Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  In childhood I was blessed with excellent vision. Then, within a few months of my eighteenth birthday, I quite suddenly found myself squinting at street signs and blackboards. Now I wear a pair of elegant progressives that I reach for first thing in the morning and part from last thing at night; I scarcely recognize myself without them. Viv, so far, has 20/20 vision in both eyes. One of these days, I used to tell her, you’ll grow up.

  I was in my second year of training as an ophthalmologist at Edinburgh University when my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. As soon as my mother phoned to break the news, the several incidents I had noticed, and ignored, at Christmas came together in an irrefutable declaration: the way my father dragged his foot through the snow on our Christmas walk, the way he delegated pouring the wine and carving the turkey, the odd jerks of head or hand.

  Parkinson’s is an idiopathic condition, which means it has no known cause, although smoking, infuriatingly, lowers the risk. There is, as yet, no cure. Often it progresses slowly for years, but my father, once diagnosed, grew rapidly worse, as if the illness had only been waiting to be acknowledged. On the phone my mother’s voice was frightened, and when I visited at Easter I was shocked by the changes only a few months had brought. That summer I moved back to the States.

  As a manager at the MBTA in Boston, my father was ambitious for his life, not his job. He did not seem to mind that he had never been promoted beyond area manager. He liked to travel, to tend his garden, to kayak and fish; in winter he took tai chi lessons and, intermittently, studied Japanese. He went walking in the Adirondacks and wrote haiku in the manner of Basho. Illness brought out the best in him. He followed a strict diet, did his exercises, and campaigned for better health care. He asked often how he could make my mother’s life easier. More recently, he submitted with good grace to the presence of caregivers.

  One evening, the second autumn after I moved back, he summoned my mother and me to his study. When we were settled with our drinks, he announced that he was planning to file for a no-fault divorce.

  “I’d still want to see you, Peggy,” he said earnestly, “but you’d be free to find another husband, one who can make you supper and put in the storm windows. I might linger for years, especially if you keep taking such good care of me.”

  My mother was wearing a blue cardigan that matched her eyes and well-cut jeans; she was at that time fifty-two, lively, sociable, passionate about her job. Gently she set down her glass. “Edward, did I upset you? I know sometimes I’m cranky, but I never mean to make you feel you’re a nuisance. You’re not. I’m glad we get to spend so much time together.”

  My father laughed, and Nabokov, nearby in his cage, gave a gruff imitation. “I’m a huge nuisance,” he said. “Elephantine. Actually I find it reassuring when you’re cranky. Makes me feel less of a charity case. No, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. You’re in the prime of life. You deserve a companion who can do the things you enjoy.”

  As my mother walked towards him, I left the room and drove home to my fit and lovely partner, who, unbeknownst to me, was pregnant with Marcus. Would she have made that offer to me? Or I to her? The answer, I thought then, was yes, and yes.

  I met Viv the spring after I returned to Boston, when she sat down beside me on the subway and opened her copy of the New Yorker to the article I was reading in mine. Later she confessed she had already read it but hoped the coincidence might draw my attention—which, along with her elegant profile and crooked left pinkie (an accident with Nutmeg), it did. As the train emerged onto the bridge over the Charles River, we both paused in our reading to look at the gray water, and I asked what she thought of the article. Until that very morning I had been carrying a torch for Ruth, my girlfriend of four years, who was still in Edinburgh, studying to be an anesthesiologist. We had talked often but vaguely about her coming to Boston. Walking home after I got off the train, with Viv’s phone number written in the margin of my magazine, I had finally understood that Ruth would never move to the States.

  I lived then on the pleasingly named Linnaean Street, where, more than two decades earlier, Fran and I had gone to school. We both recalled our teacher telling us about the famous taxonomist, a brilliant man who believed that the swallows in Sweden wintered at the bottom of frozen ponds. The forsythia was just coming into bloom, and as I neared my apartment, I picked up a bright red cardinal’s feather. I slipped it into the letter I wrote to Ruth that weekend. Only after the envelope disappeared into the mailbox did I realize that I now faced a modern dilemma: namely, how to avoid e-mail until my letter arrived. I could not bear the childishness of being caught in an excuse—computer problems, a hospital emergency—or the mendacity of writing as if nothing had changed. So, as with Robert, I hid. I deleted Ruth’s e-mails unread, her phone messages unheard, until they dwindled and then ceased.

  Viv, as I’ve mentioned, at that time worked in mutual funds. I liked that her job was so different from mine, and I liked that she knew so much about current events. My patients were not, for the most part, affected by changes in weather and regime, but in her world a storm in the Indian Ocean, or a new president in Chile, could change everything. She followed international politics in a way that only a few of my American friends did, and she was reassuringly left-wing, believing not only in the obvious causes—gay marriage, women’s rights, abolition of the death penalty, gun control, recycling, universal health care—but in the more obscure ones like proportional representation, job sharing, and death with dignity. She had grown up in Ann Arbor, where her mother still lived, and had seldom met a Republican. One of the things she envied about my profession was that I met all kinds of people. “And you make them better,” she said. “We try,” I said, “but sometimes it’s too late, or we make mistakes.” Viv nodded, and said fund managers made mistakes too. She tried never to forget that money always represented something precious: a house, a goat, a violin. Later that night she took me to a club, where we flung ourselves around on the dance floor. Need I say I was equally charmed by her high-mindedness and her exuberance.

  After qualifying as an ophthalmologist in Massachusetts, I practiced for two years. I found surgery deeply satisfying, but when Trina was born, and my father’s condition worsened, I needed a job with shorter, more predictable hours. My sister worked as a publicist for a music company in Nashville, and was as helpful as a person living a thousand miles away can be, phoning frequently and visiting when she could, but the brunt of my father’s care fell to my mother and to me. Viv and I moved to our town outside Boston. I started my business, and Viv joined Claudia at the stables.

  Since our father’s death, Fran and I have been much less in touch, so it was a pleasant surprise when, the Sunday after the fire, she phoned. Viv talked to her for twenty minutes before handing me the phone.

  “How’s it going?” Fran said. “Viv seems really excited about this new horse. It’s nice to hear her being enthusiastic again.”

  As I said, there is listening and listening. At the time Fran’s “again” did not register. Viv’s job in our marriage was to be the enthusiast. Over the years she has taken lessons in boxing, salsa, and more recently, Pilates. She had learned to make a gâteau Saint-Honoré. She campaigned for Clinton, Gore, and Obama. She protested the start of the Iraq war and the threatened closure of our Montessori school. Her ability to enter wholeheartedly into a cause or an activity is one of the many things I admire about her. Or, I should say, used to admire.

  2

  THE DAY AFTER FRAN’S phone call, Merrie greeted me at the office with the news that our UPS delivery was late, and my first patient was already waiting. Her glasses were pushed up on her forehead, and she spoke in the extra-calm voice she uses on busy days. I can claim no special intelligence in hiring Merrie; she was the receptionist for the business that previously occupied these premises, a dermatologist’s, and when I took over the lease, she phoned to ask if I needed help. “I know zilch about optometry,” she said, “but I can talk to anyone
, and I’m a whiz on computers.” Both of which turned out to be true. She is also tall, a serious runner, a devout Catholic, and the single mother of three daughters, two of whom share her coffee-colored complexion while the third, the youngest, is much darker. She has never mentioned a father, singular or plural. On the rare occasions when she steps out from behind her desk to give me advice, I pay attention.

  Besides Merrie and myself there is Leah, who is trained in optometry, and Jo, who is in her twenties and still taking classes. Merrie had urged me to hire Jo. “We need some young blood around here,” she said, and she was right. Jo is good with our older patients, talking them into more flattering frames, urging them to give progressives a chance. The four of us get on famously and rarely meet outside the office.

  My first patient was seated in a corner of the waiting room, wearing the uniform of the local Catholic school, reading a magazine. The older girls roll up their skirts and loosen their ties, but this girl’s skirt was knee length, her tie neatly knotted. She did not look up as I said, “Good morning. I’m Dr. Stevenson.” It was her mother, in her own short skirt, who gave me a girlish smile and said that Diane was having trouble seeing the blackboard.

  “No, I’m not,” said Diane quietly.

  While she continued to gaze at the magazine, her mother said they’d moved to our town in June. Diane had always been a good student, but her new teachers were complaining that she never volunteered in class, and sometimes confused assignments.

  In my office Diane read the first two charts and then guessed wildly, mistaking P for X, N for O. At last, not turning on the light, I sat down beside the chair.

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Stand up,” I said. “Close your eyes and walk towards the door.”

  Arms outstretched, she took a couple of hesitant steps then stopped. I urged her on, and she shuffled forward until her hand touched the door.

  “What’s the matter?” she said again. “Am I going blind?”

  “No”—I reached for the light—“but you are shortsighted, and no amount of willpower will change that. If you don’t wear glasses, you’ll miss most of what’s going on around you. You may have an accident, or cause one. Let me show you how things will look.”

  Diane returned to the chair. “Can’t I have contact lenses?”

  “When you’re older,” I said. “Within a week you’ll barely notice your glasses.”

  We bargained our way to a prescription. Back in the waiting room, her mother thanked me. Her voice went up at the end of her sentences in a way I couldn’t place until later, when Viv told me that she had grown up in Canada. While we waited for Merrie to finish a phone call, I asked Diane if she knew my friend Steve Abrahams, the biology teacher at her school.

  She nodded. They were doing a cool project on soil. Her mother chimed in that Diane preferred micro-organisms to people.

  So my first meeting with Hilary ended, neither of us knowing the part we already played in each other’s lives.

  IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING my father’s death, I missed him in every way imaginable. I also found myself, as I had not since Marcus was born, with odd stretches of time, sometimes as long as half an hour, when I had no immediate task, and in those empty intervals I also missed surgery. The week after I saw Diane, I met with a patient to discuss his cataract operation. As I held out my model eye, twelve times life-size, and explained how the new lens would be folded to fit through a small incision in the sclera and then unfolded behind the pupil, I wished that I were the one sliding the lens into place.

  I put the feeling away to examine later and drove to Windy Hill. In the decades since she inherited the farm, Claudia’s great-aunt had sold off most of the land, but the stables were still surrounded by fields and woods. The nearest neighbor, half a mile away, was a fancy farm stand and nursery. As I drove up the hill to the barn, several of the horses grazing in the paddocks on either side raised their heads. I recognized Dow Jones, the bay Viv used to ride in competitions. I parked in my usual spot beside the row of horse trailers. In the large field half a dozen riders were circling under Claudia’s instruction.

  “Shoulders back, Louie,” I heard her call.

  I was searching for the slouching rider when a flash of white caught my peripheral vision. During my years with Viv, I have, inadvertently, learned a good deal about Equus caballus. Horses have been domesticated for over six thousand years. They appear in early cave paintings at Lascaux and Pech Merle. The wealthy King Croesus had a soothsayer who described the horse as a warrior and a foreigner, and another king, I forget his name, was buried surrounded by a dozen stuffed horses. Until the twentieth century, horses fought on many battlefields and were part of most people’s daily lives. They have the largest eyes of any land mammal and are blessed with both binocular and monocular vision. Historically horses are divided by a kind of class system. Hardworking horses—cart horses and plow horses—are described as cold-blooded. Racehorses, Thoroughbreds, and Arabians are hot-blooded. Those in between—the warm-blooded horses—are bred to combine the best of the other two.

  Mercury, true to his name, was unmistakably hot-blooded. The lines of his body, the arch of his neck, the rise and fall of his stride, were, I agreed with Viv reluctantly, beautiful. I was so absorbed in watching him that I paid no heed to his rider until, nearing the fence, she waved. Then I recognized Diane’s mother. Turning back to the circling ponies, I saw that the girl on the brown pony, not quite trotting, was my patient, minus her carefully chosen glasses.

  Besides the indoor arena, the stables consist of a large barn that houses most of the stalls, a tack room, a feed room, and the office, and a smaller building that houses additional stalls and storerooms. Inside the barn I made my way to the office, a modest room furnished with various castoffs. My mother donated the red curtains and the table and chairs. I contributed two filing cabinets that Merrie wanted to replace and a coffeemaker. That afternoon Marcus and Trina were working at opposite ends of the table: Marcus on homework, Trina on an elaborate drawing.

  “Hi, Daddy,” they said.

  “How was your patient?” added Marcus. He has Viv’s fair coloring, but his high forehead, straight eyebrows, and slightly blocky nose are, according to my mother, a direct throwback to my namesake: Uncle Donald. He is an ardent swimmer and almost always smells faintly of chlorine.

  “My patient was all right,” I said. “He liked knowing about his surgery. Some people do, some people don’t.”

  “Which are you?” Trina reached for another crayon. Small for her age, pale-skinned and dark-haired, she is the barometer of our household, monitoring approaching storms, pleading for calm weather. She can work on a single picture for an hour.

  “I like to know about things in advance,” I said, “but I tend to worry. What about you?”

  “I don’t like surprises,” she declared. “And I don’t want anyone to cut me open.”

  “Surprises, yes,” said Marcus. “Definitely no cutting.”

  Like many children, mine are deeply interested in bodily functions: how long they can hold their breath, or stand on one foot, whether they can walk in a straight line with their eyes closed, where sweat comes from. When Marcus broke his leg on the playground last May, they were both fascinated by the X-ray showing the thin dark line across the tibia. And when my father, in a last vain effort to control his illness, had an operation that involved cauterizing areas of the brain, Trina drew a picture of him, his head haloed in sparks.

  “Where’s Viv?” I asked.

  “With the horses,” said Marcus, unhelpfully.

  She was not in the feed room or the tack room. She was not in the first row of stalls. At last I heard her voice coming from a stall in the second row. She was talking to Charlie, one of the stable girls, who was grooming the school’s oldest pony, the stalwart Samson. I rode him once, and it was like riding a carousel; whatever I did, he followed the horse in front. Now I patted his whiskery nose and joked th
at they were getting him ready for the rodeo.

  “Poor Samson,” said Viv. “You don’t give him enough credit.”

  “We’re putting him on a diet,” Charlie added. “He’s going to be our most improved pony.” A slender girl with a loud laugh, she had been working at Windy Hill for nearly three years and was Viv’s favorite among the stable girls.

  I explained that I wanted a quick word with Diane Blake before I took the children home. Viv said her lesson ended at five. How did I know her?

  “She’s one of my patients. Her mother was riding that gray horse you told me about.”

  “Mercury. Isn’t he amazing?”

  “He’s fantastic,” said Charlie, her voice as dazzled as Viv’s.

  Back in the office I asked Trina and Marcus if we could wait for ten minutes. While they returned to their projects, I studied the calendar on the wall. Each day displayed a list of lessons, deliveries, vet’s and farrier’s visits, which stable girls were on duty. Merrie kept a similar calendar in my office. Of course there were surprises—Marcus’s leg, a horse struck by colic—but for the most part, I thought, as I sat in that cozy room with my industrious children, we knew what we were doing next week, next month, next year.

  The lesson ended. From nearby came the stamp of hooves as the riders dismounted. When I stepped out of the office, half a dozen girls were milling around the lockers that had been installed last year, after a student’s purse went missing. Claudia had argued against them. “I worry they make the stables seem less safe,” she said. “Like a dog wearing a muzzle.” But Viv had prevailed, and within a week everyone took the lockers for granted.