“What are we watching?” Paul said, but Cal didn’t answer; one of those flea-market bargain shows, God knows what he sees in it, not that he cares, it’s just TV. The phone rang next door and Susie looked into the room.
“Does Cal want any pasta?” she asked, in the quiet direct voice you use to communicate intimacy. She was also a mother talking to another parent, with a sick kid.
“Can somebody get that?” Liesel called from the hallway. You could hear her moving across the wooden boards, her show of hurry. The ringing stopped and Dana said, “Essinger residence,” and Paul in spite of himself felt a flare-up of some faint emotion.
“I don’t know, you hungry, Buddy?” but the boy didn’t answer and Paul said, “Give us a minute and we’ll come in.”
“I’m just wondering because I’m wondering how much to give everybody. There isn’t exactly an excess amount …”
“It’s fine,” Jean shouted, invisibly, from the kitchen. “Everybody’s happy, everybody’s got plenty!’
“Well …”
“I’m heating up some Vietnamese,” she called out.
“How old is that?” Nathan asked her.
“Not old. It’s from last night.”
“Last night you were picking us up.”
“From two nights ago then, it’s fine.”
“You can probably count us out,” Paul said to Susie.
“There’s enough, I just want to get a sense …”
“I don’t know, just give me a minute. I just want to sit here for a minute.”
“Are you okay?” Susie asked, but he was watching TV.
When he came back in, Liesel was still on the phone, talking to Bill. She was dressed now, in one of her smocks; her gray hair looked wet, and she sat on the chair by the window, under the telephone base, which was mounted on the wall.
Dana said in an undertone, “Does he want to eat something?”
Paul shook his head. And then, looking her full in the face, which he didn’t usually do: “Should we take him to the doctor?”
“Will they be open on Christmas Eve?”
“I’ll ask Liesel when she gets off the phone. Otherwise we can always go to the emergency room …” and Jean said, “It’s exciting, looking at houses. It’s like shopping for a new life.”
“I don’t want a new life,” Susie said.
“Who doesn’t want a new life?”
“You’re worrying me,” Dana said.
“He’s fine, I just thought, if the drugs will help, let’s get him some drugs.”
“The deal was, that if Romney won, I said we could go, but then Obama won and somehow, anyway,” but Susie knew she was repeating herself, and stopped.
“I want a rectory,” David said.
“Why do you want a rectory?”
“What’s a rectory?” Margot asked.
“We’re just renting,” Susie said. “Until we work out—”
“I don’t care what we do but it’s the way we talk about it together that leaves room for improvement.” Sometimes David used her family to say the things he wanted to say in private, but so Susie couldn’t respond without picking a public fight. “I want to be able to … even just in the realms of make-believe, we should be able to make plans or show some of the usual human emotions …”
“It’s where a rector lives,” Julie said. “It’s a house.”
“What’s a rector?”
“Do you really want to talk about this now?”
“Yes,” David said, “because Jean is here. She can protect me.”
“I’m here.” Even at thirty-two she could play the kid sister. With her short hair and boyish face … she blushed, easily, too.
“These are my usual human emotions,” Susie said.
Nathan, standing at the kitchen counter, was fixing himself a plate of fish curry and rice. He ate from the serving spoon, he tried everything out. After a meal, the tablecloth was always dirty around him. “It’s not a good time to buy property in England. Prices there are historically overinflated.”
Jean, indignantly: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You make that stuff up.”
“A rector is a priest,” Clémence said. “What’s wrong with your carrots?”
Margot had a code, according to which … “They’ve got pesto on them,” and her mother tried to spoon them apart. She had come late to motherhood, after years of watching her friends … playing the role, adopting new personalities and habits. So this kind of thing bothered her less than it might have. Even the ordinary battles had a certain charm.
“These are fine, you can eat these.”
“I’ve seen the figures,” Nathan said. “The relationship between median income and house price—”
Liesel, still on the phone, lifted her hand in the air. “Is Judith there now? Yes … when … Can everyone be quiet? I can’t hear.”
And Bill, from his sister’s hospital room, watching her sleep while the monitor over the bed recorded her data—in constantly shifting lines and charts, with an electronic pulse that seemed to fade in and out, expanding and contracting in the form of a number, 57 55 58—tried not to raise his voice. He didn’t want to wake her (Rose had been awake earlier, and semiconscious), but he could hear in the background the noise around the kitchen table, not all the words but everybody’s tone, and thought, Oh Nathan, let it go.
* * *
Judith had come at lunchtime with a foot-long Subway sandwich—she had managed to get a cab after all. (There was a Subway concession in the hospital food court.) “I can’t eat all this anyway, Uncle Bill. I figured you might want some.” Bill stood up to let her take the lounger—he borrowed a folding chair from one of the nurses, and in fact, when she offered him half of her sandwich, he accepted it. He hadn’t eaten all day. “Would you believe some of the houses around here,” Judith said, comfortably. “When I came last night it was dark. Gables, wraparound porches. Turrets. Who lives in these places—they must cost, what. A million bucks. Two million.”
While they talked, his sister slept, with her mouth open but color in her cheeks. Cold winter sunshine, ten stories up, poured into the room, as white and clinical as the hospital walls. Rose’s room had a view of the river and the bare bluffs of the Palisades State Park on the other side, covered in white, looking like an unexplored, unsettled continent, while the wide flat slow-moving Hudson drifted by. Only the traffic on Warburton below and the rusted railroad tracks beyond it reminded you of human occupation.
Bill said, “Is Mikey all right? It must have been hard, leaving him behind. Especially at this time of year.”
And this set her off again.
“He’s fine, you know, my mother-and-law and I—I guess I won’t be able to call her that much longer. What do you call her? We have an understanding, and part of that understanding is that, as women, who have spent our lives putting up with Jewish men … Of course, she takes her son’s side but she also feels like … she’s getting him back. The first thing he did when all of this started is move home. I can understand it for a couple of months, but … he’s not even looking for an apartment. He says he needs the help with childcare, when Mikey stays over. Okay, so his mother helps. But she would also help him at the Park Evanston, believe me. The truth is, he wanted to move home, he’s happier at home. So I say, let him be happier. Who am I to stand in his way. It’s like I’m saying to Leah, you win. She won. But what bugs me is that Mikey has no sense of Christmas. When I was a kid, we used to go to the movies, it was a nice day. We never had a tree or anything like that, but Rose always wanted me to think it was a nice day—she didn’t want me to feel left out. Half the kids I knew in school came back after the holidays with … I don’t know what. Stuff. Atari this, Atari that. This is one of the things I’ve promised myself, this is one of the deals you make, when you get divorced. To get you through it. That next year Mikey will know what Christmas is …”
And sitting there, listening (he didn’t have to ask many questions
), Bill couldn’t help feeling comfortable, too. He admired Judith, almost in spite of himself, and recognized that there was something cheerful and patient in her complaints. It touched him, also, the easy intimacy she showed around her uncle, whom she had seen, God knows, maybe half a dozen times in the last ten years. Maybe she talked like this to everyone, maybe she talked like this to the cab driver on the way over. But he didn’t think so. And Rose, in her mechanical bed, knocked out, drugged up, hooked up, but she was a presence, too—part of the intimacy. Apart from anything else it astonished Bill how un-distressed her daughter seemed. She was already making plans to fly back to Chicago as soon as the airports cleared.
There was a limit, of course, to how long she wanted to leave Mikey. “I guess it’s just you and me for Christmas,” she said to Bill. Maybe the day after, she could fly back. Rose seemed stable, there was no point in sitting around all day, staring at her like this. When she needed help was when she moved back home, right? And she didn’t want Mikey to see his grandmother in this condition. It bugs me anyway, the … the difference between the way … her and Leah … Because how can Mom compete? She lives in New York, we’re in Chicago. Maybe at some future point we can move back home, but that’s going to be difficult, depending on the terms of custody, and the fact is, I don’t really have a home to move to. Manhattan is too expensive and if I move in with Rose … you can see for yourself. It’s depressing, right? And all we do is fight anyway. I figure at my age I have a very narrow window to meet somebody—very narrow. And to make a new home for myself. Otherwise, what am I looking at, what kind of future? I have to be realistic. We’re going to have to sell the house. Gabe says it’s too big for two people anyway. Which is of course (and he knows this perfectly well) just another one of his reproaches. He wanted a lot of kids … Well, he can make them with somebody else.”
And she laughed, and Bill thought, I listen to all this for her, because when we were kids … I was Billy and she was—running the show.
But he saw the resemblance, too. He couldn’t help seeing it, with Rose lying there and Judith sitting in the armchair. The heavy lips, and their coloring, rose on pale, a constant sort of uneven flush on her cheeks, not healthy-looking, but vivid and showing a certain … energy of character … in spite of other indications, physical sloppiness, laziness. When Judith stood up, she pushed up with her hands. As a tall woman, she wore flat comfortable shoes, and she moved, in her layers of clothing, a little like she was dragging something behind. Whenever she sat down, she had to adjust herself. Her shoulder bag contained multitudes. She drank a lot of bottled water and applied herself obsessively to the Purell dispenser, mounted against the wall behind her. Bill disliked the chemical quality of the gel, which evaporates but never entirely and leaves a definite smell. Judith’s hands were starting to look a little raw.
After lunch the doctor came in—always a different doctor, and Bill, who was squeamish, tried to make himself pay attention to the medical details. This one looked in her forties, short but not unattractive, with curly hair. She was obviously Jewish: Dr. Kleinman. Her accent was the accent of people he grew up with. She wore a wedding ring. Judith couldn’t help herself, she needed to impress these people, and show them that she had spent two years in medical school. She referred to this fact again and again. “I’ve got a lot of respect for doctors, because I couldn’t make it. Two years at Pritzker was enough for me.” And he could hear in his niece’s voice her own conviction, that she was endearing herself by confessing this failure—that this was one of her likable qualities. Maybe it was, who knows. The fact that Pritzker was an elite institution, very difficult to get into … of course, that was also part of the confession.
But Dr. Kleinman had an easy, businesslike manner, natural without being personal. What Rose had picked up was a kind of CRE, almost certainly during or after her hip operation. She was lucky to come in when she did—a little later … the infection had spread to the blood, there was a danger of sepsis. Sometimes with these bugs some of the older antibiotics turn out to be relatively effective, but they can really knock you out. She also had some fluid on the lungs, which they needed to keep an eye on. And so on. Has she been conscious at all since you’ve been here?
Bill said, “She woke up a little around eleven o’clock. I’ve been here since ten.”
“And how did she seem?”
“She knew who I was, she didn’t seem surprised to see me. But she was also very tired, she seemed a little underwater. I asked her if she wanted to watch TV and she said, okay, so I flipped through the channels. The Price is Right was on and she wanted to watch that. But she fell asleep again pretty soon.”
“Well, she’s fighting, she’s a fighter …” But Dr. Kleinman had already made her notes. “Her numbers are in the … she seems to be responding to the drugs.” And she looked at Bill, rather than Judith. It was a human look—this was also part of the job, the last thing on her list. “Don’t be afraid to call if something worries you. That’s why we’re here.”
“When will she …” Bill began to say, he didn’t want her to leave. “I mean, at what point can we expect …”
“That’s hard to … these bugs are very unpredictable. Your sister has had a significant event. But she seems to be responding well. I’m a little worried about the pneumonia, but like I say, we’ll keep an eye on it.” She was starting to repeat herself, and Bill let her go.
Judith had brought along her iPad. She was looking at real-estate websites, partly to find out what their house in West Ridge would go for. The market had recovered slightly but not enough to make a difference—they’d be lucky to get what they bought it for six years ago. “It’s the kind of house that realtors call cute,” she said. Real estate was one of the things she was thinking of going into. You can’t just sit around the house all day when the kid goes to school. Dinah, the woman who sold it to them originally, had mentioned … when Judith got in touch a few months ago … it’s funny how these people become figures in your life. But she was also looking at rentals, somewhere she and Mikey could move to afterward. Whatever she did seemed to involve a lot of interruptions. Messages of one kind or another would ping through, and she’d react semipublicly to these interruptions (laughing or making noncommittal noises), and then turn around to Bill and try to explain her reaction: “My friend Sharon is in the process of hiring an au pair …”
He said, “I’m going to call home,” and she offered to let him use her phone, but he said, “I need to stretch my legs anyway.” He needed a break anyway. Also, he wanted to use up the calling card.
There was a telephone in the waiting room, really just a kind of lobby or unused cubicle near reception—a few toys in a corner in a box, a couple of wipe-down fake-leather armchairs, a coffee table with old magazines (Homes and Gardens, People, Sports Illustrated). The television on the wall showed CNN: an American contractor had been shot and killed at police headquarters in Kabul … the shooter was an Afghan policewoman, who had been on the job for two years. It took him several minutes to get a ringtone, he had to battle a lot of numbers, and then Dana picked up and gave the phone to Liesel, but it was hard for her to hear. Everyone was just sitting down to lunch (Texas is an hour earlier), there was a lot of noise … and Liesel, across all the miles, said, “Is Judith there now?” and he started trying to describe her, the way she was taking it all, but stopped, because it wasn’t the kind of thing you could explain without meanness, and he didn’t want to.
* * *
After lunch, Paul said to Liesel, “Do you think we can see a doctor today? I wanted to get Cal checked out.”
“Don’t you have a doctor?”
“This is not one of the things I’ve dealt with yet.”
She stood up from the table. Clémence was already clearing up, and Nathan had started making some counter space for himself. He had complicated plans that required a lot of room; his cooking was always something of an operation. Ben and Julie were old enough by this point they were
expected to bring their dishes to the dishwasher, but they needed chivvying, Ben especially. Clémence said, “I don’t know what to keep and what to throw away, I don’t know the Essinger algorithm.”
“Bill’s not here,” Paul said. “Throw everything away.”
“I’ll deal with it.” Susie was shifting containers in the fridge. “My kids like rice, it’s an easy meal.”
Willy and Margot had run into the yard.
Liesel said, “Come to my study. I need to look up the number.” And Paul followed her.
“Armes Kind. Wo tut es weh?” she asked, making her way slowly through the house, out of the kitchen and into the corridor, past the stairs and through the living room, where the winter sunshine, broken up by pyracantha leaves, left footprints on the rug. Poor kid, where does it hurt? She opened the sliding doors to her study and sat down at her desk, which faced the back of the yard. Willy was running in the grass, under the mild blue skies. He carried something in his hand, and Margot followed him in an attitude of complaint or protest, dragging her feet and waiting for him to stop. He stopped and then she started toward him, and Liesel lifted the lid of her computer. She pushed the mouse around, with an impatient and strangely touching gesture, to wake it up, and Willy ran away.
“He says his ear. I figure we may as well get it checked out.”
“I think I left my glasses in the kitchen. On the windowsill over the sink, maybe. Bill always tells me to put them in the same place.” And Paul went to get them, feeling childish.
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