Profiles in String 26

I wrote 50,000 words, and all I got was this little badge!

And Darwin's back, so those of you who are heartily sick of Emma and Martin should be cheered. For all four readers of this story: I can't wrap it tonight, but I think we're heading for a close over the weekend. 

...

   There had been little for me to do after the accident. The police were mainly interested in talking to witnesses, and I had seen nothing. Emma’s body was loaded into an ambulance. I had been wrapped in a blanket and tucked in the back of a heated squad car while the officers gathered accounts. The distraught driver, a petite ponytailed blond on her way to a gig as a personal trainer, had sobbed in hysterics.

   “I never saw her,” she wailed. “It was pouring so hard, you know? And I had the wipers on high, but I just couldn’t see anything. And then -- oh my God! -- she just stepped out in front of me, she didn’t even look at me. I barely had time to even hit my brakes. She just appeared in front of me,” she repeated, appealing through tears to the officers, the bystanders, and me. “I never even saw her until it was too late.”

   Calls had been made. I said I know not what to my father, who offered to take care of calling other family members and promised that he and Mom would make flight arrangements that day. I fielded anxious calls from my mother and Stacy, who seemed to be under the misapprehension that I’d been injured, as they kept asking if I were all right. I spoke in a clear, pinched voice to Peggy, who drove immediately down to the scene, took one look at my white face, and ran interference for me and contacted whoever needed to be contacted -- the parish, the doctor’s office, I don’t know. I shook and made shrill wisecracks, and Peggy spoke soothing words to me and asked if I was okay to drive myself home. 

   That night in the living room, the green brocade sofa was still frayed and shabby. The green carpet still matted with age and the massive television still bore up under the weight of the remote, a TV Guide, and a box of tissues. The large dining table still stood in its usual spot between the living room and the kitchen and every chair was tucked in its place. Every individual aspect of the space was substantially the same, but the essential character of the room was altered. It was not a place of joy or anger or tension or grief. It was empty, a place of nothingness.

   I wandered aimlessly, touching an item here, pausing in a doorway there. There was nothing I wanted to do. No one needed anything from me. I was free.

   After a time my phone rang. It was Martin, calling at the usual time. It rang, and I looked at it as it rang. I would have preferred nothing more in the world than to suddenly find myself laying beside him, quietly sheltered in his arms, but to talk to him on the phone at that moment was beyond my abilities. The sound stopped after a moment, but I wished it would continue for hours so at least I could know that he was thinking of me.

   There was a knock on the door. I laid on the couch. The door opened, and I heard Peggy calling, “Emma? I’ve brought some dinner for you.”

   I appeared in the hallway.  “That’s kind of you, Peggy. I don’t think I’m very hungry.”

   “You probably don’t feel like eating, but when you do, you won’t feel like cooking.”

She told me a few things about the calls she’d made, and the expressions of sympathy she’d heard. I nodded and carried on competent conversation. 

   “Do you want me to stay here tonight, Emma?” she asked, getting ready to leave. “I could sleep on the couch?”

   “No, but thank you. I think I’d like to be by myself.”

   She accepted that, but at the door she added, “If there anything you need me to do for you tonight -- run to the store, do the laundry, anything?”

   I hesitated. “Could you... would you call Martin and tell him about it?” She looked surprised, so I rushed on, “I... I can’t talk to him right now. Tell him I miss him and I wish he were here.”

   “Of course,” she said, so gently and simply that I had to set my face to a rigid blankness until she left.

I went into the kitchen and poked through paper bag of food. Peggy had made macaroni and cheese -- from scratch, apparently -- and salad, and there also was a bottle of sparkling juice and a box of good tea. I tried to eat a noodle or two, but the effort of stabbing a noodle onto the tine of a fork and lifting it to my mouth was just more bother than I wanted to put myself through. I left everything sitting on the table and threw myself face down onto the couch. After fifteen minutes my phone buzzed with a text message from Martin.

   I’m so sorry. I understand.

   I laid on the couch and refreshed the screen until the battery ran dangerously low and whispered the words to myself as if they were an orison to with which to summon him.

   Sleeping on the couch wasn’t really as attractive in theory as in concept, so eventually I staggered down the hall to the bathroom to brush my teeth. My reflection in the mirror was strange and pale and desolate. I felt as if I’d never truly seen my face before this moment. Emma’s cup for cleaning her dentures was on the side of the sink where she’d left it this morning, and I did not move it. I didn’t move any of her things, or touch them, in case -- I couldn’t clearly formulate the reason in my head -- in case they might be needed again. They were still her things.

   My parents flew in the next day, Saturday. I was glad to see them; I had missed them more than I realized. They each held me in turn when they arrived, and I felt warm and protected, safe and weightless for a brief time. Mom set immediately to cleaning the kitchen, fascinated by the odd assortment of items stashed away among the dishes and the pantry. Dad sat with me on the couch while I told him the whole story of the accident, what little there was to tell. 

   “I didn’t even see it happen, Dad,” I told him, my head resting on his shoulder. “I was doing just what the doctor told me to do, making sure that she had her walker, so she wouldn’t fall and hurt herself. What a stupid reason, right? If she’d fallen at least she’d still be alive now. I should have locked her in the car until I got the damn walker open.”

   “Aunt Emma always had a mind of her own,” he pointed out. “She could have unlocked the door if she’d wanted to get out.”

   “At least that might have given me time to catch her.” 

   My mother entered the living room carrying an item enclosed in its tupperware container. “Emma, this bag of flour expired five years ago!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you get rid of it?”

   “Emma didn’t like the things to be moved around too much, and she seemed to know if I threw anything away. It was easier not to upset her.”

   “Well, I’m tossing it now,” Mom proclaimed, heading back into the kitchen. I opened my mouth to protest, then stopped. 

   “It can’t possibly matter to Emma now, hon,” reasoned Dad, seeing my twitch. But it seemed wrong to start clearing out her things so soon. That was her expired flour, after all.

  Mom and Dad were staying at a hotel, since they weren’t particularly keen to sleep in Emma’s bed. Dad, like Peggy, offered to stay on the couch, but I still wanted to be alone. Their vitality affected me strangely. I knew that Emma’s death mattered to Dad. She had been a favorite aunt of his, and he had many fond memories of her. But it seemed to me as if, for them, Emma had been dead for years. They weren’t shy about touching her things or throwing away junk, or speculating on who might get her dishes or furniture. They had not lived with her for the past six months, feeding her and clothing her and fighting with her and loving her.

   I had no desire to sit up alone in the empty house, so I got ready for bed early. Sleep didn’t come instantly, though. My active imagination wrote and rewrote Emma’s last moments, crafting new endings or magnifying minute details of that morning into glaring portents of impending catastrophe. I should not have let her get out of the car. I should not have bothered with her walker. I should not have taken my eyes off of her. I knew, better than anyone, how unpredictable she could be. How could I have been so careless?

   The mental fidgeting became so disruptive that I couldn’t lay still, so I sat up and swung my legs out of bed, preparatory to making some of Peggy’s tea, when my phone rang. I snatched it up. It was Martin.

   I tried to sort out my emotions. After the day with my parents, I wanted to talk to someone who knew Emma as I did. But I still didn’t know whether I was ready to handle the vulnerability of having to express myself to him in words. Without having come to a full decision, I took a deep breath and answered the phone.

   “Hey.”

   “Emma,” he said, his voice warm with concern. “I’m so sorry. I wondered a bit when you didn’t answer the phone last night, but I didn’t expect anything like this.”

   “Neither did I.”

   There was a pause. 

   “I keep wanting to ask if you’re all right,” he said, “but that doesn’t seem like a good question right now.”

   “No.”

   Another pause.

   “Do you even want to talk now, or should I let you go?”

   “I... I’d rather just listen to your voice, if you don’t mind.” I curled up in bed again and laid my head on the pillow.

   “I’d be happy to oblige, if I could think of the right thing to say.”

   “How’s Grace?”

   “Oh, she’s fine. I don’t think she really misses me when I’m gone, which is one of the reasons I decided to stop traveling so much. She’s not used to me being around all the time, and I want that to change.” He waited for a second to see if I would respond. “I had some barbeque here in Kansas City.”

   “Was it good?”

   “Our clients took us to this restaurant where you can order sausage wrapped in bacon and barbequed up with way too much sauce. I like bacon as much as the next man, but I couldn’t even look at it. You would have been appalled.”

   “That’s just vile.”

   “I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it almost put me off bacon, and that takes some doing.”

    I had nothing to say to that, and the silence stretched on.

  “Emma,” he said at last, “I really am so sorry. I know you don’t want talk about it, but I don’t want you to think that I don’t care. I hate the thought of you being all alone right now.”

   “My parents were here,” I said with difficulty. 

   “That’s good. I’m glad you had some company.”

   “They weren’t good company. It doesn’t really seem to matter to them that Emma is...” I hastily reached for a safer formula. “...isn’t here.”

   “My poor Emma,” he comforted, with a catch in his voice that nearly undid me. 

   Now my words rushed up and forced their way past the tightness in my throat. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, Martin. This wasn’t how Emma was supposed to go. She was supposed to die of Alzheimer's, and now she’s one more traffic statistic. I would have taken care of her until the end. Instead she died because I was taking care of her.”

   “Emma,” Martin said gently, “you’re blaming yourself, but this isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault. She might have died at Christmas when she got lost; we just happened to find her in time. You kept her safe as long as you possibly could. That’s what matters.” 

   He was right, of course, but it was no solace to me.

   I laid with my eyes closed and listened to him breathe.

   “Do you want me to let you go?” he asked finally.

   “No,” I said. “I wish you could read to me until I fell asleep.”

   I heard a faint rustling. “Well, here are your options,” he said. “I have on the one hand a half-completed draft of ‘Supply Chain Efficiencies and Warehouse Management Technology’ and on the other, a copy of The Tailor of Gloucester I picked up for Grace.”

   “You went on a two-week trip and didn’t bring a book for yourself?”

   “I don’t think,” he said simply, “that you really want to hear about five years in a Vietnamese prison camp.”

   Pages turned.

   In the time (he began) of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets -- when gentlemen wore ruffle, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta -- there lived a tailor in Gloucester.

   I pulled up my blanket and wrapped myself in his voice.

Vincero!

Profiles in String 25

48,728/50,000. After getting three hours' sleep I had a few moments of hating everything today, including my kids, Darwin, and all of you, until I realized that I was going to be able to bring it in tomorrow. Today.

Here's a picture of me with the radiant Sarah Reinhart taken two weeks ago, after I'd spent a good deal of the weekend in the hospital with my mom. I'm the bleary-looking one on the right. You can imagine how haggard I look now.
...

  Every night when Martin called me, I had new and strange stories about Emma to relate.

   “Last night she was dozing in the easy chair in the living room, and her walker was standing in front of the fireplace. She doesn’t like the stupid walker, and she often parks it right there. As I was passing through from the hall to the kitchen, she plucked at my sleeve to get my attention, and pointed at the walker, and she asked me, “Do you see that orangutan? He’s just sitting there.” And then she started waxing eloquent about   the orangutan on the hearth. Stop laughing, Martin. It was extremely disturbing. I tell you she must see these things. She’s so serious about it, as if there were nothing to debate. 

   “Okay, you’ll like this one. Emma was sacked out in the same easy chair in the living room, and she was looking at one of the chairs pulled out from the big dining table, in that space between the kitchen and the living room. And she turns to me and says, “Doesn’t that chair look just like the Holy Family?”, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that a chair should bear any resemblance at all to the Holy Family. I tried to get her to elaborate, maybe point out which leg looked like the Virgin Mary, but she couldn’t be any more specific. It’s as if she’s seeing omens.”

   “Tonight it was a rhinoceros. No, in the kitchen this time. I don’t know why you’re so amused; don’t even try to tell me you weren’t shaking like a little girl over the man in the closet.”

  The evening was a witching time for Aunt Emma. She wandered and kvetched and growled some nights; on others she sank into a tearful depression. This odd sundowning began to take its toll on me. She and I both became nervous and apprehensive as the skies darkened and stars begin to twinkle and night rolled in. Some evenings we sat rigid in the living room, Emma in her own world and me in an agony of frayed nerves over the impending upset or vision that might not even occur.

   I described all these things to Peggy as we stood in the yard, her with the paper and me hauling the garbage cans. She grew worried at my nervous laughter and shaking hands. “Emma, you need to get out,” she prescribed. “Let me sit with your aunt tonight while you do something. Get a massage or have your nails done” (I guiltily thrust my ragged fingers behind my back) “or do the shopping or something, but do something for yourself, without Aunt Emma.”

   I murmured my acceptance of her offer and retreated inside, where I seethed as I watched her right a fallen flowerpot on her porch and establish herself in a rocker to read the paper in the crisp morning air. How easy it was for her to tell me to take care of myself! Even if I went out tonight, when I arrived home Emma would still be waiting for me. My going out would not solve the problem of Emma’s decline, nor would it fix what ailed her, nor  would it stop the twilight madness. When I came back home everything would still be the same. My going out would solve nothing except to give me a slight taste of the carefree life of anyone who was not me. I resented Peggy for her easy life with her happy healthy family and loving husband. I resented Emma for the disease which required someone to wait on her hand and foot. I resented Grace for living with Martin and siphoning his time away from me. I resented Martin for his unconscionable good luck in finding a job that let him travel to exotic locales like Kansas City, where at this moment he was probably having intelligent conversation with polished and professional and non-needy women...

   “Stop!” I ordered myself, clutching my arms and rocking a bit. “Stop it, Emma! Get a hold of yourself. You’re being stupid and you know it. Stop now.” But I moved through the afternoon with hot tears brimming and a tingling jittery ache radiating out to my fingertips and feet. I would snap at Emma even as I enjoined myself to resist such behavior. My agitation kindled her own, and she grew restless and angry, which, in turn, keyed me to a pitch of irritation hardly to be endured. By the time Peggy arrived late in the afternoon, I was barely fit to speak to her as I rushed out the door.

   I drove aimlessly through Emma’s neighborhood, passing up and down the pleasant residential streets with their lacy covering of venerable branches starting to swell and burst with new foliage.  My meandering route brought me around to the cemetery, and without questioning, I parked and passed through the flaking iron gates into the still peace of the abode of the dead. “Resquiescat in Pacem,” bid many of the gravestones, and indeed, I seemed to be the only unquiet soul walking amid the tombs and monuments to grief. I brushed the brittle lichen off the markers and studied the tiny memorials of heartbreak in the children’s section.  I passed up a hill crowned by a vast and spreading tree, and at the summit looked down at the sun glinting off the steeple and arches of Our Lady of Lourdes.

   Though I had had no firm intention of doing anything in my precious free time, my feet drew me to the heavy doors of the church and to the rear of the line of penitents awaiting their turn in the confessional. A woman intently studied a pamplet entitled “An Examination of Conscience for Mothers”, and a trio of older gentlemen carried on a quiet but spirited discussion of the impending baseball season, which seemed to vie for importance in their minds with the entire Triduum. A small knot of college students preparing to enter the Church at Easter clung to each other for moral support in the face of their first time in the confessional. I allowed myself to be pushed forward along the line until I was before the tripartite box with the ornately carved doors, the leftmost of which opened to emit one of the college students with a joyous, tear-stained face.

   I had barely had the mental wherewithal to think of anything in the confession line, much less examine my conscience, and it was not until I found myself kneeling in the dark cubicle and being blessed by the priest on the other side of the screen that finally confronted the reality of the present moment. I took a deep breath and opened my mouth and spilled out all my failings of the past months, the jealousy and anger, the envy and bitterness, the petty grudges and spites. I enumerated the times I’d failed Emma and the ways in which I’d hurt Martin. I dredged back into my past and hauled up times I’d lashed out at Stacy or disobeyed my parents. And then I waited for the judgment to fall, braced against the consequences. 

   “The Lord has already forgiven you,” said the priest. 

And when I emerged from the confessional with a joyous, tear-stained face and knelt with bowed head in the wash of jeweled light pouring through the stained glass window, my ridiculously simple penance of three Hail Marys , so little to offer the One against whom I had truly offended, became sufficient by the very merit of their inadequacy. They were not enough, but I offered them, in that present moment, with everything I had to give, and the peace I received in return was extravagantly out of proportion to my meager gift.

   Aunt Emma was planted in her chair with her evening face on when I arrived home. Peggy greeted me with undue warmth as I walked in the door.

   “Oh, Emma, I’m so glad to see you,” she said, with the slightest hint of hysteria in her voice. “She’s been saying the oddest things, stuff you wouldn’t normally pay any attention to, except that it’s as if she really sees something. I feel as nervous as a cat. Is she always like this anymore?”

   “That’s how it is most nights,” I commiserated. “It can really wear on you.”

   “I don’t know how you do it,” she said reverently as she gathered her coat and book. “I think I’d go crazy. You let me know the next time you need a night out, and I’ll make sure John is available to come over and sit here with me.”

   “You’re too sweet, Peggy.”

At the door, she took my hand. “I’m serious, Emma. Please let me know if you need me to do anything for you. You’re so competent that I don’t always remember to offer help, but I’m always to give it.”

   “I appreciate that, more than you know,” I said. “I think I’ve been trying to be too self-sufficient for too long.”

   Even the promise of rain could not dampen my newly strengthened spirits the next morning. The morning was cool and cloudy and temperate -- the first true day of spring. Emma too seemed heartened by the change in weather. She consented to eat, to take her pills with no fuss, and to select her own outfit from the closet. We were going out.

   Nurse Linda has expressed concern, at her last visit, with Emma’s increased moodiness and torpor. “This could be just the normal progression of the disease, of course,” she said, “but I think she needs to go in and have her medications evaluated. Maybe we can find a different dosage that will help keep her from these big emotional arcs and mini-depressions.”
   “I hope so,” I replied, watching Emma shuffle sullenly around the living room with her book. “It’s painful to see her so unhappy.”

   It was more than the usual production to take Emma places anymore, since she had been prescribed her walker. It was apparently a standard-issue model, down to the tennis balls on the front feet, but it seemed less wieldy than the average beast. To fold it for travel took a combination of Rube-Goldbergesque maneuvers, none of which I ever mastered. Every time I set out to collapse the thing it was as if I was confronting it afresh. Emma, for her part, disdained the walker and avoided using it as much as possible. She preferred to travel under her own reduced speed. 

   Today was no different than usual. I pulled up to the curb at the doctor’s office and wrestled with the walker while she climbed out of the car and started for the door.

   “Emma, wait a minute while I get your walker,” I commanded, but she shuffled  doggedly on toward the door. Finally I abandoned the half-opened walker and hastened to take her elbow.

   “Is it all right if I leave my aunt here for a moment while I park the car?” I asked the receptionist in the waiting room. Emma, safely in a chair, cast a benign eye on the fish tank, the reception station, and the magazines.

   “Of course!” replied that lady, with professional cheer. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”

   A light drizzle was starting to blow as I parked and hauled the walker with me back into the office. Emma, unbudged, reposed like an angel, cherubically turning the pages of a children’s activity book. The bright colors and simple illustrations pleased her, and she carried it back into the exam room with us.

   The doctor and I discussed her strange new behaviors and her recent fall in front of her, as if she were a child, but there was no answering indignation or even interest on Emma’s part as she sat on the paper-covered exam table peering nearsightedly at an image of children ice skating on a small pond on a snowy day. He scrutinized her current prescriptions and asked questions as he checked her over.

   “How’ve you been feeling, Emma?” he asked heartily.

   “Howard ice skates,” she said, holding the magazine close to her nose.

   “Does he? That’s great!” the doctor boomed. Emma paid him no mind, searching, perhaps, for Howard among the hooded and mittened children cutting figures on the frozen pond. “How’ve you been getting around? Okay?” he persisted.

   “She hates the walker,” I told him.

   “It does mean a certain loss of independence,” he conceded, “but especially with this recent fall I think it’s crucial that she use it any time she’s trying to get around. She was very fortunate not to have been injured the other night, but as the body gets older, even minor shocks to the system can have very serious effects.”

   “I’ll do my best to make sure she’s using it,” I promised.

   Emma touched the picture in the magazine gently as the doctor and I discussed different options for her new medication routine. He tapped the prescriptions into his computer. “We send ‘em right to the pharmacy for you,” he assured me. “You should be able to go right over and pick them up, and we can get her started on these today. Now you’ll want to call me if you start noticing any of these effects...” By the time we were ready to leave I was awkwardly clutching a sheaf of papers in one hand and guiding Emma’s walker with the other. To complicate the situation, Emma, previously so accommodating, had become attached to the children’s magazine and would not give it back.

   “Here, Emma, let’s leave this for other people to look at!” I wheedled, trying to pry it from her fingers. She demurred and fussed and began to protest loudly.

   “She can take it with her,” offered the receptionist, with professional cheer. “We’ve got plenty more.”

   The drizzle persisted as we stepped out the door, and I looked with dismay at papers, Emma, purses, and walker. Out of the mists of time floated up a memory of my mother trying herd Stacy and I around a store when we were small and rousty. Someone had said to her, “My, you have your hands full!” Standing by the doors just out of the drizzle, I suddenly felt a surge of understanding for my mother wash over me. No wonder she had seemed hassled and frustrated so often, all those times we had thought she was overreacting to what seemed normal childish games. “You were right, Mom,” I acknowledged, shaking my head.

   The solution seemed to be to leave Emma parked by door while I drove up to the curb again. After being given her way over the magazine, she was biddable again, and even chatty as we rode over to the pharmacy, commenting on the buildings, the people, and the scenery. Only once did she seem to rise out of her bland affability, on seeing a man with a dark suit and a hat darting out of the rain into a building. “There’s Howard,” she exclaimed, leaning toward the window and craning her neck to follow the figure.

   “No, Aunt Emma, it can’t be Howard. He’s not around much anymore.”

   “Where’d Howard go?” she asked, puzzled. “Where’s that man now?” And she continued to brood over the question as we pulled up to the pharmacy.

   Urban’s is an institution, founded in a brick storefront nestled amid an assortment of small family-run businesses back when Milton Avenue was still a sleepy neighborhood lane. Even as the street grew to be a thoroughfare, and then a four-lane artery, the small historic district has maintained its plateglass charm, though the once broad sidewalks have been reduced down to strips that tuck comfortably under the striped awnings. Tourists and connoisseurs flock to Urban’s now to sit at the vintage soda counter and order phosphates and egg creams, but it is still a working pharmacy. Emma was a long-time customer of Urban’s, and the druggist and cashiers knew her well. 

   The rain had increased to a steady downpour, and I hoped we’d be able to find a parking space somewhere near  the pharmacy so I wouldn’t have far to struggle with Emma and her walker . The street was busy today, however, and there were no gaps along the curb as we approached Urban’s. And then, a stroke of luck: a car backed into the street and pulled away, leaving a vacant meter directly in front of the big glass doors.

   “Hang on, Emma!” I called cheerfully. “It’s time for some parallel parking action.”

I pulled up, flipped on my right turn signal,  and waited for the irritated driver behind me to get a clue and move on. Then I began to maneuver the car back into the space.

   The instructors in my high school driver’s ed class had presented parallel parking in very technical terms, thus producing a classroom full of navigational idiots, but I learned the proper technique on spring break junior year from a white-haired gent in New Orleans who observed from the sidewalk, plastic beer cup in hand, as I made several fruitless attempts to wedge an SUV full of coeds between two compacts on Amelia Street.  Whether he took pity on my incompetence, or he just thought I was cute, I don’t know, but he taught me the trick of parallel parking, and I’ve used it to impress people ever since.

   Parallel parking is a science first, but there’s a measure of art in the execution. First the car should be even with the car in front of the space. Then, before the driver starts reversing, the wheel needs to be cut all the way to the right. When the car is backed halfway into the space, the wheel needs to be cut all the way to the left. Once the nose is smoothly in, the wheel is straightened out, and the car is adjusted in the space. 

   “Piece of cake,” I bragged to Emma. 

   “That’s nice, honey,” she said, leafing through her magazine.

   We were nestled nicely against the curb, and Emma would be able to exit the car right under the awning so she wouldn’t get wet. I patted her shoulder. "You stay here and look at the pictures while I get your walker set up."

   "Howard ice skates," she said, finding the winter pond scene again.

   "That's a good idea, Emma. You look for Howard.

   Cars splashed past me, raindrops gleaming in their headlights, as I tried to wrangle the walker out of the trunk without scratching up the car behind me. Emma let herself out of the car and stood watching the street as I fought to unfold the recalcitrant thing. “I’ll have this in a second, Emma,” I promised as I tugged at a sticky latch.

   “Okay, honey. That man is Howard,” she said.

   “What do you mean, Emma?” I asked, glancing toward her. But she was gone, and before I could even call out for her, I heard an onrushing shriek of brakes and the soft and sickening thud of impact.

Being a Dad Without a Father

Being out in Southern California again, and for another funeral, I find myself thinking in particular about the experience of being a man, particularly of being a dad, who has lost his father.

I find myself wanting to say that in addition to the natural grief we always feel at death, that there is a particular feeling of disconnection or incompleteness that comes from being a man who loses his father comparatively young. The process of growing up and having one's own family is one which brings a new pespective on one's youthful life. The inexplicable actions and words of parents suddenly fall into place and make sense as we find ourselves facing our own adult problems and raising our own children. "Hey, Dad, I get it. Is this what you were thinking?" you want to say. "I'm like you now."

With your father dead, this becomes a one sided conversation. You reach these epiphanies and think, "Yeah, this must be what Dad was going through," but with no answer back, you never feel quite sure. The distance of childhood perception stands between. Is this how Dad felt? Maybe I look to my kids now like he looked to me then. Maybe I don't even remember right.

In some sense, the image of "Dad" fixes at the extent to which you were able to understand and share experiences when he was alive -- a slight distance or idealization, something you never quite feel you can inhabit the inside of or live up to.

This is how I've come to think of it. Though as I watch my uncles in their late 40s and early 50s talking last night about losing their father at the age of 84, I wonder if I've built up "what it would be like to have your father longer" into some sort of ideal in its own right. From these men not much younger than Dad was when he died, I get the same sense that "Dad" is a figure never quite felt to be fully understood or lived up to. That the gap between "my dad" and "trying to be a good father" persists through life.

In the end, it is doubltess most important simply to be thankful to have had such a good one at all, for any length of time.

Profiles in String 24

It's frickin' 5 am. 6100 words today. Ninety million times listening to the Jane Eyre soundtrack on repeat. I'm shaking like Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. Did I mention that we haven't had heat since the boiler caught fire on the 18th? We live like distressed nobility, shut up in the small rooms at the back of the house, huddled over space heaters. It's supposed to snow on Wednesday.

Sorry 'bout the formatting. 45,755/50,000. Vincero, friends. Vincero.

...

Spring was approaching. There was still a chill in the air, but it was a chill that bore the promise of later warmth. The crocuses and snowdrops were pushing through the damp earth, and Emma, leaning on the windowsill, would sit in reverie and watch the flowers for an hour at a time. As I sat in the library, I could her gently soliloquizing on how she had planted those bulbs herself, in some past spring more immediate and vibrant to her than the present. Then she would wander through the house, examining and sorting and pondering, and I would get up to make sure that the sounds of her activity were all benign.

I followed a clattering one day and found her in the silverware drawer, removing every utensil. She would study it and mutter, and then lay it on the counter so she could seek answers from a different fork or butter knife. Sometimes she would shake the whole drawer.

“Emma, can I help you find something?” I asked her. “Is there something you’re looking for?”

“Broccoli,” she fussed. “That broccoli. It came out, and then I don’t know.”

“Emma, are you hungry? You want broccoli?”

“I don’t know,”she said plaintively. “I can’t find it. The thing, it doesn’t work, and now this broccoli.”

“Here, Emma,” I said soothingly. “Let’s sit down. I know you’re hungry.” She allowed herself to be guided to a chair, where she slumped as I heated a microwave dinner for her. It was becoming more of a struggle to get Emma to eat. She seemed to prefer the mushy texture of pre-prepared foods, and I didn’t want to spend my energy in fighting her over meals.

I put the warmed food onto a plate and carefully diced up the meat patty and carrots and cut the brownie into small pieces. She was apathetic as I placed the dish in front of her and laid a napkin and fork by her hand. 

“Can you eat something, Emma?” I urged. “These are all things you like. See, carrots and meat, and I’ll get you a glass of milk.” She picked up the fork and pressed the tines experimentally against her palm. The milk seemed to intrigue her, however. She picked up the glass and swirled it around, then put it back on table and purposefully inserted the fork into the milk. 

I sat beside her. “Okay, you don’t like the fork. That’s fine. Let’s eat some other way.” She sat inert, so I picked up a piece of meat and put it in her hand. “Would you eat this, Emma?” Still she regarded it. I guided her hand to her mouth. “And in it goes. Good girl, Emma. Let’s try it again.” With me moving her hand from from her plate to her mouth, we worked through most of her dinner, until, with a sigh, she refused to open up one more time. I cleared the plate away and wiped her down and helped her up from her seat. She stood uncertainly, looking around at the warm afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows.

“That thing is lost,” she moaned. 

“We’ll find it, Emma. Do you want to take your nap?” I gave her my arm, and we made the journey to her bedroom. I tucked her in.

“Have a good rest,” I told her.

“Thank you, honey,” she sighed, turning her back to me.

I told the incident of the counterful of forks to Nurse Linda that week when she arrived for her regular visit.

“This behavior is part of the progression of Alzheimer's,” she said, with a rueful shake of her head. “She’ll forget words or substitute wrong words, and her ability to remember the use of simple tools such as forks will keep deteriorating. I know you’ve already moved the knives to a high shelf, but you’ll want to keep an eye out for anything that might be dangerous to her. It might not be a bad idea to remove the knobs from the stove so she can’t burn herself by accidentally turning on the gas, and to turn down the water heater so that she won’t be in danger of scalding herself.”

“What about her movement? She seems so unsteady lately. She doesn’t grip things as well as she used to, and her walking has really slowed down.”

“Unfortunately, that’s normal as well. Keep a good eye on her in the kitchen and the bathroom, which are where most falls happen. I’ll file for a walker for her, and that should give her the extra support she needs to get around.”

Emma was not as pleased as usual to see Linda. She was irritable and snappish, though passive. Linda took it in stride.

“Don’t be surprised if she’s more belligerent and moody,”she warned me, as we stood in the doorway of the kitchen watching Emma stare vacantly at the television. “I can tell she’s having an off day today, but will probably become more common for her.”

“What can I do to keep her happy?” I asked.

“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” she told me. “You’ve done an impressive job here, Emma, and she couldn’t be in better hands.”

Martin had been trying to transition to a new role in his company, and as a result his schedule had become much more demanding. He called me at least briefly most evenings, but between late meetings and picking up Grace from her grandparents on his end, and handling Emma’s increasingly erratic behavior in the evenings, we had not seen each other since the evening of the dinner at his house. On Ash Wednesday we met at Mass and sat between a hungry, fidgety Grace and an Emma sunk quietly in the wanderings of her own mind. We assured ourselves plenty of room by parking in the pew for the handicapped, with Emma’s walker standing guard by the entrance. The packed church (“Where are all these people the rest of the year?” Martin grumbled) rustled and muttered and emitted a constant sigh of sound that seemed to nettle Emma as the Mass progressed. She needed my help to settle her behind her walker in the line of people inching forward to receive the ashes. 

“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” the priest intoned as he drew his thumb across her forehead. The smudge of black ash stood out against the pallor of her forehead as she turned aside so I could receive my mark. I moved away in my turn to see Emma shuffling with a fixed aspect toward the door. 

“No, Emma, not yet!” I whispered, catching her and steering back to the pew, where we held up the line of penitents as we maneuvered the walker back into position. I nudged her gently back into place by Martin and sat myself at the end to block any attempt at escape. 

“No!” she protested, looking wildly around at the masses advancing past either side of our pew. “That’s not my walk. You let me have it.”

“Aunt Emma, please,” I begged, stroking her arm urgently. “There’s nothing wrong. We’re in church. Shh, let’s not distract everyone.”

But her breaths came ragged and faster, and to my horror tears started spilling down her cheeks.

“Shh, Emma, shh,” Martin whispered, putting his arm around her and holding her. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

I fished desperately in my pocket and pulled out the rosary with the clear green beads and let it slide down through my fingers to rest in a shimmering pool on the wooden seat. “Look, Emma,” I coaxed, moving it around with my finger in imitation of her string games. Her attention was caught, and she watched me slide the rosary around and arrange it into wavy patterns. I moved my hand aside as she put out her finger and began to nudge the chain here and there, widening it out to form a rough circle. Then she pressed a finger against each bead in turn, rolling the facets to and fro for a few beats before moving on to the next.  She gently sank back into her torpor, holding her rosary and cycling the beads through her fingers rhythmically and repeatedly.

“Peace be with you, Emma,” Martin offered quietly before the Agnus Dei. I leaned my forehead against his cheek, and he laid his hand lightly against the back of my head and let my temple rest against his lips for an instant. Then Grace was clamoring to be held, and he turned to her before I could see his face.

In the parking lot, Martin and I could only have the briefest of conversations after I’d loaded Emma in the car. 

“I want to come see you soon,” he said, ignoring Grace, who was tugging on his hand and moaning, “Daddy, let’s go.”

“I’m always free.”
“I’m leaving for my final trip on Sunday afternoon.” he said, “I’ll be gone for two weeks, so I was hoping I might come over on Saturday.”

I had to smile.

“What?” he asked, fending off Grace trying to rummage through his pocket for his phone.

“Nothing. It’s my birthday. You can get me a present in whatever exotic place you’re going. Where is it this time? Baden-Baden? Irkutsk?”

“Kansas City. I’m told they have some good barbecue.”

“Too bad it’s Lent.”

“Most days aren’t Friday.” He swung the protesting Grace up onto his shoulders. “Child, if you don’t shape up...” he threatened. She seized his head and tried to shake it around.

I started to step into the car.

“So will you let me come over?” he insisted.

“When have you ever asked my permission about coming in the house?” I asked, leaning my arms on the roof of the car.

“On Christmas. Now it’s Ash Wednesday. I’ll make it a holiday tradition.”

“Well, who am I to stand in the way of tradition? Come over, then.”

“I will, and you’d better put Emma to bed early.”

He stepped off across the parking lot, jouncing his giggling daughter, and I remained leaning on the car, watching them and unable to wipe a big silly grin off my own face.

On Saturday I tried to cajole Emma into helping me put together the right outfit. She followed me tractably enough to my closet, bearing the Jane Eyre with Howard’s inscription. She had taken to walking around the house with it, and though I feared for the book, I didn’t want to take it away from her. Now she laid it on the bed and patted the cover.

“I need your help, Emma!” I said cheerfully. “You’re so good at finding what’s pretty. Come and tell me what I should wear!” She pawed vaguely at the rack of clothes, but there was no light behind her eyes. “Well, that’s nice, honey,” she said, and wandered back out of the room. I bit my lip as I watched her brushing the wall for support as she wandered to her bedroom for her nap. She had taken against the walker and wouldn’t use it unless compelled.

Even Emma’s malaise couldn’t quench my anticipation for Martin’s arrival. He had noticed my dress last time; I would wear it again. He liked my hair up; I would do it up tonight. I hunted through the cabinets until I found some old candles to illuminate Emma’s silver candlesticks. Firewood was procured, though I didn’t lay the fire myself. The wine glasses were washed until they sparkled. Finally, all preparations complete, I threw myself down on the couch and closed my eyes, laying my cheek on the precise spot where Martin had held me by my shoulders the last time he was here.

My phone rang, and I groped lazily for it on the table beside the couch. 

“Hello,” I purred.

“Hey, sweetie,” said my mom. “Happy birthday. Do you feel all right? You sound sick.”

I sat up abruptly and only nearly missed clocking my knee on the coffee table.

“Mom, hi,” I said guiltily. “I was just laying down.”

“Oh, you must be so tired, poor thing. Is Aunt Emma wearing you out?”

“Not really. I try to keep a good eye on her and head her off before she gets in any trouble. I caught her carrying around the toilet brush the other day.”

“It sounds just like taking care of a toddler,” Mom sighed. “What are you doing tonight? Any big plans?”

“Not really. I’m looking forward to a quiet evening at home.”

“Looking forward to a quiet evening?” Mom wasn’t fooled. “That sounds like most nights. What’s so special about this night?”

“I do have a friend coming over for a while.”

“Ah, a nice quiet friend you don’t want to tell your mother about.”

“No! Mom!” I protested. “It’s just a friend. He’s dropping by before he goes out of town.”

“That sounds serious.”

“He has a daughter, Mom.”

“That sounds like Peggy Harriman’s nephew.”

I nearly fell off the couch. “You know about Martin?”

“Not really, but I used to chat with Peggy over the holidays when we’d be at Aunt Emma’s. He was seeing a red-haired girl for a while; she was supposed to be just beautiful. Then she got pregnant, and he took care of the baby because she fell in with the drug scene.”

I waited. “Well, what else, since you’re such a fount of knowledge?”

“I don’t know any more about it, but you seem awfully interested to find out,” she teased.

“He’s very interesting,” I confessed, “and I do like him. But I don’t know. It’s hard to tell when he’s being serious and when he’s just flirting. It’s not like he hasn’t been around a bit in the past.”

“Everyone makes mistakes, sweetie.”

“Not everyone has a daughter to show for it.”

“Would you rather he didn’t have a daughter to show for it?”

I had no answer for that.

“Well, I hope you enjoy your evening with... Martin? Was that his name?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to call and tell me all about it.”

“If there’s anything to tell,” I answered glumly. “You call me if you remember anything else.”

We rang off, and I sat back and tried to find the perfect spot I’d occupied before while I pondered the psychic powers bestowed by maternity. The phone buzzed again.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh, I hope it hasn’t come to that,” said Martin.

This time I did hit my knee as I popped up. 

“Are you on your way?” I asked as brightly as I could through gritted teeth.

“I still want to come over,” he said evasively. “I just got a call from Janice. She was supposed to be watching Grace tonight, but something urgent has come up, and Tom (that’s Grace’s grandfather) is working late, and the short version is that if I came, I would need to bring Grace with me. Is that...” He paused. “Would that be okay with you?”

I was silent.

“I’m sorry, Emma. I wanted so much to see you before I went, but I have to take care of Grace.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m just overwhelmed by the fact that this is the first time since I’ve met you that you’ve asked me a question without sounding like you expect the answer to be ‘yes’.”

“Is that a positive or a negative answer?”

“I think this new-found humility of yours should be cultivated. Were you seriously considering not coming?”

“Yes, if you had not wanted me to come. But you haven’t answered me. Do you want me to come over, with Grace?”

“I think you already know the answer. Yes, of course I want to you to come over.”

“We’re quite a pair,” he asserted with sudden lightness. “Between Aunt Emma and Grace, we’re never at full liberty. One day I’ll get you off in a dark corner by myself, and then you’ll be hard put to light a cigarette fast enough.”

“I’ll see if I can fit you into my busy dark corner schedule,” I promised.

Aunt Emma and I were waiting on the couch when there came a tentative knock on the door, followed by several loud thumps. I opened to see Martin and Grace on the doorstep, bearing food just as they had before.

“Knocking and all,” I marveled. 

“Oh, that’s for the sake of the child,” he said as they entered. “But you’ll note she did the knocking, not me.” 

Martin set the bags on the table. “I know you like Chinese takeout,” he remarked, “because I asked myself, ‘Does Emma like Chinese?’ and I was already sure the answer was ‘yes’.”

I restrained myself from brushing his hair out of his eyes.

Grace was clutching a tote bag embroidered with her name. “I brought my work,” she said importantly. “I’m making a scrapbook with Grandma.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Will you show it to me after dinner?”

“Yes,” she conceded, “but it’s not done yet.”

Martin served Grace, and I went over to Emma. Sitting beside her, I asked, “Aunt Emma, would you like to come have dinner with us?” She seemed amenable, so I led her to the table and sat her on the far end from Grace and made a bowl for her with rice and applesauce. Grace watched, fascinated, as I spooned the food into Emma’s unresisting mouth.

“Don’t stare, Grace,” Martin corrected her. “It’s not polite.”

She turned her eyes away and clambered up beside him to whisper loudly in his ear, “Why does she eat like a baby?”

“You can ask me about Aunt Emma, Grace,” I said pleasantly. “She’s old and sick and has a hard time remembering how to eat some days. She wasn’t always like this, though; I remember when I was your age and I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.”

“Are you going to get sick and eat like a baby?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“Grace!” Martin scolded. I laughed.

“I hope not,” I told her, “but if I do, I hope someone who loves me will take care of me like I take care of Aunt Emma.”

After dinner I settled on the couch between Emma and Martin while Grace sat on the coffee table and opened her bag to pull out an elegantly embroidered photo album. 

“Grandma loves to scrapbook,” she informed me seriously. “She made this for me, and she helps me put my pictures in with the special glue.”

“Grandma is very crafty,” I murmured to Martin. He snorted.

Grace flipped through the pages. Grandma may have been responsible for the fancy exterior of the book, but inside Grace’s taste predominated. Pictures were glued in  at angles acceptable to the aesthetic of the four-year-old. She had scorned the need to put pictures in chronological or any other discernable order, or indeed on consecutive pages. Aunt Emma seemed to perk up at the sight of photographs, so Grace allowed her to hold the book in her lap while she herself leaned over the arm of the couch and busily educated us about the contents of her scrapbook.

“Grandma and Grandpa took me to Disneyworld last year,” she sang, poking at a snap of Mr. and Mrs. Landry and Grace wearing mouse ear hats.”

“Will you look at that!” said Emma blandly. “They’re sure flopping around.”

“And that’s me at preschool,” Grace continued, scrutinizing a shot of several children grinning messily over a plate of cupcakes. “That’s Mikey Timmons next to me. I hate him.”

“Grace,” admonished Martin.

“I’m not keen on him,”she amended. “You should see this one.” She closed the book in Emma’s lap, then opened it carefully to the second page. “This is my mom. You can tell because her hair is like mine.”

I leaned over Emma’s shoulder to see the photo. Baby Grace, banging a spoon on a highly-upholstered high chair, was attended by a stunning woman leaning over the back of the seat. The woman’s vivid curls, captured in a tightly-drawn ponytail, were echoed by the baby’s wispy fluff. Tiny Grace gazed up at her mother with a radiant glee, but  her mother’s toothy smile in the direction of the camera was pasted like a mask on a visage that was already reflecting the ravages of addiction, and her eyes seemed focused on some inward need. I yearned to hold the photo and study it in depth, but Grace was already turning the page and chattering about a birthday party at Aunt Laurel’s house (“That’s my sister,” Martin enlightened me.) and the pretty dress Grandma had made for her.

“Would you like dessert?” I asked abruptly. “Aunt Emma likes ice cream, so we always keeps some in the house.”

Grace was amenable to ice cream, and we all repaired to the kitchen again. She wasn’t phased this time by the sight of me reminding Emma to put her hand containing her spoon to her mouth. She and Martin played a game in which he helped her eat her ice cream by lifting her hand to her mouth, and she giggled and grew antic.

“Now it’s your turn!” she said to me, bouncing around the kitchen. “Daddy, you help Miss Emma eat her ice cream.”

Martin’s hand closed over mine, and he leaned behind me. “Do you need any help?” he asked, close to my cheek.

“Absolutely not, in front of this audience.”

“Your instincts are sound,” he agreed, but his hand lingered on mine.

Martin and Grace selected a book from her bag to read on the couch while I got Emma ready for bed. Emma seemed very sleepy and it was difficult to navigate her through the steps of her evening routine. She sat obediently on the toilet, then stood up indecisively. I helped her run water over her dentures and put them into the glass with a tablet. Her docility was refreshing, but also rather unnerving.

I sat by her side after I’d tucked her in. She rolled to face me, but looked fixedly past my shoulder.

“What’s that man doing in my closet?” she asked clearly.

I swiveled to face the closet. One large sliding door was open, revealing a packed row of dresses and shirts hanging over an array of shoes, but there was nothing out of the ordinary on display.

“There’s no man, Aunt Emma,” I assured her. “There’s nothing in the closet.”

“There’s a man in my closet,” she proclaimed with confidence. “That man is in my closet.”

It was a ludicrous thing, on the face of it, but her utter certainty, combined with her matter-of-fact manner, began to wear on me. “Shall I close the closet door for you?” I asked uneasily.

“That man is in my closet,” she repeated.

I stepped to the door. “Martin, would you come here for a minute, please?” I called, in what I hoped was a tranquil voice.

He settled Grace on the couch with her book and came quickly down the hall, pausing in mild alarm at the sight of my pale face. “Is something wrong?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. 

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, a trifle unsteadily. “Will you look at something for me?” He followed me into the room and amiably wished Aunt Emma a good night.

“The man is in my closet,”she stated.

He turned quickly around in surprise and confronted the lifeless closet. “Do you see anything that could look like a man?” I asked him. 

“No,” he confessed, and we both looked back at Aunt Emma. She, in turn, looked at the closet so assuredly that even Martin was unnerved.

“Let me close that for you,” he said, and swiftly slid the door shut. Emma still gazed steadily in that direction.

“That man. Howard,” she said. “Where’s that thing of Howard’s?”

“Do you want your Jane Eyre, Aunt Emma? I’ll go get it,” I offered, too swiftly. We left the room and pulled the door to, and stood staring at each other in the hall.

“I think I’m as brave as the next man,” Martin finally said, “but that was the eeriest experience of my life.”

“Mine too,” I agreed shakily. “Come with me to get the book. I don’t dare go by myself right now.” 

We crept down the hall and into my bedroom to find the book. Martin was, for once, disinclined to press his advantage on finding himself alone with me in what could pass for a dark corner.  I snatched Jane Eyre off the bed and we both hesitated outside Emma’s door for a second longer than was suitable for mature adults.

“If we open that door and she’s still looking at the closet, I’m not going in,” I whispered. Cautiously we nudged the door open a crack and peeked in, but Emma, mercifully, had already fallen asleep. I slipped in and laid the book on her table, then fled.

In the living room Grace had fallen asleep under her book. There we stood, in the quiet house, and for a moment just breathed. I shuddered once or twice, and Martin ran his fingers through his hair to push it back out of his eyes.

“I brought some wine,” he said.

“Yes, please.”

We trooped into the kitchen -- neither of us felt particularly like being alone. He found the corkscrew and I presented him with the wine glasses I’d washed so carefully that afternoon. We sat solemnly at the table and imbibed.

“So,” I asked. “Was that a picture of Kristy in Grace’s scrapbook?”

“Yes. It was taken around Grace’s first birthday. She went into rehab not long afterward.”

“When did you meet her?” I asked.

There was a long pause, and I thought that he might choose not answer.

“Before I went to business school,” he said at last. “We met through friends and went around to the same clubs. I was working at a fairly intense job and making good money, and I thought I deserved to live it up in my after-hours life.” He smiled faintly. “And Kristy didn’t share your strong moral standards.”

“Neither did you, apparently.”

“Oh, I’m not denying my share of the blame. I was infatuated and stupid.”

“That’s a bit callow.”

“Does it sound that way? And yet you won’t deny that I acted stupidly. It didn’t seem to matter what I did, as long as I worked hard and moved up. Then she told me she was pregnant, and it was as if the wind were knocked completely out of me. The idea of Kristy getting pregnant had never entered my mind, or hers either, and suddenly we were parents without meaning or wanting to be. I offered to marry her, but she didn’t want to tie herself down.”

I ran my finger around the rim of my glass. He leaned forward and grabbed my hand.

“I know you may not think much of me right now, Emma. You’re a person who always weighs the consequences, at least in the things that matter most. But I did persuade her to keep the baby, and if that’s the only responsible role I played in the whole situation, I think you’ll agree that at least I the right thing when it mattered most.”

I did not look at him.

“Do you see her much anymore?”

“No. She knows better than to come to me for money anymore.”

“What does she do now?”

He shrugged. “She stays with friends. She scrounges money for drugs. She steals, probably, or worse.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes.”

“So what happens to her now?”

“If she won’t stay in treatment, she’ll probably die on the streets.”

His matter-of-factness infuriated me.“Martin, this woman is the mother of your child.” 

He passed his hand over his eyes and rested his elbows on the table.

“I did what I could to help her, back when I had more influence over her. Her parents are still trying, in their way. They’ve paid for treatment and for her rehab, more than once. But she’s an adult, and has made her choices, and it’s not my job to force her into cleaning up her life.”

I stared blindly out the window.

“Emma,” he entreated, “you think of frailty and weakness, and you see your aunt, who allows you to treat her with dignity.  But can would you do with someone who refuses every offer of help? How do you respond when a person has thrown every last shred of her dignity out the window and lashes out against every attempt you make to try and restore it? I gave Kristy all the help that it was within my power to give, when it was mine to give. Now I need that time and energy to provide for Grace.”

The image of the red-haired woman and child was still fresh in my mind. I pushed back my chair. “How will Grace feel about the way you’ve abandoned Kristy to her fate?”

“Abandoned?” And finally he was angry. “No one has abandoned Kristy, least of all me. I never went off and left her. You seem under the misapprehension that she is somehow my charge.  But Kristy is not my wife, Emma. Is that distinction lost on you? I’m not vowed to love and cherish her in sickness and in health, as long we both shall live. My obligation is to Grace, to bring her up safely and protect her, as best I can, from the snares that caught her mother.” He was standing now, and the green flecks in his eyes were dangerous. “And now I think I’ll take my daughter home and put her to bed.”

He strode past me out of the kitchen. His fury had shocked me into numbness, but now a sick regret stabbed and twisted in my gut. I took a few steps into the living room and watched him sweeping Grace’s belongings into a pile. “Martin...” I pleaded.

“Are you satisfied now?” he asked coldly. “Have you learned what you needed to know?”

“I don’t even know what I wanted to know,” I cried, “but I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

He had thrown Grace’s books into her bag and was preparing to lift her up when there was a thump and a cry from the vicinity of Emma’s closet. We both froze facing each other, and then we were hurtling down the hall. There, on the floor of the bedroom, was Emma, with her adult diaper tossed nearby. A wet and sour smell was already pungent in the room. 

“Emma!” I gasped, flying to her side. “Are you hurt? Can you stand? Martin, help me get her up.” We raised her to her feet, and she wobbled in a daze. 

“Let’s see if she can walk to the bathroom,” he suggested, and put his arm under her shoulders for support.

“Emma,” I instructed, slowly and loudly, “Can you walk? Can you come to the bathroom with me?”

“I...” she mumbled. “I’m lost. I can’t find me. There’s something. That thing.”

We escorted her across the hall.

“What do you need me to do,” Martin asked, as I helped Emma through the door.

“Down in the laundry room is a basket with some of Emma’s nightgowns and underwear folded up. Will you bring that here, and I’ll change her?”

He departed immediately. “Oh, Emma, what happened?” I asked her as I stripped her soiled nightgown from her and started warming the water in the tub. I helped her climb in and sit down, then I lathered her with soap and used the sprayer to rinse her off. There was a knock on the door, and Martin called, “Here’s the basket.”

I stepped out and selected a new nightgown for Emma to wear. “Would you dump this basket in room and roll up the rug that she fell on and put it in here? I’ll clean it tomorrow.”

Emma was clean now, but the haste of the past moments had agitated her, and she was crying softly to herself. I put a fresh adult diaper on her and worked her nightgown over her arms. Then I guided her back to bed.

Martin was waiting in the room to help settle her in bed. “Do you need me to do the laundry?” he offered.

I considered. “Actually, would you sit and read to her? She’s upset, but she always likes to hear you.”

“Okay.” He sat in the chair and opened up Jane Eyre in the middle. “Aunt Emma, here’s a book I think you like.”

I picked up the basket and moved slowly from task to task, carefully gathering the laundry into a clean sheet and bundling it into a basket, adding bleach to the washing machine, and turning then to menial jobs of disinfecting and scrubbing and restoring. Throughout the process I found myself concentrating not on the disagreeable aspect of the work, but on the faint rising and falling of Martin, narrating the action of the story. 

Finally I crept back into the hall and stood quietly in the doorway. Closing my burning eyes, I let myself drift away on the warm timbre of his voice.

“Sir,” I interrupted him (he read), “you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate -- with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel -- she cannot help being mad.”

“Jane, my little darling (so I will call you, for so you are), you don’t know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?”

“I do indeed, sir.”

“Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dearer. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat -- your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me.”

Tears pricked and stung, and a sob rose and caught in my throat. I bit my lip and dashed angrily at the drops on my cheeks, but the battle would not be won, and my tumultuous emotions, would not be suppressed or denied any longer. I leaned my arms against the jamb of the door and sobbed out the disappointment and frustrations and stresses of the past months, the trials of life with Emma and the tension of being near Martin.

And then his arms were around me, and I was crying against his chest while he murmured my name into my hair. “Love, what’s wrong? What’s the matter.”

“I’m twenty-three today,” I wept. “It’s my birthday.”

He rocked and hushed me and wiped my tears away with his thumbs. “Happy birthday, love. Happy birthday.”

The awkward moment arrived when I had to stop crying and confront my dripping nose and Martin’s soggy shirt. He handed me several tissues, and I blew and hiccuped inelegantly, then fled to the bathroom to gape in distress at my red eyes and face. Short of splashing cool water on them, there was nothing I could do about my ravaged looks, so I took a deep breath and went to find Martin.

He was in the living room holding Grace.

“I can’t stay any later, Emma,” he apologized. “Grace is sleeping at the Landrys’ tonight and my flight leaves earlier than I like to contemplate.”

I snuffled. “Will you call me at six AM again?”

“If you like,” he laughed.

I held the door open for him, and he carried his red curly bundle out.

“I’ll come see you as soon as I get home, Emma,” he said. “Be expecting me.”

Volumes of Memory

Everyone has certain sights or objects and strongly remind them of the past. The other night, having just got in to my mother's house, I stepped into the library in order to give MrsDarwin a quick call and catch up on doings back in Ohio. Pacing around while talking I was realizing what a strong visual memory I have for my parents books.

The present house is not one I ever lived in -- my mother moved here after my father died in order to be near her parents -- and so the layout of the library is different. And yet, the books are the same. A number I've read, but far more I have not. Yet even among those books I'd never taken down from the shelf there is an intense familiarity to the books which I saw on the shelves throughout my childhood. The "old books" all showed as familiar faces while newer acquisitions jumped out as unfamiliar. I could probably sort the whole library into books acquired in the last ten years and those acquired before with a fair amount of accuracy. And likewise with the non book inhabitants of the shelves. Thomas the blue china elephant looks down with a familiar smile, and the enigmatic saxaphone playing frog hides on a lower shelf. But the miniature mounted globe is unfamiliar.

Profiles in String 23

40,868/50,000 -- though part of that is filler as I've been sketching out the final steps of the plot. 

I think this novel has jinxed my entire month of November. I'm getting to know some of the ER people by name, and Jack will have twin scars on his eyes. Bad bathtub. 

Darwin is out of town for his grandfather's funeral, and won't be back until the 30th. Please pray for the soul of Frank Ramirez.

...

   Emma loved getting ready to go out. The routine of picking clothes and applying her makeup always seemed to soothe her. Her eye for color and style was still strong when she chose to give it free reign. Now she threw open her closet and surveyed her options.

   “Now where are we going, honey?” she asked. 

   “We’re going to have dinner with Peggy Harriman’s nephew Martin. He had the little girl with the red red hair, do you remember? They brought us dinner on Christmas.”

   “Well, you don’t say!” she exclaimed. “That pretty little girl. Where does she live?”

   “With her father, Aunt Emma. Her father is Peggy Harriman’s nephew.”

   “I should call that gal,” she mused, poking at the clothes on the hangers. “What’s pretty in here?”

   “You always used to say that, Emma,” I reminded her. “Do you remember when I stayed with you and we would get ready to go out shopping, and you’d look through your whole wardrobe of stylish dresses and wonder what you had that was pretty?”

   “I guess I kept some nice things,” she admitted complacently, selecting a red sweater to go with her tan slacks. “Bring me that box, honey.”

   I handed her the jewelry box from her dressing table. She searched through it a moment and drew out a string of pearls. Laying it across the neck of the sweater, she smoothed the nacreous strand into a circle and tapped each pearl in turn, pressing her finger gently against the minute roughness of the surface.

   “Now I’m all set,” she told me, with a glint in her eye. “Wearing a nice outfit is like putting on armor. No matter what comes at you during the day, at least you look good.”

   “You always look good, Emma,” I assured her as I helped her into her sweater.

   “You go on,” she hushed me, but she patted my hand.

   Fortified against any occasion in her finery, Emma set her stylistic sights on me.

   “You should wear some color, honey,” she admonished. “The men like to see a girl who has some color.”

   “I was going to wear a black dress,” I offered. “Black is always elegant.”

   “Black is for funerals,” Emma sniffed. “Let’s go right over and see what you have.”

I watched with grudging curiosity as she pawed through my monochromatic closet. “Honey, all this black will wash you right out, with your coloring.”

   “I thought it made me look serious.”

   “It makes you look dead.”

   She emerged bearing the tea-length green dress I’d worn as Stacy’s bridemaid four years earlier.    “Now green is your color. Look how it brings out your eyes.”

   “Emma, that’s far too formal,” I protested. “We’re just going to Martin’s apartment. The nice young man, remember?”

   Emma patted my shoulder. “Even a nice young man likes to see a pretty girl.” And from the closet she pulled my black cardigan and hung it on the shoulders of the dress. “You put that over it, and pin up your hair, and you see if the nice young men don’t raise their eyebrows.”

   “No wonder you had to take up smoking,” I murmured, but I was surprised at the accuracy of Emma’s instincts. Stacy had chosen a dress with simple lines for her wedding party, and now, paired with the cardigan, the deep V of the neckline looked almost demure. 

   “Aunt Emma, you’re a genius,” I proclaimed. “How do you do it?”

   “Honey, that’s my job,” she said, picking up my hairpins and beckoning for me to sit on the edge of the bed. “Women pay lots of money to have someone pick their pretty clothes for them.”

   “But you did it for me for free.” I sat on the bed and allowed her to twist my hair up. “Thank you.”

   The city is old, and is always in flux. Seen from afar, an undulating blanket of trees pierced by innumerable steeples, it seems to have altered little over the years, but those of us who love it know better. Areas come into vogue and drop into disrepute. Acres of fruit trees or corn fields must make way for shopping centers and apartments; neighborhoods are built and demolished and revived. Emma’s home stood in a stately enclave, a bastion of good breeding regardless of the ravages changing demographics may have wrought all around it. Martin’s neighborhood was on the better end of regentrification. He lived in a townhouse set in a development that was constructed on the former site of blocks of crumbling apartment buildings. It was an aspirational address for young professionals who had not yet risen to the ranks of urban pioneers, or who were coming off their city loft days. Martin was in the latter category. 

   Grace answered the door when we knocked, her red halo of hair warmly backlit. 

   “Daddy, it’s the lady,” she yelled.

   “Let her in, then,” he called back.

   I escorted Emma into a tiled entryway and helped her wriggle out of her coat. Grace ran into the living room and returned with a well-preserved woman of indeterminate age whose pale coloring hinted at the genetic origin of Grace’s locks.

    “Grandma, this is the lady,” she insisted, tugging Grandma urgently. The grandmother offered her hand graciously.

   “I’m Janice Landry, Grace’s grandmother,” she said in a pleasant tone, quickly taking my measure with a practiced eye.

   “How do you do?” I replied. “I’m Emma Trapnel, and this is my great-aunt Emma.” Aunt Emma was delighted. 

   “How do you do, honey!” she exclaimed, squeezing Janice’s hand with genial pressure. “Sit right down and let’s put our feet up.” She turned to me. “Are those folks coming soon?”

   “No, Aunt Emma.” Janice was leading us into the living room and specifying the most comfortable chair for the purposes of settling Emma. “We’re having dinner with Peggy Harriman’s nephew, Martin. You remember Martin.”

   “You remember me, Aunt Emma!” Martin swept her from my hands and tucked her into the soft leather club chair. “This is a chair fit for a queen, so naturally it suits you.”

   “Oh, a nice young man!” she said coyly. 

   “And Emma! It’s been so long,” he said, sliding my coat from my shoulders. “I see you’ve already met Janice, Grace’s grandmother. She was just here to drop Grace off.”

   “I hope you have a lovely dinner,” said Janice to me, and though she smiled politely, I could see in her eyes the glimmers of a deep reservoir of sadness. She kissed Grace good-night and moved to the door, followed by Martin with my coat. They didn’t speak as he let her out, but she paused for a moment and touched his shoulder before moving out into the twilight.

   “Grace, why don’t you find your book and show it to Aunt Emma?” he asked as he came back into the living room. “Emma, what can I offer you to drink?”

   “Oh, anything,” I said, trailing him to the kitchen.

   “Let me rephrase that: what do you want to drink?”

   “I like a gin and tonic when I can get one.”

   He pulled bottles from the pantry and glasses from the cabinet and stacked them on the counter. To the collection he added a lime pulled from a basket of fruit.

   “I’m impressed that you keep limes around just to have,” I commented.

   “You’re not the only person in the world who drinks gin and tonic.”

   He pulled an ice tray out of the fridge, twisted it efficiently, and shook a cube loose. Plunking it in a glass, he poured our a measure of gin. As he concocted the drink, I perched on a bar stool and casually surveyed the room with a bit of the sizing-up technique Janice Landry had applied to me. Having grown accustomed to the jaundiced glare of Aunt Emma’s kitchen, I felt struck with snow blindness by the unsaturated light. It leached the color out of the cherry wood and stainless steel and flinty tile and left one with an uneasy feeling that precedes an interrogation. Either Martin hadn’t put his stamp on the room, or it resisted any attempts at de-neutralization, as it still maintained its designer sterility.

   “How long have you lived here?” I asked.

   “Two years.” He squeezed a section of lime into my glass, then dropped it in and handed it to me. “I’m thinking about buying a house now that Grace spends most of the time with me. This isn’t really the best place for kids.”

   “I can imagine.”

   He mixed up his own drink, and we sipped in silence. 

   “How has Emma been this week?” he asked.

   “She’s been normal. We didn’t do much.”

   “You learned about Howard.”

   “By accident.”

   We sipped.

   “What are you making for dinner?”

   “A cheese omelet, I think.”

   “You think? You don’t know already?”

   “I find myself struck by indecision in your presence.”

   “That’s not like you.”

   We sipped.

   “Would Aunt Emma like anything to drink?” 

   “She’d probably appreciate some water.” 

   He filled a glass and we carried it out to Emma, who sat content to let Grace show her various books and toys.  Martin glanced back toward the kitchen. “Do you want to go sit out in the back room?” he asked abruptly.

   “Let’s,” I replied, a shade too eagerly. We took our drinks and passed through the living room to a little nook in the rear, not much more than a curtained bay window sheltered in an alcove. Two battered easy chairs of the most comfortable variety provided a bit of privacy from the living room, and small lamp glimmered on a table tucked between them. 

  “Do you mind if I put my glass right on the table?” I hesitated.

   He scoffed and sloshed his down beside his chair. I slipped off my flats and curled my feet underneath me, while he hooked a small ottoman with his foot and drew it to rest in front of his chair. We looked out on the small fenced back yard and let the chatter of Grace and the murmurings of Emma wash over us.

   “You look different tonight, Emma,” he said. “That color suits you.”

   “It’s kind of you to say so.”

   “And I like your hair up.”

   “Aunt Emma should get all the credit. She did all the fashion work. She has an eye for that kind of thing.”

   “I hope she’s not the one responsible for that very becoming blush.”

   “Of course not. That’s the alcohol.”

   He grinned. “That’s my old Emma. I was starting to wonder if all the sharpness had drained out of you.”

   “Did you wonder that?” I studied my ice cubes in my glass. “You didn’t take any pains to find out this week.”

   “I took many pains this week, and every one of them was given to me by you. You’re exquisite in many ways, Emma, but I think what I admire most about you is your elegant ability to slip a knife into me and twist it before I even realize I’ve left myself open.”

   “And what’s fascinating about you, Martin, is your consummate skill in saying absolutely nothing while insinuating everything.”

   “It seems” he said, “that you find it difficult to tell whether I’m in earnest when I’m flirting with you. The answer is yes. I like to flirt, and I would be delighted if you responded in kind every time.”

   I hissed out a sigh and abandoned my chair in favor of the cool darkness by the window. “I don’t doubt that you like to flirt. I doubt whether you mean anything more than flirting. You seem to love the game for the game’s sake.”

   “I love wordplay as much as you do, Emma, even if your mastery of the art tends toward slicing rather than stroking. And yes, I love the thrill of the game. But is it so difficult for you to believe that I could love the game not for its own sake, but for yours?” 

   “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

He rose from his chair and took a step toward me, and I sought the protection of retreat to keep from dissolving under the intensity of his gaze.

   “Do you really mean that, Emma?” he asked softly. “Or are you still just scoring easy points?”

   “Daddy,” came a plaintive wail from behind us, “I’m hungry.”

   “Go watch cartoons, baby,” he urged, without turning around.

   “Martin,” I reproved, uneasy at having no escape from his nearness. “Your daughter wants something to eat. And Aunt Emma probably does too.”

    Still he stood behind me. I didn’t trust myself to try and brush past him back into the safety of the living room with its twin buffers of Aunt Emma and Grace. Then he exhaled suddenly and moved away. “Well, it’s good to know that at least some of the women in this room know what they want from me.”

   After this, dinner proved to be a fairly restrained affair. Martin was a surprisingly competent cook, dicing onion and whipping eggs with a vengeance and turning out a cheese omelet of a quality that ought to have delighted me after my months of wrestling with Emma’ vintage stove. But he was a perfect gentleman all through the meal -- all cordiality and deference. And when I bundled up Emma against the evening chill and hustled her to the car, he gallantly held her door open as I settled her in, and then went so far as to shake my hand as he bid me a pleasant evening. I stared at our clasped hands in disgust and admiration, and breathed a sigh of defeat. 

   “Fine, you win,” I said. “I can’t believe you stooped to such a dirty trick as this, though. I hope you’re ashamed of yourself.”

   “Every day,” he declared. Then he kissed my hand and sauntered back inside. I felt the familiar desire to throw my shoe at his head. Instead, I got in the car and drove home, surprisingly light-hearted.