Wives & Lovers Page 6

  “Could you?”

  The clerk puts him on hold, and music plays through the wire. Strings and soft horns. Henry thinks of a tape running by itself in a room, and abruptly he feels the sense that things are in a great hurry. “Come on,” he murmurs into the music.

  “Sir? She doesn’t answer the page.”

  “She was with three other women.”

  “Yes, sir. The four nice ladies from Virginia. They’re all out somewhere, I guess. I’ll try the other rooms if you want.”

  “Do,” Henry says.

  Again, he’s listening to the music. Perhaps a minute goes by.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  He thanks the young man and hangs up.

  ANOTHER STORM COMES THROUGH Sunday afternoon. It snows all night, and all the next morning. And still there’s no call from Natalie. Henry tries the hotel three times. No one’s seen the group from Virginia.

  He calls his son again.

  “Do you suppose something’s happened?” Brian says.

  “I don’t know what to think. I can’t imagine that Natalie wouldn’t call me—just to check up on things.”

  “Well, Norman’s out at sea. He’s on his way to Norfolk. He should be arriving tomorrow or the next day. But it could be longer, depending on the weather, I guess.”

  “You left a message for him,” Henry says. “Right?”

  “Of course I did. And I talked to Tommy. He says he can probably come if we absolutely need him. Mom wasn’t there but he was going to tell her.”

  “He can probably come? What the hell is that?”

  “He said he’d tell Mom about it. The airport’s closed, Dad. They’re all closed, up and down the country. From here to Boston.”

  Henry keeps the fire going and watches the news, weathermen trying to predict the path of the snow, the accumulations in and around Point Royal. Snows are sweeping across the plains with the jet stream, which has dipped all the way to north Florida. There’ll be a deep freeze for days. His mother breathes very shallowly, but seems quite peacefully asleep. Early Monday afternoon, she awakens again.

  “Henry?” Her voice is fearful.

  “I’m here.” He gets up quickly, moves to her side.

  “Oh,” she says, taking his hand. Her fingers are warm. “You made a fire.”

  “Will you have something to eat?” he says.

  “We just had tea.”

  He stares into her face.

  “Where’s Natalie?”

  “Natalie’s coming,” he says. There can be no use in worrying her, and even so he wants to say something, understands with a little transitory shock to his system what comfort he is in need of from her, even now.

  “Talk,” Elena murmurs.

  “You should let me fix you some soup.”

  “I think something’s wrong.”

  At first he thinks she means Natalie. But she has moved slightly; it’s clear she’s waiting for something to hit her, inside. She closes her eyes, and her mouth drops open slightly. But then she only gives forth a little snoring susurration, sleeping.

  HE CLEANS THE HOUSE, goes through drawers and boxes of old clothes in the closet downstairs. He finds a pair of jade cufflinks, his father’s. He sits in the stinging odor of naphtha and looks at photographs taken forty years ago. In one, he himself stands in bright sunlight with Lorraine and his mother. He’s between the two women and is wearing his Army uniform. He remembers feeling handsome in it. He stares at the uncomplicated happiness of the photograph, and recalls the sense of being possessed of something neither of them could know about or understand. Even then, married to Lorraine less than a year, there was someone else, someone he knew in his summer job in Washington, a flirtation, and he thinks he can see something of it—some quality of amorous satisfaction and confidence—in his twenty-four-year-old face. He remembers those months of a sort of daily scheming, keeping his life in secret. Even then.

  The fire has gone down—scattered red coals sending off heat. He stokes it, watches its moving shapes. There isn’t anything to do but go ahead with things. He puts the radio on for the sound, tries to read. Twice he calls the hotel, and speaks with two different clerks about the fact that four women, each with a separate room, are nowhere in the hotel, and have not responded to numerous messages. Brian and Norman call, not fifteen minutes apart. They can’t leave where they are because of the snow. Anyway, Henry has nothing, really, to report.

  “I’m really beginning to worry about Natalie, now, too,” he says.

  “They probably took one of those tours,” Brian says.

  “And leave hotel rooms empty?”

  “They probably missed your messages and went back out.”

  “I’ve been calling for two days. I’ve left so many messages.”

  “Can’t they do anything to locate people?”

  “Call the police?” Henry says.

  “Why don’t you call the hotel again and ask them to call the police. Or I could call them.”

  “I’m really getting worried,” Henry says. “Will you see what you can do?”

  Sometime after dark, he goes out into the yard to get more wood. The sky’s clear now. He’s shivering, cold and afraid. The surface of snow moves like a smoke in the wind, which seems to come down out of the stars. In late fall, he’d paid to have the wood stacked in a corner of the back porch, thinking about snow and rain. He remembers now the feeling of being prepared, of being ready. The snow has blown onto the porch and around the stack, has drifted high and is draped over everything, shedding a glittering dust with each stirring of air, but the wood under the first row of logs will be reasonably dry. He moves the top logs aside. Amid the sense of rising panic under his heart, it feels good to be doing physical work, breathing cold mist and huffing for breath. He brings in several logs, stacking them inside the kitchen door. Then he stands in the entrance to the living room and gazes at his mother where she sleeps. She seems completely at peace.

  When he’s got the fire built up, he moves to the phone and dials the overseas number. He wants to talk to Lorraine about it. He considers that she will want to be kept up in any case, but part of him is also anxious to hear her voice. When the connection is made, he finds himself unable to say anything for a moment other than to ask how she is, and to answer her questions. She tells him that she’s heard from Brian. Brian calls her every day.

  “Tell me how she is, Henry.”

  He hears the sound of her country in her voice (how quickly she’s picked up the old accent!). He finds the strength to tell her that he thinks his mother is dying, that he’s alone with her, surrounded by several feet of snow and ice.

  “A great, dear old lady.” Lorraine begins to cry. “A wonderful and lovely woman. I miss her. And I miss Natalie, too.”

  Then he’s telling her about the fact that Natalie has gone missing. About this she seems faintly skeptical. She’s so used to his capacity for alarm. Anyway, he can tell that she wants to hang up. She’s settled in now, rounded by other habits, other loyalties and demands, her family, perhaps even some of her old associations. She’s home. Something’s going on in the room behind her; he can hear children—her grandnieces and-nephews—playing. It’s morning there. No one’s eaten anything yet.

  “I don’t suppose you can get away,” he says.

  She pauses, sighs. “I don’t think so, Henry.”

  “Well,” he says. “I’ll let you know what happens,” and he feels the pain of what he cannot ask of her, cannot say.

  “We’ll pray for Elena,” she says.

  NATALIE PHONES PERHAPS AN hour later. She’s been on a weekend shopping and gambling spree in Las Vegas, and she says she called the hotel several times, asking for messages. The hotel people had told her there were no messages. Whoever she spoke to assured her of this, and she asked him (it was a man—she didn’t know more) to double-check. The man put her on hold; she waited while he made sure. And so not only has the hotel failed to relay any of Henry’s urgent requests that she
call, but they charged all four women for the nights their rooms were not in use, though Natalie had spoken to someone (perhaps the same man) about reserving the same rooms for their return. “I should’ve called you there,” she says. “But I didn’t want to wake Elena if she was resting. I was sure you’d call and leave a message.” She and her friends are changing hotels, of course. And Natalie wants to sue. In any case, she won’t pay for the nights she was gone.

  “Oh, Henry,” she says, suddenly. “What am I talking about? It’s time to come home, isn’t it.”

  He can’t speak for a moment. “I was worried about you,” he says, mumbles.

  “Is Elena—”

  He explains everything.

  She cries for a few minutes, apologizing, asking him to be patient. He listens to her as she tries to master herself.

  “I was worried about you,” he says.

  “Well,” Natalie tells him, “I was never in any other kind of danger.”

  He thinks of the flights crossing the country, the snow as it must look from 41,000 feet. Natalie will fly home as soon as she can make arrangements with the others—she’ll leave immediately. Henry tells her of the storms; the bad roads. The airports closing. She’ll try. She’ll pray, and she’ll try.

  “I’ve been expecting it,” she says, crying. “You know—but it still feels shocking somehow.”

  “Maybe it’s going to be all right,” Henry tells her. And then he’s telling her about the woman who’s a hundred and thirteen, how that’s nineteen years—a generation. “Natalie, hurry,” he says, finally, breathing the words.

  HE CAN’T SLEEP. He puts another log on the fire, then goes into the kitchen and fixes himself something to eat. He sees that it’s a little past three o’clock in the morning. When he comes back into the living room, he knows immediately that his mother has soiled her bed. It’s astonishing how the body keeps producing waste, even as one starves. She’s lying on her back, and the blanket is tangled beneath her.

  “Are you awake?” he says.

  Nothing.

  He stands there for a long time, as if waiting for something to change. Finally he gathers himself, moves to her side, puts his hands in under her back and legs, not breathing, lifting her, tottering there in the light of the fire. He manages to get her in the chair, still wrapped in the blanket, then removes the sheets from the sofa. Twice he stops to go stand in the open doorway, in the blowing cold and snow, gasping. The muscles of his back are tightening. He can feel all the connective tissues like hot strips of metal along his spine. The sofa is damp where he’s washed it, and he puts towels down, and fresh sheets. She’s slumped over slightly in the chair. Her nightgown is soaked. He retrieves the blankets from his own bed upstairs, and puts them on the sofa, then works her out of the wet clothes. Her body is surprisingly, disturbingly blue. There’s a translucent quality to the skin, now, and the bones of her chest and hips seem about to push through. He sets her down gently on another blanket on the floor and there he laves her backside and legs in warm, soapy water, kneeling at her side and trying to keep part of the blanket over her for warmth. It all takes such a long time, and he’s lost in the appalling necessity, the nightmare of it, unable to believe what’s required and yet remembering that this pale, still shape is his mother; this body, with its dreadful harrowing skeletal inertness, is the body that bore him. For a terrible, inescapable, sick moment, he thinks of her in terms of sex, of all the women he has sought and wooed and dreamed of and slept with. It travels along his veins and leaves him shivering.

  “Henry,” she says, with startling force. “I feel so bad.”

  He’s lifting her, hurting, in the ache of having carried the wood and of having worked with her; the pains stab him, and he’s almost unable to straighten with her. As he moves to the sofa he nearly falls. She says, “Oh.”

  He adjusts the blanket over her, tucks it at her chin. “You have to eat something,” he says.

  She’s looking at the fire. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I’ll make soup for you,” he says.

  “Henry,” she says, kindly. “Thank you for putting me by this window so I could look out at that lovely tree.”

  The window, of course, is black. “Do you want another blanket?” he asks.

  But she has closed her eyes again, is gone again.

  He makes the soup anyway. When the metal spoon clatters against the pan, he thinks of the time of night and catches himself trying to be quiet. She doesn’t stir. He eats the soup, not really tasting it, sitting by her bed, and when he’s finished with it he washes the dishes, puts the sheets and blankets in the washing machine. Then he collapses into the chair across from her and tries to rest. Every bone and muscle of his back throbs, and though he’s quite spent, sleep won’t come. Her breathing is more ragged now. There’s something broken about it—little separate gasps, as if each one were the result of great effort. He doesn’t know how long he sits there in the dim light of the fire, listening to her, and perhaps he dozes some. It seems to him now that Time is measured out in little harsh divisions of breathing, heard in the half-consciousness of exhaustion.

  He passes the night this way.

  And has a groggy dream that Lorraine is asleep upstairs on the stripped bed in Natalie’s room; it’s another time, everyone visiting. The children are small. Lorraine is cold, curled on the bare bed in Natalie’s room, her legs pulled up to her chest, her hands over her face.

  When light comes to the windows he finds himself staring at the ceiling, listening to his mother’s breathing; and when he remembers the dream he feels compelled to walk up to Natalie’s room and look, knowing how irrational this is. Even so, it hurts him to find the room empty, the sun beating through the window onto the mattress.

  He closes the bedroom door, pads back downstairs, and puts his hand on his mother’s forehead, which gives off a low heat—not feverish, quite, though it doesn’t feel quite normal, either: there’s something inanimate about it, even as she moves a little, shuddering slightly, then lying still again. He goes into the bathroom and washes his face. And then he’s crying.

  He looks at himself in the mirror, brushes at his eyes with the heels of his palms. Finally he throws his heavy coat on, trudges outside in the cold to gather more firewood. He works furiously, sniffling and sobbing and wiping his face with the cold sleeve of the coat. He doesn’t see Brian walk up. Turning with an armful of wood—he’s stacked far more than he could need—he sees his son through ledges of drifted snow.

  “You need somebody with a shovel,” Brian says.

  Henry puts the wood down, lets it drop from his arms, and then realizes his son is talking about the snow. “Well,” he says. “You made it.”

  “The roads are miserable,” says his son. “My car’s stuck at the end of the street.”

  Henry can’t look at him, accepts his clumsy embrace, and then faces away from him. “They’re saying it might snow some more.”

  They go into the house together. Henry watches him head into the living room, and he sees the hesitation, the wariness, in his motions. Brian only glances at the sofa, then turns awkwardly.

  “Go on in the kitchen,” Henry manages to say. He hears the irritation in his voice. “I’ve got to use the bathroom.”

  In the little room under the stairs, he runs water again, splashes his face. He cleans his teeth and brushes his hair, composing himself.

  He finds Brian sitting in the breakfast nook. Sunlight is pouring through the windows now, past noon, and the colors in the tile, the table cloth, the prints on the walls, look brighter, more vivid. “I checked on her,” Brian says. “She seems okay. Asleep.”

  Henry sighs out the words, “Almost continuously since Friday.” He looks at his own hands and is momentarily speechless.

  Presently Brian says, “Can’t the hospital do something? Can’t they put her on a respirator or something—something, Jesus—listen to that.”

  Elena is breathing in small gasps. There’s somethin
g almost mechanical about it.

  “There isn’t anything to do,” Henry says. “What do you think this is, boy?”

  There seems nothing left to say. For a while they both stare out the kitchen window at children riding sleds in that part of the street. Finally Brian mutters, “I don’t know what I thought I’d find—”

  “I don’t know what I thought you could do,” Henry tells him. “But thanks for coming.”

  They are quiet again, listening to the heedless play of the children in the snow. Brian stirs, rises, and with a kind of nervous agitation, begins moving about the house, looking at pictures, occasionally talking about what he sees, and Henry feels as if his son were engaged in a form of trespass.

  THEY MAKE SANDWICHES for dinner. Henry becomes aware of the extent of his own neglect of himself: he’s eaten almost nothing for days; he can’t remember how he got from the beginning of the storms to here, how he spent all the hours. When dinner is over, Brian sits at the dining room table with a glass of whiskey and the bottle at his elbow.

  “Pour me one,” Henry says.

  The other looks at him. “Wasn’t much left. You want some of this?”

  He sits down and rubs his eyes. “I guess I wasn’t that thirsty.”

  “I think I saw some gin.”

  “No.” Henry thinks of Elena on a playground with him and the other children in 1952, wearing denim jeans and a checked blouse, her dark blond hair braided and tied across the top of her head—a young woman playing baseball all wrong, with great cheerfulness and humor. “When I was a kid,” he says, “she played baseball with us. I ever tell you about that?”

  “A few times.”

  “She’s lived ninety-four years, and that’s one of the few things you know about her.”

  “No, Dad. That’s where you’re wrong. I know a whole lot about her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Henry tells him. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  They listen for a moment.

  Henry takes the empty bottle and puts it in the trash. He stands by the sink, both hands on the counter, and behind him his son moves, makes a throat-clearing sound. Henry faces him.