by Belva Plain
“No need. You’ve trained Vicky very well. And I’ve had the accountant come in regularly, which of course we didn’t have to do when you were there. But he can supervise her, and we’ll manage fine until you go back. Jane needs her mother now.”
Summer days were long and wonderfully slow. In the evening when it was still light enough at half past eight to take coffee under the trees, you could wish that time would stop right there and save that hour: the silence before the nighttime insect choir started, the fragrances of flowers and pine, the interruption of cheerful, teenage voices, Eve and her friends going down the street, Lore’s music coming faintly from her open window, then silence again.
And Joel exclaimed, “How young you are! You could pass for twenty. There’s not a mark on your skin.”
“Darling, it’s almost dark, and you can’t see my skin. But did I see you putting sugar in your coffee?”
“A quarter—an eighth—of a teaspoon,” he said guiltily.
“You know better than that. I’m ashamed of you.”
“You’re right. I hardly ever do it. I won’t do it again.”
“Well, don’t. You simply can’t get sick. You have Jane to think of now.”
“And all the rest of you. I plan to reach one hundred. I’m strong as a horse, and you are, too. A strong, gentle mare.”
“Thanks a lot.”
They were bantering, affectionate and united. All through those summer evenings they sat there, until in September it got too cold, and they moved themselves inside with their plans. They had so many plans to make: college for Eve, and the postponed western trip that they really should take before she left. Surely they could take Jane, too, couldn’t they? She would be walking well by then and they could make the trip in easier stages, more relaxed and perhaps a little shorter.
“Lore, Eve, and I can take turns staying with her sometimes while the others are seeing the sights,” Caroline said.
“It’s hard to believe she’ll be one year old in a few months. By the looks of it, she’ll start to walk before then. A lot of kids do.”
“We’ll have a party and a little cake with one candle on it for her alone, the way we did for Eve.”
This, however, would be a real party. At Eve’s first birthday, they had still been strangers in Ivy. The Riccis had come, Vicky had walked upstairs to join them, and that was all. The Schulmans had been out of town. It would be different this time.
FALL’S colors brightened and deepened. The maple outside Joel’s office in Orangerie Number Three was clear yellow. Glancing up from his desk, he observed that by tomorrow the wind would have stripped it bare. Then the telephone rang. He was to remember it all distinctly: leaves, the Wall Street Journal not yet unwrapped, a cup, and a half-eaten roll.
“Hello,” Al Schulman said. “Are you busy right now?”
“Never too busy for you, Al.”
“I meant, have you got time to come over to the office?”
“Well, I can, but—right now?”
“Sometime this afternoon, then. I’d like to talk to you, and the telephone’s no good.”
There was a twinge, a slight lurch in Joel’s stomach. “Why? Is anything wrong?”
“Joel, don’t sound upset. Let’s meet, and I’ll explain.”
“What’s it about? Don’t keep me in the dark.”
Schulman’s sigh was audible. “It’s a problem with Caroline, an unexpected problem. But please don’t get upset until we talk. I know how you are.”
“What kind of a problem? For God’s sake, Al, tell me now. When you say ‘problem,’ it’s so upsetting that I’d probably wreck the car on the way over to you. What is it? Come out with it.”
“She has melanoma.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
Silence.
“Are you sure?”
“Take it easy, Joel. It doesn’t have to mean disaster.”
Don’t baby me. Don’t you think I know what melanoma is? Caroline. When everything is going so well for us, and we’re living in paradise.
“I’ll be right over,” Joel said, shivering in the sunshine that was pouring on his shoulders.
There were several people in the waiting room, yet he was admitted ahead of them. He strode rapidly, closed the door behind him, and said at once, “Tell me. Tell me everything.”
“When she was here for the annual checkup, I saw the raised spot on her back. Medium-sized, dark, irregular. I didn’t like the look of it. So I took a specimen and sent it to the lab. The report came back a week later, and it was bad.” Schulman paused. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. But I was sure, only I didn’t want to be. So I tried a second lab, and it was the same. Sit down, Joel. Listen, we’re going to do everything for her. This isn’t a hopeless situation. Listen to me, Joel.”
“I’m listening.” His mouth was dry. His hands quivered, and he knotted them to keep them still.
“Then I did a blood test. It confirmed everything.”
“Have you told her?”
“No.”
“She must wonder what you’re looking for.”
“She knows.”
Schulman was playing with a pencil, tapping a notebook with the point, then tipping it to tap with the other end. Joel wished he would stop. It was enough to drive a man crazy to watch him.
“What makes you say she knows?”
“She is a highly intelligent woman.”
“You say it’s not hopeless. So what comes next?”
“We have to hope it doesn’t metastasize. We did a chest X ray, and it was clear, so that’s a very good sign.”
“We have to hope it won’t spread? Just hope? That’s all?”
There was no answer beyond a nod. From the street came some whoops and shouts; schoolchildren were going home to lunch. Jane, he thought. And her mother …
“I’ve heard that sometimes pregnancy can hasten the growth of cancer that’s just beginning. Is that true?”
“You hear all kinds of things. But what difference would it make if it were true?”
“Why didn’t I see the spot on her back? Maybe I did and didn’t think anything of it.”
“What difference does that make, either? We’d do just what we’re doing now.”
“Which is?”
“Another chest X ray. Keep checking on her periodically. And I want to talk to you both together.”
“Why now? Why have you waited so long?” He was angry, and he needed to howl his rage. “Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
“It hasn’t been long, only two weeks, Joel. I wanted to wait until there could be no doubt. And I wanted to prepare you first, so that you can be strong for her. No offense, Joel, because I think the world of you, but there aren’t many people with the stamina that Caroline has, and you’re not one of them. Neither am I. Would you like me to walk over this evening?”
When the two men stood up, the doctor put his hand on Joel’s shoulder and gave encouragement. “I had to tell you the possibilities, but they’re only that, nothing more. If the thing doesn’t spread, and it very, very often doesn’t, we’ll be in the clear. If it does—well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“LISTEN to this.” Eve looked up from her book toward Joel and Lore. “ ‘It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.’ That’s from Dickens. That’s us.”
There was nothing to say, and no one did. Lore was mending. Joel was holding an unread paper, and Caroline was in the hospital. Hope, he was thinking, is a cruel fraud and trickster.
All through the fall, she had been totally herself. In December she had given a first-year birthday party for Jane and a dozen neighborhood babies, with presents, smeared ice cream, and Polaroid pictures of the event. In January, she caught a cold that did not go away but kept her coughing for a month, so that her ribs hurt. In February it turned into pneumonia in the lower lobe of the lung, and she was put into the hospital with
a high fever. By the first of March, an X ray showed lymph nodes above the heart. A surgeon-oncologist did a biopsy, and they had their answer. So fast. So fast.
He knotted his hands and held them on his knees. The posture, and the dull disbelief had become by now a habit of which he was occasionally aware. The clock ticked. It was an old, tall clock that Caroline had found and repaired. He remembered the day it had been set up in the hall. She had been so delighted with it.
“It’s a treasure. Look at the date. Don’t you love the sound? Bong!”
“My God, my God,” he murmured.
Eve rose and put her arms around him. He felt her wet lashes on his cheek.
“I think I hear Jane,” said Lore, putting the mending away. “She still wants a late bottle sometimes, but I’m not going to give it to her. She had enough at suppertime.”
She moved and spoke briskly. It was her way of telling them that life has to go on.
BY late spring, Caroline knew that she was waiting at home to die. In a great soft chair, she sat by the window, watching a storm pass over the lake. Far out, a boat—what was it doing there in this weather?—made an iron-gray blur on the pale surface. Trees here on the lawn were stirring under the force of the rain.
“I am thirty-seven,” she whispered to herself, and thought how extraordinary it was to be dying so young. And she remembered how only a short time ago, she had considered herself very old to be having a baby at thirty-six.
Now the baby was walking, taking her wobbly steps all over the house. She was a funny little thing, with Joel’s curly brown hair and stubborn ways that were unlike anyone else’s in the family. You wouldn’t think that she and Eve were related, much less that they belonged to the same mother.
I suppose, she thought, that Eve and Lore will bring her up. Or Lore will most of the time, since Eve will be away at college. I want her to have the education that I would have had if things had been different. Thank God there will be money enough for them both.
How is it that I can look toward their future without me and not weep over the cruelty of it? All my perceptions are dulled; even music has lost its power. Perhaps this is a kindness of nature, to ease the way for those who would otherwise keep hoping when there is no hope.
In the matching chair, Lore was knitting a sweater-and-skirt set for Jane. The tiny white skirt was not much larger than a table napkin. There was, as there had always been, great comfort in Lore’s presence; now, though, there was also a feeling of guilt because Lore had taken an indefinite leave from the hospital to stay at home.
“You should be at work,” Caroline said.
“I like being home. The change is refreshing.”
“You don’t fool me.”
“Who’s fooling you?”
“Remember, Lore, how we thought you had cancer? You had all those symptoms, all that pain, while I had no symptoms, and here I am.”
“Yes, here you are, and you’ll be fine if you’ll just eat something. I made split pea soup for dinner and roasted a duck. The body needs good rich food to recover, and I’m going to be very hurt if you don’t eat.”
Oh, Lore, when will you and Joel stop pretending? Still, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll go along. Only Eve is able to stare straight into the face of the truth.
“Will you take care of Jane when I’m gone?” she had asked Eve.
“Mom, you know I will. I take her in the stroller every day when school is out, don’t I?”
Along the lakefront they had walked years ago, when she had gone with Eve, first in the stroller, and later walking with Peter, holding his leash in her hand. The wind had blown her little summer dress and her long black hair. Sometimes people had paused to admire and smile.…
Oh, I remember so much and still so little, thought Caroline. You wish you could recall everything, every hour of precious life, but all you can ever retrieve are moments, some so beautiful that they bring tears, and others so dreadful that you must strain to stop your tears. You stare at your anxious, pink-rimmed eyes and blot your cheeks with powder to hide them.
“Don’t be ashamed to cry,” Eve said one time. “At night I cry in my room. Maybe Lore and Daddy do, too, when they’re alone.”
There she had stood, a tall young woman, calm and serious, with her great eyes so sad. She was beautiful. And suddenly Caroline had seen her again standing in the kitchen on that awful night, defiant, with her clenched fists hanging at the sides of her skinny little skirt, her skinny little body just beginning to bud.
Often Caroline thought about the difference between her feelings for her two girls. Jane had no hovering cloud above her. Jane was Joel’s daughter, while Eve was—
“Marry a man like your father,” she told Eve abruptly.
“Like—Daddy?”
“Of course. Who else but Daddy? A good man whom you can trust. But first go to college. If you want to go to California, do it.”
“I don’t know why, but California’s been on my mind forever. There’s a magic about the Pacific Ocean.”
“I understand. I always planned to go out west to the mountains. Eve, you’ll be all right. You will.”
“Mom, darling, I know. I’ll have to be.”
ALWAYS the seasons moved across the lake. Now, in summer, the surface looked hot; the sun blazed upon it so that it glistened like a sheet of metal that would scorch one’s hand. August was a dreary month. The tired leaves hung listlessly, and the grass was as dry as straw.
Caroline lay on a wicker chair under the shade, watching Jane in the sandbox. Soon she would be two years old, and she hardly knew her mother. Other women, Eve and Lore, had to care for her.
Now they had all ceased to pretend. It was not what was said, but rather what was not said, that told how Lore and Joel had finally come to acknowledge the nearness of death. No longer did either of them put Jane, so strong and vigorous, upon Caroline’s lap to twist and bounce and pull her hair. There was no more mention of the western trip. Talk was cheerful, but neutral.
Lore was sewing, taking in one of the dresses that now hung loose on Caroline. She had so many visitors, and Lore understood that she wanted still to be “presentable.” That had been Mama’s word, her proper mama’s “presentable.”
And suddenly, without having planned to speak, Caroline said, “Will you take care of my children, Lore?”
She had asked her the question before. Always the answer had come: “Don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die.” But this time, Lore said only, “Yes,” put down the sewing, and looked away.
After a long moment, Lore spoke again. “Your hair’s all sweaty on your neck. Eve’s bringing cologne. Let’s go in. It’s a little cooler in the house.”
Joel wanted to get an air conditioner for the bedroom, but it wasn’t necessary. A fan would do.
“One day every house will be entirely air-conditioned,” he said. “In the meantime, we can do one room, can’t we?”
But she did not want to block the window. She wanted to see the lake. “I need to,” she said. “I see people walking there. I see the clouds move.”
He said nothing, and bought a powerful fan that whirred and soothed them as they lay together.
The nights passed slowly. Their sleep was uneven. One or the other drowsed, and waking, spoke whatever had come to mind.
“I wish my parents could have known you,” she said once. “They would have been so happy for me.”
And he: “You have been everything to me. Everything, my kind and loving wife.”
Her dreams, flickering, shattered into vivid, colored fragments and were gone: Mama’s gleaming black piano, orange awnings, Dr. Schmidt’s gray mustache—“You’re strong, you’ll be all right,” he had said—and the pink linen dress of a summer long ago.…
“What is it?” asked Joel.
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“I thought you cried out.”
“Did I? I don’t know why.”
By the end of the summer, she stopped
going downstairs. It was too hard to climb back up. And she felt her own fragility in her tired arms and legs. After a while, she left the chair at the window and stayed in bed all day. They moved the bed so that she could see the blaze of autumn light outside. She heard crows call, going south. She heard a bee buzz against the window, and drowsed again. She gazed and drowsed.
One day she heard Joel’s voice talking to Eve, or Lore, or both. She thought he was weeping.
“Dear God, let the time of her suffering go quickly. Or else let time stop so I may keep her.”
There were other voices, too, a whispered hum, as if there were many people there. She did not know, and it did not matter. The voices faded, as if they were very far away.
Death seems so wasteful, she thought, when I have so much left to do.…
PART TWO
1959
EVE
ELEVEN
“Your mother wanted you to,” Joel said, “and you’ve been talking for years about going to college in California.”
They were walking on the lakeshore drive, with Jane in the stroller and Peter, who was clearly Jane’s favorite in the household, trotting, as usual, alongside. Eve looked back at the house and its landmark blue spruce. Her feelings during these last months had been painfully ambivalent; on the one hand, the house was home and shelter, with known faces and all Mom’s familiar possessions in place; on the other hand, it echoed with the silence of Mom’s stilled voice. The cheer in the house was forced and false.
Lore, too, had been pressing her to leave. “Go on and get your education. Look at me. What have I ever done? All right, I’m a nurse, and that’s important work, but all the other things that I could also have learned—the arts, and literature, and history—that I didn’t learn. Don’t be a fool, Eve. Go.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Joel said now. “We’ll take the station wagon and we’ll all drive to California. I’ll sell the car out there, since we’ve no more use for a second car, and the rest of us will fly home.”
He was quite right. Of course she must go. Hadn’t Mom always said “forward”?
