“You didn’t really want to marry her, then?”
“There was no other choice. In those days, that was how it went.”
“Was she different when you fell in love with her?”
“In love.” He emphasizes the words. His face tells a whole story, but his mouth doesn’t join in. “I didn’t really get to know her until after we were married.”
“Was she the same way with you? So—”
“Hmm, Agnes was—I don’t know—”
He sounds like he’s about to get shut down, I think, though I’m not sure. “That hardness in her, with me she was so often—”
Dad doesn’t let me find the right words. “I didn’t know how to arm myself against that either.” He falls silent.
It feels like I have no skin. A tree losing its leaves after a gust of wind. So, I was what tied my father’s fate to that woman. I let the thought blow through my mind.
“I’m tired. Really, terribly tired.” Without waiting for a reaction, Dad zooms his bed back down again. “Can I sleep a bit?” He closes his eyes. “A little nap.”
“Yes,” is all I say. I decide to go get myself a coffee, maybe with something cloyingly sweet to go with it.
As I walk down the dismal hallway toward the cafeteria, I spot Uncle Artie coming my way. It’s been a long time since I last saw him. He’s visited a few times, though my father usually manages to get rid of him in less than thirty minutes. Strange the way everyone keeps their distance, I think, even his own brother.
“I thought I’d give it a go,” Uncle Artie says, shrugging apologetically.
“Just keep insisting, that’s the way to do it with him.”
Uncle Artie gives me a kiss. “I’m happy to see you again, pretty lady.” Uncle Artie was always the kindest.
“You’re looking pretty sharp yourself.” I laugh. “Are your men making you happy?”
“Just one man these days, sweetheart.” With a big smile, he takes a photo out of his wallet and shows me a guy in brightly colored swim trunks. “Handsome, isn’t he?”
“Fantastic,” I reply.
“Is it all right if I drop in on your father now?”
“He’s taking a nap.”
“Then shall we have a drink together first? Do you have time?”
I nod and we head for the cafeteria.
“How are you? You look a little troubled.”
“Dad and I just had an intense conversation about my mom. He told me they had to get married because of me, and that he actually hadn’t wanted to.”
Uncle Artie whistles through his teeth. “You didn’t know that before?”
“No, you know Dad. We were never allowed to talk about her.”
We walk over to the self-service counter, each take a tray, and push it toward the sweets section. I choose a bowl of chocolate mousse and cream, and Uncle Artie copies. He insists on paying. Once we’re seated, he says, “I still can’t believe you never knew.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of things I still don’t know about.” I sum up what Dad told me.
Uncle Artie gives me a questioning look, then rests his spoon next to his bowl. “It was an unhappy marriage, your parents’. They didn’t talk to each other. Vincent hid in his office and, if he didn’t have to work, he’d ask us to hang around, us or the neighbors—anything to liven things up a bit. I was there a lot in those days, maybe you remember that. I was a bit younger, so it was nice not to have to spend every weekend at my parents’. And when there were people at your house, it was so much fun, there was eating and drinking and we played cards and talked until late at night, and you two little kids would hang around with us.” He sips his coffee.
“I remember my mother wasn’t happy about you coming around all the time, or am I mistaken?”
“Eh. Agnes let it happen. She complained about it sometimes, but not when we were there. I think both of them were happy to have the distraction. They’d run out of things to say to each other before you were even born. First they lost hope that they’d ever connect, I think. After that there was the fear of never connecting again.” He eats another spoonful, leaving a brown stripe above his lips.
“She was a very unhappy woman—depressed, I realize now. Only, back then that word didn’t exist. I don’t think she ever forgave your father for getting her pregnant. Well, she was there when it happened, of course.” He laughs like a child who has told a dirty joke. “But I imagine he was the one to take the initiative. Vincent, he was—” Then he looks at me, smiles apologetically, and doesn’t finish his sentence. “People said Agnes’s father, a terrible man, the whole village knew it, anyway they said he messed with his own daughters. Excuse the expression. I don’t know whether it’s true, but that’s what they said. And I know that your parents’ marriage wasn’t exactly, um, passionate. That doesn’t have to mean anything, but still.”
“Dad once told me his sex life with my mother was better than with Marie.”
“That’s odd. He complained about it a lot to me, at the time.” He scrapes his spoon across the bottom of his bowl. “Strange fellow, your dad, always has been.” I try to picture my mother, but I don’t really manage and it bothers me. “But the way she treated you, Mona, that was—it often pained my heart.” He touches my shoulder and then squeezes it.
Mice run through my thoughts. I remain sitting on my chair, my head spinning, as though it’s the only thing I can still do.
24
Alexander found the message on his answering machine in the morning. Marie had called late the night before, saying, “It’s a big emergency, can you come to the house tomorrow morning? I’m going to try to get some sleep now, try.” He’d called her back immediately, but she hadn’t picked up.
My brother said he thought something was really wrong with Dad, the water on his lungs was already a sign of total exhaustion, and what about his heart? I asked what made him think that, simply because I didn’t want to draw the conclusion myself. Alexander repeated, irritated, “‘A big emergency.’”
“As though there were degrees.” I sighed back.
He and Charlie were going to take Marvin to school and then pick me up on the way.
I go outside immediately after the phone call, even though I’ll have to wait at least twenty minutes. I try to call Louis from the portico of the apartment building. He’d gone up to his writing den quite early. The phone rings six times, then the answering machine. I leave a message. The sun is shining, but the clammy morning chases a chill through everything. I should have put on a jacket or a sweater, I think, but don’t go back in.
“Come on, Alexander, hurry.” I say it out loud. I’d like to talk to him about all the things I’ve learned, and yet I know already that I won’t. I can’t cope with the horrible things he might say about Dad. When I told Louis that same evening, he’d been very intrigued. He was disappointed I hadn’t asked for more details.
They pick me up, we drive and talk about all kinds of nonsense, and then we ring the bell. In our hurry, we’ve both forgotten our key. No reply. We ring again, the ding-dong echoes into the neighbor’s garden. “Maybe she’s at the hospital?” I say.
“She said we had to go to the house,” Alexander replies.
“Maybe she died in her sleep, just to do us a favor,” Charlie says, and I have to laugh, partly from the tension.
Alexander hisses at us, “Come on,” and points at the door as though he’s afraid Marie has her ear glued to the other side of it.
A minute later, Marie does appear. “No key?” She lets us in. “I was in the kitchen,” she adds then, as though to explain the long wait. “What would you like to drink?”
“Tell us what’s the matter first.” I sound brusquer than I’d like.
Alexander sits down at the kitchen table, in Dad’s seat, which bothers me.
“Yesterday, it must have been about eight, I suppose, quarter past, maybe, I took the inner ring road to the hospital, and suddenly, along that stretch with the row of trees,
you know, the beeches they once wanted to chop down, until they set up a committee to stop it, all the cars in front of me slammed on their brakes. Me too, of course, but I bumped into the car in front of me. I was only going around fifteen miles an hour, so at first I thought, Oh, it can’t be that bad. I get out and the other driver gets out and we stand there in the middle of the road. Terribly dangerous, actually, because Yvette’s daughter, you know, she got run over and she still has trouble with her leg, and how long ago was that?” She pauses to take a sip of her coffee. “But anyway, so we were standing there. There wasn’t much damage to his car, he was driving one of those giant Jeep things, a bit like Francis’s, but in black, almost indestructible, those things. I don’t like them, such big vehicles, but actually you should have cars like that because at least they’re safe. But the state of mine: the whole hood crumpled, the bumper dented, the right headlight broken, and God knows what inside, of course. I stood there just quaking. The man acted friendly, he asked whether I was all right. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I hit the steering wheel really hard and now my car looks like the driver should be dead.’ To which he says, ‘Fortunately, you’re not.’ As though that solved everything. People today, there’s no politeness anymore.”
In the meantime, she has pulled back her hair and pointed, her finger like an arrow, to a cut on her forehead.
“See that? And my neck hurts, oh it hurts, and around here too, guaranteed it’s whiplash, can’t be anything else, and whiplash, well, that’ll be months of misery, won’t it? Bettina had that once, the woman didn’t sleep for months afterward. So now I’m stuck here, without a car, and just when I have to get to the hospital every day and all. And Dad really wants me to—”
Charlie interrupts her. “So everything’s OK with Vincent?”
“Given the circumstances, you can hardly call that OK, Charlie, but I’m terribly concerned. Now, nothing new has happened, no, just the pulmonary edema. But I ask myself, how am I going to get to the hospital every day? And what about my neck?”
“Yes, it’s all dreadful for you,” Alexander soothes.
“You could take a cab, it’ll cost about ten euros a ride,” Charlie says, “or get a rental car until the damage has been repaired. They usually have those available at the larger auto shops.”
“The towing service dropped me at home first and then they took my car to the shop, apparently they always do it that way. And then I called them this morning, about nine, it could have been ten past, and they said it would take about a week, depending on how fast they got the new parts in. I said: ‘What do you mean, about a week? I can’t cope without a car, because my husband’s in the hospital and it’s not looking good at all.’ And then I said, ‘So, I need a car.’ ‘Yes, ma’am, but we can’t help you with that,’ he said. He said—”
“And that’s why all of us had to drop everything and rush over here?” Charlie says, turning away from Marie.
“I didn’t ask you all to come, did I? I called Alexander because I didn’t know what else to do.”
“We thought Dad was dying,” I say, keeping my voice level.
“Whatever made you think that? If Dad was dying, I’d have said that Dad was dying, wouldn’t I?”
“That’s true,” Alexander says.
Charlie looks at me and rolls her eyes.
“So, a rental car.” She grimaces like she’s imagining a vacation in a run-down hotel. “Well, I have to do something. Dad can’t be without me, not for five minutes. When I leave in the evening, he can’t stop begging me to stay a little longer.” She rotates her neck, her face suggesting someone is breaking her leg. “I think I’ll have my neck checked out in the hospital. Can you take me? You’re here now anyway, you’ll want to see Dad, so perhaps someone can come with me if they want to take an X-ray, if that’s not too much to ask. If you’re too busy, I’ll understand, you know, then I’ll look after myself. But you can’t be careful enough with a neck, Dad would agree. Oh, he’s going to get such a shock, he doesn’t even know about all this yet.”
We walk to the car. When Charlie goes to sit next to Alexander, Marie says, “Oh, so your mother has to climb into the back seat? All right, no problem.”
Alexander drives a four-door car, so there’s actually no difference between getting into the front or back, but Alexander looks at Charlie, who says, “Why don’t you sit in the front, then?” When Charlie joins me in the back, she squeezes my knee and makes a face like a silent scream. I giggle. I can’t help it, relief after the panic, I suspect.
“Oh, you think it’s funny, do you?” Marie says without looking back.
I recover myself. “Of course not,” I say, seriously. “Absolutely not.”
“There’s a strange stain on this seat, Alexander.”
“No idea what that is.”
“Well, and Daddy. That pulmonary edema is really not good news, sometimes it’s an indication of heart failure.” She looks in the sunshade’s mirror and studies her forehead. “I think it’s ketchup or something.”
“What?”
“The stain, ketchup. Have you been eating fries?”
“Huh?”
“Eating fries, in your car. I can still smell it a bit, I think, and that stain really could be ketchup.”
“I can’t smell anything.” Charlie lays her hand on Alexander’s shoulder.
“If I was you, I’d try to wash it off. They’ve got a good product for that, I’ll write down the name of it for you if you want. Otherwise, you could hang up one of those air fresheners. A car is part of the way you present yourself, dear.”
As he parks, Alexander says, “I’ll take Mom to get her neck checked out.”
“I want to see Daddy first,” Marie says as she wriggles out of the car.
“No,” Alexander says, “you’re going to think of yourself first. Come.” He takes her by the arm and, with some grumbling, she lets herself be coaxed along.
Charlie and I walk to the elevator.
“Hallelujah,” says Charlie. “I don’t know where you two find the patience.”
“Years of practice.” I grin because I always do when I say something like that.
An hour and a half later, Marie comes into Dad’s room. She is wearing a cervical collar, a very wide one, and moves her upper body as though there’s a plank in her skirt that reaches right up to the top of her spine.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Hmm, I have no choice, do I?” she says. “Whiplash, just as I feared.” Her blue eyeliner is slightly smudged, adding a grayish ring around her eyes, which already looked so sorrowful.
“Good thing you got it checked out.”
“Yes,” she says.
“We’re really going to have to get going now, though.”
Marie goes over to my father, bends over him, kisses his cheek, and keeps her face just a hair’s breadth from his. “I’ll tell you the whole story in a minute.”
“Yes, why don’t you make yourself comfortable on a chair.” This is a charming attempt by Dad to get her face at a bearable distance, I guess.
She hovers where she is. “Well, any better than yesterday?”
My father tries to sink away deeper into his pile of pillows. “Yes, yes, absolutely. Already a little better.” He sounds like he’ll say whatever she wants to hear after hours of torture.
“Oh, I’m glad about that.” Marie sits down.
“We really have to go. Sorry. Take care of yourself, Dad, and you too, Mom. See you tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” she says.
As I kiss my father again, he squeezes my hand and looks at me. His expression is somewhere between desperation and resignation. I wonder whether I’ve made things worse by getting him in contact with Joanna again. Charlie asks Marie where Alexander is.
“He went outside for a smoke. I think he assumed you might stay a bit longer.”
Charlie only smiles.
As we go to the elevator, I picture them sitting there, the two of them, her talki
ng about nothing, him saying nothing. It’s important to choose your partner wisely, I think, if only for the last part. I’m going to call Joanna, maybe she’d like to see him again.
Mona in Three Acts Page 28
