The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  Phoebe had turned her chair away and Max saw she was crying, thinking of Dan. A minute later she was fine, even refreshed. Nick pointed out the house to the children when they came abeam of it, a red and white pile above the beach between two jetties. Max thought he saw someone move on the porch, although the house was supposed to be empty; a trick of the light perhaps. Then he thought of himself alone on the porch, watching the Mara go by and waving back to all the people aboard.

  ONE CORNER OF THE PORCH, where six chairs were arranged around a low table, was called Potsdam because it had the air of an impending conference. On several mornings, while the sunlight hit it in a diamond pattern through the trellis, Robin sat there with John, listening to him talk, asking questions quietly—a psychologist, although he thought he was talking to his daughter. Several times, through the living room window, Max saw him weeping.

  The morning after the boatride Marie was sitting in Potsdam watching everyone when her face began to twitch with a seizure, the first since the radiation treatments. John watched it the way he had watched only a few things in his life—a gale hitting his house, a long, slow accident in progress. After a moment he looked at his wristwatch and timed the attack. At thirty seconds he opened his mouth and tilted his head back to look through his bifocals. He said, It’s all right, Marie. Marie reached for a napkin and pressed it to her cheek, as if she had eaten something too cold. Then she relaxed and fell back. John said, Fifty-seven seconds, and enfolded her in his arms. Afterward she could not speak. Max carried her upstairs and she slept the rest of the day.

  The following morning, a Sunday, while Robin and John were talking again in Potsdam, when they had in fact got to some important point before which John stood poised and anxious, suddenly they heard Marie calling out. Penny opened the door to the porch and said Marie was calling for Robin, who left her father and rushed upstairs. Marie sat upright in bed wailing, at times emitting small shrieks and screams in a loose pattern of repeats. When she saw Robin the pattern stopped. She opened her mouth in a silent scream, something only she could hear. Robin knelt by the bed and took her hand. Another sound broke loose from Marie’s chest, a keening wail that she matched with a rocking motion back and forth. Then, having quieted down, she looked at Robin, held Robin’s hand in her lap and raised her eyebrows as a sign she was ready to say what had upset her, was ready to try. Robin leaned close to Marie’s face, ready to field any clue, on any level, the best she could. Max, Nick, Penny, Jack and Phoebe had come into the room. But John had not. There being no chance Marie could express herself, she looked instead around the room, pointedly; not looking so much as acting-out looking, which meant, where was John?

  Penny went down and found him slumped on the couch in the living room, pressing both hands against his ribs and taking quick shallow breaths of air. It was not clear what he had experienced. He refused an ambulance. Jack drove along the beach road, thinking to avoid the traffic on the highway. Instead cars, bikes and people seemed to drift and glide back and forth around them, everything languid and slow in the heat. At the hospital John was shunted through the cut-and-bruise bureaucracy and into a receiving cubicle. An ECG revealed an irregularity. Hospital rules required anyone suspected of heart trouble to stay overnight. He lay with the back of his hand resting on his forehead, a habitual position. The pain seemed to have gone. He appeared to have the same watchful attitude as everyone else, except that he said to Max, I don’t get it. Who’s supposed to be left?

  On Monday the hospital was able to call his doctor, who confirmed the irregularity, and he was sent home. Marie was aware of what had happened. John told her the doctor said he was fine, it was just anxiety. He was to take some of her Valium.

  Do you mind, lady? he said.

  Robin said she had been wrong to leave him when Marie called, when he had just got, in that moment, to the point of needing someone, and no one was there. Upstairs, Marie had collected everyone and everything to her. After that, John had no more problems physically, although he continued to sit by an open door to the deck, for hours of every day, looking down the coast.

  She counted on Max to help with her appearance. After Robin and Penny bathed her, settling into her chair, she would look at him and daintily touch the side of her head—an abbreviated reference to Mae West’s Oh say gesture, which to her meant, did she look okay? Now and again she examined her right hand, which was lifeless and swollen. She held it with her left and turned it over, pinched it, regarded the yellowing nails, then let it drop. Reassuring her with a kiss, he smelled her talc and cologne, which evoked a particular moment of the past: dressed in a long silk gown, wearing pearls and a diamond pin, a black fur stole over her arm, she steps into the room, twirls around so that the silk circles out, and says, How do I look darling?

  He arranged her wig. Max of Cedar Beach. Penny tried but hadn’t the knack of making it look real, which despite its cost was difficult. Marie’s cheeks swollen from the steroids, she looked very like a picture of Grandma Angela on the dresser.

  ROBIN SEEMED ABLE TO OBJECTIFY, to help them all by being solid. She never cried. She seemed to focus on the facts of the moment to see her through, rather than the emotion. It wasn’t just her background in psychology; it was her way. He thought of a story they heard about her after a summer at camp. Five teenage girls in a rowboat on the lake. A watersnake slithered off the oar blade into the boat, inducing sheer terror, the terror of young girls for the idea of a snake. Coolly, Robin took it by the tail and flung it out of the boat. The four other girls looked at her with astonishment. They regarded this act as evidence of a bravery beyond heroism, perhaps even unto oddity. Whence came this coolness? Her manner with Marie was characterized by a need to understand and a reluctance to pity, perhaps from having studied and treated others. But she was no less gentle. They would look at each other for long moments. He had seen his mother nod afterward as if in agreement to something implied.

  In July Phoebe had her fifty-ninth birthday. She was three years younger than Dan who on Labor Day would be one year in a coma. When Max asked how Dan was, Phoebe always replied, The same. She visited him at the nursing home after work, usually twice a week. She said Uncle Frank went every day, sometimes twice a day. He talked to Dan, brought lunch and ate it beside him. Phoebe didn’t like it but remained polite. The kids gave her a party—the works. Marie proved again that life was opera by again singing when she could not speak.

  By the end of July, when it was as if they had always lived there, Max noticed his father and Nick spending time together. Occasionally, before dinner, he would see them in Potsdam talking easily, gazing comfortably out to sea. Nick’s father had died what some would call the perfect death—a heart attack on a golf course—except that he had been only fifty-nine. What had appeared as sudden and unexpected five years before now seemed merciful and clean; a flash of light then release. But it had left Nick with no chance of knowing his father as an adult, and this now predisposed him to John’s company. In the years Max and Nick had been lovers, John’s attitude toward Nick had slowly evolved from coldly polite to cordial, and even to a level of respect—which seemed mutual—for each other’s opposite. It had been natural or at least automatic, when John’s children brought their mates to Cedar Beach for the summer, that Max bring Nick, who had in fact turned down a considerable amount of work to be there. Nick was in that stage of his profession which precedes success, being known to his peers but not to the public. It was universally thought within the family, especially among the children, that Uncle Nick, while already glamorous, would one day be a star.

  DURING THE DOG DAYS MAX USED the beach and swam in the sea less than usual. The sand was hot, the air muggy, the crowd thick and inane, swathed in oils. He walked through the patchwork of blankets and umbrellas one day noting all the books he saw people reading; books on finance, star biographies and a particular fat saga of the moment predominated, as if these few titles had been passed out in numbers from the boardwalk. Semicircles of mi
ddle-aged women sat reading and talking. Here and there a blanket presented a complete family, and invariably, it seemed to Max, the father displayed a birdlike attitude—of vigilance, of unease—an absent air. Max walked through it all. directly into the sea.

  It was that moment often captured in wallpaper borders and ceramic plates, of a small white sailboat pinned in the reach to a vivid plane of blue and a vivid plane of light blue. The tide was out. He sloshed hundreds of yards across the soft accommodating back of the sand) bottom, the water barely touching his ankles. Flat sheets of it unfurled like bolts of material in all directions, with short crisscrossing dashes of foam that met abruptly and threw up sudden sprays catching the light. He passed through a number of bathers at knee level, the greater number at the waist, a few men and boys up to their necks. The thermocline was a palpable dimension, three or four inches wide, into which he slid his toes like cold socks.

  Nick played with the children, a strong machine imported for their use in water. He held them up over the waves, flipped and sabotaged them, each idea exhausted by repetition. Jack’s little boy and Robin’s two younger girls were about the age Max thought of for himself when he remembered being a child during the summer. How was it different for them? he wondered, turning, as always, and imagining the beach as it had been—nearly empty, very wide and white—as if a filter of years, like a scrim, had been lowered over it. He sat on the beach for a few minutes with Penny—she expected it—and her friends, she who had shared every blanket, every amusement ride, nearly every wave of it with him; who in fact, because of her own strong nostalgia for the same period and place, saw to it that her own little boy and girl now got the same. He listened to the snatches of talk—repetitive, soothing, inexhaustible; he put his face down against the blanket to hear the booming clarity of the waves, until the drone of a rickety, single-engine plane, dragging behind it its message of cloth letters, like a secret revealed, caused him to lift his head and read again, these years later, that Noxzema was the answer.

  ONE VERY HOT AFTERNOON, in the middle of the warmest week of the summer, Max found Marie’s bed empty and the door to the deck ajar. His mother, in her nightgown, was lying dazed and stuporous outside on the tarpaper. As he was about to call for help, Nick came out through another door. Marie lay by the railing, her head resting on her arm, her eyelids closed unevenly, like window shades. That part of the deck dropped twenty-five feet into a stone stairwell. They didn’t say it but wondered with a look if she had come out to jump. When he roused her, she said, It’s so hot, and refused to get up. They shifted her body so that she could lean comfortably against the house, and then sat down on either side of her. A small breeze blew over them like hot cloth dragged across their faces. On the porch below several of the children were swinging in the hammock.

  Lying in bed, it had seemed to Marie that the rectangle of light standing against the wall was the way out, if she could reach it. With no particular difficulty she had walked the few steps from the bed to the screen door, which suddenly gave way, spilling her out into the heat and light as if she had barged into a furnace. The heat. It took her some time to identify this sensation, and meanwhile the air and the cotton sound of the beach relieved her of the idea of moving farther. Now, in her view, it was as if she had never left the bed. She leaned, half asleep, against the side of the house. When she opened her eyes she saw the hazy blue sky, heard a drift of sound—perceived and forgotten instant by instant. She thought of nothing, felt nothing aside from a vague sense of disapproval, disappointment perhaps.

  LATE ONE NIGHT AT THE END OF AUGUST, just before they were all to return home, Robin woke Max and brought him into Marie’s room. It was a night John usually spent in Hillcrest and Marie was alone. A light from the bathroom shone in on her face. She seemed not to be breathing and did not respond when Robin shook her arm and called her. Her eyes were open but not focused; Max asked if you could sleep with your eyes open and Robin replied, That’s a coma. Then Marie suddenly breathed in deeply, shifted and awakened. Immediately she began to cry and to squeeze Max’s hand. She cried for a minute or so then relaxed and fell into what seemed like a normal sleep.

  It was after two o’clock. He came out onto a dune beside the lighthouse and sat in the sand. He thought of her eyes before she had awakened. He had looked into them and thought, My mother is in there. And for an instant something of what she had been looked up at him. A part of her that he realized he had not seen, or seen clearly, or remembered seeing for a long time, was there in the dark center of her eye, as if he had found her where she was lost or hidden—in a well or in a pit dug into the ground. Her own smallness, tininess, the remnants of her self, had looked up at him.

  The night was very warm. The two-second light from the lighthouse took endless pictures in the negative—the ghostly beach, the matte sea, all dimensions lost—then a comparative blackness would return with the muffled sound of the waves. The house was dark except for the dim light in his mother’s room. He thought that none of the imprecision of their hope, nor their well-meant explanations, could have any effect on this extreme lack of order. Perhaps she had become immune to the Decadron. Perhaps the tumor had grown suddenly, or shifted momentarily. Maybe it was the heat. But whatever had happened, from what it was to what they saw, she seemed beyond any ability of theirs to comfort her further. He thought then of Dan. She seemed tonight to have caught up with him.

  But in the morning, when he came downstairs, Max found her dressed and sitting in her chair, freshly bathed, with a small smile on the one side of her face, and her eyes, remembering nothing, wide open and watching him.

  VI.

  MAX FIRST HEARD THE VOICE WHILE HE WAS SHAVING, a short burst of static was followed by a woman singing a few bars of “Tonight About a Quarter to Nine,” and then he heard a voice say, Take a piece of paper and write down what I say.

  He paused, the razor close to his cheek, and looked beyond his reflection in the mirror into the corners of the bathroom. A presence had not accompanied the Voice. He was startled to find himself thinking in this new way. He had heard a voice clearly, as if someone were transmitting directly into his mind; and he said sarcastically, Do you mind if I finish shaving first? To which the Voice replied, Perhaps it would be better if I called another time.

  The beach house had been closed and he and Nick had returned to their apartment in Manhattan. When the Voice came again, he was driving alone out to Hillcrest to see his mother before Thanksgiving.

  I am speaking to you from a certain distance, the Voice said in a chatty tone. You are receiving me mentally. I can hear some of your thoughts and all of your conclusions.

  A thought of my own, Max said.

  A thought, yes, the Voice replied, but more than a thought.

  He asked where the Voice came from. From Iala, the third orbiting planet of the Star Arcturus, the Voice answered, although I am speaking to you now from a reconnaissance vessel considerably closer, just beyond your radio planet.

  My radio planet? Max said, and the Voice explained, Your sixth planet, Saturn, is a radio planet, a communications planet. Most systems of a certain size have them. The noise is deafening, but it can be tuned to any frequency, including all those of the human brain.

  And why me? Max wanted to know.

  I wonder if you wouldn’t mind if that was explained another time, the Voice said soothingly.

  More bad news, Max thought, but the Voice was gone.

  He was aware in the mornings of having had rich, violent and informative dreams. The next time he spoke to the Voice he said, You’ve been brainwashing me as I sleep. And the Voice replied, This is entertainment and education, but if you didn’t care to dream it, you wouldn’t.

  In one of the dreams the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center began to emit a high-frequency vibration in the key of E, like a gigantic tuning fork. Over a period of days the vibrations got louder. Although the sound was not unpleasant, the two buildings were evacuated. One clear brigh
t night the vibration was greatly increased. Roller skaters circling the smooth marble plaza across the base of the buildings looked up to see the tops of the towers slipping into the docking slots of a huge ship of lights from space, a ship that covered the lower third of Manhattan. In many languages it was announced to the city below that those who wished to leave Earth could take the elevators to the top of the towers and come aboard.

  Nick complained that Max was talking in his sleep, sometimes giving a litany of responses—Yes, no, I don’t think so, of course not—as if in endless interrogation. One morning he found Max’s name written in pencil over the light switch by the front door—Max Desir. As Max was rubbing it off he recognized his own handwriting. When he asked the Voice why he might have done this, the Voice said it didn’t know; this was not part of the program.

  He demanded information from the Voice about Iala, the third orbiting planet of the Star Arcturus, in order to balance the shared intimacies, the pillaging really, of his mind.

  Well, life on another planet, the Voice enthused. So much that is different, so much that is the same in a different way. On Iala they watch Earth as you watch television. Using Saturn, a commercial system tunes in human eyes at random, then assembles and edits programs that are broadcast to the public. Example: the lengthy preparation and service of meals on Earth is enormously popular to Ialans, who have, amongst other things, this cultural, psychological and biological difference from humans: they eat alone in private cubicles and defecate together at table.