Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  “Thank heaven your culture isn’t mine!” Lucinda said. “Anyone who’d say they didn’t love this I would erase from my address book.”

  Mal snorted. “Not if they had deep pockets.”

  Gently, she slapped him on the arm. “You are one mean child.” She rested her cheek on his shoulder.

  I excused myself and went to the loo. I sat on the closed toilet until I felt calm again.

  Friday evening, I put on my grandfather’s tuxedo. It had been cleaned but not worn since the night Mal had borrowed the shirt. It was early yet, and I sat in my living room with Rodgie beside me on the couch and Felicity perched on a hand. I did not allow her up on a shoulder, afraid she might soil my suit, though she was rarely so inconsiderate. With my other hand, I stroked Rodgie; glutton for affection, he groaned and pushed his head up against my palm. I stared at the clock; leaning beside it was a postcard I had received that day from Tony. Thanks for your presence, it read. You make me glow. Surprises me every time. I’m selling you by the dozen, you might like to know. See you back there in a month. (Don’t ask for royalties, rich boy.) I surveyed my living room and had a flash of objectivity in which I saw how dull it looked.

  I was to go by Mal’s flat first, then Lucinda’s. We would take a taxi to a restaurant that overlooked the northern reaches of Central Park, to a gala benefit, dinner and dancing, raising money so that disadvantaged children could take music lessons. Mal had received the invitation. He told us (though I was in on the pretense) that the two of us needed a fine night out. Lucinda had passed her midterms; a week of warm wind goaded us toward spring. There were things to celebrate, he said, and so, knowing how much Lucinda loved dancing, he had bought the tickets. We were forbidden to decline.

  I said good-bye to the animals and turned off all the lights but one. Halfway down the stairs, I stopped. I returned to my flat. Felicity was settling onto her perch, helping herself to her fruit cup, picking out morsels of banana, her favorite. Grapes would be next, then apples.

  I put a banana in the pocket of my overcoat and held out my hand. “Come, lass.” She flapped her wings as we left the flat, nervous and eager. Before we went outside, I folded her inside my coat against my chest.

  Mal had all his lights on; I wondered if his sight was failing, too. When I let my coat fall open and Felicity saw where she was, she let out a long, loud call and flew. She made a low swift circuit of the living room and shot back toward the bedroom. She flew laps, calling out with obvious delight. Parrots’ memories, it’s said, are as sharp as their lives are long. Mal was sitting on the couch. He watched her with a smile until she made a landing, at last, on my shoulder. I moved her onto the back of the couch, next to Mal.

  “Well, doctor, the transfer is complete,” he said. He reached up slowly to scratch Felicity’s neck. He moved now as if underwater; even this small motion must have hurt. “Thank you,” he said.

  We had an hour before I would leave to meet Lucinda. I still had not made up my mind if it would be right to try and dissuade him. But I could not get past imagining the words “Are you sure” or “Don’t you think.” He would outtalk me, as he always had. And he would be angry.

  I could hear Mal’s breathing. His lungs, which had not recovered fully from the trauma of his infection (and probably never would), were as terminally tired as his limbs; only his mind seemed agile now. This, Mal had argued, was essential. It was what he called the fulcrum point. You do not wait until your mind goes, too.

  “You’re staring at me,” he said. “As if you’re a bystander to a wreck.”

  “I just don’t want to believe . . .”

  Mal closed his eyes. A fringe of tears formed on the lashes. He wiped them away. “Shut up,” he said quietly. “Shut up and will you for fuck’s sake live. I am not going to dwell on you now, though I could say a few things. I am simply going to order you to live. Fucking, pissing, shitting live.”

  His crying was an awful sound, because he would not accept it. His pride had not tired, either.

  I sat beside him. I put a hand on his hands, which were clenched in his lap. He did not pull them away. With a deep harsh breath, he stopped crying.

  Felicity had flown across the room and settled on one of the chrome railings of the hospital bed. Mal looked at her and said, “I wish it would rain.”

  I asked him if he wanted a fire, and he said no. He asked me to help him back to the bedroom, into his bed. Felicity followed us, landing on a chair. She watched us intently for a few seconds; something was odd about the way these flightless creatures moved and spoke today, something was out of the ordinary, but we did not hold her interest for long.

  “I want you to tell me everything, so I know you know the script,” said Mal. I reviewed it all, as if I were his dutiful son, and then I fetched everything he told me he would need. I counted out the pills—morphine and, as Mal liked to call them, his Klaus Barbitols—and put them in a saucer beside the bed. I poured vodka into the purple glass pitcher from Venice. I pushed the empty vials down into the kitchen rubbish, which I would tie up and take outside when I left.

  I peeled the banana I had brought and put it on another saucer, which I set on Mal’s desk in the bedroom, next to a ramekin I’d filled with water. His computer was gone—given away, perhaps, like the flute.

  “You’re leaving her?” said Mal.

  “Unless you don’t want me to.”

  “Oh I’d like her to stay. I may hear her sing yet.” He looked at me. “You’d never clip her wings, would you?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  He said quietly, “She was deprived of the jungle and her fellow creatures, and for that I’ve sometimes felt guilty. I would never—never—take from her the gift of flight.”

  For so many months, I had believed I was waiting for his death, as if I just wanted to finish a chapter in my personal story. Not like the end of Mum’s life, when I had childishly imagined so many scenarios of healing: sudden remission, a diagnostic error; presto, a new magic bullet of a drug!

  “I’ve been a terrible friend,” I said as I stood at the foot of Mal’s bed.

  “No,” he said. “You’ve been an excellent friend. Fallible but excellent. What you have been terrible at is something else, something we’re not going to talk about now. There’s no more time for you, I’m sorry.” He spoke with abrupt strength, and I knew that from the moment I closed his door behind me until my appointed return in the morning, I would play out a thousand of the same wishful scenarios I had for Mum.

  “Take this quilt off the bed. I don’t want it ruined,” he said.

  I pulled Lucinda’s quilt off his legs. I folded it—the assembly of all those fine dresses, those evenings of dance and festivity—and laid it on a wooden trunk which I knew held clean sheets and blankets and a gold silk dressing gown, a gift from a long-ago fly-by-night lover. Too ludicrous to wear, said Mal, but much too fabulous not to keep. I had come to know this home as well as any I’d ever lived in myself.

  He told me to go. Just before I reached the door, I heard him laugh his exhausted laugh. I looked back toward the bedroom. He said, “She’s tickling me.” He sat on the edge of his bed, Felicity on his shoulder, shoving her beak behind his ear. “Go,” he said again, his face a brief illusion of joy.

  Lucinda opened her door with a similar expression: the smile of a girl greeting the boy of her dreams. She looked so magnificent, it broke my heart. She spun around and said, “How about this, young man?” as she held out the wide shiny skirt of a dress that shimmered both orange and green in the light. “I just learned the name of this fabric. It’s called ‘doupioni silk’—like something a maharanee would wear. I saw it in the window of this vintage shop around the corner. I hardly came equipped with a ball gown!”

  She told me I looked handsome. I helped her on with her coat, and she took my arm in a manner befitting the era of her dress. In the taxi, she began to talk about Mal. I had vowed to find a way to talk of other things—her vocati
on, her husband, her religion, her politics, her quilting, anything else—but I felt too numb to make the effort.

  The restaurant had an extraordinary view. On this cold black night, the park looked like a velvet sea, with patches of phosphorescence where lamps shone up through the skeletal trees. A quartet played all the songs Lucinda loved: Gershwin, Porter, Jerome Kern. When we danced (I was glad for my strict boyhood training), she sometimes sang the lyrics over my shoulder. “You’re such a good sport to do this,” she said at one point as we looped about the floor. “I’m almost falling in love.”

  “I’m not a good sport. I’m having a lovely time, too,” I said. On any other night, this would have been true.

  I ordered champagne with our dinner; Mal had told me that this was the one thing she would drink to excess. He hoped it would make her sleep late. After two glasses, she became teary and said, “Two more months. That’s all I’m bargaining for when I pray. His doctor told me that wasn’t an unrealistic hope. Just till we’ve had some real spring.”

  I gave her my handkerchief. “You’ve been through a lot. I admire you incredibly.”

  She blew her nose. “Oh no. I’ve led a completely charmed life until now. I have been the antithesis of Job.”

  “I know about Jonathan’s cancer,” I said. “That must have been an ordeal. I’m sure you still worry about him.”

  Lucinda set down her glass. “What cancer?”

  “His . . . Hodgkin’s? The summer before Mal was to go off to Juilliard?”

  She looked out the window at the view. Her expression was impossible to read. “Mal told you Jon had Hodgkin’s disease?”

  “He said that’s why he stayed up north instead of . . .”

  “That’s not . . .” She sipped champagne. “Sometimes Mal tells odd lies, his imagination gets a little out of control. He has such an imagination.” She shook her head, looking perplexed.

  I felt disoriented at her revelation but wanted, yet again, to flee from discussing Mal—especially, right now, from discussing how honest or dishonest he might be. I told her it was time to dance again.

  We closed down the party, as I had been instructed we should do. The last song was “A Hundred Years from Today.” Lucinda did not sing the words; I hoped she didn’t know them. Don’t save your kisses, warns the song. Be happy while you may.

  In the taxi, Lucinda leaned against my coat, crying and reminiscing about her son as a baby. She was saying, “You know, I breast-fed that child,” when we stopped in front of her building. “Almost no one did back then, you know. Not in Boston, where we were living while Zeke finished his degree. He did it like a natural, Mal, he just came out knowing what to do, how to survive. He did everything early and well—walk, talk, everything. My other children had to be coached and nurtured along. But that’s Malachy: he just knows how, he’s just so . . . masterful. And a know-it-all. Never stops correcting people. I tried to break that habit when he was little, I told him it would make him lonely, but would he listen? Well, what a silly question, right?”

  She refused to let me see her upstairs; the temperature had plummeted, and she was sure I’d never get another taxi. I could not find the right thing to say before we parted; when I saw her again, circumstances would surely have estranged us. In the end, we just held each other like old friends after a reunion.

  INCHES AWAY FROM MY SKULL, rain gives the roof a good thrashing. I sit with my boxed-up father in my lap. Mal was packaged the same way, but Lucinda chose a high-end container, cherry with a coffinlike finish, even if it was to serve its purpose for only a few months. It did not take her long to forgive me my complicity—either because she was in fact a saint or because Mal had explicitly asked her to in a letter left beside his bed. Up in Vermont that June, after we dropped the ashes in Lake Champlain, after I brushed the last of them from my clothes, after the mass Lucinda arranged, she showed me the letter. It began, Dear Mom, Before anything else, I have to demand this one thing: Burn me. Get rid of this body. I don’t care what you do by way of rites—have Kenny Rogers call a square dance, I don’t care—but burn me.

  After my evening out with Lucinda (my second betrayal to undo my first), I went home and changed into ordinary clothes. Mal did not want me to go to his flat before dawn, but I did not want to sleep. I sat in my living room, Rodgie beside me, and wrote down ideas for making this room a happier, more stylish place. I fell asleep despite myself and woke, my face in Rodgie’s fur, to the wail of a car alarm. It was six, the sky an indeterminate gray.

  I hurried into shoes and a coat. What must not occur was an early-morning visit from Lucinda. She had, more than once, shown up in Mal’s kitchen just after sunrise bearing fresh bread and fruit. He had not liked these visits, but he understood her anxiety. She would have been awake for hours, just waiting for the earliest possible time her arrival might seem acceptable.

  I stood for several minutes outside Mal’s door, key in lock, before I could let myself in. The first thing I saw was Felicity, her gorgeous red plumage a flame in the strengthening light. She slept on the chrome railing of the gypsy caravan; its circumference must have felt just right for her feet. When I closed the door, she raised her head and called to me. She flew to my shoulder. At moments, she looked so startling in her surroundings that she reminded me of the angel in paintings of the Annunciation. What were the angel’s first words? Fear not.

  I stood and listened. I heard nothing. I walked through the orderly kitchen past the loo and down the hall. It was still nearly dark in the bedroom, but I could see Mal. He lay face down, his head and one arm hanging over the edge of the bed. I listened again. My greatest fear had been that I would walk in on death throes, unearthly groanings, the kind of breathing I had heard from my mother before she died. My greatest hope had been that I would find an irate insomniac Mal, reading or watching the telly, saucer of pills and pitcher of vodka untouched on the table beside him.

  I looked at the table. Empty saucer. Pitcher three-quarters full. The plastic bag unused; something about that consoled me. I did not know if Mal was dead, but he was still. His face lay against the side of the mattress. The bony fingers of his fallen arm rested on the floor. What if he were merely asleep? As I moved closer to the bed, I smelled something awful. The exposed sheets looked wet or stained. Out of terror more than sorrow, I began to cry.

  Felicity brushed her head against my ear, knocked her beak on my temple, the signal that she was impatient for food. I reached up and touched her. I pulled myself together.

  I pushed Mal’s upper body back onto the bed. It was astonishingly light, like the body of a lifeless songbird. His skin felt cool, but it might have been cooled by sweat. I felt no breath; I did not want to try to detect a pulse, and he had not asked this of me.

  I went to the file cabinet and pulled out the medical folder he had shown me. It was thick with photocopied prescriptions. I had never paid close attention to the particulars of Mal’s medicines, to the cause-and-effect connections of this symptom with that drug, this drug with that life-sustaining cellular process. The names of the drugs were surprisingly few, but their repetition, over sheet after sheet, astounded me. They read like an inventory of the important things in life I refused to know.

  If it looked as if Mal had succeeded, I was to find and remove all prescriptions for the pills which Mal had used to kill himself. They were clipped together at the back and had come from three different doctors. Mal did not want to risk incriminating them—or have his mother blame them.

  When I had folded the incriminating papers and stuffed them into my coat pocket, I took Felicity into the kitchen. From another pocket, I took a bag of seeds and emptied it into a teacup. I took an apple from a bowl of fruit and cut it up. I left her on the counter, eating.

  I felt calmer. I returned to the bedroom and looked around, everywhere but at the bed itself. I did not know what I was looking for. A final memory for deliberate imprinting?

  What caught my eye was a red leather box on the floor bes
ide the bed. It was the kind of box used to file photographs. The label inside the small brass frame read CHRISTOPHER.

  Christopher? I sat on the floor and, weak-willed as ever, took the lid off the box. Inside was a scant collection of papers and photographs. Fifteen or twenty photographs, mostly of a child, a boy. One of Mal’s little nephews? But in a few pictures, the boy was much older, at least sixteen. In the latest, he was graduating from high school. Among the papers were two letters addressed to Mal in a careful feminine script, the return address in New Hampshire. (That far I did not go; I set the letters aside.) There was also a letter, older, postmarked May 2, 1968, from Lucinda. It was addressed to Mal at college.

  Close the box, I admonished myself. Close the box. I intended to, but before I did, I pulled from the very bottom a newsletter. It was called Notes in a Major Chord, dated Summer 1967. On the front page was a picture of a pretty teenage girl, clasping a cello between her knees, and two boys, one at a harpsichord, the other holding a flute. The story was headlined “Spirited Young Trio Delve Boldly into Baroque.” They were posing, not playing, and the flutist, with a homely brush cut but an adorable smile, was Mal. He rested one hand on the nearest shoulder of the cellist.

  The cellist—she had to be; of course she was—she would be the one with whom he had fallen “a little in love.”

  I looked again at the boy in the gown and tasseled cap; I looked at his eyes. Pale and incisive, they were so unmistakably Mal’s. And then I did close the box—though how desperately now I wanted to read those letters. How much did Lucinda, mother of mothers, have to do with this boy’s life, with his very being? Back then, had there even been a choice for the pretty young cellist, even without Lucinda’s persuasive meddling?

  Like a fever, a series of feelings that seemed entirely wrong for the moment but which I could not suppress overwhelmed me: envy toward the cellist who had been Mal’s lover, if only once perhaps, if only as a misguided tribute toward her talent; irritation toward Lucinda, though I could only guess her place in this drama; and a creeping contempt at the lie Mal had told about Jonathan to cover up what he must have looked back on as a crisis he should never have allowed to change his life the way it did. Or maybe it had freed him. I would never know, because this time, between life and nonlife, there had been no choice, not as Mal had seen it.