Age (7 page)

You are bringing out the Sancerre, and the glasses.

Kit returns, smelling of my Vol de Nuit.

‘It’s good on you,’ I whisper, and dare to touch her cheek. ‘I can never smell it on myself.’ And show her my ankles, now as trim as hers.

I changed to nylons in the bedroom, Rupert. I’m not at all sure I believe in God. But it was as good a way as any of thanking him.

As for you—you look older. I see that any event, even the best, ages one. Minute by minute the body gives up a portion of its substance, no matter what. Exchanging its energy for time.

We lift our glasses. Sherm is about to offer a toast, to you, no doubt, but you fiercely hush him. The words die in his mouth with a sound of tissue paper, which is probably what they were. ‘But he doesn’t know that,’ you say later. ‘Gemma, we’re too hard on him.’ And then you chuckle. ‘Recognition makes one more benevolent.’

But that was all to come.

In silence we sip. Sherm does lean toward the bottle to note the year, but corrects himself in time. He understands ceremony, this he does.

Mr Quinn is the cupbearer here. As his posture now makes all aware. He bows to me. Then to Rupert. ‘Where else can one meet again a heaven once known—except in wine?’

He says this each time, telling us who taught it to him. Each time I forget who. Halfway down the glass he will ask our permission to toast his wife—which we will join. On the second glass, we in turn will propose a toast to the greatest tennis player America has ever had, amateur
or
professional: William T. Tilden, 189- to 19—. He will correct us if we get the dates wrong. We always do. Then he will leave, refusing a third.

But today he is mum. He has his decade’s manners. We have visitors.

So it is Rupert who proposes the toasts. ‘To the champion Roxanne Marie-Celeste Quinn—who once played a match with Suzanne Lenglen herself.’

Mr Quinn, holding his glass a trifle higher than the rest, says: ‘Not in competition, of course.’

‘And now—’ Rupert says, ‘to William T. Tilden, the greatest in tennis ever, 189- to 19—.’

‘Nineteen—’ Mr Quinn says. Then with a shy smile he rises to go.

‘Ah—ten-nis-ah—’ Sherm says, pointing his good eye at Rupert. ‘A new poem?’

I stand up again. I don’t do much of that, not that I’m such a gentle personality, but because it hurts the shoulders to lift even a thin glass. But I want to make a toast of my own. To all husbands. To all wives. To all of us still extant, harmonious or not, and to all those gone on into the pattern ahead. To the libraries that sustain us, and the vegetables. To this kitchen, a hearth that will vanish. To the Prendergast, whose darkening cannot be stayed. To death even—that provenance which none will prove false.

And to you who will read.

‘To—
this
hospice,’ I said.

‘W
E SEEM TO BE
drowning in sentiment,’ I told Gemma. ‘Maybe that’s the way to go.’

Getting the prize has been like winning the race I’ve never before admitted I was in. Yet does it come too late for encouragement? For I also hear its verdict: Your work is done.

Still, the announcement won’t come out for some months. And Sherm, who had sworn not to tell but couldn’t be trusted there, had on the way home from our house suffered a slight—what do they call a stroke nowadays?—‘neural accident.’ ‘He can speak clearly enough,’ Kit said on the phone. ‘But somehow, you don’t
believe
what he says.’

I saw that happen to my father. Physical loss saps one’s authority. Especially with others who are still whole. According to Gemma, Kit is certainly not that. But her loss has been in another direction. That lemony disposition of hers has turned her mind sharp—even improved by the other loss?

‘Poor Sherm,’ I said to Kit. Late in life one begins to love even one’s enemies. Though he was never quite that.

Gemma was putting a large yellow tuber into the oven to bake. She’s looking sharper but talking less. I think the years make women feel less unique to themselves. She’s said as much. Once she was a woman she could recognize in any mirror. ‘I had a certain flashy reticence. Now I only see my type.’ And what was that? ‘A brown-dyed old lady, proud of wearing a blouse too young for her.’

What men suffer is a loss of arena. Even if we’ve never had much of a one. Or even if it’s not outwardly true. When the announcement does come I’ll have telephone calls, invitations to speak, travel if I want it, and more media exposure than I have ever had in my life—for a short while. But my real arena is my work. And the body crucial to it.

‘What’s that you’re baking?’

‘Mr Quinn put me on to it. Not exactly expressing a desire, but almost. Scrape the center with a fork when it’s done, and presto—pasta. Miracles of the loaves and fishes can’t compare with a spaghetti squash.’

‘How is he today?’

‘Better. Was nothing but flu, he says.’

He had never been sick before, he told us. A next pleurisy could carry him off. But to our relief—for where would this end for us otherwise, there in the same house with him?—a nephew had turned up.

The squash went in. Now she must find another work pretext. Dozens of them in the last few days. Curtains. Duties in the small garden behind the house. My not too dusty books. And oddest of these addenda: plotting our concert and play subscriptions for the coming year. Mr Quinn’s illness, an honest scare, had ended up a godsend. I’d seen it all before. Anxious women pull domesticity over their heads. Or women like Gemma.

‘Those big black ants that are coming in from the cellar,’ I said, ‘I just now drowned one in the toilet.’ I always feel guilty—and always tell her. I always wish I were a Hindu who out of religious consideration would not have done such a thing. Yet my hand always flashes out. By what is called instinct.

‘Oh, did you.’ She knows all that. She shut the oven door.

‘The ant—reminded me of you. Going down—in such a swirl. And of me. One day the hand above us will flash. Casually.’

‘You’re low, aren’t you.’

I nod. ‘And you?’

She nods.

‘So it better be sentiment, hmm?’ she says. ‘So let’s go
that-way.
To the Plaza.’

Before we left, she wound her hair up with a big comb. Did it make her older, not to have hair long at the cheek? Or younger—to have dared that high sweep? I couldn’t decide.

She said, ‘It’s time. And it should be white.’

A
LL THIS WEEK WE
have been immobilized. By a woman Rupert has not seen for over thirty years and I have never met. Gertrude herself never phoned. Apparently that is not her way. If she has a way that she herself is aware of. Rupert says she used not to. We do not speak of her easily now. Who could?

We took the bus. We no longer take the subway because of the stairs, and its general rottenness. I’m stingy on taxis, except in emergencies. The bus is an old favorite. Even at eleven in the morning, the widows’ hour, it’s not as full of the old as the crosstowns are, and it gets us out, along a route we know so well. Rupert always enumerates as we pass. ‘The flower market,’ he says. ‘Those buildings quiver with humidity. People don’t realize. Whole caverns of green storage, in the rear.’ At Thirty-fourth Street he said: ‘Macy’s is like a large, square fact. Of course it would be. Herald Square.’

Then, when we are stuck in traffic for a while: ‘That British voice that called. I suppose it was the nurse?’

A matter-of-fact woman, the day after the one with Sherm and Kit. Mrs Acker would be going into hospital for a three-day treatment, then wished to see both of us, the third day after that.

‘Please hold on until I get my husband,’ I said.

When Rupert came on the line the voice repeated its message. I was to be sure to come as well.

When Rupert hung up he said: ‘Mrs Acker. That’s new. She never took a man’s name before, married to him or not. Wonder could that be the theater man? Owned a lot of them. Not in London. Palladiums. Brighton, Blackpool, places like that. Must be. Sounds like her. To have floated along there.’

I’d waited a couple of hours. Then I’d said: ‘You didn’t say for sure you would go. Or we would?’

‘No.’

May one ignore the shrewd narcissism of the dying? Or must one skip to it?

In the bus, when we reached Forty-seventh Street, the jewelers’ center, Rupert said: ‘Whatever she was, she’s on Mount Neboh now.’

We both know our Bible. That’s the one where Moses went up to get the commandments from God. I was glad Rupert hadn’t said Gethsemane.

‘I’ll do whatever you do,’ I said.

Then we were a block from the Plaza. Then we were there.

On those opulent steps I said: ‘A peculiar place to choose to die. When you can choose. As apparently she can.’

He took my arm. ‘Always could.’

After we got the number of Mrs Acker’s suite from the desk clerk I said: ‘What disease has she—that she can specify what day she’ll see us? After so-and-so many days’ treatment.’

‘Maybe they can’t really. But she can. She always specified.’

This was more than he had said of her in all the week just past. I know my role. I have to get it out of him, help him to answer her. Help us to.

At the line of phones where you ring up on your own, all are busy. As we wait I say: ‘That day Sherm told us. And Quinn came knocking. I thought it was her knock. I thought she would be asking for us to take her in.’

Just then a phone became free. After Rupert had sent up our name and hung up he stayed there for a minute gazing at the receiver, then bowed to the next applicant and led me away.

‘If that were all she’ll ask,’ he said.

In the elevator we were alone by the time we reached her floor.

‘Who the hell does she think she’s commanding?’ he said.

I know the answer to that one. So does he. If he can ask me that, nothing else much matters. I am his real wife. He wants me to say it for us.

I say—as lightly as I can—‘Death.’

T
HERE ARE TWO SISTERS
in charge. Sister McClellan, the one who called us, speaks in that balanced voice we first heard. The voice of reality, constantly presenting the facts of the case—to the patient above all—and meanwhile making the most tender gestures in her direction, but a laying-on of hands that stop just short of touch. Sister Bond as steadily enunciates their theory and practice in a voice like a dove’s—all the while extending the patient the most intimate physical care.

There was no hush-hush anteroom stuff. Gemma and I were led straight in. To the wheelchair. The patient is the thing, at all times. And it is the patient whose task it is to orient us. Our task—the ‘family’s’—is to assist and attend—and learn—in preparation for our turn. Even though the Sisters bloom with a health pink with optimism, there’s a distinct sense of ‘you next, we next’ in all they do. The ‘family’ need not be blood-related. Some patients specify not.

‘It
boosts
them,’ Sister McClellan said later, while the patient smiled. Sister Bond: ‘All available medical treatment is explained to them. They,
they
decree.’ Often sending away the crew dispatched from Intensive Care.

The woman in the wheelchair might have had a blanket over those wasted legs but must have preferred not. That’s the way I see her as we approach. A woman in a wheelchair. The theory is—they told us later—not to conceal.

‘Is it you?’ she said, and then I knew her. There’s not much else left to guide.

Then she got up and walked. She’s dying of half a dozen things, we learn, among these too many white cells, a lack of red. This is why they can more or less predict where she will be when. The chair is for her bones, which break. But for the heart she must walk some each day. She has saved that for us.

She told us what she wanted of us over tea, ordered up. ‘In the hospice there would be other pretties about—like me.’

Acker had been willing to sponsor a few other patients over here, but it hadn’t worked out, with the immigration authorities for one. And yes, he was the man I’d thought he was. ‘He’s backing a play about our group, in London. In the West End.’ Though she was no longer married to him. ‘He was quite willing to send over a few—companions—to see me through.’ But the management here had also balked.

She’s asked me to come ‘because you were the most honest. And knew me best.’

She hasn’t yet greeted Gemma, only glancing at her without other acknowledgment, as if the state of dying—or dying in such state as she was doing—was introduction enough.

As often these days when I tense, I feel the wordplay coming over me in adrenaline profusion. What dreadful bit will I emit?

‘And I asked Gemma because from what I heard of her she would come.’

Gemma ignores her. She’s seen my trouble. She puts her hand on my shaky wrist, saying one word to me. ‘Triolet.’

To my surprise, Gertrude laughs, ‘never heard that one. But I get what you’re saying, sweetie. He’s yours.’

The Sisters were openmouthed. Their voices blend in a whisper:
She laughed.

Nudging together, they inch a step nearer Gemma and me. We might be statues being scrutinized.

Just then a waiter brings in the tea.

I feel for the first time that I am in a room with four women. And that Gemma will handle it. The waiter has brought two tables which he sets up at a distance from one another, one in the center of the room, at which Gertrude immediately sits. The Sisters watch her get to it and into her chair, drawn up by the waiter, who clearly knows this routine. I recall that Gertrude could always impose one. The Sisters watch her until she is safe in the chair, their eyes discreetly averted. They are very good at this covert surveillance. But still I recognize the stance—the way we all look at the sick when we think we are well. I resolve to stare at Gertrude straight on.

Her table has three other chairs. She motions me to sit on her right, Gemma on her left, but I ignore this. I remember that empress motion—and how when Gertrude and I were breaking up I used to wait for that command and then do the opposite. Having learned that Gertrude led you by many insignificant steps to the fait accompli—the path you didn’t see until it was behind you.