The Canterbury Sisters (24 page)

Silvia had lost a breast to cancer by this point—yes, even that cliché was not denied her—and for the first time in her fifty years on earth she stood in the chilly shadow of her own mortality. Maybe it was this brush with death that had made her generous. For she could now admit that Steven had not only been right to leave, but that he had possessed more courage than her. He’d been the one willing to take the hit. Willing to be the bad guy to the kids and to their extended families, willing to lose his job at the high school when it came out he’d been trysting with the mother of one of his students. Through the years he’d paid alimony and child support without complaint and, even though it was his dead relative who had provided that long-ago down payment, he’d left her the house. Meanwhile she had been allowed to play the victim. To rest in the cushy role of abandoned wife.

And then Silvia saw a final additional truth: that she had been far happier single than she’d ever been when she was married.

Once she took a great breath and truly admitted she was happy, then her life began to open up all around her. She would bring a book and eat in any restaurant she pleased. Take organized trips like this one. Paint a wall red, decide she didn’t like it, and paint it over purple. She began to run full marathons, not halfs, and, since no one had required her presence during weekends for years, she registered with an agency that supplied backup musicians for traveling bands. The decision to take this thankless job was a bit of a whim, a way to brush up on the instruments she had let languish, such as her violin and cello, but she got far more work than she would have guessed. She would often arrive at a gig and not know what would be asked of her—classical, bluegrass, gospel, or rock. It was fun to fly by the seat of her pants for once, to risk making a mistake or looking foolish, to be the only gray-haired lady in the band.

And then the second unlikely thing happened. Silvia fell in love.

He was a black saxophonist in a jazz group, with the surprising name of Willem. Adopted out of Africa as an infant, raised by Dutch parents, a vagabond, an orphan, a child of the wider world. But by this time Silvia figured that if a man who seemed to be the perfect match could fail you badly, then the inverse might also be true. A man who looked all wrong might turn out to be all right.

She and Willem have had seventeen years together, she tells us, as we walk along the seawall that flanks an unseen sea, a fine rain misting on our hair. There has been such perfect symmetry to her life. Seventeen years with the first husband, then seventeen alone, and now seventeen with the second. “I’ll spare you the math,” she adds. “I’m seventy-three.”

I’m surprised. I’d imagine we all are. Her face is weathered, but her body is young. She walks not only briskly but in a strong and unfettered fashion, her shoulders swinging easily with each step, her hips rising and falling in the smooth cadence of a woman who will never truly age.

Her children are long married now, she says. She has five grandchildren, two of them musicians, and three athletes. Through the years Steven and Carol have always come to their concerts and games, which isn’t surprising. The doting father became a doting grandfather. And it was at a soccer tournament for one of their grandsons that Silvia first detected the difference. She and Willem had been sitting near the field, and Steven and Carol had arrived late. Steven nodded at her as he always did when he passed and had headed up the steps to his favorite position in the bleachers, higher up than her and more centrally located. But on this particular sunny afternoon, he had taken Carol’s arm for the climb. Not to help her with the steps, but rather to guide her.

Turning her head to watch them making their slow and careful progress up the bleachers, Silvia’s mind had raced. Steven’s nod in passing had been just like all the others—or was it? Carol had looked vague. Steven had looked grim. And then it hit her.

She was sad for him. Alzheimer’s was a cruel disease.

Seasons continued to cycle. Basketball, the winter concert, softball, graduation, summer pops. And over the course of that year, Silvia watched Carol decline and Steven struggle to attend to her. By the Fourth of July swim meet, he couldn’t even leave her alone long enough to go to the snack bar or bathroom. One of the kids or grandkids would have to sit with them and even then if Steven rose to leave, Carol would cry out. A piteous animal cry of abandonment, announcing her fate to everyone within earshot. People would look away.

“He can’t bring her and he can’t leave her,”
Silvia’s son tells her. “Pop is kind of stuck.”

She does not gloat. In fact, to her great surprise, the more she thinks of it, the more the story of her first husband’s lost love breaks her heart. Her son tells her that there are days when Carol doesn’t know who Steven is, days when she tries to run from him, or clings to him, days when she flies at him in fury and scratches his face.

“What’s going to happen to them?” she asks her son, and he says he doesn’t know. Steven won’t consider putting Carol in a home. He won’t ask for help.

And then came the day that Willem got lost in Costco.

At first it was no big deal. They had said they would meet over by electronics and she’d gone there and not found him and she had searched the store, aisle by aisle, until a call came over the loudspeaker, asking her to come to the snack bar. She found Willem pacing, both frightened and angry, blaming her for going to the wrong place. He insisted that they had said they would meet at the snack bar but his hands were trembling as he said it. She hastened to agree with him. Of course they had said they’d meet at the snack bar. It was her fault. She was the one who had gotten confused.

That was the first time, possibly a fluke, but soon enough there were others and then these incidents began to come with a telling regularity. Pans left on a hot burner, ignored traffic signals, outbursts of anger over a dropped cup, a tendency to call a particular grandson by his father’s name.

She could have spent a lifetime contemplating the irony without feeling compelled to do anything about it. Silvia had always been a bit of a slow reactor. Of course Steven would be the one who would come up with The New Plan. Because one day, at a Christmas concert a year and a half after she had first noticed Carol’s vagueness, Steven confronted Silvia in the lobby of the auditorium. She had been struggling with Willem, trying to get him to give her back the car keys. She wouldn’t let him drive anymore—that was entirely out of the question—but he liked to hold the keys as they sat in public places, playing with them like a toddler. On this particular day, he was a quarrelsome toddler and Silvia had been so preoccupied with trying to cajole him into giving up the keys that she had only been annoyed to see Steven approaching. He had Carol by the arm, just as she had Willem by the hand, and as she looked up, Steven had said, “Maybe we can find a way to help each other through this. We were always so good at handling the twins.”

After that the four of them went everywhere together. At first it was just to those activities revolving around their mutual grandchildren, but they soon saw that traveling as a unit made everything easier. Steven would pull up and let Silvia out with Carol and Willem and the three of them would sit on a bench while he parked the car. During the event, Silvia and Steven would place their second spouses between them and then, when it was time to go home, the pattern would repeat itself. Silvia would wait with Carol and Willem while Steven went to get the car. After a while Steven suggested they should add what he called playdates, where he would drop Carol off at Silvia’s house and run errands or go to a doctor’s appointment and then, a few days later, he would keep an eye on Willem for her. Silvia would not always use the time productively. She knew she should, but most often she would spend her precious free afternoons simply walking in the park, watching the birds and squirrels. Relishing the sanity, the chance to have a few minutes alone with her thoughts. The fact that at least for the afternoon, she had no one to worry about but herself.

The three hours of Willem’s playdate would pass as if they were one but still, even the briefest of respites was a relief. A single year of caregiving for Willem had left Silvia so exhausted that she couldn’t imagine how Steven had coped for three times as long all by himself. Having a spouse with Alzheimer’s is like having a child who will never grow up—a child who is going backward, actually, who will in time lose the ability to walk and talk, who will eventually end up in diapers, back in a high-walled crib. But the grief of all this was dulled, just a little, by the presence of Steven and his wordless empathy for her situation.

“I don’t want to put her away,” he blurted out one afternoon as she and Willem were leaving. “When she first realized she was slipping she . . . she made me promise that I wouldn’t take her to one of those places. You know, the memory centers where everyone sits in rocking chairs holding baby dolls, even the men.”

Silvia didn’t say anything. She’d made the exact same promise to Willem.

“I hang on for these afternoons,” Steven said. “You’re the one who’s making this whole thing tolerable.”

And from there it was hard to say exactly which one of them had the next idea. Whether he said it to her or she said it to him, whether they discussed it in the car, or in a doctor’s waiting room, or at a ball game.

If we move in together, we can keep them both at home.

Now they share a house—Carol and Steven and Willem and Silvia. The love of his life and the love of hers. Most days, the loves of their lives cannot remember either love or life, so Silvia and Steven must do all the remembering for everybody. Steven tells her about his years with Carol, the good times and the bad. Mostly good, damn him, she tells us with a laugh. And she describes her life with Willem, her own late-life adventure, blowing in like an autumn storm. They celebrate their successful marriages together, for otherwise, who will? The arrangement may be unorthodox, but it makes certain things possible, like this trip. Silvia would not have considered leaving Willem to take two weeks abroad if she hadn’t known he was safe and happy with Carol and Steven. She does the same thing for Steven, giving him two weeks off to go camping in the fall. They keep each other going. They can’t imagine now how they could survive any other way. They celebrate Christmas at the house, which makes it easier for the grandkids and, as for the twins, this is the first time in more than thirty years that they can offer them a singular home base. There are pictures on the walls: Carol and Steven riding burros down the Grand Canyon, Silvia and Steven on a cruise and then Silvia and Willem on a cruise, even Steven and Willem on a pier with the grandsons, playing at fishing, and it’s all right because it has to be all right.

Her friends ask her how she can possibly accept the situation. Changing the diapers of the woman her husband preferred to her. Even their daughter had a problem when Steven and Carol first moved in. “Too weird, Mom, just too weird,” she had said, and at times Silvia will admit it’s confusing, living with both husbands, trying to explain it all to lawyers and doctors and the IRS. But the longer Silvia exists inside this broken world, the more she realizes that situations which are simple to describe are often hard to live with, and that some of the things that sound bizarre actually work out quite easily.

She makes mistakes sometimes. Once she called Steven “Willem” and he had said, “Oh dear God, not you too,” and they had both started laughing. Laughing hysterically right there in the kitchen, the sort of laughter that is part sobbing, until Carol and Willem had both stumbled in from different directions and joined them. They had stood there for a minute, all with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Crying, bellowing, weaving, not one of the four of them quite sure what they were laughing about.

Now Silvia pauses. Shucks her backpack and rifles through a pocket until she stands with a picture of four old people sitting on a lush, flower-strewn patio. Two of them gently turning the other two in the direction of the camera. “This is my family,” she says simply.

“I don’t want to interrupt . . .” says Tess.

“You aren’t interrupting,” says Silvia. “I’m finished. That’s everything.”

“And your story was lovely,” says Tess. “But I have a bit of a question. How is everyone doing on the stamina front? Because we’re coming to a fork in the road and we have a decision to make. If we’re brisk, we can work in a trip to Dover this afternoon, before we stop for the night. See the cliffs, I mean. But if you’re tiring we can head straight into town and find our inn.”

We all struggle to understand just what it is she’s asking. My thoughts are still in that kitchen with four people all standing with their arms around each other, and I suppose everyone else is stuck there too, in that moment of great beauty and equally great pain. It’s like walking out of a movie into the clear light of day and forgetting where you parked your car.

“If we’re this close to Dover . . .” Steffi finally says. She’s still smarting about missing that damn stable.

But this time Jean agrees with her. She’s nodding. “It would be a shame not to see the cliffs. We’re so near, after all.”

“Quite so,” says Tess. “That’s what I thought. They’re in the National Trust, so it’s a walk through parkland and down a rather steep hill, but then at the bottom . . . well, if we don’t want to walk back up, we can always call Tim to come fetch us in the van and there’s a lovely little tearoom at the top of the cliff. An old lighthouse leftover from the war, and they serve pastries and pie and the lot. Sound good?”

We agree that it sounds good and Tess looks more closely at me, Silvia, and Jean. “You ladies with the sore feet,” she says. “Holding up?”

It’s the first time I’ve thought about my heel in hours. We all nod and then, at Tess’s suggestion, we stop and pull our sweaters and hoodies from our backpacks. Because the wind has picked up and become stronger, even in the last few minutes. Steffi’s phone beeps and when she looks down, she says that it just welcomed her to France. Tess says indeed, we’re that close to Calais. We should be able to see the shore of France from Dover Beach if the weather holds fine, that swimmable distance which divides one land from another. France. It sounds romantic. More foreign than England. The idea spurs us to walk a bit faster.