Wives & Lovers Page 5

  “I want to go home. That is my wish. Can I not be granted that after ninety-four years?”

  The doctor shrugged. He was the family physician, and he would do what the family wanted under the circumstances.

  So they came back to the house, Henry and his mother. They spent two days getting used to living with the injury, and with Elena’s new inability to keep down anything solid. They had been doing all right, and though she spoke of death now and then, Henry had marked the signs that her appetite was improving. He had in fact already begun thinking about life beyond the winter months, when the bones would heal enough and the cast could be removed, and her appetite would return to normal again. He could not believe that she wouldn’t make it through to another summer. He had been thinking about the snow as something in the way of the coming spring—warm weather to take her out in, flowers for her to appreciate once more. Work for him to do around the house. She had always been so healthy. He’d read of a woman who was a hundred and thirteen. Nineteen years older than his mother.

  But her appetite grew worse, and the snow came, the winds, the biting cold and ice.

  Now she turns to him and seems to search his face, as though wanting to see, if she can, the change in the set of his features, the thing that might betray him, give forth the answer to her own unasked question.

  HAVING GROWN UP IN this house, as the only boy in the house, he had been coddled and spoiled by the women in it. Aunt Viola’s words: coddled and spoiled. Viola was his mother’s great-aunt, who as a young girl living in northern Virginia had looked upon Robert E. Lee, and had grown up to write a book about manners, customs of entertainment and propriety for a lost country, a place that had already changed utterly before she was old enough to write. But it took people so long to recognize that what they had valued and thought was true was in fact no longer valuable or true. Aunt Viola’s book was an old embarrassment by the time Henry was born, and she herself had reached that age when no one asks about future plans. She had her history; she was gruff and direct, and she frightened Henry, with her dark-spotted hands and her great bulk, sitting immovable in the kitchen, in the aroma of whatever she was baking.

  “Stand here,” she would say to Henry, meaning that he should approach her and be within reach of those thick-fingered hands. He was sixteen. He couldn’t remember a time when she had not been there, ruling everything, the whole family. She had raised his mother alone, in a time when women weren’t even allowed to vote. “Here,” she would say. And Henry would stand there to be examined.

  “Skinny.” Her hands went over his shoulders, down his arms, as though she were judging the texture of the skin. “Too skinny. When’re you going to get some meat on these bones?”

  “I don’t know,” he would answer.

  “Well, you have good broad shoulders. That’s an important thing for a man to have.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And talk like this,” she said, drawing her chin down into her chest and lowering her voice. “Your voice is too high. You have the face of a girl.”

  “I don’t shave yet,” he said.

  And she dismissed him. “Skinny.”

  It seemed to him that she was always leading up to something like this conversation with him. And somehow she had a way of reading him, of seeing through him. And it was she who always led the talk, the women sitting in the kitchen listening to her, right up to the first years of his marriage. It was a standard and accepted thing in the family that Aunt Viola didn’t like men: she had a visceral reaction to them, like some people have to spiders, or mice.

  “YOU FEEL FAINT BECAUSE you haven’t eaten anything solid in a while,” he says to his mother, now.

  “No. Right. I’m fine.”

  “Your color’s good,” he says.

  She breathes. “I felt as though I was sailing away.”

  “Any pain?”

  “My back’s sore. My wrist under this cast. The side of my neck. I’m one ache from head to toe.” Again, she’s attending to something inside. Her hand tightens on his. “Talk to me, son.”

  He can’t think.

  “I know,” she says. “Talk to me about Christmases.”

  He tries to think of something; he’s fifty-eight years old and he can’t call up the full memory of a single Christmas. All those Christmases with at least one child in the house, and everything is indistinct with repetition, clouded by habit; it all runs together. He can see that she’s being brave, staring out the window at the snow gathering on the lawn.

  “I don’t remember the last white Christmas,” he tells her.

  “I never get tired of snow,” she says. “Even now when it’s so treacherous to someone like me.”

  “Be nice if we had a fire,” he says, trying to seem calm.

  “Don’t go to all that trouble now.”

  “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  “Talk about something,” she says.

  His mind is blank.

  “How long were you and Lorraine married—how many winters.”

  “Elena.”

  “Think,” she says.

  It’s a command. He hears something almost dismissive in it. “Thirty-six years.” He’s taken her hand now and is holding it in both of his.

  “You were the most beautiful couple,” she says. “I don’t understand why you had such trouble all the time.” It’s what she has often tried to console him with. The thought comes to him that she knows so little about him, really. She knows he had some trouble with alcohol over the years; she knows his wife did, too. She knows Lorraine has left him. She’s connected the two things, and has forgiven him for it, since, decades ago, her own husband had the same problem. But it’s not the alcohol—it was never the alcohol—and among the things she doesn’t know is that he never felt any ease in the society of his own house, his own wife and children. Something roiled in him and quailed, and poor Lorraine stood it—the restlessness and the fits of drunkenness and the periodic infidelity; the remorse and the appeals for understanding, the confusion, the daily worry over keeping some version of the family intact—Lorraine stood all of it, until the last child, Norman, was on his own with the Navy.

  “It was me,” he says to his mother. “I just don’t know why.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Elena says. She hasn’t heard him.

  “Let me call somebody,” he says.

  “Don’t talk about it. Please. Tell me how Brian’s doing.”

  He tells her that Brian is doing fine.

  “Nobody’s fine living by himself,” she says.

  “He’s doing okay, Elena. He’s taking care of himself.”

  “Can’t understand what happens. Poor children don’t even try. How long was this marriage. Two years?”

  “Something like that. They weren’t actually married. They were talking about it.”

  “And he was running around with someone.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What a thing.”

  Henry’s quiet.

  “I couldn’t get to know so many people intimately. How does he do it?”

  “Let me fix you something,” he says.

  “How old is Brian?”

  He isn’t certain about it. For the moment, he just doesn’t know. In the time of Lorraine’s absence, he’s found all sorts of embarrassing gaps in his knowledge of his children: Henry misses birthdays; there have been hurt feelings. “You know your mother kept track of everything,” he has said to his sons. “I’ve always been so bad at that sort of thing.”

  Once, Norman, calling long distance from Maine, where his submarine had put in for some repairs, said, “What sort of thing is that, Dad? A birthday.” And Henry could find nothing to say to him. That was one of the nights, alone in the other house, when he began to see that he was not going to be able to stand it by himself.

  He gives his mother’s hand a small shake, feeling the need to arouse her. “Do you feel tired?” he says.

  She’s staring off. “I’
m terrified.”

  “Is it happening again?”

  “Oh, Lord,” she says. “Talk.”

  “Should we listen to some music or something?”

  “Talk to me.”

  “It’s nerves,” Henry says. “It’s natural.”

  “I thought I was used to the idea,” she says.

  For a moment, he’s not quite sure what she means—and then he is sure.

  She’s gazing at him. “You don’t fuss like your sister would.”

  He pats the back of her hand. He can’t believe she hasn’t perceived his fright.

  “But boys believe in death more than anything, don’t they?” she says. “They’re always thinking about it. All the time.”

  Henry doesn’t know what she wants him to say or do, now. “You sound like Aunt Viola.”

  She smirks. “She knew some things.”

  “She was wrong about some things, too.”

  “Yes, she was. Like all the rest of us.”

  He says nothing.

  “You’re talking about her book, aren’t you?”

  “That, too,” he says.

  She takes her hand away. “I’m such trouble. You don’t want to talk about any of this.”

  “I don’t mind talking about whatever you’d like to talk about.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Viola’s book.”

  “Then we won’t talk about it.”

  “I’m troubling you.”

  “Just rest,” he says.

  “It’s all right being afraid,” she says. Then she sighs. “Poor Natalie. I’m glad she’s not here. I make her so nervous.”

  Natalie hasn’t taken anything like an extended trip in all the years she’s lived here. She and her companions are old friends, all unmarried and unattached. Last week, when he talked with her on the phone and she wanted to call off the rest of the trip to catch a plane back, Henry thought of her out there on her own, standing in the confusion and noise and bustle of another place, and didn’t have the heart to ask her to come home purely to relieve what he supposed, given the confidence of the doctor, was his own anxiety: the chance that Elena’s trouble might be more serious than a simple broken collarbone.

  “Every time I cough Natalie wants to call the rescue squad,” his mother says.

  “Why don’t you let me get you something to eat.”

  She shakes her head, staring.

  “Has it gone away again?” he says.

  “Can I have some water?”

  He puts the tea things in the kitchen, pours the water, and when he returns to the living room, he finds that his mother has leaned back and closed her eyes.

  “Elena?” he says.

  She’s quiet.

  “The water,” he says. “You okay?”

  “Sleepy,” she says. “Put it down on the nightstand.”

  He puts it on the coffee table.

  She looks at it, then at him. “Oh, that’s right. This is the living room.”

  “Do you want the television on?”

  She doesn’t answer. She closes her eyes again.

  “Anything you want me to do?” he says, helpless.

  Her breathing is even and slow, her forehead cool. She’s simply asleep.

  He makes his way upstairs to Natalie’s room and pulls the blanket and pillows off the bed. Natalie’s room smells of perfume and hairspray. Two of her wigs are on the dresser, along with an old Sunday missal with colored ribbons marking the places in it. On the wall is a representation of Christ, with soft, feminine eyes, small violet lips, and slender hands indicating the radiant heart in his chest.

  The house is too quiet.

  He unplugs the portable radio and brings it downstairs with him. Carefully, he puts the blanket over his mother’s shoulders, then sits down across from her with the radio on low. Outside, the snow sweeps at the windows, and faintly he hears the voices of children playing on the hill beyond the end of the yard. He listens to them, listens to the wind. He dozes a little, dreams he’s playing outside a house in southern Virginia, and she’s in one of the windows, singing.

  Waking with a start, he sits forward in the chair to look at her. In the shadows her features have taken on the appearance of a kind of grimace. It’s just the bad light. But even so, it makes him utter a small sound of alarm. “Elena?” he says. She stirs slightly, turns her head on the pillow, and the grimace softens. Her eyes move behind the lids with whatever she’s dreaming.

  SHE SLEEPS ALL AFTERNOON and through the night, and she’s still asleep in the late morning when he tries, unsuccessfully, to wake her. He calls the hospital. The doctor takes a long while to call back. When he does, he says it sounds as though she may have slipped into a coma. There isn’t much to do under the circumstances, especially if she doesn’t seem to be in distress. “You know,” he says, “heroic measures, with someone that age—” He stops.

  “A coma,” Henry says. It just looks like sleep.

  “Do you want me to try and stop by?” the doctor asks.

  “Can you get over here in the snow?”

  “I can try.”

  “She’s just sleeping,” Henry says.

  But that evening she’s awake. She sits up, or tries to, and she doesn’t seem to know him. “I have to visit the bathroom,” she says. Holding her elbow and wrist, he walks with her down the corridor and into the little room below the stairs. She needs help sitting down. When she’s situated she asks him to please go get her a clean nightgown from the bureau in the bedroom. He does so, averting his eyes when he comes back with the nightgown. “Thank you,” she says, taking it from his outstretched hand. “Now please shut the door.”

  He occupies himself making a bed for her by the fireplace. She takes a very long time in the bathroom, and twice he has to knock softly, worrying that she might’ve passed out.

  “Just a minute,” she says irritably.

  Finally she calls to him, and there’s something of panic in her voice. “I’m here,” he says.

  She asks him to come help her with the nightgown. She’s standing in the too-bright light of the room; her arms and back look bruised to him. “Here,” she says, holding out the shimmery cloth. They turn in the small space of the room; she can’t raise her free hand over her head, and the other is fixed in its cast. At one point she laughs, or makes a sound like laughter. They move and grope and almost fall, and finally she has the nightgown on. It drops over her thin body like a fall of dust. “I thought you left me alone,” she tells him.

  “No,” he says. “I made you a bed in the living room.”

  “I don’t want you to leave me, young man.”

  “Elena,” he says, “do you know me?”

  She looks at him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  In the living room, he arranges the blanket over her shoulder, kisses the side of her face. She wants to talk. She tells him how she met his father on a street in Memphis in the hot summer of 1917—a girl nearly exactly as old as the century, doing something of which her family would be appalled to learn, playing piano to the jittery pantomime of silent movies in a theater on Beale Street. “The whole city smelled of coal,” she says, “and that poisonous breeze blowing in off the mountains. I loved the movies, back then. I haven’t seen a movie in forty years.”

  “It’s been a long time for me, too,” he says. He doesn’t even hear himself.

  She talks about his father’s early death, in an automobile accident in 1942, something Henry only sketchily recalls: He has an image of men carrying his father’s body home, moving into the small parlor of the house in Memphis, where they had all lived before Elena brought her children north, in 1937. He still has dreams about the tall men crowding into the room, carefully laying the body out on the table.

  “Imagine,” Elena says now. “He was on his way home. He was only a block away. And he couldn’t get through that one intersection alive. That last one. I heard the crash, sitting in the kitchen, cutting celery.”

  In a little while she
has drifted off again.

  He builds a fire, feeling oddly as though she’s watching him, attending to him in some half-conscious daze. Her eyes open, then close.

  “Awake?” he says.

  No. She’s quite still, and there’s just the faint rising and falling of the clean nightgown over the bones of her chest. Outside, the wind blows, and he thinks of it as something searching for a way into the house. The snow keeps falling. Drifts climb to the windows. He stokes the fire, then sleeps in his chair in the liquid glow of it.

  During the night, the sputtering of the embers wakes him, and he gets it going again. He tends it through the morning. No one calls. Everyone he knows is out there somewhere in the snowy city, grappling with the storm, heading into the weekend. Perhaps lines are down. Far off, he hears sirens.

  HE CALLS BRIAN ON Saturday afternoon. “I think she’s gone to her bed, son.”

  “Does that mean this is it?”

  “I guess that’s what it means.”

  “I’ll come over tonight, if I can get out.”

  “The roads pretty bad?” Henry asks him.

  “Awful.”

  “Call Tommy and Norman, will you?”

  “What do I tell them?”

  Henry can’t think. The question seems aggressively obtuse.

  “Should they make plans to come home? I mean they’ve got to make some plans if they’re coming. Norman’s got to ask for leave, and he might be out at sea right now. And Tommy’s in England—well, you know that.”

  “I want everybody here. If it can be done.”

  “Did Aunt Natalie come back from Florida?”

  “I told her not to. I’m going to call her now.”

  “What about Mom?”

  “I haven’t talked to anybody yet.”

  “God,” Brian says. “Gram.”

  “I’ve got to call Natalie,” Henry tells him.

  There’s no answer at Natalie’s hotel room, so he leaves a message at the desk for her to call. He tries her again a little later on, and still there’s no answer. Again, he talks to the front desk.

  “She might be somewhere else in the hotel—would you like me to page her?” the clerk says—a young-sounding male voice.