Address in hand, Lucinda walked straight to Saint Joseph’s to pray for the safe return of both Burns boys and to confess her less-than-chaste feelings toward the one whose heart she was determined to secure. She wrote to him that evening; within two weeks, she had a reply. He asked about her rabbits, her parents, the weather. Was his little brother, that chowderhead, keeping up with the haying? What he’d give to have been there for the Fourth of July parade! (He would have driven the tractor pulling the wagon with the 4-H float; Zeke had taken his place.) Had Lucinda saved a program from the concert on the green? Could she send it along?
Her heart felt as if it had rocketed to heaven, then drifted back to reside in her chest. She went to the backyard and hugged her rabbits. She would show two of them at the fair in August. If she won a ribbon, she’d send it to Matthew. What if she bought him a Saint Christopher medal; would that be too bold?
She wondered if he would have to fight. Older girls bragged about what heroes they knew their boyfriends would be. They’d mow down the Nips and the Huns as sure as they knew how to mow down corn and hay. Lucinda didn’t care if Matthew came back a hero. She just wanted him to come back alive. Was it insolent to ask this of God? Matthew Burns, Matthew Burns, Matthew Burns, she murmured in private, the syllables like beads on a rosary, the name a prayer in itself. Matthew Elijah Burns would come home from war, go to college, then come home again and marry Lucinda Margaret James. Where they lived was of no importance; let Aaron and Dora take over Sanctuary Farm. She and Matthew could have their own farm; a house in town; a hut by the river. Lucinda would never love anyone, she swore, as much as she loved Matthew Burns.
She wakes with a sore neck, her left arm numb. It took hours for her to fall asleep, the bars of the sofa bed’s frame palpable through the skimpy mattress; she will never subject another guest (another welcome guest) to a night like that. She gets up and uses the washroom off the kitchen that was once used by the hired hands before the midday meals that Zeke’s mother cooked for a dozen men.
She’ll get the coffee going, then check on Zeke. The percolator parts are still in the dishwasher. She will have to devise a new routine, make as many preparations as possible in advance. Everything will take more time.
Jasper Noonan, she thinks. Speaking of time, she must somehow carve out enough of it to call him today. She’ll call while David is here. (If she were Zeke, she would ask David to Google Jasper Noonan before returning the call.)
When Lucinda goes into the living room, she sees Zeke lying on the rug next to the hospital bed. “Oh God!” she cries out and kneels beside him. “Zeke!”
He opens his eyes and stares at her blankly for a moment.
“Are you all right? Did you fall?” The bed’s guardrail is down.
He frowns at Lucinda. “Washleep.”
“I see that now, but you gave me a heart attack. Did you try to get up by yourself? I left you the bell, to call me.”
“Shridiculish.” He turns slowly until he’s lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. “Whole thing ushurd.”
“I know it is, Zeke. But, please, can we get you up here, just to the chair? If you let me lift your shoulders …”
He winces and crosses one leg over the other. That’s when she notices that his pajama bottoms are wet.
The phone rings. Struggling to rise, she thinks, I am way too old for this.
“Mom? Did I wake you? I have a superlong day and I wanted to catch you. Between classes and office hours, I am totally unreachable today.”
“No, Jonathan, we’re awake.”
“Is everything okay? Is he okay?”
“He’s lying in the middle of the living room floor right now, staring at the ceiling. But he’s fine.” She knows that her telling this to Jonathan will annoy Zeke and get him to move. Or so she desperately hopes.
“I wanted to tell you I’m coming out a few days early.”
“What’s that, sweetheart?”
“A colleague will cover the lecture I’d miss. I’ve got papers coming in from my seminar students, but they get turned in by e-mail these days, so I can read them just as easily out there. So here’s the plan: Cyril and I will do all the cooking. Are Teeny’s girls coming? Maybe we should do the meal at her house? We’re totally flexible, Mom. You call the shots.”
Lucinda carries the phone into the living room, where she can keep an eye on Zeke. Unkindly, she thinks of the urine sinking into the Chinese carpet. She will have to look for that pet deodorizer spray they used when Jethro was old and arthritic, too weary to bother with going outside. (Zeke loves being greeted by a dog when he comes home, but thank heaven they hadn’t replaced Jethro yet. Debilitated husband plus puppy: imagine!)
Zeke’s eyes are closed, arms at his side. But for the regular movements of his chest, he looks like a corpse.
“Jonathan, Thanksgiving was the furthest thing from my mind.”
“Mom, it’s in less than two weeks, and no way are we going to skip it. How about you leave it all to us? I made a reservation for me and Cyril at that great B and B. Let us be your slaves. You can kick us out whenever you need to.”
“That’s so generous, sweetheart. But please stay here. I always like having you here.”
“Are you okay, Mom? I mean, are you managing?”
“Honey, I have enough help for the time being. This place is going to be like a hive today. It will be good to see you whenever you can come.”
“Next Saturday,” he says. “I’ll be your slave for a solid week. How’s that? Cyril can make it on Tuesday. He’s going on to Boston for a Hawthorne symposium, so it works out perfectly.”
Jonathan and Cyril—the man she is now accustomed to thinking of as her second son-in-law—are tenured professors at Berkeley, Jonathan in gender studies, Cyril in American literature. (Their two most recent books—Jonathan’s Sexual Identity in Firstborn Children and Cyril’s The Fine Hammered Steel of Woe: Ecclesiastes and Melville’s Ambivalent Soul—sit on her bedside table, beneath others she is far more likely to read.)
Zeke is now struggling to rise. “Raaaahg!” he bellows, walruslike.
“Is that Dad?” Jonathan sounds horrified.
“I have to go. I’ll call you later—tomorrow. We’re doing fine, sweetheart. I love you.” She hangs up.
Lucinda drags one of the armchairs over to help Zeke pull himself up. She braces the walker against the chair. “We have to get you to the bathroom, get you dressed. And I know you don’t like it, but you’ve got to let me help.”
“Pished onnarug like a dog.”
“Well, yes,” says Lucinda. “You did.” She hopes he’ll laugh. She hasn’t seen him laugh once since the stroke. Zeke is a man with a hearty, charming, persuasive laugh. (Can a stroke knock out the specific zone in your brain that generates laughter?) He doesn’t even smile. All right, he’s in a rage. The doctor warned her that this would be a normal reaction for a man accustomed to Zeke’s level of activity and control.
With the help of the walker, she guides him to the larger bathroom for guests, off the front hall, but there isn’t enough space for both of them and the walker. She leaves him there so she can go upstairs and get him clothes. At the rehab center, Zoe made Lucinda practice undressing and redressing her husband. Zeke made Zoe leave the room. They worked in embarrassed silence, Zeke refusing to let her take off his undershorts.
When she returns, Zeke has locked the door and won’t let her in.
“Zeke, I have your clothes. You’re going to freeze.”
The door opens a few inches. One hand, shaky, clawlike, emerges: an image from a horror movie. “Giff me clojsh.”
She hands him his boxers, then his trousers, then a shirt. She says, “You’re going to need my help, especially with the buttons,” but the door closes.
Through the tall windows flanking the front door, Lucinda sees an unfamiliar car pull up. It’s already nine-thirty, and she’s still in her nightgown.
Zoe approaches the house and, catching si
ght of Lucinda inside, waves.
When Zoe comes in, she wipes her feet with the same enthusiasm she applies to her difficult work. She hangs her yellow down jacket on the coat rack, looks Lucinda over, and shakes her head. “Rough morning.”
Zoe is small and wiry, astonishingly strong; Lucinda has seen her lift Zeke from a fall, supporting his entire weight. Her hair is dyed albino blond, a color defiantly incongruous with her dark eyebrows and cinnamon-colored skin. Lucinda imagines her growing up as the lone little sister to a pack of brothers who brought her up scrappy and resilient but confident, too. She radiates the contagious calm of someone who’s well and widely loved.
“He’s in the bathroom,” says Lucinda. “He won’t let me dress him.”
“That’s your husband all right.” Zoe calls out, “Hey, Zig, it’s me—Zag. Holler if you need me. We got our work cut out for us today!” She turns back to Lucinda. “You go get dressed—no hurry. Have breakfast in peace. Read the paper or just chill. Chillax, as my ten-year-old loves to say.”
Lucinda, unlike Zeke, is happy right now to have someone order her around. Chillax, she thinks. She will do her best. But first, she’ll dress herself.
The things we take for granted, she muses sadly as she hooks her bra behind her back, a daily act she hasn’t consciously registered for years. What if she, too, were to have a stroke, lose the ability to do so much as button a blouse? She thinks of their collective fate in the hands of their two surviving children, Christina and Jonathan. How long before she and Zeke are both consigned to a nursing home, however deluxe?
For the past few days, the morning light in the bedroom has startled Lucinda, as it does every year when snow arrives. The deep drifts left by the unexpectedly early blizzard still cover the fields, their milky radiance filling the upper rooms of the house, lending the white walls a pristine eggshell luster. Beautiful light, beautiful views—but waiting for the plow to get her out had been unnerving. At least the phone lines had held through the storm. She was able to call Zeke at the center, assure him she was fine.
From the window in her dressing room—the room where Zeke’s mother kept all three of her sons as newborns—Lucinda has a head-on view of the long lane connecting the house to the road. When she was a young bride, she drove the length of it several times a week, visiting her in-laws for dinners, attending church fund-raisers. Dutch elms, planted in two perfect colonnades, enclosed the lane, their supplicant branches interlacing overhead. By late June, the glossy foliage formed a tunnel of cool moist air; to the younger Lucinda, entering that tunnel stirred up restive, conflicting emotions.
All the elms—all fifty-eight, though no one had bothered to count them before—died of beetle blight in the early sixties, soon after she moved into the house. From this window, she saw them wither and succumb. No amount of money or horticultural expertise could save them. Removing the stumps cost a fortune. The lane remained barren, the timothied meadows lapping thirstily along its bermed edges, until a few years ago, when Zeke decided to plant rows of a specially grafted disease-resistant maple (for now the maples are threatened by yet another blight). The new trees are still tentative and spindly, but last summer they leaped in height, and a month ago they blushed dramatically, the leaves on their young limbs flushing a regal, violet shade of crimson.
She wishes she could go for a long walk; it’s time to get out her snowshoes. Walking a good distance, alone, always cheers her up, sets her right. But solitary luxuries must wait.
A delivery van turns down the lane. Not until it steers onto the loop in front of the porch does Lucinda recognize the logo of the village florist. “Fiddle.” She sighs. Bring on the parade of floral tributes. Zeke will rage at this, too.
As Lucinda rushes downstairs, hoping to reach the door before the bell rings, she catches sight of Zeke, now dressed, in the living room with Zoe. She’s brought her “toys”: the massive rubber ball, the thick elastic bands, the Gumby-like gizmos that strengthen hands and feet.
Lucinda signs for the flowers quickly, making no small talk. Gladiolas, the funeral flower. To our champion and friend: We pray daily for your speedy recovery!!! With affection and blessings, Father Jess and the staff of St. J’s.
Lucinda laughs. Ecumenically tolerant though he may be in public, in private Zeke rails openly against the backward teachings of the Catholic Church and the harm it has done to the world’s poorest peoples (that plural an irritation to Lucinda, a sign that he’s a politician down to the marrow, even in his kitchen, alone with his wife).
Sadly, his accusations were reaffirmed by the selection of the latest pope. Benedict’s views mirror those of Father Jess, who succeeded Father Tom with what some of the most vocal parishioners praised as an invigorating return to “more solid values.” To them, Father Tom was a good, hardworking man, but he’d been tarnished by achieving priesthood in the age of Father Drinan and the Beatles. Lucinda wonders if that is precisely what she loved about him, that tarnish. You might have defined it as a wider latitude of forgiveness. Not long before Mal died, Father Tom assured her that God had made her son the way he was, that Mal would be blessed and welcomed to the kingdom of heaven so long as he fully embraced Jesus Christ as his Savior.
Which, Lucinda knew in her heart even then, he probably never had, perhaps not even as the small child who always seemed to have his own opinions, often lofty or contrarian, about the world around him. Mal had been her easiest baby: he seemed to “catch on” to everything, from nursing to turning over to sleeping through the night, with an almost condescending ease. Yet once he learned how to express his thoughts (early, of course), he became the kind of child who exhausts his parents with every possible iteration of why, but, not so, isn’t true! He questioned the absurd delights of nursery rhymes, the happy endings to fairy tales. And Lucinda, in struggling to respect his challenges and doubts, came to feel far closer to him than she had to Christina or, later, to Jonathan. He was, she secretly felt, the child she could most confidently call hers.
After Mal died, she wished that she could gather up and possess his entire life. She had a hard time parting with any of his belongings. She had the impulse to claim even his pet parrot, Felicity, whose exotic aloofness and dark stare had always made her uneasy. But Felicity had already been in the care of Fenno McLeod, the friend who had so charmed Lucinda and then been the one to help Mal end his own life. It took her months to forgive Fenno, to stop seeing his complicity as a betrayal, to realize that Fenno might have been, at the end, the closest thing her older son ever had to a spouse. He had been, quite literally, a helpmeet. She has lost touch with Fenno, and now, all of a sudden, she feels sad and rueful about that, too.
Lucinda invited David for lunch, not realizing that this would subject Zeke to having his junior assistant witness how infuriatingly infantile his eating habits have become. She set the kitchen table for the two of them, hoping to leave them alone together—but what was she thinking?
And soup: what a cruel food to serve Zeke. She puts the bowls back in the cupboard. Sandwiches don’t seem like enough to offer, however. Cut vegetables? On two plates, she arranges slices of cucumber, halved cherry tomatoes, carrot sticks. She spoons hummus into two small dishes.
After cutting Zeke’s turkey sandwich in quarters, she decides she had better do the same with David’s. Maybe she should just go ahead and arrange the vegetables into smiley faces.
A bowl of chips. She now buys the kind made from sweet potatoes, though she doubts they’re much healthier than the usual (and far less expensive) type. The packaging on food has come to resemble political advertising. (She long ago stopped commenting on the alarmist radio spots and glossy postcards cooked up by Zeke’s so-called troubleshooting team.)
The doorbell chimes exactly at twelve-thirty. David’s comings and goings are as prompt and cheerful as birdsong. His ambition ripples off his perfectly pressed shirts like heat off the tarmac in August. Lucinda starts toward the front door and then sees Zeke heading there with his walke
r. (Another pearl for the broken necklace.) She retreats quickly, pours iced tea into two thin, lightweight glasses (graspable in one uncertain hand?).
Zeke enters the kitchen first, so slowly that Lucinda has a hard time just standing there, waiting, as if it’s perfectly normal to take twenty seconds in crossing the room. “Good to see you, David,” she says.
Right behind Zeke, his towering height now exaggerated by his boss’s shrimplike posture, David beams at Lucinda. He’s carrying an armload of folders, so he doesn’t shake her hand. “Great to see you, Mrs. Burns. The senator’s doing fantastically, don’t you think?”
“Rubbish,” says Zeke, this word coming out clear as a bell. “No shickophantijm round ear.”
David tries to laugh lightly. He casts a fleeting oops sort of smile at Lucinda. He’s someone too reliant on his charms, but he’s good at what he’s supposed to do, and that’s what matters. Especially now. She doesn’t want to think about what will happen to Zeke if he can’t keep up with his work. Even the optimistic young doctor wouldn’t give a prognosis on that. She thinks of Father Jess’s most ardent supporters and how, flowers and prayers for swift recovery aside, they would love to see Zeke’s seat not only vacant but filled by some bushy-tailed young Republican. Vermont has more than its fair share of Sarah Palin clones just waiting to boast about the state’s permissive gun laws. If retirement would cripple Zeke, that would kill him. Look what happened in Massachusetts when Senator Kennedy died.
This latest intern in a decades-long parade is the most handsome one since Leo, the intern Zeke had back in the late eighties, who stayed nearly four years, far longer than any before or since. Leo was working for Zeke when Mal died, twenty years ago now. Because Zeke worked from home so much that terrible spring, Lucinda saw a great deal of Leo. She saw up close what Zeke’s interns did for him: the stupefyingly boring tasks outnumbering the ones that gave them any sense of political know-how. She concluded that politics itself, even at the highest level, involves a staggering amount of exhausting, mind-sapping, tedious work. Not unlike, it occurred to her then, the work of getting back to living your life after losing a child.