The Widower's Tale (47 page)

The waitress returned. A burger. A Caesar salad with grilled salmon. Dressing on the side. Water, please. Tap.

"I've made you cry. Oh God." She reached across the table then. She seized both of his hands. "I should have had you to my place, I was just ..."

"Scared. Of me. Of what I might do." He should have pulled his hands away, but he didn't.

"No!"

"You thought I would become angry and hurt you."

"That's not true. I would always trust you."

"Why?" said Celestino. "I ran away from you."

"I see now that you did what you had to."

"No. We are here because you did not want me to see more of your life. Your furniture, your pictures, your kitchen, your--"

"Stop. This isn't fair."

"Why fair? What would be fair?" Now he did pull his hands away. He was careful not to raise his voice. "I am a day laborer, in the words of the newspapers. A lawn soldier, I have been called. I prune trees. I seed lawns." He hesitated, already sorry he'd said so much, but he had to go on. "You. You are a university scholar who will go out into the world to save the poor children. Isn't that how you see us?"

"I'm incapable of saving anyone, not even myself," she said quietly.

When the food arrived, they stared across the table, not at each other but at each other's dinner. Celestino noted the perfectly parallel grill lines on Isabelle's fish. He willed her to eat first. Despite the day's work--removal of a fallen tree--he had little appetite.

Finally, she lifted her fork. "I'm sorry. I made it sound as if I'm to be pitied. I'm not. Not at all." She cut into the salmon.

Celestino waited for a moment, watching her. Then he ate: slowly, carefully, with his best manners. Looking at her again, he wished he could burn away the younger Isabelle, see her now for the very first time. She would not seem so different from the equally smart, equally pretty women who served him sandwiches and tea on their lawns.

"Now you're scaring me," she said. "What are you thinking?"

"How does it matter? You are sending me away."

She put down her fork and knife. "I will feel guilty no matter what I do now. But I want you to have something." She pulled her purse into her lap. She pushed a blank envelope across the table. He tried to ignore it.

"In there," she said, "is the name of an amazing immigration lawyer. He helped our housekeeper. He works for almost nothing. I worry that you'll need someone like that."

He began to eat his fries.

"Take it. Do not throw it away. I need to know you'll have somewhere to turn if things get ugly for you. Because, in a minute, they can."

He smiled bitterly at the envelope. "Ugly," he said. He realized that he had probably grown ugly to her. He could imagine the taller, better-dressed men who had kissed her, shared her bed, in the past eight years.

"Excuse me," he said, "but I will go now."

"Please don't," said Isabelle.

"What is there to stay for?"

She had no answer to this, only a plea, a look of desperate sadness.

"You will have a book to keep you company while you finish your dinner," he said, gesturing at her bag. "If I leave now, I will catch the next train." He opened his wallet and put a twenty-dollar bill on the table. He put on his coat.

She stood when he began to walk away. She grabbed one of his arms and held out the envelope. "Take this. Do me one favor only and take it."

He took it. He folded it in half and pushed it into a back pocket of his jeans.

16

Sometimes I thought the mud would drive me mad. I share Mr. Eliot's low opinion of April: it is indeed the most maliciously fickle month, but I am sorry to say that lilacs have little to do with it. Lilacs do not bloom in these parts until the cruelest month is a calendar page in the recycling bin. We may as reasonably expect a four-alarm nor'east blizzard as we may a respite of winsome blue skies--though such skies will mock what lies below: the earth dark and sodden, a stew of peat, sand, rotten leaves, and petrified long-lost mittens.

Sarah soldiered on. She'd grown accustomed to the surprisingly widespread loss of hair--her limbs were slippery smooth as those of an infant--but she had begun to complain of a leaden sensation in her legs, of toes and fingers that prickled intermittently all day. "Like my nerves are cringing," she said. Sometimes, when she ate, she would cover her mouth and gasp; food that was either too cold or too hot sent needles of pain through her teeth. Now the meal she liked best was a plate of tepid mashed potatoes alongside a grilled sandwich of cheese and spinach on soft bread.

I remained her chauffeur on treatment days; how guilty my pleasure at knowing I would see so much of her and then, if she came back with me to Matlock for a rest, lavish her with tenderness. The weather was so awful that she no longer had the heart to banish me from the hospital. Once she entered Trudy's funhouse of toxins, I would often read a book on one of the waiting-room couches. I had abandoned Henry James; I'd begun to find him, as Robert would say, a major downer. Craving a more picaresque source of entertainment, I turned to Iris Murdoch's most farcical novels, their comedy dark, even diabolical. Poppy had loved Iris Murdoch.

If I lurked about, Chantal would include me whenever she ordered lunch for "the girls." Once in a while, Trudy would emerge and sit with me for a few minutes; I had not been invited back to the inner sanctum since Sarah's first day of chemo. Trudy treated me gently, as if in her eyes I had suddenly become a certifiably
old
man. She would greet me not with a casual "How's it going, Dad?" but with a sotto voce "Dad, how are you feeling these days?"

"Put upon," I told her that day in early April. "Mired in the muck, of my overly trafficked driveway and the ordeals of those around me. Although it occurs to me that I hardly ever see your sister."

"Clover's wrapped up in her quest to move the children north."

"Still?"

"She has a lawyer in New York now. I have no idea where she gets the money to pay him." Trudy sat next to me and leaned close, speaking softly.

"At least she talks to you," I said.

"No," said Trudy. "What I know comes from Todd. He called because he's worried about Lee. He says a teenage boy shouldn't be the object of a tug-of-war. No one talks about it in front of him, but he's old enough to sense that someone's up to something. Todd says his grades are down."

"He's a boy," I scoffed. "He wants to be an athlete. Perfectly normal."

"But Todd wants to get him into a good high school. It's very competitive there, even for public."

These were pressures I'd never endured. I had not worried about my daughters' education; I'd worried about their happiness. I suppose the two are related, in the long run, but I never thought about that. Perhaps this explained Clover's plight; should I have pushed her to get better grades, so that she, like her sister, could have gone to an Ivy League school?

"Well, I've never doubted Todd's judgment," I said. When Trudy agreed, I felt a twinge of betrayal. "Listen to us. Poor Clover."

"She does not deserve your pity," snapped Trudy, though she spoke in a whisper. She placed her hands on her thighs, one of many practiced gestures to signal that she must move on. I'd come to know them all. "Okay, Dad. I just wanted you to know that Sarah's doing beautifully. She's very strong. Body and spirit both. Many women at her stage of treatment would be in far worse shape all around. I wanted you to know that, from me."

"Horse's mouth." I put my hand on Trudy's white-coated knee. Our fingers touched, awkwardly, but I did not pull away. "Thank you, daughter."

"You're welcome, Father." She kissed me on the cheek.

I went back to
The Flight from the Enchanter
, in which a capricious young woman becomes enthralled with two brothers. Ah, duplicity, I thought oh-so-smugly: there's
one
concern I do not have.

On the way out of Boston, Sarah slept. I listened to a classical station, content to have her beside me, belted in safely, gently snoring. Her head drooped sideways, displacing her makeshift turban. At the intersection of Route 2 and the turnoff to Matlock, I stared at her until the light turned green. Veins glowed blue and lavender just inside her naked scalp. I felt as if I were in love with every inch of her bloodstream, every pore in her skin.

Because of the unforeseen ravaging of my long dirt driveway (which I could see would now have to be paved), I'd asked Tommy Loud to install a barrel of sand beside the mailboxes. I'd pull off the road, get out of the car, and strew several coffee cans' worth of traction onto the mouth of the driveway. This was where the parents' cars idled as they came and went, exacerbating the muck.

Sarah woke as I performed this new ritual. She was confused. "Where's Rico?" she asked through the open door of the car.

"At home," I said. "Don't fret."

She frowned. "Gus with him?"

"Yes, your mysterious and reliable cousin, whom I seem destined never to meet."

She lay back against the passenger seat. I drove us to the front door. Though she tried to protest, I carried her into the house.
Like a bride
, I almost said. She fell asleep for another hour on the couch, and then I made her eat a bowl of noodle soup. "From a can," I confessed. "But organic. The preservatives are grown in petri dishes blessed by the Dalai Lama."

She rolled her eyes. "Funny hurts right now."

"Then humor is off the menu." I swept an arm through the air.

I watched her eat. Even though I'd let the soup cool a bit, steam rose and brightened her face. Why
not
a bride? Why not a new bride, a new house? My glance shifted briefly to the mantel. The surface of the large silver bowl had reverted to an iridescent tarnish. Behind it I had tucked Maurice Fougere's impetuous letter. It had been sitting there, unanswered, for over a month.

When Sarah finished the soup, she asked to go. For once, I looked forward to releasing her, to being by myself, to pursuing my sudden scheme.

As soon as I returned from Packard--where Sarah never let me take her farther than the door of her building--I retrieved the letter. It was six o'clock, but I had a suspicion that Fougere's elves worked at his studio all hours of the day and night.

The elf who answered the phone informed me that the master had just flown to Dubai; could an assistant help me? No, I said. The matter was personal. I carried the letter into my study and opened my computer. As I clicked on NEW MESSAGE and watched the blank sheet of virtual paper flash onto my screen, I felt as if I had no time to lose.

Sometimes forbearance sneaks around behind you and gives you a rude, well-placed kick.
Take that, you self-satisfied prig. Ha!

A few days later, Sarah came down with a cold. Almost immediately, she developed a fever. Trudy ordered her to visit a lab in Lothian where technicians could draw blood and look at her white-cell count. I learned this after she called to tell me that she'd flunked the count.

It was Saturday. We had planned on taking Rico to the science museum, and I saw no reason to cancel that expedition. Now, however, we would drop Sarah at the hospital so that she could receive an injection of some warlord drug that would muster the immune troops pronto. The nurses would watch her until her temperature dropped. Rico and I would head to the museum on our own and pick her up later.

"I now know why people talk about being held hostage to a disease," said Sarah. "So if the museum closes before they unchain me, maybe you could take Rico somewhere for dinner." I told her I'd be thrilled to do that.

At the museum, the first exhibit we entered was devoted to the human circulatory system. Hordes of children were cavorting through felt-lined tunnels representing veins and arteries; fleece platelets hovered in the tunnels, along with other microcellular organisms rendered in fabric and foil. Video screens embedded in the walls showed a miniature movie taken inside the human heart--fuzzy and dark, like a bad art film from the sixties--along with cartoons of lungs and other organs doing their proper jobs to maintain the body's irrigation network. All around us, like sci-fi Muzak, played the contrabasso of a beating heart.

I tried to steer Rico to the upper floors, where we were promised dinosaurs, the solar system, a special show about robots in movies. But no luck. The lub-dub sound track had him in its thrall.

After he'd made a round of the tunnels and caves, he found a display where he could push a button that set off a 3-D simulation of the heart performing its intricate valvular tango. Rico pushed the button over and over.

"Mom's blood is filled with drugs that slay the tumors," he said when he finally turned away. "The drugs can find them
anywhere
. They can't hide."

"That's good to know," I said. Perversely, I thought of the wily, malignant bin Laden, of Green Berets and Navy Seals searching those Afghan mountain ranges until the end of time.

"Some people do die of cancer," Rico said, leading me at last toward the elevator.

"Well, fewer and fewer, now that they have such excellent drugs, like the ones your mom is taking."