Silver

by Hilma Wolitzer

  We paused in the kitchen, so he could rest. Our old black Labrador, Shadow, half rose from his mat near the door. He wagged his tail with mild, sleepy curiosity. Was it morning already, time for his walk? When it came down to it, he would choose Howard, with whom he set out every day to rediscover the neighborhood.

  There were our places at the table, the sturdy appliances letting us pass. In the garage, Howard’s garden tools hung on the pegboard, next to his red satin softball jacket. It was a setup to get me, stage props of touching personal effects. The smells of grease and gasoline, the decaying spears of grass in the teeth of the rake. I helped Howard into the car and went around to the driver’s side. When the automatic garage door lifted, like a theater curtain, I saw a portion of blue-black summer sky through the rearview mirror, and a handful of stars.

  On the way to the hospital I tried not to talk, but I couldn’t help it. I said anxious, stupid things. “Look,” I said, “the Castellis are having a party. We weren’t invited.” I did seventy-five and eighty on the Expressway. Howard usually hated being my passenger, but this time he didn’t complain or start pumping his imaginary brake. He didn’t stir or say a single word, not even to let me know he was still alive. So I had to keep glancing at him, veering out of lane, with the horns blaring all around us.

  At Nassau General, I pulled into a just-vacated space near the emergency-room entrance. “Well, that was lucky, anyway,” I told Howard as we got out. The reception area was brightly lit and busy, and most of the rows of orange plastic chairs were filled. There were parents with crying or sleeping children in their laps; a young couple in evening dress, holding hands; a hugely pregnant woman, who was reading; and an elderly man in a bathrobe, watching a baseball game on the ceiling-mounted television set. I led Howard to a seat and went to the inner doorway, where a security guard stood watch under a sign that said: Have Your Insurance Cards Ready. I hadn’t even brought my purse with me. I peeked inside the doorway and saw two clerks typing. The triage nurse was sitting at her desk, taking a man’s blood pressure. He had a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his other arm, and he was chatting gaily with her about the Mets. “Excuse me,” I said. “My husband is having chest pains.”

  I expected her to leap up in concern, and maybe the bleeding patient, too. They continued sitting there. She wrote something on a chart; the man winked at me. If we had come by ambulance as I’d wanted to, Howard would be inside by now, attended by doctors. I’d given in and driven him, honoring the old contract of compromise we’d made after he came back to me. I had to back off—to give him air, he’d say, as if we were talking about an accident victim—and he would be faithful. When the nurse finally looked up to acknowledge me, I was practically dancing with anxiety. “My husband,” I repeated carefully, the way you do with a foreigner, or a lip reader. “He has chest pains.”

  She signaled to the guard and he ducked into the room behind her and came back with a wheelchair. “Which one?” he asked, and I indicated Howard, who was paler than ever and watching the ball game, it seemed. He looked absurd and pathetic in his improvised outfit—a dying Hawaiian jogger. The guard wheeled him away, holding me back with a raised hand when I tried to follow. “We’ll call you,” he said, with the insincerity of a casting director.

  I remembered going to the hospital in Queens to give birth to Jason. They wouldn’t let Howard go up with me at first, even though I told them he was a Participating Father. We had practiced our breathing for months, but no one had taught us how to say goodbye. “We’re in this together!” Howard called after me, and we waved and blew volleys of kisses until the elevator door closed between us. Hours later, when he showed up in the labor room, haggard with waiting and worry, I snarled that he was a filthy, stinking liar, that I was in this alone. Now I waved at Howard and he didn’t wave back.

  One of the clerks beckoned me inside the office. I sat at the side of her desk and filled out the medical and insurance forms. Why did they need all that information? Why did they want to know Howard’s religion and his mother’s maiden name? I wondered if I should call her. There was no way to break anything to her gently; she had an uncanny instinct for disaster. I’d say, “Hi, Henrietta,” and she’d start screaming, burning up the wires all the way from here to Miami Beach. I had nothing to tell her yet, anyway. Any minute, Howard could come walking out, his lips white with Gelusil, swearing he was going to watch his diet from now on.

  It was so quiet back there. A city hospital would have been jumping on Saturday night, with victims of gunshots and stab wounds staggering in, and people OD’ing on everything from crack to vanilla extract. Oh, why did we ever move? We wouldn’t have grown bored there, or so isolated from one another. We’d have been forced into intimacy because there wouldn’t have been enough room to have such secret, separate lives. In Port Washington, Howard had the whole back-yard jungle to escape into, and I had my choice of two and a half bathrooms in which to sulk. I knew this was not rational thinking. After all, Howard had first betrayed me when we’d lived in that tiny apartment, and you could die of loneliness lying right next to someone in the same bed. Our move out here twenty years ago had symbolized our growing maturity—irresponsible kids don’t take on mortgages and school-budget referendums. We told ourselves and the children that we had done it mostly for their sake, that we wanted them to live in nature, to know about trees and grass. One day, when Jason was about fourteen and still being chauffeured everywhere, he growled from the backseat of the car that it was the wrong kind of grass. Ann had adjusted quickly, showing signs of suburban matronhood before she was three.

  I handed over the completed forms and the clerk stamped and stapled them and told me to wait outside until I was called. I took a seat next to a sleeping man, after grabbing a handful of magazines from the rack on the wall. The baseball game was still in progress, and the couple in evening dress were still there, the camellias browning fast on her wrist. The young woman smiled at me and rolled her eyes, and I rolled mine and smiled back in exasperated sympathy. What a way to spend Saturday night!

  I thought of calling our children, not to scare them, of course, but to let them know what was happening, and for their company. But Jason and Flame were playing a dance on the Lower East Side, and Ann and Spence were at a fancy dinner party in Katonah. And they would be scared, especially Jason. When he was little and didn’t want to hear whatever we were telling him, he’d race around with his fingers stuck in his ears, chanting “Liar, liar! Pants on fire!”

  I opened one of the magazines on my lap. It was a copy of Sports Illustrated from June 1984. The lead article was about surf-casting off the coast of Ibiza. The magazines were all soiled and tattered, like the ones in the laundromat. This place was like the laundromat—the orange chairs and the trapped cigarette smoke and that oppressive sense of humanity. I shuffled through the pages, unable to read anything. They should have let me stay with Howard—we were in this together.

  One of the clerks came out then and called a name. A whole family rose like flapping birds and rushed after her. Why hadn’t she called me? I was here first. A woman went to the pay telephone near the magazine rack. She said, “Henry? I’m still here. He doesn’t look so good. You know, yellowish. We’re waiting for the doctor.”

  As soon as she hung up, I called La Rae’s number, collect. It rang and rang, but no one answered. I sat down again and began working my fingers together nervously. Howard hadn’t looked so good, either. Bluish. Jewish. Mother’s maiden name: Henrietta Gold. She was a bride once, and then—bang!—a widow. Well, not that fast, really, but maybe it seemed that way to her. What was going on in there, anyway? I tried to think of something else. That man with the bloodied towel around his arm, a chef, probably, or a butcher who’d missed with his cleaver. To remove bloodstains from fabric, soak in cold water and coarse salt for several hours …

  The sleeping man next to me came awake and said, “Well, hello there.” I moved two rows over and looked up at the ball game in time to
see an instant replay of a home run. The pitcher wound up with excruciating slowness. The ball moved from his hand in a languid course to the plate, where the batter swatted drowsily at it. It arced across the diamond to the rim of the left-field wall and the outfielder leaped, as if for joy, and watched as it passed his glove and disappeared into the stands.

  The clerk stood in the doorway and called another name. I couldn’t make it out for a moment, and then, when no one else responded, I realized it was mine. I followed her past the offices into the inner sanctum, an enormous room partitioned by curtains into cubicles. Someone was moaning loud and fast in one of them. Not all of the curtains were drawn, and I saw bare feet, sheeted bodies, and bleeping heart monitors. Everyone looked like Howard. The clerk motioned me to a middle cubicle and there he was, behind the curtain. Or somebody pretending to be him. His hair had thinned a little; he’d lost some weight. He had clear tubes up his nostrils for oxygen and something clear dripping in through his taped hand. A jagged line went up and down across the screen of his monitor, like the profit-and-loss chart of a company in trouble.

  “Howard,” I said. “It’s me, Paulie,” as if I, too, had changed while we’d been apart and he might not recognize me.

  He lifted his free hand; the wrist was banded with a plastic I.D. strip. “Paulie, I’m having a heart attack,” he whispered. “This is it.”

  The moaning patient began to scream, and a baby cried somewhere with ascending rage or panic. “No, no,” I said. “We don’t know that.” I looked around behind me for a nurse or a doctor, someone to refute what he’d said, but they were all busy elsewhere.

  “Myocardial infarction,” Howard said, and I knew he hadn’t made that up; it had the terrible ring of truth. Why hadn’t someone told me first? Then a doctor appeared. He looked very young, about seventeen or so, with recent acne scars and big, goofy-looking ears. “I’m Dr. Forman,” he said, and he shook my unwilling hand. “We seem to be having a little problem here.” He unhooked the chart from the foot of Howard’s bed and glanced at it. “From what we can tell, your husband has suffered a small myocardial infarction.” Howard’s eyes blazed with victory before they dimmed with despair.

  “Oh, small,” I said, insisting on the bright side of things—my worst fault, according to Howard, after my inability to be serene.

  “We’re admitting him, of course,” the boy-doctor continued, “to our cardiac care unit.”

  How could he know anything about it? I imagined him carrying a toy doctor’s kit, like the one Jason once had, with a little play stethoscope and a jar of pastel candy pills inside. But a real stethoscope hung from his neck, ruthless rubber and stainless steel, and he leaned over Howard to listen to his heaving chest with solemn, grownup interest.

  I watched the erratic line of Howard’s monitored heartbeat. It flattened out completely once, and an alarm buzzed for a few seconds before the line moved into peaks and falls again. “That thing’s not working,” I said to the doctor, and he smiled at me and patted my shoulder before he left.

  An aide came and told me I could take Howard’s personal belongings home. After I’d signed a release, she handed me a plastic bag. I opened it and took out Howard’s shirt and sweatpants. They were sopping wet; he might have gone swimming in them. At the bottom of the bag, I found a smaller bag with his watch in it. He always wore it, even to bed and in the shower, as if he might be cheated of precious time if he didn’t keep careful track of it. “Here, you’ll want your watch,” I told him, and I fastened it above the plastic wristband. My hands were trembling and I could hardly see through my brimming eyes. “Do you know what time it is?” I said. “We haven’t stayed up this late in years.” Shut up, I told myself. Stop twinkling, you dummy. It was cruel to be so cheerful at the bedside of someone who was sick and frightened. Was I still that angry with Howard, even now? I took his hand and brought it to my cheek. I wasn’t really cheerful. Even as I blathered I felt like weeping, and my own heart had squeezed into a fist that wouldn’t open. “Sweetheart,” I said. “I’ll stay here with you.” And I did, until two orderlies showed up to take him to the cardiac unit. Again, I tried to follow, wishing I were smaller and less conspicuous. They told me to go home and come back the next morning. “Go home, Paulie,” Howard echoed bravely. When I began to protest, the tears spilling onto his hand at last, he said, “The dog.”

  Of course. I’d have to walk him in a few more hours so he could water the world. I’d have to feed him, too. Life goes on, I thought. That’s the way it goes. As if my mother had taken control of my brain and was stuffing it with clichés. I kissed Howard and went back through the reception area and out into the parking lot, shocked by the heat and darkness after that brilliant, air-conditioned chill.

  I drove home with Howard’s limp clothing on the seat beside me. He might have been removed from them by a wicked spell, and could be restored by the incantation of the right words. I stayed in lane and didn’t exceed the speed limit, as a replay of the night’s events began to unreel behind my eyes. I saw us getting into bed again, Howard’s hand moving to my hip. Everything that had happened—my thoughts about leaving him, his pain, the whole hospital drama—seemed as inevitable as that home run I’d watched on television. I couldn’t have stopped any of it, any more than the outfielder could have stopped the home-run ball. And I would have left Howard—I really would have—but he couldn’t leave me. Not this way, not yet.

  At home, Shadow barked twice, a complaint more than a warning. You again, his glance seemed to say, but where’s Howard? I petted him for our mutual consolation, and endured his breath while he lapped my face. In the bedroom I turned on the air-conditioner, knowing I’d hallucinate Harry James again in that hum, and hear the phone ringing all night with bad news, and my own voice practicing to say goodbye.

  2

  PAULIE LEFT AND THEY took me upstairs. I couldn’t get over what was happening; it kept throbbing in my head like a news bulletin: This is it. This is it. I had the Flax family heart, that treasure my father and his father had smuggled past the Czar into America.

  I was in another big room, the same striped curtains. How could you tell what time of day it was in here? I didn’t see any windows, and they probably always kept the lights on, the way they do in prisons. At least I had my watch. 1:15. A nurse came through the curtains, a pretty blond kid like our Annie. She played around with the tubes and she gave me a shot—to relax me, she said, to help me sleep. I told her I couldn’t take a chance on ever sleeping again. “Think positive thoughts now,” she said, whatever that meant. Her perfume made me sad.

  Poor Paulie—I’d scared the hell out of her. She’d talked nonstop there for a while, and I figured she’d kill us on the way here, driving like Andretti on uppers, but I didn’t give a damn. It had to be better than dying from this—the pain getting bigger and bigger until the time bomb inside you goes off—kaboom!

  The quiet was spooky; I could hear all the respirators breathing around the room. Small coronary, that prodigy said, and Paulie was thrilled, as if we’d just won the lottery. Ah, she was only trying to cheer herself up, poor kid. I should have let her call for an ambulance, though. I’d never felt so rotten in my life, with pain all the way up in my jaw and down through my arm. I threw my guts up the minute they took me in, and I thought: Food poisoning, after all—that lousy ham! Then a whole team of them went to work on me, and when they wired me into their system, I knew it was the real thing.

  What I wanted more than anything now was a cigarette, just a couple of deep drags to relax me. That shot wasn’t working, and how long was I supposed to lie here like this? I’d go nuts before morning. Jesus, it was only 1:22. That had to be wrong. I shook the watch, making the heart monitor go berserk. The pain in my chest was still there, but dulled, as if I was only remembering pain. I felt wrung out, dead tired, but not sleepy.

  If I died, Paulie couldn’t stay in the house forever. The mortgage was almost paid off, but the place was too big for her to handle
alone—shoveling snow, hauling out the trash, putting up the storms. She’d get married again, maybe. I saw some faceless guy, some joker like Frank Peters, working my garden, smiling over at Paulie lying spread-eagled in the hammock, the way she does. It was the wrong thing to think; the pain came closer and louder. What? What did I mean by louder? That shot was making me punchy.

  I vowed to give up smoking, midnight snacks, all my bad habits. Stu had a fit whenever I lit up after a game. “And with your family history, Howie,” he’d say, shaking his head. Well, thanks a lot, Dad and Granddad. Jason, that dumb little stud, was going to lose it when he figured this whole thing out. For no reason, I thought of how he’d looked right after he was born, like something squeezed through a cookie press, but kind of beautiful, anyway. I loved him as soon as I saw him, and I felt sorry for him. I still loved him, of course, but I also hated him a little, for being so laid back, so easy to lead around by his cock, the way I used to be. That girl he lived with was kind of cute, under the fright wig and the makeup. She reminded me of Paulie, I don’t know why. Sara is small and skinny, and Paulie has such a full, curvy body …

  The nurse came in with the doctor and said, “You were sleeping, that’s good.” She said it really loud, as if I was deaf. Did I look that old to her, like somebody’s deaf old grandfather? The doctor poked around and asked how I was feeling. I told him okay, except that a truck had run over my chest, and he wrote it down and left. The nurse peeked under the covers—I had a tube down in there, too. “So,” I croaked, “do you come here often?” At least I got a smile out of her and a pat in the vicinity of my feet before she went out again.