The Unfortunates (6 page)
Dr. Orlow, the director of inpatient trial therapy, walks them from the car to the entrance, with George behind the chair. The doctor is boyish and tall, stooped like a teenager who’s grown so swiftly he’s not yet re-coordinated his posture; behind his glasses, his eyes are a vague blue. She dislikes him. But she’s pleased by the urgent way he ducks over her, as if he’s just hit his head on a low beam. He tells her that her room is ready, and why doesn’t he take her on a tour while Mr. Somner handles the paperwork?
“Yes, go,” George says. “I’ll catch up.”
The doctor straightens behind her chair. As her neck is inflexible and he is tall, she can no longer see his face. A sudden black wave of fear rolls her, heart to tongue. Hers is the child’s dread at being led away by a stranger.
“George!” she calls, but hears no answer.
Dr. Orlow wheels her down an antiseptic but acceptable hall. He shows her a library of red grass-cloth wallpaper and dark wood; a dining room overlooking the lake, the sun shining too brightly on the filmy glassware already set upon the tables; a tearoom crowded with spider plants and overstuffed, rose-chintz couches. On to the residential wing, they pass the open door of a patient’s room. She catches a flash of hospital gown, a narrow window, linoleum, a bare foot.
She twists to speak. “My room doesn’t look like that, does it?”
“Let’s go find out. You’re on a different hall. This is the quickest way through.”
“No. I want to see every type of room. I need something to compare. There is no proof without comparison. I’m not tired.”
The chair turns and they seek out a few doors that are safe to open.
“Wretched! Wretched compared to mine, I hope.”
George joins them and takes the doctor’s place.
“Everything okay? Ready, Mother?”
“No. Tell Annie Mason I want to be briefed on all their activities. She knows, but tell her anyway!”
“Sure. Now, can we get you settled?”
Her room has a wide, white-mineral cleanliness. Her floor is not linoleum but pale wood. It’s on the ground level with French doors to the back lawn. The lawn slopes to the edge of the lake. George throws open the doors with as much ceremony as he can muster.
“Round Lake, you can see why,” Dr. Orlow says. It shines in the distant out-of-doors, a blot of light in the green. “Yours is the only room with a door directly onto the garden.”
She thinks, then I am the only one who will escape, should there be a fire. It’s a fine room; she can’t disagree. It certainly contains the best furniture—hers. She had it shipped ahead. Her decorator arranged it. She’d had him shipped ahead too. She can see he did the best he could under the circumstances. Yet, what a sinking strangeness she feels, sinking into the stranger that is now herself, coming into a new room cluttered with the chairs she scrambled under as a child and sat straight-backed in as an adult. Her high, four-poster bed with the pinecones etched out of the posts. Her father’s tea service, silver leaves winding up each handle. The clot of family photos in silver frames, arranged beside the tea service. The horsehair couch with the stubby claw-feet. The green marble table from her entrance hall at home now holds a welcome basket of fruit wrapped in cellophane and ribbon. A few landscapes, a few mirrors, a few more end tables than ends of couches to line them beside. The Turkish rug from a guest bedroom, a red, flattened maze on which her children used to play stones-in-the-water, leaping from one geometry to the next so as not to burn or drown.
“Jean should be here any minute to help you get oriented,” Dr. Orlow says. “I think you’ll like her. Amazing transformation of the room. You’ve raised the bar.”
“Looks nice, doesn’t it, Mother?”
Her eye falls on a framed photo of herself from a 1981 issue of
Town & Country.
Did she ask for that one? Likely not! Will they think she’s the kind of pathological person who likes to gaze upon photos of herself? Then she remembers. Everyone is that sort of person now. In the photo, she wears a jade silk skirt suit and is smiling, leaning against a tree in a small Alphabet City park her dollars had restored. The cover text had read, “A Woman of Uncommon Energy.” Nor had she asked for the photo beside that one! If the decorator’s made one mistake, two, what else has been misplaced? This photo is eight, maybe nine years before the
Town & Country
shot: she’s boarding a private plane, up the glinting steps on the tarmac, baby George in her arms. She’s turned back in front of the open door to have the picture taken. Patricia is hiding behind her skirt, her arms wrapped around CeCe’s waist, a red-yarn bow and a pigtail. Hawaii, but who took the picture? Not Walter. Walter, already inside. His leg is there in the photo, jutting out onto the carpet, as he was seated. It
is
a beautiful photo, joy in her face, her eye to the camera, but his wicked leg ruins it. The plane, on loan from a friend. Walter ignored her once they were introduced to the only other passenger in the otherwise empty private terminal—that year’s Miss America, a girl from Wisconsin on a press stop with
Holiday
magazine. CeCe made sure they weren’t photographed side by side. As they were escorted across the runway, Walter called CeCe Fatty Dolores. He pinched her arm in front of Miss America and the children. (He’d taken to calling her Fatty Dolores the year she had a producer’s credit on a musical version of
Lolita
she’d thought was brave. Fatty because she’d been pregnant with George when the show closed. Dolores because Walter was so many years her senior. There was nothing, when she met him, to suggest what lay ahead.)
“Yes,” she says to George, “the room is fine.” She tries her best to look pleased. “Although I don’t like how the photos have been arranged. And I don’t like anything else.”
“Adjustments take a while,” Dr. Orlow says. “I’ll leave you to it. Do you have any more questions, for the time being?”
Through the initial visits to the hospital, CeCe prided herself on accommodating each bit of bad news with ladylike discretion, even cheer. No need to make the doctors feel bad, to make things messy. Yes, she bullied the help for a bit of relief. She complained about the food, the spongy pillows, the fussy bedside manner, and the yoga pants worn by the new wife. She told George the nurses were stealing money from her purse. She told the nurses Iris was stealing money from her purse. The nurses were not seen again. What better fun, she asked George, once it was all straightened out, are nurses and children for? She would not apologize; there wasn’t much else she was able to do to keep her spirits up. But entering this room, she is overcome—never until today has she noticed that all her furniture, all inherited, is decorated with a leaf or a flower or an animal. That it’s all of a woodland theme. She feels her hands reaching up to her mouth, she finds her mouth is open.
“Forest,” she says to George, meaning also to say
motif
, and something against the decorator, for she doesn’t know what kind of chairs and tables she would have chosen for herself, had she chosen for herself, and now she will not ever. She reaches up and throws her fist into her son’s lapel. The linen absorbs the impact with an unimpressive whump. She notices Dr. Orlow has halted mid-departure and that a woman is in the room, in some kind of nurse’s costume; Jean, here to orient her, presumably. George’s gaze unfocuses to the ceiling, as it had when she would scold him as a boy. Weakling, she thinks, unclear as to whether she means him or herself. She seizes his chin and pulls his bright green eye down to hers and tells him it is time to go home,
now, now, now,
incanted as calmly as any witch would lay a curse. She wheels her way out of the room.
“I’ll get her,” George says, but before he moves to follow, he is mesmerized by the look of her hands on the light gray rubber. He has never seen her touch a wheel of any kind. They find her down the corridor, inside a supply closet. The shelves are stacked with plastic bins. She has almost managed to close the door. She is sitting in the dark.
Iris and the dog lift their faces out of half sleep toward the sound. A door downstairs being opened, pulling her out of the well of a nightmare and back into the bedroom. It’s almost eleven. 3D springs clumsily off the bed, whimpers by the closed bedroom door. She falls back. George as a boy—nine, maybe ten—this is what she is dreaming. A sunny road runs along the ruin of a stone wall, winding the loamy fields as far as she can see. She is following the squirrel from one of her band posters—peepholes for eyes, cherries for guts. They come to a column supply truck overturned in the road, abandoned so long milkweed and goldenrod climb its wheel. Medical supplies spill out the back, glinting metal. The tattered canvas, its faded red cross, flaps in the breeze. George is slumped against the wall, legs splayed in the dry dirt, head bent over his little blade of a chest. The squirrel leaps the wall and pauses behind George’s ear. In the air is the slow play of dandelion. She should stay with George, but the squirrel is continuing up the road in the direction of—a church? A church, though only the facade stands, a jagged mason tooth and a missing eye, light shot through the socket, light in the rubble of the nave behind—tongue gone, gone the interior castle. The mask of a church—not a church. Suddenly she understands. Bombed. The black of planes has already come. If the planes have come once, they will come again. She calls to little George to move, to find cover. She knows the lie! When they draw the maps, they do not include the shadows of the planes. George lifts his head.
Come, please come!
she cries. He will not stand. She sees his eye is canceled too. He points his chin at her and laughs.
I did it, Mama
, he says.
It was me.
She’s sweated through the sheet. Back in the morning light, unbidden she remembers Carol’s face as it looked in the last days, skull-out, in Oswego. Her dream—what was it? A piece of her grandfather’s story of the Battle for Brittany, maybe, a story Carol relayed only at the end, carried to Iris down a dark hall in the long, translucent hands of dementia.
“Lo? Hello? Iris?”
The jangling of keys, a sound so ordinary it must be real.
She cracks the bedroom door. Victor, here to walk 3D, is letting himself in through the back, the mudroom. He bangs his keys onto the marble kitchen island, stomps his sneakers. 3D barrels down the stairs.
“Mutt-friend,” she hears, “devil-dog, hey!”
Victor bends on one knee by the breakfast counter. The blue leash hangs slack against his leg. From the top of the stairs, she sees he is having a serious conversation with the dog. Her work schedule is still unpredictable; she never knows when she’ll be around for the midmorning walk.
“I don’t believe it. 3D, you are telling me this is happening in the park? Go on. And you went over to them and they—Lhasa apsos? Yes, it
is
a stupid name. The nerve. To be iced by the likes of them. No wonder you’re feeling low. Now, don’t you take it to heart. Mutts are the very best, and you are the very best of the mutts.” The dog’s muzzle rests in Victor’s open palm.
“Who first,” Victor calls up the stairs, “you or the dog?”
In the mirror she sees the disassembly of sleep.
“3D, please! I’m a mess. I need coffee. You need coffee?”
“Had mine,” he calls, thumping his thermos on the counter. “Come on, dear dog, we’re going for a walk.”
She dresses and puts the coffee on and watches them amble down the sloped back lawn. They stop where the edge of the woods meets the grass, a crooked stick hanging from the mouth of the dog, a tennis ball in the dog walker’s hand. He looks up and catches her at the glass wall and waves. She likes his face: wide-awake eyes set between round cheeks and Elvis sideburns, under short, black hair. Because of all the exercising and showering, he always appears air-fluffed and squeakily scrubbed. He’s her age, but in the habit of peering all around him with a generous interest that makes him appear younger. A scar cuts a streak out of one of his eyebrows. His skin’s a warm bronze, deepened with outdoor activity. What are you? she’d asked one afternoon when they were drinking beers by the pool. I’m everything, he answered, frowning at the question. India and Africa by way of Trinidad, Belarus through upstate New York, Philippines out of Los Angeles, Sicily via the Bronx. What are you? Eh, she said. Canada, France. Jersey. Acadian. A bowl of snow.
He disappears into the trees after 3D. The odd thought comes to her that the curved edge of the lawn is the rim of an eye, the dark swimming pool is its center. An eye without a reflection, without—the word for the middle of the eye. Your own name, stupid, she thinks. She isn’t all awake. Idle makes idle, her mother would have said, and been right. Now that she hardly works, so many hours must glide over her to make a day. Once, when she was little, behind her mother’s back her old aunties gave her an orange plastic record player and a set of twelve-inch vinyl records, the abridged audio of several of Disney’s animated films. Every night she’d play one and fall asleep clutching the cardboard sleeve of the record—
Cinderella
,
Snow White
. All the same, a virtuous girl who sings a song. She never thought what happened after the end, the marriage. In the fairy tales there were two ways: off the wedding page to a blurry but total happiness, or left behind to rot into the ragged crone of the next story, her itchy heart ticktocking away in the dusty sharkbox of her chest. No, Iris doesn’t miss her years alone. But her life before George felt more vital in its loneliness than this kind of day. Why George fell in love with her she doesn’t know, though she doesn’t doubt him. Last week, they shared a grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich in the grass under the ash tree. George fell asleep with a magazine on his face and her hand on his chest. The dog woke them, late in the afternoon, nudging them with his nose. Even with this—happiness—when she doesn’t have any properties to show, there isn’t much to keep her from staying in bed, heavy as death.
The coffeemaker wheezes full. She gets a cup and returns to the window. By now, Victor and the dog will be in the meadow dotted with blue-eyed Marys. There’s the sound of the cicada and the sun tangled across her forearms resting on the table. Dragonflies skim the top of the pool—how is an hour gone already? 3D gallops out of the woods, the light on his red back and on Victor, lifting his sneakers high out of the grass. The tennis ball flies from Victor’s hand. 3D bursts forward, the stick dropping from his mouth. Next time she’ll go with them.
