“Excuse me,” David says to Gillian when she’s finished diverting the blame. “Fenno, would you mind waiting in the surgery? There’s tea on the hot plate. Introduce yourself to Neal.”
Just like that, I’m dismissed. Lillian hasn’t looked at me once.
I have the petulant urge to head back to the car and ditch the buggers, David and Lil, Dumpy Dad, the punker and her pony. Excellent riddance to all. But I let myself into the main clinic, through a perky new Dutch door with polished latches. I’m greeted in stereo by a young man in a white smock hunched over a calculator and a woman with a Siamese cat in her lap. The cat purrs contentedly away. A hypochondriacal cat, I suppose. Clearly not an emergency, and I decide that this will be a test. I will make my decision based on whether the cat gets service first or I do. Because, idiotically, I’m here without having decided on a firm reply to the looming question. I was to decide on my drive north. I was to decide while luxuriously housed on Arran. I was to decide on the aimless journey back. I was to decide in the late, sleepless privacy of my childhood room and, finally, during the early-morning drive I made here an hour ago. Each time I failed.
I take a seat next to the perky Dutch door and, before the cat’s mistress can mention the weather, pick up the nearest magazine, a veterinary journal. Resolutely, I page through inflamed udders and jaundiced livers and suppurating gums just to remain safely inside my shell and marinate in righteous indignation. Neal, incurious about my petless presence, returns to his calculations, rocking witlessly to and fro as he punches in his numbers. (Now there’s a contender, I hear my mother whisper tartly in my ear.)
I have actually begun to read about squamous cell carcinoma in short-haired cats when David walks through the Dutch door. Without quite looking at me, he puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes it briefly as he says, “Hello there, Wally, shall we snip those stitches and hustle you back to your place in the sun?” The woman stands, holding Wally in her arms. I can tell from her bright expression that she’s infatuated with my brother, as I suppose all his female clients must be. David strokes Wally (who cringes at his touch), then turns to lead cat and mistress through an inner door. Wally begins to emit a barely audible yowl, like the whine of bad radio reception. My sentiments exactly, I think as David shuts the door behind them.
I stand and fling the magazine onto the table, a parting gesture of disgust witnessed by no one, but then there’s a startling buzz. Neal picks up a phone. “Yes, yes . . . oh yeah?” he says, looking straight at me. He sets down the receiver and says, “You the famous Fenno?”
“Famous?” I say (or snort).
He laughs. “The wild brother from New York City.”
“I’m hardly wild.”
“Well, wild or no, Mrs. McLeod’s waiting for you in the barn.”
I think of Mum, the only Mrs. McLeod I know: waiting for me in the kennel, in the car, downstairs at Tealing, at the airport before she was ill—and now perhaps, if Lucinda’s concept of the universe wins out, waiting for me in life-after-death. Or, if David’s wins out, waiting in a Church of Scotland Hell for the equally damned souls of her lovers (to be followed by me) while Dad inhabits an alpine cloud bank, a literally divine Greek isle. There he roams, eternally and happily pensive, expecting his good son Dennis and his bullishly captivating chum Marjorie Guernsey-Jones. Whether David would make it to Heaven I see as a toss-up, though right now I can’t be objective.
AS THE WEATHER WARMED toward another summer, I seemed to be living a life of chiaroscuro—or scuroscuro: between one kind of darkness and another. On the surface, Tony and I seemed to have an understanding, but I did not honestly know what it comprised. I never did merge our life with the rest of mine, as I had once determined to do. I never even tried. Sometimes Tony would come to a reading. He might stay, for the wine and cheese, and we might leave together once I cleaned up. Ralph would throw me a furtive leer, but he did not pester me for details since he was now busy, at last, with a courtship all his own: an architect from Princeton whose house, on weekends, welcomed even the dogs.
Mal’s health began to slide again, if subtly. In May, along with narcissus and lilacs, the Hungarian dermatologist made his debut. The spots appeared inside Mal’s mouth, and Dr. Susan, as I’d come to think of this all-important but faceless figure, recommended another doctor. This doctor would inject the latest potion of hope directly into the lesions.
After returning from his first visit to the new doctor, Mal rang me and asked for a favor, the first in months. Would I stop by a certain Japanese restaurant and pick up miso soup? At his door, he looked several shades paler than he had a few days before. His voice sounded muffled because he was moving his mouth as little as possible.
Mal set the carton of soup on his kitchen counter. He turned and said very slowly, “I’ve a pact with this devil disease. Get to have the rudest, most damning symptom of all . . . neatly hidden away . . . but twice the pain. Deal of the century.” Rudest came out “oodest,” century “thensery.” Then he zipped his mouth shut with a finger and led me back to the door.
Abruptly (though this was how most news came from abroad), Dennis called to announce his wedding, less than a month away. I had no idea who the woman could be. They’d met in Paris, he said. She was gorgeous, smart, decisive—and to his delight had decided that he, Dennis, would do. “Do?” I said. “Merely do?” No, no, Dennis assured me, laughing, they were passionately in love. “And will that do?” I asked tersely. “Oh Fenny, you’ve lost your sense of humor. Sometimes you know! You just know! Haven’t you ever felt that way?” Of course not, I wanted to snap. Do you see me sending Kodacolor Christmas cards of soul mate plus offspring? But I congratulated him, told him I couldn’t wait to meet her. I did imagine she must be angelic, though I had yet to meet anyone French who possessed that virtue.
Did the wedding have to be rushed? He laughed. “Well yes, rather so—if she’s to fit into her grandmother’s gown, which she’s always wanted to wear.” He laughed some more, laughed as if drugged, and his bride, in my mind, became a good deal less angelic.
“If you can’t make it, I’ll certainly understand,” he said. “And it won’t be a grand business anyway, Mum’s death being so recent.”
It could have been the grandest affair of the century, planned a year in advance, and Dennis would still have forgiven my absence (I don’t think he’d know a grudge if it mugged him). So I was relieved, and not because I didn’t want to be there.
In June Mal stayed home, mostly in bed, for a week. For the first time, I entered his bedroom. Like mine, his back windows overlooked a row of gardens, some slovenly, some tidy, but all in some semblance of bloom. The two long walls leading to the windows were lined with records and books, and across his broad dark sleigh bed lay a quilt which I knew Lucinda must have made, a crazy quilt of velvets, velours, jacquards, and satins—greens, blues, and golds with an occasional sliver of black. “Two decades of party dresses I had to beg her to withhold from Goodwill, down on my knees,” said Mal when I asked. “I said, ‘Well if I can’t wear them, Mom, at least let me cocoon inside them.’ And who knew? They might just cure my insomnia. That won my case.”
Mal never let me cook, but I would pick up dinners from the Gondolier’s Pantyhose, Le Codpiece de Santa, and a Chinese restaurant newly christened One Fun Yum. He seemed to have become ravenous. Gone was the ascetic diet, and the cancerous lesions in his mouth, he said, had all but vanished. “More like Cindy Crawford beauty marks, not those Carl Sagan black holes just waiting to suck down my brain.”
But Mal was tired, bone tired. “Literally,” he said. “I can actually feel my femurs from inside out. Sometimes my ribs seem to itch.” The professionally laundered shirts I had picked up the previous week remained in their packages, stacked on their shelf in the cupboard. I did not ask about work, about concerts he must be missing. By the Fourth of July, he felt strong enough to visit friends on Fire Island.
Tony and I stood on the barren roof of Ralph’s buildin
g and watched distant fireworks over the Hudson River. He brought a camera that night and photographed everything, almost randomly: the treetops and rooftops around us, the sky when it lit up, blooming with neon chrysanthemums. Our faces and torsos, our glasses of wine, the sparkling tarpaper under our feet. When the fireworks ended, he left abruptly. “Appearance I have to put in,” he said. I did not need to ask to know I wasn’t invited. For hours, I comforted poor Rodgie through his first night of bottle rockets and cherry bombs. He slept, shaking when the explosions came, under the sheets against my naked legs. His silky fur was wistful consolation.
I called Mal almost every day; when he felt well, he would bristle at the sound of my voice. “You again? What, you need a cup of kidneys for a pie?” He did not go to Europe for the festivals, but he was still reviewing new recordings and covering the few local concerts that mattered in the off-season. From working, especially from writing, he would gain more energy until he was, if not fully active, able to refuse with predictable arrogance all my offers of help. “Is this the diaper service calling? The baby hasn’t been born yet.”
When he did need me, he was all business, his gratitude hidden. I did not mind, because I had begun to think of this time, this season, as Mal’s Last Days, and my vigilance was selfish. I did not want him to die, and I knew I would miss him, but I planned on looking back and seeing myself as a minor league angel. What might yet be expected of me, I did not care to know, but I would face each task as it came. So far, my tasks were easy.
In September, when Mal’s lights were on more evenings than not, I began to wonder about his work. Unsure whether I wanted to reassure myself or brace myself for The End, I would search the paper for his byline, and just as I was sure his continued shoptalk must be delusion or pretense, there it would be, over an interview with Michael Tilson Thomas or a review expressing arch bewilderment at the hackneyed art direction in a new Swan Lake. “If we must go through the anguish of expiring on those waters yet again, cathartic though it may be, don’t we deserve the justice of a fresh imagination? Don’t we deserve to mourn without the black tutus, the crowns of black nylon roses, the forest backdrop that looks like it was lifted from a decorator’s dumpster at the Plaza Athénée?” He made less effort now to soften his critical blows.
One evening when I picked up his cleaning, I found two young women in front of his building unloading boxes from a taxi. “Excuse me, excuse me!” one of them called out as I climbed the front steps. “You live here?”
No, I said, I was visiting a friend.
“Not Mal, not Malachy Burns?”
After a bit of scrambling and ferrying, the three of us stood outside Mal’s flat with four cardboard boxes, a large framed picture wrapped in paper (plus a newly cleaned tuxedo and a package of pressed bed linens). “Hey, Mal,” the girls chorused when he answered the door. “Hope it’s all here! Juliette did the packing. She said to say thank you for letting her snag your spot. You can borrow it back anytime, she says.”
They helped bring the boxes inside but turned down a drink. Before they left, one of them hugged Mal and kissed him on the cheek, clearly surprising him. “Ciao,” he called quietly as they closed the front door below.
“Early Christmas?” I said.
Mal began unwrapping the picture. “The next-to-last good-bye. ‘Congratulations: You’ve earned the prestige of working at home.’ Proto-severance.” Pulling away the paper, he revealed a poster of a richly colored costume design: a girl or boy, it was unclear which, in a turban and translucent harem pants. He or she held a slim curved sword, testing its point on a fingertip. Mal stared at the picture for a few seconds, then turned it fully toward me. “La Sultane Bleue from Schéhérazade.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Well it’s yours if you like. I’ve looked at it long enough.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Say no if you want. I wouldn’t be insulted.”
“I’d like it. I would.”
“Well good.” He leaned the picture against the wall and walked into the living room. “Have a drink. To you, that’s an order. Though I am relieved those girls didn’t stay. Nice girls, but girls, and I don’t mean their gender. Funny how twenty-four-year-olds begin to look prepubescent. Remember that age? Remember how indignant you felt when your parents’ friends told you how young you were? How maddening it felt when you knew they were married by then, even had a baby or two?”
“Or had gone to war,” I said.
“Oh mine got off. Not that he wanted to, or so he claims. His mother smuggled him off to Wisconsin, to her childless brother’s farm. He’d never milked a cow in his life, but he acquiesced. The world might be at war, even at worthy war, but to his mother, my father was the world.”
As Mal was to his.
We ordered out for dinner (Codpiece coq au vin), and we ate in the kitchen, in full view of the unopened, unmentioned boxes. I knew better than to offer to carry them back to his bedroom or help him unpack. I could imagine their containing the dull knickknacks of any office—files, staplers, tape dispensers, a dozen half-used pencils and Biros—but more likely they were filled with artifacts as beautiful and rare as the furnishings in his flat: an autographed toe shoe, a costume tiara, the gold-leafed program to a gala premiere, a pair of antique kid gloves, a collapsible silk top hat.
After we finished our chicken, Mal opened his freezer and offered me a choice of several ice creams and sorbets. I declined; he helped himself. Our conversation had hit a lull, and I listened to the sound of a spoon scooping ice cream methodically into a bowl. When Mal returned to the table, he looked at me steadily and said, “Do you realize that you never ask how I’m feeling?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, though I was irritated. How much could he expect of me?
Mal shook his head. “No, no. Don’t crumble on me now. I wasn’t criticizing, I was . . . marveling?” He spooned ice cream into his mouth, closing his eyes at the pleasure. “I may be needy at present, but I do not need a nurse, a daily taker of my pulse.”
Not yet, I couldn’t help thinking.
IT’S BEGUN TO RAIN lightly again, and the barn is dim.
The minute I enter, Lil says, “Fenno, this is such a bloody mess.” She starts toward me with her honeydew embrace, but I stop inside the doorway and fold my arms. This stops her too.
“I can hardly disagree with that.”
Her eyes shimmer. “You are so cross.”
“Yes. And I wonder if you even know why.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says. She covers her face with her hands.
I will myself not to complicate matters by comforting her. I say quietly, “If you could please stop crying for a minute, I could think a bit more clearly.”
She swallows her weeping and wipes her face on the sleeves of her white lab coat. Beneath it, I catch sight of her flowered summer dress and the delicate freckles on her chest. “That dreadful letter, so stupid to have dashed it off like that without—”
“It wasn’t dreadful,” I say. “It overwhelmed me, but it would have knocked me flat in a sentence or two. I was already knocked flat.”
“But you’re—”
“No, it’s my turn here,” I say sharply. I sigh and look away from Lil’s mournful face. I realize I’m leaning on Nero’s stall. The pony is lying in the straw, snoring. (Aren’t horses supposed to sleep on their feet? My poor selfish mind craves any distraction.) “I wish people would stop treating me as if I speak a foreign language and can’t be spoken with directly about anything whatsoever. Am I that intimidating? Am I that difficult?”
“This is hardly ‘anything whatsoever,’” says Lil.
“I’m not talking about ‘this’ or just this. The piper at the luncheon! The hymns at the church! The ridiculous ashes, which of course I do not have.”
Lil’s breath catches rhythmically in her throat, the aftershock of tears. “Well maybe we wish the same thing. And maybe we’re not the we you see us as. Not even me an
d David.”
“Well I am cross at David, I’m very cross at David. I don’t have the faintest idea where Dad’s ashes got to. If we’d just gone and buried them—”
“Please don’t let’s talk about that. Please.”
“You mean, can we talk about your agenda please? Well, I will talk about whatever I like,” I say. “That’s part of my point.” (I hear myself lapse into a whine, and then, reflexively, I hear Mal: “Nix the Rodney Dangerfield. No one’s dissing you; they’ve just got lives to live.”)
Lil begins to cry again. “Oh David should have—I wanted David to . . .”
“If you wanted David to talk to me about this baby crisis, that would have been an enormous mistake.” Giving in, I wrap my arms around her, which makes her cry harder, into my shirt.
“Stop interrupting,” she sobs. “I wanted him to apologize . . .” On the wall, the intercom sounds. “Oh bloody Christ.” She pulls away from me and picks up the receiver. She tells Neal she’ll ring someone back. She tells him she’s fine, she’s just had a sneezing fit. Must be the new straw. Observant Neal will swallow that one.
When Lil hangs up, she takes a deep jagged breath. I hold out my handkerchief. She sits in the chair by the intercom and blows her nose. She leans her head against the wall and closes her eyes. “You’re right, you talk. Talk about anything.”
From the stall next to Nero’s, a large bored-looking Angus cow keeps an eye on me. If I were paranoid, her expression would seem accusing.
“If you and David were to have a child that I—that you’d had because I helped you out—that is, if I could—and if I came back on the occasional holiday, the way I do now, what would that be like?”
Lil opens her eyes. “I don’t know.” Her breath catches in hiccups. “What would you want it to be like?”