“Is it hopeless?” Mary peered up at him as at a divinity.
“Nooo. He could start to regain some use of his right side, perhaps even speak again. But there’s severe damage to a critical part of the left brain. Some of it is probably irrevocable.”
He stood up. He was eager to get away from them, Elizabeth thought. Didn’t like delivering bad news. She stood too, put her hand out to shake his. They all stood, shook hands, uttered politenesses. He’s not the one to talk to. Doesn’t know the nitty-gritty.
After he’d left, Elizabeth said, “I’d like to … do you mind waiting? I’d like to speak to the nurse.”
“We’ll all go,” Mary said authoritatively.
They found Edna Thompson in the ICU control room. Elizabeth addressed the nurse in a low voice, respectfully.
My God: what’s happened to her? where’s her usual arrogant manner? Mary wondered.
“Nurse Thompson, we—my sisters and I—have been wondering. Our father seems—somewhat angry. He seems aware we are present but he doesn’t respond to us. We’re a bit upset about this.”
The nurse put her hand on Elizabeth’s arm, and looked in her eyes (first time she’s done that, Mary thought). “Oh, Ms. Upton, I understand you’re upset. But try to imagine what you’d feel like if you woke up and found yourself paralyzed, unable to speak, unable to move on your own. Especially a big important man like that. The poor soul is just bewildered and frustrated. It’ll take a few days for him to comprehend and then to accept what’s happened to him. And that can be hard on the family—they sometimes mistake that frustration for anger—but believe me, your dad’s not angry, he’s just confused and frustrated. He’ll be better in a few days, you’ll see.”
But he was not. Moved on Monday to a private room on an upper floor, surrounded by flowers and magazines his daughters provided (others having by now forgotten him), he continued to glare into space.
“Raging at his fate, such a powerful eloquent man, unable to speak, you can understand it.” Dr. Stamp shook his head sadly. “‘Do not go gently into that good night,’” he intoned, showing off. “‘Rage, rage at the dying of the light!’”
The nurse from the rehab hospital had indeed rejected him, Dr. Stamp said apologetically. There was an excellent nursing home near Boston, on the North Shore. Expensive, but he presumed that was not a problem. Good because it was not too far from Logan—they could fly in and visit him, fly out again the same day. Would they like to drive up and see it?
“Could we take him home?” Alex asked timidly, darting looks at Elizabeth.
He stopped dead. “And do what?”
“Take care of him ourselves.”
“You sure you want to do that?”
“No. What do you think?” Elizabeth said.
Amazing. She sounds human, thought Mary.
He shook his head from side to side. “Well.” He grimaced. No idea what they were getting themselves into, these girls. Love, affection, duty, admirable of course, but … “Well. It would be hard, I have to warn you. You’d have to have a visiting nurse once a day to check his blood pressure, listen to his heart and lungs, make sure he had no congestion in his chest, check his calves to make sure he isn’t developing phlebitis. He’d have to be fed—of course he can help feed himself with his left hand. He’d have to void in a bedpan, which would have to be emptied; he’d have to be bathed every day, sponge bath of course. He might get, probably will get bedsores, which need applications of ointment. You’d have to work to keep his bottom dry. He’d need a hospital bed with electric controls and—other stuff—the nurses would know. A foam rubber mattress, a soft sheet of some sort.”
“Chamois. And a bed tray,” Alex said helpfully.
“Right.” He looked at them meaningfully. “It would mean the most basic care, like taking care of a baby. Round-the-clock. Possibly for years.”
“Thank you, Doctor, we’ll think about what you’ve said,” Elizabeth said crisply.
“He could have another stroke. It might be frightening for you,” he warned.
“What are the chances of that?” Mary asked timidly. “Another stroke.”
He shrugged, sighed, shook his head. “I can’t predict. But most people don’t live long in his condition.”
The sisters nodded and went home.
As soon as lunch was over, the table cleared, Elizabeth spoke.
“So what do we do?”
“He’d hate being in a nursing home,” Alex said.
“He’d like us wiping his bottom?” Elizabeth asked.
“He’d loathe it,” Mary moaned.
“Don’t expect me to do it,” Ronnie warned.
“Why? Didn’t he take care of you when you were a baby?” Mary said querulously. “Change your nappies and feed you your pabulum? What an ungrateful child!” Ronnie swung around to face her and she laughed, laying her hand over Ronnie’s. Ungloved. “We could hire a woman to do it,” she said. “A stranger. A practical nurse, if they still exist.”
“He’d prefer that. Of all the options. Being in his own house but being tended by a servant. He’d hate us doing it but he’d also hate a nursing home.”
“Do we care what he hates?”
“We care what we hate.”
“If he goes to a nursing home he’ll fade and die. We can write him off, we’ll never get a word out of him.”
They stared at the table, mouths set, silent.
“And we want a word out of him. I do, anyway.”
“You may not get it anyway.”
“But are we prepared to spend months, maybe years here, taking care of him?” Elizabeth asked. “I’m not.”
“Nor I. We have our own lives to get on with,” Mary agreed. How can I borrow money from a man who can’t speak?
“I have unfinished business with him,” Alex insisted. “We can send him to a nursing home when we’re through with him. Say we found it too much. Dr. Stamp will certainly understand.”
“You’re really ruthless,” Mary said, surprised.
They looked at Alex, at each other.
“Wouldn’t you like a few answers from him too?” she asked sharply.
Mary and Elizabeth exchanged a deep look. They glanced at Ronnie, who dropped her eyes.
“It’s decided then?”
“I’m in favor. For a while.” Elizabeth laid her hand down in the center of the table. Mary put hers over it, Alex added hers. Ronnie hesitated, then added hers. “Is this a pact?” she asked.
They nodded.
She grinned. “Do we mingle blood?”
Elizabeth and Mary didn’t know where it might be, but Ronnie looked in the key cabinet and sure enough, there was a key labeled “Nursery Wing.” Alex went upstairs and tried it. The key turned but the door stuck. She banged and pushed, but it didn’t open until she pressed down on the doorknob with all her weight. Then it swung open; she peered in. No wonder it stuck, hadn’t been opened in years, maybe decades from the look of it. Dust webbed the windows, the legs of tables, the angles of walls and ceiling. Cobweb dimmed the light from the windows but the room was still light enough, a large children’s playroom, cluttered with sturdy old-fashioned wooden furniture, armchairs covered with bright-colored chintzes, child-sized chairs and tables for drawing and games, shelves along the walls holding dolls, books, stacks of games. Alex moved farther into the room and examined the shelves more closely. Mostly girls’ toys, but a few toy trucks and cars, a chemistry set. Must have been Elizabeth’s. Or mine? Freezing in here, the radiators turned off, chill dank air that hasn’t been disturbed maybe since I was nine years old, the last child to play here. For surely Ronnie was never allowed to. Why not after all. It was too bad.
“It would blur distinctions, which always leads to disaster.”
Was that his voice? Do I remember it?
She walked toward the hallway to the right, toward what she remembered as the nanny’s room, yes there was the toilet and the bathroom. She stopped, a memory clicking into
place: Mommy. Her mother, here. She slept here when I was sick. And when I was having all those nightmares. Terrible nightmares, she still remembered them, horrible monsters pursuing her, pressing her into corners. …
She pushed open the nanny’s room door—bare and shabby but also bright. The upstairs rooms were lighter than the front rooms downstairs. The ones you were in at night. Seemed topsy-turvy.
The narrow iron bed was covered with a cheap cotton spread; the mirror over the chest of drawers had some old faded photographs stuck in it—Mary, it looked like, about three or four. Left behind by the last nanny?
She went to the window and looked down—a kitchen garden, protected by palings, invisible from the public outdoor spaces.
Don’t remember that. I would have loved it, seeing vegetables grow, I would have helped plant, or at least harvest. … Pick tomatoes, green beans. Fun. Was it here then? I bet Noradia put it in. Ronnie and her plants. Yes.
She turned, retracing her steps through the playroom and entering the hallway to the left. She stopped in the doorway of a large white functional room. The nursery. A workroom: no lace-skirted pink-bowed bassinets here. Two narrow beds, a large crib and a small one, a changing table, shelves piled with receiving blankets, baby-sized flannel pajamas, tiny undershirts, and hundreds of diapers, yellowed and dusty now. She peered inside an old Bathinette: its rubber basin was cracked and filthy. Her body began to shudder. She glanced at the cribs, asking herself which was hers, glanced at the beds, glanced away. Her body jerked. She could not breathe, breath wouldn’t go in or out, the room shivered. She put out a hand to steady herself, touched cobweb climbing up a shelf, cried out, jerked away carrying a sticky trail. …
She woke up on the floor in a crumpled heap. She reached out to pull herself up, touched the same sticky goo, whimpered. She staggered out of the room and across the playroom to the bathroom, turned the tap on full force and put her hands under the water. She stood there as the water hit her hands with such force it sprayed out onto her pants, onto the floor. Her pants were soaked, the floor puddled, before she removed her hands and looked for a towel. The towels hanging on the rod were grimy with dust. She rubbed her hands on the sides of her pants, then put them under the water again and cupped them, tossing water onto her face. She turned off the tap and with the edges of her fingers picked up one of the dusty towels and dropped it on the puddle on the floor. Without wiping up the water, she walked as steadily as she could to the door of the nursery wing. When she left it, she locked it again.
Elizabeth swung around in the desk chair. What the fuck am I doing, what am I getting myself into, I could lose my job, this is insane. I’ll become a nonserious person in their eyes, lose what edge I have: men don’t take leaves to tend their sick fathers. Not even their sick wives or kids. You are truly mad if you do this. You have to be like them if you want to get ahead. Even the doctor thinks it’s crazy. Stick him in a nursing home and get it over with. The others will go along with whatever you decide. Your silence has created a power vacuum in which Alex is able to force her will on them. After all, what do you owe him? An education, that’s all he ever gave you. And with his money, he didn’t feel that at all.
Not doing it for him.
What then. Keep your eye on your priorities, what you want, what you need. Don’t get caught in emotional struggles that don’t advance you, the underbrush that booby-traps people, holds them in the past when they think their eyes are on the future.
Everything I’ve ever done was for him.
Nonsense. You’ve derived considerable pleasure from your work and certainly from your status.
Didn’t help. Couldn’t make up for all the rest.
Nothing can. … So do what’s best for you now.
She threw her glasses down on the desk and stood up, stared out at the darkening sky. Not even four o’clock and starting to get dark. What day was it, November 26, a month yet till the solstice, December 22, shortest day of the year, when all hope seems dead.
Clare died in May, a beautiful spring day, life returning. Weather means nothing.
Nothing means anything.
She kept pressing her lips together. Her heart was heaving like a stomach just before it erupts.
She and Clare drinking in his favorite Oxford pub, the Spread Eagle, sitting outdoors at a rustic table on a May evening, talking, talking. No end to their conversations, they could have gone on forever. She wanted them never to end but of course he always had to go home. They’d dawdle toward his car, then drive back to London, he’d drop her in Hampstead, head home to Ellen. Sometimes he’d take her home with him—lumbering old house in Ladbroke Grove, surrounded by huge shabby old Victorian houses. It always looked uninhabited from the front because it was always dark, but he’d walk straight to the back where Ellen had set up a studio in an old greenhouse, electric heater going full blast in the drafty damp room. She’d look up at him from her easel or sketch pad—oh hello, you came home for tea? Hello, Elizabeth, you here for tea? Leave the room, disappear for twenty minutes, show up in the sitting room with sandwiches with almost no filling, tea, packaged cake on a tray. For Clare the gourmet. Ate little herself, rail-thin, silent, paying no attention to Clare, who went on talking a mile a minute as if Ellen didn’t matter, as if he didn’t notice her anger or distance or whatever it was, as if he didn’t notice how bad the food was, how dismissive. Uncomfortable. Didn’t like going there. Better when we were off somewhere, in his study at LSE, driving down to Oxford to visit someone. He never came to my room. Did I invite him? Probably not—ashamed of the shabby furniture, gas ring, electric kettle, nosy landlady. Afraid of his reaction to being in my bedroom. …
Time he was invited to Paris and took me along: his assistant! God how my heart leapt, was this it, was he going to make love to me now, was I going to find out what love was like? Twenty-two I was, skinny, practically no breasts or hips, a boy’s body. People said I looked like Katharine Hepburn. My hair was long and straight, brilliant red then, it drew attention. Before we left I went to a little boutique near Claridge’s and spent a month’s allowance on satin pajamas and a matching satin robe, deep gray, forgot to buy slippers, would have looked really stupid, all dressed up in satin with bare feet.
Didn’t matter.
My complexion must have matched my hair, I was so excited as we checked into the hotel, charming place on the Left Bank, looked like an old farmhouse. The room was furnished with real furniture, old pieces, lovely, big old windows with lace curtains. Gone now. At least I couldn’t find it last time I walked the Left Bank. A huge bathtub in the corner of my room, screened by lace-covered panels. Two rooms, of course. Of course. My hands trembled as I unpacked, hung my things in the armoire, I had trouble with the hangers, dresses kept sliding off. Went off to the conference to register, everyone knew him, he introduced me to all of them, all men, the way they looked at me I was sure they knew, they didn’t take me seriously. I was embarrassed, I was still innocent, didn’t know nooky was standard at conferences, but oh I was proud too—of being his, of loving him, being loved by him. He loved me. I know he did. But he never said he did, did he, Elizabeth. Never even hinted it. Not then. Not until it was too late. Nothing personal in our talk. Oh, he’d asked a little about Father, my life in the States. I made it sound as if I lived full-time in a mansion in Lincoln. Concord Academy, Smith College: it all sounded good.
Dinner with a bunch of them in some brasserie, strange food to me then, choucroute garnie, pork hocks, headcheese, escargots, much wine and talk, late. Peck on the cheek, good night Elizabeth dear, see you at eight tomorrow morning, be sure to be ready on time.
I walked down the hall to my room just as out of control as I’d been that morning, not-seeing, not-hearing, heart pounding not leaping anymore: he didn’t love me. He wasn’t going to. Why? Am I ugly? Lack charm? Don’t play up to a man’s great god-self the way Mary does?
I put on the satin pajamas and robe, I sat at the little table facing the French windo
ws overlooking the street and I poured myself a drink from the bottle of single-malt whiskey Clare had insisted I buy at the duty-free shop. I toasted myself: Here’s to Elizabeth, so ugly, charmless, ungainly, awkward, egotistical, superior, arrogant, and nonsexy that even a man who loves her doesn’t want to go to bed with her!
Drank myself silly, had a big head all day next day, went through the motions at the conference. Of course he didn’t really need me there and I wondered why he’d brought me, and by dinner, when I’d recovered, I asked him. A little bitterly, maybe.
“Liz, I want you to get exposure. Getting to know a professional world, getting familiar with faces and names and the language, the manners—these things are everything, believe me. I want you to learn them. Talk to people, establish a connection with them. In the academic world, that can make all the difference.”
My heart felt like a desert suddenly rained on, I was overcome with gratitude. How could I have questioned him? So good he was, intent on educating me, introducing me to the world he hoped I’d be able to enter. Of course he wouldn’t go to bed with me, he was a married man, he was honorable, respectful of women, even of his bitter indifferent wife, respectful of me.
So we went on and in that understanding my mind blossomed, I could trust him, trust his mind, his character, his honesty. He loved me as a protégée, the way men love boys, advance them, further their careers, and if there was any other element in his love, well, that had to be sacrificed to honor. Went on together for years, even after I came back to Washington; we wrote every week, spoke on the phone. I went to England every summer, spent time with him there. We went together to Italy one summer, to the Loire Valley, to Normandy and Brittany—to Mont-Saint-Michel, the fortifications at Saint-Lô, the Bayeux Tapestry, the chemins cru, food cooked with apples and cream and calvados. Made me sick one night.
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