The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

  Dotty died so suddenly.

  Stupid, delighted Dotty.

  That Dotty died unexpectedly on Valentine’s Day might in another person be remembered as the last flash of a brave and wicked humor, an ultimate defiance of the sentimental mush of the day. Except, Dotty was not that person. Dotty was the opposite, earnest sort. Not a person like CeCe.

  Her sorrow over Dotty. This too came unexpected, an ache of mysterious origin. Her grief—greater even than the news that Pat had her baby, a healthy boy named Douglas at the beginning of February, a little early but to no harm. Pat called from the hospital, described the sudden labor, the baby’s rumpled brow, said, “I can’t wait for you to see him,” and CeCe felt sure it wasn’t the ragged euphoria that followed birth. Pat meant it. But even this proves hard to hold on to as the days at Oak Park beat on, and her old life slips further away.

  The truth is, nothing has caused her such an abiding sorrow as Dotty’s death. How can this be? It catches her at the moment of its choosing and whatever she is doing is lost. Such grief! Sometimes a physical grief, snapping over her chest like a vise. Sometimes, a kind of vacancy, black as the waters of a subterranean pool, sensed instead of seen in the pitch. Grief, not like this at her father’s death, not Walter’s leaving, not Pat’s leaving, not the first time she heard them say multiple system atrophy, not at what kind of a man her son has become, not even for the child she had before Patricia, who so quickly died. Maybe that. But that was so long ago, before they’d known to tell pregnant women to eat bananas. Grief, in its empty way, reminding her of the summer she was sixteen, the year before her father’s death, back from Miss Porter’s to New York to visit, at the lavish, modern apartment he and the wife had bought in her absence. After sitting the morning by his side, she escaped into the sunshine and walked the six blocks south to the house she’d grown up in, now a museum and library. She hadn’t been since they’d moved. She climbed the steps and paid the entrance fee—a dollar, it being 1952—and received a tin visitor’s button to pin to her collar, with the scrolled letters JSS. Inside, the lead-crystal chandelier and the gilded mirror still hung over the marble mantel. She’d invented characters for herself in that mirror, standing on a striped silk chair. The chair was gone along with the rest of the furniture. Without furniture, the wood floor’s zagging, French herringbone inlay overwhelmed her eye. No one recognized her. New were the display cases with rare and ancient musical instruments, placed at regular intervals around the room. There were only a handful of other visitors, and she chose a handsome, young couple to follow as they passed quietly from room to room—through the double doors into the library, which she found more or less the same, though velvet cords pressed across the rows of leatherbound books and across the old couches. Her father’s elephant tusks made their broken arch on either side of the pocket doors at the other end of the room. Gone were the stuffed birds from the Brazilian rain forests for which there’d been a special glass cabinet with a heavy iron key, always waiting in the lock. Many afternoons, she’d turned the key and placed the birds in a jumble of color on the rug. These had been moved to the Natural History Museum across town. She left the couple and passed into the drawing room, found a piano on a stage facing a fleet of empty chairs. A performance space, of little interest to the other visitors. A few ducked in, gazed up at the painted ceiling, and left. Back in what was now the lobby, she noted the passages to the dining rooms and kitchens were locked behind a new, plain set of doors, white with a metal bar. She could not climb the roped-off marble stair or ride in the mirrored elevator that had brass doors engraved with dancing jaguars and a velvet seat. She asked the docent what was upstairs. Administrative offices, a recital space, practice rooms, an archive open to the public by appointment. Did she want to make an appointment? She shook her head no. Five years went by before she had the will to return, for a tour from the museum’s director of the renovations upstairs—a floor over the pool, under the curved glass ceiling! She refused to see Toto’s room and refused to see her own. She was twenty-one and the board’s newest trustee.

  Otto hadn’t made it in time. She mourns for Otto too. What is wrong with her? Shouldn’t these last months have hardened, not softened, her? She’d prefer that. It’s only, Otto loved his wife. A tall man with beautiful white hair and wide blue eyes and nostrils like an iguana’s, who had all these months rented a condo a mile from Oak Park and shuttled from his and Dotty’s home in Phoenix. The morning of Valentine’s Day he was only that mile away, sleeping.

  It can’t be for silly Dotty that CeCe has lost her appetite. Dotty had become a little dear to her, she’ll admit, but mostly, Dotty annoyed her. Her prattling, provincial, short-time friend. But for Otto—running up the hall where only days before she and Dotty had taken one of their inching winter constitutionals. Dotty had leaned against her, but no more than usual. Otto had disappeared around the corner without seeing CeCe, frozen with her hand on the wall. Watching his coat flap around the corner, she shut her eyes. Dotty and Otto, heartlanders who believed in the sentiment of holidays, who had built their life in a seasonless state on seasonal greetings, not only as his business, but—that story of little Fernanda in Mexico, had they not had children of their own? Had she never asked? He’s probably good at his job, she’d thought, as she made her way slowly after him. She had a vision of Otto’s future. Back at work with one of his subordinates, a designer with a red wax pencil stub behind his ear. She’d chastised herself: they don’t use pencils anymore! A young person, without a pencil, then, bringing Otto a folder of new designs for the following year’s Valentine’s cards, hearts spilling onto his desk. Poor Otto would probably never know when a valentine might be delivered, reminding him of the morning Dotty died alone, the morning no tie of their spirits tugged him from his dream. He’d probably bought her a Valentine’s present. When he returned to the rented condo in the dark, would he put it out of sight? As unbearable to keep as to throw away.

  By early afternoon, Otto was waiting in the lobby, for the bereavement coordinator to assemble Dotty’s paperwork. CeCe sat beside him, across from the portrait of Dr. Forum. “It’s an imitation of a Copley,” she said, pointing until Otto looked up. “And a poor one. Notice the strange proportions? Dr. Forum’s eye is the same size as his ear. The artist painted the backgrounds and the bodies at his shop and brought his faceless portraits from town to town by wagon to be sold. He filled in his buyer’s face last. I tell you this—I don’t know why.”

  Had Dotty looked worse than usual the last time they played cards? Not that CeCe had noticed. But maybe she hadn’t looked closely enough. As CeCe understood it from Nurse Jean, early in the morning Dotty had the stroke and managed to grope the red emergency button by the bed. The heart attack, shortly after. After, but enough time between for Dotty to be moved from one room to another, the wall going by. Time enough to know that as the windows of her own eyes failed no one who cared would be there. Time enough to cry husband and time in the dark to hold his name against the end of seeing. Time to hear the slamming of the trap, to hear the end of hearing.

  In the lobby, Otto bent his big, white head low (so silky, like a bird’s) and put his hand over his eyes and became a statue. He was so still CeCe didn’t dare move, which was how she came to spend many minutes studying Dr. Forum. She was glad that as she put her hand over Otto’s, it was free of any tremor that might disturb him. His long wool coat hung open. Underneath he wore evergreen-plaid pajamas and running shoes without socks, his naked ankles jutting out.

  If Dotty hadn’t looked worse, had she been worse? These last months, CeCe has grown stronger. Fluidity, sometimes, restored to her movements. She dares, some days, to think the word cured. The shakes don’t visit for days at a time. She experiences the side effects they warned her about: the racing, steroidal energy, the hot flashes, cramps in her extremities, a red, dashing kind of heat-mania she feels even in the sockets of her eyes. But these she can live with. They can be concealed. When she walks, the joints
of her fingers and toes are stiff, but this might be the cold. Dotty complained of the same. Every day, CeCe asks if she’s allowed to return home with the Astrasyne. The answer is the same: she must be on-site, under the auspices of a participating care facility, like everyone else, for the observation of her motor reflexes and the habitual measure of her blood pressure, her liver enzymes, the biweekly EKG.

  Still, since Otto took Dotty home (out the back, in a lights-off ambulance to the airport), CeCe can hardly bear the days. Though everything is as before—the nurses’ bright greetings, the sun crossing the February sky, the pills, the sleeping and waking. “How’s your mood?” Jean asks, and this only serves to remind her that Jean asks this exact question up and down the corridor, to other patients, in other rooms. That life is the same for every other patient as for her: the bright Velcro rip of the blood-pressure cuff, the iced lake, the same tiny stamp of the manufacturer on the back of each spoon, the same weekly appearance of the blimp in all their skies, twisting above the empty trees, cruising the frame of each window. Each day, a ghost of the day before. Where is there proof that any given moment belongs to her, and not to a stranger down the hall? No one comes to see her. She reminds herself she’s kept her whereabouts a secret and forbidden the few who know from visiting. But how graciously they comply! Only Esme and Annie Mason and Pat phone her. Each day, strange visions of George creep upon her. Always he is out in the world, enjoying a fictive jumble of pleasures from her past and his: George at Le Petit Daudet, a dripping filet mignon in his hand; George, passing through the rooms at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, licking an ice-cream cone, stopping to consider The Feast in the House of Levi; George, drenched in sweat but gray as a corpse, returning his squash racket to its case with a terminal zip.

  “You’ve lost someone. You’re depressed,” Jean says, the first week of March. “That’s called depression.”

  This is untenable. “You have an obvious mind,” CeCe answers.

  Standing on the narrow, black point-ends of the hands of the clock, trying not to fall. Where would she go if she did? Out of dimension. Out of favor. Out of range. The clock’s minute hand, owned once by pain and now by side effects, moves on its own unpredictable schedule, too slow or too fast, whereas the hour hand moves steadily toward meals. (Is it possible she misses the pain? Does she not remember how to organize her soul without its interruption?) Her father, who at his end could not breathe, said it felt like a lung full of storm.

  “Thank you,” Jean says, and laughs.

  “No, by obvious, obviously you don’t understand me. What I mean is, you might be a bit of a disappointment to—I don’t know to whom. Your parents? A boyfriend? Do you have a child?… Oh, dear, do you not yet have a child? But how old are you? What are you feeling now, dear? Is it depression?”

  That was the last she saw of Jean. For a week or three, she’s not sure how long, she doesn’t answer the phone and doesn’t call anyone back.

  When she finally dials Esme, her husband answers. “She’ll be so glad you’re calling. We’ve been worrying and worrying. Wait one second.” There is the sound of the phone’s being dropped into something soft, then Esme: “Cecilia!”

  Two days later Esme arrives, holding her duck boots in a plastic grocery bag so as not to drip snow, having changed into dry sneakers in the hall. They embrace, and how good and familiar Esme smells! Lemons and bread.

  Esme will hear nothing from CeCe until she’s straightened the bed, straightened the pile of newspapers on the table. She bustles around CeCe’s room as much as a person with a limp can bustle. She shakes the curtains—to evaluate their cleanliness rather than to clean—makes a sound of disapproval, and takes a seat at the table across from CeCe, putting her thickly ringed hands on the knees of her ample jeans.

  “Why didn’t you call for so long?” Esme says. “I am not happy.”

  “I’m sorry.” CeCe cannot, bathed in such kindness, remember why she kept Esme away. “I didn’t think I’d still be here.”

  “No one comes, what’s happening to you is no big deal. That’s what explains it.”

  “Did I tell you Pat had her baby?”

  “The grandson. About time! But we’re talking about you today. I come every week from now on. Mondays.”

  “Too far. I forbid you.”

  How has she hardly thought of Esme and missed her all along?

  “The decision is not yours anymore. I go where I like. You haven’t got a say.”

  And after this she doesn’t, for Esme embarks on an update on the doings of her husband and son and niece and on the state of CeCe’s house—in January, a snowstorm knocked a branch from the willow tree into the window of one of the upstairs guest bedrooms, but Esme oversaw the window’s replacement and the tree is fine. Esme interviews her at length about the food she eats and the company she keeps. CeCe tells her about Dotty, and even though she doesn’t cry, her fists are clasped tight under Esme’s patting hands. She feels better.

  “I don’t see jazz hands,” Esme says, for Esme is the only nonmedical professional to directly address her tremors, which she calls a variety of comical dance terms and, when it had been bad, going to the big dance.

  “I’m doing well. I think it works. I’m only waiting.”

  She gets up from the table and walks a steady circle around the room, turns her neck side to side, raises her arms over her head and behind her back, and sits back down again.

  “Wonderful!” Esme says.

  The following visit, Monday as promised, after less amiable chatter than usual, Esme says, “Now we have to talk about you not answering George’s calls.”

  “You’ve seen George?” She’d watched Esme and George grow apart when he was in his teens. She never knew why.

  “No, Iris. Iris is worried. Now I’m worried too. You know about his play? That it came and went?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw it. Iris’s third time, my first. Front row. We had our night of it. I don’t get to the city much. It was a special night for me, very nice. But the show closed. Quick-fast. Two weeks.”

  “How is it possible? Where?”

  “Manhattan.”

  “But where?”

  “Not where the action is. Near where the tourists go. The—what is it called—South Street Seaport.”

  “I wouldn’t help him. I was sure no one would. What did you think?” she asks, hoping it might not be what she heard. Transformed, maybe, by outside direction.

  “I think it’s impressive to make the people come together and sing with the costumes and the music and the sets.”

  “I’m sorry to ask, but do you know how he did it?”

  “Speak to Iris.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Iris says the bank likes you so the bank liked George. Now she’s having trouble with the payments. Credit cards too. I believe her that she didn’t know. She’s very worried and very surprised.”

  “But you say the opera’s closed. That’s good. I’m sorry, Esme.”

  “Why sorry?”

  “Well, it’s rude. The opera. Offensive. You know that.”

  “It’s okay.” Esme nods and shrugs at once.

  “And—is George all right?” Every call, she’d almost picked up, almost called back. But then she would remember the feeling of how he put the headphones over her ears. His calls stopped. Iris tried twice after that, asking how CeCe was, asking for her to please be in touch. These CeCe also ignored. For reasons beyond her, Dotty’s death cemented her resolve.

  “I don’t see him. He’s in their house. Iris comes out, he stays in.”

  “He’ll need time. At least it’s finished.”

  “Not yet. I don’t like to give you these, but you should know. My son helped me with the Google.”

  Esme unzips the nylon bag and hands CeCe some tidily paper-clipped printouts. The first is from the website of the New York Post. She reads:

  There’s not much to write home about The Burning P
apers, a new opera at the Abbott, written and produced by son of New York royalty George Somner.

  She skims over the opera’s god-awful plot summary and resumes:

  If you’re looking for some silver spoon schadenfreude, this production doesn’t disappoint. Somner has responded to accusations of racism and sexism by claiming The Burning Papers is misunderstood. According to a tweet from his hastily opened and closed Twitter account, it is an “engaged response to the alls [sic] of contemporary society.” Prior to opening, this nutso project’s press material stated The Burning Papers is “confidently anticipating” a national tour. Only hours after speaking with us, however, the production’s publicist, Simon Padgett, released a statement of his own: “The nature of this material and its presentation were not accurately represented to our firm. We do not condone or promote projects that traffic in negative stereotypes of any kind.” This reviewer agrees: eventually, the unpleasantness of the music and its message is so over-the-top you can’t help but giggle—or leave.

  “How is this the first I’m hearing of this? No one called me for my comment? Not that I’d have given one.”

  “You’re not taking calls for three weeks, remember? That’s how. They called your house. They called and called. They even called me.”

  The next review is from what must be a blog, because Esme’s son has thoughtfully written BLOG across the top.

  Highnotes.com

  The Burning Papers

  The Abbott: 425 Water Street

  In Previews show times TBA

  tickets at www.ticketwicket.com

  As I endured this mad dream conceived and produced—or perhaps committed—by George Somner, I could not but ask, why? This opera is described by its composer, Vijay Muller, as an “experiment in dislocating boundaries and borders,” and the night I attended, The Burning Papers tested the boundaries of a palpably uncomfortable audience. A variety of conceits, including a group of feuding eunuchs whose status, in this dystopian future, is determined by their skin tone, as well as ugly portraits of enslaved women and homeless “gypsies,” are so jaw-droppingly weird, obscure, and offensive it was difficult for me to focus on the musical composition itself, but I can report that the original score is both jarringly scattered and numbingly dull. Particularly misguided was the use of chains and shackles as frequent costume elements for the women: it was unclear to this viewer if their clanking was an intentional or unintentional addition to the score. Rumor has it the show’s director, Bernard Lieber, quit the production several weeks before previews began in what may have been a career-saving move, citing that old standby, “creative differences.”