Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “But where will you go?” Linda asked.

  “I’ve taken a condo in Dubuque. I’m going to travel. And I’m thinking of writing a book.”

  Linda turned to see how Robin was taking all this news, but she wasn’t there, had probably gone off to find a bathroom.

  “And Mr.… your father? Doesn’t he mind, about this?”

  “That’s right,” Verna said. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Upstairs,” Verna said, walking.

  Robin was coming from the other side of the stairway. Linda beckoned and she followed them.

  The old man was in the bedroom Linda had imagined as Robin’s. It was small and cozy; the ceiling slanted, and blue floral paper was fading on the walls. It stank in there, the unmistakable odor of prolonged illness. The old man had had a stroke; the diagnosis was easy. His features were in crazy disorder, like a child’s drawing of a face, like her mother’s had been. One pale eye was fixed on them, and wept.

  Linda heard a small, breathless sound behind her, from Robin. “It’s okay,” she said, and then walked to the bedside, her hands clasped at her waist. “I’m Linda,” she said. “Wright’s wife? I’m the one who sent you—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Verna said. “He can’t hear a word you’re saying. He’s in a coma.”

  “But his eye …”

  “It got stuck like that when it happened. Three months ago.”

  A toilet flushed nearby and a fat woman in a white uniform and brown Space Shoes came into the room and took her place in a bedside chair. “Well, visitors!” she said. “How do,” and picked up a magazine and began to read.

  “You kept him at home,” Linda said, touched by that.

  “No private insurance,” Verna said briskly. “And his Medicare days ran out. If he’s still alive when the bulldozers come, Lewis’s company will pay for a nursing home.”

  While Verna was speaking, Linda thought she perceived a flicker of response in that staring eye. What if he could hear everything, and was only unable to respond? If the other women were not in the room, she would have spoken to him, introduced Robin, explained about Wright. Just in case. Verna led the way out. There was to be no deathbed reconciliation, no chance for last-minute repentance.

  This was her father’s house. Robin wandered into the kitchen after Linda went off to the living room with that woman. Maybe he had sat at this table to do his homework when he was a boy. It looked new, though, so she supposed it must have been at a different table. But he had looked out through those windows, dreaming about becoming a husband and a father someday.

  The remains of dinner were on the table and the countertop: the bones of a well-picked chicken, a salad limp and drenched with dressing. She opened a drawer in a cabinet next to the stove and saw the usual chaos of kitchen utensils. The silverware looked old, with its heavily carved and curved handles. She picked up a fork and put it into her mouth, tasting the metal. There were footsteps overhead, creaking, and Robin panicked, shoving the fork into the pocket of her jeans. This place gave her the creeps. She would stay here about three minutes after Linda left. She had to get the money first, though.

  There was a telephone on the wall, and under it, the local directory. Reismann, Wright Sr., was listed, making her heart stutter. She shut the book and went into the hallway just as Linda and that woman came from the living room. Linda curled her finger at Robin, indicating she wanted her to follow them upstairs.

  An old man was lying in a child’s bed, staring at them with one terrible eye. It smelled like a laundry hamper in there and Robin sucked in her breath and held it. Linda and the woman spoke and then they went downstairs again. The other man was in the hallway. At a signal from the woman, he took Robin back into the kitchen. Had they discovered the fork was missing? She felt its cold presence against her thigh. He poured more whiskey into his glass and said, “Want an apple? Want some ginger ale?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Robin said.

  “Go to school, do you?” he asked, leaning against the refrigerator, his eyes almost closed, and Robin knew this asshole’s purpose was merely to distract her while the women spoke. Well, she didn’t care what they said to each other. She felt supremely calm, superior, armed.

  “She doesn’t look like Wright,” Verna said.

  “Yes, the coloring. And around the eyes. There’s a definite family resemblance.” Who had said that before?

  “She’s half and half, you know.”

  Linda was confused. She thought of the cream mixture they used in their morning coffee and cereal. “Pardon?”

  Her confusion amused Verna, who looked even more like James Cagney when she smiled and her eyes narrowed. “The chosen people,” she said.

  “What?” Linda asked, but it was only reflex; she understood. “Was that what the falling-out was about? Between you and Wright and your father? Does it go back that far?”

  “That one was in the oven when he married her. My father used to say he wouldn’t crossbreed cows, even to get a better milker.”

  Linda felt ill again, the way she had in the car. And beyond the malaise, anger was building. She wanted to tell Verna how Miriam had left him, how he had raised Robin so valiantly by himself, but she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. And of course she couldn’t leave Robin here, even if Verna was willing to take her. She could not leave Wright’s ashes in this hostile atmosphere, either. Linda had imagined scattering them over cornfields within a playful wind’s distance from his first home. But the home itself would be gone soon, and although he’d never told her this, she knew now that his childhood had been miserable.

  “What’s that?” Verna asked, pointing to the painting Linda held close to her breast.

  “It’s a painting,” Linda said, and she flashed it like a crucifix in the face of a vampire. “By a friend of mine!”

  “I could use a painting for my new place,” Verna said, ready to strike a compromise.

  “Not for sale!” Linda shouted. “Not for sale!” She lurched to the hallway, to the kitchen door. “Come on!” she bellowed at Robin. “Let’s go! Do you think we have all night?”

  They ran to the Maverick holding hands.

  15 Most of the large houses in the area had been converted for other purposes. Driving along slowly, looking for the address, Linda saw lawyers’ offices and insurance offices, a group dental practice and a travel agency.

  Then there it was—511 S. Allison Street. This one could have been a VFW hall, had there been a flag flying out front, or an Elks lodge, if there’d been a BPOE sign on the porch. Instead, there was a small, discreet shingle: May F. Livingston Women’s Center, and a parade of demonstrators pounding their sidewalk beat.

  Linda had to park a block away. As she walked toward the clinic, she saw there were actually two parades, both composed almost entirely of women. The group closer to the house was marching clockwise, and they chanted and carried signs that proclaimed them Mothers Against Death. Other signs said: Abortion is Homicide. Life is a Gift. Save Our Future Presidents. A couple of marchers pushed strollers festooned with banners, and with fat, gorgeous babies inside. One woman held a huge photograph of a human finger. When Linda came closer she saw the photo also showed a shrimp-curled fetus, its oddly shaped head no bigger than the finger’s nail. And the chanting became clearer. “Stamp out death! Stamp out murder!” God.

  Across the street, moving counterclockwise, the opposition held their signs: Our Bodies—Our Choice. The Right to Decide. Stamp Out Stampers. They had a blown-up photograph, too, this one of a horribly battered infant. Born to Die Like This! the caption read. They were singing “We Shall Overcome” in sweet, high-pitched voices, slightly off-key.

  A few hecklers loitered on the sidelines, including some small boys who threw pebbles alternately at each group. A police car was parked against the curb in front of the house, its call box squawking, and two policemen lounged against the hood, their arms folded. One of them was smiling.


  Linda stared at them and had her first conscious feminist thought. This was a civil war, women against women, and the policemen were out of it, non-partisan, merely keepers of the law. But they were men and therefore, in their own language, the alleged perpetrators.

  She walked quickly through an opening in the line of demonstrators in front of the house. “Don’t be a killer,” someone hissed, intimately, almost in her ear. One of the thrown pebbles glanced off her shoulder. “Hey,” the smiling policeman called to the small boys.

  The vestibule was cool and dim. The Venetian blinds were drawn tightly against the action outside, and the air conditioner was going at top speed, to block the noise as much as the heat, probably.

  Almost all the chairs in the waiting room were taken. A receptionist was typing at an old oak desk. “I’ll be with you in a sec,” she said, without looking up.

  Linda waited, clearing her throat in preparation for speech.

  When the woman did look up, her face was encouraging, friendly. “Hello. May I help you?” she said.

  “Linda Reismann, I called last night?”

  “Oh, yes, Ms. Reismann. You have a ten o’clock with Dr. Lamb. We’re a little behind schedule this morning, so will you have a seat, please, and we’ll call you as soon as we’re ready. You can fill out this card for me while you’re waiting.”

  The other people were not all women. An elderly couple flanked an adolescent girl, as if they were her armed guards. A young man held the hand of a young woman, and two women who seemed to be in their thirties had babies on their laps. Linda noticed a playpen and a little jump seat in the opposite corner.

  The receptionist’s phone kept ringing. She made appointments with callers for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It was a pleasant room, shabbily genteel, with a few landscapes, like Wright’s, hanging on the walls. In what kind of rooms had all the loving taken place?

  Linda tried to picture their apartment bedroom in Newark, but it was already dissipating in memory, replaced by that recent series of motel rooms, so vivid in all their plastic glory. You remember best what happened last. And what happened first. When she was a very little girl she’d found a box of wooden matches and spilled them onto the kitchen table. They were lovely, uniform, the heads a white-tipped brilliant blue. She pushed them around, experimenting, and began to make the rudimentary outline of a house, when her father came into the room. “See?” she said, pride overwhelming timidity. He picked her up swiftly, and she was astonished by the anticipation of an embrace, until he carried her to the stove. There he opened a gas jet and held each finger over it briefly to teach her the dangers of playing with fire.

  The two women chatted, and the lovers whispered urgently. The elderly couple did not speak to one another or to the girl braced between them, who couldn’t have been much older than Robin.

  I’ll remember this, too, Linda promised, committing to memory a ceiling stain, the pattern of bluebirds on the girl’s blouse, the ping of the typewriter’s carriage bell, and the refrain of the ringing telephone.

  She took a pen from her purse and began to fill out the card. There was the usual stuff: name, address, age, occupation, allergies. And the more pertinent items: number of pregnancies, number of living children, date of last menstrual period. She had still not been able to recall that, and put in a carefully drawn question mark.

  Other particulars stumped her as well. Who to contact in an emergency, for instance. Certainly not Robin, a mile away in the Marriott Motor Inn, which Linda had given as her address. And to Robin she’d said, not untruthfully, that morning, “We need some time away from each other, I think. Everybody needs privacy once in a while. Why don’t you stay here and I’ll go out for a couple of hours and go shopping, and do some other things.”

  She had especially chosen the Marriott for this pause in their journey because it had a swimming pool and a coffee shop; and they were given a large room, where Robin would not feel trapped while Linda was away. First there had been the call to the local medical society to get the name of a registered abortion clinic that would treat non-residents. It would be ironic and awful if she had to go all the way back to New Jersey to undo what had been done there in the first place.

  What kind of emergency did they have in mind? Just the word on the page implied danger. She tried to assess if she could ask without humiliation if there actually was any danger, say even a tiny incidence of death. They’d have to cart the bodies out through a secret passageway, or the demonstrators would be on them like vultures.

  She finally wrote Iola’s name and distant address in the provided space.

  The receptionist called the young girl, and her parents hesitated, then leaned away a little, releasing her. After a few minutes, one of the women went in, depositing her baby in the jump seat first. The baby began to cry and the other woman walked over and rattled keys in its face until it stopped.

  Finally it was Linda’s turn. The room she was taken to was an ordinary examining room. It had a table with stirrups, a little curtained enclosure for undressing, and a sink with the usual medical paraphernalia alongside it. A nurse came in and gave her a specimen bottle. “You can go in there,” she said, indicating an adjoining bathroom. “And leave it on the counter. I’ll get it later.”

  Linda wondered if they ever mixed up the specimens, giving the wrong people the good/bad news. She undressed from the waist down, as instructed, and put on the yellow paper gown.

  Dr. Lamb, a sturdy middle-aged woman, came into the room. She shook hands with Linda and then she scrubbed her own.

  Then Linda was in the stirrups, the gown billowed at her waist, and Dr. Lamb was saying, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed. When was your last period?”

  “I’m not sure,” Linda said. “They’ve always been irregular … And then my husband died, and I really lost track … I’ve been traveling with his daughter …” She thought she sounded like a nitwit or a liar.

  “I’d say twelve weeks, maybe thirteen.”

  “It’s not too late, is it?”

  “To abort? No, not at all. It can be legally done until the twenty-fourth week. Do you use contraception?”

  “An IUD,” Linda said.

  The doctor’s hand disappeared again and she probed and poked. “When was it checked last?” she asked.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Well, you may have passed it.”

  “Does that happen?”

  “Sometimes. Do you wear contact lenses?”

  What had she found in there? “No, I don’t. Why?”

  “Try and relax, please. It’s just that this reminds me a little of searching for one that’s lost. You know, a blind exploration.” She washed her hands again and told Linda to sit up. “The IUD isn’t there any more. No pain? Bleeding? So we can suppose it hasn’t wandered off and lodged itself where it doesn’t belong. And you certainly are pregnant. But we’ll test your urine anyway. Do you want to terminate this pregnancy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, get dressed and Mrs. LeRoy will set up an appointment.”

  “Will I be asleep?” Linda asked. Will I die?

  “You’ll get an injection of a light anesthetic, so you’ll be asleep during the actual procedure, which will be a vacuum aspiration. But you’ll come back very quickly and you can rest here until you’re ready to go home.”

  “Why did it fall out?” Linda asked.

  The doctor shrugged. “It happens. The body rejects it, just as the IUD rejects the sperm. The bouncer is bounced.” She opened the door and then turned back. “Did you know that in ancient Egypt, camel drivers setting out on long journeys would insert pebbles in the vaginas of their animals to create an unwelcome atmosphere for the sperm. That’s probably the earliest predecessor of the IUD.”

  “Why didn’t they just keep the camels apart?”

  “Ahhhh,” said the doctor. “Why?” And she left the room.

  They had a cancellation for the following morning at nine-thirty. “A li
ght supper,” the receptionist said. “Nothing by mouth after 10 p.m. The fee is two hundred dollars, payable before surgery.”

  The marchers crowded her when she stepped outside. “Thou shalt not kill,” they said, and then opened ranks to let her pass.

  16 Robin floated on her back in the turquoise-tinted Marriott pool. Just ahead at all times was the subtle topography of her own body: new breasts peaking gently in the blue bra of her bathing suit, and past them the small white field of her belly with its silly puffed button. “Ring-a-ling, anybody home?” her father used to ask when she was little, pushing it in with one finger. You were once attached to your mother there. If the cord was never cut and tied, you could not be lost from one another. But then everybody would be attached, wouldn’t they? And what about all the dead people? Only Adam in the whole universe would ever have been truly alone, while Eve strolled in Paradise strung to her children, and to their children, and to their children … Robin tried to keep her gaze skyward, but the glare was brilliant, and there was so much activity near her in the water. Small children splashed and screamed hoarsely for the attention of parents who lay on webbed lounges and frowned into the sunlight, while water from their dripping suits darkened the shadows beneath them. “Look at me! Look at me!” the children insisted. “Watch me dive, Dad! Are you watching? Here I go!”

  “Very good, Seth,” the parents said. “I’m watching, Roger. Betsy. Dougie. Felice. Don’t scream like that. Don’t get chilled. Are your lips blue?” And they never looked at all, never moved their forearms or towels or straw hats from across their eyes.

  Robin wished they’d all be quiet, that they’d disappear, so she could think without distraction. She had never behaved like these kids herself, even when she was their age. She certainly never shouted, “Look at me!” to her father, mainly because he usually was looking at her. When he took her to the town pool in Newark, he expected her to demonstrate everything she had learned that morning in the Minnows Club. “Show me how you kick,” he would say. “Show Daddy the breathing.” His interest was anxious and it encumbered her. She wished he’d stay with the other adults and have adult conversation that couldn’t be interrupted unless you pretended to be drowning.