Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  “Right,” Daniel said. “Tracking down a fugitive. Visiting my mother too.”

  “It’s always good to visit your mother,” the doctor said. “On the other hand, not if it sends you to the emergency room. Maybe you should have stayed in Seattle.”

  “Maybe so. But this is probably indigestion. Don’t you think?”

  He was feeling suddenly better. He was feeling rather mellow, in fact.

  They must have given him something when they’d hooked him up to the IV—Valium, maybe?—because he was feeling much more mellow than he had any right to feel, under the circumstances.

  “Well, could be,” said the doctor, scribbling something on the paper on the clipboard. “Could be a lot of things. That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  She was still writing. It went on for a while.

  “What the hell are you writing?” he said.

  “I’m writing my memoirs. Don’t worry. Nothing about you.”

  On a TV somewhere nearby, Bill O’Reilly was doing his blowhard thing, shouting at one of his guests.

  “Can somebody turn that bullshit off?” Daniel said.

  “What?”

  “Fox News. Right-wing bastards.”

  “A white male officer of the law who doesn’t like Fox News. This gets stranger and stranger. Well, I agree with you about their politics, but we’ve got to give the people what they want. When we tried putting it on CNN—hello!”

  Evidently she’d noticed something on one of his monitors, and then he felt a spike in his chest that was stronger and sharper than anything he’d felt so far. It was like a feeling that wanted something, if that made sense.

  The doctor and some nurses were in action around him; he didn’t know where the nurses had come from, but one of them was pretty, so that was something, that was something he could use to take his mind off whatever it was that was killing him. Was something killing him? Was he dying? Am I dying? He wanted to ask somebody—the frizzy doctor, the pretty nurse—to tell Janine that he loved her, Janine and Emily and Mark, but talking would be too much of a strain. Maybe they’d given him too much pacifier—pacifier? Was that the word?—and maybe he was dying; all he knew was that he was shutting down. He knew he was going under, and he didn’t know whether he’d come back up again. He put his wife and daughter and son at the center of his mind, and as the wave of something sweet and soft came up, he tried to hold fast to the thought of them. He wanted his last thought to be love.

  65

  Janine was in her bathroom in the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown, shaving her legs.

  The situation was too complicated to be borne. She was going to the conference center next door to attend a panel discussion about the psychology of impulse control in adolescents, and then she was going to sleep with a man she shouldn’t sleep with.

  I should write a paper, she thought. The role of the impulsive self versus the rational self in the planning of extramarital affairs.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d shaved her legs for Daniel. Yet here she was, shaving her legs for Santa.

  Damn it, Emily, get out of my head!

  She wasn’t thinking about Daniel that much, but she couldn’t stop thinking about her children. What would Emily think? What would Mark think?

  What would it matter what they’d think? They were her children. There was nothing relevant about what they’d think about her having illicit sex with Santa. The thought of her having lawful wedded sex with Daniel would gross them out.

  If she’d been trying to have an affair ten years ago, it would have been impossible, because, while slipping illicitly into bed, she would have been worrying about whether there was enough peanut butter left to make lunch for the kids the next day. You can’t have an affair in that condition. You have to wait till the kids are grown.

  But one of the reasons it had always been so glorious to make love with Daniel was that everyday concerns didn’t deflate the experience, because the experience of making love with him included everything. From her highest erotic and spiritual longings to the question of whether she’d remembered to buy peanut butter, everything in the world was in that bed.

  Why had it ended? Why hadn’t it remained?

  She went to the window. Her room looked out on Greater Pittsburgh, if there was such a thing.

  Pittsburgh, however wimpy it was, however terribly it had been laid to waste by an uncaring capitalism, was a city, and she could never fail to be thrilled by the lights of a city in the evening.

  It would have been nice to share this with Daniel.

  If only Daniel would talk! If only he would dance! If only he would willingly do things with her—go to museums or shows or karaoke bars, go hiking or bicycling or swimming or ice-skating. He would do these things, but never willingly. He didn’t do anything willingly except read and have sex and go to the movies. Anything else and it was a smiling “Believe me, darling, I won’t do that.” It was funny, but sometimes it made her want to brain him.

  She didn’t know what she wanted. Here she was, in the heart of Pittsburgh, that hotbed of sexual transgression, and she didn’t know what she wanted. The thought made her so disconsolate that she forgot to finish shaving her legs.

  66

  In the morning he discovered that he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t remember being transferred, but he was in a regular room now. He was still hooked up to an IV pole; he still had a blood-pressure cuff on his arm and a blood-oxygen clip on his index finger.

  A nurse came into the room to check his machines.

  “Did they operate?” he said.

  “Excuse me, hon?”

  “Did they operate on me?”

  “Not that I know of. You want them to?”

  “No, I—” he started to answer, until he realized that she was joking.

  He had the sense that he’d had an important dream, a dream that would help him understand his life, and when the nurse left he tried hard to remember it. But the only thing he could dredge up from it was that Emily had written a book called The Internet in Winter.

  Later a doctor came in—a calm, slim, elegant man named Chatterjee. He told Daniel that he didn’t appear to have suffered a heart attack, but that they couldn’t be sure.

  “Coronary events can be chameleons. We’d like to keep you here another day or two, so we can get more acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of your cardiological system. We don’t think there’s any damage, but we want to be certain.”

  After the doctor left, Daniel once again began to think that he should let somebody know he was here. Florence seemed the obvious choice, only because she was around. But he couldn’t bring himself to call her.

  He’d once read that when soldiers are dying, most of them cry out for their mothers, if they cry out for anyone at all.

  But most soldiers don’t have Florence Gordon for a mother.

  Maybe he wasn’t giving her enough credit. She was, after all, the only person who’d called him while he was going through whatever he’d gone through yesterday. She didn’t know that it was happening, but maybe, on some psychic level, she did know. She, and no one else.

  He got his phone out of the bedside table. He started to press the numbers in, but before he was finished, the keypad lit up. It was her.

  “Hi, Mom. I was just about to call you.”

  “That’s funny, because I’ve been calling you nonstop since yesterday afternoon.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that—”

  “Where have you been? I don’t understand the point of carrying a cell phone around if you’re not going to be available.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Is this the way you are on the job? If one of your irredeemables calls you, needing to be bailed out or whatever you do, is this what you do with them? Let it go to voice mail?”

  “No. That’s probably not what I’d do.”

  “Then why do you let my calls go straight to voice mail?”

  He closed his eyes. Why indeed? />
  “I actually didn’t hear it ring.”

  “But why do you have a cell phone with you if you keep it in a place where you can’t hear it ring?”

  He glanced over at his monitors, expecting to see that his blood pressure was climbing out of control, but it didn’t seem to be changing.

  “I wasn’t calling for a frivolous reason. I can’t find some research material Emily was supposed to have given me, and I have no idea whether she actually did the research or not. I’ve got a huge amount of work to do, and I really need it.”

  “Why don’t you call Emily?”

  “Of course I called Emily. She didn’t answer either. I called her and I texted her, and she hasn’t responded, and that’s why I called you. So I’d appreciate it if you’d speak to her and get her to help me straighten this out.”

  It was true that Emily never answered her damned phone, at least not for adults. He and Janine had been hassling her about this for years.

  “She’s away for a couple of days. She’s up in Boston.”

  “Boston? What’s she doing in Boston?”

  “She’s giving a lecture at the Kennedy School. What do you think she’s doing? She’s visiting some friends.”

  “When is she getting back?”

  “I’m thinking she’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  “What are those noises? Where are you?”

  It was the hospital public address system—not voices, but mysterious boopings and beepings.

  “So can you wait until Monday?” he said.

  “Forget about it. I’ll go down to Bobst myself.”

  A nurse came into the room and started emitting pleasantries.

  Can you tell your nurse to keep it down because you don’t want your mother to know you’re in the hospital? Is that done?

  “But next time I call you people, can one of you pick up your phone?”

  After they got off, he wondered if there’d been an exact moment during the conversation when he’d decided not to tell her where he was and what was happening.

  After another day’s worth of tests, Dr. Chatterjee told Daniel, once again, that he didn’t seem to have had a heart attack, but he strongly advised that Daniel see a cardiologist. “Your cholesterol’s too high, your triglycerides are too high, your blood pressure’s too high. You’ll consider this a wake-up call, if you know what’s good for you. Time to start exercising. Time to eat right—you should look into the Mediterranean diet. Time to learn some simple relaxation techniques—meditation or tai chi. Statins, definitely; maybe a beta blocker too.”

  The doctor kept going. He had a lot to say. Daniel listened glumly to this recitation of all the different ways in which he had to change his life.

  67

  Florence was working when the phone rang, but she felt she had to answer. There were not many people whose calls she had to take right away, but Peggy Greer, the social worker at the Mount Kisco Jewish Senior Center, was one of them.

  It was a Thursday afternoon, the day after the bloodmobile protest. She was still aching. Being stepped on can do that to you.

  Florence picked up the receiver and said, “What happened? Is she okay?”

  Peggy was silent for a moment, apparently having expected a more conventional greeting.

  “Florence?” she said.

  “Yes, it’s Florence. Is Yetta okay?”

  “Yes, she’s fine. It’s not an emergency. It’s not a crisis.”

  “Well then why are you calling me? Isn’t it Ruby’s turn?”

  “It is Ruby’s turn. But she’s out of town, and she asked me to find out if you were available.”

  “All right. What do we need?”

  “We respect Yetta. We respect her a great deal. She’s a remarkable woman.”

  “Yes yes yes, we all know that. What do you need?”

  “We need you to talk to her. We need you to talk to her about personal hygiene.”

  During her youth, Yetta Berman had been known as the Rosa Luxemburg of the Bronx. She’d been active in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and, when the women’s movement was being born, Yetta had been one of the first to sense its possibilities. She’d been an inspiration to Florence and to most of Florence’s old friends. Five years ago, Yetta had endured a series of strokes, and now she was like a vague allusion to the woman she used to be. Her children were on the other side of the continent, so everyone in Florence’s circle—all of Yetta’s daughters, as Vanessa once said—undertook to take care of her when she needed it. They’d worked out a rotation, with one of them on call every month.

  “What’s the problem?” Florence said.

  “Yetta’s been giving off powerful odors. Our staff started to notice it a few months ago. Even some of the other seniors have started to complain, and if they complain, you know it’s serious, since most of them can barely smell anything anymore. She wears the same clothes day after day. She may even be sleeping in them. And we’re sure she hasn’t been bathing herself.”

  “So what’s the odor? Body odor? Piss? Shit? All three?”

  There was a long pause. When Peggy discussed difficult subjects, she liked to speak in a roundabout way, thinking that this softened the impact of the hard facts she was forced to deliver. Florence’s bluntness made her uncomfortable.

  “The staff and I believe—we’re relatively sure of this, actually—that it’s primarily urine,” she finally said. “It’s a powerful odor of urine.”

  “Thank God for small favors,” Florence said. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “It would be wonderful if you’d come up here and speak to her. She simply won’t listen to any of us here, and we’re hoping that she’ll listen to her old friends.”

  “And what do you want me to say?”

  “Ultimately we want her to understand the importance of bathing regularly and changing her clothes. But as a first step, it would be fabulous if you could help her see that she needs to start wearing adult briefs.”

  “Adult briefs? You mean diapers?”

  “We prefer to call them adult briefs.”

  “She actually needs diapers?”

  “She can’t control herself anymore. She’s had several accidents. Some gerontologists believe that when a woman reaches a certain age—”

  “That’s all right. I don’t need the theory. Diapers it is.”

  None of this was a surprise. Yetta hadn’t been taking care of herself for years. It was a wonder that Florence hadn’t received a call like this before.

  On Friday morning, Florence took the train to Mount Kisco. She was refreshed by the simple clarity of her mission: she had to get Yetta to agree to start wearing diapers.

  Despite the state she was in, Yetta still lived alone. Ever since her strokes, her friends had been advising, and her children pleading, that she move into an “adult community.” But she insisted that she was perfectly capable of caring for herself, and although she was addled and forgetful, she wasn’t far gone enough to be declared incompetent, so no one had the power to force her to leave her home.

  Sometimes Florence thought that what kept Yetta at home wasn’t independence but rage. She was angry at her children for living on the other side of the country; she was angry at her friends for not visiting more often; she was angry at her husband for having died. Sometimes Florence thought that Yetta’s militant neglect of herself was like an obscene gesture toward everyone she believed had abandoned her.

  The senior center was her main connection to the world. At nine in the morning, Monday through Thursday, a jitney picked her up at her door and took her there, and for five hours she sat there in the most uncomfortable chair she could find, refusing to take part in any activities. She took a grim satisfaction in rejecting anything that might make her life more pleasant.

  From the train station, Florence took a taxi to Yetta’s house, a Victorian so broken-down and with a yard so weedy that it looked as if it had been abandoned long ago.

>   “What are you doing here?” Yetta said when she opened the door.

  “I told you I was coming. We talked on the phone.”

  “Oh. Right,” Yetta said. Florence was sure she didn’t remember.

  “Well, you might as well come in,” Yetta said. “Too bad you missed Simon.”

  “Was Simon here?”

  “He just left. I’m surprised you didn’t see him.”

  Shortly after her stroke, Yetta had started to speak of an imaginary friend named Simon, who seemed to be an amalgam of her long-dead husband, Oscar, and some more dashing figure—perhaps someone Yetta had known in her youth, perhaps someone from the movies.

  Florence took a long breath before she stepped inside. Yetta hadn’t opened her windows in years, and the smell inside her house was indescribable. The deep breath was mostly symbolic—you couldn’t hold your breath throughout the visit—but Florence needed to take it even so.

  “What happened to you?” Yetta said, nodding toward Florence’s cane. Florence told her the story, and Yetta seemed a little disappointed that it was only a sprained ankle.

  Pushing aside a pile of junk mail and newspapers, Florence took a seat on the living-room couch. There was a shriveled, blackened banana on the coffee table, with fruit flies circling it in the air.

  “Where can I throw this out?” Florence said.

  “What? Are you crazy? What do you want to throw it out for?”

  “Yetta, it’s inedible.”

  “It’s edible. I’ll do something with it. I’ll make banana bread.”

  Florence put the banana down.

  “Save me a piece,” she said.

  Yetta picked it up and put it down on top of the TV, where it would probably remain for months.

  “How are things going?” Florence said.

  “How are things supposed to go?”

  “How’s the senior center? Are you still enjoying it there?”

  “Oh, sure. Watching old idiots play bingo all day. I’m having a ball.”

  “Is the food still decent? You used to say they served a decent lunch.”

  “Of course. Better than ever. It’s a five-star restaurant.”