All the Dead Yale Men (13 page)

Silvery moisture, part drool, part river water, came out of Jerry's mouth.

His legs kicked into the dry weeds on the shore, and he jerked harder, as though he knew he was on hard ground, and made that sound, which was the worst part, that “ah, ah, ah.” Jerry banged his head on the stones in the weeds, and I took off my jacket and
put that under his head, but his blood was already seeping into the cloth and on the ground, surprisingly red on the dry grass of summer. It made a sleek line through weeds until it mixed with the water of the Delaware.

His bridgework came out when I put my handkerchief into his mouth, and so I pried open his mouth to get the teeth before he choked on them. Pia picked up the imitation teeth and put them into her shirt pocket with an infinite, considerate gentleness. I put my hand into the pinkish foam of Jerry's mouth and the teeth he had left cut me.

The “ah, ah, ah” came out as an infantile burbling, a choking and perfect cry of surprise and horror.

Pia used her phone to call the local rescue, and as she said “Just down river from where Trout Cabin comes into the Delaware,” Jerry stopped breathing.

With my ear on his chest I could hear nothing but the river, the cars on the road, Pia's clear, calm voice as she explained exactly where we were. The artery in Jerry's neck made a faint and irregular pulse, but then my fingers, where he had bitten me, were bleeding, and maybe it was just the throb of my own heart. I put my head on his chest again. The river seemed blue beyond the grass. Even the current seemed slow and sluggish, but obviously wearing down those stones in the middle, which had been there for thousands of years but which the river would reduce to dust.

“Dad? Dad?” said Pia.

Jerry's nose had a bulb, and I squeezed it with one hand and held his mouth open with the other.

“Clear the vomit,” she said. “Turn him to the side to make sure it isn't blocking the airway.”

We turned his head into the light and his mouth was a conglomeration of slime, of red flesh, of his tongue that was a color I had never seen before. It was warm and wet, and yet I didn't
want to press too hard, to do anything that was going to make it worse. Then I turned his head back, relieved to see that he was still bleeding from his scalp. But maybe less than before. Did that mean he had bled out from an interior wound? Was his blood pressure falling? I held his nose and put my lips against his, into the sheen from his drooling, as bright as the river. Then I blew into him, still holding the nose, once, then waiting, and then again, the chest rising and falling. The blood from my fingers ran down his cheeks and into his mouth. I used my handkerchief to wipe it off his mouth, but the cloth was filled with grit, and then Pia pushed my hand out of the way and said, “I'll do it.”

She brushed away the slime and the blood from my hand and took Jerry's nose the way that one touches a newborn. She squeezed Jerry's nose, not quite so hard as I had done, more as though she knew precisely what she was doing. She took a deep breath, put her lips against Jerry's, held the odd-looking nose with her thumb and first finger, and breathed into Jerry's lungs. The chest rose. The breath came out with a gurgling wet sound, a sort of bubbling that made me think Jerry had swallowed some of the Delaware, but then it seemed possible this was a death rattle, river-like but still having that same, wet horrifying quality, all the worse for being in the sun and that silver glare.

Pia's lips were covered with blood and slime and she shook her head, as though she knew what I was thinking after all. No, she seemed to say, No. I don't think he's dead. Then with that same, infinitely gentle movement she put her lips against Jerry's again, squeezed that nose that looked like an old rubber bulb, and breathed in, not too hard, not too soft. The chest rose and fell with a quality that was at once regular and yet frightening.

We sat face to face, covered with the slime and blood. An occasional gurgle came from Jerry's throat. Up the river from the next town, Pond Eddy, came the siren with its ululating whine.
I managed to get the handkerchief around my fingers enough to keep them from bleeding, and as Pia sat up, I reached down and took the nose, Pia letting it go not because she was reluctant to go ahead, but because of something else: a gentle suggestion that said, All right, all right. It's going to be all right. Or, at least, if he is going to die, it is going to be in the ambulance, not on our hands, not with us demonstrating our incompetence.

The siren came along the river, but the ambulance passed us, went a quarter of a mile down river, stopped, turned around and came back. It was an old Ford van that had been outfitted with a used siren and a cheap light.

Jerry's eyes opened. He breathed on his own.

I let go of his nose and rocked back on my heels, and as Pia and I faced each other the second wave of the seizure hit with a power that made us both flinch: Jerry stiffened again, like some new, previously unknown material. He touched ground in just two places, like a yogi, just the back of his head and his heels, his back and legs completely free of the ground. You could have run your fist under there without touching his back. The seizure came in earnest, trembling, shaking, and the odd voice of it was like a prayer, or an expression of fear.

One man and one woman in uniforms that must have been at one time jumpsuits for a gas station, the kind that had Bob or Sam stitched on the front, now came through the dry grass, which in the sun appeared with filaments of red, like a toaster. Jerry's cry was constant, so articulate and yet so meaningless.

The woman was Mary Drucker.

“I'll bet he stopped taking his pills,” said Mary. Then she opened his shirt pocket and took out a pharmacy bottle, an iodine-colored one, and held it up. Then she read the number of the pills, the date, shook it again. “Look. Look. You see that?”

The man opened his bag and removed a syringe, took off
the top that protected the needle, and put it into Jerry's arm, the plunger coming down with a slow, soothing movement, the silver liquid, as bright as the glare, disappearing into Jerry's arm.

The seizure stopped.

Then they checked to see if he was able to breathe, if the airway was clear, and when they were satisfied that Jerry was breathing, they went up to the ambulance and brought down the stretcher on wheels. Pia and I sat back, our faces bloody and covered with slime.

The stretcher bounced through the dry grass and rock, looking for all the world like a small boat afloat on a dry sea. Mary Drucker and the man loaded Jerry onto it, tied him down, covered him, and took him up to the road, where they slipped the gurney into the back of the cheap ambulance and slammed the door.

Mary turned to me and said, “Nice to see you Frank. Where you been keeping yourself?”

“Boston,” I said.

She shrugged. As though that was all there was to say about anyone who abandoned a small town along the Delaware for a place like that. Then she shrugged and said over her shoulder, “I told Jerry if he doesn't take the phenobarbital, this is going to happen. I told him.”

“I mentioned it to him,” I said.

“Mentioned?” she said. “Well, the only way he is going to listen is if you mention it with a two-by-four.” She turned to the man who had given Jerry the shot. “Mentioned? Did you hear that?”

“I called the hospital in Port Jervis,” said the man. “They're waiting. He doesn't like the way the pills make him feel.”

“What the hell does that have to do with the price of bread?” said Mary. “What does feeling have to do with things like that? You do it or you don't. Don't talk to me about feelings.” She turned to me. “Isn't that right, Frank?”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Sometimes.”

She turned to Pia.

“You know what I mean, don't you?”

“Yes,” said Pia. “I do.”

“The only one with any sense in this group,” said Mary. “You do your job. Let other people do theirs.”

They got into the van and slammed the door, and then it took off, that wailing louder than ever, at least when it turned around, but then it receded, the sound having an odd throb.

“What do they call that?” I asked Pia.

“The sound?” she said. “The Doppler effect.”

“Yes,” I said. “That's what it is.”

She nodded. Sure. She remembered. It was like those moments when she explained Fermat's theorem: it happened as fast as a memory triggered by the scent of honeysuckle or an orchid, but then the sound and scent of the river came back.

Jerry said the seizures came first as a blue light, as though it was the exhaust of a flying saucer. Or sometimes he said it was like a storm, one of those cells out of which the tendrils of a tornado come, rich with the shape and color of the tentacle of an octopus. It came down and touched the earth, at once black and contradictory, like smoke and the ink of a squid. Sometimes it was like an eclipse, when the moon covers the sun, but the shadow was as violet as a gentian.

He didn't really stutter, although some words gave him trouble, and while he had a disability check and while my grandfather had left him a little money, I still sent him a check every two months. Well, not a check. A stack of twenties held together with a rubber band. When we were together, we played a game, and he said “One,” and I said “Two,” and then he said “Three,” and we went on that way until we got to nineteen, since he couldn't quite understand how it went from the teens to the
twenties, then thirties, then hundreds. Still, he liked geometry, and he glowed when I showed him a proof.

Pia and I washed our faces in the river.

“Dad,” she said. “You understand, don't you?”

“What?”

“I will never, ever have children. Period,” she said.

“Wait,” I said. “They've got all kinds of genetic tests . . . ”

“Don't,” said Pia. “Don't give me any lawyer bullshit. Or any bullshit. For once, I want you to listen to me. Can you do that for once?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I said.

“Just listen. Don't ask questions. You heard me,” she said.

“But . . . ”

She was standing on the bank, a little above me, and so we stood nose to nose. Her eyes were the same gray color as mine, maybe a little bluer, although that could have just been anger.

We turned away from each other and got into the car, and drove to the hospital in Port Jervis. Jerry was fine. Then we drove home, back to Cambridge, and we didn't say a word until we pulled into the driveway.

“Have you heard what I said?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “The end of the line.”

“Good.” She swallowed and closed her eyes. “Is there any other way? Is that what you want? Seizures? Incapacity? Madness?”

IT WASN'T THE
best of times or the worst of times, but some other combination altogether. Or maybe it is better to say that it was the best of times, but fate, or darkness, or that substance Thucydides tried to define, if only by events, was waiting to do its worst. The first detail of it had to do with a dinner Alexandra made five months before my father died.

Alexandra put pasta on the table, linguine with a white puttanesca sauce, some tomatoes with fresh mozzarella and basil, a white wine, Orvieto Classico Superiore. Then she sat down and smiled. Well, I thought, at least she is making an effort. She put the pasta onto a plate and handed it to me, and in that moment we both held that white plate, when we both tugged it at the same time, I felt some firm, definite pull. I have lived with my wife for twenty-five years, and I know that pull, that insistence, which is so perfectly mixed with hesitation.

Alexandra taught film production at Boston University, and for a long time she had wanted to make a documentary film about Marinetti, an Italian Futurist who, to my mind anyway, was simply bonkers: he and his followers, at the early part of the last century, embraced the worst aspect of the modern age with a sort delusional pleasure. For instance, they thought that the sound of a machine gun as it mowed down soldiers was a kind of music, or the music of the age. The new symphony. My wife was as amazed by this as I was, and for a long time she had tried to interest people, like WGBH, in funding the project. I had even written proposals with her.

“This is good,” I said, with the pasta on a fork.

“Yes,” she said. “Isn't it?”

“I wonder if you have heard anything about the funding for the Marinetti?”

“I can't fool you,” she said. “How do you do that? How do you know I've heard something?”

“The way you cook,” I said. “So?”

“Well,” she said. “It's not the funding. But close. I've been invited to teach a course at the University of Rome. American film of the twentieth century. Frankly, I'll have to go quickly, since someone else backed out on them for the spring. I'll have to be there next week.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It won't be that long,” she said. “I'll be back before summer. By late spring. I know it might be tough for you, after losing the Citron case. Pia will be at school. I skedaddle to Rome . . . ”