down to rest in the chapel alcove, imagining the face of Mrs. Udstrom's tortured son against the shadows. She understood his childhood torment, felt their fates converge—her years of pain and his seemed to twist together into a pattern of shared anguish. Her heart, his heart, pounded, echoing in the dark chamber of the chapel room. She knew him now. This afternoon in that defeated house, she had stared into the past of a man whose heart she carried beyond death. She realized also that finding him had finally set her free. Udstrom's life was over. Hers was not.

Sadness mingled with her relief, and she felt her eyes sting. She gazed up at the stained-glass windows, the deep-blue light like glistening seawater through her tears.

Diller had sent Sharlie home with a list of permissible foods—bland, dietetic items that she learned to detest. After three weeks of obedience she decided that in her new life—the resurrection, she had taken to calling it—she would allot one day every four weeks to consumption of contraband. At the beginning of each month she gleefully pinpointed the night of sin on her calendar and tantalized herself for days with fantasies of the forbidden delicacies she would devour.

Tonight was Wednesday, the twenty-first of August, and she and Brian met in front of Mario's Pizzeria on Second Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street.

“I hope it's really greasy,” she said as they took a table by the window.

“Don't look at me when your voltage drops to ten,” he warned.

“Don't nag me, Brian.”

His head snapped up from the menu.

“Sorry,” she said, but her face was tight “If I had to stick to that miserable glop, I might just as well be dead. I have to be normal every once in a while.”

Brian nodded, but it wasn't until their pizza came that they began to talk again.

On their way up to the apartment an hour later, just as the elevator doors were closing, a frantic voice called, “Hold it!” from the lobby, and Susan, Brian's downstairs neighbor, slid through the opening. She was out of breath from running, and in her tennis dress she was tan and lean, exuding vitality from every bronzed square inch.

“Brian!” she cried delightedly. “Where the hell have you been?”

“California,” he said, and before he could introduce Sharlie, she rushed on.

“They kept telling me ‘out of town' at your office. God, I've been scrounging partners all over the city, but nobody can give me our kind of game. When, my dear, when?”

With an uncomfortable smile Brian said, “Susan, I'd like you to meet my wife, Sharlie.”

Susan's jaw dropped. “Hi,” she said to Sharlie finally, eyes very wide. They had arrived at the seventh floor, and Brian held the door open as she talked. “You're who was in California, huh? Well, lucky girl. I've been working on him ever since I moved in, but I finally decided I'd better be satisfied with a singles match once a week.”

She stepped out of the elevator and turned to Brian with a weak grin. “Married. Well, listen, don't let me keep you. But I want a game. Sharlie won't mind. Will you?” She looked at Sharlie, and the great dark eyes stared back until Susan's smile faded. The doors shut, and they heard Susan's deflated voice call, “Best wishes …” as the elevator rose to the floor above.

They walked down the hallway in silence. Brian unlocked the door and turned to give Sharlie a mischievous look as they went inside, intending to tease her for what he assumed was jealousy. But her face was set hard.

“You've slept with her, haven't you?” she said.

Brian, taken aback, hesitated, and Sharlie burst out, “I knew it. I could tell. She didn't give a
shit,
did she, whose feelings she clomped on with her P.F. Flyer Superwoman sneakers.”

Brian pointed to the floor in alarm. “Hey, calm down.”

This only enraged her further. “No, I don't want to calm down. I'm sick of calming down. She's so goddamn healthy, I hate her.”

She slammed into the bedroom, leaving Brian to stand in the middle of the rug, suspended halfway between laughter and fury. He stood still for a few moments and then decided the best course was to ignore the entire incident. He went into the kitchen, drank half a quart of milk, and settled himself by the television. He flipped past the special ballet performance and stopped the dial at
Charlie's Angels.

God damn her, he thought, staring morosely at the screen. Let her stew in her own venom.

Half an hour later Sharlie crept out of the bedroom and sat down beside him, very prim and quiet, her slight body barely making a dent in the sofa. He looked at her solemnly, and she stared back with huge eyes.

“I'm sorry,” she said softly.

He tried to keep his face stiff but finally looked away, attempting desperately to maintain his righteous exasperation.

“I'm really sorry,” she repeated, her voice barely audible.

“Oh, shit,” he said. He reached out for her, and she felt the ferocity in his arms.

“Do you think we'll burn up with it?” she murmured against him.

“Sometimes I think so,” he said.

“You're going to turn me into a piece of ash,” she whispered, holding him as tightly as she could. Then she tilted her head back to look up at him mischievously. “And that's with an
h
!”