The Summer Guest Read online

  “That’s okay, Pop.” His hand takes my wrist; he is watching me breathe, I know. I do my best to give him good breaths. But all the air I possess seems to sit at the top of my lungs, the slenderest inch of oxygen, like an ankle-deep puddle marooned by an evaporated sea.

  “Well, you rest more.” He pats my arm to tell me I’ve done well. “Okay? Just rest. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  Footsteps, voices, all about me the rising tide of day. I hear the sound of Joe’s pickup driving down the trace, the hollow clap of aluminum canoes coming on and off their racks, the bee-like, dopplered buzz of an outboard as it rounds the farthest point—the sounds of departure, of everything streaming away. Franny enters, full of her big-heartedness and the well-intentioned pretense that with a little more shut-eye I will be as right as rain and ready to run the hurdles. She kisses me on the forehead while she smooths my hair with her fingers, tells me about the weather in her loud, husky voice, holds my head to help me take small sips of water from a plastic cup. Harry, she says, are you being good? No fooling around now; rest is what you need. The lake isn’t going anywhere, she says. When she is gone, Hal, my good lieutenant, returns with January, and a breakfast of muffins and juice I can smell but not bring myself to look at. From the little girl’s lips bubble pleasant bits of wordlike sound: “baboo,” “mawmish,” “ticknuck.” Gibberish, and yet as I watch her from my bed, her thoughts are as clear to me as the voice of an orator at a podium: Where is Mommy? Why is everyone acting this way, the way they do when I can’t sleep because my ears hurt and they take me to the doctor? Her eyes inspect my useless form with calm appraisal. I like the ducks, the ducks are interesting. There are ducks in New York, at the park where we go on Sunday and Daddy reads his paper, ducks and a carousel and a zoo with white bears like the ones in my snow globe. I like the bears best of all. If you’d asked, I could have told you. Grandpa, is that why we came, because you’re sick, and to see the ducks in Maine?

  Is that what it means to be old?

  Meredith’s hand healed and was soon forgotten. Even the doctor who examined it the next day—complimenting my handiwork, and the choice of diaper ointment—seemed wholly unalarmed. We’d been to a party? How many drinks had she had? She looked tired; was the baby letting her sleep? He waved a flashlight beam over her damp eyes, asked her to hold out her hands and press her palms against his own, to stand on one foot and hop. The last made her laugh with embarrassment; hopping, like some kind of pogo stick! Was that all modern medicine could come up with? Twelve hours since the smell of burning skin had filled the kitchen, and now she was joking. The doctor was nobody we’d seen before: a slim man, olive-complexioned, who exuded a faint aroma of oranges. The lenses of his eyeglasses were thick as paperweights. When he was finished with his questions, he pulled a stool to the examining table and sat. Atop his head floated a disk of pink skin that I watched while he re-dressed her hand and smoked, squinting over the cigarette that bobbed in the corner of his mouth. He had read something lately, he remarked, about cigarettes and their deleterious effect on circulation at the extremities. He tipped one shoulder and frowned. He was no example, he admitted, rising and plucking a speck of tobacco from his tongue, but perhaps she might consider quitting smoking.

  “He had the worst halitosis,” Meredith said on the ride home. Her hand, wrapped in heavy gauze, lay palm-up on her lap—not part of her, but an object in its own right, like a package she was bringing to a party.

  “I thought he smelled like oranges. Isn’t that strange? Who smells like oranges?”

  The doctor had given her a painkiller of some kind, a large white pill he said would make her drowsy. For a while we drove in silence.

  “Maybe I will,” she said finally.

  “Will what?”

  She turned toward me in her seat. Her left hand floated upward, a levitating cloud, and made a little wave. “Quit smoking.”

  Which she did; she stopped that very day, sweeping through the house to collect the cigarettes and matches and toss them in a bag and out the door, and soon enough the bandages came off, and what happened that summer night in the kitchen on Marvine Road faded from memory—a small and curious episode, but in the end an isolated occurrence, or so we thought, and certainly nothing to fret over. How did you get that scar? a friend might ask, passing her a drink at a party. That scar there on your hand? And for a moment Meredith would pause to examine it, to hold her hand before her face and turn it in the light like an old letter she’d found in the bottom of a drawer. Oh, this? she’d say, her voice brightening with recognition This scar? You know, it was the funniest thing, what happened, the strangest thing really; we’d just gotten home from a party—Harry, do you remember? That doctor with the awful breath. You always tell it better than I do.

  Then Sam was sick, and what happened that night in the kitchen was mislaid, along with everything else. We were the parents of a sick child, a baby who would not grow, who still, as he passed his first birthday, wore the same clothing, the little T-shirts and fuzzy bags with arms, that we’d bought the week when he was born. It fell upon us swiftly, that awful year, beginning with an autumn cold that became bronchitis, which became pneumonia, and on and on—a period of time that seemed not to pass but to spread like spilled ink into a single, everlasting night of panic. No one understood what was happening; even the doctors could not explain it, not completely. His lungs were weak; there was something wrong with his liver; his heart, for no apparent reason, skipped every sixteenth beat. His body was a magnet for every kind of illness and infection. For a while we thought CF—cystic fibrosis. But the tests said no. Through the winter and spring he worsened: measles, strep throat, roseola with a blast of fever and convulsions; no childhood illness failed to touch him in those months. But when I remember that time, it’s not the frantic nighttime dashes to the hospital I think of, or even the long, white hours of the hospital, but odd, unrelated moments when I found myself alone. Dusting off the car in the driveway after a sudden snowfall, in case Sam needed to go to the doctor; standing by the electric doors of the emergency room to wait for news and watching a haze of spring rain floating through the lighted cones of the street lamps; sitting in the kitchen of my quiet house on a morning in July—a morning when our baby was actually home and well—and feeling, for the first time, that Sam would truly die. Other children Sam’s age would have been walking, saying their first words, learning to eat from a spoon. Our little boy was learning only how to leave us behind.

  He would be forty-five now, a grown man, if he had not died that fall. His final pneumonia took him quickly: a fever that rocketed skyward, the tiny, bottlelike lungs filling, coma, death within hours. After all he’d been through, it seemed a mercy, though of course that was an illusion, something to say to fill the silence of his missing life: the bicycle he would not ride, the books he would not read, the friends he would not have and the girl he would not kiss. The thousand pains and pleasures of his life, shelved in a tomb that the door of early death had sealed. No, there was no mercy in what happened to my boy at all. When he died, he weighed just eleven pounds.

  It’s said that many marriages do not survive the loss of a child, that such grief is a room parents enter together but depart alone. I have no cause to argue the point, having sat in just that room. From that day forward we loved each other, Meredith and I, but we loved with broken hearts. And when, on a morning not long after we had buried Sam, I came into the kitchen to find Meredith standing at the window, cupping the curve of her stomach in a secret way that I alone understood, I knew we would go on.

  Why Sam but not Hal? There is no knowing. I might as well ask, why Meredith and not me? I had a dog once—what a dog he was! A retriever with something else mixed in, a breed that liked to work and herd: Australian shepherd, maybe, or collie. I named him Mauritz, though Hal called him Ritzy, and it stuck. Ritzy the dog. A steadfast member of the team, as relentless as a metronome: Meredith joked that he would have taken a job bagging groceri
es at the corner market if only he’d had hands. I loved him, as one can only love such a dog; but I also knew what he was. Behind his eyes, twin chestnuts of the most tender soulfulness, lay, encased in its suitcase of bone, a brain that knew nothing at all of time or sorrow or even the true joy that sorrow makes possible—only its own desire to please, an aching, needful love that could achieve its fullest contentment with the most meager offering: a stale biscuit, a walk around the block to do his business, a pat on his golden head. His own existence, its nature and finitude, was a mystery to him; he might have thought he was a person, or else I was a dog. The day I took him to the vet to have him put down—he was thirteen, his hips so bad he could barely walk to his bowl—I could think of only this to say: “You have been a good dog, and a great comfort to me, and I thank you.” It was all he wanted to hear. I’d never wished so badly to be the dog he thought I was.

  We waited for Hal to grow sick, as his brother had, and to this day I think that because of this fear we never quite loved him well enough: we braced ourselves against his departure with the timid fantasy that he was not our son but a kind of visitor, a nephew or refugee, a child misplaced by unfortunate circumstances and temporarily given to our care. No photo albums or memento books or birthday parties (not until he was twelve and simply insisted; by then we had moved to Chappaqua and Hal couldn’t be stopped from showing his friends he had a house with a pool). His entire early childhood went unrecorded and then, as his mother became ill, was subsumed by her struggle. I made my money, grew my business; it’s not important how. Two stores became four, four became eight, a phone call from a withering competitor, offering to sell, and then the floodgates opened. My touch was golden; everywhere it was said that Harry Wainwright could do no wrong. And yet the money was nothing, the long hours pure distraction; Sam’s death had turned me from a father into a provider, and into this task I poured myself like water from a pitcher. All of which is not to say that Hal is not a fine man, only that I can take no credit for this.

  And, giving the loudest laugh to our fears, Hal was not just healthy, but robust. I realized this all at once, on an evening when Hal was fourteen. I was moving the garbage cans to the corner, a pair of large cans on wheels, when, over my shoulder, I felt his presence. The sun was behind us; his shadow, thrown on the driveway, stretched ten feet into the road. The effect was an illusion, a ten-foot-tall boy on eight-foot legs, like a giant from a fairy tale, but when I turned, the image I had just seen conflated in my mind with the actual boy before me, and what I saw wasn’t a boy at all, but a man, or nearly. The broad chest, the tight waist, the legs and arms roped with muscle: all of these were a man’s. He wore gym shorts, red high-top sneakers, and T-shirt despite the autumn chill—it was October, close to Halloween—and in the crook of one arm he was cradling a basketball. The way he held it, with such casual ease, seemed to transform the object completely, to inject it with vivid life: not a toy but a tool, like a carpenter’s hammer or a writer’s pen, it had become an extension of all the coiled energy inside him.

  “What are you staring at?”

  “Nothing. Just taking out the cans.”

  “You were staring.”

  I shrugged, still taken aback by the sight of him. I felt a little foolish. I loosened my tie. “How you holding up there? You want to shoot some baskets?”

  He frowned. “You never shoot baskets.”

  “I can try. I used to be pretty good, you know.”

  He said nothing about this, but released the ball and gave it one firm bounce on the blacktop, catching it cleanly with a single, outstretched palm.

  “Back in Scranton.”

  I heard the derision in his voice: Scranton, my boyhood Eden. I hadn’t been back for years and years; my father was long dead, my mother living now in Florida. Every quarter I sent a huge check to the nursing home, and three or four times a year I flew down to visit, usually alone, since Meredith could no longer travel. But Scranton: I’d not really been back for more than a quick visit since ’43, and the day my father drove me north to the Maritime.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m thinking of trying out for the varsity.”

  “Hey. That’s great. You should.”

  He bounced the ball again. “I could have done that,” he said flatly, and pointed with his eyes to the cans.

  “It’s no bother. I’ve got it.” I rolled the last can into its spot by the curb. “The varsity. That’s really terrific, Hal. What does your coach think?” I tried to remember his name but couldn’t. A heavyset man with a back wide as a tortoise, wearing a whistle on a string. Myers?

  “The cans are my job, Pop. That’s all I came out here to say.”

  By this time—the day I saw my son’s shadow in the driveway and knew how much I’d missed—Meredith’s hand was no longer a mystery. Another shadow falling across those years of work and worry: as Hal grew, the inkling that something was seriously wrong with Meredith grew beside him, like a dark flower in an adjacent pot. Small, inexplicable injuries, the kind of mishaps that happen to everyone from time to time but in Meredith began to accumulate with the force of a mortal argument. For a while it was a joke: clumsy Meredith, accident-prone Meredith, Meredith who could trip over her own feet on a bare floor in broad daylight. She dropped things, knocked things off tables, sliced her fingers open on knives and can openers, banged into other cars in parking lots; her arms and legs and hands accumulated scars like a Russian general’s medals. Headaches, and a permanent sheen of sweat, and she was always, always cold: For goodness’ sake, she would grouse, why is it always so freezing in here? Did somebody forget to pay the gas bill? What’s wrong with this thermostat? What’s the point of finally having a little money if we can’t heat the house? Never mind that it was summer, the windows wide open, the leaves fat and full of chirping birds. Once, on a trip to Florida, on a day of ninety-degree heat and humidity heavy as goulash, she wore a wool coat to the beach.

  It was when her speech began to flatten and slur—not the way a drunk speaks, the words collapsing under their own weight, but more as a kind of snuffing out, certain syllables inexplicably melting as she spoke: peesh for peach, shuz for shoes, tawble for table—that a diagnosis was achieved. I use the passive deliberately; it was an event without agency, as when one says “It’s Tuesday” or “It rained.” Syringomyelia: nothing we had ever heard of, and for just a moment, sitting in the doctor’s office on Fifth Avenue on a pleasant winter afternoon after a train ride into the city and a good lunch downtown, the newness of the word itself made us fail to feel its weight. Seated on the far side of his desk, we shared a funny look. We had a boy in school, a business to run, ideas about the future: of a house in Maine or Florida, or selling the business and retiring early, of seeing London and Paris and Rome. If we had never heard of it, how bad could it be? Though of course the opposite was true: we’d never heard of it because it was rare, infinitesimally rare, and nothing you would want to know about if you didn’t have to, like a brutal little war fought far away among people whose names you couldn’t pronounce.

  The doctor removed a fountain pen from his shirt pocket and, on a yellow legal pad, quickly sketched a pair of lines with a series of flattened circles between them. A cutaway view of Meredith’s spine, we understood; really, it ought to curve a little bit, he said, like so, but we got the idea. He pointed with the tip of his pen to the flattened circles. See these? They were cysts, he explained, fluid-filled spaces where none should be; it was possible Meredith had been born with them, or at least had had them many years. It was hard to say, though in her case he believed the condition had been present for some time. She might have a single cyst, or several. The precise mechanisms were not well understood, he continued, though it was known that over time these cysts elongated, pushing nerve tissue against the bones of her spine. Imagine a balloon, he said, slowly expanding in a tube. Patients usually felt the effects first at the extremities—she said she’d first noticed this some years ago, yes, an incident wi
th a cigarette, when she’d burned herself and not felt it? And, as the condition progressed, other things, the complaints she knew so well: the sweating and the constant coldness, the headaches and stumbling, the cuts and scrapes and difficulties of speech and the lack of sexual responsiveness. (For we had conceded this, too, when pressed, though also saying, well, wasn’t such a thing more or less natural, didn’t that just generally fade over time in any marriage?) All of this happening as the cysts filled and stretched and did their damage.

  We listened like students, feeling somehow chastened; I had the absurd thought that we had fallen into a dream in which we were kids together at school and had been held back after class. The doctor’s office door was closed; hung on the wall behind his desk were diplomas, certificates, assorted testaments to his credentials, all in heavy, gilt-edged frames. I tried to read them but failed, realizing only then, and with a mild alarm, that they were written in Latin. Time flattened under their gaze; all our life, it seemed, we had been sitting in offices like these. All right, I said, rousing myself, but about these cysts. When would they stop growing? Or could they be removed somehow? A pained and startled look bloomed across the doctor’s face. He was sorry, he said, that he had not been clear. The thing was, they didn’t stop growing. And inside the spinal column was far beyond reach. Perhaps someday such a thing would be possible, but that was years away. The nerves, we understood, were slowly being crushed. There was nothing to be done. He was truly, truly sorry. He knew we had a boy, still young. It was not good news, he knew.

  How does anyone begin such a new era in their lives? We thanked him and left and took a taxi to the station. The strangest thing of all, how ordinary life goes on: even the condemned man needs to fill the hours. Beneath the smudged heavens of Grand Central, we ate littlenecks at the Oyster Bar, then went to catch our train. Before boarding, Meredith bought a magazine from a vendor on the platform, and a bag of roasted cashews. As the train carried us north, I watched her flipping through the pages, pausing here and there to read an article of interest, chewing on the roasted cashews that she removed, one at a time, from the waxed paper bag. The pages were printed with a cheap ink, and I saw that her fingers were smudged. Neither of us had said a word about the doctor’s pronouncement; we had entered a kind of trance, the bubble of first-knowing. Her condition could take ten years to run its course, he’d said, and watching Meredith read her magazine, I felt for the first time in my life the shortness of a decade. Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand—once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over. When the train stopped at Hartsdale, I saw, under the lights of the platform, that it had begun to snow. The air was as still as held breath, absolutely without motion, and the snow descended through it in loose, unhurried swirls, following barely detectable currents. A moment of churchlike silence: the car was so quiet I could hear the snow falling. I watched it a moment, then closed my eyes and tried to hold this image in my mind, to make it last, but then I felt the yank of the car as the force of the engine was relayed down the line and we were pulled out of the station, away. A surge of cold air behind us, and the conductor marched through the car, grabbing ticket stubs from seat backs, singing the names of the towns that lay ahead: White Plains, Valhalla, Mt. Pleasant, Hawthorne.