The Beggar's Pawn

by John L'Heureux

  He deleted the entire email and started fresh.

  Cara mia: Vast changes in my novel. I think I told you already that I’ve given up the idea of a novel about a novelist, etc. etc. and replaced it with a biographer writing a biography, etc. etc. but just today I decided on a much more radical change. I ran into your father and mother in the park and, while chatting with them, a whole new novel came to me: a study of contemporary life as seen through the lives of a dysfunctional family—my own, of course, not yours. This means jettisoning the fifth dimension and writing in a much more traditional form. I worry that I am giving in to the demands of the market but my muse tells me this is the story I must write.

  He was still erect and gave some thought to masturbation but decided instead to wait until Helen got home from Walmart and let her discover yet again what a real writer was capable of.

  14.

  The serious winter rains fell in January and the lion-colored hills around Palo Alto turned green overnight. The weather was cold for Northern California and it was dark by five o’clock and the combination of cold and dark proved enough for David Holliss. He retired from the university and from the English department. He had plenty to do. Research on Gissing promised to take him into oldest old age and there were books to read that he had always meant to get to someday and there was some interesting Home Box Office stuff to watch on television. And Netflix, of course. So the full, rich life of the intellect could continue without the burden of reading one more term paper or directing another PhD dissertation. What he disliked most of all was telling students their work was fine except for this and this and this and so you’d better just start over. And to be honest, David told Maggie, I was always slightly over my head in the English department and it’s a relief not to feel I have to live up to their standards. I’m at heart a vulgarian, and Judge Judy, he said, is just my speed.

  The winter rains trickled away in early April, and soon the hills turned ocher and amber and pale yellow, and David and Maggie went off every morning to the dog park. Dickens was slowing down these days. He still chased squirrels dutifully but you could see his heart was not in it. He was less eager to greet strangers. And his appetite was off. He would slobber all over you for a couple of licks from your bowl of ice cream but his canned dog food held little interest for him and his kibble held no interest at all. He continued, however, to dive for cover at any sign of tension in the house. When Maggie got exasperated with David for interfering with her cooking now that his whole life was free time, Dickens would respond to her raised voice, or even the start of a raised voice, by crawling on his belly beneath the kitchen table until the threat of battle had passed. And he seemed to have aches that the veterinarian could not identify. He had trouble getting up because his back legs kept giving way beneath him and when he slept he made small moans and his legs twitched convulsively.

  “He’s chasing a rabbit,” the vet said and dismissed the moans and the occasional limp as perfectly natural for an old dog. “But he’s only ten,” David said. “Well, he looks old,” the vet said. Dickens continued to moan and David and Maggie took him to another vet.

  “Bone cancer,” this second vet said. “There’s nothing much we can do. We’ll put him down when there’s too much pain.”

  “You’ll put me down first,” David said, and smiled grimly at how often comments like this came back to haunt you.

  And so David was not terribly surprised when early in May—steeped in irony as he was—he had his third stroke.

  He woke in the middle of the night with a terrible pain in the right side of his head. He had been dreaming he was a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay and they were subjecting him to enhanced interrogation by hammering a nail, slowly, with small taps, into the side of his head. It hurt so much that he sat up in bed, rigid with pain. A stroke, he said to himself, and he was right. He pushed himself out of bed and took a step in the direction of the bathroom and felt his hand slide down the wall until he was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He listened for a moment but there was no movement from Maggie. He tried to call her but succeeded only in making a small croaking sound. Maggie stirred in her bed and continued to sleep. Dickens, who slept across the doorway, came to inquire what was going on. It was two or two thirty in the morning—David could barely make out the clock—so he was on his own. Stroke or not, however, he could still think straight. You couldn’t call a doctor at this hour. And, since it was Sunday night, there was no point in going to the emergency room, where the janitors and their assistants would be taking blood and performing operations. The thing was to keep on thinking clearly. The thing was to get through this without making a fuss. The thing was . . . He tried to stand by pushing against the nightstand and working his way up the wall with his right hand as a kind of grappling hook and in a minute or two he had done it. He was standing. His left arm still had feeling in it though his left leg was useless. It was made of rubber and gave way under the least pressure. He took a deep breath and determined to go on. Leaning against the wall and pushing himself along with his right arm, he managed to stagger down the corridor to his study. It all looked different in the semi-dark, but he found his desk chair and collapsed into it and rested. He was rather proud of himself. He was surviving.

  “Good boy,” he tried to say to Dickens, who curled up at his feet.

  A blood clot, he decided, as bad as the first time, and maybe worse. So long as it doesn’t rupture. So long as the blood can find its way around the clot. What he had to do was keep his brain functioning and somehow get through the night.

  He picked up his worn copy of New Grub Street. Surely Gissing would help preserve whatever brainpower he still had. He began to read the introduction but the words failed to make any sense. He turned ahead to the familiar opening pages and after a while he began to follow Gissing’s story about the cruelty and barbarism of the publishing industry. He forced himself to read on and on and he was still reading in the morning when Maggie came down the corridor and asked, rhetorically, “What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?”

  His speech was thick and muddied but he was able to mumble, “It well may be,” and she realized at once what had happened.

  * * *

  —

  THE RECEPTIONIST AT THE EMERGENCY room was unimpressed. She had seen strokes before and the patients were usually delivered flat on their backs by ambulance. This one was standing at her desk and speaking, more or less, though it was true that he had propped himself up with his right arm. He seemed altogether too cheery for a stroke victim. She assigned him to Dr. Burke, who was the newest intern. He was cute and upbeat and could use the experience, she figured. Dr. Burke, who looked fourteen, was succeeded by several other interns who were also fourteen, and finally David was examined by an elderly doctor of twenty-six who confirmed that indeed he had had some kind of stroke. How bad it was and whether or not it had yet run its course remained a mystery. He would need an MRI and an MRA and a CAT scan before they could make a determination. Meanwhile he should think about his choices for a living will. If it came to the final crunch, did he want to be resuscitated or not? Did he want to refuse all extraordinary survival measures? For instance, some patients wanted to exclude intubation. How did he feel about a tube down his throat?

  All this death-or-no-death business came as a surprise to him, and the exhilaration he had felt in realizing he was still alive now took a downturn and he was gripped by a sudden panic. What about Maggie? What about Dickens? What about that goddam Gissing project? His high spirits vanished and he found himself merely embarrassed.

  “Choices, choices,” he said. “Can’t we wait until we see the results of the MRI and the other alphabets?”

  The answer was no. After a brief exchange with Maggie, he decided on no extraordinary means of survival, and intubation—yes—providing the breathing tube could be removed if he turned into a vegetable. Maggie would have to make the decision to pull the plug.


  They put him in a room with another stroke victim, this one unable to move or to speak, except to shout “Jesus!” at unexpected moments, and they left him there until they scheduled his brain tests. By that time he had resigned himself to whatever might happen, convinced that even with this third stroke he would be lucky: he’d stroll out of here into a brave new world of low cholesterol and healthy morning walks with Maggie and Dickens.

  * * *

  —

  CLAIRE HAD LONG SINCE given up her hope of playing Hedda Gabler and, having put aside the role, she also put aside her resentment of David, his failures as a father, a husband, a professor of the humanities. “Humanities, ha!” she had written Reginald in those old days, sublimated now and processed in her mind as part of her rich past history of loves and betrayals. She would have been surprised to learn that Reginald had put aside none of these things. They were still fresh in his mind and in his notes and he planned to make excellent use of them.

  “Humanities, ha!” she had written, but that was months earlier and long forgotten, and so when Maggie phoned her with the news that David had had another stroke, and this one was the real thing, Claire’s first rush of feeling was compassion for her mother, who had to face this all by herself, and then a kind of sadness that so big and energetic a man as David should be brought so low. She saw her father propped up in a wheelchair, head tipped to the side, mouth twisted in an effort to make himself understood. And drooling just a little.

  “I’ll come home right away,” she said.

  “I’m calling the others,” Maggie said. “It isn’t clear yet how bad he is. He hasn’t had his MRI or his MRA or his CAT scan. But I wanted you to know, just in case.”

  So it might be a false alarm. Claire experienced a moment of disappointment, as if she had used up all this sympathy unnecessarily.

  “Well,” she said. “Shall I come home or not? We’re rehearsing a repeat performance of You Can’t Take It with You, so it’s not what you’d call totally convenient for me to come, but I could. I can.” She waited for a response, but there was none. “The lighting is all done, really.” She waited some more. “Mother?” she said. She realized then that her mother was crying and could not speak. “I’ll come home. Poor Mama. Poor Misery. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Only if you can,” Maggie said, concealing her momentary anger at Claire’s lack of concern for her father. “Only if it’s not too much trouble.”

  * * *

  —

  MAGGIE CALLED SEDGE and left a message on his home phone. He got back to her late that evening.

  “Is this the real thing or is it a TIA?”

  “The doctor says it’s the real thing. It’s his third.”

  Sedge had rushed up to Palo Alto for the first two strokes only to discover there was nothing he needed to do and nothing he could do. It was just a matter of waiting for the old guy to recover. After the first stroke David had limped a little and then, in a while, he was fine. No residual effects beyond a left hand that sometimes went weak. There was that and a tendency to fall over when he stood up too quickly. Sedge had hung around wasting time. After David’s second stroke there had been no ill effects at all.

  “The third might be the lucky one.” Sedge said this before he thought of what that might mean. He quickly added, “I mean it might be a stroke with no side effects at all.”

  “I thought you should know,” Maggie said. She’d be damned if she was going to ask him to come home.

  “I’ll come home right away. Do you need anything?”

  “Just my husband,” she said, angry at the question itself.

  “You can count on me.”

  “I know that,” she said, without a trace of sarcasm.

  * * *

  —

  SHE PHONED WILL in Essex. She couldn’t recall the time difference—actually, she could but decided she didn’t care—and she reached him at three in the morning while he was still in bed with Cloris, the graduate student and wife-to-be.

  “I’ll call him for you,” Cloris said, as if at this hour he was down the corridor in his study.

  After a decorous pause, Will said, “Mother? I hope nothing’s wrong.”

  “It’s your father,” Maggie said. “He’s had a small stroke. Nothing too disastrous so far, but the doctors are keeping watch.” She was not sure she could handle the return home of Claire and Sedge and Will, all at the same time. “No need to pack a bag yet. I just thought you should know it’s happened.”

  Will at once fell into his Perfect Son mode: “I’ll check with British Air in the morning and I should be able to get an emergency flight tomorrow or at the latest the next day. I’ll be there, Mother.”

  “There’s no need for alarm, Will,” she said. “I just thought you should know . . . in case.”

  “Cloris will want to come as well. Don’t worry about meeting my plane. We’ll take a limo from the airport.”

  “Your father will pull through this, Will. There’s no need . . .”

  “Lots of love, Mother. See you soon.”

  All of them home, plus Cloris, the graduate student home-wrecker. She couldn’t stand even the idea of it.

  * * *

  —

  MAGGIE DID NOT TELL the neighbors about David’s stroke that first day. It was too private and too awful to share so she carried on as if nothing had happened. Nonetheless Dickens sensed that something had happened, and the neighbors, being for the most part academics, knew at once that something had happened. Not anything so interesting and final as death, but something disastrous that deserved their consideration and comment. There were no inquiring phone calls and certainly no pop-in visits, just a heightened awareness of what was or was not going on down the street in the Hollisses’ house. Nobody wanted to see David dead or even crippled, but there was a certain quiet satisfaction in someone’s brush with death that was not—thank God—your own.

  * * *

  —

  DAVID’S MRI AND MRA and CAT scan proved positive for a stroke.

  “A large blood clot has settled exactly here in the right side of your head,” the doctor said. He looked like a taller, thinner version of Robert Redford—blond hair and all—and patients were always relieved to be in the hands of this eminent neurologist. He was handsome and brilliant; it was almost as if his brilliance were a function of his good looks, and thus the families of the stricken were always unsure whether they were grateful or merely in love. “Exactly here,” the doctor said, and with his index finger he touched the very spot where in David’s dream they had driven the nail into his skull. “The clot’s still there, you can see it on the screen, but the blood has found a path around it and, despite the damage already done, if the blood sticks to that path, you’re well away. Give it a week or so.”

  “‘Well away’?” David said.

  “Good to go,” the handsome doctor said and let his blond hair fall forward on his brow. “All set to live again. Ready for the races.”

  He shook hands all around. He was the head of the department of neurology and had many more people to see and so he left them, grateful as they were, and went ahead on his glamorous way.

  David had been lucky for the third time. Was there no end to his good fortune?

  * * *

  —

  THE HANDSOME DOCTOR SHOWED him images of his brain. “Do you see those white spots? Those are dead matter. They show up in all the slides. They indicate where neurotransmitters have failed. No surprise. This is, after all, your third stroke—the first two were just blips on the screen—but you’re well into your seventies. What are you, seventy-four, seventy-five? You’ve earned your dead spots.”

  “But my speech isn’t affected. Or my thinking. Has my thinking been affected?”

  “Only you would know. Best to look on the bright side. We’ll give you blood thinners and you
’ll be good to go. Just be careful not to fall or hit your head.” He patted David on the shoulder. “Good man,” he said, already on his way, “good news, good news.”

  It was decided, despite the good news, to keep David in the hospital until the likelihood of another stroke had passed. A few days, perhaps a week.

  Hearing this, David lost some of his optimism. And as they suggested he might, he became unsteady on his feet, he limped a little, and he kept waiting for that bloody tsunami to slosh through his brain. So that when Claire flew in from Baltimore to give consolation to her mother and a decent burial to her father, she found a rather sulky, depressed old man who looked as if he should be dying but showed no signs of doing so.

  15.

  Claire was the first to arrive. Maggie met her at the airport and very nearly failed to recognize her. From her Broadway coach Claire had learned something about the art of makeup, and in the debacle over staging Hedda Gabler she had lost fifteen pounds, not a great deal in itself but for someone short and square the loss proved transformative. Her hair was cut fashionably short and streaked in auburn, lending a kind of feathery halo to her face. This was a new Claire and Maggie was for the moment struck silent.