Either Side of Winter (25 page)

The boys began. Claudius, with his back turned, loudly, bravely: ‘Now my offence is rank.’ The words rang rudely in the hallway. It suggested a strange freedom, which all of them enjoyed, to hear his unembarrassed echoes along the corridor. His tone unexpectedly patrician. The manner of a boy used to loneliness, long words, private dramatics. ‘Help, angels!’ – his voice rising grandly, before it broke into a squeak at the back of his throat – ‘make assay; Bow stubborn knees; and heart with strings of steel Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe. All may be well.’ At that, he pressed his head between his knees; his hair spread across the floor tiles. Rachel imagined giving it a good scrub between soapy hands.
Later, the words ‘all may be well’ offered her some comfort. Brian Bobek repeated them to her when she fell quiet; but many other things had come between them by then. ‘OK, Hamlet,’ Mr Englander broke in. ‘Take your hand out of your pocket. Before any protest: I know I
said.’
Claudius had won a few laughs, and this good-looking kid felt put out by them. It seemed suddenly beneath him to give it feeling.

Afterwards, Claudius rose grandly to his feet, and turned into the doorway. He had to hold the hair out of his face; his book propped open by the thumb of his other hand.

Rough applause. Claudius bowed widely, sweating, puffed up, out of breath – just once, his gifts acknowledged. Hamlet had already sat down and crossed his legs.

‘Perhaps,’ Mr Englander remarked, ‘Shakespeare should have called the play
Claudius, King of Denmark.
A more passionate protagonist.’ Such licence with the name made an impression on Rachel; it never occurred to her books could be called anything but what they were. That choices had been made, inside, outside the text. When the door closed behind him, she caught his eye. He sighed through his nose: these kids. A complicitous frown.

He began to discuss in detail both speeches, ‘answering soliloquies’. This short scene – his tone quiet, pervasive – lies at the heart of the play, its literal centre. (What an old ham he was, really, Rachel thought, perching at the window in his bow-tie.) This is what happens when you fail to act. Among other failures, the failure to communicate. Hamlet could have killed Claudius on the spot, his prayer had fallen short of God. (Rachel imagined balloons flagging and sinking as the helium
leaked.) Each soliloquy involved a significant refusal: Claudius would not give up his wife or throne, and so condemned himself knowingly to hell. There is also, of course, God’s rejection of the prayer to be considered. And Hamlet refuses – to fulfil the purpose of the story, his father’s revenge. And why? Because the language of
doing
is very inexact. As soon as you
do anything
, mistakes get made. So he wants to think about it. He wants to work out the whole thing in his head. The modern experience, Mr Englander said, standing now, pressing his hands together flat before him, is defined by this: if you refuse to act, wider worlds open up within.

Some years later, more deeply read, a lecturer herself, Rachel learned to appreciate this account for what it was. Clear-headed, passionate, a high-school teacher doing his best. At the time, however, it promised much greater things: access to the larger conversations of adulthood, in which vital matters could be openly discussed, the heart’s dearest secrets offered up.
People talk about important things.
Still later, as a grown woman, a married mother, she remembered him more sympathetically: simplicity has its place. ‘If you refuse to act, wider worlds open up within.’ This kind of talk still attracted her. She had supposed such conversations were commonly held; by this time she realized her kinship with Mr Englander was something rarer. (She thought of him whenever she looked over those drafts of her unpublished novel, kept in the storeroom of her house on 82nd Street. She abandoned it after college, quite happily in the end. Like a neglected pasture, covered in clover, they suggested a more general prosperity.)

That night she went home to Park Avenue and began to write, hot in her head in her hands in her heart. Beginning her first serious argument with him:

All of this seemed tremendously important to her, even with her father dying in the next room.

As soon as she stepped out of the lift, Rachel knew she was there. There were empty bags from Dean and Delucca lined neatly against the wall. A glass of hyacinths on the coffee table gave off meadow odours, a strong undertone in the room, a window letting in a draught of outside air. A rug from home lay folded over the red couch. Cluck-cluck of closed-door talk from her father’s bedroom. She knocked, and he answered alone, ‘Come in.’ Tasha lay back at an angle on the bed, one leg on the floor. She had her hand on her father’s hair, lifting up the strands of it, patting them down again. ‘Rachel, darling,’ she said, rising brightly. ‘I’m making coffee. Do you want some?’ The manner of someone brushing off an infidelity.

When she was gone, Reuben tried to sit up. ‘Help me.’ Taking his hand, she shifted him back in the bed, then let go to get pillows to place behind him. ‘Now that I’m dying she’s collecting me again.’

‘That’s not fair, you walked out on her.’

‘Well, what could I do? And now she’s walked in again. I’m in no position.’ Rachel’s still face was subtly accusative; she felt like a child again, pulling no weight, as her father tried to lift her in his arms. All give; amazing how hard it was to carry someone utterly unresisting. That’s how she felt now: slack. And wanted no part of this set-up. ‘Hear me out. I’m in no position.’ His voice, carefully modulated, betrayed the repetition
of his thoughts, a private argument already thrashed out. Even so, an audience inspired him with fresh passion, at a third try. ‘I’m in no position to turn down what I can get. I’m scared, Rachel. I have to do this alone. I don’t want to. I want to take somebody with me.’

‘Don’t I sit here? Don’t I listen?’

‘Believe me, at this stage, if you could take somebody with you, you would. You’d hold on to their hand and drag them after you.’ Tasha came in with two cups of coffee, set them down and went out again. She was wearing a flowered dress, light blue; her legs were still good from the knees down, her high lean calves, her arched feet. ‘Well,’ Reuben said, preparing to drink, leaning his head tenderly forward on his neck, ‘You’re too young. It isn’t fair.’

Afterwards, they all ate supper together. Tasha ordered in; they sat at the kitchen table. ‘Isn’t this nice?’ she kept saying. Rachel felt like a kid again; she wanted to scream, why do we have to pretend to be happy? The opened window looked over the courtyard, and the windows on the far side, unevenly lit. So many private lives. Later, she watched Tasha make her inspection of the apartments. Very approving: there were no marks anywhere of a third party. Rachel read silently on the couch. After Reuben went to bed, Tasha moved to sit beside her, laid her hand on Rachel’s thigh. ‘I thought you’d be happy,’ she said.

‘All you two do is fight. It’s all you ever did.’

‘We haven’t fought yet.’

‘You will.’

Tasha withdrew her hand and sat back. ‘Fighting isn’t so bad,’ she said. ‘You’ll learn that.’

Rachel closed her book. ‘I’m going to bed.’ She didn’t move, preparing herself for speech. Even she guessed it sounded over-rehearsed. ‘You can’t even let him die without nosing in. You always have to take centre stage.’

Tasha, deliberately childish, playing her daughter’s game, ‘I saw him first. I saw him first.’ Rachel knew when she was
being talked down to. But she remembered what Frannie had said: ‘It isn’t only your death.’ Well, it didn’t feel like hers at all any more. Or rather, this was only her first death; she had all the others to come, the people she hadn’t met yet, the lovers, the friends. Also, of course, her mother’s. For Tasha, this was the last one that mattered. She had the better right.

In the morning before school, Rachel liked to look in on her father in bed. Mostly in a rush, a glance in the door; the school bus came at a quarter to eight up Madison. When she put her head in the next day, her father lay on his back with his eyes open; Tasha on her belly still sleepy, heavy in sleep, the covers around her rumpled in human shapes, her plump arm sprawled across Reuben’s chest and holding him by the neck. He didn’t want to move; he didn’t want to wake her up. He lifted his eyes and closed them again, one of those gestures, more intimate than meaningful.

She decided to do something about Brian Bobek; in the event, this proved to be relatively easy. They had coffee one night in the diner on First. He smoked a cigarette, the taste of it later strong on her tongue, a little headrush. She told him about her father; consolation quickly turned to something else. With her eyes shut and her face pressed against his, the world seemed close and large; gratefully, she was blind to most of it. They held hands at lunchtime. In the baseball field, in the bright weather, she laid her head on his lap and he tried not to move. Frannie’s name never came up. Rachel, looking up through shut lids, saw red. Sometimes, among the bins in the alley behind the cafeteria, they made out; the sun shone hot on the white concrete, their faces sweated and cooled each other, their hands were restless and full of blood. Once Mr Englander discovered them; she was suddenly heartbroken, and ran after him, feeling an urge to… confess everything. But there was nothing to confess. And she never told Tasha or Frannie or her father.

Reuben didn’t have long left in any case. The nausea got worse. After all this, a lifetime of eating, shitting, pissing,
fucking, he couldn’t keep anything down, he was sick to his stomach. He was beginning to reject the world, his body wanted no part of it any more. Not that you saw Tasha cleaning up. Mostly it was still Rachel who brought mop and bucket from the kitchen cupboard, who held his hand and lifted heavily upwards when he got off the pot, who counted the pills out for him in her childish palm. When Rachel mentioned this, Tasha cried, ‘You have no idea what I’ve been doing all day, what I’ve been dealing with. You, you come home after a day of school. Every morning you leave him to me.’ In any case, Rachel was glad enough of the work, of doing her bit to help him die. She couldn’t share his bed at night, this was what she could do. It also occurred to her that these relations were less painful for her than for Tasha; her mother had known him in his more vigorous days. And Tasha, after anger, very weepy, heavy-nosed, yellow-eyed, leaned also on her daughter. ‘What have they done to him?’ she said. ‘My husband, my lover. When I first met him, you should have seen the way he danced, like a man from the movies. Such light, quick feet. Me, I always had heavy limbs, my breasts alone… a woman’s sleepiness. Later he told me how much the lessons cost; he could never refrain from mentioning prices. It gave him real pleasure on its own: the best in town, the most expensive.’ Now, she didn’t say, there were days he couldn’t walk unaided from the bed to the bathroom to be sick.

Also, the headaches; the pressure on his brain was growing. His private doctor, a grizzle-headed German who took peculiar pride in his unstained accent, his American manner, prescribed cortisone pills. These relieved him somewhat. There were worse details. Rachel discovered the terrible power of the specific – of things, as she said to Frannie, you could never imagine, and never imagine going wrong. They had inserted a ‘line’ in his stomach to facilitate the chemotherapy; this became infected, an ugly, bloody mess. Two days in the hospital, a course of antibiotics. Visiting him
in his white-tiled room was particularly painful, the journey to his ward alone exposed wide human suffering, the family of suffering, the vast sibling struggle for the parent’s attention, to alleviate pain. Money bought Reuben his own room, a view of warehouses. But in this case at least it couldn’t buy him what mattered.

Reuben, at his best, managed to keep up the joke. ‘Tell me, Doc; how much does a new head cost?’

The doctor was unamused. A conscientious man, also honest: he had little real interest in the pain he could do little to cure. And his sympathies were less tender than his professional curiosity. Still, he was an excellent physician, at the top of his field. His time was in large demand and humour wasted it. Everywhere, everywhere, Rachel thought, we are one among many. (Her language for such reflections had grown richer, subtler; yes, this did in fact soften the blows of reflection, cushion them slightly. She was reading passionately.)

Such a relief after all that to have him home again. It was almost happiness in itself, or very like it, to nurse him in his own bed. To arrange the daffodils on his window sill, and in the pleasure of this arranging, imagine his own.

The German increased his dose of morphine. Reuben swallowed the dry tablet dropped on his tongue in the morning, in the evening. Between times, when the pain grew inhuman, he drank morphine from a coffee mug. Rachel looked up the word in her dictionary: he was drinking not sleep but dreams. His manner was beginning to suffer from this necessary blurring. Rachel knew she was losing him – a loss of focus, a fade not to black but to the colour of ordinary life. When he died, ordinary life could begin again; they could wash the sheets of his bed, open the window, drive his smells from the room. They could go to the movies. Reuben drifted in and out of consciousness; like a man on an airplane, uncomfortable, dreaming of arrival.