Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  “I would have named him Francis,” Fix said, yet again making Cousins feel he had asked a stupid question.

  “When the first one was a girl we named her after Kennedy’s daughter. I thought, that’s fine, I’ll wait, but now—” Fix stopped, looking down at his daughter. There had been a miscarriage between the two girls, fairly late. They were lucky to get this second one, that’s what the doctor had said, though there was no point in telling that to the deputy district attorney. “It works out this way.”

  “It’s a good name,” Cousins said, but what he thought was, Lucky you didn’t wait.

  “What about you?” Fix said. “You’ve got a little Albert at home?”

  “My son’s name is Calvin. We call him Cal. And the girls, no. No Albertas.”

  “But you’ve got one coming up.”

  “In December,” he said. Cousins remembered how it was before Cal was born, how he and Teresa would lie in bed at night saying names to one another in the dark. One name would remind her of a kid who got picked on in grade school, a kid who wore stained shirts and bit his thumbs. Some other name would remind him of a boy he never liked, a bully, but when they got to Cal both of them were happy. It was something like that when they were thinking up names for Holly, too. Maybe they’d spent less time on it, maybe they didn’t talk about it in bed, her head up on his shoulder, his hand on her stomach, but they’d picked it out together. She wasn’t named for anybody, just for herself, because her parents thought it was a beautiful name. And Jeanette? He didn’t even remember talking about a name for Jeanette. He’d been late getting to the hospital just that one time and if memory served he’d gone into the room and Teresa said, This is Jeanette. She would have been Daphne if anyone had asked him about it. They should talk about what they were going to name this new one. It would give them something to talk about.

  “Name this one Albert,” Fix said.

  “If it’s a boy.”

  “It’ll be a boy. You’re due.”

  Cousins looked at Frances asleep in her father’s arms. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if they had another girl, but if it was a boy then maybe they would call him Albert. “You think?”

  “Absolutely,” Fix said.

  He never did talk about it with Teresa but he was there in the waiting room when the baby was born and he filled out the birth certificate—Albert John Cousins—after himself. Teresa had never much liked her husband’s name but when would there have been an opportunity to bring that up? As soon as they were home from the hospital she started calling the baby Albie, Al-bee. Cousins told her not to but he wasn’t ever around. What was he going to do, stop her? The other kids liked it. They called the baby Albie, too.

  2

  “So you’re telling me that you named Albie?” Franny said.

  “I didn’t name Albie,” her father said, the two of them following the nurse down a long, bright hall. “If I’d named Albie I wouldn’t have given him such a stupid name. You could trace a lot of that kid’s problems back to his name.”

  Franny thought of her stepbrother. “There was probably more to it than that.”

  “Did you know I got him out of Juvenile once? Fourteen years old and he tried to set his school on fire.”

  “I remember,” Franny said.

  “Your mother called and asked me to get him out.” He tapped his chest. “She said it would be a favor to her, like I was so interested in doing her favors. When you think about all the cops Bert knew in L.A. you have to wonder why they were bothering me.”

  “You helped Albie,” she said. “He was a kid and you helped him. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “He didn’t even know how to set a decent fire. I drove him over to see your uncle Tom at the fire station once I got him out. Tom was back in L.A. then. I said to Bert’s kid, ‘You want to burn up a school full of children then these are the guys who can teach you how to do it.’ You know what he said to me?”

  “I do,” Franny said, not pointing out that there had been no children in the school when Albie had set it on fire, and that he’d done a pretty good job. Say what you will for Albie, he knew how to set things on fire.

  “He said he wasn’t interested anymore.” Fix stopped, which made Franny stop, and then the nurse stopped too to wait for them. “People don’t still call him that, do they?” Fix asked.

  “Albie? I don’t know. That’s what I’ve always called him.”

  “I’m trying not to listen to this,” Jenny said. The nurse’s name was Jenny. She was wearing a name tag but that didn’t matter, they knew her.

  “You can listen to anything you want,” Fix said. “But we should be telling better stories.”

  “How are you feeling today, Mr. Keating?” Jenny asked. Fix had come to the UCLA Medical Center for chemotherapy so the question wasn’t entirely social. If you didn’t feel well they sent you home and the entire process was pushed even further out into the unknowable future.

  “Feeling fine,” he said, his arm hooked through Franny’s. “Feeling like light on the water.”

  Jenny laughed and the three of them stopped in a large, open room off the hall where two women wearing head wraps sat with digital thermometers in their mouths. One of them gave the newcomers a tired nod while the other stared ahead. All around them the nurses came and went in their candy-colored scrubs. Fix sat down and Jenny gave him a thermometer and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm. Franny took the empty chair next to her father.

  “Just to get back to the original point for a minute, you and Bert talked about what he should name his son before Albie was born?” Franny had heard the story about the fire and the phone call that came after it a hundred times but somehow the one about Albie’s name had never come up before.

  Fix took the thermometer out. “It wasn’t like we talked about it later.”

  “Hey!” Jenny said, pointing, and Fix put the thermometer back in his mouth.

  Franny shook her head. “It’s just hard to believe.”

  Fix turned his eyes up to Jenny, who unwrapped the cuff. “What’s hard to believe?” she said for him.

  “All of it.” Franny opened her hands. “You and Bert making drinks together, you and Bert speaking, you knowing Bert before Mom did.”

  “Ninety-eight on the nose,” Jenny said, and ejected the plastic thermometer sleeve into the trash. Then she pulled a length of bright-pink tourniquet out of her pocket and tied it around Fix’s upper arm.

  “Of course I knew Bert,” he said, as if he were being denied the credit he was due. “How do you think your mother met him?”

  “I don’t know.” It wasn’t a question she’d ever thought to ask. There was no time in her memory before Bert. “I guess I thought Wallis introduced them. You hated Wallis so much.”

  Jenny was kneading the inside of Fix’s elbow with her fingertips, searching for a vein that might still be open for business.

  “I’ve known junkies who shot between their toes,” Fix said with something approaching nostalgia.

  “One more reason you don’t want a junkie for a nurse.” She tapped another minute on the papery skin and then smiled, holding the vein in place with one finger. “Okay, mister, here we go. A little stick.”

  Fix didn’t flinch. Somehow she had managed to slip the needle straight in. “Oh, Jenny,” he said, looking into the part of her hair as she bent over him. “I wish it could always be you.”

  “Did you really hate Wallis so much?” Jenny asked. She plugged in a rubber-topped vial and watched it fill up with blood, then she filled another.

  “I did.”

  “Poor Wallis.” She slipped out the needle and taped a cotton ball in place. “Just hop up on the scale and then I’ll be done with you.”

  Fix got on the scale and watched as she tapped the metal weight back with one fingernail. Tap-tap down, another pound, another, until the scale balanced at 133. “You’re drinking your Boost?”

  When they were finished with what were called
the preliminaries, they went farther down the same hall, past the nurses’ station, where doctors stood reading reports on computer screens or their phones. They went into the large, sunny room where the patients lay tilted back in recliners, tethered to trickling streams of chemicals. Someone had turned the volume off on all the televisions, which meant they were freed from commercials but left with the discordant beeping of monitors. Jenny led Franny and Fix to two chairs in the corner. It was a gift, considering how busy the chemo room was. Everyone with the energy for preference preferred the corner chairs.

  “I hope you have a good day once this is over,” Jenny said. Jenny didn’t administer chemo. It was only her job to get the chart ready for the nurse who would take over his case from there.

  Fix thanked her and then settled in, using both hands to push himself into the recliner. When his head tilted back and his feet levered up he gave the small sigh of a cop in his chair at the end of a long day on the beat. He closed his eyes. For five full minutes he stayed so still that Franny thought he’d gone to sleep before the line was even started. She wished she’d thought to bring a magazine with her from the waiting room and was just starting to look around the treatment room, because sometimes magazines got left in there, when her father went back to his story.

  “Wallis was a bad influence,” he said, eyes still closed. “She was always sitting in our kitchen going on about liberation and free love. What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn’t have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to. When she was sitting next to Miss Free Love then free love sounded like a great idea.”

  “It was the sixties,” Franny said, glad he was awake. “You can’t pin the whole thing on Wallis.”

  “I’ll pin anything I want on Wallis.”

  It probably wasn’t a bad idea. Wallis had died ten years before of colon cancer, and for all her talk of free love and liberation, she had stuck it out with Larry, who she had married when she was a junior in college. Larry saw her out of her life as patiently as he had seen her through it—giving her bed baths, counting her pills, changing her colostomy bag. Larry and Wallis had moved to Oregon after Larry sold his optometry practice. They grew blueberries and paid an extraordinary amount of attention to their dogs because their children and grandchildren so rarely had the time to visit. Wallis and Beverly had been maintaining their friendship from opposite sides of the country since they were twenty-nine years old, since Beverly left for Virginia to marry Bert Cousins, so Wallis’s late-life move hadn’t affected them at all. Los Angeles, Oregon, what difference did it make when you lived in Virginia? If anything, they were closer after the move because Wallis had no one but Larry and the dogs to talk to. Beverly and Wallis had e-mail and free long distance now. They talked for hours. They sent birthday presents to one another, funny cards. When Beverly married her third husband, Jack Dine, Wallis flew from Oregon to Arlington to be the matron of honor, as she had been the maid of honor at Beverly’s wedding to Fix, but not in Beverly’s wedding to Bert, which had been conducted privately and without friends at Bert’s parents’ house outside Charlottesville. Later, when Wallis got sick, Beverly flew to Oregon and they sat up in the bed together and read Jane Kenyon’s poetry aloud. They talked about the things in life that had mystified them—mostly their children and their husbands. Wallis hadn’t liked Fix Keating any more than he liked her, and she never minded that he assigned to her full responsibility for things that could not possibly have been her fault. If she could shoulder the burden of his blame while she was alive, it was hard to imagine she’d be bothered by it now.

  “Are you cold?” Franny asked her father. “I can get you a blanket.”

  Fix shook his head. “I don’t get cold now. I get cold later. They’ll bring me a blanket when I need one.”

  Franny looked around the room for the nurse without letting her eyes linger on any of the patients—the woman asleep with her mouth open, hairless as a newborn mouse, the teenaged boy tapping on his iPad, the woman whose six-year-old sat quietly in the chair next to hers and colored in a book. How had chemo gone for Wallis? Did Larry drop her off or did he sit with her? Did their sons come up from L.A.? She would have to remember to ask her mother.

  “They’re slow getting started today,” Franny said, not that it mattered. The soup and the bread that Fix wouldn’t eat were ready at the house. Marjorie would be waiting for them. They would watch Jeopardy! Franny would sleep in the guest room upstairs.

  “Never be in a rush to have someone poison you. That’s my motto. I can sit here all day.”

  “When did you get to be so patient?”

  “The patient patient,” he said, pleased with himself. “So do you and Albie keep in touch?”

  Franny shrugged. “I hear from him.” Franny had talked about Albie too much in her life, and now, as if she could make up for it, she made a point of not talking about him at all.

  “And what about old Bert? How’s he doing?”

  “He seems okay.”

  “Do you talk to him very often?” Fix asked, the soul of innocence.

  “Not nearly as often as I talk to you.”

  “It isn’t a contest.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “And he’s married now?”

  Franny shook her head. “Single.”

  “But there was a third one.”

  “Didn’t work out.”

  “Wasn’t there a fiancée though? Somebody after the third one?” Fix knew full well that Bert had had a third divorce but he never tired of hearing about it.

  “There was for a while.”

  “And the fiancée didn’t work out either?”

  Franny shook her head.

  “Well, that’s a shame,” Fix said, sounding as if he meant it, and maybe he did, but he had asked her the same questions a month before and he would ask her again a month from now, pretending that he was old and sick and didn’t remember their last conversation. Fix was old and sick, but he remembered everything. Keep examining the witness—that’s what he had told her over the phone when she was a kid and her ID bracelet had gone missing from her locker. She had called him from Virginia at five o’clock, the minute the rates went down, two o’clock California time. She called him at work. She had never called him at work before but she had his business card. He was a detective by then, and he was her father, so she figured he’d know how to find the bracelet.

  “Ask around,” her father had told her. “Find out who was changing classes and where they were going. You don’t need to make a big deal about it, don’t let anyone think you’re accusing them, but you talk to every kid who walked down that hall and then talk to them again because either there’s something they’re keeping from you or there’s something they haven’t remembered yet themselves. You have to be willing to put in the time if you’re serious about finding it.”

  Patsy was his nurse today, a child-sized Vietnamese woman who swam in her XXS lavender scrubs. She waved at him from across the crowded room as if it were a party and she had finally caught his eye. “You’re here!” she said.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  She came to him, her black hair braided and the braid caught up in a doubled loop like a rope to be used in the case of true emergency. “You’re looking good, Mr. Keating,” she said.

  “The three stages of life: youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking good, Mr. Keating.’”

  “It all depends on where I see you. I see you at the beach lying on a towel in your swim trunks, I don’t think you look so good. But here”—Patsy dropped her voice and looked around the room. She leaned in close. “Here you look good.”

  Fix unbuttoned the top buttons on his shirt and pulled it back, offering her the port in his chest. “Did you meet my daughter Franny?”

  “I know Franny,” Patsy said, and gave Franny the smallest raise of the eyebrow, universal shorthand for The old man is forgetting. She pushed a large syringe of saline to clear the port. “Tell m
e your full name.”

  “Francis Xavier Keating.”

  “Date of birth.”

  “April 20, 1931.”

  “That’s the winning ticket,” she said, and pulled three clear plastic pouches from the pockets of her scrub top. “Oxaliplatin, 5FU, and this little one is just an antiemetic.”

  “Good,” Fix said, nodding. “Plug ’em in.”

  From outside the seventh-story window the bright Los Angeles morning came slanting in across the linoleum floor. Patsy skated off to the nurses’ station to input the details of treatment while Fix stared up at the silent advertisement playing on the television that hung from the ceiling. A woman walking through a rainstorm was drenched and dripping, lightning shooting down around her. Then a handsome stranger handed her his umbrella and as soon as he did the rain stopped. The street was now some British gardener’s idea of the afterlife, all sunshine and roses. The woman’s hair was dry and billowing, and her dress trailed behind her like butterfly wings. The words “Ask Your Doctor” parked across the top of the screen, as if the advertisers had anticipated everyone turning off the sound. Franny wondered if the drug was for depression, an overactive bladder, thinning hair.

  “You know who I always think about when I’m here?” Fix asked Franny.

  “Bert.”

  He made a face. “If I ask you a question about Bert or his pyromaniac son, that’s called making conversation, being polite. I don’t think about them.”

  “Dad,” Franny said. “Who’ve you been thinking about lately?”

  “Lomer,” he said. “You didn’t know Lomer, did you?”

  “I didn’t,” she said, but she knew that story too, or some version of the story. Her mother had told her a long time ago.

  Fix shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t remember Lomer. You were sitting in his lap the last time he came over. He was carrying you around everywhere with him. He didn’t even put you down when he ate his dinner. It was just a couple months after your christening party, I remember now. You were a pretty baby, Franny, and you were sweet. Everyone made such a fuss over you and it drove your sister crazy. Before you came along, Lomer paid all his attention to Caroline, which was how she liked it. I remember Lomer saying to her, ‘Caroline, come up here, there’s plenty of room,’ but she wasn’t having it. She couldn’t stand to see the two of you together.”