The Republic of Love (39 page)

All night long, he told her, he had been out of his mind with worry. He hadn’t known where to call, what to do. He had envisioned a hundred different scenarios, he had –

He had what?

He had thought something really serious might have happened.

She cut him off. “Tom,” she said, “listen. Something serious
has
happened. I still can’t believe it, but it’s true. My father has left my mother.”

“Left your mother? Your father’s left your – what do you mean, your father’s left your mother?”

“Just that,” she said, or rather shouted. “He’s left her.”

I
T WAS
C
LYDE
who phoned Fay on Halloween night with the news. The bedside clock said 12:30. She had been asleep for only a few minutes, a deep sleep. The telephone rang and rang, blowing through her head and mixing with her dreams. She had felt heavy-bodied and stupid groping for the receiver and pressing it up against her ear. With one hand she rubbed her head, pushing her hair aside. Who on earth could be calling at this hour?

Clyde.

His stammer was terrible. He sounded insane. Their father had left their mother. Left her.

She remembers that her hands were very cold. She felt an
urge to blow on them with her warm breath, but she would have to put the telephone down, and how could she do that while Clyde was talking? He talked and talked. A picture came to her of her brother on the other end of the line, a blocky woodcut, highly stylized. Wide front sections of his pale colored hair would have fallen over his right eye. His boyish excited look. Feverish. But what
was
this he was talking about? All her senses felt muffled. There was something here she wasn’t understanding. And something, too – the thought came later – something she instantly understood, a skewer driven straight to her brain. She hung on to the telephone, swallowing, wishing she had a glass of water. A sliver of absurdity had lodged itself inside her throat. “What?” she said, and reached for the lamp switch. “What did you say, Clyde?”

“You’d better c-c-c-come over right away,” he said. “Can you g-g-g-get a c-cab?”

F
AY’S BEEN SLEEPING
in Bibbi’s old bedroom in the Ash Avenue house. She sleeps with the door open so she can hear her mother if she calls out during the night.

In the morning Bibbi or else Clyde will come to spend a few hours so that Fay can go to work. She plans to talk to Hannah Webb about taking some vacation time. A couple of weeks, maybe more. The doctor – old Dr. Plette – has told them that their mother cannot under any circumstances be left alone.

Of course, she’s heavily tranquilized. “I don’t like these damn drugs,” Dr. Plette explained, “and I’ll keep a careful eye on the dosage, but she’s got to have something to get her through this. At least until she adjusts.”

Adjusts! Fay can’t believe he’s actually pronounced such a word. She wants to strike Dr. Plette in the middle of his rounded foolish piggy belly. What a ridiculous man. Can he really have lived to the age of sixty-five believing that someone like her mother was going to adjust? Who would expect her to adjust? Her heart’s been cut out of her body. Look at her. There’s nothing left of her but
soft, weeping flesh. Her bones have been extracted, and with one hand she picks at the skin of the other. Overnight these hands have acquired a plucked, leathery, spotted look to them. Her eyelids have purpled, and the eyes themselves are dull and childish. Her mouth sags. Her chin hangs on her chest. She refuses to dress herself. Fay has to remind her to brush her teeth. Nevertheless, her breath is rank. She pushes her food away. Despite the drugs, she can’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time. Submissive, she hangs on to Fay’s hand hour after hour. “Let me brush your hair,” Fay pleaded with her this morning, but she shook her head; her scalp is so tender, she couldn’t bear the thought of a hairbrush or even a comb.

A number of things have to be dealt with immediately. Fay sits down with Clyde and Bibbi at her mother’s dining-room table – already she is thinking of it as her mother’s table, not her father’s – and together they make a list.

First, there is the question of Peggy McLeod’s gynecological practice. What should they do? Her receptionist, Melanie Letkemann, will have to be told. Patients who have appointments during the next month must be phoned and given referrals. “Will that be enough time?” Bibbi asks in her soft, bewildered voice. “A month?”

They consider. A month is as far ahead as any of them can think.

The three of them stare down at the walnut dining table. Clyde taps the figured surface with a thumbnail. An heirloom from – but Fay can’t remember which side of the family it comes from. Once, she knew. Probably it is a hundred years old. Substantial, highly polished, the grain unusual and for that reason prized. Most of the evening meals of her childhood took place at this table. Christmas dinners, birthdays, celebrations. At one end their father, irreducible, uxorious, sat and carved. At the other end their mother served mounded vegetables, divided pies and cakes, smiled, presided.

They will need a lawyer. Clearly Hank Lerner, the McLeods’
family lawyer, won’t do. Like Dr. Plette he is too old, too entrenched, too familiar, too thick. Fay mentions Patricia Henney, the lawyer who oversaw her condo purchase. Clyde says he will ask Sonya for some names. As soon as they have decided definitely on someone, Fay says, they can set up a meeting and discuss what should be done. If anything. What can be salvaged.

The word “salvage” seems to clatter on the tabletop. Why has she said it? Bibbi looks up, frightened. Clyde sets his jaw. Fay puts her hands over her face.

One of them will have to talk to their father. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. Both Fay and Bibbi look at Clyde.

“M-m-maybe we should all g-g-g-go to see him,” Clyde says. “Together.”

“No,” Bibbi says, “no.” She folds her hands tightly on the table. Her eyes are filmed with tears. “We can’t do that. We can’t confront him like that, not all three of us.”

“No,” Clyde agrees. “We can’t.”

This is a bad dream, Fay thinks. She stares for several seconds over the top of Clyde’s head, straight into the fanciful carving of the walnut buffet, another heirloom, and then up at an old gilt-framed watercolor of pale green poplars against a yellow sky. Her parents have owned this painting forever. She’s grown up with those splotched poplars without ever really seeing them – the daubed leaves and unspecified background. Anonymous. Bibbi is biting her nails, and Fay wonders if she is thinking about Jake Greary, wanting to get on a bus this very minute and hurry home to him, to their three shared rooms over the shoe-repair shop in the North End; Fay wonders, too, about Jake Greary. How will he regard this sudden rupture in his lover’s family? With cold triumph? A bourgeois black hole?

Clyde is glancing at his watch, a quick, furtive look, and Fay understands that he’s anxious to be on his way, home to Sonya and his children, his stronghold, away from this nightmare.

“Well,” Fay says at last, “maybe I should go to see him.”

She cringes, hearing her big-sister voice, her vowels full of
deadened authority. She looks at her brother and sister, who continue to study the tabletop and say nothing. “But I haven’t the faintest idea what I can say to him.”

“H
OW IS SHE
?” Tom asked. He had stopped in at the Ash Avenue house to deliver a suitcase of Fay’s clothes.

“Terrible. She’s asleep at the moment, but she didn’t sleep at all last night.”

“I miss you terribly.”

“I miss you, too.”

“Do you?”

“You know I do.” She put her arms around him. In his heavy wool overcoat his body held the freshness of nourishing reality. And he wore a brown cloth cap she had never seen before, which made him seem like a visitor from an old-fashioned world of simplicity and privilege. “You’re cold,” she said. She was moved to do something kind for him but couldn’t think what. “Your face is freezing.”

“You’re warm.” He rubbed her upper arms with his hands. “You feel wonderful.”

She held on to him. “It’s been a misery, sleeping alone up there in that little twin bed. I feel so – ” She stopped, shook her head.

“How?”

“I don’t know. Maidenly and responsible. It’s all so heavy. And I can hear her crying. Hour after hour.”

“Ah, Fay.” He held her close.

“Do you know what I did last night?” she said.

“What?”

“It was strange. In the middle of the night I had this terrible longing to hear your voice. I was all of a sudden dying for it. And then I remembered that I
could.
I could just switch you on. With a flick of the dial I could have what I wanted.”

“And?”

“I kept it on low. You were doing your Paul Anka shtik. Oh, you were lovely. Corny but lovely.”

“Look, are you sure you don’t want me to stay here, too? Just temporarily. I could easily – ”

“It would be wonderful. But she can’t bear to have anyone in the house who isn’t family. Not yet, anyway. She’s got this idea – ”

“What?”

“That she doesn’t want anyone to know.”

“That he’s left?”

“She’s made us all promise not to tell a soul. She’s even sworn Dr. Plette to secrecy. Not that we trust him for five minutes.”

“People are bound to know sooner or later.” He bit his lower lip. “In a city this size.”

“If they don’t already.”

He paused. “It really isn’t reasonable.”

“I know, I know. But
she’s
not reasonable. Not rational, I mean. She’s suffering. If you saw her, Tom – it’s heartbreaking.”

“Does she think he might come back?”

“She doesn’t say so in so many words.”

“What do you think?”

“I think she’s expecting him to come home any minute. Every time the phone rings she freezes. She thinks he’s calling to say it was all a misunderstanding. Or temporary insanity or something.”

“It is possible, isn’t it? Temporary insanity? Maybe he’s having some kind of breakdown? In the first year of retirement people often do.”

“She never dreamed anything like this could happen. Well, none of us did. I guess we’re all still in shock.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“There is one thing, Tom.”

“What?”

“I wonder if you’d phone Iris Jaffe for me. About the shower she’s giving for me Thursday night.”

“What about the shower?”

“Can you make some excuse, say I’m terribly sick or something. Maybe she can postpone it.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“I couldn’t face it. All those old friends. All that joviality.”

“What I meant was, don’t you think you ought to take Iris into your confidence? She won’t believe me for a minute, that you’re sick, I mean.”

“Maybe you can think of something else.”

“I don’t know, Fay. It would be a whole lot simpler if you just told her what’s happened.”

She stared at him. His expression seemed for a moment closed, not unkind but carrying a kind of willed incomprehension. “Tom, I just can’t bring myself to talk about it yet. I can hardly talk about it even to Bibbi or Clyde. Iris will ask me why.”

“Why he’s left?”

“I keep thinking there’s a missing piece here. Something we’re not taking into consideration.”

“But what did he say to your mother when he left?”

“She doesn’t know, she’s terribly confused about it. He felt crowded, she says, he couldn’t breathe. Something like that.”

“But couldn’t you – ask him?”

“I don’t know.”

“I gather you haven’t talked to him yet?”

“No.”

“Not even on the phone?”

“No, not yet.”

“What about Clyde? Or Bibbi?”

“They haven’t talked to him, either. We’re just trying to – ”

“What?”

“Catch our breath, I guess. And figure out our strategy.”

He picked up her hand in both of his and stared at it for a minute. “When are you planning to see him?”

She opened her mouth. What came out was a shameful whimper of sound.

“When, Fay?”

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow for sure.”

I
N MOMENTS
of great or sudden emotion people utter strange words.

“Daughter,” Richard McLeod said to Fay when he opened the door and saw her standing there. It was three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Six days since he’d left home.

He’d rarely addressed her in this formal way.
Daughter,
like a tag of dialogue out of an Elizabethan play. His tone was mild, deliberately so, it seemed to Fay.

“Won’t you come in?” he said, and opened the door wider.

He had found himself a small furnished apartment on the top floor of a building in the west side of the city, a flat-roofed, ugly low-rise block put up in the fifties or sixties.

The afternoon sky was brushed with pink and purple. Clumps of gray snow clung to the misshapen shrubbery that flanked the entrance, and wet tracked slush made the floor of the small lobby dangerous. The walls were painted a shiny tan. Fay had never seen this building before, had never, in fact, driven down this particular street. One of the doorbells was marked “R. McLeod.” She rang, and a buzzer let her in. Her own father, R. McLeod, lived in this bland brick building; the realization made her stumble slightly on the slippery tile, and she was assailed by a potent mix of belief and disbelief. R. McLeod of Ash Avenue, retired dry-cleaning executive, husband of Peggy McLeod, father of Fay, Clyde, and Bibbi McLeod, this man now occupied an apartment in an anonymous flat-roofed building off Berry Road, out by the airport; he
resided
here, was
domiciled
here.

The tiny elevator, bewilderingly lined on three sides with mirrored squares, swayed slightly as it ascended, and the single-panel door opened with a jerk. Gravy smells pervaded the long hallway, and a different smell, a sharp chemical odor, emanated from the hard, tufted, fire-resistant carpet and from the hardware on the apartment doors. Number 510 was at the far end. Her father stood there waiting, the door partly open.

What struck Fay most forcibly was the fact that he looked exactly as he always did.

Her father. She observed him as she might a stranger: an elderly, slightly stooped gentleman in a green buttoned cardigan and soft gray trousers. His white hair sat lazily on his head. He looked comfortable, amiable, self-possessed, mildly paternal; he looked, to her surprise, sane. His eyes blinked once or twice seeing her, but with his usual lively and familiar blue-toned sanity.