Thinking of the girls, I realize that I may not see them again before I leave, that I did not say good-bye. I open the door to the room where they are sleeping, my brothers’ old bedroom. The glow of a night-light guides me along the straits between mattresses, suitcases, toys, and shoes. There is a cot set up for the baby: Christine sleeps hunched in a tangle of white wool, nested into a corner. Only her forehead and an eyebrow are showing. I reach into the cot and straighten the blanket over her body, pull it away from her face. Just as I have it perfect, she rolls over and twists it up again.
Théa and Laurie, though they have separate, adjoining mattresses, are sleeping together on one. Théa’s body is draped half on the mattress, half on the floor. Laurie, the alpha sleeper, lies splayed on her back, one arm thrown dramatically across her sister’s neck. Gently, I move Laurie’s arm down by her side and pull a blanket across their bodies as well; they do not stir.
The two sisters sleep so silently, I have to peer carefully to see the motion of their breathing. If I kneel down to bring my ear close, I can hear it; it sounds literally pure, as if their lungs were lined with pristine wedding-gown satin. I wish for an instant that they were mine.
Their mattresses are near the ladder that leads to the foxhole. I look up, into darkness. The window is right there, but the moon and stars are well hidden by clouds. How long has it been since I climbed this ladder—twenty, twenty-five years? The opening at the top is narrow, difficult for all but the most nimble adults to pull themselves through.
Out of curiosity, I open the drawer of the nearest bedside table. After a snowstorm that knocked out power for a week when I was a child, Mum put torches in every room; David and Dennis each kept one at the ready.
So little here has changed, I marvel as my hand closes around the torch; it even works. When I turn the beam upward, it collides with the great fan-shaped window, revealing rivulets of steadily streaming rain that make a tiger pattern on the glass. All right, I think, and I climb. I knock my head against the rim of the opening but, with a little contortion, pull myself up and through. I sit cross-legged before the wide window, as we did when we were small, and switch off the torch. I wait patiently for my eyes to adjust, for the silhouettes of fields and woods to come clear. Now the kitchen voices are out of range; all I hear is the rain, its careless clatter. I begin to discern its differing impact on the leaves of the trees, on the slate terrace, against the windows and the shingles of the roof so close to my head, along the copper gutters shunting it away. These must be the melodies Felicity hears when she sings in return; she could easily outsing these torrents, and though her opera would be an imitation, her joy would be deep and real. I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I’ve refused to vanquish.
I hear the burn now, too, its eager rushing. Its banks have filled enough this week that it is unusually noisy. I entertain memories of playing by its banks which have not crossed my mind in years. David, Dennis, and I would dig through the leafy mulch with our hands, carving out miniature rivers that meandered down the slope between the trees. This was a time before they doubted my dominion. I was head engineer and would order them to collect rocks and sticks of very particular dimensions, to fashion embankments and dams, bridges and jetties. When the design was complete, I would make them relay water in pots from the burn to the top of the slope, to pour through the waterways I had masterminded. When the burn was dry, we would bring water from the kitchen. We made boats from birchbark, buoys from conkers that fell from an old chestnut tree in front of the house.
In my memory, this type of play seems to extend over years of my life, but in reality it probably occupied us for a single set of seasons, spring to autumn, then became as dull and outmoded as the last year’s fascination.
It is easy to imagine our parents spying on us through a window, sharing a moment of pride in our cooperation, our inventiveness, our diligence; picturing our respective futures as happy, productive, intelligent citizens—or even collectively, our lives plaited quite naturally into a family venture: Fenno McLeod & Brothers.
I felt as if a stone were plummeting from my throat to my groin when a new thought struck me: that soon there might be another child, mine but not mine, who would play among those trees by that burn, would grow up in the very house where I had grown up, perhaps in the very room, sleeping in the very bed, going (though I hoped not) to the very same schools. Which of the places, objects, and recreations surrounding me now had shaped which parts of my grown—or outwardly grown—self? Had they anything to do with my innate loneliness, my strange satisfaction at thinking myself so misunderstood, my reluctance to recognize love where I ought to have seized it?
My eyes have adjusted, and through the blur of rain the sky looks curiously bright. Lights are on in one of the distant houses built in a pasture where sheep used to roam; slender trees sway to and fro, unable to resist the rhythms of the wind. Off to the side, Mum’s old kennel is a gnomelike mass—the only bit of our material past that David intends to expunge. Otherwise, I’m quite sure, the torches will remain in their appointed drawers, the dusty vases on their high shelves, the stalwart lilacs where they were planted before we were born. Perhaps my father’s cabled jumper will remain on its hook in the kitchen, to sag yet further, toward his wellies on the floor below.
In New York, it is fashionable to dissect one’s childhood publicly, to see the most ordinary events as the genesis of later failures, disappointments, betrayals. Dinner parties become roundtable discussions about what our parents’ proclivities—how they disciplined or toilet-trained us, taught us to draw or ride a bicycle—“did” to us all. The past is a hall of mirrors, not of statues. I think of my mother’s possible infidelities and mine; should I be hunting down some subtle connections there?
I look around me; predictably, the space is much smaller than I remember it. At the back are a few boxes which must contain toys we tired of: archery sets, elfin armies, incomplete packs of playing cards. But to the opposite side of the hatchway is an odd assembly of small shapes. On all fours, I crawl gracelessly around the opening to see it more clearly.
A dolls’ tea party, much like the picnic under the lilacs. Of course: Laurie, perhaps even Théa, could climb up here and create a separate world, just as we had done. I am happy to see the parasol I gave Laurie, opened and propped in place by stacks of boyhood books, elegantly sheltering the party. The Chinatown doll and two French companions sit around a makeshift table laid with doll plates and cups (no ashtrays this time). The table, a box of some sort, is draped with an Hermès scarf patterned with poppies, and as I wonder whether Véronique permits such casual use of her overpriced accessories, something about the little table strikes me. I lift a corner of the scarf.
FRONT AND CENTER
in Mal’s vernal living room, the hospital bed looked like a slug on a gardenia plant. Mal was being released that afternoon, and Lucinda had asked me to shop. “Make the place extra-homey,” she added. “Plump up the pillows and all that.” I bought food—rice, crackers, soft American bread, plain white foods for the toothless—and various “aids” from the chemist which, though each innocuous (alcohol, cotton, peroxide . . .), unnerved me by their sheer number. At least, I reassured myself, adult nappies were not on the list.
What had happened was this. The night after I left for Paris, Mal had taken Lucinda out to a local restaurant—the Gondolier’s Pantyhose, from her description. His appetite had been good, she said, but hers had not been good enough, and for that she did not know how to forgive herself. Happy with bread, Mal had ordered nothing to start, while she had ordered carpaccio. But it wasn’t what she had expected, all that bright pink meat. She pushed it over to Mal, who said that suddenly, in fact, he was ravenous. “What the hell,” he had said, though she hadn’t understood why at the time. The more he could eat, the better, she had reasoned.
They had talked about his father’s campaign (she had persuaded Mal to attend a Memorial Day parade in his parents’ town) and then argued happily about the meaning of the word
miracle
. Lucinda had criticized her son for overusing it to refer to perfectly ordinary, if nevertheless astonishing, creations of God. “By that definition,
everything
is a miracle, which devalues His most extraordinary feats,” she said with sunny indignation.
I indulged her digression; consciously or not, she was nailing down a memory for herself.
They had parted outside the restaurant. At three in the morning, she had been roused by the telephone. (This, I guessed, was when Mal had tried to reach me in Scotland.) Mal had got himself to the emergency room after waking up feverish and vomiting. The doctors were fairly certain that the beef was the source of the salmonella. “I had no idea the meat was
raw
or I never would have let him touch it!” said Lucinda. “I’m such a hick, I thought I was ordering an eggplant thing with capers I had in Boston once.”
I had visited Mal the previous day, taking with me as laughably inadequate penance a splashy but scholarly volume on the history of Italian opera; he had seen it in a catalogue on my desk at the shop, so it would come as no grand surprise. I prepared myself for his anger, and for his appearance, which I supposed would be one of greater emaciation and pallor.
In my unflagging self-interest, I somehow assumed I would be his only visitor (other than his archangelic mother). So when I entered his room and saw four complete strangers around his bed, chatting and laughing, I could only stop in the doorway, dumb.
Mal saw me at once, or I might have left. “Fenno,” he said smoothly, though he was hoarse, “meet a few of my ex-colleagues.” I did not meet Mal’s eyes until I had shaken hands with a dance critic, two food writers, and a copy chief. A large terra-cotta pot of moss and orchids posed effetely on a table, next to a telephone, a box of tissues, and a yellow plastic pitcher.
These people were more than old colleagues; they were friends. One of them, a stylish gray-haired woman, sat on the edge of Mal’s mattress. A young man in black, the dance critic, poured him a cup of water. Sometime in our acquaintance, I had forgotten that I was not a part of Mal’s mainstream life, that he had chosen to keep me drifting along on my separate, obscure little tributary. I had forgotten that I was hardly his only source of help or companionship. I was a neighbor, a valet, a pet-sitter. I felt humbled and insulted.
When we looked at each other now, over the shoulder of the gray-haired woman, who was serving up some spicy rumor about someone whose name I knew vaguely as a byline somewhere in the paper, I could see no malice or anger in Mal’s sunken eyes. It was as though he had no memory of our pact, that I would be there to make sure no one violated his dignity just to keep the electronic graph of his heart rising and falling into oblivion. I pictured him on a ventilator, a frightfully well-preserved man-size parsnip or celery stalk, and thanked whatever fortunes had pulled him out of the ICU.
So we had not yet been alone when I unpacked the provisions for his flat. After putting away the foods, I unwrapped the cut hyacinths I had bought at outrageous expense and arranged them in a purple glass pitcher from Venice. I laid a fire but did not light it, uncertain if smoke of any kind might be forbidden. Mum, in her last winter, could not tolerate a fire.
Outside, the light was failing; I switched on lamps. I sat on the couch against the windows, but this put me face-to-face with the hideous behemoth that had taken the place of the velvet chaise (now exiled to the dining room). As I returned to the kitchen to look for a beer or a bottle of wine, I heard Lucinda’s voice in the stairwell.
When I opened the door, I could see Mal, supported between Lucinda and a strange man. I could see how quietly infuriated he was by their help and did not offer to join in. “Oh darling, will you put on some water for tea?” Lucinda called up when she saw me.
“Yes, everyone make their darling selves at home, pretty please,” said Mal, his voice a hiss as he willed himself up the stairs.
The strange man was Mal’s brother, Jonathan. He had Lucinda’s curly auburn hair and slim, compact build, but a very different face, round and well-fed, a face without the character of bone. He seemed in a mild panic, anxious to do whatever was required but helpless without direction. “Oh! Yes!” he would exclaim when his mother asked him to fetch something or help her with the levers on the bed.
Mal sat sideways on the couch, knees drawn up, facing the fireplace. He asked me to light the wood. “I’m not sleeping there,” he told Lucinda as she fussed with the bed, trying to raise the upper half. “So send it back.”
“You don’t have to, certainly not now,” she said, “but eventually you might find . . .”
“That I’m near enough death to do so.”
Lucinda stood by the bed looking miserable. Jonathan excused himself to go to the loo. He’d done that just fifteen minutes before.
“I think you’ve had enough of my company for now,” she said quietly. “Am I right?”
“Yes, Mother,” said Mal. “Perhaps that’s it.”
She said to me, “Would you mind if Jonathan and I just . . . if we slipped out for a bite? We’ll be back in an hour.”
I told her that of course I didn’t mind. I was relieved when Mal made no comment. (What made it my business to mind?) I think he just wanted them to leave.
It was hard not to stare. His Adam’s apple protruded like a morsel of food trapped in his throat, and even through his T-shirt, the place where his clavicles came together looked too precise, the architecture of his body much too evident. The backs of both his hands were bruised purple and yellow from IVs, and there was a bandage at the base of his throat, probably a sign of intrusions which I had agreed to prevent—or, at the least, to oversee.
Looking at Mal in profile, I thought of the expression “so thin she disappears when she turns sideways,” which I had heard someone use to describe one of these malnourished girls now looming above the city on billboards. That this aesthetic should be in fashion now seemed cruel, even sadistic.