Plantation (53 page)

Millie tightened her lip to me and shot me a look. It was all right to make jokes with her, but not about God. No, sir.

“Don’t ask me! There it was! Poof ! I spent the next who knows how long on my knees begging for guidance! Somebody in this family needs to take a position in times of crisis and there’s not exactly a line of volunteers outside the door, is there?”

“You are one hundred percent right. Come on. Let’s get them cleaver flowers in a pot to boil. Roots and all. Make some tea.

Makes tumors shrink.”

I shot her a look, like the one she had sent me.

“What?” she said, and put her hands on her hips.

“Shrink tumors? I thought you always told me it was a diuretic.”

“Rinse the dirt off the roots. It’s a diuretic too. Good for what ails you. Can’t hurt.”

“Oh,” I said, and put the pot under the spigot, giving it an inch or so of water.

“Yanh, put this in too,” she said and tossed a handful of ivy in the pot.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Ivy? Isn’t that poisonous?”

I knew the minute I said it, hell would reign.

“You know something, girl? You gone drive me crazy, yanh?

We gone add some honey to the mix and it stops cancer from growing. Also opens the liver, gallbladder, and spleen to flush out toxins! Now, go on answer the door!”

I hadn’t even heard the knock! Millie was right. I should just leave her to her business and let her tend to Mother. By the time I reached the door, Eric was there and was welcoming in Rusty. I could almost see his heart pounding under his T-shirt and he reeked of mouthwash. Young love. Nothing like it.

“Morning, Rusty! So good to see you!” I said. “Would you like some coffee? Hot tea?”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Levine,” she said, “I brought a thermos. But thanks.”

“You go on, Mom. If she needs anything, I’ll get it for her,”

Eric said, beaming at her like Alfalfa at Darla. He followed her to the living room where Millie had set up a table for them to use.

“Oooo-kay!” I said and returned to the kitchen.

The phone rang. I watched it with Millie and then picked it up on the fourth ring. It was Dr. Taylor’s office. Could I come in with my brother? She wanted to know if that afternoon was convenient.

“No, I’m sorry, it’s not. Can I just speak to Dr. Taylor?”

“He’s with patients,” she said, politely and firmly.

“I’ll wait,” I said. Okay, that was a New York City, ballsy thing to say, but I had every intention of holding until he picked up the line.

“That’s not possible,” she said, taking an Am-I-Not-Special?

thrill-pill to mark her tiny and insignificant amount of power.

Yesterday, I hated doctors. Today we could add nurses to that list.

“Oh, but it is!” I said, sweetly, assuring her I’d be a gargantuan pain in her ass if she pushed me.

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“Hold on, please,” she said.

I held. And held, and held, and held. Millie looked at me as though I’d lost my mind.

In a moment of ingenuity, I placed her on hold and redialed Dr. Taylor’s office on another line. She answered.

I said in a very even tone, the kind I used with Eric’s old teachers when I talked to them in my bathroom mirror, “If you don’t put Dr. Taylor on this phone right now, I’m going to call you every five minutes and drive you insane.”

She put me on hold without a word and Jack Taylor picked up the line.

“Caroline?”

“Oui! C’est moi! Qué pasa?”

“God. And she’s multilingual. Listen, Caroline, I don’t like to talk about these kind of things on the phone but I understand your anxiety so I’ll come to the point and then if you want to, you can come in and we’ll discuss any questions you might have.”

“Good,” I said, “thanks.”

“It’s what I feared. The CAT scan shows enlarged liver and spleen and tumors in the bones and brain. The blood work indicates that your mother’s liver is already failing. She has fully metastasized cancer. She probably has about six to eight weeks to live before she begins to shut down. There is no course of treatment—

just to keep her pain-free. I want you to stay in touch with me and call me every day if you want to. I’m sorry, Caroline. I truly am. I’ll call Jim Thompson myself. There’s no point in putting her through more tests.”

I couldn’t speak. Life drained from me, the room went black, and I sank to the floor. The next thing I remember is Millie kneel-ing down by my side.

“I told him we’d call him later,” she said and wiped my face with a cold cloth. “I’ve had my cry and you’ve had your swoon.

Time to call Trip, put our heads together, and figure out what to do with this information.”

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k She pulled me to my feet. My face was locked in a scowl.

“What you thinking, girl?”

“That this is a big mistake,” I said, sticking my chin out and shaking my head back and forth, my eyes brimming with tears again, never leaving hers. “This just can’t be so.”

“Go on, honey, let’s let ’em roll.”

Millie and I went out to the back porch and sat on the top step together. Sat like we had sat stringing bushels of beans and shuck-ing corn when I was a teenager, sat like we had sat when I was younger, pulling heads off shrimp—like two old friends, anchored together, and we wept and wept like children.

Forty-three

A Doctor in the House

}

Friday afternoon

ICHARD called me on Tuesday night. His

colleagues had nothing to offer that Jack Taylor R didn’t know. Same procedures, same prognosis, same predictions.

“Oh, hell, Richard. It’s bad,” I said, after I told him about the test results. “I am just so broken from this. I feel like I’m falling apart.”

“Of all the rotten things. Do you want me to come down?”

What? Want him to come down? Advice, sure. Visitation, of course. But, come down here and sleep in my bed? Was that what he meant? Was he insane or did he find death titillating? Did he think I was implying that I needed him? I did, I admitted that to myself. But for comfort as a friend, not as a husband.

“Come
here?
” I said. It was the best I could manage. I’d had enough shock for one week.

“Caroline,” he said, “you left me, darling. I didn’t leave you. I still love you. If you need me, I’ll come.”

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k I hardly knew what to say. In just a few weeks, I felt that I had struggled and rearranged my life to go on, perfectly well, thank you, and that that new arrangement had only occurred as a result of his outrageous infidelity and his bizarre erotic tastes! Was he crazy? Or was I?

“What are you saying, Richard?”

He sighed deeply, the way he always did when he was searching for words. “That I’ve had sufficient time to think and sort things out.

I realize that I took you outside the boundaries. You are perfectly entitled to your opinion. I know that seeing Lois and me together was very upsetting to you. I know I was wrong, Caroline. Not wrong to want what I want, but wrong in that my desire hurt you.”

“What? Now desire is different than infidelity?” Not wrong to want what he wants, but wrong to hurt me? Or what? More head games! He had been leading a double life and the only reason it was wrong was because I caught him? Because Lois was nearly strangling Johnson under a tent of linen?

“I’m saying that I’d give it a go again, if you wanted to, that is.”

“What happened to Lois?”

“She’s dating an oral surgeon.”

“A root canal doctor?” I had to snicker. A perfect Freudian coincidence.

“Apparently,” he said. “They seem to be rather serious.”

“Gee, that’s too bad.” I felt a fleeting droplet of sympathy for him. All alone in New York with no one to wrestle his Willie under a napkin in a restaurant. Puhhhhleaaase. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

“Very funny,” he said.

“Well, then, try the personals in the back of
New York
magazine. Sure—MWMDRPHD seeks F for SMBDHJ. Like Eric says, do the math.”

“I imagine that on some level, I deserved that.”

“Yeah, my inner child felt like a drive-by.”

Silence. Followed by sighing and more silence.

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“Oh, hell, Richard. I’m just not, I don’t know, I can’t think about . . .”

“There, there, darling. You’re right. Now is not the time. You just remember that if you need me, I’ll be there in a few hours.”

I thanked him to give the conversation a cordial end and gave the phone to Eric for them to chat. I walked away feeling my stomach roll.

The past few days had been that way. Mother had been suspiciously quiet all week—locked up in her room, on the phone. She took it upon herself to call Dr. Taylor Tuesday afternoon and invite him for dinner Friday night. She said she preferred to talk to him on her territory, that she’d be more comfortable asking questions in her living room while knocking back a bourbon and branch than in his office where she could smell medicine.
Surely he could
understand that?
Poor Dr. Taylor was no match for Mother’s dis-arming charm. He accepted and Dr. Death would arrive within the hour. She was upstairs dressing and primping as though her lover were about to knock on the door with flowers.

Okay, I’ll admit that Jack Taylor was a nice man and it wasn’t his fault that Mother had skin cancer that would kill her. And it wasn’t his fault that he had to be the one to deliver the bad news.

Still, he was Dr. Death.

Eric and I had decided to help prepare the dinner, with Millie’s supervision.

“I ain’t so crazy about you coming back yanh and trying to take over my kitchen!”

“It’s a good thing I am back! You and Mother would buy every gadget available on the Internet if I let you!” As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. Mother wouldn’t be buying gadgets any longer. No, Mother’s “dotcom” days were countable. I pushed the thought aside and went over the menu with Eric once more.

“Did you put soup spoons on the table? The round ones?”

“Yep, to the right of the teaspoon, just like you showed me,” he said. “What’s the soup anyway?”

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Cream of tomato with lump-meat crab, finished with a shot of sherry.”

“Hold the sherry in mine,” he said, “I don’t drink.”

The edges of my lips turned up and I looked up at Millie. She was shaking her head, testimonial to witnessing another precious statement from Eric.

“Lemme check that crab meat. Might have some shell in them,”

Millie said.

She was determined to have a role in everything we did all week. I couldn’t blame her. The reality of Mother’s certain demise had hit us all, shaking us up. Even Frances Mae had appeared on Wednesday, her right arm filled with flowers and that ugly red-headed baby of hers on her left hip.

“Hi! Come on in!” I had said when I opened the door.

“No, I can’t stay. These are for Mother Wimbley. How is she feeling?”

“Well, she won’t discuss her health. But she’s been in her room a lot and on the phone a lot. Are you sure you don’t want a glass of tea?”

“No, thanks,” she said. I took the flowers from her and she shifted my niece, Little Red Rottweiler, to her other hip. “The girls have ballet this afternoon, so I’m driving all over hell’s half acre again! I swanny to Saint Pete, all I do is drive!” She was already halfway to her car. “Bye! Tell Mother Wimbley I send her a big kiss!”

I thought about Frances Mae as I chopped tomatoes for the soup. Even she had been uncharacteristically generous and congenial. We had all been seeing less and less of her. A small blessing given the hurricane we were feeling in our hearts.

Trip and Frances Mae were not coming for dinner. We would be just four at the table—Mother, Jack, Eric, and I. Somewhere during the week I had decided to throw myself headlong into the kitchen and cook away my grief.

As bungling and out of practice as I was, every technique I P l a n t a t i o n

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knew resurfaced slowly as I called on them. Actually, what I did was buy
Gourmet
and copy the presentations as well as I could—

that and other things I downloaded from the Web. Having pictures helped.

I counted portions of meat and realized I had overcooked again. We had tomato soup, grilled baby trout on a bed of greens, sliced medallions of pork over garlic mashed potatoes, and homemade peach ice cream for dessert. We didn’t need four pounds of pork, even if it did shrink when I roasted it.

“Your potatoes smell good!” Millie said, lifting the top of the double boiler and inhaling the steam. “Garlic?”

“You betcha! Learned that from you! Sautéed and then smashed and chopped. Everything’s ready—just have to quickly reheat the fish. Roast is done too. What did the world do before garlic?”

I turned to see her stick her finger in the potatoes and quickly lick it off.

“Mmm!” she said. “Whatcha got for appetizers? This doctor is single?”

“And why would I care if he was? Appetizers? Oh, Lord, Millie! I completely forgot about that! Yeah, he’s single but he’s the messenger of doom. You know I hate doctors.”

“You stupid too, yanh? He’s pleasant to look at, I suspect?”

“Pleasant enough. If you like the undertaker type.”

“And you think you don’t need me?”

“Millie? I need you now worse than ever!”

We eyed each other for a minute of serious thought and we were either going to start crying again or make dinner before Dr. Taylor arrived.

“I’ll go to the freezer. I got raspberries and brie in phyllo. Turn that oven on to four hundred degrees and go on and get dressed.

You look like something the cat dragged in! Where’s Eric?”

“I don’t know; I’ll find him. Where did that boy go?”

I called all around the house and when I went upstairs, I heard his voice coming from Mother’s room. I stood in the doorway and 4 3 6

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k watched them. They were completely oblivious to me. Mother was on her chaise in a kimono, hair and makeup perfectly done. Eric was enthralled, curled up on the floor at her feet.