by Anita Shreve
But Stephen. One could not have a thought of Harrison and not immediately afterward think about Stephen. Stephen, whose deep fear of boredom had sometimes pushed him blindly forward. Stephen, who had managed to remain lovable despite his popularity, whose desire for risk, which they all had found so appealing, had often got the better of him. Stephen, who remained fixed in place, while all the others had gone on — grown older, married, had children, had affairs, failed in both love and work — whereas Stephen had simply stopped. Like all those people at the "World Trade Center had simply stopped. Like all those people in Halifax had simply stopped.
Agnes sat at the desk, and Innes checked his tie in the mirror over the bureau. She picked up her pen.
He wondered if he would be the only man at dinner not in uniform, and he hoped that Dr. Fraser hadn't signed on in some reserve capacity. The lack of a uniform begged explanation, which Innes didn't like to give, since the asthma was plainly absent and the rest sounded either feeble or self-serving. He hadn't had to explain himself often because he had lived in a universe of American students and physicians (their numbers dwindling after April, when America had entered the war), but he could see that he might have to invent, for the casual acquaintance, an ironclad reason why he was not in service dress. It occurred to him that apart from Dr. Fraser, there might be no men at dinner at all, since so many had been sent abroad.
He opened the door of his room and glanced to either side of the hallway. He saw no other activity, no one to guide him to the sitting room. It was a modest house, though he had a sense of many rooms. He saw himself already slightly lost, opening doors and closing them in search of another human being. He hoped not a servant. Decidedly not the sullen man who had carried his suitcase.
Innes descended the stairway to the front hall. From another room, he could hear voices. He heard someone say "chutney jar" at the end of a question, and from elsewhere, with some emphasis, the word "socks." The doors off the hallway were shut, reminding Innes of Mrs. Fraser's unwelcoming bosom.
Innes guessed that the large oak door to his right might lead to a sitting room. He gave it a try, and it opened to a chamber lit with a globular lamp that did little to illuminate an otherwise shadowy expanse. He noted that the heavy blackout curtains were drawn. He heard the crackle of the fire and, like a primitive, headed in its direction. As he did, he saw a woman sitting with her back to him. Innes hesitated. The woman seemed not to know he was there (was her indifference deliberate or had he really been so stealthy?) and he did not want to intrude upon her perfect immobility. On the other hand, he was a guest, expected to know little of the household, expected to be welcomed. Besides, if he left now, he would almost certainly make a sound, and then the question of why he was retreating would have to be raised.
"Good evening," he said, his throat needing a clearing.
Innes advanced, and the woman turned her head, not to Innes directly, but in profile to acknowledge him. The lamp on the console behind her lit up as much of her face as she had allowed. He was struck first by the hair, a dark mass that had been done up in an intricate knot and then let loose in a broad sweep that came low over her forehead and covered her ears. Her cheek was smooth — she was young: nineteen, twenty? — her mouth in repose. Her eyebrow sloped downward in nearly a straight line, and her eyelashes formed an exquisite curve. Eager to see the whole face, Innes walked toward her, saying, Hello and I'm glad to have found someone.
She held out her hand, and he took it.
Innes could make out all of her face now, the brief smile erasing the odd chill of the profile only. She had lustrous dark eyes. Over a dress of thin black polka-dot material, she had on an almost iridescent feathery blue wrap. Innes could see the outlines of a black corset or a slip. The collar of the dress was wide and low, suggesting a sailors. The skirt of her dress lay in folds just below her knee.
"You must be Mr. Finch," she said. "I'm Hazel Fraser. I'm first down. I'm having a sherry. Will you join me? I'm sorry to say my father is not back yet. I know you must be eager to meet him."
"I am," Innes said. He stood with his hands at his sides. He had not been invited to sit. Should he pour his own sherry? Yes, of course he should. He bent toward the bottle on the table in front of Hazel, aware that his hand was trembling, regretting that he had not waited a decent interval or declined altogether, for she would certainly see the trembling, which was even more pronounced as he picked up the small gold-and-blue goblet from the tray. He counted six goblets and wondered who the others would be.
"Please sit," Hazel said when Innes had finally managed the business of the bottle and the glass, trembling fingers a death knell for an eye surgeon, though Innes's hands were always rock steady in the operating theater. There, a cold certainty stole over him. As a physician, he was supremely focused and, he sometimes thought, gifted.
"How was your journey?" she asked.
"Uneventful," Innes said, adjusting his suit as he sat. He had only the one suit and two shirts, which would be inadequate for the city. He hoped there would be time to visit a tailor, though he would have to be frugal with his purchases. Until a salary was negotiated — Innes assumed a salary, though there had been no discussion of that eventuality — he had only the money that his sister and mother had sent, a fortune to them but barely enough to cover the expense of a new suit.
"The very best sort," Hazel said, "though one always secretly longs for adventure."
"Do you think so?" Innes asked. "I should think an absence of adventure a good thing during wartime."
"Here one longs for excitement," Hazel said. "We are a backwater city."
Innes searched for a diplomatic response.
"I've lived here all my life," she added. "But you," she said with superb manners, shifting the emphasis away from herself, "you have had an intriguing time of it — school in America, I'm told. A degree in medicine."
So Hazel knew that Innes was from Cape Breton. Doubtless she knew his circumstances as well. "If cadavers and libraries and books be thrilling," he said, meaning it to sound kindly and not arch, "then perhaps I have." He could see now that the woman he had just met (he adjusted her age to twenty-three or -four: a certain gravity about the mouth) desired risk, that it was on her mind and on her tongue, though possibly she struggled not to allow others to see it. Hence, the perfect immobility.
(Innes thought that, yes, he had had a certain kind of adventure, though not one of traveling abroad and studying for his degree. Rather, his had been one he would just as soon forget — the necessary struggle of the poor, the daily quest for food, an endeavor that held risk and sometimes resulted in death, as when his father, a fisherman, had been washed overboard from his vessel. Innes now belonged to the category of people who longed not for bodily adventure, for he had had that, but rather for some quite tangible adventure of the mind. That he awaited eagerly, impatiently.)
"There you are," Innes heard behind him. He pictured the rapidly advancing figure of Mrs. Fraser even before he saw her. He was surprised by how much he minded the abrupt interruption. He had not even begun to have a proper conversation with Hazel, a conversation that could not be continued now in Mrs. Fraser's presence, a fact that admitted of a certain kind of intimacy between himself and the woman sitting across from him, however slight, a conversation that suddenly seemed urgent to Innes, not because of its content, which might, after all, turn out to be banal, but because he had not heard enough of Hazel's voice.
"You've found the sherry, I see," Mrs. Fraser added, implying an act of poaching. Innes stood, as good manners demanded. He couldn't sit unless Mrs. Fraser sat, and she showed no inclination to do so. Indeed, she seemed agitated, even slightly affronted, which couldn't be, Innes reasoned, simply the sherry.
"May I pour you a glass?" Innes asked, bending slightly toward the bottle, catching Hazel's bemused eye as he did so. Innes also saw, in the firelight, a circle of tiny diamonds on a finger of the hand holding the blue-an
d-gold goblet.
"Not just now," Mrs. Fraser said, suggesting that possibly the hour for drinks had not yet arrived (another small affront?). "Hazel," she added, looking pointedly from the young woman to the still-standing Innes, "wherever is Louise?'
And it was then, as Innes straightened to his full height (he was not exceptionally tall, though he towered over the diminutive Mrs. Fraser), that he began to understand that in Mrs. Fraser's eyes, and perhaps implying some fault of his own, he had introduced himself to the wrong sister.
As it should be, Agnes thought, setting down her pen and standing up from the desk. With some satisfaction, she moved to the bed and began to unpack her duffel bag.
Bridget studied the two fifteen-year-old boys in the backseat: both asleep, bodies sprawled, mouths open, the tinny sound of music audible through the headphones that covered their ears. Matt, her son, had smooth skin despite the expected legacy of his father's acne. His friend's face was nearly ravaged, a cruel announcement of the arrival of adolescence. Bridget wanted to tell Brian about BenzaClin and tetracycline, but could one do that without insulting him? Probably not. Perhaps Bridget could mention the antibiotics to Brian's mother? No, that might be just as bad. Bridget would stay out of it, then. And didn't she have enough to worry about without taking on the burden of Brian's complexion?
Still though. The miracles of modern medicine.
Bridget lingered on Matt's sleeping face, something she was seldom able to do now. More often than not, her son was still awake when she went to bed, his circadian rhythms wildly out of sync with her own. Though Bridget saw him sleeping in the mornings when she went upstairs to fetch him for school, it was a chore she dreaded. Matt woke sullen and uncooperative, a deep resistance to being snatched from his dreams evident in his heavy footsteps to the bathroom, his overlong showers, and his maddening inability to pick out a shirt and a pair of pants in a timely fashion. Rarely would he eat breakfast, and trying to engage Matt in conversation in the early morning brought little joy. Instead, mother and son communicated in short interrogatives that Bridget suspected were being repeated throughout North America. You have your backpack? Your cleats? Did you finish your homework? What time is practice over? Answers might come in the form of grunts that could escalate to snappish replies if Bridget asked one question too many. She had learned over the last year and a half to be present if needed, invisible if not, a skill she had nearly mastered.
Afternoons were better. Matt, more sociable when he got home from school, charged through the door, smelling of the gym or the playing fields, ravenous and willing to consume almost any food put in front of him. It was the only time Bridget could get him to eat vegetables — raw with a dip. Matt would talk to her, her questions accepted as valid, though she rationed them and never asked the same thing two days in a row. Since she had become ill, Matt was, upon occasion, solicitous. He might ask her (suddenly looking up at her from his guitar) how she was, or Bridget might catch him studying her face when he thought she wasn't looking. Bridget had attempted to hide as much of the illness as she could from her son, Bill getting the brunt of it and accepting it without complaint.
It was Bill who stayed home from work on the days Bridget received the chemotherapy, who sat with her while the medicine was fed through the IV. Bridget could not think of it as poison, which many patients did and which she supposed it was. Rather, she preferred to think of the three chemicals that dripped into her body as beneficent potions. And it was Bill who was in the house during the afternoons and evenings when Bridget could not raise her head from the pillow. On treatment days, Bill brought her ricotta cheese and fruit, oddly the only food that appealed to her. He left her alone when she wanted, or stood in the bedroom, hands on his hips, while she threw up in the bathroom. She did not like him to see, though she knew he could hear. Occasionally, when she was nauseated, a terrible sensation of panic would overtake her, and she would call out to him, and he would come. His presence, just outside the bathroom door, would be enough to calm her. He would remind her that the ordeal would be over soon and that the medicine was doing its job, platitudes she just as easily could have told herself.
She glanced at Bill behind the wheel — at his steely hair, at his round face, sculpting itself with age; at the other sculpture of his torso, coming undone with the years, like ice slowly melting. Bridget loved Bill. Not fiercely, as she loved her son. Not all-consumingly, as she had once loved Bill as a teenager. But, rather, solidly and knowingly, a deep undercurrent of passion and memory running below a grateful surface.
Aware of her attention, he turned his head and reached out with his hand, giving her something between a pat and a poke, the touch both automatic and reassuring. "How are you doing?" he asked.
"Fine," she said, knowing Bill would accept her answer, even as she knew he knew she might be lying.
Bridget wasn't fine. Since the chemo, long drives made her carsick. She ached to get out and to stretch her legs, to breathe fresh air. She was hungry, too, another consequence of the chemo, the constant need to put food in her stomach as well as a perfectly justifiable desire to indulge herself from time to time causing a weight gain of twelve pounds in six weeks. The weight gain struck Bridget as egregiously insulting. She particularly minded now on her way to her own wedding. Bridget thought of the pink boucle wool suit she would wear to the ceremony, of the way the waistband of the skirt pinched and caused the skirt to rise up higher than it should. And that thought led to a dispirited one of the ironlike underwear she would need to put on under the suit to smooth out the new swells and rolls: the one-piece, the panty hose, the skirt girdle. Too much architecture, and yet Bridget was unwilling to let herself go entirely.
She didn't want to reveal, for example, her nearly bald head.
Shed told herself that the wig was for her son's sake, that if she didn't look sick he wouldn't worry about her as much. And it was better, too, for the sake of her colleagues at the school department. But of course the wig was for herself. In the middle week of the three-week treatments, when she had recovered some of her energy, she could almost believe that she was well. Her skin tone had changed (she was paler, and she'd been told that might be permanent), but with the wig and a sweep of blush, she thought she could pass for normal. Fear was counterproductive, Bridget had learned. One couldn't spend every minute thinking about death.
She fingered the wig now, the stiff netting that lifted slightly off the back of her neck. It was made of real European hair, colored light brown, thicker than hers had ever been. But Bridget could not get used to the strange otherness of this head of hair that was not her own, that was really more of a hat.
The wig had been terrifically expensive, and Bridget had gone to great lengths to find it. During her first three-week treatment, she had traveled from the Boston suburb in which she lived to New York City on the advice of a friend who'd known of a wig shop in Brooklyn that was supposed to be the Rolls-Royce of wig makers {sheitel machers, Bridget had learned). Bridget had spent the night at a hotel in Manhattan and then had taken a long taxi ride to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, noting the sharp demarcation of the neighborhood with its Hebrew signs and kosher shops. She'd entered the unprepossessing wig shop full of doubts, aware of herself as an outsider and yet welcomed in a kind of chaotic way to the back room. There, as she had waited for the owner, who would tend to her and who would become something of a confidante in the weeks following the initial fitting, Bridget had stared into the mirror, unable to keep from watching a drama that was unfolding in the chair next to her. A woman who could not have been older than eighteen was trying on a newly made wig for the first time.
The girl seemed young for her age, about to spiral out of control in the way that adolescent girls sometimes could — alternately delighted with her wig, and then snapping at her mother, snatching the wig off her head as if it were diseased, and then sobbing. The girl would be married in two days, Bridget learned (calculating that the
wedding date would be a Wednesday; odd to get married on a Wednesday), and would have her head shaved just before the ceremony. The Orthodox tradition to which the girl belonged forbade a married woman from showing her hair to anyone but her husband. The young woman would wear her wig for the rest of her life. The girl had an astonishingly beautiful head of hair, thick and long and shiny, and Bridget could not believe that she would in two days' time allow someone to cut it off, the image harsh and reminiscent of Jewish concentration camps or of French female collaborators during World War II. The minutes that Bridget had spent in that back room had seemed among the most foreign of her life (the most difficult to translate), and it was only when the owner came in and gently put her fingers through Bridget's short (and surely foreign in this setting) hair that Bridget had rattled back to the reality of her cancer and to the reason why she was visiting the shop.
It had taken three trips to Brooklyn to complete the process, each journey more arduous than the last as Bridget had progressed through the treatments — the last trip nearly desperate since she was by then losing her hair at a rapid clip. Bill had arranged for a car to pick Bridget up at home and deliver her to the now-familiar, even comfortable, sheitel macher, where the staff had greeted her like an old friend. The car had waited for Bridget and then had taken her home, a round-trip of thirteen hours and costing Bill nearly a thousand dollars, every penny of which, Bridget later decided, was worth it.
Bridget was used to the wig now and even liked its convenience (she could wake up, put it on, and have instantly perfect hair), though it became an unwelcome inanimate object in the bed on the nights when Bill slept over. The most difficult part of the cancer was not the fear of death or the treatments themselves but rather, Bridget had decided, the loss of dignity, particularly excruciating in the run-up to a wedding.
