by Shem, Samuel
“Happy birthday, Doc,” she said, wiping away tears. “Sorry we’re late. We just drove in from North Dakota.”
“Unbelievable! But why?”
She ignored the question. “We saw the photo in The Crier. That was great!” She was beaming. “Simply great!”
“What the hell happened to you?”
Her eyes told him it was too much to tell right then, in the whirlwind of Cray and the re-meeting. “Give me a little time.”
“Orvy, listen! I learned how to milk a cow and milk a goat and drive a combine, wanna hear?”
“Totally!” Cray started to tell him, but then Amy was there and started crying and that set everybody off again.
Soon the hour caught up with the boy. Orville carried him up to Selma and Sol’s big bed. Then he and Miranda unloaded essential items from the car. The Ford Country Squire looked battered and worn but triumphant for making it back from North Dakota. He carried their suitcases and the birdcage with the zebra finches. The finches sang and Starlight shrieked. For anyone to sleep, the birds had to be separated and so they were. Miranda carried in a big typing paper box containing her thesis.
All, exhausted and high, went to bed—Hayley in the guest room, Amy in Penny’s old room, Miranda and Cray in Selma and Sol’s, and he in his turret.
At two in the morning Orville was still awake, staring out his window onto the square. He was too wired to sleep, sensing for the first time since he’d been back that the house was full. It was a home to real live sleeping people with lives all the subtle colors of rainbows and all the power of diesel combines harvesting those seas of wheat, machines that were the whales of the plains. As if a family, yes. He could almost hear the breathing of each of them—Amy, Hayley, Miranda, Cray, the finches, Starlight who still believed it could fly but could still only fly down and always slept facing the water dish. He sensed so much life in the house, the place suddenly so full of hope, that he was sure that in this love nest there was no way that his dead mother would dare appear.
A knock on his bedroom door. Miranda stood there in one of Sol’s bathrobes, one with the logo of a Spanish conqueror’s helmet and the name of their golf course in Florida, El Conquistador.
“Hi,” she said. “Can we talk?”
“Sure. I have a special place. Can you climb the ladder to the roof?”
“With help.”
“Let’s go.”
He helped her up to his boyhood sanctuary, the flat tin roof. He brought up a folding chair for her to sit on and sat beside her on the warm tin. This, he told her, was the only place in the house where he’d found any peace or privacy or fullness, the only place for him in the Family Rose. He pointed out his old pals the copper beech, the larch, the giant maple, and the summer constellations of the tilting stars, the shy sliver of moon. They fell silent, comforted.
“I left for a lot of reasons,” she said, in answer to his unasked question. “I probably know only about sixty percent of them, even now. I was hurt—but that wasn’t the main thing.” She hesitated. “I just couldn’t bear to watch what we had together fall any lower, not with the savageness we both showed the last time, on the bench under the catalpa, by the stream.”
“Horrible, yes. I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” Tears rushed to her eyes, and she blurted out, “It’s incredible to see you again. I . . .” She paused, swallowed hard. “I haven’t stopped loving you, you know.”
He was startled, affirmed. “And I you. You and Cray were with me every day.”
“But I shouldn’t say that. You’re leaving, right?”
“Right. I’ve got my ticket out.”
“Where to?”
“Rome.”
The word sank in. “Ah.” She tried to breathe. “Maybe we shouldn’t even talk,” she said. “Just forget it?”
“Can’t. Just seeing you and Cray again, it’s hard to imagine that there’s not still a sliver of hope for us, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She wanted desperately to say more but could not.
Crickets did their thing with their hind legs for a while.
“Tell me everything,” he said at last, “from the time you left.”
She told him about packing up everything and then slipping away at night, dropping off the Scomparza box on his porch on the way out of town. Mrs. Tarr was the only one who knew where she was going, but not why, and was sworn to secrecy—she would be her lifeline to Columbia. They drove west across the grand, seemingly optimistic sections of America and in a few days reached her Auntie Heyward’s farm, an island in the archipelago of farms in the ocean of wheat, hundreds of miles west of Grand Forks. She told Cray nothing except that she and Orville had had a falling-out—as he had noticed—and had broken up and that they were taking a geographical cure for the summer. Cray would be the man of the house and the farm and he would love it.
“Which he did,” she said, “though he missed you terribly. Nightmares, tears, moping around—the works.” She choked up, but then gathered herself. “It was hard to tell him not to write you, call you, but he’s a good kid. He picked up right away that I needed him to be big and to help take care of things, of himself, and me. So he helped—he grew up so much this summer! Grew closer to me again, too, like when he was a child. He told me on the drive back that he wasn’t a child now, he was a kid.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“And then there was my thesis.” She glanced at him with a furtive smile.
“You finished it?” She nodded. “Yes! Good for you! ‘The Columbian Spirit!’” He reached up to hug her, but it was too intimate—like when they first met—and he held back.
“Funny,” she said, “but looking back on the history of my working on it here in town, I realized that I was becoming the latest victim of the odd spell Columbia casts. I’d always been facile at writing history, in my pre-Columbian days, but here I just couldn’t do it. I was in a weird kind of limbo, like my brain had turned to lard and my fingers were heavy with weird breakage. Only when I got away did I get any perspective on things, catch fire again, and I just raced through it all, and it’s . . . well, it’s all right.”
“I’m sure it’s brilliant. I can’t wait to read it.”
“I have to revise and do the bibliography. I’m really going to dive into it the next two weeks, night and day. I have to finish it before Cray goes back to school.”
“Will you make me a copy? Signed by the author?”
“Sure.”
Their eyes met and held for just an instant—as if there was too much gravity in the glance to keep afloat—and then fell. They stared straight ahead into the night at nothing visible, except maybe a glint of moonlight off the gold cross on the top of St. Mary’s steeple. With what seemed enormous effort he put his hand on hers, his palm over the back of her hand. She raised her hand and turned it over so that they were at least palm to palm. Their fingers intertwined, feeling known, alive with their shared history.
Orville felt himself losing substance, starting to fade, as if part of him was already gone.
Miranda felt displaced, knowing now that it was truly over and that all she had left to do was ride out the couple of weeks before he went back to his life with his Italian lover, no kids and no family, and that would be that.
It was the best they could do, and the worst—sitting together staring into the night, being somewhere else. He in his somewhere else, she in hers.
· 29 ·
Dear Orvy,
By now it is two months since you left, and I hear from Amy that you are happily settled in Rome with Celestina. What I am about to tell you will unsettle you emotionally, but I sincerely hope it will not change your relationship with her. It is over between us and, I feel, over in a good way. With one caveat, from our history.
I am now five months pregnant. Yes, it is yours, ours. Given what you told me
, it is a miracle, but I guess miracles happen. Yes, I thought to tell you, many times before I left for North Dakota. I found out soon after our disastrous day of the benefit for the Worth. The first time I sensed I might be pregnant was just before I came outside with the punch bowl and cups. You were waiting for me at the car, we were late, and you were angry. The reason that I was late coming out of the house was that I was in the bathroom being sick. I put that together with the way I had been feeling (“the flu that was going around”) and the fact that my period was late, and despite the impossibility of it being real, I decided to go for a pregnancy test the next day. I almost told you then, but it was such a jagged, terrible time. I held back, thinking that if it were positive, I could tell you. The next time I saw you was when we had that talk out at the bench by the stream under the catalpa tree, when we saw, I think, the worst of each other and had a terrible fight—the worst fight I have ever had with anyone. We could not accept what we saw in each other. It was over.
There was no way that I could tell you, then, and there was no way I could stay. I would never want you to stay in Columbia under that kind of duress. You chose not to be with me, and I you, and that was that. When I came back, we had reached some level of . . . well, yes, a level of love that was based on your leaving, and it was hard, but it was—in your mind anyway—a clean break. When we were up on the roof at your house that first night back I thought to tell you, wanted to tell you, but I didn’t want you to stay simply because you felt you had to. Clearly you needed to—to use your mother’s word—“fly.” And that, of course, is one of the things I loved about you.
This will upset you greatly, and I am sorry. I am profoundly sorry.
But I want you to know, from the depth of my soul and my love for you, which right now feels like a sun-warmed metal charm deep inside me, that whatever part you want to play in the child’s life is fine with me.
I have confidence that we will move through our unspooling history around our child in a way that will bring out, in both of us, our very best—which, I believe, is remarkable.
Love,
Miranda
She sealed the letter, wrote her address where it should be, wrote his name where it should be “c/o Celestina Polo,” and, skipping the street address—she would have to make sure to get it before he left—wrote “Rome, Italy.”
The next day she went to the post office and bought the correct postage and the Air Mail stickers and affixed them carefully.
She put the letter in the top drawer of her dresser, which Cray would never open. She would mail it two months after Orville had left.
· 30 ·
A week before Orville was due to leave, he sat in the kitchen staring at one of the framed photos he’d dug out of the bottom of the Scomparza box. It was his bar mitzvah picture—before he performed. Sol, Selma, Penny, and he were dressed up. Sol in his suit looked schlumpy, Penny in her neck-revealing beige suit looked aristocratic, and Selma, her face whole, wore the cobalt number she’d flown around in, which made her look pretty gorgeous. Orville was in an ill-fitting brown suit. He’d been dragged down to the garment district in New York to get it wholesale from a second cousin’s brother-in-law in the business. He recalled watching a cutter sail a power knife smoothly through foot-high piles of material as if it were so much butter. He was measured up precisely. The suit would be custom-made to fit. When it arrived in Columbia, it didn’t.
Selma was the tallest, Penny next, then Sol, then Orville. Sol looked like he was in significant hemorrhoidal pain, Penny looked noble, and Selma triumphant and maybe a bit flirtatious—definitely flying high. Orville looked like he was about to fall off a cliff.
In many ways it would have been a lovely photo. The problem was that the photographer was a Columbian. The camera was tilted, off-kilter, and a touch out of focus. All members of the Family Rose, like four stick figures, were leaning to the left, as if on an ocean liner caught precisely at the instant of impact, the crashing into the iceberg.
Orville noticed a scrap of paper tucked into the back of the frame. In Selma’s handwriting: “Interviewed new cleaning girl. Darling, but Ethiopian.”
Doorbell. Telegram.
BEEL NOT FEEL WELL
RETURN HOME MONDAY AUGUSTO 20
ON SLEEPY HOLLOW 16:39 IMEEG LOVE BABS
“IMEEG”? What the hell was that?
Two days later Orville stood at the train station watching the Sleepy Hollow tilt scarily as it rounded the sharp bend into Columbia. His heart was beating fast—he realized how much he’d missed Bill and was looking forward to seeing him again.
During the week or so since Miranda and he talked, they had not seen each other much, and when they did it was always in the presence of Cray and Amy. Miranda was totally preoccupied with her thesis, and the kids had renewed the best of their big sister/little brother thing. They joined forces to try to convince Orville to stay. When that failed, they made him promise that they could all visit him in Italy. Miranda and Orville were treating each other gingerly, like a man and a woman who have survived the crash of a small plane and don’t want to risk air travel again anytime soon.
With Orville leaving, Penny had attacked his mother’s house with a neat-freak vengeance and a goal of obliterating every micron of dirt and every trace of his year living there. An army of cleaners scoured and scrubbed. Most of the furniture was covered with sheets. Every time Orville came back to the house to sleep, he had the impression of it being, if not a house of the dead, a house of the dead furniture. These sheet-covered chairs, tables, and sofas reminded him of draped corpses in morgues wherever he’d gone as an itinerant doctor, some with pennies over their eyes to bribe the guards of heaven. Corpses are a kind of furniture, he mused as he waited for the train, are they not? After arriving home he would snatch the covers up and off, relieved that beneath were not bodies but couches and ottomans, bureaus and lamps. The next day they would be shrouded again.
As the train pulled in, Orville saw that something was wrong. The conductor was leaning out from between two cars, waving frantically, shouting something. Finally, he was close enough to hear.
“A doctor! Get a doctor!”
“Call an ambulance!” Orville shouted reflexively back at the stationmaster, as he started running toward the train. The train slowed, shuddered. Orville ran at an angle to it, trying to gauge where it would stop, overshooting, then jumping up on the lowered metal steps.
“I’m a doctor.”
“C’mon.” The conductor disappeared into the car, Orville following.
The dear old man lay slumped over onto his wife, drool coming out of a flattened corner of his mouth.
“Orvy! Thank God!” Babette cried out.
“What happened?” he asked, automatically doing all the emergency things—airway, cardiac, breathing.
“He wasn’t feeling well, you know, high up in Peru, but was not bad all the way here until . . . suddenly he just keeled over.”
“How long ago?”
“Just after we rounded the bend around Mount Pecora and started across the swamp and he saw Columbia again. He was so . . . so happy!” She wept.
By the time he heard the crescendo cry of the approaching ambulance, Orville knew the diagnosis. After his triumphant trip around the world, upon entering the outskirts of Columbia, Bill had suffered a massive stroke.
Bill’s fall from health had been severe enough to kill him. And yet he lived—sort of. He was comatose, gravely ill. Orville had considered sending him up to Albany Medical, but Babette told him that she and Bill had discussed things and he’d said that if anything happened he wanted to be taken care of in Kinderhook Memorial and taken care of by Orville. That first night Orville stayed up all night with him doing what he could, making sure that his cardiac medications were on board and putting in a pacemaker and starting him on steroids to reduce brain swelling. He called the best neurologists
and neurosurgeons in Albany. Many of them knew Bill, and one made the trip down to examine him. All agreed that he had suffered an occlusion of a major vessel; the prognosis was grim. All of Bill’s risk factors—obesity, smoking, sedentary lifestyle, heart disease, family history of cardiovascular accident, bad lipid and cholesterol profile—made the prognosis even worse.
Orville knew that the critical period for strokes was the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours. During that time he rarely was far from Bill’s bedside. Babette stayed at the hospital much of the time, too. Bill had been taken up to the top floor, the Schooner Suite in the Wing of Selma Rose. Orville hadn’t been up in the suite for a while, and his first look out the west-facing windows was startling. The hospital was high up on Cemetery Hill, the view unparalleled: straight down Washington to Parade Hill, up over the pathetic pink-and-blue ski chalets of Plotkin Village, skimming out onto the broad river and skipping up off it, climbing the Catskills speckled with the first fall colors and, on the peaks, a hint of the first snows. It was achingly beautiful, all the more so for Bill, in a coma, being unable to see it.
A bed was brought in for Babette. Everybody knew everybody, of course, and everybody was upset. Bill had been their doctor, and much more. He had become the true icon of Columbia. Forget the phony whale icon invented by Milt and Schooner and SPOUT. This man was the heart of the town. After all, Orville thought, wasn’t Starbuck linked to the forgotten utopia of its Nantucket founders by his name, and linked tightly to the century by his eighty-odd years? Bill’s stroke was the town’s stroke. Orville saw, in his patients, a shadow cast.
He had seen a lot of strokes, coming to understand that strokes have their own way with brains and souls, and the best that could be done was to prevent complications and to rely on the tincture of time. Bill had not been lucid since the train. There was still light in him, but it was flickering. After a week he was stable but still in a coma. With the pacemaker beating his heart, with excellent nursing care and the attention of Babette and friends and patients, he seemed at peace.
