Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (38 page)

“Which he did,” she said, “though he missed you terribly. Nightmares, tears, moping around—the works.” She choked up, but then gathered herself. “It was hard to tell him not to write you, call you, but he's a good kid. He picked up right away that I needed him to be big and to help take care of things, of himself, and me. So he helped—he grew up so much this summer! Grew closer to me again, too, like when he was a child. He told me on the drive back that he wasn't a child now
,
he was a
kid.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“And then there was my thesis.” She glanced at him with a furtive smile.

“You finished it?” She nodded. “Yes! Good for you! ‘The Columbian Spirit!'” He reached up to hug her, but it was too intimate—like when they first met—and he held back.

“Funny,” she said, “but looking back on the history of my working on it here in town, I realized that I was becoming the latest victim of the odd spell Columbia casts. I'd always been facile at writing history, in my pre-Columbian days, but here I just couldn't do it. I was in a weird kind of limbo, like my brain had turned to lard and my fingers were heavy with weird breakage. Only when I got away did I get any perspective on things, catch fire again, and I just raced through it all, and it's . . . well, it's all right.”

“I'm sure it's brilliant. I can't wait to read it.”

“I have to revise and do the bibliography. I'm really going to dive into it the next two weeks, night and day. I have to finish it before Cray goes back to school.”

“Will you make me a copy? Signed by the author?”

“Sure.”

Their eyes met and held for just an instant—as if there was too much gravity in the glance to keep afloat—and then fell. They stared straight ahead into the night at nothing visible, except maybe a glint of moonlight off the gold cross on the top of St. Mary's steeple. With what seemed enormous effort he put his hand on hers, his palm over the back of her hand. She raised her hand and turned it over so that they were at least palm to palm. Their fingers intertwined, feeling
known,
alive with their shared history.

Orville felt himself losing substance, starting to fade, as if part of him was already gone.

Miranda felt displaced, knowing now that it was truly over and that all she had left to do was ride out the couple of weeks before he went back to his life with his Italian lover, no kids and no family, and that would be that.

It was the best they could do, and the worst—sitting together staring into the night, being somewhere else. He in his somewhere else, she in hers.

· 29 ·

Dear Orvy,

By now it is two months since you left, and I hear from Amy that you are happily settled in Rome with Celestina. What I am about to tell you will unsettle you emotionally, but I sincerely hope it will not change your relationship with her. It is over between us and, I feel, over in a good way. With one caveat, from our history.

I am now five months pregnant. Yes, it is yours, ours. Given what you told me, it is a miracle, but I guess miracles happen. Yes, I thought to tell you, many times before I left for North Dakota. I found out soon after our disastrous day of the benefit for the Worth. The first time I sensed I might be pregnant was just before I came outside with the punch bowl and cups. You were waiting for me at the car, we were late, and you were angry. The reason that I was late coming out of the house was that I was in the bathroom being sick. I put that together with the way I had been feeling (“the flu that was going around”) and the fact that my period was late, and despite the impossibility of it being real, I decided to go for a pregnancy test the next day. I almost told you then, but it was such a jagged, terrible time. I held back, thinking that if it were positive, I could tell you. The next time I saw you was when we had that talk out at the bench by the stream under the catalpa tree, when we saw, I think, the worst of each other and had a terrible fight—the worst fight I have ever had with anyone. We could not accept what we saw in each other. It was over.

There was no way that I could tell you, then, and there was no way I could stay. I would never want you to stay in Columbia under that kind of duress. You chose not to be with me, and I you, and that was that. When I came back, we had reached some level of . . . well, yes, a level of love that was based on your leaving, and it was hard, but it was—in your mind anyway—a clean break. When we were up on the roof at your house that first night back I thought to tell you, wanted to tell you, but I didn't want you to stay simply because you felt you had to. Clearly you needed to—to use your mother's word—“fly.” And that, of course, is one of the things I loved about you.

This will upset you greatly, and I am sorry. I am profoundly sorry.

But I want you to know, from the depth of my soul and my love for you, which right now feels like a sun-warmed metal charm deep inside me, that whatever part you want to play in the child's life is fine with me.

I have confidence that we will move through our unspooling history around our child in a way that will bring out, in both of us, our very best—which, I believe, is remarkable.

Love,
Miranda

She sealed the letter, wrote her address where it should be, wrote his name where it should be “c/o Celestina Polo,” and, skipping the street address—she would have to make sure to get it before he left—wrote “Rome, Italy.”

The next day she went to the post office and bought the correct postage and the Air Mail stickers and affixed them carefully.

She put the letter in the top drawer of her dresser, which Cray would never open. She would mail it two months after Orville had left.

· 30 ·

A week before Orville was due to leave, he sat in the kitchen staring at one of the framed photos he'd dug out of the bottom of the Scomparza box. It was his bar mitzvah picture—
before
he performed. Sol, Selma, Penny, and he were dressed up. Sol in his suit looked schlumpy, Penny in her neck-revealing beige suit looked aristocratic, and Selma, her face whole, wore the cobalt number she'd flown around in, which made her look pretty gorgeous. Orville was in an ill-fitting brown suit. He'd been dragged down to the garment district in New York to get it wholesale from a second cousin's brother-in-law in the business. He recalled watching a cutter sail a power knife smoothly through foot-high piles of material as if it were so much butter. He was measured up precisely. The suit would be custom-made to fit. When it arrived in Columbia, it didn't.

Selma was the tallest, Penny next, then Sol, then Orville. Sol looked like he was in significant hemorrhoidal pain, Penny looked noble, and Selma triumphant and maybe a bit flirtatious—definitely flying high. Orville looked like he was about to fall off a cliff.

In many ways it would have been a lovely photo. The problem was that the photographer was a Columbian. The camera was tilted, off-kilter, and a touch out of focus. All members of the Family Rose, like four stick figures, were leaning to the left, as if on an ocean liner caught precisely at the instant of impact, the crashing into the iceberg.

Orville noticed a scrap of paper tucked into the back of the frame. In Selma's handwriting: “Interviewed new cleaning girl. Darling, but
Ethiopian.
”

Doorbell. Telegram.

BEEL NOT FEEL WELL

RETURN HOME MONDAY AUGUSTO 20

ON SLEEPY HOLLOW 16:39 IMEEG LOVE BABS

“
IMEEG
”? What the hell was that?

Two days later Orville stood at the train station watching the Sleepy Hollow tilt scarily as it rounded the sharp bend into Columbia. His heart was beating fast—he realized how much he'd missed Bill and was looking forward to seeing him again.

During the week or so since Miranda and he talked, they had not seen each other much, and when they did it was always in the presence of Cray and Amy. Miranda was totally preoccupied with her thesis, and the kids had renewed the best of their big sister/little brother thing. They joined forces to try to convince Orville to stay. When that failed, they made him promise that they could all visit him in Italy. Miranda and Orville were treating each other gingerly, like a man and a woman who have survived the crash of a small plane and don't want to risk air travel again anytime soon.

With Orville leaving, Penny had attacked his mother's house with a neat-freak vengeance and a goal of obliterating every micron of dirt and every trace of his year living there. An army of cleaners scoured and scrubbed. Most of the furniture was covered with sheets. Every time Orville came back to the house to sleep, he had the impression of it being, if not a house of the dead, a house of the dead furniture. These sheet-covered chairs, tables, and sofas reminded him of draped corpses in morgues wherever he'd gone as an itinerant doctor, some with pennies over their eyes to bribe the guards of heaven. Corpses are a kind of furniture, he mused as he waited for the train, are they not? After arriving home he would snatch the covers up and off, relieved that beneath were not bodies but couches and ottomans, bureaus and lamps. The next day they would be shrouded again.

As the train pulled in, Orville saw that something was wrong. The conductor was leaning out from between two cars, waving frantically, shouting something. Finally, he was close enough to hear.

“A doctor! Get a doctor!”

“Call an ambulance!” Orville shouted reflexively back at the stationmaster, as he started running toward the train. The train slowed, shuddered. Orville ran at an angle to it, trying to gauge where it would stop, overshooting, then jumping up on the lowered metal steps.

“I'm a doctor.”

“C'mon.” The conductor disappeared into the car, Orville following.

The dear old man lay slumped over onto his wife, drool coming out of a flattened corner of his mouth.

“Orvy! Thank God!” Babette cried out.

“What happened?” he asked, automatically doing all the emergency things—airway, cardiac, breathing.

“He wasn't feeling well, you know, high up in Peru, but was not bad all the way here until . . . suddenly he just keeled over.”

“How long ago?”

“Just after we rounded the bend around Mount Pecora and started across the swamp and he saw Columbia again. He was so . . . so happy!” She wept.

By the time he heard the crescendo cry of the approaching ambulance, Orville knew the diagnosis. After his triumphant trip around the world, upon entering the outskirts of Columbia, Bill had suffered a massive stroke.

Bill's fall from health had been severe enough to kill him. And yet he lived—sort of. He was comatose, gravely ill. Orville had considered sending him up to Albany Medical, but Babette told him that she and Bill had discussed things and he'd said that if anything happened he wanted to be taken care of in Kinderhook Memorial and taken care of by Orville. That first night Orville stayed up all night with him doing what he could, making sure that his cardiac medications were on board and putting in a pacemaker and starting him on steroids to reduce brain swelling. He called the best neurologists and neurosurgeons in Albany. Many of them knew Bill, and one made the trip down to examine him. All agreed that he had suffered an occlusion of a major vessel; the prognosis was grim. All of Bill's risk factors—obesity, smoking, sedentary lifestyle, heart disease, family history of cardiovascular accident, bad lipid and cholesterol profile—made the prognosis even worse.

Orville knew that the critical period for strokes was the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours. During that time he rarely was far from Bill's bedside. Babette stayed at the hospital much of the time, too. Bill had been taken up to the top floor, the Schooner Suite in the Wing of Selma Rose. Orville hadn't been up in the suite for a while, and his first look out the west-facing windows was startling. The hospital was high up on Cemetery Hill, the view unparalleled: straight down Washington to Parade Hill, up over the pathetic pink-and-blue ski chalets of Plotkin Village, skimming out onto the broad river and skipping up off it, climbing the Catskills speckled with the first fall colors and, on the peaks, a hint of the first snows. It was achingly beautiful, all the more so for Bill, in a coma, being unable to see it.

A bed was brought in for Babette. Everybody knew everybody, of course, and everybody was upset. Bill had been their doctor, and much more. He had become the true icon of Columbia. Forget the phony whale icon invented by Milt and Schooner and
SPOUT
. This man was the heart of the town. After all, Orville thought, wasn't Starbuck linked to the forgotten utopia of its Nantucket founders by his name, and linked tightly to the century by his eighty-odd years? Bill's stroke was the town's stroke. Orville saw, in his patients, a shadow cast.

He had seen a lot of strokes, coming to understand that strokes have their own way with brains and souls, and the best that could be done was to prevent complications and to rely on the tincture of time. Bill had not been lucid since the train. There was still light in him, but it was flickering. After a week he was stable but still in a coma. With the pacemaker beating his heart, with excellent nursing care and the attention of Babette and friends and patients, he seemed at peace.

Orville began each day by checking in on Bill and ended each night with him, too. Babette would sit on the other side of Bill's bed as Orville examined him. He came so early in the morning and so late at night that often Babette was in her flannel nightgown and her ram's horns of curlers.

Over the years, he had seen a few patients who had come up out of coma, and he had learned that sometimes they could dimly hear and sense what was going on around them. He was careful what he said in Bill's presence and asked others to be careful too. Babette, with Orville's encouragement, would talk to Bill, tell him the news, the weather, the gossip, and replay the status of the grudges. Bill himself had once told him that coma is a balance of the soul between the living and the dead, a kind of tug-of-war between powerful adversaries so equally matched that the little flag tied to the midpoint of the rope trembles constantly with the effort, even if it does not perceptibly move. Those of us who are braced solidly in life can be of great help, for the dying sometimes sense that we are reaching out, pulling hard, back. The rope, stretched taut between life and death, is not like other ropes—there's always room on it for more hands. For Bill there were hands aplenty. Four generations of Columbians came by.

Orville repeatedly did a checklist of his treatment of Bill, always coming to the dead end of medical knowledge. He had fitted his mentor into the tight boxes of diagnosis (occlusion of the middle cerebral artery resulting in contralateral hemiplegia, hemianaesthesia, and homonymous hemianopsia), of treatment (none, really), and prognosis (despite Bill's being left-handed and thus having more bilateralization of brain function, poor). One side of Bill's face and one side of his body were paralyzed. Every time Orville saw Bill's face he could not help but see the half-fallen face of his mother.

The end of Bill's first week back, the 27th of August, would be the day that Orville fulfilled his mother's will and the day that he had arranged to fly to Rome. As it approached, he realized that there was no way he was going to leave Bill in such dire shape.

On the 26th he called Celestina at her apartment in Rome. No answer and no answering machine. He tried several times, all day long, into her night. Nothing. So he sent a telegram.

MY FRIEND DR. STARBUCK IN COMA

CANNOT LEAVE HIM YET

CALL ME ALL MY LOVE ORVILLE

A few hours later she called, waking him. It was two in the morning on August 27th.

“
Allora,
you are not coming?”

Orville heard the tension in her voice. She seemed on the edge of significant anger. “I am coming, baby, but I can't leave yet.”

“This Dr. Starbuck, he is your guru?”

He was surprised at the word, but then not, and said, “Yes.” He explained what had happened.

“Ah . . .
Sì, sì.
I get it.” She said this in a somber, thoughtful tone.

Most of the time as they were falling in love, Celestina had been lighthearted, funny, and outrageous. But once in a while a dead serious look would come over her face, and they would have remarkable, revealing conversations about things he'd come to imagine as impenetrable—life, death, love, the soul, transformation, forgiveness, compassion, loving-kindness. By that time he'd mostly given up on these themes. Her Buddhism had given him a whole new way of understanding them, and he loved her for this.

Now as she went on, her tone was steady and sure, like the day on Lago d'Orta. Hearing her this way again now made him yearn to be with her. She
has
changed, he thought, she's onto something. There's a whole world of possibility now with her.

“
Transizione dell'anima,
” she said, somberly. “The transit of the soul.” A sigh. “I regret to say,
caro,
it is for you another gift.”

“I think so, babe, yes,” he said, smiling. How he had missed this, her!

“And have you seen the first gift, your mother flying around?”

He realized that he had not seen Selma airborne since the night of his surprise birthday party, the night Miranda and Cray had come back. She'd flown a lot when they'd been away, but not since they'd been back. Like Selma, he was superstitious, and now asked himself: Is there a link? The dead don't fly in the face of love?

“No,” he said, hiding these thoughts from her. “Not since my real birthday.”