The Professor of Immortality

by Eileen Pollack

  Twice in the past week Maxine has searched her mother’s bureau, which holds only a few panties, brassieres, and nightgowns, and the drawer beneath the nightstand, in which her mother keeps an emery board and a tube of ChapStick. But she goes through the motions. She shuffles through the book of crossword puzzles, which, until recently, her mother worked to keep her mind sharp. The week’s menus from the dining room. The calendar of activities at Sunrise Hills. The tattered manila envelope in which her mother has stowed the birthday cards and letters Zach used to send when he went traveling.

  “Sorry, Mom. There’s nothing from Cousin Joel.”

  Her mother screws up her face to signify that even though she never attended college, she has been blessed with more common sense than her daughter. “I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing it for your son. That boy could accomplish great things. If only he had the resources. And Sam’s mother won’t leave a cent.”

  Maxine understands her mother’s concern with money. She grew up poor. Her share of Sayers Appliances ran out while Maxine was in high school. Aside from a pittance from Social Security, her mother has nothing. And she isn’t wrong that Zach won’t be getting an inheritance from Sam’s mother. Sam’s alcoholic father lost what little remained of the Pardue family shipbuilding fortune. The proceeds from Sam’s insurance went to pay Zach’s tuition at MIT. All of which adds to her reasons for not telling her mother Norm has heard from Zach. If her mother finds out her grandson really does need money, she will drive herself even crazier about the lawsuit.

  “It’s all right, Mom. Let’s get you ready for dinner.” She slides her arms beneath her mother’s back so she can lift her to her wheelchair.

  “Stop!” her mother shouts. “You’re hurting me!”

  Sick at heart, Maxine keeps maneuvering her mother’s rigid torso.

  “Stop! You always hurt me!”

  In all honesty, Maxine doesn’t have a clue what she is doing. Yesterday, when she tried to help her mother pull on a sweater, her mother’s arms got caught in the sleeves and she sat writhing like an animal in a trap. If only her mother would allow herself to be transferred to the floor for residents who need around-the-clock nursing. But that would mean admitting she is dying.

  Maxine braces herself, then swings her mother from the bed. She wheels her to the bathroom, lifts her from the chair, and settles her on the toilet. She turns her back and waits. Have any of the geniuses who are trying to keep humans alive forever actually cared for an aged parent? Presumably, what they are promising is immortal life without the need for some kind soul to wipe your genitals.

  With difficulty, she settles her mother back in her chair and wheels her to the dining hall. Eleven years earlier, when her mother moved to Sunrise Hills, she struggled to ingratiate herself with the best-dressed and most attractive female residents. But that was when she resided four floors down, in Independent Living. Here on the fifth floor, the staff arranges the seating based on who is cogent enough to carry on a conversation.

  “Hello, Elizabeth!” her mother shouts to the stout, white-haired lady to her right. “Such a beautiful sweater you are wearing!” The Parkinson’s causes her mother’s eyes to squeeze shut. Her mouth contorts. Her arms flutter around her head. And yet, she incorporates these distortions into her usual gestures, like a housewife who hopes no one will notice a mess because it blends with the pattern on the rug. The effect for Maxine is to make her mother seem a grotesque caricature of her younger self.

  The other women dip their spoons into their mushroom barley soup. Maxine’s mother, knowing if she attempts to spoon soup to her mouth she will dribble it on her lap, hasn’t circled “soup” on that day’s menu. She looks longingly at the roll on her bread plate, which some sadist has sealed in plastic. Maxine unwraps the roll. Without acknowledging the help, her mother tears off a piece. Hands jerking, she conveys it to her mouth.

  “You must be Henrietta’s daughter,” says the well-preserved redhead to Maxine’s left.

  “Yes,” Maxine says, bracing for what will follow.

  “Do you work at the university?” When Maxine answers yes, the woman asks if she knows her daughter, Megan Kavornick, who teaches in the political science department. Yes, Maxine says, she knows Megan slightly. The woman asks what subject Maxine teaches.

  “She studies the future,” her mother says dismissively. “She is trying to figure out how we can live forever.”

  “Ha!” another woman barks. “No thank you very much!”

  The redhead finishes her soup. She looks up happily. “Oh,” she says. “You must be Henrietta’s daughter. Do you know my daughter, Megan Kavornick? She teaches at the university. She’s a professor in the department of political science.”

  “Just ignore her,” her mother orders.

  “I’m sorry, no,” Maxine says. “I don’t know your daughter.”

  “That’s a shame. What do you do at the university? What subject do you teach?”

  Luckily, one of the staff, an older black woman who has as much trouble walking as the residents, brings the main course. Because Maxine’s mother can’t swallow solid food, her dinner consists of three scoops of mush, one beige, one green, one yellow. Her mother jabs her fork in the yellowish mound, which might be pureed chicken. Her arm jerks, and a dab of mush lands on her blouse, between the Eiffel Tower and the Folies Bergère. Her mother refuses to wear a bib; if Maxine offers to feed her, she snarls and says she doesn’t need any help. She finishes her roll, then sits shaking and grimacing while her tablemates pursue their only slightly more successful attempts to feed themselves.

  The waitress brings ice cream. Her mother allows Maxine to pry off the lid, then uses the flat wood spoon to convey the ice cream to her mouth. Maxine is dying for coffee. Not wanting to trouble the waitress, she crosses the room to a station where a glass pot squats on a Bunn-O-Matic. And whom does she see but Arnold Schlechter, using his maimed hand to spoon ice cream into the mouth of an elderly man who must be his father. With his flyaway white hair and the patch on one eye, the younger Schlechter doesn’t seem far removed from a nursing home himself.

  “Pop,” he says, “come on, you’ve got to keep up your strength.” He swabs a dash of vanilla from the old man’s lip. “Remember when you used to walk me to Coney Island to get a treat? And I asked if they named the island after the ice cream cones?” His father nods happily. Sensing a presence behind him, the younger Schlechter looks up. “Oh,” he says dully. “Marlene, isn’t it? Your husband directs that global technology group.”

  Maxine doesn’t bother to correct him. “I didn’t know your father was here. My mother is over there.”

  Schlechter doesn’t even pretend to search the room. “My wife and I moved Pop here from Brooklyn last month. But it’s taken longer than we anticipated for the jackass workmen to install a ramp on our house and add an accessible bathroom.” He turns back to the old man. “We’ll get you out of here day after tomorrow, Pop. I promise.”

  She wants to explain that her mother refused to come live with her, that she preferred the independence of Sunrise Hills. “It must have been hard for you today,” she says.

  “Hard? No. That son of a bitch gave me the chance to go on national television and take a logical knife to his idiotic ravings. Because of him, the ideas he detests have become far more widely promulgated than otherwise would have been the case.”

  Despite his vehemence, Maxine suspects that if you had asked Arnold Schlechter whether he preferred to let someone shoot out his right eye and blow three fingers off his right hand in return for a national forum for his ideas, he wouldn’t have accepted the proposition. Oddly, Schlechter and the bomber don’t disagree that computers threaten to destroy humanity. The major difference is that Schlechter believes the ugliest effects can be warded off, while the bomber maintains a revolution will be required. Maybe that’s enough to warrant
the bomber’s hatred. But she is nagged by the suspicion that the bomber has met Arnold Schlechter and taken a personal dislike to the man. Or he is channeling Maxine’s own repugnance.

  “I’m sure you’ve thought of this before, but is there any chance the bomber was one of your students?”

  Schlechter puts down the wooden spoon with which he has been feeding his father—she can’t avoid staring at his stumps. “First of all, I long ago turned over my student rosters to the FBI. If they found a match, they would have notified me. Second, I am not going to waste my time trying to understand what drove this cretin to commit such heinous acts. I don’t care if he grew up ‘oppressed,’ or ‘abused.’ Despite what you liberals think, evil exists. And I am singularly ill equipped to comprehend it. I refuse to allow an act of terrorism to alter who I am, or what I might believe, or how I might behave.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I can see that. I’m sorry I brought this up.”

  “I did think I might find a little peace and quiet here, of all places. I thought I might be able to share a pleasant dinner with my father. Right, Pop?” He takes the old man’s withered hand and presses it to his cheek, beneath the eye patch.

  “I’m sorry,” she says again. At the coffee station, she pours a cup of room-temperature sludge but spatters the liquid on her pantyhose. Avoiding the Schlechters, she takes the long way to her mother. She brushes the crumbs from her mother’s lap, then tries to wipe the stains from her blouse.

  Her mother flails to make her stop. “Take me to my room,” she orders.

  Maxine backs her mother’s chair from the table. “Good night, Mrs. Dean. Good night, Mrs. Cooper. Mrs. Kavornick, if I see your daughter, I’ll tell her you said hello.”

  “Oh?” Mrs. Kavornick says. “You know my Megan? Do you work with her at the university?”

  Maxine wheels her mother to her room. Her mother wants to watch the news, so Maxine switches on the television. And there he is, Arnold Schlechter, standing against a painted backdrop of the university’s iconic bell tower, spraying saliva as he says he doesn’t care to discuss the terrorist’s so-called motives because we need to recognize evil when it blows up in our faces. The déjà vu feels uncanny.

  The anchor displays the sketch of the bomber everyone has seen a million times. It shows a man wearing aviator sunglasses and a hoodie. He reminds Maxine of no one she has ever known.

  “That’s the one,” her mother says. “That’s the young man who played with Zach.”

  “Norm?” she says. Except for the hoodie, the man in the sketch looks nothing like her son’s friend. They aren’t even the same race.

  “No! Norm was only a silly boy. I mean the one who played with him after school. You never were careful whom you allowed …” She gasps for breath. “To associate with. My grandson.”

  Instantly, Maxine knows who her mother means. She knows, because she has spent the entire day pretending she didn’t know. “Thaddy?”

  “I don’t remember the name. But yes. He was always telling Zach to turn off his computer. Throw it away. Smash it. He wanted Zach to go outdoors. Which I approved of.” She gags on her own saliva. “But something about that young man put me off.”

  Maxine is glad she hasn’t eaten dinner—she feels like vomiting. “How do you know all that? Did Zach talk to you about Thaddy?”

  “Zach liked this Thaddy. But what the young man told Zach worried him. It worried me. Even before I met him.”

  “You met Thaddy?” As Maxine remembers, Thaddy refused to drive a car.

  “They bicycled here to visit me. But I could tell something was off. Your son always was too kind. You could have left him in the care of an axe murderer …” She struggles to breathe. “And Zach would have said the man was nice. So as not to hurt his feelings.” Her mother screws up her face. “You were the same way, as a child.” She uses her left hand to capture the right and imprison it in her lap. “You still are.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I brought up my concerns.” Her mother coughs. “I told you he might be … after Zach.”

  “After him?”

  “You let them go camping!” Her mother licks her lips. The gesture seems salacious, even though Maxine knows her mother licks her lips because talking requires such effort. “Maybe this young man wasn’t homosexual. But something bothered me. About his eyes.”

  Maxine needs to steady herself. Years ago, she asked Thaddy to keep her son company a few afternoons a week, after school. Zach was thirteen. Maybe fourteen. Thaddy hadn’t minded. He liked Zach. It wasn’t as if she hired him as a babysitter. But she allowed Thaddy to take Zach on a sleepover in the Arboretum. Thaddy wasn’t gay. But if he was as lonely as she remembers him. If the women his own age kept turning him down.

  No. That isn’t what she is afraid of.

  “Oh, Mom!” she says. “What if Zach … What if I tell the authorities about Thaddy, and Zach ends up having something to do with …” She can’t bring herself to say “the bombings.” But what if Zach remained in contact with Thaddy even after Thaddy left Ann Arbor? What if that’s why Zach quit his job and went into hiding? She braces herself for her mother’s diatribe condemning Maxine for neglecting Zach in favor of her research. For allowing him to spend time with a graduate student she didn’t know very well. For not hiring a detective when Zach went missing.

  Instead, what her mother says is: “If you think for one minute my darling grandson …” Her features cloud. “Unless this student of yours might have hurt Zach? Might be involved in his disappearance?”

  “God, I have to figure this out. Are you going to be okay? Should I help you get back in bed?”

  “Go.” Her mother jerks her hand. “But don’t forget my appointment. The time in the basement is an hour earlier.”

  Maxine forgives her mother for thinking about her appearance at a time like this. After all, she believes her grandson to be incapable of anything hurtful or illegal. Maxine also believes her son is innocent. But she can’t help thinking that somewhere in America, the mother of the young man who actually is responsible for all these maimings and deaths believes her son to be incapable of such evil, too.

  … Regrets Something She Failed to Do

  So many months have passed since she visited her old office in the Residential College that Maxine feels like a ghost here. Or an emissary from these students’ future. They laugh and high-five each other, skittering through the shadowy passages on their way to rehearse some artsy production of The Tempest or the Cuban drumming concert for which posters line the corridor, unaware that one day they, too, will be mourning a spouse, missing a child, or caring for an elderly parent.

  Or maybe they won’t be. By the time these undergraduates are in their fifties, the medical profession might have conquered aging. When the withered crones rocking in her mother’s nursing home were born, penicillin hadn’t been discovered. Scientists didn’t have a clue as to the existence of DNA.

  Her office door is taped with yellowing cartoons of every variation of a fish evolving into an amphibian who crawls onto dry land and evolves into a small, lumpy mammal, who evolves into a stooped, hairy primate, who evolves into an upright man, who evolves into the punchline of the gag: a bearded hippie protesting with a sign that reads THE END IS NEAR; a fat, balding hacker slouched over a video game; or, Maxine’s favorite, a woman waiting to ask,“What took you so long to get here?”

  She flicks on the light, sets her backpack beside the desk, which, unlike the metal desk in her office at the IFS, is made of wood, as are the bookshelves, the filing cabinet, and the chair in which she sits. On a ledge above the radiator sits the stuffed beaver Sam gave her the year they met—the beaver being the mascot of MIT.

  That year, the year they met, Maxine had been twenty-one and Sam four years her senior. He had just started work for an affable if demanding Iranian
engineer who had been commissioned by the United Nations to come up with low-cost methods of manufacturing building materials in developing countries. Whenever Sam got frustrated, he would go out and pace the Harvard Bridge. This was Maxine’s first year studying for a degree in a field the university called Science, Technology, and Society and her classmates in engineering called Good Luck Finding a Job. She would be sitting in her cubicle at the library when her anxiety would build to such a pitch she jumped from her seat, abandoned her notebooks and pens, even her precious new TI-30 calculator, and jogged to the Longfellow Bridge, past its salt-and-pepper-shaker towers, along the Boston side of the Charles, past the sailing club and the bandshell, then back across the Harvard Bridge to the library, where, panting now, calmer, she felt able to confront whatever problem she had been trying to get a grip on, as if her mind had been working all along, the way the pickerel, eels, and alewives had been carrying on their lives beneath the shadowy surface of the Charles River even as she jogged past them.

  Sadly, she knew as much about proper running technique as those pickerel and eels knew. The day she met Sam, she took too big a leap and landed awkwardly. She winced, then hop-skip-hopped across the bridge, trying not to put too much weight on the damaged ankle. When a reedy, bearded stranger asked if she needed help, her impulse was to tell him no. She had just spent four years surrounded by men who gazed at her across a laboratory, hoping she might ask their assistance connecting a circuit or debugging a program. Even if she had been crawling across that bridge with four shattered limbs and a machete protruding from her back, she would have insisted she was fine.

  But she couldn’t tell this stranger no. He was like some dog that had been trained its whole life to assist a human in need. Although Sam told her later the opposite was the case. He was determined to avoid the trap the world sets for the children of alcoholics. Namely, turning them into world-class rescuers. What attracted him was Maxine’s obvious determination not to be rescued. Plus, he liked the way she had piled her hair atop her head, so he could see the sweat bubbling on her neck. He would have an excellent excuse to settle her on a bench, unlace her shoe, hold her swelling foot and ask, “Does this hurt? Does that?”