Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
“I’m not and I won’t be. I was old before I went to seminary. I was a normal person for twenty-three years before this began.”
“How old are you now?”
“Thirty-seven years old on the twentieth of the month.”
“I’m twenty-six,” she said. “Nora Jane says it’s the best age there is.”
“Eat your breakfast,” he suggested. “Stay here with me.”
“I was going to the bookstore,” she said. “I canceled my appointments this morning. I wanted to find another book to read.
I had this book of poems Freddy gave me but I couldn’t read it. It was all about the sadness of love. I wanted a book about
Iraq or something for the real world.”
She had not moved her hand and now she turned it over so their palms were touching.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“What men and women do,” he answered. “Eat your scone.”
She took back her hand and picked up a fork and used it to cut off a piece of scone and put it into her mouth. She began to
chew, very elegantly, deliberately, beautifully.
The sun, which all morning had been behind a thick line of clouds, broke out above them and shone down on San Francisco with
the full force of a solar storm that had begun many years ago but only now was hitting Northern California on its way to Nevada
and New Orleans and Mississippi. It burned down upon the Bay Area as if to touch and warm every atom in all the animate and
inanimate matter known to man or God or the idea of God or order or memory or dream. It is the sun, and anyone with any sense
would worship it, Mitzi was thinking, because, for goodness sake, it isn’t always asking hard things in return and just lets
people soak it up and be. Amen.
I
KNOW ALL OF MITZI’S COUSINS
,” Nora Jane was saying. “They’re an old German family, except Mitzi’s mom is Irish. Mitzi knows all those Irish dances that
are the fad now. I want her to start teaching a class but she’s too busy. Mitzi’s somebody, Freddy. Wait a minute.” Nora Jane
was using the speakerphone outside the isolation room. She would be able to go in soon, but for now the doctors “just wanted
to be sure the marrow is everywhere we need it.”
“Just to be extra careful. It’s been so nice so far,” the Indian oncologist had said, so the Harwoods had taken that to heart
and become the model recovery patient and family.
“This speakerphone is getting bad,” Nora Jane said. “Don’t you think so? It’s worn out from everyone yelling in it.”
“We won’t need it soon. Okay, go on. So, in other words, she’s worthy of him and he can just dump the priesthood like he did
coaching and what else, oh yes, writing. I like your cousin Donny, Nora Jane. I just mean this is his pattern, you know. So
don’t be surprised.”
“I am not surprised. I begged him not to go to that seminary. I told him it wouldn’t work. When Mitzi was in New Orleans she
worked for the John Jay Salon. She quits things too. If it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t have gone back to hairdressing. She
gets burned-out easily.”
“All the young people are like that now.” He sat up in the bed and pushed both machines away and thought about unhooking one,
then thought better of it. “I am tired of you seeing me like this. Do you still love me, Nora Jane? I wouldn’t blame you if
you didn’t.”
“Don’t talk like that. I’ll show you when you get home if I love you or not. Can anyone but us hear this? I’m sorry. Go on.”
“I was going to say no one wants to work. Well, my people do. Maybe the only people who still like to work are people who
love books. Anal-retentive book lovers.”
“It’s because they work for you, you and Francis take care of them. Anyway, don’t worry about Donny and Mitzi…although…” She
started giggling. “I guess it’s your fault they both came over on the same night. I blame it on that automobile ride together.”
“N.J., may I buy the girls a new car, well, two cars? I want to so much. It will get me through this last week if I could
only get Steve Hart to come up here and tell me about the BMWs. I’ll get them secondhand. I can take them off my income tax
if the girls work in the store this summer.”
“I give up. Okay. But they have to be completely safe, Freddy. I mean it. No convertibles and that’s final.”
“You better go on. Donny will be waiting.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. Tell Donny I’m behind him. He can work at the bookstore if he needs a job.”
He waited until she was down the hall, then called the BMW dealership in Walnut Creek and told his friend Steve to hurry up.
“Bring everything you have,” he said. “Bring a laptop in case we have to look at other stores.”
“I’m on my way.” The good-looking blond man gathered his notes and laptop and ran out of the dealership and got into a new
7401 lender and headed off for the hospital. He and Freddy had been plotting to buy the twins new cars for months. Today was
the day.
* * *
Father Donovan was waiting in the hospital lobby. He took Nora Jane’s arm and they walked two blocks to the French café Nieman
and Stella had found while Freddy was undergoing the transplant. It was small and clean and smelled like wine and garlic and
hot bread. Nora Jane ordered asparagus and trout almondine and Donny told the waiter to bring him the same.
“So it’s over,” Nora Jane said.
“It won’t be all that easy. You can’t just walk out. I’ll volunteer to stay until someone else gets here and gets settled.
I have the Crisis Center running. I think I can get a lady we had speak the other night to be the director for a while.”
“I don’t know why everything about the church is so sexy,” Nora Jane said. “Well, it is. The mass is sexy. It is, Donny, you
have to admit it.”
“Vacuum sweepers and vacuum-sweeper bags are sexy to me this year,” he answered. “Don’t you want wine?”
“No, I quit. Too much sugar.” She took his hand and held it on the table. “I was thinking this morning about when I used to
come watch you play rugby on Sunday afternoons and you would be so beautiful. You’re too handsome to be a priest. I knew it
was the wrong thing for you to do.”
“It wasn’t wrong. I had to try it. I’ve paid the Jesuits back for what they gave me.”
“The Jesuits?”
“It’s the Jesuits at Loyola who put this idea in my head. I just went with the Dominicans because they could take me in a
hurry.”
“The next thing you do for a living, decide on it over a long time, okay? I mean, don’t just go jump into anything. Freddy
said to tell you that you have a job with him anytime you want or need it.”
“How nice. How good of him.”
They were quiet. The waiter brought French bread and butter and they broke the bread and ate it. “So is Mitzi in this too?”
Nora Jane asked. “Have you told her?”
“I ran into her this morning. There are no accidents, Nora Jane. We ran into each other at that coffee shop near the bookstore.
I took it as a sign. I told her that I love her. I’m going to call her this afternoon and ask her to have dinner with me.”
“Oh God, this is deep, Donny. This is deeper than the mass. This is going to be all anybody talks about for weeks.”
“I can get a job in social work. I’m not worried about working. I have money in the bank. I never touched the money Mother
gave me. I should have given it to the church but I never did. So see, I knew I was going to do this. I’ve known for a year,
ever since Mother died.”
“I knew it from the time you thought it up.”
“Maybe we can go home some weekend,” he said. “Go visit Grandmother’s grave, see people. I miss New Orleans, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t have good memories of being there, except for Grandmother. I just remember Momma being drunk.”
“I’m sorry, dearest cousin.”
“’The past is a swamp, where we wander at our peril.’ It’s a new year, Donny, and it’s going to be a good one for all of us.
A year to remember.”
“I believe that. Let’s have dessert? Let’s have creme brûlée?”
“Yes, oh, yes, yes, yes, like Molly Bloom, yes, like Grandmother singing Puccini, yes. Like here and now and this golden,
golden day.”
She began to hum “Vissi d’arte,” which their grandmother had sung in
Madame Butterfly
at the Metropolitan Opera when she was twenty-six years old, and later that same year in Paris and Milan. Donny’s eyes filled
with tears and Nora Jane moved her hand from his hand to his arm and held it as if to save him from all harm, as her grandmother
would have done if she were there. She moved her chair nearer to her cousin and kept holding his arm and the waiter came and
took the dessert order and returned with creme brûlée on beautiful lavender-and-blue plates. Nora Jane picked up Father Donovan’s
spoon and handed it to him and he brushed the tears from his face and she said, “Go ahead, you go first.”
“No, ladies first as long as I live, especially if we’re going to call in Grandmother’s ghost.”
“Okay. God, I love this stuff.” She took her spoon and broke the golden baked sugar and dug down into the lovely egg-and-milk
center and took a bite. “Perfection,” she said.
Father Donovan, soon to be Donovan Michael James Whittington the Fourth again, aimed his spoon at the exact center of the
custard and broke it cleanly. The cream poured up around the spoon and of course that took his breath away. If it hadn’t been
for Nora Jane being there, he would have just looked at it and not even eaten it.
“Proving my point,” he said in a low voice.
“What?” she answered, because she was thinking about where it would be good for him to get a job in the Bay Area so he wouldn’t
move back to New Orleans and take her good friend Mitzi with him. Nora Jane didn’t like losing people that she loved. She
liked to keep them near.
That night Mitzi Ozburt dressed in her most conservative navy blue pleated skirt and a blue cashmere sweater with a white
collar and cuffs. She looked like a Catholic schoolgirl when Donovan came to pick her up. She had intended to show him what
a good girl she was, but of course the sexiest thing in the world to a Catholic man is a woman dressed in something that looks
like a school uniform. If her slip had been showing a little bit or she had worn saddle oxfords, it might have taken less
than an hour for them to get into Mitzi’s cherry four-poster bed, but as it was they had a glass of wine and talked about
feeling guilty for a while before they made love, and vowed devotion, and said will you marry me, and this is crazy, no it’s
not, you’re right, it’s not, and do you want some babies, I do, I do too.
“God forgives everything and we are not sinners,” Mitzi said. “Those old guys who want to keep people from being happy are
the sinners.”
“We will live lives that are good,” he said.
“And live right now,” she answered. “My client, Sui Wong, is a physicist and she says living in the present is the most spiritual
and Zen thing anyone can do. It teaches other people to do the same, and if you could teach that to suicide bombers they wouldn’t
blow themselves up.”
“Amen to that.”
“I am really hungry,” Mitzi said. “I’d really like to go somewhere and get something to eat, and I mean fast. I haven’t eaten
in days, it seems like. Could we just go to a fast-food place and get something, if you don’t mind?”
“We can do whatever you want to do.”
“Come on. Get dressed. I’ll show you the real me.”
On their way out of the house, Mitzi stopped and picked up a handful of crackers and ate them on the way to the car. Fifteen
minutes later they were at an Arby’s Drive-Thru window collecting roast beef sandwiches and Jamocha milkshakes. They sat in
the car in the parking lot and ate their dinners, and Donovan decided it was like coming back from a trip to Antarctica and
finding himself in heaven instead.
When Nora Jane got back to the hospital, Nieman was in the hall by the speakerphone and Freddy’s room was full of nurses and
technicians unplugging machines and getting ready to transfer him to a private room. He was sitting on the edge of the bed
arguing about getting into a wheelchair. He was really angry, he wasn’t pretending or joking. “I can walk, for God’s sake,”
he was saying. “I have been patient, as in the
patient
, for several months now and I’m tired of this. I want to walk down the hall to the room. Get me a longer robe.” He turned
to the window where Nieman was looking into the room. “Go get me my robe!” he yelled.
“Okay,” Nieman signed, and moved back from the window and pulled Nora Jane back to the nurse’s stand. “Don’t let him see you.
He doesn’t want you to see him in a wheelchair. I surmise that’s the problem here.”
“Larry’s DNA is fading,” she answered. “I think the Harwood genes are reemerging.”
“The Rosenstein side,” Nieman added. “It’s his mother’s side that have the tempers. Well, where have you been?”
“To Le Comte, the food was really good. My cousin Donovan is leaving the church. That’s the latest news. He’s in love with
Mitzi Ozburt.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not. He’s leaving the church for her.”
“Stella had a breakthrough this morning, with some antiviral she’s been nursing. I came down here to tell Freddy but when
I got here this had started.”
They moved out into the hall so they could see the door to his room. As they watched he came walking out the door with a white
cotton blanket wrapped around his shoulders like an old Navajo chief. He was wearing hospital slippers and his skinny legs
were sticking out beneath the hospital gown and they were as white as snow except for the veins and scars from high school
soccer. He was smiling and he was triumphant and he came toward his wife and best friend with two nurses and three attendants
trailing behind him, plus a fat man pushing the empty wheelchair.
“
Hola, amigos
,” he said, in a perfect imitation of the Spanish Little Freddy was learning from Diego Martinez, the contractor who was building
the hot tub on the Harwoods’ stone patio.
“Qué pasa in los realidad worlds?
Freed any priests today? Invented any miracle drugs? Started any student protests? Saved anybody from their darker selves?
Enrolled my daughter in the Princeton Review course like I told you to do six weeks ago and no one has done it yet?”