The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  The story of how, in the end, the Ashes’ porch got renovated went something like this: the previous year Maida went to Ed and said she wanted a new porch, and the next day Ed got the contractor involved. The two men discussed some ideas, after which the contractor went away and made a rough set of drawings, which were eventually presented to Gene under misleading circumstances. The Donnellys had invited the Ashes over ostensibly to cast a tie-breaking vote on the color of their new kitchen tile, but it happened on this same evening that the porch drawings were sitting out near the tile samples and the contractor was on hand to explain his designs.

  Gene saw that there was nothing to be gained by fighting the new porch. His main contribution was simply to advance the idea that he would save them money by building it himself. For a minute or two, the others indulged this proposal as a serious gesture, which is to say, they acknowledged Gene’s wish to be able to build something himself. But then the conversation proceeded with the Donnellys figuring out when the contractor could step away from his duties at their house in order to be free to work at the Ashes’.

  So Ed’s contractor built the porch Maida wanted, a wide porch with long floor beams that ran parallel to the front of the house and met in a pretty diagonal pattern at the corners. The pale exterior of the house was repainted a blazing blue, a color Gene had only ever seen on the bathroom walls of a show house. The new porch (white, like the trim) was now wide enough for furniture. The contractor built some custom benches out of ash and finished them with a natural-looking stain. They were attractive, no question, but if Gene was by himself, he preferred to sit on the steps leading to the yard, where he would not have to look at the unnecessary project on which they had spent a great deal of money perhaps just so they could be the type of people who spent a great deal of money on frivolous things.

  Not everyone shared this opinion, of course. The renovation was exactly what Maida wanted. And whenever Ed came over he made a point of remarking on his satisfaction, which once included him pulling away one of the benches from the wall, turning it over to examine the underside. With a murmur of approval at the handiwork, he said, “Yup, that’s my guy.”

  On the morning of the camping trip, when Ed arrived to pick up Annie and Gene informed him that she wasn’t yet ready, Ed said that he would wait outside and Gene felt an obligation to wait with him. The day was already warm, too warm for the early hour. The air smelled of the river, the brackish water gulping for rot along the boats’ hulls, the dead fish parts scumming the banks with their ripeness. They sat on one of the benches and Ed gazed up into the eaves of the porch once again, as if his estimation of the work might be different this time. “I’m glad she got what she wanted,” he said.

  I’m glad she got what she wanted. Gene repeated the words in his head.

  “You can’t say it’s not an improvement,” Ed said.

  “It’s something,” Gene said.

  The silence between them that ensued was neither completely comfortable nor uncomfortable. In general Gene found his relationships with men to be trickier than with women. It was unclear who was to inquire about whom or if the aim was something else entirely, like the ability to withstand discomfort at close range without adopting the behavior of a threatened creature. In his life his friendships with men had mostly proved tenuous. The connection depended on the immediacy of shared circumstances and as soon as the circumstances changed, the connection dissolved. His friendship with Ed had been the exception, though if they were honest with themselves, their dim view before the children were born was that kids were going to ruin their social lives, especially the friendships. But the children had turned out to be what had kept them together, and early on the parents had discovered there were forms of support and wisdom a grown-up could offer to a child who wasn’t his own. Gayle and Ed had taken a special interest in Dary, Maida was especially fond of Colin and Michael, and Gene had a particular affinity for Brian.

  Gene supposed his preference for Brian was partly due to the fact that Brian had never had the social confidence of his younger brothers. He was the lanky ten-year-old reading his father’s copy of War of the Worlds in the back seat of the parked car, feet against the window, while Gene and Ed went into the store to buy fishing rods. When Brian was fifteen he told everyone he wanted to build airplanes, and sure enough he went to engineering school, where he studied aeronautics. His junior year he met Allison, the daughter of a commercial pilot, and they married as soon as he graduated and then moved to Florida, where he’d gotten a job working for an aeronautics company. Housing was cheap at the time and Brian figured out that if they bought a small house, improved it, sold it, and did this twice, they could afford the large house they really wanted in less than a decade. So he and Allison moved into a bungalow and did exactly that. They had two gifted children, twins who were now teenagers: a boy they had twice sent to soccer camp in Moldava during summers because the Moldavans took their youth sport training more seriously than Americans, and a girl taking private lessons in music composition from a retired symphony conductor.

  It had never made much sense to Gene why Ed couldn’t get along with such a smart and successful son. When Gene asked Ed about this once, Ed corrected him and said he got along with Brian as well as Brian did with anyone; it was just that getting along with Brian was difficult because Brian was uptight. After that Gene felt a tribal, paternal duty to like Brian even more in compensation for the lack of interest he must have perceived from his father.

  Now Gene said, “How’s Brian? How many houses does he own these days?”

  “He may not own any soon,” Ed replied. He told Gene that Allison was filing for divorce.

  The news caught Gene by surprise. To him the marriage had always appeared uniform—in a good way—across its various areas of aspiration. Brian and Allison were the kind of people who said what they were going to do and did it, whether it was in the plans they made for their real estate holdings or the way they went about raising their children. They’d had more success in these areas than many parents, and if they couldn’t stay together, he didn’t know how anyone else would manage. A rift of sadness opened inside him, sadness and also a strange sense of guilt, because in his own life he had experienced a joy that was repeatedly demonstrating its unavailability to the next generation. He’d been married for forty-nine years. How many people currently living or not yet born would achieve that in their lifetime? The guilt was related to a sense of personal failure: some set of skills or values had not been successfully transferred to the children they had raised. It was as if no one had told them there was a difference between courtship, in which the smallest misstep might bring about a sudden and absolute ending, and marriage, which was meant to absorb these missteps and grow more durable because of them. Hadn’t they heard? Marriage wasn’t inoculation against conflict.

  “Allison finally figured it out,” Ed said. “She realized Brian was on the hook to pay for the kids whether they stayed married or not.”

  “Maybe it’s just a threat to get what she wants,” Gene said.

  “What she wants, is to get out of the marriage.”

  “That’s just a thing people say when they’re angry. It’s like a chew toy. You chew it, but you don’t actually swallow it.”

  “So Brian should call her a liar?”

  “Look, if a patient comes to you and he’s dying, do you say, ‘Too bad, bud, better luck next time,’ or do you do everything you can to save him?”

  “We patch him up.”

  “Well, there’s your answer.”

  “But they die anyway. Eventually.”

  “All right, but in the meantime you make an effort. You would stay awake for a week if you thought you could save somebody that way.”

  “I don’t know that I would. Anymore. After you do that sort of thing once, you’re tired. You realize pretty fast the only way you can keep going is if you hold something back. You can’t just give away all of yourself, even if it means someone will p
robably die.”

  “You’re just being humble.”

  “I don’t believe in being humble. Humility’s just a covert form of arrogance.”

  “You would do your best.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But no one gets all of you.”

  “If this were Brian’s third or fourth marriage, then sure, maybe the thing to do would be to walk away. But he’s still young.”

  “His mistake is he’s telling Allison she can’t leave him because it’ll ruin his life. I told him he should tell her his life has never been better.”

  “Women like a man to fight for them occasionally,” Gene said. “It renews their interest in romance.”

  “I’m talking about marriage. If Brian knew what was good for him, he’d recognize that it’s over and start thinking about the rest of his life. That’s what Allison’s doing.”

  “But it isn’t finished until one of them dies,” Gene protested. “Even then, it still isn’t over. Children are forever.”

  A new silver station wagon slowed in front of the house and pulled to the curb.

  “Speaking of,” Ed said, standing up. “Colin’s going to be hanging around this weekend while we have his kids.”

  Ed met his son in the street and the two tall men hugged, a double hug that involved switching the position of their arms halfway through. As they approached the house they were both smiling, Colin’s smile a more effusive and optimistic version of his father’s, and the two of them with their thin lips and broad smooth foreheads.

  When Colin was twenty-two and his college peers were vying for jobs in business and consulting, he had signed up for the Peace Corps and spent two years in Senegal. His decision gave his parents something to tell people at parties that eclipsed most of the other things people tended to say about their offspring, a situation that seemed to please Ed and Gayle. Colin’s life hadn’t looked terribly different from that of his peers since he’d returned to the States—he’d gone back to school for an executive MBA and become a respectably paid CFO at a nonprofit in Boston, where he worked long hours and had a 401(k) like everyone else—but Ed was proud of him in a way that always seemed brand-new and at the same time rooted in this past when Colin had been a scared but brave young man teaching entrepreneurship classes to village women old enough to be his mother. Ed was proud of Michael too, though that was a little bit different, since Michael worked in finance and in general Ed disdained the overt pursuit of money. But Michael had gotten his first job on Wall Street almost accidentally, when his AA sponsor connected him to someone sympathetic to his situation, and Michael’s struggle to get sober had provided just enough sordid counterbalance for Ed’s taste to make his youngest son’s moneyed New York lifestyle more acceptable to him.

  Colin kissed Gene on one cheek and then another, a ritualized greeting Gene found somewhat excessive and which he had always explained in his own mind as a residue of those years Colin had been a foreigner. A hug followed, and before Colin could undertake the double hug, Gene detached himself.

  “Wow,” Colin said, gesturing to the house. “You really went to town.”

  “It was all Maida.”

  At the mention of her, Colin took Gene by both elbows and looked into his face with a softness that Gene found intolerable. “She was one of a kind,” Colin said. “She never tried to sell you on any of that fake stuff other people did. You know, once when I was a kid I told her that when I was sleeping a monster sometimes stole my face and put on my clothes and went around doing really bad things to other people, only I could never tell anyone, because of course they’d think it was me. And she said, ‘Oh, I wonder if we’ve got the same monster.’ I’ll never forget that. Another parent would have told me it was all just a dream and not to think about it anymore. Justine and I talk about it all the time. Because we are those parents, telling our kids not to worry. But Maida understood how to talk to children. My mom tries, but—”

  “Your mother is a saint,” Gene said. “Believe me.”

  Annie appeared on the porch wearing a large humped backpack that slued noticeably to the left.

  “Honey, look who showed up here,” Gene said. “It’s Uncle Colin.”

  “Hello, Anna-banana,” Colin said. “God, I can’t believe how much they grow when they’re away from you.”

  Dary stood in the doorway with a camera. “They grow extra when you can’t see them. They’re sneaky like that.”

  “Come here, rascal,” Ed said.

  Annie came slowly, carefully down the stairs. When she reached them Ed began to fix the alignment of her backpack, tightening some straps and loosening others. “How does that feel?” he asked.

  “Heavy.”

  “It’s going to be heavy, no way around that.” He adjusted the straps some more, until gradually the mountain of blue nylon found its center on her back. “How’s that?”

  “I’m still alive, I guess.”

  Ed squeezed her head affectionately. “That’s my girl.”

  6.

  WHILE GENE WAITED for Dr. Fornier, he regarded himself in the mirror above the sink. He no longer felt much connection to his body, this broad frame his granddaughter still occasionally jumped on without warning. The curvature of his belly was as pronounced as it had been for most of his life, but this flesh was strange to him now, the remnant of some other life before Maida’s death in which each food had a distinct flavor that he could taste and sometimes even craved, and eating and drinking were more than just required daily actions for nutrient delivery. He brought his hands to his face. It felt oddly lumpy, a homemade mask of a face.

  There was a sharp double rap on the door and then Dr. Fornier entered. After the usual greetings the official business began, with Dr. Fornier asking a cascade of questions:

  “Sleep?”

  “I don’t need much.”

  “How many hours a night?”

  “Consecutive hours?”

  Dr. Fornier made a note. “Any problems with walking, balance, or locomotion since I last saw you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Dr. Fornier placed his notes on his knee and began to discourse about the foot, that sudden locus of peril in age, of ingrown nails, unresolved dampness, subterranean warts, protuberant spurs, ulcerous sores, and unwelcome odors. “Foot health,” he concluded, as if he had just finished taxonimizing a new condition that would forever bear the distinguished imprint of his biography and name. “Any problems?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “That’s the difficulty, isn’t it? We get a little older, the feet seem farther away.” He said this with plaintive delicacy, as if he was speaking with authority on the subject not from education or training but from the despondency that comes from having experienced the situation firsthand. But Dr. Fornier was younger than Gene by at least a decade.

  He touched one of Gene’s toes. Could he identify which toe it was without looking? At that moment Gene hated Dr. Fornier. This hatred bolted through his body and joined up with an old hatred left over from his last visit with the doctor, when Dr. Fornier had examined the ankle that sometimes rolled. During that appointment the doctor had made him demonstrate how he would use a cane if he was to use a cane, a question that was a) completely irrelevant, since he would never use a cane and b) infinitely insulting, since only a moron could fail to use a cane properly. Throughout this humiliating exercise Dr. Fornier’s aspect had been at once supervisory and congratulatory, as if Gene was a child and Dr. Fornier his parent.

  “How about any disturbances in mood, diet, or exercise?”

  “No, thank you,” Gene said.

  “Still a sense of humor,” Dr. Fornier noted approvingly and actually wrote something down. “How about this—why do you think your daughter wanted you to come in today?”

  Gene gazed at the ceiling as if he might find the answer written up there. “My wife passed away.”

  Dr. Fornier looked up from his notes. “Yes,” he said. “I remember. How are you doing
with that? Is there anything I can do to help things along?” Dr. Fornier studied him for a moment the way a person takes one last look at something complex in the moment before he translates it to something simple and apprehensible. “Let’s get you feeling like yourself again, Eugene,” he said with brisk confidence. He removed a small notepad from a drawer and began scribbling. “I’m giving you something to help you go to sleep and something to wake you up, so to speak.” He ripped off a page and handed it to Gene. “You let me know how it goes, okay?”

  Dary met him downstairs in the pharmacy. She was wearing what he thought of as one of her draperies. There was hardly any distinction in her appearance between her public and private lives: at home or out in the world she wore the same formless tops that looked like the idea of a shirt before it had been cut, and the same stretchy leggings favored by babies and eleven-year-olds—anyone, in other words, who might spontaneously wish to curl up on the floor for a nap. Her style of dress had never passed through that succession of phases seen in some professional women where as their rank advanced they got dowdy, but Dary had also missed being stunning. In the totality of a life it was a minor loss, except for when you considered that you could never predict whom you might meet running an errand.

  There was no line to drop off the prescription. Within ten minutes his name was called. There was a line, however, to pick it up: several customers waited behind a piece of grungy yellow tape meant to extend privacy to the person receiving instructions at the window. Dary offered to wait in line for him, but the idea of her collecting the prescription on his behalf embarrassed him. He couldn’t prevent her from noticing signs of his body’s failure, but that didn’t mean she needed to receive material proof of it. He wondered why it was inherently humiliating to acknowledge the body’s decline. Why did the glitches seem to reflect negatively on him, as if he had done something blameworthy? It made no sense, no more than the pride some people took in their uninterrupted good health. And yet his shame was real and present.