Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  Jessie realized her imagination was in overdrive again. But she had seen so much grim stuff working in the ER, and had heard so much from Kat, that she knew anything was now possible in Vermont. As children, she and her two brothers had mocked their father, calling him “Dr. Death.” Because of his months in French field hospitals during World War II, and his stints at Roosevelt Hospital in New York and at the Burlington medical center afterward, he had been convinced that if his children water-skied, they would collide with a dock. If they rode horses, they’d be thrown and become paralyzed. But over the years she had learned that disaster really did lurk around every corner. So much of his unbearably anxious behavior had made sense once she became a parent to Anthony and Cady. He had been trying to protect his children. She got that. She had apologized to him on his deathbed for her years of impatient scorn. He said he hadn’t noticed.

  This beautiful lake out her window—140 miles long, 15 miles across, 400 feet deep in spots—was a joy in the summer, when the surface was glassy and sunstruck. But during other seasons, this same lake could turn terrifying. As was happening at that very moment, a sudden blast of north wind could whip up ocean-size breakers that eroded banks and swamped boats at their moorings.

  During her childhood she had been entranced by these fickle moods. She and her older brothers, Stephen and Caleb, had motored around the lake in a Boston Whaler in all kinds of weather, in and out of inlets, on and off other people’s islands, in those halcyon days before children were required to phone their parents every five minutes to assure them that they hadn’t yet been kidnapped. They had laughed wildly into the wind as they rode the breakers in their trusty Whaler, dodging stabs of lightning. It was a wonder they had lived to reach adulthood.

  She remembered sitting in this living room, watching on TV as the twin towers imploded. She had sat paralyzed for a long time while footage of the planes crashing into the buildings replayed repeatedly. Eventually she had shifted her gaze out the French doors to the turbulent lake and had spotted an unmanned sailboat drifting past, mast snapped and hanging double, riggings snarled, tattered sail flapping as the boat bucked the crashing waves. Soon the overcast sky above the lake had filled with jets scrambled from the Plattsburgh air base, heading too late to New York City, their deafening roar bouncing back and forth between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains.

  Jessie was old enough now to recognize that world crises came and went in perpetually recurring cycles. Several years before she was born, her father had gone to war against the Germans. But he eventually came back home. Then the Cold War heated up, and she and her classmates had hidden from atom bombs beneath their desks at school. Some boys she knew in high school had been drafted to fight communism in Vietnam. A few returned in body bags, or with missing limbs. Her brother Stephen had served there as a medic and still woke up screaming from nightmares.

  But later the Berlin Wall came down, and strangers embraced on the pedestrian mall in Burlington, just as they had in Times Square on V-E Day. It appeared for a time as though the perennial dream of a world at peace might now be possible. The funds squandered to defend against marauding Nazis and stealthy Communists could instead be used to feed and house, heal and educate people all over the globe. But those collapsing twin towers had derailed this reverie, and now the West was once again bankrupting itself in a struggle against sinister foes who kept popping up in new places and fresh disguises, like an endless game of Whac-A-Mole.

  Reviewing her thoughts, Jessie diagnosed herself as suffering from PTSD. She would be minding her own business when, out of the blue, an image of Kat or one of her parents as they lay dying would assail her. When you started seeing only the sadness of life, with none of the simultaneous beauty and humor, you were in trouble. Her mother, her father, and her lover had all died within the past two years. It was one thing to tend patients, but something else again to watch your own loved ones shrivel up like dried apples. By dealing with death so closely for so long, had she become a death magnet? Mysterious corpses were now floating right up to her doorstep.

  Chapter 2

  Arabian Nights

  Jessie sat behind the admissions desk in the Amphitrite’s clinic, writing an e-mail on her MacBook Air, trying to explain to Anthony and Cady, and to Malcolm and Martin, her abrupt departure from Burlington to accept this position as a physician on a cruise ship. She was careful not to mention the fact that she didn’t want to spend her twilight years baby-sitting their children. She knew some grandmothers who refused to baby-sit. The less forthright ones simply moved to Boca Raton.

  The engines were vibrating beneath her like a cat purring. It was hypnotic. But she needed to stay alert because cases of norovirus were popping up all over the ship. The sea was rough, and waves were sweeping up over the portholes, making her feel as though she were trapped inside a sloshing aquarium.

  A new e-mail from Brenda appeared on her screen, informing her that the investigation into the death of the woman in the lake had been closed. They had found her shoes and purse on a rock ledge not far from Jessie’s condo. The purse still contained cash and credit cards, ruling out a robbery. The woman had lived in Burlington’s North End, and her friends said she just liked to wade in the lake. The autopsy showed no trace of drugs or alcohol. A head injury had killed her. It was possible someone had pushed her off the cliff, but there was no suspect or motive. It was down to suicide or an accident, most likely an accident, since no note had been found and no depressive symptoms had been noticed by her friends or family.

  Jessie shrugged irritably. As a physician, she had been trained to locate causes and effect cures. Unsolved mysteries annoyed her. It still seemed weird that the woman would have chosen to wade in a lake full of ice.

  The phone rang several times. Since Amy, the nurse practitioner on desk duty, didn’t answer, Jessie did. A man in suite 10024 reported that he was vomiting and had diarrhea. Jessie told him she would stop by his room right away for a stool sample. He laughed and said he didn’t know that doctors made house calls anymore, much less in the middle of the Arabian Sea.

  As Jessie headed for the service elevator in her white slacks and epauletted uniform shirt, with her lavender stethoscope draped around her neck like unattractive tribal jewelry, she reflected that norovirus wasn’t something to joke about. Hand-sanitizer dispensers had been set up all around the ship, with signs urging people to use them. If they couldn’t short-circuit this outbreak, the buffets and pools might have to be shuttered. The ship would need to divert to the nearest port to be disinfected. It could cost the cruise line millions and ruin the holidays of the passengers, some of whom had saved up a lifetime for this trip.

  And most important to Jessie, this would leave her unemployed, with too much free time in which to remember how it had felt to close her mother’s eyelids with her fingertips:

  The lids popped back open, and the hollow amber irises, flecked with gold and russet and copper, seemed to gaze right past Jessie toward the sunlight streaming through the window. Jessie closed the lids again. Again they flipped open. Her mother looked as startled as Jessie felt. This was why the Greeks had weighted down the eyelids of the dead with coins.

  Jessie held the lids shut for a long time. She removed her fingers carefully, as though performing a magic trick. The lids remained closed. Straightening up, she stepped back from the narrow bed. At her mother’s request, Jessie had moved this bed from her parents’ house to the rehab center. Her mother’s spinster aunt Emma, for whom her mother had been named, had slept in it for most of her life. And now her namesake had died in it.

  Jessie’s mother was lying atop a Double Wedding Ring quilt her own grandmother had pieced. The wedding rings in question resembled the neck shackles worn by slaves. Her mother was dressed in the blue slacks and yellow golf shirt Jessie had bought for her stay in this facility following her heart attack. Everyone, her cardiologist included, had assumed that she
would soon be back home again. She was also wearing the white Velcro-strapped tennis shoes Jessie had bought her. Jessie realized how mortified her mother would be to know that she was lying on this ancestral quilt with shoes on, so she slipped them off and set them in the closet. She felt absurdly pleased that her mother had chosen this outfit in which to die. Traditionally, she had returned any new clothing Jessie bought her for a refund, preferring to wear hand-me-downs from Jessie and Kat. Kat was quite tall, and Jessie quite short, like Mutt and Jeff from the Sunday comics of long ago. So none of their castoffs really fit her mother, but at least they were free.

  The nurses had withdrawn. Jessie knew she had a few minutes before the house physician arrived to issue the death certificate and the funeral home came to collect the body. She sat down beside the bed and took her mother’s hand in her own. It was already turning cool. Jessie was a hardened physician who had dissected corpses in medical school and done innumerable autopsies since. She had watched many patients die, so she was taken aback to discover that tears were bathing her cheeks and dripping onto her mother’s new yellow golf shirt.

  * * *

  —

  The man who answered the door of stateroom 10024, Charles Savage, was silver-haired, with a part so precise that it could have been sculpted by a razor. His erect bearing, apparent even in his white terry-cloth guest bathrobe, suggested a military background. His much younger wife, Gail, was statuesque, with a blond ponytail and eyes as turquoise as an Antarctic crevasse. She had the looks of a beauty queen turned trophy wife.

  While Charles was in the bathroom providing a stool sample, Gail, attired in a sage green silk dressing gown, prowled the room like a caged tigress, sitting on the couch, standing up, circling the glass-topped coffee table, perching on the edge of the king-size bed. She slid open the glass door to the balcony and then closed it again. She kept sipping a brown liquid from a cut-glass tumbler. Jessie could smell alcohol. She could also detect a hint of Samsara perfume, which she recognized because Kat used to wear it, too. Jessie associated that scent with some of her happiest moments—collecting a stool sample from a stranger not among them.

  At medical school, one of the first challenges had been to conquer the normal animal reflex of revulsion at the sight and smell of bodily fluids—blood, semen, saliva, pus, mucus, feces, urine, vomit. These were the tools of the medical trade, and their analyses were crucial to a diagnosis. Some students couldn’t face it and had to find other careers. Blood had especially appalled Jessie, and she had experienced shudders of physical pain when viewing other people’s gory wounds. But repeated exposure eventually cured her of these unhelpful responses.

  Her father’s father had been a doctor in a small Vermont farming town, trained near the turn of the twentieth century at the University of Vermont’s College of Medicine in Burlington. He had volunteered to join an American medical unit that went to France during World War I to work at the American Hospital near Paris. While there, he met and romanced Jessie’s grandmother, the only woman surgeon at a nearby hospital in the Lycée Pasteur.

  Her grandmother had grown up in New York City and was one of the first women to serve as an ambulance surgeon, riding into slums under a police escort. She had once treated a dozen partygoers who had acquired tetanus from injecting heroin cut on a dusty mantel. Upon returning from France, she had marched in the suffrage parades in Washington, D.C., and New York City, with swarms of hostile men jeering from the sidewalks. When women finally got the vote, she had said how pleased she was no longer to be classified with prisoners, children, and the insane. How Jessie’s grandfather had persuaded her to move to the Green Mountains was a mystery. She must have really loved him. They practiced together, she driving a converted hearse into the little mountain towns for impromptu clinics, he riding a horse where their ambulance couldn’t go.

  Jessie remembered as a small child watching her grandfather observe a patient crossing his office floor to his desk. Before the patient could sit, her grandfather had announced, “Pneumonia.” An X-ray at the Burlington hospital confirmed this diagnosis. This intuition both her grandparents had possessed still seemed like magic to Jessie. She and her medical peers, lacking such self-confidence, honed by decades of experience, relied instead on MRIs, CT scans, PET scans, blood tests, and X-rays. Of course her grandparents hadn’t been traumatized by the threat of multimillion-dollar lawsuits if they made a mistake. In their day, patients had been grateful when doctors could help them, rather than litigious when they couldn’t.

  Later that night, after a test by Stan—the lab technician from Glasgow—had confirmed norovirus, Jessie returned to suite 10024 with a box of latex gloves and a bottle of hand sanitizer. She explained to Gail the need to use them as she cared for her husband, and the importance of washing her hands often, for as long as it took to sing “Happy Birthday.” She assured them that a nurse would return twice a day to check on Charles’s progress, and she instructed them to remain in their cabin until she released them from quarantine. They could order their meals from room service. A steward specially trained to deal with the virus would deliver them and would clean their cabin.

  “Are you telling me that I can’t leave this suite that we’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars for?” asked Gail.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Savage, but that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “But I’m not sick!”

  “We don’t know that. We need to keep you isolated until the incubation period has passed. We can’t risk your infecting other passengers.”

  “But one of them must have infected Charles in the first place.”

  “True. But it’s not as though you can identify that person and take revenge. He or she is probably already well again.”

  Gail heaved a long-suffering sigh.

  * * *

  —

  As the cabin door sucked shut behind the doctor, Gail threw off her robe, revealing a black lace bra and thong. She rifled through her closet.

  “What are you doing?” called Charles from the bed.

  “If that little old lady thinks she’s going to ruin my cruise, she’s got another think coming.” Gail pulled on an embroidered emerald green galabiya she had bought during the previous year’s trip to Egypt. “Tonight is the Arabian Nights Gala, and I’m certainly not going to miss it.”

  “But you heard the doctor, Gail. You’re supposed to stay here. You could spread the virus to other passengers.”

  “If I’m sick, I’m sick, thanks to you. If other passengers get sick from me, that’s their problem.”

  Charles watched her wrap her blond hair into a French twist and secure it with a tortoiseshell clasp. Then she applied plum lipstick and smoky gray eye shadow in the mirror on the closet door.

  As she swept into the hallway in a cloud of Samsara, Charles felt like weeping. They had been so much in love when she had been a nanny to his children. The split with his wife to marry her had been catastrophic, both emotionally and financially. But it had seemed worth it because, at age eighteen, Gail had been thrilled to be the wife of a World War II veteran, a boatswain’s mate decorated for valor after Okinawa. His first wife and many friends had warned him about May–December romances, but he had ignored them. It was true that he rarely managed to satisfy her sexually anymore, and he wasn’t supposed to take ED medications because of his heart condition. Nonetheless, he had brought along some Viagra just to try it out. He had also been considering an implant, but what was the point if Gail didn’t even want him? This cruise was supposed to be a second honeymoon that would reignite their passion, but Gail left him behind in the cabin every chance she got.

  Still, it was wonderful to be back at sea again. Several other men from his World War II battleship had also arranged to be on board with their wives. They planned to visit the battlefields of El Alamein once the ship reached Alexandria. Meanwhile, they had been meeting every afternoo
n to play Texas hold ’em on the pool deck, just as they had done all those years ago in the North Pacific. They wore royal blue baseball caps one of them had brought, printed on the front with the words NAVAL VETERAN and an insignia involving an anchor wrapped with chains. It was such a relief to relive those terrifying episodes off Okinawa with others who had shared them.

  * * *

  —

  Jessie locked up the clinic and returned to her cabin in the staff quarters on the eleventh deck. It felt tiny compared to Charles and Gail’s suite, and it had just a large window rather than French doors leading to a balcony. But she preferred to regard it as cozy rather than cramped. Also, since a steward would clean it, change her sheets, and do her washing every week, it felt to her like the Plaza. She removed and hung up her white uniform, donned the happy-face pajamas Kat had given her, and climbed into her bed.

  Having departed from Sri Lanka that morning, the Amphitrite was currently crossing the Arabian Sea en route to Dubai. The nurses had described Dubai as a pearl-diving village that had recently transformed itself into a space-age metropolis—a Disneyland of the Arabian Desert.

  She was a long way from Burlington. This had been her intention when she signed the six-week contract (which Ben, the lead medical officer, said would be extendable once they reached Brooklyn). She had been the porter at death’s doorway for too long. Vermonters were peaceful people compared to most Americans, comprising the highest per capita population of Buddhists of any state. But when they weren’t meditating, they sometimes ended up in her ER. Her confidence in human kindness and common sense had been undermined over the years by the steady flow of knife and gunshot wounds, battered women, rape victims, and drunks and druggies who had wrecked cars, motorcycles, ATVs, motorboats, Jet Skis, and snowmobiles. When she was younger, she had been proud to regard herself as a kung fu warrior, poised to defeat whatever accident or disease burst through the door of her ER next. But after her parents and Kat became ill, she had been forced to face the fact that there were some opponents she couldn’t outwit or overpower.