Sometimes the memories that returned to him—snow on mountains, disturbances of light—were not even his own. Those vast receding vistas of high peaks must be out west, yet he had never, after all, gotten to the Rockies. Those scenes that came to him at night were from his childhood fantasies, or else the ones Louisa had described, on the day they’d gone to Bear Mountain.
He had wanted to stay home and get through Mr. Starin’s paperwork that day, but he had conceded, knowing that she had a right to his company, that all over the world husbands took their wives to the country on Sundays. And so they had taken the bus upstate, with their lunch in a picnic basket she’d bought specially for the occasion—a lunch that turned out not to contain any napkins, or salt for the hard-boiled eggs, or anything to drink. The bus had dropped them off in front of a drugstore with a CLOSED sign on the door, on a sunny Main Street deserted except for a little cluster of people on the church steps, the women with flowers or fruit on their hats, the men shifting impatiently from one foot to another as their more garrulous wives formed a little circle around the minister. But just a few streets away there were woods, as she had promised, and green hills, and the gurgle of a stream. When they reached its banks she took the picnic basket from him, spreading out a cloth on the grass, but as she was unpacking their lunch she stumbled on her impractical high-heeled sandals and dropped the cucumber sandwiches in the foamy water. She turned to him then with a look of pure dismay, her mouth a round tragic O, and suddenly laughter welled up in him; the wind was rustling the branches overhead, the sun was making patterns on the grass, and they both stood there helpless with laughter. The happiness he felt in that moment was almost like pain.
“Is this what the West looks like?” he had asked her later, lying with his head on her lap.
“Oh, no,” she’d said, stroking his hair. “It’s much more majestic. And it doesn’t look like the Alps, either, though I thought it would. I thought it would be something like Oberaudorf. But nothing could have prepared me for that landscape. Even with everything that was going on, even knowing I was going to run away, I couldn’t stop looking out the window.”
“Then tell me what it was like,” he’d said, with a sudden stab of envy.
“I can’t. I can’t describe it.”
“Try.”
Her fingers had stopped moving. “It felt like the cleanest place on earth. As though no other human had ever been there, as though nobody had ever put a foot on that ground, or even breathed the air. It felt as though you were looking at God. As though the world had just been born that day.”
Another night he had a dream in which the other Louisa, the clumsy one from after the operation, sat on a lumpy bed in a room with red-flocked wallpaper; a dog was whining outside the door to be let in. This was not his own memory either. Otto had visited Louisa when she was staying in a rooming house in Reno, waiting for the divorce to come through, and written to him.
“She hasn’t said a word against you,” Otto wrote. “She hardly speaks at all. She just sits alone in that ugly little room. I try to imagine what you say to yourself, how you justify this total destruction of a human life, and I can’t come up with any answer.”
He had just asked Connie to marry him when the letter came. It was spring, the time for new beginnings. Connie had told her family that his wife was crazy and had to be put away, that he was still deeply in debt for her care, which was why they’d decided to wait awhile to marry. (In fact, it was the loan for the surgeon’s fee that he was paying off.) All her sisters and sisters-in-law were specially nice to him on that account, pressing food on him and asking solicitously after Emma, though the men of the family were sullen and watchful, addressing him only to ask for the pepper or the gravy and excusing themselves from the table to go smoke together on the stoop as soon as the meal was over. Probably they did not want their sister marrying a Jew, a divorcé, a foreigner. So he sat with the women among the coffee cups, embarrassed by their sympathy but unable to deflect it without telling them more than seemed advisable. He tore up Otto’s letter without answering it.
When Sharon returned, and asked him once more if he was sure there was nothing he wanted, he tried to imagine telling her about Louisa, what he had done to Louisa. She would listen with all her young gravity; when he had finished, she would tell him, no doubt, that he was a good man, he must forgive himself, that being the only wisdom she knew. But he was not looking for absolution.
“You’re going to have phantom pains,” she said. “Have they told you about them? How you’ll feel pain in the leg that isn’t there any more?”
Yes, he said, they had explained all that.
“Okay then. You really ought to get some sleep.”
He would try, he said. She probably thought his sleeplessness stemmed from simple dread: the next time he lost consciousness, on the operating table, he would awaken with one leg; the phantom pains would begin. But at least, as he’d told her, they’d warned him about those. Nobody had prepared him for the sort he was feeling now.
CHAPTER THREE
After Emma left on Mother’s Day—it was the one time she switched her visit to Sunday—Mrs. Rafferty went on silently drinking the sherry she had pressed on them until, by the time she would usually have been making supper, her shoulders were heaving under her print housedress. Tears were running down her face, which she wiped away with the back of her hand.
Louisa had often seen her the worse for drink—since the other residents left, it had happened with some regularity—but usually she became argumentative, and then grew maddened by Louisa’s failure to fight back. Louisa could not remember ever seeing her cry. She went and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, feeling, as she did so, the muscle there. It had been years since she had been called upon to play the role of comforter.
She reached into her sleeve and pulled out the rumpled Kleenex she always kept there, which Emma was always telling her to throw away. But Mrs. Rafferty ignored this. “Oh, I’m a fool,” she said, and then, as though the sound of it had satisfied her, “a fool.” She took an identically crumpled tissue from the pocket of her housedress and blew her nose. “You don’t know,” she said in a thickened voice, “how much I loved that child. I used to be so happy when she’d come to stay. God forgive me, but after my sister’s husband went off I had some of the happiest times of my life. She couldn’t always look after Betsie, you see, she used to work those big parties, they went on half the night sometimes, over on Park Avenue, she’d come to pick her up in the mornings with such lovely food in her bag, you wouldn’t believe how much those rich people just left on the tray, she told me. Little canapés with swirls of cheese and more shrimp than anyone could eat. And teensy petits fours with four layers in ’em, still sitting in their ruffled paper.” She blew her nose again.
“Mr. Rafferty was alive then, of course, and he’d play cards with her after dinner, old maid and things like that, or chutes and ladders, I’d have to break it up and make her go to bed, she’d plead and plead to stay up later, and he was as bad as she was, he’d never say it was time she went off. ‘This child needs her sleep,’ I’d say, and he’d wink at her and say she could sleep at school. How she used to laugh at that. But finally she’d let me take her upstairs—she always slept in the room you have now—and after her bath I’d listen to her prayers and tuck her in. Those were the best times of all, after she’d gone to sleep, when I’d get on with the darning, or busy myself in the kitchen, with such a sense of richness, just thinking of her upstairs. Knowing she was there.”
“You haven’t heard from her?” Louisa asked gently.
“No. Not since that day she was supposed to come and she canceled.”
“She’s just young, that’s all. Young and thoughtless. Or busy with her own life. I’m sure she’ll call you soon.”
“I don’t want her to. I never want to speak to her again.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“It’s all very well for you,” Mrs. Rafferty
burst out. “You’re lucky. Your daughter comes every week. How would you feel if there was nobody on earth who belonged to you? You think about it.” Rising unsteadily from her chair, she seized her sherry glass and headed for the kitchen with a heavy tread, her retreating back eloquent with grievance. Meanwhile Louisa went on standing there, her own eyes prickly with tears. It wasn’t the malice in Mrs. Rafferty’s voice that had upset her; it was the glimpse of a loneliness so vast that even she could be regarded as lucky.
Two months after the surgery, when he was due to be fitted for a prosthesis, the surgeon phoned and asked him to come to his office. He knew what that signified: the last X-ray had revealed more cancer in the stump. So it was over.
“Is it really necessary that we do this in person?” he asked the man. “I’ve got my West Coast managers coming in this afternoon.” He had returned to work only that week, hobbling around on crutches; it would be too onerous to haul himself downstairs and into a cab, then haul himself out again at the other end, only to hear his death sentence.
“It’s just I’m afraid I’ve got bad news,” the surgeon said, and told him what he already knew. After they’d hung up, Rolf sat staring at the phone for a minute, noting for the first time ever the exact contours of its plastic casing—noting also, dispassionately, that now his fate was certain he felt none of the elation that had been there when the idea first arose. What he felt was only fear. But a minute later he picked up his pen and made a note about the figures for the West Coast.
That evening he phoned Emma, while Connie slammed doors in the kitchen, all her anger now being turned on inanimate objects. When he’d told her the news, she had cursed at the Duncan Hines cake she’d been baking for the members of the hospital board, who still consulted him on matters pertaining to the new oncology unit, and had been due to arrive in a few hours. He did not tell them about the cancer; he concentrated on the linear accelerators instead, steadying his mind on the organizable facts. Number one, he said, number two, number three … Somebody has got to determine how many radiation physicists we will require.
How were things going at work? he asked Emma, and she told him, sounding wary, that it looked as though she’d have to find another job. Mr. Eath, she said, was running out of funding. But she had answered an ad for an editor’s job at a college textbook publisher; she had an interview scheduled for the following week. He asked her the name of the publisher, and what sort of textbooks they published, and wished her luck. Then he told her.
As with Connie, the news seemed to enrage her. “But how could this happen?” she asked, her voice rising. “How could it?”
“There’s no point asking why. It happened, that’s all.”
“But why did they put you through all that, why did they amputate your leg, if the cancer was only going to come back?”
“They couldn’t know that. They did what they considered best.”
She was almost shouting now. “You said that with the chemotherapy too. And the radiation. You always stick up for them.”
“Are you suggesting that they deliberately deceived me?”
“I think they used you. I think they wanted to see if it would work, but they didn’t really know, and they pretended they did.”
“That’s very far from being the case. Nor is it very flattering to me. Nobody lied to me. They told me right from the beginning what the risks were.”
“But they never told you it could come back so fast, did they? Not in eight weeks.”
He could not remember any more, except that one of the doctors had said, “All I can tell you is, if it was me, I’d do it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, exhausted by all the passion being expended on his behalf. “It’s just one more punishment.”
“Punishment for what?” she asked, and now she really was shouting. “For what? What are you talking about?”
He cleared his throat; he was about to change the subject, to question her further about the textbook publisher. Where were the offices located? Would she be working with philosophy books? Instead, something else came out. “You know very well what I’m talking about,” he said. After that she was the one who changed the subject.
CHAPTER FOUR
Poor Emma,” Khim had said once. “Poor Emma. She will be trying to understand death.” He was lying on his back in bed, smoking one of his infrequent cigarettes, a Dunhill from a red-and-gold box.
“No I won’t,” she said, feeling accused. They had made love a few minutes before; now she sensed a shift in his mood. His upper lip, which curled over the filter each time he inhaled, looked cruel and taut.
“Nothing wrong if you do. Only I pity you.” He swung his legs over the bed, stubbing out the cigarette in the bronze ashtray on the floor. “I go make us some tea and we can talk philosophy.”
That was one of his recurring teases, that all she really liked him for was to argue philosophy with: “Such a serious girl. The first time you came to my office, about the job, I said to myself, this woman is much too high-minded for me, she will think I am a very frivolous person.”
“You didn’t really think that.”
“Yes, I did. In your gray dress, like a Quaker. Then I looked at your résumé, I saw that you had been to graduate school in philosophy. Aha, I thought, she has a rich daddy, she has been trying to discover the nature of good.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Not at all. Besides, you do have a rich daddy.”
She had told him early on, when her father first got sick, that she might have to work irregular hours sometimes, so she could go to the hospital in Connecticut during the day; she would make up the time in the evenings, she said, if he didn’t mind.
“Of course you can,” he said, “goes without saying,” watching her with that concentrated stillness that always unnerved her. Then he asked her what sort of man her father was.
“He’s like a monument,” she’d said flippantly. “Like an old-fashioned bank with pillars.” Khim looked disapproving, as she’d known he would.
She used to go to the office directly from Grand Central, on those days she went to visit her father; she knew Khim’s schedule, she knew when he was taking Mr. Seng out to dinner and would be safely gone by seven. Mr. Seng was the most demanding of the authors, he phoned almost daily to complain of something, but he was the only one Khim spoke of with respect. The others he called ungrateful, unrealistic: “They are lucky to be published at all. Where does money come from for these books?” She didn’t know, she said. “Cultural agencies who finance press are certainly getting funding from CIA. Nobody else is caring about Cambodia now. Is miracle these writers being paid for such books no one is wanting.” But Mr. Seng, he told her, was a true scholar, a man who had devoted his life to the study of the carvings at Angkor Wat. However frustrated he became at the stream of angry words issuing from the phone, however much he shook his fist in the air as Mr. Seng was berating him, he went on taking him to dinner week after week—in order, he said, to make sure the man got something decent to eat.
When she got to the office on those evenings she would begin conscientiously, sitting at her desk in the little alcove with her red pencil in hand. Sooner or later, though—unable to focus on the laws pertaining to agriculture in Cambodia in 1954, or defeated by the sheer impenetrability of the prose—she would get up and stand in the doorway to Khim’s office, as though the polished desk with its brass drawer pulls and square crystal inkwell, the gray velvet couch, the carved chair, the lacquered cabinet, contained the answers to some urgent question she had not formulated yet.
A Giotto print hung behind the desk: a luminous angel standing with bowed head among the shepherds, against a sky so blue it seemed to eat up sunlight. It had disconcerted her the day she’d gone there for her interview, as Khim himself had disconcerted her—the fierce straightness of his back, his hands and mouth and gleaming hair, his very elegant tie that did not fit with her ideas, such as they were, about Cambodians. And then the fu
rniture did not belong in that room; green paint was peeling off the walls of his office, and the radiators were chipped and rusty. She had felt clumsy, off balance, the whole time.
One night when she was alone in the office she went and opened the top drawer of his desk, very quickly, as though it were not herself but someone else who was doing it. She told herself she was only curious to know how old he was. It was so difficult to tell. There might be a passport in there, a visa application. In fact all she found were paper clips, some pencils with blunt ends, a cheap fountain pen, and an envelope containing a single, heavy sheet of paper covered with characters she could not read.
One day in February when her father was being irradiated with a new sort of machine at the New Haven hospital, she just caught him, as she entered, gripping the rails of the bed, his head thrown back, his teeth bared in a grimace of pain, but when he saw her he let his hands drop and said, “Well, well, look who’s here,” in that labored, hearty voice he adopted for her visits. He brushed aside her questions about the treatment and asked her instead what manuscript she was working on at the moment, what Mr. Eath thought of the latest news from Laos; he always inquired respectfully about Mr. Eath’s views on the situation in Indochina.
It was not what she’d wanted to talk about with him. But there was no way in, there was never a way in. She found herself telling him, in phrases as stilted as his own, about the sixteen-year-old guerrilla fighters in the Cambodian countryside and the shockingly low rate of literacy among Cambodians under French rule. He nodded gravely, with seeming deep interest, gripping the rail of the bed again, until his knuckles were white; he shut his eyes and then opened them quickly, as though not to be caught out. She went into the white-tiled bathroom to refill the Styrofoam pitcher by his bed, and as she came out a spasm passed over his face.
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