“Fenno? Fenno? Fenno, I don’t know where you are, but I’m guessing, I’m hoping you’ll have to . . . have to pick up your . . . messages. Mal’s at Saint Anthony’s, there’s no one else nearby to call, I’m waiting for Zeke to get here, I’m just, I just thought . . .” Her voice rose to a fragile falsetto. With forced composure, she gave me the number of her sublet. I stopped the machine and, desperate for a pencil, raked aside the envelopes I’d put on my desk.
According to the inane monotone following her message, she had left it two days after my departure. “Oh Christ,” I said. I cursed the machine as the next few irrelevant messages droned on. Then, as I hoped, Lucinda again: “I don’t know why I’m trying you, I don’t know where you’ve gone, I hope
you’re
all right, but I know you’d call me if you got my last message. Mal’s been . . . he’s breathing on a machine and they’re keeping his blood pressure stable and I don’t know how much he’s aware of right now, but they’re saying he’s got a fighting chance of . . . recovering. Will you call us? Please?” She sounded calm but weak. She gave her number again and said she’d be picking up messages there. She was at the hospital nearly all the time, she explained, but you couldn’t ring the ICU.
Of the last sixteen messages, fourteen were delayed, clearly hesitant hang-ups, and two were casual calls from people I knew and liked but whose words, at that moment, I simply couldn’t hear. I was dressing as I listened to the tape run its course. It was full. Lucinda had left her second message three days back. If I had returned as scheduled, I would have been in the air approaching Long Island.
I rang the number Lucinda had left. It echoed endlessly into my ear. No answer, no machine. Felicity had already burrowed her head under a wing and fallen asleep. So much for avian telepathy. I went to the living room and peered across the street, as if Mal’s dark windows had anything further to tell me. I left a lamp on, hoping Felicity would not have to wake without me again. As I locked the door behind me, I wished I could leave her a note.
The cold was a punishment I needed and deserved. My eyes filled with tears at the shock, and I almost broke down at this easy suggestion of grief. I crossed the street and rang Mal’s bell. My only rational reason was that if Mal were not back, and it did not sound as if he could be, someone from his family would be staying here. I rehearsed an introduction in my mind. “You don’t know me, or know of me, but . . .” But I’ve neatly fucked over your brother/your son. If he’s still alive to hate me for it.
By the time I got to Saint Anthony’s Hospital, it was three in the morning. The emergency room looked empty as I passed its aquarium glow. Entering the hospital’s less urgent entrance, I had to wait several minutes at the reception desk before anyone came forth to acknowledge my existence. The guard eyed me blankly, no offers of help.
“Hoo, no visiting hours now, honey,” said a large, blessedly cheerful woman, shaking her head emphatically. “You got family upstairs?”
I had lied enough, so I explained that a friend of mine had been admitted while I was out of town, and I was anxious to know at least where I would find him once they did allow me up. The woman sat down at a computer screen, which lit her spectacles with a running pattern of tiny stripes—names, names, names scrolling past—and then she punched a key that stopped the stripes, and then another. She said, “Huh.”
Not morgue, not morgue, not morgue, I thought. But would she even be authorized to tell me such bad news? What
coul
d
she tell me?
Body released to the family.
Scheduled for autopsy.
No such person. Not any longer, hon.
She said, “Mr. Burns was moved from ICU yesterday afternoon. Doesn’t show a room number here, but if you come back after eight, the system should cough one up. Answer your question?”
“Is he . . .?” I wanted to ask if he was conscious, able to level at me the full arctic sting of his rage.
“Hon, I don’t know from medical know-how,” she said, guessing at the nature of my curiosity. “Hon, we just guard the portals and the names hereabouts. You go off and get some sleep, won’t you? Coffee machine’s busted, ain’t no hospitality neither. Your friend seems to be among the living, that much I can tell you.”
I did not return home but walked here and there through the brutal cold, hands driven into my pockets because I had left my gloves behind. I looked into warmly lit windows occupied by headless but beautifully dressed mannequins and garish arrays of cosmetics. At five, I went into a coffee shop and ordered eggs. Another loner offered me part of his paper, but I refused. At six, I went back to the hospital and sat in the lounge. There was no sign of the motherly woman who’d helped me three hours ago. At seven, as I had hoped and feared, Lucinda walked through the revolving door. She saw me almost before I saw her. She set a shopping bag on the floor and hugged me.
“I thought you’d fallen off the earth,” she said without a trace of scolding.
“I was . . . I was completely out of touch. I’m so sorry.”
Her smile drove deep lines into her face. “I think he’s going to be all right. I think, if I’m persuasive enough, they’ll let him go home this afternoon. They’ve been very kind to us here.”
I wondered about the “us,” how large it was. Lucinda went over to the reception desk and had an inaudible conversation with the young man now at the computer. I looked down into the shopping bag: bananas, bagels, a
New York Times,
white tulips. A small paper bag.
Lucinda touched my arm and picked up the bag. “I found a place that makes incredible rice pudding. I don’t suppose he’ll be eating yet, not solids, but you never know. I’m always optimistic.” She smiled warmly at me, as if I’d been here all along, a helping hand in the catastrophe. “That’s just how I am,” she said, and took my hand as if I were her child.
“I tried to call you last night, when I got in . . .” I stopped, ashamed that I was about to make excuses.
“It’s ridiculous, but I’m uptown for now; Zeke insists on hotels. He’s used to a staff and a telecommunications center; not me, thank heaven.”
When we stepped off the elevator, she walked straight to the nurses’ station, beaming. I lagged behind, uncertain what part I had to play. I saw heads shaking, then a smile or two, concessions being made. Lucinda came back to me. “They’re letting me peek in, just a five-minute peek. I’ll tell him you’re here and coming back later. They have to clean him up and take him for some tests. If the tests send him home, I’m all for that.”
“I’m not sure he’d want to see me anyway,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. Besides, he’s still quite out of it. He was touch and go for a few days, and while he knows where he is, I don’t think he knows
when
he is.” She laughed at her small joke. I wanted to share her giddiness, her fragile relief, but I was not so optimistic. I was glad the nurses would let in only Lucinda for now. I was sure he would greet me like a second plague (or would that be a third?).
EVERYONE IS LAUGHING.
I can’t see them from up here, but their voices carry. My twin brothers and their wives still linger at the long wooden table in the kitchen (we haven’t used the dining room once), and I will rejoin them after I’ve packed. Early tomorrow, I will head back to New York. I need to organize myself before another night of drinking and reminiscing. This one will be long and, I hope, free from recriminations or veiled competition.
I can still taste the white chocolate mousse, worthy of a dinner on Mount Olympus. After a week of this food, I’m hitching my belt a notch farther out. The salad days loom, I think idly. What does that expression really mean? It’s an idiom whose definition I can’t keep straight, no matter how many times I look it up.
Despite those first gorgeous days, it’s rained for most of my time here. The peonies are battened flat against the grass, the petals pummeled off their stems; the lawn, though ecstatically green, is a marsh. Dennis was nevertheless determined to grill the meat outdoors (lamb again, this time drenched in coffee, of all things). Lillian held a golf umbrella over the chef and his fire; afterward, they came in wet, shivering and giggling, but bearing a platter of perfect pink lamb, its thin black crust pungently steaming.
The little girls ate with us, engulfing our attention; only after they were firmly put to bed did we discuss the one thing we’d been avoiding: division of material spoils. It was far easier than I’d expected, perhaps because the children’s gaiety left us feeling friendly and generous. There wasn’t much I wanted to pay to have shipped across an ocean; David, having claimed the house itself, conceded to Dennis the few pieces of furniture he wanted. Véronique—admirably, I couldn’t help thinking—held her tongue about everything but the family silver. We did not mention Dad’s ashes; there had been ceremony enough, and that would have to do.
My clothing is packed in a minute. I leave out khaki trousers, a comfortable cotton shirt, a jumper, a jacket with my passport tucked inside. My flight does not leave Prestwick till early afternoon, but Lillian will take me for a detour, one more visit to her doctor’s clinic, one more “donation.” I wince at the memory of yesterday, not so much all the drawing of blood and the prying questionnaires but the embarrassingly genial nurse who led me to my little room; the chair whose upholstery had clearly been waterproofed; the absurdly small cup with the wrapper so hermetically sealed that I had to open it with my teeth; the magazines and videos, all hilariously wrong. Thank heaven I’m a bloke with a good imagination.
Lil went with me. We were in David’s pickup again, as we’d been after Dad’s service. This time I insisted on driving. We had more than an hour on the road ahead of us, during which I had no earthly idea how we would manage to converse, so the minute we had both closed our doors, I turned to Lil and said, “Look. We’re just going to pretend that this is perfectly routine and dull, what we’re doing here, which means that we aren’t going to discuss it. I have plenty of American friends who would howl at this approach as pathetically British, but that’s what we are, isn’t it? That’s the fate of our natures.”
She didn’t laugh. Looking pained, she said, “I’m thinking about all these tests I’m forcing you to have. . . .”
“To get these tests behind me will be a relief. Like going to the dentist after great procrastination.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“See what I mean?” I laughed. “My dear, everything I’m doing here is very kind of me, it’s more than very kind of me. That’s not the point.”
“No.” She looked like she was going to cry. I was tired of seeing her cry. I took hold of her shoulder and shook her just a bit.
“Lillian, Lillian,” I said, “you’ve been depressed for too long, you’re in the habit. Where’s the girl whose scanty dresses showed off her tits and knickers all over the place, leaving hard-ons right and left, who danced like a rock-star nymph in front of the masses? Where’s the lass who sent me that passionate letter, who’s determined to buck a few pretty lofty conventions to get what she wants?”
For a moment, I was afraid I had driven her deep into herself, that she would ask me to get out of the pickup, that she would back down. She closed her eyes and sighed loudly. She raised her hand, as if she were one of the schoolgirls she used to teach. “That girl’s right here. Right here.”
And off we drove.
From my childhood desk, I take my father’s envelope. Once more, I empty its contents onto the bed. The lipstick, the drawing, my mother’s kennel book, my birth certificate, the letter. I decide not to reread the letter, not now. It will only baffle and disappoint me again.
The medals and the key I found in the vase downstairs, those I leave on the table beside my bed; perhaps they have nothing to do with my parents at all. Perhaps David’s right: the vase and its contents were left there by Tealing’s previous owners (one of them exceptionally brave and, if he is still alive, missing the material proof, poor chap).
I take Mum’s passport out of the desk as well and weigh it in my hand, wondering how serious a felony this theft would be; but who else would want it? Looking at her face, I remember something: all our family pictures. Unlike our father, Mum did not come from a “distinguished” or well-documented family; one of its few legacies—and that one perhaps not entirely authentic—is my name. Fenno, she told me, was the name of a fierce, courageous chieftain who lived in the remote Highlands several centuries back and kept his clan safe from marauders. He was part Viking, my grandmother claimed, explaining our pale hair and skin.
So the family photographs, the old ones, are nearly all of my father’s more prosperous kin, and though Mum never spoke ill of these relatives, she kept their pictures—and even most of those taken of us, her sons—in a captain’s chest under a paisley rug in the living room. In dividing up the larger, more visible objects, we forgot this slice of our past. I think I will not bring it up.
I slip everything, including Mum’s passport, back into the envelope, the envelope into the side pocket of my bag.
I turn out my lamp and start toward the kitchen stairs, but I pause at another wave of laughter. How are we all so merry in the wake of a death? Are we reinforcing the parapets of life? I listen. Dennis’s laugh is the loudest, David’s the deepest-pitched. Lil’s . . . Lil’s is altogether new; I hardly heard it this past week. It is, to my ears, full of her new resolve, new gratitude, the sense of moving forward after standing still so long. I worry that circumstances will betray her again, but motion is what she needs right now, even if it’s risky.
Véronique’s laugh is, again to my biased ears, self-consciously seductive. Yet I find myself succumbing to a gratitude of my own; she has been mercifully discreet since our dreadful conversation in that paradise of a garden. She behaves as if it never happened. Yet the distance between us has acquired a bemused tenderness. At dinner, watching my nieces hold court, I thought of taking their father up on his repeated invitations to visit them in France; for the first time, I could picture myself in their mother’s house, under her dictates, possibly even enjoying myself.