Trust Me (25 page)

She did not say she minded, but everything seemed to halt when he climbed the last, pie-slice-shaped steps, so the room had the burnished silence of a clock that has just stopped ticking. She sat lit from all sides, surrounded by windows, her soft brown hair scarcely touched by gray and the wrinkles of her face none of them deep, so that her head seemed her youthful head softened by a webbed veil. The rug she had been hooking was set in its frame at the side of her armchair, and a magazine lay in her lap, but she did not seem to be doing anything—so deeply engaged in gazing out a window through the tops of the beeches that she did not even turn her head at his entrance. Her motionlessness slightly frightened him. He stood a second, getting his breath. Where once just the tip of the old Hancock Building had showed above the treetops, in the distance, now a silvery cluster of tall glass boxes reflected the sun. He had always been nervous in high places, and as his eyes plunged down, parallel with her gaze, through the bare winter branches toward the dead lawn three stories below, his thighs tightened and he shuffled self-protectively toward the center of the room.

Since she said nothing, he asked, “Do you feel all right?”

“Of course,” Jeanette answered, firmly. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know, my dear. You seem so quiet.”

“I like being quiet. I always have. You know that.”

“Oh yes.” He felt challenged, and slightly dazed. “I know that.”

“So let’s think of something for you to do,” she said, at last
turning, with one of her usual neat motions, to give him her attention. And she would send him back down, down to the basement, say, to repair a framed photograph that had fallen from its nail one night, when no one was looking, and broken its glass. It was strange, Brad reflected, that in this room of her own Jeanette had hung no pictures of the children, or of him. But, then, there was little wall space between the many windows, and the cushioned window seats, two-thirds of the way around the room, were littered with old paintings, crocheted cushions, and books whose cloth covers the circling sun had bleached. He thought of it as her meditation room, though he had no clear idea of what meditation was; in even the silent seconds inserted between rote petitions at church, his own brain skidded off into that exultant plotting which divine service stimulated in him.

Her illness came on imperceptibly at first, and then with cruel speed. They were watching television one night—the hostages had been taken in Iran, and every day it seemed something
had
to happen on the news. Suddenly Jeanette put her hand on his wrist. They were sitting side by side on the red upholstered Hepplewhite-style love seat that they had impulsively bought at Paine’s in the late Forties, during a blizzard, before the move to Newton. Because of the storm, the vast store was nearly empty, and it seemed they must do something to justify their presence, and to celebrate the weather. His love for her always returned full force when it snowed. “What?” he asked now, startled by her unaccustomed gesture.

“Nothing.” She smiled. “A tiny pain.”

“Where?” he asked, monosyllabic as if just awakened. The news at that moment showed an interview with a young Iranian revolutionary who spoke fluent, Midwestern-accented
English, and Jeanette’s exact answer escaped Brad. If in the course of their marriage there was one act for which he blamed himself—could identify as a sin for which he deserved to be punished—it was this moment of inattention, when Jeanette first, after weeks of hugging her discomforts to herself, began to confide, in her delicate voice, what she would rather have kept hidden.

The days that followed, full of doctors and their equipment, lifted all secrecy from the disease and its course. It was cancer, metastasizing from the liver, though she had never been a drinker. For Brad these days were busy ones; after the five years of retirement, of not knowing quite what to do with himself, he was suddenly housekeeper, cook, chauffeur, switchboard operator, nurse. Isolated in their big house, while their three children anxiously visited and then hurried back to their own problems, and their friends and neighbors tried to tread the thin line between kindness and interference, the couple that winter had a kind of honeymoon. An air of adventure, of the exotic, tinged their excursions to clinics and specialists tucked into sections of Boston they had never visited before. They spent all their hours together, and became more than ever one. His own scalp itched as her soft hair fell away under the barrage of chemotherapy; his own stomach ached when she would not eat. She would greet with a bright smile the warmth and aroma of the food he brought to the table or her bed, and she would take one forkful, so she could tell him how good it was; then, with a magical slowness meant to make the gesture invisible, Jeanette would let the fork slowly sink back to the plate, keeping her fingers on the silver handle as if at any moment she might decide to use it again. In this position she sometimes even dozed off, under the sway of medication. Brad learned to
treat her not eating as a rebuff he must overlook. If he urged the food upon her, sternly or playfully, real anger, of the petulant and surprisingly bitter kind that a child harbors, would break through her stoical, drugged calm.

The other irritant, strangely, seemed to be the visits of the young Episcopal clergyman. He had come to the church this year, after the long reign of a hearty, facetious man no one had had to take seriously. The new rector possessed a self-conscious, honey-smooth voice, and curly pale hair already receding from his temples, young as he was. Brad, who had been privy to the infighting among the search-committee members that had preceded his selection, admired his melodious sermons and his conservative demeanor; ten years ago a clergyman his age would have been trying to radicalize everybody. But Jeanette complained that his visits to the house—though they rarely extended for more than fifteen minutes—tired her. When she became too frail, too emaciated and constantly drowsy, to leave her bedroom, and the young man proposed that he bring Communion to her, she asked Brad to tell him, “Another time.”

The room at Mass. General Hospital to which she was eventually moved overlooked, across a great air well, a concrete wall of steel-rimmed windows. The wing was modern, built on the rubble of the old West End. It was late March, the first spring of a new decade. Though on sunny days a few giggling nurses and hardy patients took their lunches on cardboard trays out to the patio at the base of the air well, the sky was usually an agitated gray and the hospital heat was turned way up. During his visits Brad often removed his suit coat, it was so hot in Jeanette’s room.

Dressed in a white hospital johnny and a pink quilted bed jacket with ribbons, she looked pretty against her pillows, though on a smaller scale than the woman he had known so long. Her cheeks still had some plumpness, and her fine straight nose and clear eyes and narrow arched brows—old-fashioned eyebrows, which looked plucked though they weren’t—still made the compact, highly finished impression that had aways excited him, that kindled a fire within him. Her hair was growing back, a cap of soft brown bristle, since chemotherapy had been abandoned. Only her hands, laid inert and fleshless on the blanket, betrayed that something terrible was happening to her.

One day she told him, with a touch of mischief, “Our young parson was in from Newton this morning, and I told him not to bother anymore.”

“You sent the priest away?” Brad’s aged voice seemed to rumble and crackle in his ears, in contrast to Jeanette’s, which sounded crystalline and distant.

“ ‘Priest,’ for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Why can’t you just call him a minister?” It had been a joke of sorts between them, how High Church he had become. When on occasion they visited the Church of the Advent on Brimmer Street, she had ridiculed the incense, the robed teams of acolytes. “He makes me tired,” she said now.

“But don’t you want to keep up with Communion?” It was his favorite sacrament; he harbored an inner image, a kind of religious fantasy, of the wafer and wine turning, with a muffled explosion, to pure light in the digestive system.

“Like ‘keeping up’ an insurance policy,” she sighed, and did sound tired, tired to death. “It seems so pointless.”

“But you
must
,” Brad said, panicked.

“I must? Why must I? Who says I must?” The blue of her
challenging eyes and the fevered flush of her cheeks made a garish contrast.

“Why, because … you know why. Because of the salvation of your soul. That’s what you used to talk about when I first met you.”

She looked toward the window with a faint smile. “When I used to go alone to Copley Methodist. I loved that church; it was so bizarre, with its minaret. Dear old Doctor Stidger, on and on. Now it’s just a parking lot. Salvation of the soul.” Her gaunt chest twitched—a laugh that didn’t reach her lips.

He lowered his eyes, feeling mocked. His own hands, an old man’s gnarled, spotted claws, were folded together between his knees. “You mean you don’t believe?” In his inner ear he felt all the height of space concealed beneath the floor, down and down.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “Doesn’t it just seem an awful lot of bother?”

“Not a bit?” he persisted.

Jeanette sighed again and didn’t answer.

“Since when?”

“I don’t know. No,” she said, “that’s not being honest. We should start being honest. I do know. Since you took it from me. You moved right in. It didn’t seem necessary, for the
two
of us to keep it up.”

“But …” He couldn’t say, so late, how fondly he had intended it, enlisting at her side.

She offered to console him. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” When he remained silent, feeling blackness all about him, to every point on the horizon, as on those nights in the Pacific, she shifted to a teasing note: “Honey, why does it matter?”

She knew. Because his death was also close. He lifted his eyes and saw her as enviably serene, having wrought this vengeance.
A nurse rustled at the door, her syringe clinking in its aluminum tray, and across the air well in the blue spring twilight the lights had come on, rectangles of gold. It had begun, a few dry flakes, to spit snow.

Though she had asked that there be absolutely no religious service, Brad and the young minister arranged one, following the oldest-fashioned, wholly impersonal rite. Jeanette would have been seventy-one in May, and Brad was three years older. He continued to go to the ten o’clock service, his erect figure carrying his white hair like a flag. But it was sheer inert motion; there were no falcon flights of his mind anymore, no small, true voice at his side. There was nothing. He wished he could think otherwise, but he had believed in her all those years and could not stop now.

F
OR THE FIRST YEARS
that Nick and Katie Higginson lived in the little New England town, they were preoccupied with their house, an early-eighteenth-century saltbox that had been allowed to drift perilously close to complete dilapidation. The beams in the dirt cellar were powdery with dry rot; the lovely old fireplaces, with their wrought-iron spits and inset bake ovens, had been bricked and boarded over. The floors—the irreplaceable broad pine floorboards—had been painted dark hard colors and, in the room that became the Higginsons’ dining room, covered with several layers of linoleum. The house, though not large, had been divided; to accommodate the families that lived in both halves, upstairs rooms had been partitioned, downstairs doors had been removed, and makeshift arrangements of plumbing and wiring had been pushed and cut through the precious old woodwork. Some raised-field panelling had been, incredibly, wallpapered over, and layers of poisonous green paint had all but obscured the beauty of the exquisite shell cupboard to the left of
the fireplace in the living room—the house’s gem, with its serpentine shelves and curved back panels, all framed in bolection-molded trim and stop-fluted pilasters. Nick and Katie scraped and refinished, and what they could not do paid others to do. The floors, worn in visible troughs near the doorways and along the central hall, were pried up board by board and relaid and sanded level. A downstairs bathroom was built into the space of an abandoned stairway. Unobtrusive baseboard hot-water heating replaced the ponderous cast-iron radiators, whose paint had been peeled by their own steam; dainty twelve-over-twelve sash windows were restored where a previous owner had barbarously installed casemented Thermopane.

Through her new windows Katie would gaze out at the street, one of the town’s main streets; a block away, the shops began, and people shopping downtown often had to park in front of the Higginsons’. There was, she realized those first years, a set of people in town about her and Nick’s age, who saluted one another on the sidewalk and even embraced, as if a jovial reunion were constantly in progress. They wore, these young adults in their early thirties, a ramshackle and reckless yet well-heeled air; they seemed, in winter sunshine or summer shade, in quilted parkas or cotton shorts, to be always between parties. She and Nick had joined the available organizations, the conservation group and the Congregational church and the historical society, and yet no parties forth-came. She learned the names of some of the set—Brick Matthews and his wife, Felicia; Tory Riddle and her husband, Trevor; the Ledyards, Joan and Kenneth—but not the way in.