I leaned over and kissed Mom good-bye. I stood up and followed Dad to the door. I looked back one last time. Mom’s eyes had glassed over, making her seem even more detached. I fought off a shudder.
“Let’s go,” I said, and we left.
Outside in the car, Dad sat quietly for a few moments, his eyes shut. When he opened them again, he said, “I cannot tell you how much I hate these visits.”
“I know it’s horrible to say, but you can’t help but wonder if they couldn’t give her something to help the end along.”
“We’re not as enlightened as the Netherlands on that front. Too many right-to-lifers screaming legalized murder whenever you mutter the word euthanasia. The same right-to-lifers who scream murder whenever someone mentions stem-cell research as a possible cure for Alzheimer’s . . . because it means fusing an egg and a sperm in vitro. And meanwhile, Dorothy sits there, mentally dead—”
He broke off and let out a large sigh.
“And do you know what really gets me? The two hundred thousand that Dorothy still had in trust from her parents—money she was planning to bequeath to Jeff and Lizzie—is simply ending up in the pockets of that goddamn home. Forty thousand a year to keep her alive. For what purpose, what aim? And I know she’d hate the idea that the money she so wanted to go to her grandkids . . .”
“Jeff and Lizzie are doing just fine in the money department, bless their free-market souls.”
“Well, it still galls me . . .”
“Dad, let’s get a drink, eh?”
“Let’s get two,” he said.
I drove us to an old, no-frills bar he liked in downtown Burlington (his ability to drive was still a point of pride to him). Two drinks became three, accompanied by old-fashioned bowls of unshelled peanuts of the sort you don’t see anymore. I can’t remember the last time I drank three vodka martinis, back to back—but God, were we both hammered by the time I got the bartender to call us a cab. Despite his age, Dad really could hold his booze—by which I mean that, though clearly smashed, he managed to remain eloquent throughout, especially when he went into an extended rant about our current president (“The Fratboy in Chief,” as he called him) and his “junta.”
“You know, these days, I’m actually starting to get nostalgic for Dick Nixon—which, believe me, is something I never thought I’d do during my lifetime.”
The taxi dropped us back at Dad’s house around six. I staggered into the kitchen, rooted around the pantry and the freezer, and found the makings of a spaghetti Bolognese. As I somehow managed to throw dinner together, Dad went to his office, sat in the rocking chair next to his desk, and promptly passed out. I discovered him there when I walked in to inform him that dinner would be served in about twenty minutes. But he was so out of it that I decided I wouldn’t put the spaghetti on to boil until he came around.
But just as I was turning to leave his office, my cell phone went off. Dad jumped awake. I simply jumped.
Lizzie.
But when I glanced at the LCD on the phone, the number that came up was a 212 area code.
Margy.
I hit the answer button.
“Hey there,” I said. “You were on my mind today.”
“Is this a good moment?” she asked, sounding serious.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m at my dad’s place in Burlington. Something up?”
“Can you find a place to talk privately?”
“Has the cancer come back?”
“No, but thank you for jumping to horrible conclusions. Listen, I can call back later.”
“No, don’t hang up, I’ll just . . .”
I pulled the phone away from my ear, and explained that it was Margy on the line, and that I needed to vanish for a moment or two.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m still sleeping off the martinis.”
I wandered back into the kitchen, closed the door, stood over the pan of Bolognese sauce, picked up a wooden spoon, and started stirring as I put the phone back to my ear.
“We can talk now,” I said. “You sound bad.”
“Well, since you asked, I did cough up a little blood this morning, which required a lightning dash across town to my friendly neighborhood oncologist, who dispatched me immediately to a radiologist for a little photograph. It turned up nothing, which meant that I squandered an entire morning and simultaneously had the shit scared out of me. Then, when I got back to the office, a parcel was waiting for me. You know, my company’s started handling writers now—things are that bad. No, I’m joking . . . but a lot of New York publishers are outsourcing certain authors to certain PR companies, and we’ve started to be sent the occasional proof for consideration.
“Anyway, and this is the point of this call, a conservative publisher, Plymouth Rock Books . . . they’ve gotten rather big over the past few years, surprise, surprise . . . contacted me two days ago, saying they were handling this Chicago talk-radio pundit who had developed quite a following around Lake Michigan, and who they were now hoping they could break out nationwide. He’s written a book that they are certain will be a coast-to-coast best seller. It’s the story of his radical years in the 1960s, all his subversive activities, his flight to Canada, and his Pauline conversion on the road to Damascus that has made him recant his radical past and turned him into the Great American Patriot—and Serious Christian—that he is today.”
I stopped stirring the sauce.
“Tobias Judson?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And have you read the book?”
“I’m afraid so.”
I turned the gas burner off, walked over to a kitchen chair, and sat down.
“You know what my next question is going to be,” I said.
“Yes, I do,” Margy said. “And yes, you’re in the book. In fact, he devotes an entire chapter to you.”
TWELVE
MARGY WANTED TO spill the beans and tell me everything that was written about me in Tobias Judson’s book. But I was so knocked sideways by the news that I wasn’t thinking clearly. Acting on instinct, I refused to let her give me a précis.
“I don’t want to hear what dirt he’s dished,” I said. “I want to read it myself.”
“You sure you don’t want a little hint about . . . ?”
“I’ll go berserk if you tell me, and then worry all night until the book arrives.”
“You’ll worry all night anyway.”
“True, but at least I’ll know I won’t be able to get wound up about what you said he said.”
“The good news is that he doesn’t use your name.”
“Which means that, from my perspective, there’s plenty of bad news.”
A long pause.
“Your silence is just a little telling,” I said.
“I’m saying nothing. But I will FedEx it to you first thing tomorrow. You’re back in Maine then, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, it will arrive the next morning.”
I flinched. Dan usually took Thursdays off—and though he’d never open my mail, if a FedEx package arrived for me, he’d ask who it was from and wonder out loud about its contents. And then I’d have to lie . . .
“Send it to me at the school,” I said.
“I hear you,” Margy said. “Listen, once you’ve read the book, I want you to call me right away. Without giving too much away, you might need what’s known in my trade as ‘professional representation’—better known as a loudmouth to refute . . .”
“Stop, please. Once I’ve read it, I promise I’ll call you immediately and we’ll talk. Before then, I can’t really say anything . . .”
“You’re taking this all rather coolly,” she said. “Like, if it was me, I’d be bouncing off the walls.”
“I’ve got larger concerns right now.”
“May I ask?”
So I brought her up to speed on Lizzie, spelling out, for the second time today, the entire vexing story—only now adding into the mix the fact that my fa
ther had been counseling her for weeks. When I finished, Margy said nothing for a while. Then, “You know what the worst thing about all this is . . . or at least, from where I sit? It’s the fact that you and Dan have been such solid damn parents. No divorce, no professional or domestic chaos. And from what you’ve told me over the years, you were always there just about every night for them when they were growing up. And despite all that care and loving attention—”
“It doesn’t work that way, Margy. You can only do and provide so much. After that, it all comes down to . . . God, I don’t know. We all hope our kids will get off lightly in the ‘life is hard’ stakes . . . but it doesn’t always turn out that way. All I can think about is how horrible things are for Lizzie right now. She’s unhinged by unhappiness . . .”
“Don’t say that, hon.”
“Why not? It’s the truth.”
“She’s just having a rough passage.”
“Margy, don’t try to soft-sell this to me. Lizzie’s stalking a married man. She’s sleeping in her car outside his front door—and when she talks about what’s going on, her voice takes on this strange, distorted, supercalm tone, as if what she’s doing is the most natural, understandable thing in the world . . . whereas the truth of the matter is: she’s heading straight into psychological free fall.”
“At least your dad got her to see a shrink.”
“But so far, he hasn’t exactly brought about a miraculous recovery.”
“Hey, take it from one who knows: therapy takes years . . . and even then it doesn’t completely change everything.”
“The state she’s in right now, Lizzie doesn’t have years. I’m scared for her, Margy.”
“And now I am truly appalled with my shitty timing. Dropping this other thing in your lap . . .”
“I had to know about it. Anyway, it’s best I hear it from you, rather than find out by other means.”
“All going well, none of what he wrote about you should ever get out.”
“You’re giving the game away again.”
“Sorry, sorry. Me and my big yenta mouth.”
“Shut up. You’re the best friend imaginable.”
“When do you expect to hear from Lizzie?”
“Tonight, I hope.”
“You’ll call me afterward?”
“Promise. Are you still at the office?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Won’t your oncologist slap you around for pushing yourself too hard?”
“I’m his poster girl for lung cancer. The bitch who beat the odds . . . so far anyway.”
“If they say they’ve got all of it, you’re in the clear.”
“Now it’s you who deserves to be trampled on for soft-selling a shitty situation. Dr. Drugstore—my new name for Walgreen—said they got virtually all of it, but note his qualifying use of the word virtually. Anyway, I’ve spent hours on the Mayo Clinic website, reading up on my charming self-afflicted illness. The fact is, secondary, tertiary, and . . . is quadruplary a word? . . . anyway, the blunt fact is that, after all the MRI scans and radioactive sugar drips I’ve endured, they can’t be a hundred percent sure they’ve found everything.”
“You’ve beaten it, Margy.”
“Virtually beaten it.”
After I hung up, I found myself pacing around the kitchen, willing myself to calm down, telling myself there was nothing I could do about Tobias Judson (yet again, even thinking his name made me shudder) and his damn book. And since I wouldn’t be in receipt of said book until next week—as the school was closed for Easter vacation until then—I’d have to completely block it all from my mind.
Yeah, right.
All right, I knew I was going to be worried sick about this for the next week, but I couldn’t say anything to my father. Because that would provoke massive guilt and recriminations in him and raise that entire damn business again—and the last thing I wanted to do was to bring him grief . . . especially at his age and with the ongoing calamity of my mother weighing on him all the time. So . . .
“Hannah, you off the phone yet?”
This question was accompanied by a light rapping on the door.
I took a deep breath, tried to rearrange my face, then said, “Coming now, Dad.”
I opened the door. My father immediately went to the stove and started stirring the pan of sauce while the pot of spaghetti boiled nearby.
“Didn’t mean to hassle you,” he said, “but the spaghetti’s just about done.”
“No problem. I’d just finished up.”
He studied me for a moment.
“You okay?”
“Margy’s had some ups and downs recently.”
He knew about her cancer, as I’d told him about it when she was diagnosed just before Christmas, and had been giving him regular updates since then.
“Poor Margy,” he said. “In the great scheme of things, lung cancer is about as bad as it gets.”
“That is the truth. And I suppose one of the things about getting older is the way you start to bargain with fate all the time . . .”
“As in: Please don’t end my life in an undignified, monstrous way?”
“Exactly. And, I suppose, one of the big problems with not believing in an all-controlling God is that, when terrible stuff happens to yourself or to those closest to you, you can’t console yourself with the thought that it’s all down to some divine plan.”
“Religion, ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die.’”
“Is that original?”
“I wish. An English poet: Philip Larkin. Something of a misanthropist, yet also rather brilliant about life’s big, unspoken fears. Or perhaps the one big unspoken fear that haunts everybody: death. ‘Most things may never happen: this one will.’”
“Isn’t that spaghetti ready to go?” I asked.
Dad smiled.
“That’s a very Italian response,” he said.
“To what?”
“To mortality. When seized by thoughts of your own ephemerality, the only solution is: eat.”
Over dinner, we managed to work our way through a bottle of red wine that Dad had found in a cupboard. I would have happily downed methylated spirits if it had blocked out all my fears. We both glanced several times at the kitchen clock on the nearby wall, wondering when and if we’d hear from Lizzie.
“What time did she say she was meeting him?” I asked.
“After work. So that could mean seven, eight . . .”
“If she hasn’t called by ten, I’ll give her a ring . . . even though she’ll hate the idea I’m checking up on her.”
“Under the circumstances . . .”
By nine, the bottle of wine was empty and there was still no word from Lizzie. The postmartini nap had revived my father. He was talking at full steam, telling me an extended but rather amusing anecdote about getting very drunk in London during the war and finding the address of T. S. Eliot’s flat, and rolling over there with a Harvard friend and knocking on the door.
“It was eleven-something at night, and he was in his pajamas and bathrobe. He was just a little bemused by these two American servicemen, standing outside his front door, clearly smashed. He got rather indignant and said, ‘What is it you want?’ I remember how cut-glass English his accent was—and how, even in his nightclothes, he had the demeanor of a great man. Anyway, he’d asked a question which obviously demanded an answer, and I was so out of it, all I could say was, ‘It’s you!’
“He slammed the door right in our faces, and my buddy, Oscar Newton, turned to me and said, ‘Well, April is the cruelest month.’ Three weeks later, Oscar was killed in France . . .”
The phone rang. We both jumped. Dad answered it. His expression showed disappointment.
“Hi, Dan. Yes, she’s here. And no, we haven’t heard from Lizzie yet.”
He handed me the phone.
“Not a word at all?” Dan asked.
“We’re still waiting.”
“Y
ou’ve obviously filled your dad in.”
“No, Lizzie did that already,” and I explained how she’d been calling him for several weeks. I expected Dan to be further wounded by this revelation, and to ask why she hadn’t turned to her own father for advice and support. But in true Dan style, he kept whatever hurt he felt to himself.
“It’s good that she’s talking to her grandfather. I just wish we knew what was going on.”
“That makes three of us. Listen, as soon as she rings . . .”
But by the time Dad began to fade, around ten-thirty, there was still no word from her. So I called her cell phone and was connected to her voice mail. I left a message, simply saying that I was wondering how she was doing, and telling her to call me back when she could . . . and that my cell phone would be on all night, so if she needed to speak with me, I’d be on immediate tap. I thought about ringing her apartment, but worried that she might interpret too many messages as interfering. So I turned to Dad and said, “I think we should call it a night.”
“She’s occasionally called me in the middle of the night,” he said. “If she rings . . .”
“Wake me up.”
“I just feel like jumping into my car, driving down to Boston, just to make certain she’s all right.”
“If we don’t hear from her by midday . . .”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Dad said.
I went up to the guest room, undressed, put on the nightshirt I’d brought with me, climbed into bed with a copy of some early Updike stories I found on one of Dad’s bookshelves, and tried to focus on his elegiac depictions of a childhood in Shillington, Pennsylvania, hoping it would send me into the sleepy oblivion I craved.
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 140
