by Greg Johnson
Driving slowly through the neighborhood during his frequent visits that winter, Thom had experienced sudden throes of nostalgia. As a boy, he’d loved the storied names of the neighborhood streets—Robin Hood Road, Little John Trail, Nottingham Way—and had raced with his friends along the untrafficked pavement and through the flat, enormous lawns that were never again so green as in his childhood memories. When he was seven or eight, he’d played Robin Hood to his sister’s Maid Marian, wearing a green chintz cape his mother had fashioned from leftover drapery fabric, loping ecstatically among the towering backyard pines and water oaks on a stick horse his father had made at his worktable in the basement. As an adult, Thom seldom saw kids playing outside: most of the renovated places were bought by affluent, childless couples or gay men. The elaborately landscaped front lawns were now dotted with placards warning of security systems, and the lawns themselves were tended not by white-legged dads jauntily riding their mowers, but by professional crews arriving in large trailer-trucks with three or four men who cut, clipped, trimmed, blew, and departed after less than an hour.
When Thom left for college, his mother insisted that he’d chosen Mercer only as an excuse to move out of the house. There were plenty of good schools right here in Atlanta, after all; he could have gone to Emory, as Abby had done. For once, Lucille’s paranoid suspicions were correct. But Thom knew better than to tell his mother that, and once he’d moved back to the city after graduation, he evaded her petulant queries: what was the point of renting an apartment, instead of reclaiming his perfectly good boyhood room? He did intend to visit his family once in a while, didn’t he, since he lived just a few miles away? Though Thom came to dinner every Sunday night and often stopped by on weekdays, his visits were never frequent enough or long enough to suit Lucille. “Thanks for granting us an audience!’’ she would call out, as he hurried down the sidewalk to his car.
Once his father had become bedridden, however, Lucille grew strangely silent. Thom visited every day for several hours, giving Abby a breather so she could have a date or study in the university library, and at times his mother sent him long, sad-eyed looks that seemed to suggest—if only for a moment—some measure of gratitude. Through January and February his father’s condition deteriorated steadily, though in their mother’s presence Thom and Abby maintained the fiction that he might eventually recover.
Not surprisingly, neither of his parents had referred again to their son’s announcement a few months earlier. After Lucille’s fit of lamenting and lambasting had gone on for half an hour, Thorn’s father had given her a quick, sharp look and said, “That’s enough, Loo,” and turned back to the football game. Thom later supposed that he shouldn’t have made the announcement in the first place. Like his friends Carter and Pace, he should have allowed the matter to remain an open but undiscussed fact of his life, like a wart on his nose that no one in a good Southern family would be rude enough to mention. Even Lucille, with her limitless capacity for denying the obvious, had years ago stopped inquiring whether Thom was “dating anyone,” or thinking about “settling down”; and when he moved in with Roy in the spring of 1989 and began bringing him along to family dinners, she behaved with the same effusive politeness a mother often adopts toward her son’s unacknowledged lover.
In private, though, her complaints about her children—she hauled them both into the same net—grew equally shrill. Outside her earshot, Thom and Abby coped with the stress of their father’s illness by reverting to the nicknames, John-John and Caro, they’d used during their teenage years. Thom would murmur in his sister’s ear, “You’re looking very well groomed this evening, Caro,” when she came downstairs after primping for one of her dates. Or Abby would catch Thom as he paused before the oval mahogany-framed mirror in the foyer. “Don’t worry, John-John, you’re still the sexiest man alive,” she’d say smartly, passing by. They seized whatever scant opportunities for humor came their way, falling easily into the banter of their adolescence, as if their father were laboring at one of his woodworking projects downstairs—a bluebird house for Lucille, another bookshelf for the Civil War collection he kept in the den—instead of vegetating in his bed; as if their mother were handling all this with maturity and good humor instead of alternating between outright denial and the occasional outbursts of self-pitying emotion that were rendering a painful situation almost unbearable.
As the doctors predicted, George Sadler had deteriorated slowly. March passed, and April; by the middle of May, he was semi-comatose but still at home, attended in his last days by several home-care nurses, middle-aged women who came and went in regular shifts. Abby arranged everything, did the hiring, spoke with the doctors and pharmacists and insurance people. Dropping by the house several times each day, Thom spoke politely to the various nurses but couldn’t keep their names straight, much less their constantly changing schedules. For Thom, the only real constant was his father lying motionless in bed, surrounded by flower arrangements sent by his friends from church and from the bank. Making his way toward the bed, Thom felt himself struggling through the over-sweet stench of the roses, gladioli, and chrysanthemums that multiplied daily in the room, their sensual and riotous life seeming to crowd out his father’s, like bright and unruly children. Or so Thom imagined, feeling a vague sickness to his stomach that he blamed on the flowers. He’d have liked to take them all outside and toss them into the trash barrel.
Sitting quietly next to the bed while his father slept, Thom kept pushing away his recurrent déjà vu: all the rituals of the sickbed, the pragmatic details surrounding fatal illness, and even his emotions were essentially the same as during Roy’s final bout with AIDS. Roy had died of a brain disease, too, a rampaging viral infection that overtook him with such merciful swiftness, he’d lived only a few days in the same twilight state Thorn’s father had inhabited for months. Roy had been hospitalized once with a case of Pneumocystis so virulent he almost choked to death, and once with a stomach virus that had ravaged his entire system. On that Friday in spring 1991 when he’d complained of a dull but persistent headache, they hadn’t thought much about it. In his logical, decisive way, Roy had decided to wait until Monday before calling his doctor; he’d begun to feel that he bothered her too often, complaining of ailments that turned out to be minor or even—it was possible—imaginary. Thorn’s lover had a CPA’s methodical, almost grave tendency to figure the odds and act accordingly, distrusting mere impulse, and as usual, Thom had kidded him: “I thought you had no imagination. I thought you were proud of that.” Roy had performed one of his dry smiles, then he leaned across—they were sitting on the den sofa, Mitzi snuggled between them—and gave Thom a peck on the cheek. “But I can’t discount the possibility,” he said. He cupped his hands and raised them, doing his dead-on impression of President Bush. “That wouldn’t be prudent. Wouldn’t be prudent.”
Thom laughed, but by Saturday night Roy’s headache had reached migraine proportions, and Thom had called the doctor himself. On Sunday, in his hospital bed, Roy complained that his vision was wavering—“It’s like I’m seeing you through water”—and that night he developed a fever that reached 104, causing even the eminently sane Roy to talk out of his head. Or so Thom had thought.
“I need the Baxter file, the Baxter file,” Roy kept saying, raising up on one elbow with a wild, unfocused look in Thorn’s direction. Roy died two days later, but it was months before Thom accidentally learned, in a conversation with one of Roy’s coworkers, that the “Baxter file” was one of Roy’s most important and problematic business accounts. Roy had fallen sick and died in early April, in the raging heart of tax season.
The shell-shocked aftermath of Roy’s death: a period of numbed, thoughtless routine during which Thom showed and sold houses during the day, watched television and saw his friends after work, and visited his parents and Abby on weekends, imagining he’d stumbled accidentally into someone else’s life and didn’t quite know what he was doing. The pain he took in small doses (alone a
t night, or driving in his car), like a bottle of hateful medicine he must sip and sip over months, years, until every drop was gone. When he’d told his parents about the pneumonia and the viruses, he hadn’t spoken the word AIDS and neither had they. He knew they must be worried about his own health, and when Abby had asked quietly, one afternoon when they were driving somewhere together, if he’d been “tested,” he’d needed only to say “Yeah, I’m negative” to know that she’d pass along the good news and that the subject need never be mentioned again. At Roy’s funeral, Lucille had embraced Roy’s mother tearfully, and Thorn’s father had shaken Roy’s father’s hand for a long, solemn moment, as befitted this wordless and puzzled bond between two men whose sons had loved one another. And that was all. No one in his family spoke Roy’s name again, and it began to seem that Thom had loved, married, and been widowed in some dimension that could not be acknowledged, so that his memories of Roy took on a slightly surreal, dreamlike quality, as though he’d existed only in Thorn’s imagination.
During his father’s last days, Thom had spent almost all his free time with Abby and Lucille, doing what he could to help care for him. The nurses did most of the grunt work, but he could see that his mother and sister needed moral support. Abby looked drawn, pale, underfed; the spring term was ending, and she was teaching almost daily at an Episcopal school where she was a substitute—one of the regular teachers had resigned abruptly—in the midst of her father’s dying. Both she and Thom were worried about their mother, who did indeed seem to be breaking down, though in an unexpectedly quiet way. After her husband became incontinent, Lucille began sleeping in the guest room, and during the day she escaped almost wholly into television, not even entering their father’s room for days at a time, frowning briefly whenever one of the nurses passed through the den on her way to the kitchen, as though the woman were a stranger wandered in from the street. When Abby and Thom discussed their father’s condition over dinner, careful to make only encouraging remarks—he seemed to be resting more comfortably; he’d gained a little weight—Lucille did not bother to accuse her children of lying, though plainly they were. After dinner, they sat with her in the den and watched more television, one program after another, the sitcoms and cop shows and TV movies all passing before their glazed, undiscriminating vision like a version of life itself they accepted gratefully, since they were not included.
One night they sat watching a hospital drama, in which emergency room doctors and nurses rushed around with the ceaseless frantic motion of an ant colony busily working its small mound of earth, when the program was interrupted to report some “breaking news.” Lucille had been laboring over a newspaper crossword puzzle, but now she stopped, frowning at the screen. Thom and Abby glanced at one another, alarmed. Thom had seen an article in today’s newspaper and had shown it to Abby, who had quietly crumpled the page and thrown it away. They knew the article would upset Lucille. But now they watched helplessly as Tom Brokaw, in deep and mournful tones, announced “the impending death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in her Manhattan apartment.” According to family sources, the end was “very near.” Immediately, Thom suspected that Mrs. Onassis was receiving euthanasia, though the television report did not hint at that. Neither had the newspaper article, which had noted that all treatment had been suspended and that the former first lady was “gravely ill.” Last week, Thom had seen a tabloid newspaper his mother brought home from Kroger’s, its front page showing a frail-looking Jackie on the arm of her male companion, walking through Central Park, and of course there had been earlier articles in the daily paper; but Thom and Abby had known better than to mention the stories to Lucille. As usual, a tacit silence had reigned in the house, making their lives still bearable day by day, hour by hour, but now Tom Brokaw had ruined all that.
Thom glanced fearfully at his mother, who had slumped in her chair. Although Lucille, unlike Abby, had looked remarkably the same through their recent ordeal, keeping her hairdresser’s appointment every Friday and seldom missing a meal, Thom saw now that her skin had paled, making her look older, grayer. Her facial muscles seemed to sag. Although the news bulletin had ended and the hospital show had resumed, she’d kept her pale bluish eyes fixed on the television set.
“Mom, are you OK?” Abby asked.
Lucille didn’t answer. She stared at the set, unblinking.
Thom felt dully, unaccountably angry. “There’s no point in getting upset, you know. We have our own troubles.”
His mother said nothing, as though he and Abby were beneath her notice. Thom had the helpless idea that if Caroline and John-John were in this situation, they’d know exactly what to do. Kennedys always knew, didn’t they? They acted. They wouldn’t have sat here gaping, their hearts pounding queerly.
Now Tom Brokaw reappeared on the screen. God out of a machine, Thom thought. Save us. In a reverential, almost inhumanly deep voice, he reported that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had, as expected, died. The family would issue a statement in the morning, he told them, and the funeral arrangements would be announced. There was no further information at the moment, but yes, Jackie Kennedy was dead. “Please stay tuned for further details. Good night.”
The hospital drama resumed. Not knowing what else to do, Thom had grabbed the remote control and flicked off the set.
Lucille stood, her eyes a little wild. Her expression reminded Thom of something, but he couldn’t remember what. His mother’s unfinished crossword puzzle fell to the floor.
“Mom?” Abby said, leaning forward. “Are you—”
“I’m going,” Lucille announced. She looked briefly at each of her children, as though daring them to argue. “I’m going.”
“That’s a good idea,” Thom said. “It’s been a tough day. I’ll make you some hot chocolate, I’ll bring it back when it’s…”
But Lucille had stalked back toward the bedroom. Abby sat there next to Thom, shaking her head. She didn’t look at him, either.
“That’s not what she meant, Thom,” she said, in an older sister’s gentle, explanatory tone. “Going to bed—that’s not what she meant, at all.”
What she had meant, evidently, was that she was going to Jackie Kennedy’s funeral. She stayed up late in the guest room, packing and repacking her overnight bag, making reservations for her hotel accommodations and her flight to New York. Thom and Abby took turns venturing into her room, trying to reason with her, insisting that she get a good night’s sleep before making any plans. At first Lucille ignored them, and then she became hostile. “You don’t understand, you!” she said to Thom, the last time he’d tried. He stood in the doorway, staring dully. What did she mean, you? Her tone was accusatory, almost hateful.
He escaped to the den and told Abby he’d given up. The earliest flight reservation their mother had been able to secure was for eleven o’clock tomorrow; if she still wanted to visit the Kennedys in the morning, he would drive her to the airport himself. Abby told him to calm down. He’d been sitting perched on the edge of the sofa, methodically cracking the knuckles of one hand, then the other—a habit from his teenage years. He heard the echo of his voice and knew he must have sounded like a teenager. He hadn’t felt this jumpy and out of sorts in years, and his sister’s standing there in the middle of the room with her air of saintly forbearance didn’t help.
“Thanks so much, Caroline,” he said. “I’ll certainly try.”
“Good,” she said, then turned and left the room.
It was official, he’d thought. Everybody was mad at everybody. He went back to check on his father, expecting to find Abby in there, but evidently she’d retreated to her room. The nurse, a crabby-looking woman in her fifties who was Thorn’s least favorite of the three, glanced up briefly from the dark corner of the room where she sat with a paperback romance novel, a portable reading light clipped to the cover. He’d never seen her do much of anything. Thom stood for a minute next to the bed, gazing at his father’s comatose form with a pang of something like envy. No anger for hi
m, and no pain, either. He’d already reached the end of his journey, Thom thought, and now lay here with his usual patience and quietness, simply waiting for his body to catch up.
The next morning, Thom had returned before ten o’clock, fully expecting to cooperate with his mother’s lunatic wishes. He went first to the kitchen, where he found Abby preparing a tray of sliced cantaloupe, frosted pastries, a cup of cinnamon-scented tea. Their mother’s favorites.
“I talked her into spending the day in bed,” Abby said, shortly. She hadn’t quite met his eyes.
“Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you last night.” Thom leaned back against the counter, his palms turned upward in a gesture of appeal. “It’s starting to get to me, I guess,” he said, though he couldn’t have said what “it” was, exactly.
A brief pause, and then she looked at him. She’d pulled her hair back and tied it carelessly on one side, but a few limp reddish strands had escaped, hanging along her slender throat; her normally clear, fine skin had a waxen pallor. She’d thrown on a wrinkled plaid blouse and blue-jean skirt, and Thom felt shamefacedly fresh and well-groomed in his starched khakis and polo shirt, the scent of his cologne and hair gel invading the room.
“Well,” she said, smiling slightly. “I guess I forgive you.”
“Honey,” he murmured, “you’re the one who needs a day in bed.”
