The Unfortunates (30 page)
XXX
Pat
PS Lotta and the little guy inside (it’s a boy! boy oh boy!) send their love to you and Iris.
“What a joke!” George says. “Who cares if she is honest if she’s never here?”
“She’s right, it isn’t fair to you. But I get it. I mean, your mom with Lotta.”
“Why bother writing
now
? Too little too late. I’m always leaving my umbrella places!” He covers his face with his hands. “I’m so sorry for saying what I said this morning.”
“It was weird, George.”
“Why don’t people change? People never change.”
“Of course they do. We change all the time, you and me.”
“I don’t mean us.” She sees his face is wet. “Do you forgive me?”
“What are we talking about here? Are you okay? Lately you seem—I guess your heart was in the right place?”
“I feel”—he frowns again, a fresh tear running down his cheek—“like I make this great effort to be better, but no one else does. Everyone thinks they are the exception. But I
am
the exception,” he sniffs. “We should sue.”
“George, it’s done.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll do whatever you say. It never goes away, no matter what.”
“You wish life were so simple.” He sniffles again and looks up at her hopefully, for he’s slumped all the way down to the carpet and lies curled beneath his chair. She hugs him awkwardly.
“You know why I really said it, Iris? I do want to have a baby! I’m so bad at saying how I feel the right way. Let’s, do you want to? Do you?” He buries his face in her shirt.
“Come now.” She pets his head, hoping to trade her contempt for gentleness.
Uncaring girl
, her mother called her, and maybe she was right. There should be no room in her marriage for scorn. She’s no fair-weather wife.
From the muffle of his face pressed into her chest, George adds something that sounds like “—can’t stay mad if we do.”
“I’ll get over being mad.”
He lifts his glistening face. “I never thought I was allowed.”
“What do you mean? Everybody’s allowed. Look at all the goons who have kids.”
“Not me.”
“Life keeps happening,” she begins, gathering conviction as she speaks. “Whether we want it to or not. We can choose, George. You already have. Look how you found me. Look how we found each other. Remember what our lives were like before we found each other?”
“Yes. Iris, do you really want to have a baby?”
“I do.” She says it because of his tears, but is caught by an unexpected happiness. A certainty that they will, one day soon, be people they wouldn’t now recognize in the mirror.
“We will!” he says, sitting up, and they are holding each other properly, and he is laughing, and she laughs too.
“Can’t you see how great our life is?” she says. “We have each other, and we have everything we need. Your opera is opening soon and I’ll be so proud of you. And we’ll have a baby! How could we be any better?”
“
The Burning Papers is
opening soon,” he repeats, brightening. “And”—he looks up into her eyes—“most important of all, you are so beautiful, and we will be a family!”
(
Winter)
Snow on snow on snow, and drifts at the corners. Beyond the indigo slick of the lake out her window, behind the trees’ brittle tangle of branches iced to black, the bald hills wait under an iron sky. Some days, the sky is so clear and still it seems to CeCe emptied of air. Other days a thin cloud appears like a puff from an old man’s cigar, like the puff from her father’s friends’ cigars, her father never having touched them. Clouds that feather to nothing before they chance cross the sky.
Dotty died so suddenly.
Stupid, delighted Dotty.
That Dotty died unexpectedly on Valentine’s Day might in another person be remembered as the last flash of a brave and wicked humor, an ultimate defiance of the sentimental mush of the day. Except, Dotty was not that person. Dotty was the opposite, earnest sort. Not a person like CeCe.
Her sorrow over Dotty. This too came unexpected, an ache of mysterious origin. Her grief—greater even than the news that Pat had her baby, a healthy boy named Douglas at the beginning of February, a little early but to no harm. Pat called from the hospital, described the sudden labor, the baby’s rumpled brow, said, “I can’t wait for you to see him,” and CeCe felt sure it wasn’t the ragged euphoria that followed birth. Pat meant it. But even this proves hard to hold on to as the days at Oak Park beat on, and her old life slips further away.
The truth is, nothing has caused her such an abiding sorrow as Dotty’s death. How can this be? It catches her at the moment of its choosing and whatever she is doing is lost. Such grief! Sometimes a physical grief, snapping over her chest like a vise. Sometimes, a kind of vacancy, black as the waters of a subterranean pool, sensed instead of seen in the pitch. Grief, not like this at her father’s death, not Walter’s leaving, not Pat’s leaving, not the first time she heard them say multiple system atrophy, not at what kind of a man her son has become, not even for the child she had before Patricia, who so quickly died. Maybe that. But that was so long ago, before they’d known to tell pregnant women to eat bananas. Grief, in its empty way, reminding her of the summer she was sixteen, the year before her father’s death, back from Miss Porter’s to New York to visit, at the lavish, modern apartment he and the wife had bought in her absence. After sitting the morning by his side, she escaped into the sunshine and walked the six blocks south to the house she’d grown up in, now a museum and library. She hadn’t been since they’d moved. She climbed the steps and paid the entrance fee—a dollar, it being 1952—and received a tin visitor’s button to pin to her collar, with the scrolled letters
JSS
. Inside, the lead-crystal chandelier and the gilded mirror still hung over the marble mantel. She’d invented characters for herself in that mirror, standing on a striped silk chair. The chair was gone along with the rest of the furniture. Without furniture, the wood floor’s zagging, French herringbone inlay overwhelmed her eye. No one recognized her. New were the display cases with rare and ancient musical instruments, placed at regular intervals around the room. There were only a handful of other visitors, and she chose a handsome, young couple to follow as they passed quietly from room to room—through the double doors into the library, which she found more or less the same, though velvet cords pressed across the rows of leatherbound books and across the old couches. Her father’s elephant tusks made their broken arch on either side of the pocket doors at the other end of the room. Gone were the stuffed birds from the Brazilian rain forests for which there’d been a special glass cabinet with a heavy iron key, always waiting in the lock. Many afternoons, she’d turned the key and placed the birds in a jumble of color on the rug. These had been moved to the Natural History Museum across town. She left the couple and passed into the drawing room, found a piano on a stage facing a fleet of empty chairs. A performance space, of little interest to the other visitors. A few ducked in, gazed up at the painted ceiling, and left. Back in what was now the lobby, she noted the passages to the dining rooms and kitchens were locked behind a new, plain set of doors, white with a metal bar. She could not climb the roped-off marble stair or ride in the mirrored elevator that had brass doors engraved with dancing jaguars and a velvet seat. She asked the docent what was upstairs. Administrative offices, a recital space, practice rooms, an archive open to the public by appointment. Did she want to make an appointment? She shook her head no. Five years went by before she had the will to return, for a tour from the museum’s director of the renovations upstairs—a floor over the pool, under the curved glass ceiling! She refused to see Toto’s room and refused to see her own. She was twenty-one and the board’s newest trustee.
Otto hadn’t made it in time. She mourns for Otto too. What is
wrong
with her? Shouldn’t these last months have hardened, not softened, her? She’d prefer that. It’s only, Otto loved his wife. A tall man with beautiful white hair and wide blue eyes and nostrils like an iguana’s, who had all these months rented a condo a mile from Oak Park and shuttled from his and Dotty’s home in Phoenix. The morning of Valentine’s Day he was only that mile away, sleeping.
It can’t be for silly Dotty that CeCe has lost her appetite. Dotty had become a little dear to her, she’ll admit, but mostly, Dotty annoyed her. Her prattling, provincial, short-time friend. But for Otto—running up the hall where only days before she and Dotty had taken one of their inching winter constitutionals. Dotty had leaned against her, but no more than usual. Otto had disappeared around the corner without seeing CeCe, frozen with her hand on the wall. Watching his coat flap around the corner, she shut her eyes. Dotty and Otto, heartlanders who believed in the sentiment of holidays, who had built their life in a seasonless state on seasonal greetings, not only as his business, but—that story of little Fernanda in Mexico, had they not had children of their own? Had she never asked? He’s probably good at his job, she’d thought, as she made her way slowly after him. She had a vision of Otto’s future. Back at work with one of his subordinates, a designer with a red wax pencil stub behind his ear. She’d chastised herself: they don’t use pencils anymore! A young person, without a pencil, then, bringing Otto a folder of new designs for the following year’s Valentine’s cards, hearts spilling onto his desk. Poor Otto would probably never know when a valentine might be delivered, reminding him of the morning Dotty died alone, the morning no tie of their spirits tugged him from his dream. He’d probably bought her a Valentine’s present. When he returned to the rented condo in the dark, would he put it out of sight? As unbearable to keep as to throw away.
By early afternoon, Otto was waiting in the lobby, for the bereavement coordinator to assemble Dotty’s paperwork. CeCe sat beside him, across from the portrait of Dr. Forum. “It’s an imitation of a Copley,” she said, pointing until Otto looked up. “And a poor one. Notice the strange proportions? Dr. Forum’s eye is the same size as his ear. The artist painted the backgrounds and the bodies at his shop and brought his faceless portraits from town to town by wagon to be sold. He filled in his buyer’s face last. I tell you this—I don’t know why.”
Had Dotty looked worse than usual the last time they played cards? Not that CeCe had noticed. But maybe she hadn’t looked closely enough. As CeCe understood it from Nurse Jean, early in the morning Dotty had the stroke and managed to grope the red emergency button by the bed. The heart attack, shortly after. After, but enough time between for Dotty to be moved from one room to another, the wall going by. Time enough to know that as the windows of her own eyes failed no one who cared would be there. Time enough to cry
husband
and time in the dark to hold his name against the end of seeing. Time to hear the slamming of the trap, to hear the end of hearing.
In the lobby, Otto bent his big, white head low (so silky, like a bird’s) and put his hand over his eyes and became a statue. He was so still CeCe didn’t dare move, which was how she came to spend many minutes studying Dr. Forum. She was glad that as she put her hand over Otto’s, it was free of any tremor that might disturb him. His long wool coat hung open. Underneath he wore evergreen-plaid pajamas and running shoes without socks, his naked ankles jutting out.
If Dotty hadn’t looked worse, had she
been
worse? These last months, CeCe has grown stronger. Fluidity, sometimes, restored to her movements. She dares, some days, to think the word
cured
. The shakes don’t visit for days at a time. She experiences the side effects they warned her about: the racing, steroidal energy, the hot flashes, cramps in her extremities, a red, dashing kind of heat-mania she feels even in the sockets of her eyes. But these she can live with. They can be concealed. When she walks, the joints of her fingers and toes are stiff, but this might be the cold. Dotty complained of the same. Every day, CeCe asks if she’s allowed to return home with the Astrasyne. The answer is the same: she must be on-site, under the auspices of a participating care facility, like everyone else, for the observation of her motor reflexes and the habitual measure of her blood pressure, her liver enzymes, the biweekly EKG.
Still, since Otto took Dotty home (out the back, in a lights-off ambulance to the airport), CeCe can hardly bear the days. Though everything is as before—the nurses’ bright greetings, the sun crossing the February sky, the pills, the sleeping and waking. “How’s your mood?” Jean asks, and this only serves to remind her that Jean asks this exact question up and down the corridor, to other patients, in other rooms. That life is the same for every other patient as for her: the bright Velcro rip of the blood-pressure cuff, the iced lake, the same tiny stamp of the manufacturer on the back of each spoon, the same weekly appearance of the blimp in all their skies, twisting above the empty trees, cruising the frame of each window. Each day, a ghost of the day before. Where is there proof that any given moment belongs to her, and not to a stranger down the hall? No one comes to see her. She reminds herself she’s kept her whereabouts a secret and forbidden the few who know from visiting. But how graciously they comply! Only Esme and Annie Mason and Pat phone her. Each day, strange visions of George creep upon her. Always he is out in the world, enjoying a fictive jumble of pleasures from her past and his: George at Le Petit Daudet, a dripping filet mignon in his hand; George, passing through the rooms at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, licking an ice-cream cone, stopping to consider
The Feast in the House of Levi
; George, drenched in sweat but gray as a corpse, returning his squash racket to its case with a terminal
zip
.