Empire Falls (59 page)

When it was his turn to serve at Mass, one week every two months, Miles accompanied her to St. Cat’s. He disliked getting up so early, but once there, still half asleep as he pulled on his cassock and surplice, he found the experience pleasant enough. For reasons he wasn’t able to articulate, the world seemed a better place and himself a better person for beginning each day at church, and before long he began to attend Mass even when he wasn’t required to serve. Other altar boys quickly learned that Miles would be there to cover for them if they were sick, and after a while they stopped bothering to ask this favor of him. And it was he whom Father Tom became annoyed with, not the boy scheduled, on those rare occasions when Miles himself became ill
.

At St. Catherine’s, Miles came to understand that responsibility could be enjoyable. He wasn’t sure that what he felt there in the warm church, with the day dawning outside, was exactly a religious experience, but he enjoyed the cadence of the Latin Mass and often was jolted out of some reverie just in time to ring the bell at the consecration. He’d recently discovered the existence of a particularly beautiful girl who worked as a waitress at the Empire Grill, and his thoughts too often drifted from the mystery of Christ’s body and blood to the mystery that was Charlene Gardiner, though he tried not to indulge unchaste thoughts during Mass
.

Sometimes at the offertory, after taking the cruets of water and wine to Father Tom, who always insisted they be presented to him handles first, Miles caught a glimpse of his mother, often with his little brother either fast asleep or squirming in the pew beside her, and he’d wonder what she prayed for. His father was the sort of man who required more or less constant prayer
,
augmented, it was often remarked, by a swift kick in the pants, so it was possible she was praying for him, though it was hard for Miles to imagine the exact nature of a Max Roby prayer. If he happened to be gone somewhere, his mother might conceivably offer up a prayer for him to come home and help out. After all, when Max was in residence, Grace could at least leave little David at home during Mass. But no sooner would such a prayer be answered, and her husband returned to the bosom of his family, than Grace would surely begin to offer prayers for his removal again, Max being more trouble than he was worth. When she and Miles returned from morning Mass they were likely to find David standing up in his crib, clutching the railings with his fat little fists, his cheeks beet-red with rage and grief, weighed down by a sagging, fully loaded diaper while Max slept off the night before in the next room
.

What Miles suspected, though, was that his mother’s prayers had little to do with his father. If she was anything like himself, her prayers sought objects of their own desire much as toddlers chase colored bubbles in the air, and he wondered if his mother’s thoughts drifted off in pursuit of long-lost Charlie Mayne the way his own pursued Charlene Gardiner. But that was pure speculation. Grace hadn’t mentioned the man once since their return from Martha’s Vineyard. In fact, Miles had kept his mother’s secret so well that there were times he had to remind himself there was a secret to keep. He began to wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing, and on their way home from Mass one morning—it was probably two or three years afterward—Miles said, “Mom? Do you remember the man we met on Martha’s Vineyard? Charlie Mayne?”

He expected her to either be or pretend to be surprised, as he would’ve been had such a question come out of thin air so unexpectedly. But Grace answered as if she herself had been contemplating that very thing, or perhaps wondering when he’d get around to asking. “No, Miles, I don’t,” she replied calmly. “And neither do you.”

G
RACE BEGAN WORKING
for Mrs. Whiting in late spring, a month after the woman had been released from the hospital—much to the relief of the entire staff, who’d had about enough of her. Mrs. Whiting had recently contributed seed money for a new wing, and everyone was aware of just how important a patient she was, but had it been a democracy the staff would’ve voted as a bloc to take her down to the river at the head of the falls and release the brake on her wheelchair
.

Instead of committing her to the rising waters they gave her into the care
of Grace Roby, who trekked across the Iron Bridge above the swift spring torrent each morning shortly after six, rain or shine, to attend two cripples, one temporary, the other permanent. Actually, Mrs. Whiting’s broken hip had been occasioned by her daughter, who’d lost her balance, grabbed onto her mother, who happened to be nearby, and taken both of them down. Cindy, thanks to a lifetime of practice, knew how to fall, whereas Mrs. Whiting, whose equilibrium, both physical and emotional, was not easily tilted and who had not fallen once during her entire adult life, shattered her hip, requiring her to cancel at the last moment her trip to Spain, where she’d rented a villa for the month
.

The reason Cindy Whiting, then fifteen, had lost her balance and fallen on that occasion was that the operation to repair her damaged pelvis, her fourth, hadn’t worked. The doctors had promised that if she underwent the procedure and then worked hard at her physical therapy, her equilibrium would be much improved, and she’d be less dependent on her walker for support. While there were no guarantees, perhaps by spring she’d be able to step unaided onto the dance floor at her junior prom, in need of no more support than the strong arm of some handsome boy. This was the carrot the doctors dangled before her, and Cindy Whiting had followed it bravely, yet again, into the operating room
.

The procedure, the chief surgeon later concluded, was neither a success nor a failure. If that most important of medical injunctions was recollected—first, do no harm—then clearly Cindy Whiting was no worse off. In fact, over time, some slight improvement would surely be noted. That it was not more successful, the surgeon admitted, had less to do with the operation than with the patient, whom he hadn’t expected to be so easily discouraged, nor so stubbornly averse to physical therapy. The staff reported from the start that neither cajoling nor prodding nor badgering had much effect, that nothing could shake her conviction that the procedure had been a complete failure, that her own efforts would therefore prove futile. Cindy preferred lying in bed and watching television and taking painkillers to being tortured in the physical therapy room. When the distressed surgeon tried to encourage the girl by reminding her of how excited she’d been by the prospect of attending her junior prom, she replied that cripples didn’t get invited to dances
.

Cindy Whiting’s adamant refusal to work at her therapy so frustrated the surgeon that he called her mother in for a consultation. Before the operation, he recalled, one of the things the young woman had most looked forward to was her father’s return from Mexico to be at her side, and he was interested to learn why that hadn’t happened. Fathers, he hinted, were sometimes
able to motivate daughters in ways that neither mothers nor doctors could imagine. Cindy, he added, seemed particularly devoted to her father, and this just might work in their favor
.

Mrs. Whiting’s response was not at all what he expected. She began by admitting that she herself was partly to blame for not preparing the surgeon for the operation’s inevitable failure, and then assured him that her husband’s presence would only have made a bad situation worse. Her daughter, she explained, had unfortunately inherited her father’s fundamental weakness of character. Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He’d been born to privilege, conditioned to expect that things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong. Mrs. Whiting had done everything in her power to curb these tendencies in their daughter, but nature, it seemed, had overruled nurture. Like her father, Cindy was subject to vivid dreams, which she invariably surrendered without a fight. She assured the surgeon that, no, there was nothing further to be done, and that he was not to blame himself
.

The surgeon was not a man who required any such warning. Blaming himself would not, in the normal course of events, have occurred to him. Nor, given his clinical training, was he used to regarding physical failure in moral terms, but as he listened to Mrs. Whiting’s dispassionate profiles of her husband and daughter, he found it difficult not to arrive at a moral judgment, though not one he was inclined to share with her, at least not until his services had been paid in full
.

I
F COLD AND DISPASSIONATE
,
Mrs. Whiting’s analysis of her daughter’s character was not, Grace Roby had to admit, far off the mark. Had Cindy Whiting even a small measure of her mother’s willpower, she might, at least physically, have benefited from her most recent operation. As was often the case with children and their parents, this child possessed a trait immediately recognizable in the parent, except that in the child it had become so twisted as to appear completely new. Both women, Grace soon recognized, were equally stubborn, though their stubbornness manifested itself in radically different ways. In Mrs. Whiting willfulness had become a driving force whose relentless purpose was the removal of all obstacles, large and small, whereas in her daughter it took the form of the intractable, doomed obstinacy with which she approached each and every obstacle. To Grace, who’d always been drawn to the heartbreaking plight of the Whiting girl, it was terrible to witness the workings of human nature in the Whiting household and to
acknowledge the all-too-certain outcome of the struggle between mother and daughter
.

Grace had never before encountered a woman quite like her new employer, and she quickly realized that to completely withhold her admiration was impossible. After months of close observation, Grace finally discovered her great trick. Mrs. Whiting remained undaunted for the simple reason that she never, ever allowed herself to dwell on the magnitude of whatever task she was confronted with. What she possessed was the marvelous ability to divide the chore into smaller, more manageable tasks. Once this diminishment was accomplished, her will became positively tidal in its persistence. Each day Mrs. Whiting had a “To Do” list, and the brilliance of that list lay in the fact that she was careful never to include anything undoable. On those rare occasions when a task proved more complicated or difficult than she’d imagined, she simply subdivided it. In this fashion, the woman never encountered anything but success, and each day brought her inexorably closer to her goal. She might be delayed, but never deterred
.

Her daughter, on the other hand, was forever being deterred. Temperamentally unable to master her mother’s simple trick, Cindy Whiting immediately envisioned the entirety of what lay before her and was thus in one deft stroke overwhelmed and defeated by it. She wasn’t so much a dreamer, Grace came to understand, as a believer, and what she believed in, or wished to, was the possibility of complete transformation. At some point in her young life she’d come to believe that the whole world, the totality of her circumstance, would have to change if change was to do her any good. Therefore, what she sought was nothing short of a miracle, and it was in these terms that she’d judged her most recent operation. On Monday she would enter the hospital as a caterpillar; on Tuesday she would emerge a butterfly. Not long after the anesthesia wore off, the girl would’ve concluded that not only had no transformation taken place, none whatsoever was under way
.

Did this disappointment make her foolish, even stupid, as her mother suggested? Grace thought not. After all, her whole world
had
undergone a complete transformation in the terrible instant when, as a little girl, she’d been run over and dragged by that car, an event that had taught her how quickly everything could change and that the stroke accomplishing such change is swift, powerful and beyond human comprehension. She was simply waiting for it to happen again
.

B
Y
M
EMORIAL
D
AY
,
having worked for Mrs. Whiting for just under six weeks, Grace expected every day to be let go. With the garden in and her
employer recuperating faster than doctors had predicted, Grace suspected that before long Mrs. Whiting would see no justification for her continued employment. Not that her salary would make any difference to a wealthy woman, but still. Her employer didn’t miss a trick when it came to money, and she seemed to know within pennies how much people needed to survive. The sum she’d offered Grace to come to work for her was so close to the bare minimum she desperately needed that she half wondered if the woman had somehow sneaked into her house and watched her juggling bills at the kitchen table
.

One afternoon in the garden, Mrs. Whiting was leaning on her cane and directing Grace, who looked up from her knees and said, “I hope, Mrs. Whiting, that when the time comes you don’t need me anymore, you’ll be able to give me two weeks’ notice so I can find another job. I can’t afford to be without work for long.” Even for a day, she thought to herself
.

Mrs. Whiting was wearing a straw hat, and she regarded Grace from beneath its broad brim. Was it a smile that played along her lips? “Where will you find work in Empire Mills? There wouldn’t seem to be much in the way of opportunity.”

“Still,” said Grace, who understood that challenge all too well, “I’ll have to look.”

“Well, that’s enough for today,” Mrs. Whiting announced. She’d been on her feet most of the afternoon, and although Grace had done most of the actual labor, Mrs. Whiting was clearly tired, having only recently been liberated from her wheelchair. Grace got to her feet and helped her employer back into the chair. “You don’t have to worry about looking for other employment just yet. You’ve been a great assistance to me these weeks.”