The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  Madelaine did not look much older than twenty-five or thirty, although she seemed to be somewhere in a corridor of health and handsomeness that stretches into the mid-forties for some people. Suddenly Max went red with recognition. It was Louella. Louella had been twenty years before, but Madelaine was Louella, his mother’s cleaning woman from Indian River.

  I’ll make sure Marie is comfortable, Madelaine said. I’ll take good care of her.

  Later in Marie’s room, while the others were out, he said in a loud whisper, Louella, and she looked up from the formation of a perfect hospital corner.

  Why’d you call me that? she asked.

  You remind me of someone I used to know. We used to know. Marie was awake now. She looked up at Madelaine, it seemed to Max, speculatively.

  Nobody calls themself Louella anymore, darlin’, Madelaine said.

  Marie was looking at him with her eyebrows raised. Doesn’t she look like Louella, Mom? and Marie looked again at Madelaine, then back at her son wide-eyed.

  Do you remember Louella, Mama, back in Indian River?

  His mother nodded but frowned and looked again at Madelaine. This was her third nurse in a week; to her they were interchangeable, like the hospital rooms from which they came. She reached out and patted Made-laine’s hand. She then tried to say what Max thought was the baby’s name.

  Aisha, he repeated, and she nodded again, as if that were the issue or the answer to any question he might have asked.

  Madelaine looked at Max across the bed. After she had helped Marie to sit up comfortably, she said, Was Louella a nice person?

  She did me a favor once, Max said, a long time ago. Well, good, Madelaine replied. Then you’ll think more of me if you think I’m like her. But what kind of favor could a young black girl do for you? Or is that private?

  Yes, he said. It’s private, if you’re not Louella.

  Madelaine handed his mother a glass of juice with a straw in it.

  You have a nice family, Marie, she said. You should be very proud of the way they’re taking care of you.

  Marie half smiled and lay back against the pillows. When Penny and Robin were in the room later, she patted Madelaine on the hand again for them to see. This was her way of choosing Madelaine, and of making sure that she stayed.

  Nick would not return to Hillcrest and Max went only in the hours John was out. He wanted to make it as clear as possible that if it wasn’t for Marie he wouldn’t go there at all. A month or so after the confrontation, Jack called and wanted to know what could be done to restore harmony. It was not apparent if he was acting on his own or on John’s behalf.

  Max said he didn’t think harmony was possible.

  Well, is that it? his brother asked. Are you just going to let it all go down the drain?

  That’s where it seems to belong, he replied evenly.

  Come on, Max. You don’t mean that. He’s your father.

  Cut the shit, Jack. We’re only reacting to something he did … Talk to him about it.

  Well, is there anything you and Nick would accept by way of apology?

  By way of apology I want a letter of apology, not to me, to Nick. And I want the tapestry back up on the wall.

  A letter from Dad?

  That’s right. Let him write it down. Nick won’t go out there until he does. Or afterward, goodbye.

  Robin said John agreed to write the letter to Nick but it didn’t arrive. The tapestry, however, as a compromise, was hung in the upstairs hall, outside Max’s room. Surprisingly, Nick was somewhat appeased, but Max said no one but them and Greta ever went up there. He continued to visit his mother alone. In another call Jack tried a different tack.

  He said, I hope Nick isn’t going to stop seeing Mom because of what Dad did. That’s not right. Doesn’t he care for her?

  Nick was hurt enough to get angry. What an incredible bunch of people you are, he said to Max. A person could get ground up into hamburger meat out there. I don’t give a shit what your brother says or thinks about my feelings for your mother. It’s all in how things look to them.

  But thereafter, once a week, Nick went to Hillcrest with Max if it could be guaranteed John wouldn’t be home.

  Marie was beyond knowing who visited her and who didn’t. She slept a deep, odd sleep most of the time and was seldom out of her bed. Eventually John stopped going to the office except for a few hours a week. Jack helped him, filling in where he could.

  By the beginning of May Marie didn’t often distinguish between them. She hardly ate and began to run a constantly fluctuating temperature. Feeney said it could not be much longer. He said that if he stopped giving her the Decadron she would die within a week. He said there would be no pain. She hovered each day at the edge of coma, drifting in and out of it like a woman at the edge of a lake she thinks is shallow but which is not.

  When Madelaine told him it would only be a matter of days, he and Nick moved into the house. Nick hadn’t wanted to but said there wasn’t any alternative.

  VIII.

  NICK STAYED OUT OF THE WAY BY WORKING ALL DAY in the garden. Mary Kay came by one afternoon and she and Max had coffee on the terrace. She talked about going around to find a funeral home and cemetery, which she had offered to do. The cemetery where both the Desiderios and the Defilippos were buried had lost some of its charm when the Long Island Expressway was run through the middle of it. The mortuaries she had seen were either lugubrious and gloomy or sleazy and vulgar. In one, she mistakenly entered an enbalming room, which fortunately was empty, containing large stainless steel troughs, tubes, run-offs, and drains in the middle. Another place seemed entirely deserted, the foyer and viewing rooms empty. Suddenly an enormous black dog appeared, its shoulders down, head near the floor, a deep, vicious growl rumbling through its bared teeth.

  My heart stopped, Mary Kay said. I nearly committed suicide by breaking and running for the door.

  Instead she inched backward, and the dog moved forward, slowly, slowly, allowing her to leave. She thought Grey’s Funeral Home in the next town was the least offensive she’d seen. In a few days they might go and make arrangements, select a coffin. She asked if he would like to see a cemetery she had found, a beautiful old place with huge trees, ornate stones and statues.

  As they drove through the stone gates Mary Kay pointed to a small gothic chapel just inside and said, That’s where the manager is, a great huge pig of a man. He must weigh four hundred pounds.

  Everything was in bud—dogwood, cherry and apple blossoms, white hydrangea, wild daisies. They drove along a serpentine macadam road, just, wide enough for the car. Shade patterns from the trees slid across the hood like veils. Many of the gravestones and monuments seemed as old as the trees: obelisks, statues, urns, crosses, slabs, a double heart, an open book, mausoleums with stained-glass windows and tiny gardens; and interspersed, smaller, simpler, modem stones, here and there a rectangle of turned earth, a pile of dead flowers and ribbons like a heap of bright laundry.

  The plot itself had several big trees, an oak and two tulip poplars joined at the base. Max had the odd and immediate feeling he was standing on the site of his own grave. He saw himself and Nick buried beside his parents, if he saw them buried anywhere. One would wind up here.

  But it’s these trees really, Mary Kay said, looking into the branches overhead. The canopy extended like a cavern of receding green billows, pinned back here and there and pierced with shafts of light.

  I saw the stone there, she said, with the tree behind it. The manager said for some reason the plot was improperly marked as sold for over seventy years, and just discovered. It’s the only one left in this section.

  Nick had settled on the idea that Andrea’s having made the tapestry was more important than John’s bigotry. They barely spoke to one another but everyone was so gloomy it hardly mattered. John was with Marie all the time, keeping his charts, pleading with her to take whichever pill it was, as if this might make a difference. He still did not seem to admit to himself
that she was going to die.

  Madelaine was strong, efficient, handsome; Aisha incongruous and lovely in her crib in the den. Greta, relieved of the awesome responsibility of caring for Marie, spent all her time in the kitchen preparing lunches and dinners and caring for the baby. Madelaine seldom brought Aisha into Marie’s room, there no longer being any point; nor perhaps did she want her baby so close to death and dying. She said the camphor was for colds, but he thought it was for protection. Clive said spirits could hide in babies for a while but that they couldn’t stay there.

  ONE EARLY MORNING MADELAINE WOKE MAX and said Marie was asking for him. He ran downstairs and found his father standing by her bed. Max came around to the other side and put his face in her neck. She was wearing one of the bandanna caps, which smelled of her perfume. The room itself smelled of oxygen and sickness. She put her good arm around his neck and held him, pressing her cheek to his. He told her he loved her and she nodded and let him up.

  She turned to John and put her hand to his chest. He leaned toward her, not knowing what she wanted.

  What is it, Marie? he asked.

  She moved her hand from his chest to Max’s and looked at him and started to cry. Then again she put her hand on John.

  Okay, Marie, John said. It’s okay. It’ll work out, I promise you.

  John had gone red in the face. He sat on the edge of the bed and held her until she slept.

  MAX DREAMED HE CAME INTO THE KITCHEN and found his mother by the sink, washing her good cups, singing to herself. He came up beside her and she stopped and said, What is it, dear? Nothing, he replied. It’s so good to hear you singing again. This fragment stayed with him when he awoke and he thought, she never sang to herself, not that he could remember.

  Aunt Phoebe moved in a few days after Max and Nick. Dan was still the same, nearly two years later. No one made the connection between him and Marie anymore. Jack came every night for dinner. Penny was five minutes away, Robin not far. Marie never looked up without seeing Madelaine and one of them.

  Madelaine began to sleep over, going home only to change clothes or get something for the baby. John was exhausted from being up all night with Marie. Madelaine made him sleep upstairs. She told Max she would know when the time was coming; soon but not yet.

  He thought of Madelaine still as Louella, someone he had thought of all his life. That she had now returned from nowhere, in the nature of an incomprehensible coincidence, did not strike him as unusual. It seemed that as a family they had always ridden to statistical cliches, doing what so many others were doing or had done that it seemed everyone was living the same life, overlapping in banal and endless ways, being so much alike that they seemed all to know each other, like neighbors, in a very small world filled with coincidences. It wasn’t strange to think Louella might become a nurse, and in this reincarnation return to the Desirs and be recognizable only to Max. Unless he was wrong. Madelaine was probably too young to be Louella. She had refused, her head cocked, to tell him her age. He wondered if this impression of her was meant to match Madeline’s intimacy with his mother. It seemed cruel for a perfect stranger to share Marie’s death with her.

  Nick planted flowers, pruned, weeded, did all the work of the overpaid gardeners except cut the lawn. Robin and Max sat on the terrace talking about John. She said he was the only one losing someone central to his life. They all had someone else, their mates, their children.

  He’s a problem solver, Max, Robin said. He’s kept her alive for seventeen months with a brain tumor. What will happen when she dies?

  He’ll switch over to the problem of surviving, Max suggested.

  Maybe not. So ominous, she said. I don’t know what he’ll do. The idea is to get through in one piece.

  ONE MORNING IN THE LAST WEEK IN MAY Madelaine woke them early, before five, and said she thought Marie was very close. Max called Penny, who called the others, and by five-thirty everyone was in there, sitting and watching, while Marie rasped out breath after breath, one by one. This went on until midmorning, when she seemed to relax suddenly into a normal sleep. The doctor came in a little after that and looked at her briefly, and they went into the kitchen with him. He said she was about to enter the coma. He explained about the tumor catching up to the edema and then passing it. He could bring her back once more with a large shot of the Decadron before she was out of reach. John asked if there would be any pain and Feeney said no.

  The next morning everyone came again including all the grandchildren, some of whom had not seen her in a while. Marie had responded to the Decadron, one last time. Her eyes were bright, calm and perfectly focused. Everyone took turns embracing her and looking into her clear eyes. No one had thought this chance would come but it had, as if they had encountered her unexpectedly in a railway station between trains. Everything about what was happening to her was in her eyes. She seemed to look at each of them with the force of normal speech and with the peace and calm of being there, in that moment. Max came into the room and found her as she had been, as he could remember her being after one of her migraines and a sixteen-hour sleep. Her eyes were on a level with his. They played over his face, taking him in, in a way that made him think of a series of images from the past, images and sequences of the two of them together. He was a baby, a little boy; she saw him now as everything he was. The eyes took him in, through the mask of swollen cheeks, and it seemed there were two things she wanted him to understand, and which he understood. The first was that she loved him. The second was that as she was now, with everyone there, she knew she would never see him or any of them again and she wanted to say goodbye. Max said, I love you, Mama, and kissed her temple.

  Later in the afternoon Father Bill came up from Indian River and administered last rites. He stood at the foot of the bed and called to her. She opened her eyes, although it had seemed she was in a deep sleep. She nodded her head once, to all of it in general, and fell back again into sleep.

  The next morning Madelaine woke them again at four-thirty. Marie was barely breathing, one labored breath at a time, and had a very high fever.

  They sat watching. Jack fell asleep on the chaise in the comer. John held Marie’s hand. Robin, Max, Nick, Penny, Phoebe, the three older girls and Greta sat about in chairs brought in from the dining room. Madelaine slept for an hour in another room, the baby playing quietly beside her. Marie breathed every twenty or thirty seconds. They were inclined to hold their breath with her, and Penny and Max looked at each other in horror when they were forced to breathe first. Later Madelaine came back in and periodically swabbed the inside of Marie’s mouth with glycerine to keep it from drying.

  They watched for hours. Toward midmorning, as if a weight had been removed from her chest, Marie again breathed more easily and her temperature dropped several degrees. Jack got up and walked out of the room. Max followed him. Jack said, We’re sitting in there trying to create an atmosphere in which she can die.

  The same thing happened the next morning. Madelaine woke Max and Nick and the others were called. They sat for hours while Marie took one breath at a time. He waited for the shift to come again. Every time Madelaine turned her from one side to the other it seemed it might happen; as if, depending on which way Madelaine jiggled her, she could keep her alive. The fever went up, reaching 106 degrees and passing it. Madelaine never took her eyes from Marie.

  Max would sit for as long as he could, then get up and leave the room for a few minutes and wander through the house. At dawn he stood at the window in the dining room. The lawn dipped down to a patch of woods. A verge of fem separated the trees from the grass, the whole thing dark green and dripping wet, filled with a patchy morning mist. About thirty large black crows, some of them jerking like toys, others standing or sedately strolling, were arrayed across the grass. It appeared they were just waking up. Little by little, there came a change of light and in twos and threes, and then all at once, they flew away.

  When Max came back into the room John had his head down over Marie,
sobbing. Max thought she had died. John’s shoulders heaved and shook and he rested his forehead on Marie’s breast. Max looked at Madelaine and she nodded her head. He went and stood where he could see his mother’s face. It had darkened. Soundless white flashes of lightning lit up the windows, followed by distant thunder and the patter of rain. Marie did not breathe. John touched his head to hers and said, Go now, Marie.

  Max wanted to be sure of the specific moment, because in that certainty would be the signal that her spirit had left. But the fever had been so high and the breathless silences too long, making several such moments. When, in particular, would the spirit have slipped away, in which moment?

  John looked up, tears streaming down his face, and said, She’s gone, children. He stood up and he and Robin embraced, then he and Penny, followed by Jack, who had come around to the other side of the bed. It was Max’s turn. He embraced his father. On the occasion of my mother’s death, he thought. Everyone now was embracing and then going to the bed to kiss Marie.

  He stood looking down at her. The color was changing in her face nearly as if a light were played over it and removed. Her eyes were closed, her head straight on the pillow, her face slightly upturned. He leaned down to kiss her cheek and whispered goodbye. As he bent over her it was as if he had put his head down to a small window cut into a thick wall, through which in the distance he saw the figure of his mother. By an acoustical quirk she could hear him.

  Max, Madelaine said, and he looked up and saw everyone leaving the room. He leaned down again. The window was gone.