“You know what for,” said Debbie, and of course now she did. This was where Henry took over. “Really, Lillian, I can’t believe you’ve let this go this long, and even though normally I would not consider it any of my business, I do think it’s critical that you see someone.”
“We’ve made you an appointment,” said Debbie.
“How dare you!” said Lillian, but that was what an intervention was for—the same thing had happened to Betty Ford, though about drinking, not about going to the doctor. Lillian said, “Arthur has to go, too.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Arthur.
“No, I mean, you have to go for a checkup, too.” She said, a little self-righteously, “He hasn’t had a checkup in a decade.”
Then, seeing his downcast face, she was flooded with regret.
The doctor was in the city; they took the ferry the next morning. Hugh was to keep the kids, and Debbie was to wrangle Lillian, as if she were a rogue calf heading for the back pasture. But Lillian gave her no trouble. As long as Arthur was along. And of course the whole experience was torture, starting from the moment they squeezed her left breast and then her right one into that machine, the way the nurse kept pushing her in more tightly until the platform was digging at her ribs, the way she had to hold her breath and stand absolutely still, and the nurse barked at her every time she had a stray thought—stray thoughts apparently caused her to twitch. Her breasts ached—not equally, but equally enough so that Lillian convinced herself for about five minutes that nothing was wrong with the one that wasn’t wrong with the other. The nurse wouldn’t allow Arthur into the mammography room, and then the doctor came out and invited him into the consulting room, looking him in the eye, but not Lillian. That was the clue right there. Young doctor—Neil Feigenbaum. Maybe forty, maybe not. Debbie remained in the waiting room, as if guarding the door. Yes, there was a large mass; yes, they needed to do a biopsy. Today was Monday. Would she mind coming back the next day? He was associated with NYU; they could have the biopsy done there. Arthur, that old betrayer, kept nodding, and saying they would be there at eight in the morning. Finally, Lillian said, “That means a six a.m. ferry.”
Arthur gave her a long, strict, and affectionate look. He said, “We’ll think of something.”
When they returned to the waiting room, after signing some papers, Debbie was just hanging up the phone the nurse’s station had let her use, but Lillian didn’t think to ask whom she had been calling—no doubt Hugh. It was not Hugh, though—it was Andy. As soon as they emerged into the heat of First Avenue, here came Andy, and Lillian realized that Dr. Feigenbaum must be Andy’s gynecologist. Andy gave her one of her limp hugs and said, “Oh, let’s have lunch.” She walked them along, chatting the whole time about Emily and Janet and Michael and Loretta (“My goodness, she keeps him in line”) and Richie and “that nice Jewish girl.” (“So ambitious. I’m sure our bloodlines could stand an invigorating infusion of Jewish blood. But I say nothing. I just bite my tongue.”) The restaurant was dark and old-fashioned, with elderly waiters who did everything with a napkin folded over one arm; Lillian half expected their attentive eighty-year-old to wipe her chin. So it was true, she thought, and now she would have to go through the five stages of grief all over again, or maybe only four of them, because she didn’t foresee any opportunity for denial, now that Debbie knew, and Andy, and soon Henry and Frank and Claire and Janet and Hugh and Jared. Arthur did not let go of her; even sitting at their table, he was practically on top of her without perhaps realizing it. Andy and Debbie kept talking—Andy about Emily, and Debbie about Carlie and Kevvie. They sang a sort of chorus. Everything Andy said about Emily reminded Debbie of something about Carlie or Kevvie, and so they traded solos. Lillian ordered the crab cakes with aioli, and Arthur (she watched him closely) ordered the scampi, and it was good, so he ate almost all of it. Debbie ordered something and wolfed it down. Andy ate a single artichoke, very delicately grasping each leaf between her fingernails, plucking it off, and dipping it in pure olive oil with just a little sea salt added. For dessert, she did a kind thing, Lillian thought—she ordered two helpings of the crème brûlée and four spoons. Crème brûlée seemed designed to promote denial.
They put Debbie in a cab to Penn Station—she wouldn’t get back to Fire Island now until after four. Then Andy said, “Oh, heavens, you should stay at the Waldorf,” and Arthur said, “Why not?” and gave her a big smile, and Lillian was already into the grief part by the time they were walking through the lobby.
—
RICHIE ROLLED OVER and nearly fell out of bed, because Ivy had disappeared. He stopped himself, though—his reflexes were pretty good even when he was mostly asleep. He thought about three things before he thought about the election: He thought that he had to get up right now and take a piss, which he did. He thought that it was already seven-thirty and he was supposed to be at work by nine. He wondered whether Ivy had made coffee. Then it occurred to him to wonder who had won, so he wandered into the living room. Ivy was standing in front of the TV, her robe hanging open, weeping. He said, “Reagan really won, huh?”
Ivy could only nod. After a moment, she said, “I knew I shouldn’t have voted for Barry Commoner.”
In the kitchen, the last bagel was gone, but there was bread for toast and a piece of apple pie, always good for breakfast. He had adopted the safest course, given the friction between Ivy and Michael—he had not voted at all.
The phone rang—Loretta, who sounded happy, although she said nothing about the election, only, “You guys want to come over for dinner?”
Richie got along pretty well with Loretta, who had a better sense of humor than either Michael or Ivy. He said, “Well, we haven’t heard from you guys in a month. You going to rub our faces in the dirt?”
“Not right away.”
“When?”
“When you least expect it.”
“What are you serving?”
“Humble pie.”
“We don’t like that.”
“Okay. Lasagna.”
“Still in the Italian-cooking class?”
“Eighth week.”
“I need something more Tuscan than lasagna.”
Loretta was silent for a minute, then said, “Tagliolini with new olive oil and fresh herbs? Then some veal medallions with a walnut sauce?”
Richie said, “I’ll work on her.”
“You should know that I forgive her.”
“The question is whether she forgives you—” But then Ivy appeared in the doorway, and he said, “Bye,” and hung up. Ivy didn’t ask who it was, but he volunteered, “Mom says hi.”
“Hi, Andy,” said Ivy.
Richie went over and put his arms around her. He gave her a very good hug—she melted into him. He said, “You feel cold. Your feet are freezing.”
“I’ve been up since four. I should have gone to bed before the results were in. I might have at least gotten one last good night’s sleep.”
“You think he’s going to start a war right now? He doesn’t get inaugurated for another two months.”
“Stop joking.”
“Did you talk to your mom?”
“Mom and Dad. At about six.”
This was a bad sign. Ivy had met his aunt Eloise, so he did not criticize her parents, who, although very left, had never actually belonged to the CPUSA or been questioned by HUAC, and anyway were twenty years younger than Eloise. But they had both gone to City College, though they now lived on Long Island. They acted as if social programs like food stamps were automatically good and Wall Street was automatically bad. Like Aunt Eloise, they tossed around terms like “working class” and “bourgeoisie” and “capitalism.” Their messy house was littered with old copies of The Nation, Dissent, and Mother Jones. Both Alma and Marcus liked to finish every family dinner with a cigarette and a political discussion; they were aggressive about making everyone at the table, including Richie, define and refine their arguments, and Richie had to admit that, usually
, his arguments boiled down to “mere instinct,” as Alma put it, shaking her head. They were fervent believers in rationality. Alma was harder on him than Marcus, who most often ended up saying, “Alma! Leave the boy alone! She likes him, then she likes him!”
“How can I leave him alone?” Alma would exclaim. “That’s his problem. He’s been left alone for all his life!”
He had to admit that, for all her eye rolling, Ivy agreed with her parents’ views. The problem was their style—Ivy thought they were loud, messy, and rude. She loved them in private, but would go nowhere with them in public, not even to a deli.
He kissed her on the forehead, then more slowly on the lips, then took the corner of a dish towel and dabbed lightly at her eyes to wipe the tears. He said, “The only reason Reagan got elected was because Carter was such an incompetent. My uncle Joe, who is the nicest guy in the world, thinks this grain embargo is going to bankrupt him. It’s like every single thing Carter did was wrong. That was Reagan’s point.”
“He’s too smooth! He’s just a mouthpiece for big business, like when he was on that show and then he was a governor! My God, he was awful in California.”
Richie said, “Give him a chance. Let him be the best of a bad lot, okay? Just let him be that for a while.” But he didn’t dare bring up the dinner invitation. For all her good nature, he knew that Loretta would, indeed, demand some humble pie—she was like that. And they couldn’t just put it off: Loretta never forgot, and she kept score. The election, say, gave her ten points, but not showing up for dinner and “taking your medicine” would give her a point, too.
When he called Ivy at lunchtime, she said, “Okay, we can go.”
He said, “Go where?”
“Their place.”
“They invited us?”
“Richie, I know she called you this morning and invited us for dinner. She called me at the office just to make sure you told me.”
“She really is like the CIA, isn’t she?”
Ivy laughed, which meant she was getting over the election.
Richie said, in a wheedling voice, “What difference does it make who won? They’re all the same, really.”
“You’re hopeless,” said Ivy.
“We only see them four or five times a year. It’s like a penance. Or maybe like interest payments. We may both hate to visit our families, but we owe something every so often, don’t we?”
Ivy said, “Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Four hours. I can take it.”
When the argument started (after the veal, before the Sambuca), the girls were like trained debaters, and Richie and Michael kept exchanging looks. Ivy went first: “Whatever you say, just don’t start with me about Adam Smith. He did not trust merchants. He thought they would get together and shit on everyone else if they possibly could.”
Richie said, “I would rather talk about the hostages in Iran than this.” They ignored him.
“Adam Smith?” said Michael. “Was that the guy you slept with last summer?”
Richie kicked him under the table—rather hard, in fact. Michael said, “Ouch.”
The girls were used to their shenanigans.
Loretta said, “I don’t need a theorist. No one does. I just have to look around and see what a mess all of these agencies I pay for are making of the country. People want to do stuff, and they can’t, because there’s too much paperwork.”
“Like set fire to the Cuyahoga River.”
Point for Ivy, thought Richie.
“If people wanted it cleaned up, they would have cleaned it up,” said Loretta.
“They did want it cleaned up, and it has been cleaned up,” said Ivy, “by EPA regulations. Not by the invisible hand.”
At this point, Michael ran his fingertip lightly up the back of Loretta’s neck. She laughed, but grabbed his hand. She said, “You wanted it cleaned up. But maybe those people living there were willing to make the tradeoff between jobs and a little pollution. There’s no proof that pollution is bad. Maybe it’s just stuff that’s in the wrong place.”
Michael said, “When Loretta was little, her room was papered in DDT-impregnated wallpaper. Just for kids. Donald Duck pictures on it.”
Loretta spun around. She said, “What was wrong with that? It was a good idea. It killed the mosquitoes that landed on the wall.”
Meanwhile, Ivy was staring.
Loretta said, “If you ban DDT, and then millions die from malaria, you haven’t done anyone any good.”
“Let the market kill them,” said Ivy.
“At least it’s their choice.”
“How about full warnings on the roll of paper, saying what is known about DDT?”
“We know it will kill mosquitoes. We don’t know it will hurt kids. Anyway, I guess the market decided about DDT-impregnated wallpaper, and that was that. I haven’t seen it lately. Or lead-based paint, or X-ray machines in shoe stores. Things come and go. If you don’t let them come and go, then you get like Russia.”
Richie thought maybe she had Ivy there.
But then Ivy said, “Russia isn’t the only alternative. Banks in the U.S. used to print all the money, and now the government prints it, because a free market in dollar bills didn’t work and was chaos. There are things that the government should do, and things that companies should do. I don’t want Russia, but I don’t want the Mafia, either.” Michael was beginning to look bored, and Richie sympathized. Michael said, “I loved The Godfather Part II. Pow-pow! Let’s have the Sambuca. You do this thing—you put a coffee bean in it and set it on fire. Burns off all the alcohol. Pow! Pow! Oh, you got me.” Michael fell to the floor.
Loretta said, “Reagan is tough. The Iranians know it, and the hostages will be released.”
Ivy said, “We’ll see.”
Richie thought, “Uncle.”
Loretta said, preening just a bit, “Yes, we’ll see.”
On the way home, Richie and Ivy agreed, no more Michael and Loretta until at least the end of January.
1981
CHARLIE WAS READING a book. He was sitting up in his bed with his back against the headboard, knees drawn up, quilt to his waist. All he had on was a T-shirt from camp that was ripped at the collar, but even though it was zero degrees out and Mom had turned down the heat for the night, he was not cold. It was three-fifteen by the clock, and he was on page 477. There were about 150 pages left to go. Charlie had stayed up over the years to watch movies, drive around, TP Ricky Horan’s house, talk to Leslie Gage on the phone, and listen to rock and roll turned very low, but he had never stayed up to read a book. Even while he was following the story with joy and pleasure, he was also rather amazed at himself.
He had found the book lying on the street outside of Kroger’s. He took it home, hid it in his room so that Mom would not make a big deal over him finally reading a book, then opened it idly, noted the print was small. The first sentence made no sense at all, but he laughed at the second, “The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out on the Wart by rapping his knuckles.” He half understood this when he realized that the Wart was a child, not a blemish. It took him half an hour to read the first two pages, they were so strange. But he saw that they were meant to be strange, and he felt like the author was making a puzzle for him—this many words I will give you to understand, this many words I will keep for myself, and then there are these words in the middle, which you can have if you work at it. Things popped out of the page and into his head, and he pictured them. He went on, although he had only the dimmest idea about Arthur and Gawaine from occasionally looking at Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. When he got confused by the words, the story stayed in his head, and drew him back.
He stretched his shoulders a little and turned the page. Now the story had turned to Lancelot and Guenever (which he pronounced in his mind to rhyme with “whenever”). He liked the line “Half the knights had been killed—the best half.” He read about the ones that were left, and s
aw that King Arthur was thinking about how, whenever you set out to do something, you use up the good stuff first, and then you are stuck with the bad stuff, whatever it is. This was kind of like Charlie’s experience on both the swim team and the diving team—they always did their best dives first, or swam the backstroke first and the breaststroke last, just to get so far ahead of the other teams that they maybe couldn’t catch up. But that meant that you had to do your worst dives when you were more tired, so that you got even lower scores than you might have. The next part he could only sort of picture—stuff about clothes people were wearing and how stupid they looked. But he understood perfectly the part about Guenever. All the good people were gone, and those that were left were like the kids at school—they mostly wanted to see her fuck up, not because they cared, but because they didn’t have anything better to do.
Charlie could not say that this section of the book was his favorite, even though he couldn’t stop reading. What he had really liked was the part about Merlyn turning the Wart into a fish and a hawk. Even though he had never been farther from St. Louis than Chicago, in one direction, and the Ozarks, in the other, he could read that part and imagine just what England was like—all the birds and castles and hills. There was also a place where he, Charlie, had cried, something that hadn’t ever happened before, even in a movie. When the kids—Gawaine and Gareth and the rest of them—killed the unicorn for their mom and dragged it home all dirty and wrecked, and their mom didn’t even let it in the house, he thought that was the saddest thing he had ever read or seen. He did not know why. But it looked like even sadder things were to come.
At four-fifteen, the book fell onto the quilt, and his head dropped back onto the edge of the headboard. He was perfectly comfortable—one of his skills was sleeping soundly no matter what his position. When he first went to camp on the Current River, the other campers would test him: Head out of the bunk? No problem. Feet on the floor? Feet tied to the upper bunk? Spread-eagled? If he was asleep, he was asleep, that was Charlie. The other kids came to respect that after he blackened a few eyes for them. And anyway, he was big—six foot three, 165 pounds, too big to dive anymore unless he faithfully lifted weights. But he didn’t mind that. He and Coach Lutz both knew he was coming to the end of his talents. Coach Jenkins had told him about a thousand times that Mark Spitz, who was six one, with an arm span of six two, weighed 170. Somehow, Charlie, six three, with an arm span of six four, could arrive at 182 pounds and win seven Olympic gold medals, or maybe only one. “You’re the hope!” Coach Jenkins said. But Charlie needed fear to keep him going, and breaststroke was a singularly unscary activity, unless maybe you were swimming to Cuba and there were sharks. He hadn’t done that yet.