• • •
When she woke again, she wanted to talk about the party, so he told how the fireworks went off among the branches of the trees and scared everyone; how there were hurrahs and shouts of excitement, and how everyone had a good time. As he talked, he remembered calling her from the bedroom telephone. She had sounded so chipper, so happy for him. He heard the weakness, and the slight breathlessness, but she had her wits about her in spite of the medicine, thinking to ask if his new next-door neighbor, Mrs. Ewing, had brought her dog with her to the party—Mrs. Ewing being one of those people who treated her dogs and cats better than she ever treated any human being, including her own daughter, Marvina, who was a good friend of Georgia’s and Byron’s. Mrs. Ewing had recently come to Marvina’s house to restore order, as she saw it, Marvina being undisciplined and still single at forty-three.
Eight years ago, Georgia, Byron, and Marvina went to Rome on one of Georgia’s whims. Georgia had lived there briefly when she went to Europe before the war, and she said she wanted to be in the city with Byron, to see where he had lived and walked and been happy. One of her dearest friends was an opera singer who lived near the Pantheon. They all sat out on the Piazza Navona, drinking Campari and soda, and the opera singer, whose name was Umberto, broke into an aria, drunk and happy, leaning toward Georgia as if to serenade her. He was a big, florid man, who kept saying, When will you come live here with me? It was all joking, because Umberto already had a companion, Pietro, who had lost a leg in the war, and now served as his personal secretary. Georgia kept saying that she wished Reese had been able to make the journey—but Reese was recovering from shoulder surgery.
Over the years, Byron often thought of returning to the ancient city, and he would trouble Georgia about it, believing that she was settling in too well at Brighton Creek Farm. She knew this of course, and she would say, “I’m happy. Really. I can go anywhere, just closing my eyes.”
He stayed in her room until well past midnight. She slept again, breathing easily, perfectly still, no slightest stress in her features. He nodded off, and shook himself awake; it happened several times. When he went home at last, he couldn’t sleep. Reese had come in and taken most of his things. A row of his paintings leaned against the downstairs wall, with a note attached: he’d be by to pick this up in the morning. There were a few items of furniture, a few books, some bric-a-brac. It had always been Byron who did most of the collecting of things. Reese never kept many books; yet the empty places in the shelves showed.
The lights were on next door at the Ewings’, so Byron went out and walked the sidewalk in front of the two houses. A clear, cold night, with a moon and moon-shadows everywhere. If Marvina wanted company, she would see him and come to the door. This was how they had navigated socializing since Mrs. Ewing had moved into the house. Marvina had never been one to keep regular hours and was often awake all night. She liked to sleep in, and frequently took naps in the middle of the afternoons. Alma Ewing had attempted to put a stop to all that. Like most people concerned with morality in others, Alma believed that early-to-bed, early-to-rise was the most healthy way of living. Tonight Marvina was up—he could hear music—but she didn’t come to the door, and finally he went back into his own house, and got into bed. He could still hear her music—the Rolling Stones—and she was probably playing it loud to annoy her mother. Perhaps it was partly the music that kept him awake.
• • •
Early the next morning, he heard Reese downstairs, collecting the last of the paintings, and realized that there were two voices. Byron buried his face in his pillows and tried not to hear anything, his heart hurting so awfully he wondered if he were not having a coronary: how physical heartbreak was! He would never have believed it. He thought he had felt it before; but this was completely and terribly new. The rattling downstairs took a very long, bad time, but at last it ended. He took the pillow away, got up slowly, rubbing his chest, and walked downstairs. Paintings gone. The house to himself. He sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and wept quietly.
Perhaps an hour later Marvina walked over to ask if there was anything she could do. He’d showered, shaved, and dressed, and he felt slightly better. It was just itself, the same pure pressure under the heart, the same band of deep aching. He had gathered some of the cards and letters that had come from Georgia’s far-flung friendships—many of these people were bedridden themselves, or housebound. They ranged as far away as India, and as close as next door (Marvina).
She wanted to bring something for Georgia to read. She was also contemplating a basket of fruit—Georgia had always loved Bosc pears, and they were particularly good now. But then she also had no appetite to speak of.
“What do you think?” Marvina asked.
“Your music was on late,” Byron said. “Were you up late?”
“I took a pill and went to sleep. Did it keep you up? I meant it to keep Alma up.”
Byron smiled. “Did it?”
“Alma’s sleeping late,” Marvina said.
They smiled. He was astonished that he could smile. It rose up in him like the freshest air.
They went together to the small grocery store down the street. Marvina drove. They bought several pears, some apples, and clementines. She found a small straw basket in the little boutique next to the grocery. She bought it, and a linen cloth, which she folded over the fruit. It looked enough like a gift basket. Georgia liked things homemade, this way. Something that took time to make was much more valuable and fine as a gift. Every year in early fall she began fashioning the things she would give for Christmas: knitted mittens and scarves, calendars she had made out of old photographs, cards with cutout trees on them, decorated frames, corkboards. Every gift had something of the person it was intended for—a theme or a special flavor reflecting her feeling for that person.
“She’ll like the smell of the clementines,” Byron said.
“Some flowers?” Marvina frowned. “No.”
They said little on the drive over. It was bright, chilly, windless; the little puffs of scattered cloud seemed utterly motionless in the wide, pure blue. At the hospital Marvina got out first. Byron carried the basket of fruit. In the room, they found Reese sitting with Georgia, who was asleep.
“She hasn’t waked yet,” Reese said. His eyes were rounded with shadow. He didn’t look at Byron, or at Marvina. Byron moved around Georgia’s bed and took her hand. It was warm. He squeezed it. There was the slightest squeezing back. Perhaps he had imagined it.
“Tell her I was here?” Reese said, looking sorrowful.
Byron nodded at him. Marvina and Reese went out, then, and he was alone with Georgia and the basket of fruit, in this room that was so institutional and clean, with its dull art and its cheerful paint and its television. He went around to the chair and sat down, but the chair was still warm from Reese. He stood quickly, reached over, and took his mother’s other hand, and she opened her eyes.
“It’s hard on poor Reese,” she said. “I think he’s confused.”
“You were awake.”
“For some of it. Some.” She squeezed his hand. “He just sits there looking at me and trying not to cry. I didn’t let him know I saw.”
“I think he has someone else,” Byron said.
She squeezed his hand again. “Maybe not.”
Byron told her about the two voices he had heard.
“Could be a friend.”
“I don’t understand him,” Byron said. “Does he not know I’d tell you he left me?”
She shook her head, but didn’t speak. A moment passed, in which he thought she might have gone back to sleep. Then: “I’m so tired, son.”
He sat down again, still holding her hand. “Marvina drove me over here. We brought you some fruit.”
The little squeeze, again. He began to have to fight tears. He had wanted so to be cheerful, to get Marvina talking and gossiping about her mother. Georgia would like the idea of Alma Ewing sleeping late, having been kept up with H
ot Rocks playing at volume.
Presently, when it was clear that Georgia was sleeping again, he let go of her hand and went to the door of the room. At the far end of the hall, two nurses stood talking. There was no sign of Marvina or Reese. He went back into the room and sat down, and took Georgia’s hand once more. Just in time. She turned slightly, and looked at him.
“I smell clementines,” she said, and smiled.
He reached for the basket, but when he turned back around, she had gone back to sleep. He ate a pear, and waited, and began quietly to cry again, the tears running down his cheeks. When he heard Marvina talking to one of the nurses, he slipped into Georgia’s little bathroom and ran water over his face, wiped his eyes, dried himself with one of those brown paper towels. His nose was running, like a kid’s, with crying.
In the room, Marvina had opened the curtains wider to let in more sun. Georgia was still asleep.
“Reese is a mess,” Marvina said.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” Byron said. “Really, Marvina.” He offered her the chair, and she declined, standing there looking over the fruit, picking up a pear and setting it back, finally settling on a clementine. When she opened it, the fragrance went all over the room. A nurse brought another chair, Marvina having apparently asked for it earlier. Byron thought of these humble practical arrangements in a kind of nightmarish light, as if their very ordinariness were a flaunting of the awful facts, the plain objective world brandishing itself at him, while his mother slipped away forever.
Georgia Susan Michael Townsend Mailley. The Michael was there at her father’s insistence, after his younger brother, who was killed at the Marne River in 1918. A picture of this young soldier hung on the wall in her parents’ house all their lives. Soft features, round eyes, small straight mouth—an open, intelligent, innocent face. Hard to imagine him being shot in the neck, bleeding to death on a barbed-wire fence in the rain and sludge of a terrible May morning all those years ago. Georgia had kept the picture on the foyer wall of her own house for most of Byron’s growing up. It had lain in a box of her things for the years she lived at Brighton Creek Farm. Byron, according to his grandfather, favored the long-dead uncle. Georgia had resisted the name for him, incurring her father’s wrath. As she had often done. She had, he would say, confounded him at every turn—in fact, he had taken it upon himself to warn others about the difficulties of raising a daughter. He would call friends when their wives had children, to congratulate them if they had sons and to commiserate with them if they had daughters.
Georgia married young, and then left that marriage after a period of only weeks; the fellow reminded her too much, she said, of her father—it was her father, though, who had it annulled. His frustrations with her over the years were tinged with admiration, no matter how dismayed he seemed. Georgia had done more in the world than all the sons of his friends and associates. After the marriage episode, which took place her last year of high school, she went on to Radcliffe, graduated early, then traveled to live in Europe. She didn’t return until just before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. One of her favorite stories was how, in June 1934, working for a foreign press service as a secretary and occasional feature writer, she had climbed partway up a lamppost to set eyes upon Adolf Hitler himself, a ridiculous-looking little Chaplinesque man standing in the back of a big black automobile with one hand up in that farcical salute. Later that day she was ejected from a café for imitating the führer’s stance. She would laugh, telling the story. “I was young, you know. Only twenty or so.”
Byron got his storytelling ability from her. He’d also gotten the adventuresome, generous spirit—though he would never attribute this kind of thing to himself. Others, who knew them both, did. Georgia was her own country, some said, meaning it as the highest praise. An empire, was Georgia, with her several careers, her loves and tumultuous friendships and loyalties. No one ever left her willingly except one—the second husband. The military man. He had flown for the air corps over Germany, and after the war he flew for the airlines, three years of that before reenlisting. He was a retired colonel somewhere out west, the last Byron heard, with a fourth wife and a pair of young twins. Probably ramrod straight, those twins, Georgia would say.
She had outlived so many of her friends and companions, most of whom were older than she had been. There was something about her that drew people to her, from her earliest life. Who could imagine a girl twenty-something years old traveling alone, employed by a wire service, to write about conditions in the new Germany? But she had done that. She had also been in plays off Broadway, and written a memoir that was published, about life in England just after the war—the rebuilding of London. And when she had Byron, with the air corps chap, as she called him, she settled in this little Virginia town to raise her son, her family. She thought she would have more children—hoped for half a dozen, anyway. But things changed rapidly: hostilities in Korea—and at home—caused her husband to go away, and she lost the second child unexpectedly, at almost eight months. Byron had memories of the long night when that happened, pacing in the too brightly lit waiting room with his grandfather and several friends from the library where she had gone to work. He would never forget the look of fright on his grandfather’s face. “I’m afraid we’re going to lose her,” the old man said.
How strange to think of that now. He held her hand, and wept a little more, trying to keep it from Marvina, who ate another pear and then called her mother to wake her. That was the announced purpose of the call, and she said it to please Georgia, who had opened her eyes long enough to nod and smile.
“No answer,” Marvina said.
“Poor woman,” said Georgia.
A little later, she asked Byron for a piece of paper. It hurt to talk. She signaled that her throat was sore and dry. Marvina got her some water, and she sipped it carefully, seemed to hold it a long time in her mouth. Byron was afraid she might pass out with it still there, and choke. But she swallowed it, and then wrote on the paper: Byron, I’m dying. He looked at it, and then at her face, with that strange peaceful smile. She wrote again: For a clementine.
Marvina, reading over his shoulder, sobbed and said, “Oh, God. Georgia—if that isn’t typical of you.” She was laughing and crying at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” Georgia said, rasping. “That was mean.”
Byron shook his head, and helped calm Marvina down. Georgia wrote another note, asking for some music—she had brought with her a complete set of the Sinatra-Dorsey recordings, and Byron put it on for her. She had two songs she especially liked from those years: “April Played the Fiddle” and “Everything Happens to Me.”
They put the music on, and sat listening to it. A nurse came in and worked on the IV lines, then asked Byron and Marvina to leave, so she could help Georgia go to the bathroom, and take a spritz bath. They went together down to the cafeteria and had a cup of coffee. There were several other people there, all looking tired and worried, clearly wishing they could be anywhere else. At one table a pair of young girls sat with an older brother, and they had balloons announcing the birth of a sister. The balloons were tied to the chair in which one of the girls sat. They were eating pastries and ignoring one another.
“Guess I’ll call Alma again,” Marvina said. “Poor woman.”
“Tell me about Reese,” said Byron.
She shrugged. “He’s confused. Sick at heart. You know how he feels about Georgia. And you.”
“He’s seeing someone else, Marvina.”
“I think he was feeling smothered by everyone’s love for you, Byron. No kidding. That’s what it sounded like this morning, talking to him. He kept saying he didn’t want to compete. He felt awful that we got there while he was visiting Georgia.”
“How could he think we wouldn’t come to see her?”
“He was leaving—you know.”
“No, I don’t want to talk about him.”
She reached into her purse, brought out her cell phone, and dialed A
lma, who answered this time. Alma claimed she’d been up and around, had gone out to the store to buy groceries. She asked how Georgia was.
Marvina told her about the clementine incident, winking at Byron. The clementine incident would profoundly disturb Alma. Marvina said this, after disconnecting with Alma, and then seemed to catch herself. “God almighty, what the hell am I saying?” And she began to cry.
They returned upstairs, to find that Georgia was still being attended to. The door was closed. They waited at the nurse’s station in the garish light, while people moved around them and past them. An old, old man walked by, slowly, pulling his own IV apparatus with him. His slippers made a whispery noise. When the nurse opened the door and smiled at them, Georgia was falling asleep again. Movement of any kind, the nurse said, was exhausting for her. She had been a little sick.
“What a lady,” the nurse whispered. “She apologized to me for it. Imagine that.” Byron wanted to embrace her. For a moment they all just stood there, appreciating the small slender woman in the bed, lying so still, breathing softly, sleeping, it seemed, without dreams.
That afternoon, Marvina had to go home for a while, and Byron told her to go on. He’d stay the night. “Oh, I’ll come back,” Marvina said. “I would’ve been here last night only—” She shrugged. Her mother, of course. Alma, for all her talk about salvaging things for her impractical daughter, needed attention. And poor Marvina had to give it without actually seeming to.
Something Is Out There Page 4
