A Little Love Story (15 page)

7

A
MELIA
R
OSSI, IT
turned out, was one of those people who get their satisfaction in life from having guests in the house, cooking for them and watching them eat, making a fuss over them, making them happy. I remember reading that in some places, in ages past, opening your house to strangers had been considered an essential part of being human, an acknowledgment of some kind of invisible link. I like that kind of thing. I like warmth and uncalled-for kindness, the small unnoticed generosities that speckle the meanness of the world. Often, over the years, customers would make Gerard and me a bowl of hot soup at lunch, or bring out iced tea and cookies. Once, when Gerard was having a tough time just after his divorce and the woman whose garage we were rebuilding was a psychotherapist, she’d taken him into her office for a half-hour session, gratis. Those small gestures always lifted us out of the work routine and put a kind of polish on the day.

Janet’s mother wanted me there for Thanksgiving, then she wanted me and my mother. Then me, my mother, and Gerard. Then me, my mother, Gerard, and Patricia and Alicia, his twins. I was afraid that, next time Janet talked to her mother, Gerard’s ex-wife, Anastasia, would get an invite, too, and though Anastasia is a fine woman and a good mother and an excellent dinner companion, it probably would have meant trouble, having her and Gerard looking at each other over a turkey carcass. But Anastasia was visiting her dad in a nursing home in Carlsbad, California. So, on Thanksgiving Day we had a two-pickup caravan heading out to the blue-collar suburb where Amelia Rossi lived and where Janet had grown up: Mum and I in front; Gerard, Patricia and Alicia bringing up the rear.

My mother was having a fairly lucid day. I’d told her we were going to my girlfriend’s mother’s house for Thanksgiving, and that seemed to make her happy. I’d been having a peculiar feeling all that morning, though, even before I’d driven to Apple Meadow to pick her up. Something was haunting me, some bad breeze from a forgotten dream, some premonition. I thought it might be because one of my favorite uncles had died on Thanksgiving Day, years before, so the holiday was always ringed in black for me.

The sky was low and gray, the winds wirling, and the truck felt less than perfectly stable on the road. To make things stranger, on the way over the Mystic River Bridge, as I was thinking about Janet’s father again, my mother said, “We forgot to pick up Dad at work.”

“Dad’s gone, Mum.”

“Gone where?”

“He died.”

“Of what?”

“Two strokes.”

She fell silent for a while, as if the shock and sadness of this fact had knocked her back down into a world of feelings that wrapped themselves around her like wet sheets. She sat there, wrists crossed in her lap, bouncing on the truck’s old seat, making her way all wrapped up and with great concentration along one dim interior alleyway after the next. Her husband was dead. Why had that happened? What did it mean?

On the north side of the bridge we left the highway and stopped at a traffic light, and in the mirror I could see one balding head and two blond ones. That cheered me up.

8

A
MELIA
R
OSSI’S
house was a one-and-a-half-story box with an attached garage, set behind a swimming-pool-sized patch of lawn. Janet had parked at the curb, leaving a driveway just big enough for one caravan. Gerard and I worried we were making too much work for Mrs. Rossi, so to compensate for that we’d brought along half a supermarket aisle worth of here-we-are gifts: wine, cider, eggnog, chestnuts, two cheesecakes from a famous Jewish deli in Brookline, a bouquet of flowers. We climbed out into the driveway and unloaded the cargo. I was nervous, for twelve different reasons, buffeted by cold winds and demons. Handing a package of chestnuts and a half-gallon of eggnog to Patricia and Alicia, respectively, I said, “And all the guests were amazed that the father of the bride had saved his best eggnog for last.” Even my mother looked at me as if I were crazy.

The house had been built into the slope of a hillside, so that from out front the first floor seemed like a second floor. I looked up. Janet’s mother stood in the picture window there, a vision of what her daughter would have been with thirty more years and one different gene: plump, pretty, happy, shining a little beam of good feeling down on people she had never seen.

Patricia dropped the bag of chestnuts. They spilled out and rolled off lopsidedly in five directions, and by the time we collected them and made our way to the front door, Janet’s mother was standing there. She greeted the twins by getting down on one knee. “But who, who are these two perfect creatures at my front door?”

They said their names at the same time. By then, Amelia had a hand on each shoulder. “I can tell you apart already. Patricia has a pink dress on, and Alicia’s dress is pink!”

The girls squealed, showed her their offerings, made an attempt at the curtsies Gerard had been ridiculously trying to teach them. Squeezed into the six-foot-square entranceway, we made our introductions. Gerard kissed Amelia’s hand and spoke a rehearsed phrase in Italian, even though I’d told him three times that Janet’s mother did not speak the language of languages and had never spoken it. Amelia took my mother’s hands in both of hers, said something about having heard so many good things about her, and about her son.

My mother said, “Yes, Ellory’s chief of surgery now.”

Amelia had been briefed on the situation. “Oh, how wonderful,” she said. “You must be very proud.”

“I am.”

When it was my turn, she thanked me for the cheesecakes then reached up on her tiptoes, kissed me on the mouth, and gave me the kind of hard squeeze that surprises you and makes you smile. Above us, I could smell the turkey cooking, and I said what you usually say, that it was nice to meet her, and nice of her to invite us, that I’d heard wonderful things about her, too. And then I said, “Your daughter is a precious gemstone in my life.”

This was not the kind of thing I was known for saying. And it was spoken, naturally, into one of those moments when everyone else has gone quiet—just a little pocket of accidental silence, so that the precious gemstone part went up the stairwell and thumped around in the small house like a pigeon with a broken wing. Gerard was halfway up the stairs by then. He stopped and looked back at me, lifted his eyebrows and held them up there in one of his comic faces. Janet’s mother started to cry, and wiped at her eyes with her fingers, smearing a little bit of makeup. The silence stretched out. I rushed to think of something else I could say, but from the top of the stairway Janet called down, “Pay no attention, Ma. He says dumb things when he’s nervous, that’s all.”

Amelia couldn’t quite get everything back together, though. We were standing looking at each other, a background song playing “Precious Gemstone.” The tears kept squirting out. “Go up, go up,” she said at last, taking hold of my elbow and turning me, and when I started up the carpeted stairs she ducked outside for a breath.

Janet had met everyone and was leaning against the top of the railing, looking gaunt and breathing very badly. “Nice going, Romeo,” she said hoarsely before I kissed her.

In three minutes, Amelia was back in the kitchen, dry-eyed. We heard the hinges on the oven door, and she was prodding the turkey with a long fork. Janet made a fuss over the girls the way her mother had, getting down on one knee and holding her hands behind her back, then bringing the hands out one by one and giving each girl a certain kind of doll Gerard had told her they liked: soft, long-legged creatures with their hair in dread-locks, the fashion of the season. She set them up with
The Sound of Music
on the bedroom VCR, then came back and poured wine for my mother and me and a glass of orange juice for Gerard. I was looking at her and pretending not to, a new trick of mine, and I did not like what I was pretending not to see.

Gerard told Amelia he enjoyed watching people cook—which was true—so we all ended up standing at the kitchen door in a knot, taking turns setting our glasses down and carrying out dishes of sweet potatoes and lasagna. There were good smells everywhere, plates and forks and butter knives shining on a gold embroidered white tablecloth, Tony Bennett on the stereo. I kept sneaking looks at Janet. Just before Gerard volunteered to start carving the turkey, she disappeared into one of the bedrooms and I heard the sound of the oxygen machine, food for the starving rest of her, its dull bubbling hum already standing next to some-thing else in my mind.

In the room where the girls were watching their movie, I heard the Mother Superior singing “Climb Every Mountain.” Gerard went in to fetch them. My mother was fingering a photo of Janet’s dad, naturally, of all the pictures on the side table. Amelia called us in to eat. I had little lines, little hot currents running in my legs and hands, the universe sparking bad messages through me. I went into the bedroom to call Janet to the table, and she was sucking in a last few breaths. Before she knew I was there, I saw what I had seen before, a strange thing to see: she was holding the oxygen tube in place under her nose and pricking her finger for a blood-sugar level at the same time, and it was as if she were somehow outside her body, tending to it as if it were a machine, an appliance, without being annoyed or affectionate, as casual and unperturbed as if she were cleaning crumbs out of a toaster oven. People had jumped off bridges because they couldn’t deal with this, and stepped outside to cry on a holiday because they couldn’t deal with this, and lay awake on a couch in a room filled with paint fumes, trying to deal with this. She was cleaning crumbs.

She saw me, checked her number, set the tube back in its clip and the blood-sugar meter back in its neat leatherette holder, and turned the tank dial to Off.

I said, “I came to ask if this would be a good time for a quick roll in the so-called hay.”

9

I
T LOOKED TO ME
, when we first sat down, as though Janet’s mother had cooked for the seven people at the table, and also for another seventeen or twenty people who were standing patiently in the leaf-strewn driveway and who would be allowed in for a second seating once we had eaten ourselves into unconsciousness. In my family we had always made a good meal of the bird itself surrounded by various species of root crop under gravy, and something green for good measure. But to describe the Amelia Rossi table you’d have to add lasagna, cheese balls, meatballs, and hot sausage in tomato sauce, grilled green peppers stuffed with spiced bread crumbs, mushroom caps stuffed with the same bread crumbs, broiled mashed pumpkin with about a stick of butter melting on it, baked beans, white beans, green beans. The middle of the table was covered with dishes, the counters were covered with dishes. If we’d all sat there eating until there were two shopping days left until Christmas, we’d still have had three or four different kinds of pie, cake, ice cream, and the deli desserts to work on.

Janet had warned me: “It’s a ritual offering to the god of excess. Don’t have any breakfast and go light on dinner the night before. Tell Gerard, too.”

Mrs. Rossi managed to give the clear impression that she would be permanently offended if we left so much as two cheese balls on a plate, uneaten. This was conveyed via pleasant little remarks—“Oh, no, a big man like you? Who works so hard? That’s all you want?”—followed by insistent spoonfuls of meat-balls, mashed potato, pumpkin, white beans. I don’t even like white beans and I ate a cup and a half or so.

We teased the girls, made a big fuss over them, then left them alone to torment each other and try to eat. The conversation tripped and puttered for a while, settling eventually, for no particular reason, on the Big Dig, a gigantic construction project that was sucking money out of the state budget and would do so for years to come.

“I say this,” Gerard proclaimed. “I say whoever it is who’s embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from the Biggus Diggus is perfectly within his rights.”

“His or her rights, Dad,” Patricia said. “We learned it in preschool.”

“I stand corrected, and hereby apologize to the legions of corrupt female construction magnates. Perfectly within his or her rights. An enterprise like this takes the old rusty elevated roads of our great city and does the only thing you can do with them: erases them from the collective eye. If a little money gets grafted in the process of giving us back our waterfront, there’s nothing un-American about it!”

“You’d make out fine on Beacon Hill,” Janet said. She was trying hard to join in the fun, but it seemed to take a huge effort for her to get the sentence out. Between words she made a couple of small grunting noises I’d never heard.

“I intend to run for public office,” Gerard told her. “Who was it who said, ‘If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve’? Bush?”

“Lyndon Johnson.”

“Well, I say: If nominated I will run, if running I will serve!”

Gerard went on and on with his nonsense, making faces for the girls’ amusement, turning to my mother with his most serious expression and scaring her half to death by shouting, “Read my lips! I did not have relations with that woman!”

Everything went along smoothly, if crazily, for a while. Soon we were drugged by the sheer volume of food. The adults ate in straight lines; Patricia and Alicia circled and wandered. They were at the age where they fidgeted a lot, getting up and down to check on their new dolls, dropping food, giggling, finding something remarkable in a mushroom cap or a blossom of cauliflower. Gerard oohed and aahed and spewed compliments in several languages. Janet’s mother encouraged and spooned and found reasons to go back and forth to the kitchen. My mother had always had a good appetite and she seemed to be following the conversation in a fairly alert and congenial way. And then, as if the fog in which she lived suddenly blew clear of the best-trained part of her mind, she realized, when the second round of plates was being removed, that Janet was sick.

Janet had been coughing. She’d left the table a couple of times for bathroom runs, for oxygen. She had eaten almost nothing. Twice I saw her set her fork down and sit very still. The second time she did this she looked up at the top of the wall and took a series of short quick breaths with a shadow of fear over her eyes. It was the shadow that caught my mother’s attention. I saw her stop eating and look across the table. “What’s wrong, dear?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Janet took a few slightly longer breaths, grunted, and gasped out, “I’m fine.”

The girls sat still for once, turning up their pea-green eyes.

“She’s alright, Mum.”

“No, Ellory, she isn’t.”

Gerard said, “Mrs. E., what I want to know is why you haven’t come out to see the gorgeous addition we’re building in Cambridge. Don’t you love me anymore?”

But my mother’s attention was locked on Janet and she didn’t answer.

“What’s wrong, Papa?” one of the twins said.

Mrs. Rossi brought something into the kitchen that didn’t need to be brought there.

“What is it, dear?” my mother asked.

“I have lung trouble,” Janet told her, almost in a whisper.

“Is Janet going to die, Papa?”

“Die? What are you talking about, Lishie?”

Patricia was clutching her rag-headed doll in a stranglehold.

“What is it?” my mother persisted. She started to get out of her seat and I put a hand on her arm.

“Janet has cystic fibrosis, Mum.”

“What is that, Papa? Uncle Jake?”

“It’s a sickness,” Janet gasped. “I’ll be alright.”

But alright wasn’t written on her face. Amelia was standing in the doorway now, behind Janet, watching my mother over the table.

“She was a doctor,” I explained.

My mother’s eyes had not moved. “How did you live so long?” she asked Janet.

“Just lucky,” Janet answered.

My mother kept staring, the girls sat stone still. Amelia had not moved from the doorway, but she’d started to cry again. She had her right hand wrapped tightly around her left wrist, and her left hand was squeezing open and closed in a quick, unconscious rhythm. Her pretty, oval face had completely changed and was painted in a shade of hope, a terrible species of tearstained hope, that I had never seen before and never want to see again. Over the top of her daughter’s head she was looking fixedly at my mother as if, there, hidden in the shadowed valleys of her brain, might lie one treatment or medicine or procedure or idea that none of Janet’s doctors had thought of.

She knew my mother was not in full possession of her faculties, but the word “doctor” seemed to have had some magical effect on her. I’d seen this before in my life, many times. It was part of the reason I’d dropped out of med school.

All of this was compressed into maybe three seconds, but they were an unbearable three seconds.

I said, “There are new treatments now.”

It was absurd. I’d meant it as an answer to my mother’s question, but it came out sounding as if I had good news to share, a latest development snatched from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation website just that morning. Janet’s mother turned the beam of her terrible hope on me, and it was like a sweeping searchlight that stops on you, picking you out of the anonymous blackness, freezing you there, blinding you. Janet fixed me with a look that was worse than that. She frowned and made a small shake of her head. But I could not stop myself. “She’s on the list for a lung transplant,” I announced stupidly.

Amelia was wringing her hands in that odd way, blinking and blinking, waiting for the news. I could not meet Janet’s eyes.

“What is that, Papa?”

Gerard started to explain, and my mother searched around in a buried history of a million lessons and terms and hospital rounds and patients and the families of patients, plucked one word out of her memory, and spoke it—“Cadaveric”—just as Janet started to cough. The cough was something monstrous and drawn out. It was half roar. She kept coughing and couldn’t catch her breath. All her concentration was focused on the act of coughing and then breathing a small gasp of a breath, coughing again, reaching for a bit of breath. Her eyes were down, but I knew she knew it was frightening the girls, and she pushed hard against the table and stood up, accidentally tugging on the tablecloth enough to topple her wineglass. The glass fell and cracked open against the platter of meatballs, splashing them with shards and Riesling. Janet was standing, turning away. Gerard took hold of her arm, but she shook free and made for the back bedroom. We heard the cough going on in there, a hideous animal sound. I waited for it to stop but it didn’t stop. My mother had lapsed into silence. Patricia and Alicia had both started to cry. Janet’s mother went into the room with her. Gerard said, “Tricia, Lishie, it’s alright. We’ll have cake.”

When I went into the room, Janet was “tripoding,” leaning straight-armed on the bed with the clear tubes clipped on underneath her nostrils, but the booming cough wouldn’t let her go. I knelt down in front of her on one knee so I could look into her face. She was making small shaking motions with her head. I thought she wanted me to leave, but when I stood up to leave she took hold of the fingers of my left hand and squeezed so hard that I winced. She shot her eyes up at me.

“Call an ambulance,” I said to her mother. “Now.” And I watched to see if Janet would make some gesture—No—but she only roared out another swampy cough and kept squeezing.