Crazy in Love (19 page)

“Donald told me Honora was so proud of that piece in the
Times
. So was I—I had Denise e-mail it to me. You’re something, you are.”

“Those interviews seem very far away. Maybe I was a fool to do them. This place is my life, Nick. Everything important to me is here, on the Point. You, the family—I started that bay profile so I could work at home, and even with the Swift Observatory I never intended to leave.”

“Staying home is not an act of faith,” Nick said. “If it were, I’d be guilty of something, coming to London. Even if you stay in that house for the rest of your life, things will change.”

“Come home.”

“One thing that won’t change,” he said, as if he had not heard me, “is that I love you. I will come home when I can.”

We said goodbye. Wrapping my black shawl around my shoulders, I walked onto the porch. My house had never felt so empty, and I wanted to wait for the first wisps of fog, coming for us across the bay.

THE DOCTOR TOLD US
the damage to Honora’s heart was extensive, but that she would recover. She was awake, he said, and wanted to see us. Clare and I debated whether to bring Pem to the hospital.

“It’s just going to upset her,” Clare said.

“Honora is her daughter. Doesn’t she have the right to be upset?” I countered.

“Yes, if she understood what was going on. Taking Pem to the hospital is like taking a two-year-old into the frighthouse.”

“Mom will want to see her.”

In the end, I won. We dressed Pem in her best dress, a crimson paisley challis, and bundled her into the car.

“I don’t want to go!” she said.

“See?” Clare asked.

Ignoring them, I started up the car. Driving through the fog with my sister and grandmother felt snug, oddly comforting, like a mug of hot chocolate after skating. Knowing Pem had once enjoyed Bing Crosby, I pushed a CD of his into the player.

“Aren’t you afraid of seeing her?” Clare asked.

“Not really. You are?”

“Yes. I’m afraid she’ll look as bad as she did yesterday. But even if she doesn’t, I’ll never forget the color of her skin. She’ll never know how bad it was. Isn’t it weird? She knows she’s sick, but she’ll never quite be able to see herself the way we did.”

“She’s seen sick people.”

“But you never think you could be as sick as other people. Honora will think of herself as having had a heart attack, and she’ll have to live differently as a result. But she’ll never see herself wearing the death mask, the way we did. We know how it’s going to end.”

“This is morbid,” I said.

“Well, that’s how I feel. Morbid.”

“Her doctor sounds optimistic.”

“I know. But don’t you feel you’ve had a peek into the future?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of how bleak I had felt the night before. Sitting on the porch, I had waited for the fog to surround me. It had come slowly, first blurring the lights in Clare’s house, then shrouding them. When I finally went inside, my hair was wet.

We entered the hospital through a door reserved for doctors, but our theory had always been if you do something with perfect confidence, everyone will assume you have the right. Besides, the doctors’ entrance was much closer to Intensive Care, and Pem wasn’t capable of a long walk.

“What are we doing here?” Pem asked.

“Visiting Honora,” I said. She shook her head.

We walked down a long corridor filled with patients on stretchers and in wheelchairs, with inhalators, respirators, EKG machines, and heart monitors: life-giving apparatuses that filled me with terror. Pem walked slowly, her feet shuffling along the bright floor, looking straight down. Occasionally she ventured to turn her head a minuscule amount, just enough to glimpse the stainless-steel wheel of a stretcher, the base of an IV pole, the white shoe of a nurse.

“The Egyptian Wing,” Clare said, and I nodded.

Once, Clare, Honora, and I had spent a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Walking through the Egyptian Wing, past the tombs, mummies, sarcophagi, funerary figures of pharaohs, we had all recognized it as the sort of place that would horrify Pem. She had childish sensibilities and was easily disturbed by ugliness or reminders of death. That day, in the Egyptian Wing, Honora had done an imitation of Pem walking exactly as she was doing now, in the hospital. After that visit to the Met it became impossible for me to believe Pem had not been with us. Whenever I visit the Egyptian Wing, I see her perfectly, shuffling along, head down, trying to escape the macabre.

We entered Intensive Care, and all the nurses converged on us. “Only two at a time,” they said.

Honora had already spied us and was waving. At once I saw her color was better, nearly pink, and she was smiling her square smile.

“Thank God,” I said to Clare.

“She’d love to see all three of us together,” Clare said to the nurses. “Please?”

“Well, for a minute,” the chief nurse said.

Crossing the room, Pem kept her head down, but she looked up when we reached Honora’s bed. “Take that thing out of your nose,” she commanded, referring to a clear plastic feeding tube that extended from an IV bottle into Honora’s left nostril.

“I like it,” Honora said. “It distinguishes me.”

“How are you?” I asked.

“Much better. Very tired, but aside from that, fine.”

“Do you remember everything?” Clare asked.

“Up until the time they brought me to this floor. I remember you were with me, sweetie. Thank you.”

“Oh,” Clare said, surprised, as if there was nothing to say, as if she had never expected to be thanked.

“Come on, get up and let’s go home,” Pem said. She sounded agitated, and I watched her scan the room for exits without ever letting her eyes rest on people in the other beds. I was beginning to feel I had made a mistake by insisting she come. I didn’t want her to upset Honora.

“Pem,” I said, trying to calm her, “we’ll go in a few minutes.”

“I want to go now!” she said, her voice rising.

Clare and I looked around, trying silently to apologize to the nurses and other patients.

“That’s okay,” Honora said. She beckoned Pem closer. Pem leaned toward Honora’s face. They touched each other’s cheeks. Then Honora held Pem’s old hand. They didn’t say a word, but both were staring intensely. After a while Pem straightened up. Honora’s mouth twisted down, fighting what it was about to say. “What’s going to happen to her?” she asked.

“I’ll go sit with her in the waiting room,” Clare said.

We watched them disappear through the double doors. Lines on the heart monitor behind Honora’s head zigzagged in a regular pattern. Faint beeps could be heard from around the room.

“We shouldn’t have upset you, bringing Pem,” I said. “It was my idea.”

“Of course you should have brought her,” my mother said. “I wanted very much to see her. The situation is upsetting, not Pem.”

“She hated seeing you like this.”

“I know she did. She’s worrying about me, I’m her daughter, and I’m afraid of what will become of her.”

“Clare and I are taking care of her.”

“For now,” Honora said, and the silence that followed felt as sinister as the fog had last night. “Heavens, I nearly forgot,” Honora said after a minute. “What a write-up in the paper yesterday! Didn’t I tell you you’d put the Swift name on the map? How did everything go?”

“Wonderfully,” I said, feeling guilty for thinking of Mark at that instant.

“She needs her rest,” a nurse said, standing beside me.

“This is my daughter,” Honora said, “and yesterday she was called ‘a visionary’ by the
New York Times
.”

“Mom—” I said, embarrassed.

“Well, it’s true.”

“That’s really exciting,” the nurse said. “But Mom does need her rest now, so you’ll have to come back later.”

Bending to kiss my mother’s forehead, I heard her whisper: “Tyrant. No appreciation for the intellect. Bring me some copies of that article, so I can pass them around.”

“Nick sends his love.”

“Dear Nicky. Now don’t let him hurry home from London on account of this.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, betraying no irony.

I RECORDED A MESSAGE
, telling anyone who called that they could reach me at a different number, and I moved into Honora’s house. I had thought Pem would be too disoriented, losing Honora even temporarily, to move to a different house. She sat on the sofa, occasionally casting a glance toward Honora’s empty end, scratching the sores on her head. She had stopped asking, “Where’s your mother?”; now she glared at me, accusing me of taking Honora’s place.

Notes for the Swift Observatory’s third report covered Honora’s black lacquered writing table, but I had no desire to work. Staring into the fog was like sitting before a mirror. It threw my thoughts back at me. With fog enclosing Bennison Point, the only family under observation was my own.

I noticed and envied Donald’s constant presence. Saying things were slow at work, he took four days off. Of all of us, Donald seemed the most profoundly sad. Clare and I felt sad, of course, but Donald seemed truly shaken. He couldn’t visit Honora without tears spilling from his eyes. I would see him standing on the dock, staring out to sea. Eating dinner with me and Pem, at the Mackens’ house or ours, Donald would sigh a lot. “It seems strange without her,” he said more than once.

Nick sent flowers to the hospital, called Honora from London, arranged for Liberty’s to send her a red cotton robe. That same day he sent me rain boots from our favorite store in Mayfair, because my old ones had worn out. Our telephone conversations were more frequent than ever. Although he didn’t feel that he could abandon the deal to come home, he did inform the clients and other lawyers that he had to take phone calls from me any time I called. Once I called him at the client’s office. His voice sounded casual as we spoke, and he let me trail on and on about how I didn’t feel the doctor was giving us adequate information, how Honora seemed in no hurry to leave the hospital, how Pem was withdrawing more every day, sitting for hours alone on the sofa.

“I think it’s too much for me,” I had said, close to tears. “My mother just had a severe heart attack, my grandmother is totally senile, and you’re so far away. I can’t stand it.”

“Neither can I. The timing of this tender offer is terrible.”

“They’re all going to be terrible,” I had snapped. “No matter what happens the rest of our lives, your work is going to come first.”

“That’s not fair, Georgie,” he had said. “And if you’re going to be mean, I have to get off because in order to take your call I just walked away from a table of thirty people, and they’re all sitting there waiting for me to return.”

Then I had felt guilty for interrupting his intense negotiating session and making thirty people wait, many of whom billed their time at hourly rates equivalent to monthly rents in some parts of the country; at the same time I had felt touched that he had considered me important enough to make them wait. In the old days, I would have taken it for granted.

The same day rain squalls washed in, dissolving the fog, Mark Constable called me at Honora’s.

“I called your house, got your machine, and it sent me here,” he said.

“This is my mother’s house,” I said. “She just had a heart attack, and I’m staying with Pem. You know, the grandmother I told you about.”

“Georgie, I’m really sorry.”

“I found out about it the night I came home from New York. A taxi drove me home from the train, and my sister was watching out for me.”

“First you faint, then you hear your mother had a heart attack. What a day. And it started off so well. . . .”

“Oh, you mean—” I stopped myself, because I had been about to say “because of the kiss” when I realized that he meant the
Times
article.

“Did you see the piece in the
Washington Post
?” he asked.

“No—I can’t believe it, it totally slipped my mind. Did you see it?”

“Yes, and I think it was even better than the
Times
. It described more of the issues you’ve covered and included an excerpt. Something about twins reunited after fifty years.”