The Summer Guest Page 9

  He died, of course, after they had plucked him from the harbor and taken him away; what the flames themselves did not accomplish, the septic harbor waters did. But what I remember most of all from that day is the smell—of oil and diesel fuel and dirty harbor water, and the foul sweetness of a human being on fire. As Mauritz fell he pulled the smoke down with him like a rocket’s contrail, and when I looked over the rail to find his body, yelling my alarm at last, a rank cloud rose to meet me, overwhelming my senses with such nauseating totality that I had to turn my face away and retch. It was the same smell I smelled again, years later in my kitchen, when Meredith, sick already but not yet knowing it, dozed as her cigarette burned away the flesh from her fingers; the same look I saw in her eyes, as she sat on the toilet of our upstairs bathroom and considered her miraculously painless injury: an expression of the purest wonder, as if, even then, she had somehow grasped its meaning.

  It is summer now, the days long, indistinguishable. Visitors come and go in the buttery light. I entered the hospital for the last time in April—a touch of pneumonia, the old man’s friend—and now nobody talks as if I will ever leave here. Hal has seen to everything; my room is like something in a hotel. And yet it is the reductions, the final clarities, one takes to heart. I have oxygen to breathe, strong analgesics for comfort, antibiotics to hold infection at bay; I have a nurse to bathe and attend me, orderlies to bring my meals, such as they are, on their rolling metal carts. Chopped beef and leathery breasts of chicken; browning salads and limp green beans paled from the steam; small, tasteless desserts: a wedge of cake or brownie, a bowl of wobbling gelatin, oatmeal cookies hard as poker chips. They arrive compressed under stretched cellophane, or hidden beneath hatlike silver lids that seem to come from an era long past. The orderlies, usually black men but not always—I confess I think of them as one person, a single being—raise these coverings with an encouraging if manufactured pleasure, like a magician lifting a curtain to reveal, behind it, a single cooing dove. “Well now, what have we got for you today, Mr. Wainwright? Salisbury steak, I see. And cherry pie. Not bad, not bad at all.” There was a time when I could not keep even the slightest morsel in my stomach—the months of drugs and radiation and other well-meaning but useless therapies—but now I eat it all, every bite. I am already nostalgic for food.

  And Franny did not, after all, fuck me to death. It was the pneumonia that drove her glorious plans into the ditch. We gave it a try or two after that, but in the end held hands, and slept. Like teenagers, I thought, and was glad.

  My doctor is named Grosscup. At the onset of my illness I had many—surgeons, oncologists, pulmonary specialists, even a dietician. Now he is all that remains, like a last party guest who cannot find his keys. Under the chairs? On the patio? In the kitchen, put carelessly aside when he went to flirt with one of the caterer’s girls? When he finds them, he, too, will depart. Dick is an internist of the old school, loyal as a Labrador, a man who wears brogans and a suit even in summer and carries his tools in a black leather bag that opens like a mouth. He has a kind, wide face, and eyebrows heavy as wool. Every night he stores his stethoscope in the freezer.

  “Not true, Harry. I stir my martini with it.”

  It is afternoon, an afternoon in July. Here and there he moves the end of his frigid instrument across my back.

  “That goddamn thing’s an ice cube.”

  “Never mind that. Now breathe. That’s it.”

  A moment passes. He pulls my pajama top back down, instructs me to sit up, and takes gentle hold of my wrist. His thumb where it rests on my skin is rough as sandpaper. A deeper quiet settles over the room; not even the birds are singing. When he is satisfied, he takes my chart from the table and scribbles something in his awful handwriting.

  “How’s the pain?”

  We do this on a scale of one to ten: standard stuff. “Five.”

  “I know you, so I’ll write down seven.” He frowns optimistically as he reads the chart. “It says here you’re eating. Don’t know how, with the goop they serve. Makes airplane food look like the ‘21.’” Dick furrows his ample brow at me. “How’s the breathing?”

  “About the same.” I don’t know why I always lie to him. “Maybe a little worse.”

  Again he writes. Finally, he puts the chart aside and takes a chair by my bed. Always the problem: the bed is elevated, like an altar. The angle makes talking awkward.

  “Here’s the question, Harry. Do you want to go home? Because if you do, there are things that can be done.” He nods me along. “To make you comfortable.”

  He is asking me where I want to die, of course. It is not a question one longs to hear. And yet I am glad he has asked it.

  “What things?”

  He reaches to the floor where his bag, openmouthed, rests. From the interior he produces a pamphlet, tri-folded and glossy, which he stands to give me. Good Shepherd Hospice it reads, and beneath that, Information for the Family. The illustration is a simple line drawing of a tree.

  “There are others. But this is the one I recommend.”

  I am too tired to read it. A good idea, well-meaning to a fault, but the details, I know, will depress me. “Have you talked to Meredith about this?”

  He realizes what I have said before I do. “Meredith, Harry?” Dick shifts in his chair.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” I close my eyes and breathe. “Franny, I meant. Have you talked to Franny?”

  “We’ve spoken about it. She says it’s up to you. A nurse will come to the house every day, to monitor your comfort. More, as things progress.”

  I am suddenly exhausted. More than exhausted—I feel like a cup that somebody has spilled. My eyes refuse to open; the air seems to wander aimlessly in my chest, finding no purchase. To breathe at all seems hardly worth the bother. This is what is meant, I suppose, by things progressing, all of a sudden.

  “Harry?”

  At a distance I hear Dick’s voice, asking me if I want to sleep—am I sleeping, is that it? But it is not just sleeping—and then the sound of his brogans creaking on the floor as he lets himself out. A murmured conversation in the hall: Hal’s voice, and a woman’s—Sally? Frances? The voices swirl into one another like vapor; I sense a continuous flow of activity around me, and yet I am apart from these events, filled with an inexpressible calm. Time is passing, has passed. My mind goes here and there, telling its usual stories—strange things, like Sam’s dying, and Meredith, and Mauritz on fire, and Joe and Lucy and the thing that passed between us—but ordinary things as well: pouring milk onto oatmeal in my parents’ kitchen on a winter morning my father planned to take me ice-skating; running alongside Hal as he pedaled his bicycle up our street for the first time, his elbows wobbling on the handlebars, his face filled with all his pleasure and alarm; standing at the counter at the Wanamaker’s on Market Street in Philadelphia at Christmastime to select a scarf for Meredith; the lake and mountains, and a perfect hour years ago, casting a flyline over water as still as God’s held breath. I move through these memories like a ghost, until they no longer seem to be separate stories at all; they are one and the same, indistinguishable and without pause, and the realization of this fact comes upon me in a burst of sweetness the likes of which I have never felt before.

  When I open my eyes, the sky beyond the windows is dark as ink. How much time has passed I do not know. A woman is sitting in the chair by my bed; a nurse, I see, though she is new to me. She is young, with a round face and dark hair; she wears a bit of makeup, both darkening and drawing attention to the delicacy of her features. Beneath her smock I see the gently swollen belly of her pregnancy. The clock on the bedside says it is after one: one A.M. The middle of the night, but what night? I feel as if I have been away for days.

  She looks up at me and smiles pleasantly. “Look who’s awake.” Something is in her hands; knitting needles, I see, and a ball of white yarn. She brings these to rest in her lap. “Well. How do you feel?”

  “I’m—” My tongue is hea
vy as wood in my mouth. “Thirsty.”

  She puts her needles aside and rises to fill a cup from the pitcher on the bedside table. She leans over me and pours small sips of water into my mouth. All around her is the smell of summer leaves.

  “There now. Enough?” I manage a nod, and she returns to her chair, and her knitting. “That was quite a nap you took,” she says, not looking at me.

  I watch the tatting motions of her needles. The sight is enveloping in a way I cannot express: it seems to cross the boundaries of my senses, as if I am watching a symphony, or listening to roses. Do people know about this? Why have I never watched anyone knit before? I feel this new awareness with my entire body, just as I feel, strangely, that we are the only two people in the building. More than feel: I know this absolutely. It is a fact of nature. We are alone.

  “That would be the morphine,” she says.

  “What?”

  She is rolling up her yarn. The sight is so beautiful I want to weep.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Here and there.” She raises one of her needles and twirls it about. “Around, around.”

  “What . . . day is it?”

  But she does not answer. Her needles click and pause and click again. She pulls a sleeve of yarn along one needle and I see what she is making: baby booties.

  “It’s all right to sleep if you want. I’ll watch over you. Just sleep. It’s all you need to do.”

  “Those are for your baby?”

  She smiles. “Oh, I’m not pregnant.”

  And I see that she is not. Why did I think that she was? She is far too old to be pregnant; she is sixty, or even seventy. She is old as I.

  “I have a boy.”

  Her hands pause. “I know your boy. Sam? He’s a fine boy.”

  “You know him?”

  “You must be tired, Harry. It’s all right. You sleep. I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  My eyes have closed again. Her words seem to have traveled a great distance to reach me, like a voice across the waters. In the seat by my bed, her needles work away.

  “Franny will be along soon. You can be sure of that. And Hal. Everybody.”

  “Everybody.” The word is a sweet morsel in my mouth.

  “That’s right. Everybody. Meredith, and Sam. All of them. That’s how it is, Harry. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “I did.” I cannot be sure I have even said these words aloud. “I think I did know it.”

  “Because that’s the secret, Harry,” she tells me. “That there are no secrets. Not about this.”

  FOUR

  Jordan

  W hy Harry’s weird insistence on a dry fly? The fact is, there’s a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat. We’ve had folks up here who would fish only for salmon, and then only in the rivers; folks who wouldn’t spit on a smallmouth but would marry a trout if they could. There’s the old bamboo vs. graphite argument, of course, the high-tech crowd and the low-tech crowd; for every well-heeled investment banker who shows up with a custom-made graphite cannon and enough hand-tied flies to make a down payment on a condo in Vail, there’s always another (we call him “the professor,” whether or not that’s what he does, though it usually is) who fishes for “historical accuracy” (I kid you not), marching around the woods with a twelve-foot twig and a copy of Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which, if you haven’t read it and don’t mind the bad spelling, should come in pretty handy if you’re ever in seventeenth-century England with some free time to fish.

  But if you’ve been around the sport awhile, and learned it from someone who mostly understood it as an interesting way to catch fish—in my case, my stepfather Vince, an agent for the Maine Department of Conservation—then you understand the nonsense for what it is: one more way for difficult people to be difficult. This is half the fun for them, and since my job is, more or less, to keep everybody happy, far be it from me to object. If you want to fish in period costume, I’ll be the first one to fetch your knickers at the cleaners.

  Still, Harry’s insistence on fishing only dry fly had me stumped. To be sure, the dry fly/wet fly debate is the oldest aesthetic fistfight in the sport, and nearly every year some joker writes an article in one of the trades defending the “purity” of dry fly and generally insinuating that fishing with a nymph or streamer is just one step above putting a chunk of Velveeta on a diaper pin. But Harry was never one to care about such things. It’s possible to like both well enough, as Harry always had, letting the fish, the water, the weather, and the time of year make his choice for him—allowing circumstances to give shape to his pleasure, always the best way to go in my view, and probably the closest thing I have to a philosophy of life. That Harry wanted to go trout fishing one last time, but do it all wrong, amounted to a kind of dare. Maybe all he wanted, away from the drugs and the doctors and even the cancer itself, was one last, nifty stroke of luck before the curtain came down.

  Harry and his family weren’t the only guests at the camp; we were pretty close to full up, and taking a whole day off to guide him would require a little planning. After we’d gotten their gear to the cabin, Kate and I went to the office in the main lodge to sort through the list of duties for the next day. It was going to be a squeeze; we had two parties checking out and three new ones coming in, and half a dozen folks from the Lakeland Inn, the only hotel in town, arriving in the early A.M. for breakfast and a moose-watching canoe-float down the river, picnic lunch included. This was a regular Saturday staple for us, and a money loser at thirty-five bucks a head, but with a healthy payoff at the back end, since half the folks who took the trip fell in love with the place and returned the next year for a week at full price.

  A word or two about Kate. I had known Kate for eight years, since she was thirteen and I first came to the camp, and apart from one awkward, early summer, there’d been no nonsense between us. You could say there was a certain logic to the idea that we might eventually take a personal interest in one another, but there were also lots of reasons not to. I got along just great with Joe and Lucy, who treated me like family, and I knew that they’d borrowed up to their necks to send her to tony old Bowdoin and had hopes for her life that probably included a bright young anesthesiologist or management consultant in Boston, not some up-country hermit like me.

  But the truth was, and despite my better judgment, I’d begun to think about her differently—think about her all the time. What I mean is, I’d begun to see her not just as Joe and Lucy’s daughter but as a person in her own right, and I missed being near her, the sound of her voice and the way she tucked her hair behind her ears and the feeling these things gave me, like the world wasn’t such a big place after all, and I was someone in it. The last winter away from her was like a kind of cold storage, and for a couple of snowbound weeks in February, I’d even gotten it into my head to drive the Jeep down to Bowdoin, surprise her at her dorm, maybe whisk her off for a weekend down the coast or holed up in Boston, totally rearranging my life and, if I were lucky, hers. This, of course, was the loneliness talking, and naturally I didn’t do it; I knew she had boyfriends at Bowdoin, and I sensed I belonged to one compartment of her life and could not easily pass into the other. What could I do? I put the idea aside like a book I knew wouldn’t end well and stayed put.

  All of which guaranteed that by the time Kate returned to the camp in June, I had it something awful for her. I was so worried that she would detect my feelings (or worse, that her parents would) that I barely set foot from my cabin until the Fourth of July, leaving only to do my chores and then running like a rabbit straight back to lie on my cot and brood away the hours. I could tell Lucy was on to me; she kept asking me if I were coming down with something, and once or twice hinted that Kate was worried too. The only thing I could think to say was that maybe the winters had started to get to me. The truth was, I had decided the only proper thing to do—a funny word, but the right one—was quit at the end o
f the summer. But where I’d go and what I’d do, I hadn’t the faintest idea.

  In the meantime, we had a day’s chores to plan, and in the cluttered office, Kate and I went over the schedule. We were pinning our hopes on a staggered arrival for the moose-canoers; if push came to shove, we could delay a group or two in the dining hall so that Kate would have time to drive back from the put-in point, five miles upstream and a forty-minute round-trip, going like a comet. We had just about put everything together when Joe came in, with Hal in tow. I wasn’t surprised; clearly there was a pow-wow brewing, and I had a few questions myself about Harry, since I had figured out by then that any fishing we might do would be a total fabrication. Hal gave my upper arm a solid pat and asked how I was doing, but his face was creased with worry. He said hello to Kate, asked her in a chummy way how things were going down at Bowdoin (Hal was a Williams grad himself, and to look at him, probably a letterman who had banged Bowdoin heads aplenty), then let Joe show him to the old plaid sofa.

  “Let’s all sit,” Joe said. “Kate, why don’t you stay too. This concerns you as much as anyone.”

  We arranged our chairs in a circle, while Joe did the next, obvious thing, which was to produce a half-full bottle of very old single malt from the rolltop. He took four coffee mugs from the shelf above the desk, gave each one a hard blow to clean the dust out before pouring the Scotch, then passed the cups around. I swirled the Scotch under my nose, and it smelled just like its color: the luminous brown of old, old wood.