What Remains

by Radziwill, Carole

  Our world is beginning to narrow drastically. There are few people Anthony wants to see. This is his secret, this disease. I carefully filter the information I give to my family, to colleagues at work. There is no one we can talk to about it, because he still wants to pretend it is all fine. It certainly isn’t.

  4

  In Year Five Carolyn and I make up a game we call The Townhouse: a conversation, really, that she humors me with when I’m down. There are days I call her and say, “Let’s talk about the townhouse,” and then she knows it’s bad but doesn’t ask. We play it in the hospitals or on the phone late at night in New York.

  The townhouse as we know it is straight from Edith Wharton—a tottering mansion in Gramercy Park sitting remote and dreamy on an empty lot, towering over the neighborhood. There are four floors and sixteen-foot ceilings and a wrought-iron gate. Heavy velvet drapes cross the windows, and we sometimes peek out from them.

  “Grey Gardens in Manhattan!” I dub it, and she shrieks at this, delighted.

  “I’ll be Big Edie,” she says. “No, Little Edie, with a sun hat and halter, reading The National Enquirer.” Her smile spreads out, and her eyes become huge. “Oh, my God, that will be us. The Beales! People will say, ‘Whatever happened to Carole and Carolyn? They had so much promise.’ And we’ll be locked up behind our gate, ordering takeout and dressed in vintage Dior gowns.”

  It is a house well-suited for dinner parties, so that’s what we do, plan them over and over, or more specifically, plan who will come. They are the sorts of parties that cause heads of state to postpone summits. Such is the grandeur we assign.

  Everyone wants to be here, and because of this we spend hours deciding on our guests. Carolyn has a schoolgirl crush on Steven Tyler, the singer from Aerosmith, so he is given a seat. I’ve just seen The English Patient, so I put Ralph Fiennes on the list. “We have to be selective about whom we have over,” I say. “It will be very exclusive. No reporters. No interviews. And they have to be able to soft shoe and tell a good joke.”

  We expect there to be cameras clumped in the hedges at all times, waiting for us to appear—it suits us fine, since in the tradition of Grey Gardens we will rarely step outside. We imagine that everyone will want to talk to us, and we also imagine it quiet. We are wanted, yet left alone—the clamor entirely at our disposal.

  “I’ll be the eccentric, aged beauty,” Carolyn says. “We’ll have all these pictures of me—the young me—around and I’ll bring them out for visitors.”

  The floors are dark wood, “very shiny,” she says. “Walnut.” And the closets are an acre wide filled with gowns and bejeweled shoes that we will change for every meal.

  Our guests are completely enthralled with us, spellbound by our stories. They will stay until dawn, we imagine, and listen to us breathlessly, humbled and grateful for our splendor.

  We are always dressed in our townhouse—fashionable spinsters with nowhere to go. “You, the ‘Widow Radziwill,’” Carolyn says. “Who’s going to date you?”

  “Oh, really, look who’s talking,” I shoot back. “Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr.”

  We are Lucy and Ethel, Ginger and Mary Ann, the tortoise and the hare. Pick a twosome—one dazzle and charisma, the other flannel-lined jeans. In the townhouse she lets me shine. She lets me have an after—in a grand, gothic style. It is a place where my husband isn’t dying and she isn’t expected to embody Camelot. Just a glittery room set apart from our world, where we live trouble-free, whiling our days away on guest lists.

  5

  In Year Five, Anthony almost dies three times.

  Christmas is precarious. We make appearances. We haven’t seen my family in a long time. They are aware of his cancer, but I keep them at a distance, making excuses for missed birthday parties. But Christmas is hard to avoid, so we go to my parents’ house and exchange presents with my brothers and sisters. It’s awkward. They haven’t seen him like this. The house fills up and I flit around, work the room. I am louder and happier in hopes that no one will notice him. I try to be present enough for the both of us while zealously guarding his position on the couch. He barely moves from it. He is thinner now than anyone in my family has ever seen him. There is no hiding anything today, and no one knows what to say.

  I am glad when we leave and drive back to the city for Christmas dinner with Carolyn and John. There is nervous energy around all of us. We plan a trip to Cuba and Greece. We are trying to ramp a lifetime into a few short years.

  The next day Anthony and I fly down to Florida to spend New Year’s with Holly. We stay with her father and stepmother, Pete and Joan, in their guesthouse in Vero Beach. Anthony is still very weak, but he wants to go, to be with Holly and her family, to swim in the pool and enjoy the beach. I feel guilty because I don’t want to be here. At work people were talking about ski trips and vacations; couples were doing this and that. I was sick of death, sick of blood, sick of bile and walking with canes. I am tired, and I want only to sleep. I sleep on a chaise by the pool and dream about a beach in Cuba. But Anthony isn’t there in my dream. I can’t imagine how we can possibly get him there. I don’t say it to anyone. It terrifies me when a little voice whispers it to me. I want to be free.

  “It’s not good. I think I’m in trouble.”

  I look at the clock; it is six in the morning. Anthony’s standing over the sink. I jump out of bed and run to the bathroom.

  “Oh. Wow. Okay. Okay, I need to call. We need to get to a hospital.” He has been throwing up in the dark so he won’t wake me, and when I flip on the light the sink looks as if it’s filled with bright-red paint.

  I call Joan and Pete in the main house and tell them I need an ambulance. Florida, it seems, is organized for medical emergencies. Joan pushes a button in the house, a direct line to the ambulance service, and four minutes later two men arrive at the front door.

  Pete walks out of the main house when the ambulance pulls up.

  “Are you okay? Anthony?”

  “We’re fine, Pete. I’m okay.” Anthony is sitting up on the stretcher, and I get in the ambulance beside him. We ride away watching Pete standing in the driveway.

  At the hospital, the ER staff sees it is bad, and we go to the consent forms fast. I give them the background on his sarcoma and his surgical history.

  “We need to do a bronchoscopy.”

  “Okay,” I say. “What is that? What will you be doing?”

  “It’s obvious he’s bleeding somewhere; there could be a rupture in his lungs. We have to put a tube down his throat with a camera on it, and we’ll be able to see what’s going on.”

  “Is it painful?” I ask. “Is it complicated? How long does it take?”

  It doesn’t take long, and they can do it in the ER, the doctor tells me. I sign the consent forms, and it all happens so fast. I am running down the list in my head of the drugs he was treated with in chemo, of allergies, of operations.

  They give him Versed to knock him out, and he will have no memory of the procedure. I am standing next to his bed while he waits for it to kick in, the doctors anxious to begin the procedure. This is it, I think. Still, I know not to say good-bye. “I love you—I’ll see you soon. I’ll be right outside.” He looks up at me and whispers, “Don’t kiss any other boys.” And then he falls unconscious.

  I have been hoarding, like a squirrel for winter, all my acorns of hysteria. Nudging them as they come to a little place in my head for later. There hasn’t been time to fall apart—Anthony won’t tolerate it. Worry, panic, fear simply serve no useful purpose. The important thing is to keep them apart from one another, because I am afraid if they touch, these tight little balls of suppressed heartache, they will explode, and I am trying my best to save this for some fuzzy uncertain point in the future. When everything is over. When there is no more bad news and nothing to be afraid of and nothing left to worry about. There will be a time, I tell myself. It will be clear, and I will have some period of time to look out above the clouds. A period of time, lon
g enough to let it all out like the air in a balloon.

  Joan and Holly have followed us here, and they have been standing speechless, listening to me recite medical histories and medications.

  “I have to go outside,” I tell them. “I’ll be right back.” Carolyn and John are in Sun Valley for the holiday. I have my phone in my hand to call her, but before I call I sit on the curb between two cars in the parking lot of the Vero Beach hospital. I’m wearing pajama pants I grabbed from the floor before we left, and I let my body shake with sobs. I indulge myself. The kind of crying you can do when there’s no one around to see.

  Anthony didn’t bleed to death. The doctors did the bronchoscopy, put the tube down his throat with the camera, and saw nothing. The bleeding had stopped, and they couldn’t see where it had been coming from. “As if it simply healed itself,” they tell me.

  “You cleaned up the room!” Holly tells me the next day when we get back to the house. She looks at me as though I’m crazy. “I went to the room to see what happened, and there was a pile of towels in the hamper. You cleaned it all up before the ambulance came.” I don’t remember actually doing this, but I am relieved when she tells me. I knew Anthony would not have wanted anyone to see the blood. We have an early dinner with champagne and make a toast. To a better year.

  6

  We go to Suffern for dinner in January to watch the Super Bowl at my parents’ house, and Carolyn insists she come along. “I can’t believe you’ve never invited me there,” she says, indignant. “I want to see where you grew up. I’m coming.”

  Tonight, my brother Anthony is here with his wife. My sister Terri is here with her husband. My father makes a big pot of pasta, and we eat at the table, passing sodas around.

  After dinner Carolyn looks through all of the wedding albums. “You look like Cary Grant!” she says to my brother. She has all of them tell her their stories. Jeff, my brother-in-law, just got his pilot’s license, and they talk about John’s plane. “I don’t know if I’ll want him to fly when we have kids,” she says.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Terri tells her.

  My sister-in-law is pregnant, and Carolyn dishes up her plate, makes her a cup of hot chocolate. She adds a pillow under her feet, then scolds my brother for not doing all this himself.

  Driving back to the city, she sits in back leaning over the front seat, her head between us. She makes me tell her stories. My crush on Paul Merrick across the street; the gay guys who lived down the block; Linda and I lip-synching to Captain and Tennille in the Suffern Junior High talent show.

  “Oh, my God,” she says. “Is there videotape?”

  Then we sing along with the radio, loudly, until we cross the bridge and Anthony begs us to stop.

  A week later the hospital delivers the dialysis machine and sets it up in our home office. I buy a black-suede recliner at Bloomingdale’s, a comfortable, stylish-looking chair that gives not the slightest indication of function—the sort of chair we might have bought anyway. I bring in a television. The office is small, so we move out my desk to make room for the recliner, the machine, the television, and a chair for the dialysis nurses who come three times a week.

  On Presidents’ Day weekend we fly to London. Anthony has the urge to revisit his childhood—the schools, the house on Buckingham Place where he grew up, the church his father built, and the country home in Henley. The house in Henley still has the wooden benches around the oak tree and the covered gypsy wagon on the lawn. He tells me it was a Christmas present from his mother to his sister and him when they were kids. He can’t believe it is still here.

  It is a great comfort to him to find it all the same. We pull into the drive at Henley, and the caretaker rushes out. But then Anthony introduces himself, and he walks us around the grounds. He offers to show us inside, but Anthony says no. He is content just to see it the way he remembers. We go to the small church that his father built on the property of the Polish school. We go inside to the crypt where his father lies and say a prayer by his coffin. We drive to the Old Stoner Pub for lunch, and he tells me about the day his mother and sister were driving on the winding roads from the pub back to their house and had an accident, and he and his father were called panicked to the hospital. He remembers the damaged car, the spattered blood, hairs stuck in the wispy threads of a smashed windshield. The horrible feeling of driving to the hospital with his father, of not knowing.

  Then we go to the house on Buckingham Place—a redbrick townhouse, in the shadow of Buckingham Palace. We walk down the road and stand across the street and talk about ringing the doorbell, but he decides against it. He goes to William and Mary’s hospital for dialysis the next day by himself, as he prefers, and I wander around the city. It is a bittersweet visit.

  In March we go to the Oscars to root for Swear to Tell the Truth, a documentary on the life of Lenny Bruce. It is the last project Anthony produced for HBO, and it has been nominated for best documentary.

  We stay at the Peninsula Hotel, and we watch the ceremony on a big television in the hotel room with our friend Mark, an editorial producer at Primetime, who books all the big interviews.

  There is a picture of Lenny Bruce that HBO used for marketing the film. He is looking back over his shoulder, with his eyebrow cocked. His right hand carelessly dangles a cigarette, like a man who holds one longer than he smokes it. The left side of his mouth is tipped just slightly into a smile. It looks exactly like Anthony. It’s the eyebrow, I think. The reflex of a man who is on to everyone and everything—death, life, pain, taxes. He’s on to polite conversations, carefully chosen words, and finds it all a bit ridiculous. The smirk of a man who knows he gets it more than the person taking the picture. It’s not arrogant, this smirk, not mean or sneering, just the look of a man who has seen some things. He is handsome and suave in this picture, like Anthony. He’s confident, dapper, smart.

  HBO wrapped the film when Anthony was still going to the office on a regular schedule. He is excited about the Academy Awards. The film doesn’t win the Oscar, but we go to the after party at Morton’s and squeeze into a banquette. They are parading Monica Lewinsky. She sits in the center of the room near Gwyneth Paltrow. Anthony is in a tuxedo that doesn’t quite fit; it’s big on him now. He wears his father’s cuff links, inscribed in antique gold. One with Luck and one with Love. We’re at the Oscar party. We will enjoy this. I can’t help myself, though, from briefly hating the other people in the room.

  In Year Five we entertain. We bring out the good silver, the Baccarat crystal, and the Limoges china plates. It isn’t like us, and we get caught up in it, something different. It’s sort of fun.

  Marta has started coming to cook a few nights a week. She has worked for John’s family for thirty years. We have no formal arrangement; nothing was ever said, but Anthony is sick, and food is more difficult for him. She has known Anthony, taken care of him, since he could crawl; it’s almost a reflex. She purees the vegetables; she steams the fish. She brings home fresh, fat strawberries from Marche Madison. And some nights when we know she’s coming, we invite friends.

  We have my brother and his wife, some friends from work, but mostly John and Carolyn. John is making a point, I notice, of coming over more, or getting together. He calls more with plans. He is taking a stab, I think, at slowing this whole thing down.

  John is given to musing in Year Five. “Who would have thought,” he asks Anthony in our apartment one night, “we’d both end up with these girls? Two girls from, what was the name of that store?”

  “Caldor,” we remind him.

  “Yeah, Caldor. Don’t you think it’s a little odd, Anthony?”

  Anthony has no patience for this. For searching conversations, anything that eats up time.

  “We were wearing yellow smocks while you water-skied off the Christina,” Carolyn says, and the three of us laugh. We compare their yacht, with the waterslide from the top deck into the Mediterranean, the jet boats at their disposal, to the stale air of the department
store, the sticky heat when you walked out after a shift to the asphalt parking lot.

  Anthony says little. He is losing patience, I think, with all of us. We are going through much different things.

  On another night Anthony recaps the Oscar party for John and Carolyn. He describes it much differently than I remember. His anecdotes are off slightly. “Carole,” he says, teasing, “was starstruck.” He looks over at me, inviting me to join in. He describes a night I didn’t see. One in which we mingled and worked the room, watched Madonna dance. I sit quietly, not sure what to add. The truth is we barely spoke at the party and hardly moved from our table. It was loud, and Anthony was too weak to work through the crush of people. It’s disconcerting, his retelling. But then John breaks in and saves us with a story about the night he had dinner with Madonna, and she barked at him suddenly to eat, and he wolfed down his food, terrified. We all laugh, and I am grateful to be on to something else.

  The next week Carolyn and John come with Hamilton. We are sitting down to dinner when John says, “Let’s have some wine.” We have a few bottles in a rack, and I pick one out and open it. Anthony’s reaction is instant and startling. “God, Carole! That’s an eighty-dollar bottle of wine! What the hell are you doing?” The anger comes, it seems, out of nowhere, but I have lived enough to know now that is never the case. It was red wine, and John had asked for red; my selection had been arbitrary. I set the wine on the table, and Anthony keeps his frown, sitting down quiet and angry, but John jumps right up. “Don’t yell at her! Leave her alone, you’re smothering her!”