Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  Diane was not among the girls. Maybe she’s outside, Claudia suggested, and there she was, leaning on the fence that bordered the field, pretending to watch her mother, although, without her glasses, I knew that horse and rider were a blur. I greeted her and asked why she wasn’t wearing them.

  “I thought I only had to wear them at school.”

  “Don’t you want to see what’s going on the rest of the time? Wouldn’t you like to see your mum riding?”

  She responded to my question with one of her own: her teacher had posed the old ethical dilemma about who to save when a museum catches fire, your grandmother or a Rembrandt. “Most people said Grandma,” said Diane, “but I said the painting because it will give thousands of people pleasure. Which is the total opposite of Grandma.”

  As she spoke, Mercury broke into a trot; Hilary lurched perilously and grabbed the saddle. Maybe it was just as well that Diane couldn’t see what her mother was doing. “Do you like Rembrandt?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Mom and I saw a painting by him in New York, of a guy on a gray horse. He looks as if he’s going on an important errand. I liked that painting, and I bet I could get to like others.”

  Later, when Viv showed me a copy of the painting, I agreed with her description. Dusk is falling, and the young man, the Polish rider, gazes intently at the viewer as if he is on his way to save someone he loves. But that afternoon, before I could question her further, Trina appeared; she had finished her drawing and wanted to go home. As I drove down the hill, it came to me that the test I had set Diane in my office was one my father had set me. When we lived in Edinburgh, our next-door neighbor had been blind. My mother instructed me to say, “Hello, Valerie, it’s Donald,” when I met her in the street. But sometimes I simply walked past her or, on bolder days, ran. One afternoon my mother caught me in this cruel game. After supper my parents sat me down. My mother said Valerie had come to the hospital when I was born, and until her eyesight failed, she often babysat for me. My father said he had once asked her what was the worst thing about being blind.

  “And do you know her answer?” he said. “Never knowing who’s there.”

  Then he had blindfolded me, led me out into the street, and told me to walk to the corner.

  3

  I MET VIV, AS I have said, the spring after I returned to Boston. With most of my previous girlfriends, we had been friends before we became lovers. With Viv, I at last understood the expression “falling in love.” We slept together on our second date, and I felt as if I were tumbling off a high wall, a wall I had built, brick by brick, out of self-control and hard work. But suddenly I didn’t care about control; all I wanted was to be entwined with this woman. I was enthralled by her intelligence, her ambition, her gift, like that of Donald III, for seizing the day, her American confidence that all would be well, and if it wasn’t, it could be fixed. When, eight months later, she told me she was pregnant, I picked her up and carried her around the room. At last, I thought, I would feel at home in America. And Viv and I, I was certain, would be good parents. We agreed on the importance of rules and routines—plenty of books, not too much sugar or television—and on public education. When her friend Lucy sent her son to private school, Viv had begged her to reconsider. So our quarrel about private school for Marcus was notable as both our first major disagreement about the children and my first experience of Viv abandoning a deeply held belief.

  A couple of weeks after Mercury’s arrival, we were having supper at a Mexican restaurant when Viv announced that Greenfield School had an open house in early November. “It’s on a Thursday,” she said, “so we can all go.” Her tone suggested some long-agreed plan.

  I set down my beer. Why on earth, I asked, would we want to visit Greenfield? If we needed an outing with the children, we could go to Louisa May Alcott’s house, or Drumlin Farm.

  Viv set down her own beer and clasped her hands, pleating her crooked finger in with the others. “Don,” she said, “I’ve been talking about this for months. The middle school is a disaster.”

  As she listed the problems—broken computers, too few textbooks, large classes, wacked-out teachers—I realized it was true: since soon after Marcus broke his leg, she had been complaining about the school. But I had heard her complaints as a to-do list: the things we would, as committed parents, work to change.

  “These are the crucial years,” she went on, “when the pathways in the brain are formed.”

  She spoke as if she was quoting someone, and I was sure I knew who. The morning after we moved into our house, Anne had knocked on the door with a tray of cinnamon rolls. She, her husband, and two daughters lived across the street; she worked part-time as an architect. Last year the older daughter had bitten another girl. Anne had enrolled her at Greenfield and begun fervently promoting the school.

  “If you’re worried about Marcus’s pathways,” I said, “why not help him study rain forests and follow his chess tournament?”

  Twice in the last week Viv had arrived home too late to help with homework. Now, as the server brought our enchiladas, she ignored my criticism. No amount of help at home, she said, smiling firmly, could compensate for a bad school. When I repeated the arguments she had made to Lucy, her smile vanished. She accused me of being stingy. We Scots, as I have already remarked, have a long and honorable tradition of thrift, but the word stingy made me grasp my knife like a scalpel.

  “Viv, you’re talking about spending what would be a year’s salary for many people on a child’s education.”

  “Please, Don.” She reached across the table. “I know it’s a lot of money, but let’s take a look at Greenfield. Marcus is my son. I want the best for him.”

  Marcus was my son too; I would have given him my kidneys, my lungs. Let me think about it, I said.

  Recognizing a major victory, Viv changed the subject. Mercury was already gaining weight, she said. He preferred a snaffle bit, not too thin. I ate, I nodded. I was still bristling at her charge of meanness. Had she forgotten that my going to the office, day in, day out, was what kept us afloat, and allowed her to ride her beautiful horse?

  I WISH I DID not have to bring Jack into this story, but without him there would be no story. Until three years ago, when retinitis pigmentosa rendered him legally blind, he was my patient. The last time I checked, the vision in his good eye was 10/200; what is visible to a normal person at two hundred feet, he can only see at ten. He can make out the burners on his stove, and sort white socks from dark ones. His bad eye detects only the brightest lights. I have had to break grim tidings to many people, but telling Jack, a man my age, a man in love with books—he teaches classics at the university—that nothing could be done about his failing vision was particularly hard.

  I was tiptoeing around the subject when he interrupted.

  “Forgive me, Doc,” he said, “but the short version is, I’m going blind. Farewell the daylight world, farewell the winged chariot, aka Apollo.”

  He was my last patient of the day, and we had walked together to the nearest bar, where we drank Scotch and he told me how Odysseus finally, by guile and strength, gets rid of the suitors. As he spoke, he kept his vivid blue eyes fixed on my face. Even knowing what I did, it was hard to believe how little he could see. A few weeks later I invited him to dinner, and a few weeks after that, at his insistence, I took him to meet my father, who was still living at home. They had enjoyed a lively conversation about the Adirondacks, where each had hiked in better days. Jack was one of the few people I had kept in touch with during the awful last year of my father’s life. His apartment was on the edge of the campus, and it was easy to drop in on the way to and from the children’s various lessons. The week after Viv and I argued about private school, I stopped by while Marcus was swimming.

  “Screw tops,” Jack said, opening the bottle I’d brought. “God’s gift to the blind.”

  He poured two glasses of merlot and led the way to the sofa. I asked about his book. That summer he had begun to write
about blindness, his own and the wider history of the condition.

  “I’m working on a topic near to my heart,” he said cheerfully. “Namely what I find most annoying about sighted people. Number one is people asking if I want to touch their faces. To which the answer is, Christ, no. Stay away from me with your Helen Keller fantasies. The couple of times I tried it, I could only make out major features: noses, eyebrows. Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” I clinked my glass to his. “Maybe it only works if you’ve been blind from birth.”

  “Maybe it only works if you’re a kinky person who likes to feel faces. Another thing that drives me crazy”—he was warming to his subject—“is when I ask someone where I am, and instead of telling me, they say, ‘Where do you want to be?’ As if they could transport me by magic carpet. Let me show you something.”

  Jack’s apartment consists of three large rooms. The bedroom and the living room open off the hall, and the kitchen, which is large enough to eat in, opens off the living room. He got up and, carrying his almost full wineglass, stepped around the coffee table, crossed the room, skirted his desk, and disappeared into the kitchen. He came back again without spilling a drop.

  “Okay,” he said. “Close your eyes. You do it.”

  I closed my eyes, picked up the glass, took two steps, and stopped. That evening in Edinburgh when my father blindfolded me, I had come to a standstill after three or four steps. I tried to turn around, banged into a parked car, called for help. Now, still with my eyes closed, I said, “I can’t.”

  “Give me your glass.”

  With a glass in each hand, Jack took only a couple of steps before he too stopped. “One glass, yes. Two glasses, no. I need one hand free to ‘see.’”

  We had talked on several occasions about facial vision, that sense that allows the blind to detect obstacles. Now I suggested he keep a record of how soon he sensed an obstacle, whether size or surroundings made a difference.

  “The library at the Perkins school must have the latest research,” I said. “Speaking of schools, I wanted to ask you about Greenfield. Viv has a bee in her bonnet about Marcus going there.”

  Jack frowned. “That doesn’t sound like Viv. Did something rattle her?”

  I brushed his question aside. “Not that I know of,” I said. “Can you tell me anything about the school?”

  He began to list its virtues: a great classics department, a first-rate library, a music teacher who was a terrific jazz trumpeter, school trips to Tanglewood and Storm King. “But,” he said, “I can’t imagine spending thirty grand a year to send a kid there.”

  Neither, I said, could I.

  MY LIFE, FIRST AS an ophthalmologist, now as an optometrist is one of close quarters, peering into eyes, studying charts and lenses. Most days at lunchtime I go for a brisk walk, as much for the luxury of gazing at birds and buildings as for the exercise. The day after my drink with Jack, I was striding down our main street when I caught sight of a couple seated in the window of a Thai restaurant. Something about their attitudes—the woman with one hand outstretched; the man watching her—drew my attention.

  In Edinburgh Robert and I used to play a game that involved staring at a person and seeing how long it took for them to notice. The answer was usually less than a minute. I stopped staring, walked to the traffic light, crossed the street, and headed back on the far side. From a distance my mother’s expression was hard to decipher, but her posture conveyed the same information: she liked this man.

  Only a few weeks before Viv had remarked, not for the first time, how great it would be if Peggy met someone; I had agreed. But as I retraced my steps to the office, a small part of me was drifting loose. Dead leaves fluttered across the street, and suddenly I was back with my girlfriend Ruth on an autumn day in Scotland. We had walked along the Firth of Forth to the Hawes Inn in South Queensferry. As we sat by the fire, drinking beer, I had told her about Robert Louis Stevenson. He had come here to drink when he was a mediocre law student. Later, he had set a crucial scene in his novel Kidnapped at the Inn.

  In a far corner of the office parking lot, someone had abandoned two beer bottles. As I carried them over to recycling, it came to me that I had deleted Ruth’s messages not only because I dreaded her anger but also because I was afraid that suddenly, at the eleventh hour, she would offer to come to Boston. Even before I met Viv, my patience with our long-distance relationship was utterly gone, drained, like the bottles, to the last drop.

  THAT EVENING I DID not mention seeing my mother to Viv. Instead we talked about whether Marcus was ready for the advanced diving class, and which of us should undertake the delicate task of asking our neighbors not to park so close to our driveway. And the following evening, when my mother came over, I again said nothing. At supper she described her art history course. They were studying William Morris and his attempts to create a utopian community.

  “Hands up who’d like to live in a commune,” my mother said.

  Trina said she liked summer camp, but only for two weeks, and Viv said her dormitory at Yale had made her want to spend a decade in solitary confinement. I volunteered that I’d enjoyed the summer I picked grapes in France, sharing a house with half a dozen other pickers.

  “What about you, Peggy?” said Marcus. “Would you like to share your house with lots of people?” He and my mother took each other seriously.

  “I wouldn’t like to share my present house,” she said, “but I like the idea of friends living nearby. Maybe a big house divided into condos so that you could have privacy and company.”

  You mean assisted living, Viv suggested, and my mother’s eyes flashed. “Absolutely not. Those are segregated communities, our version of putting the elderly on an ice floe. I mean people of all ages, living together and learning from each other. That’s one of the utopian beliefs: everyone has something to teach.”

  “You could give Ping-Pong lessons,” said Marcus.

  “And you could teach people to swim.”

  After she left and the children were in bed, Viv said, “Peggy’s on the move. Did you notice her earrings? And she’s gotten highlights. She’ll be off on the Orient Express soon.”

  Here was my chance; but still I said nothing. I could not bear the prospect of Viv’s delighted exclamations. Instead I asked if she had fed Nabokov.

  Jack told me once that the word secret has the same root as separate. I think of that now as I parse out this history of how our family ceased to be Viv’s sun. We both kept secrets, and our secrets kept us separate.

  4

  THE OTHER FRIEND I see regularly is Steve, the biology teacher at Diane’s school. He and I were friends at high school in Cambridge, lost touch for over a decade, and reconnected when his second wife came to my office in search of new glasses. The week after I saw my mother in the restaurant, he and I met at the local park to play tennis. Steve, not afraid of his own ambition, wore tennis whites. I, pretending not to care, wore dark shorts and a red T-shirt. As we changed ends, I asked if his mother had enjoyed her cruise.

  “Not as much as she’s enjoyed complaining about it since she got back.” He described her vicissitudes with food and fellow passengers, and then, as I’d hoped, asked about my mother. She had helped him campaign for the school board.

  “She’s enjoying her course on the pre-Raphaelites,” I said. “And I think she might have a new friend.”

  His second serve went into the net. “Love fifteen. Well, good luck to her. I always thought Peggy could be another Mrs. Robinson. She’s so foxy.”

  Whatever I had been looking for, this was not it. Thankfully Steve did not press me but began to talk about the lunatic parent who wanted him to teach creationism. When he fell silent, I changed the subject. What was his opinion of the middle school Marcus was due to attend?

  “Pretty good,” he said. “Some dedicated teachers, decent labs. They could do with more money and equipment, but who couldn’t? The head teacher is a dynamo. She knows what’s going on in every corner of that p
lace.”

  I filed away his comments, ammunition for the next round.

  At 2–2 we called it a draw. I walked home through the twilight. At the corner of our street I stopped to stroke the neighbor’s elderly chow. As I patted the dog’s thick coat, I caught sight of the yellow house with its blackened walls. Since the night of the fire I must have seen it scores of times, but that evening I was struck by the realization that someone had come home, just as I was doing, planning to make supper, or repair a lawn mower, or read a book, and found the life in which those things were possible utterly gone.

  My own house looked reassuringly, misleadingly, the same. In the living room Marcus and Trina were sitting on the floor, playing Monopoly with Drew, the babysitter. “Viv said she’d be home by five,” he said, shooting me an accusing glance from beneath his long eyelashes. “Neither of you answered your phones.”

  Drew was an unusually good-tempered teenager, and I was at first more worried about placating him than about Viv’s whereabouts. When I apologized—I hadn’t heard my phone on the court—he relented; he’d only been going to study for a physics test.

  “He took all our money,” said Trina. “I’ve been in jail for three rounds.”

  “And I’m going to give him even more.” I paid him, adding an extra twenty.

  After Drew let himself out, I turned on the oven and called first Viv and then Claudia. As I stood in the study, listening to the phone ring, I stared at a photograph I had taken that summer of Viv and the children on the beach at Wellfleet, all three smiling.

  “Donald,” said Claudia. “I’ve been meaning to call you about Viv’s birthday party. You know how down she’s been.”