Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
June 01, 2005 – June 30, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $452,198.43
Driving Glynis once more to Columbia-Presbyterian, Shep was hard pressed to contrive an analogy for his emotions that was anything short of ridiculous. Like opening the envelope that contained his SAT scores? He hadn’t cared fractionally this much about going to college even in the days when he’d cared about going to college. Like opening the door to Dave’s office the April after he’d sold Knack for a million bucks, and was about to find out how much he owed the feds? Sure, he’d felt a bit sick to his stomach then; The Afterlife was at stake. But he’d been familiar with capital gains rates, and had been prepared for the ballpark. For that matter, Shep’s reputed concern for money was highly exaggerated. So he had never cared this much about any tax bill, even about the check he wrote to the U.S. Treasury in 1997 for close to three hundred thou.
No, for driving to get the results of Glynis’s first CAT scan since beginning chemotherapy there was no parallel. They didn’t talk. They had already talked. No amount of talk would affect the shrinking or expanding shadows on her slides. She was the same, she was better, or she was worse. The verdict was not on their efforts. That was one problem with a frivolous comparison to test results of the educational sort, whose scores rated having performed well or badly; they were outcomes you had ordained. However much Shep’s father may have regarded his son as an alien philistine, the man had successfully inculcated in his firstborn a drive to be good, to do good, and to do well. Yet whether Glynis was doing well would not issue from either of them having done well. Having always strived for excellence even in humble endeavors like installing a new bathroom vanity, Shep was confounded by consequences at once so vital, yet determined solely by the heedless decree of fate. His anxiety was therefore akin to the way Jackson must feel when the greyhounds were off and running and he’d placed a sizeable bet on a dog.
Shep distracted himself by considering Dr. Goldman. Vigorous and aggressive, the internist was a roughly handsome man; at six-feet-who-knows, he was large. While you couldn’t call him fat, a fleshy midsection did betray him as a man of appetites. Likely no stranger to a rack of ribs or a double Scotch, he displayed the very failure to take his own advice that Shep had missed in Dr. Knox—who, fit, trim, and younger by fifteen years, was by conventional measures far better looking. So why was Philip Goldman the more attractive man? Objectively his handsomeness was very “rough” indeed—which was to say that he wasn’t handsome at all. His broad face was smashed flat, and his eyes were set too close together—small and almost piggy. Yet he moved with energy and self-conviction, swallowing hallways in the same hungry lunges with which he doubtless downed a meal. He moved like a man who was killingly handsome, and thus he swept you up in the illusion that he was. His appeal was kinetic, and would never translate to static photographs. A smitten girlfriend would proudly show his snapshot to a confidante, and the friend would privately shake her head, flummoxed by what on earth the poor woman saw in this homely lug.
Frankly, Shep was a little jealous. It wasn’t only that the doctor was better educated, more successful, and rich. There was an intimacy between the doctor and his patient that Shep couldn’t equal with twenty-six years of marriage. He didn’t know what you called his wife’s unquestioning devotion to her doctor if it wasn’t love. She had merely trusted Dr. Knox, which was atypical enough; she believed in Dr. Goldman, and with a passion that felt erotic. When her husband admonished her to eat, she dug in her heels. But when toward the end of May Dr. Goldman urged her to eat, Glynis had made a proper project of gaining weight, cheerfully requesting her every favorite dish. Whatever had inspired her fuller cheeks shouldn’t matter, but Shep was still bugged.
Shep’s absenteeism was already teetering into the danger zone with Pogatchnik; at least Goldman’s obliging this early evening appointment had enabled him to put in a full day at work.
In silence, Shep held hands with Glynis from the parking garage to the office on the seventh floor, using his free hand to hit the car’s key fob and punch elevator buttons. Before knocking timidly on the door, he paused to lock eyes with his wife. It was the kind of glance that defendants and their spouses might share while the jury files in. Glynis was innocent, but this judiciary was capricious.
The door swept open. “Mr. and Mrs. Knacker, please come in!”
Shep took one look at Goldman’s beaming face and thought: Not guilty.
“You’re looking well!” Goldman cried, shaking Shep’s hand and laying a second palm on the forearm for added warmth. (Shep was not looking well. After months of mopping up his wife’s high-calorie leftovers, he looked more like Goldman every day, but several inches shorter and absent the poetry-in-motion magic trick.) When he shook hands with Glynis—”And you’re looking very well!”—her wiry metacarpus was every bit a match for the big doctor’s clasp. She may have under-served her talent, but even intermittent filing, sawing, and polishing had produced the fiercest grip of any woman Shep knew.
They sat before the desk. Shep was glad for the chair. He felt shaky. Asterisks were spinning in his visual field, as if the office swarmed with flies. He prayed that Goldman wasn’t the round-up type, who would cast a merely middling outcome in glowing terms.
The doctor bombed to his seat, clasped his hands behind his head, and tipped rearward in his spring-backed chair with one cordovan on the edge of the desk. His lab coat was open, his shirt crumpled, his hair in disarray; he was a bit of a slouch. But then, any specialist with patients flying in from New Zealand and Korea could afford to look unkempt. “Well, boys and girls, I have fabulous news!”
Shep dropped his shoulders in relief. The internist was a man of science, not a car salesman, and by code of practice couldn’t turn back the odometer on a last-legs clunker.
“The evil shrinketh before the mighty hand of righteousness,” Goldman proceeded gleefully. “I know that Alimta is a bastard, Mrs. Knacker, and you’ve been a real trouper.” (This much beloved term real trouper was apparently medical shorthand for does not wake doctor in middle of night when suffering side effects hospital staff have already prepared her for.) “But it’s been worth it. I’ll be honest: that one biphasic patch is being stubborn. But it hasn’t got any larger either, so we’ve arrested its progress. The other two are significantly reduced in size. We’re not seeing any metastasis, either.”
Shep reached around Glynis’s neck and kissed her forehead in blessing. They squeezed each other’s hands while tumbling over one another to exclaim, “That’s wonderful! That’s terrific! We’re so grateful!”
Goldman loaded a CD into his computer, showing them cross-sections of Glynis’s organs, which looked like slices of a fancy game terrine in an upscale restaurant. Shep castigated himself for ever thinking critically about Philip Goldman. Maybe the guy really was handsome. Shep wasn’t a female, so who was he to judge? And if Glynis “believed” in her doctor, the faith had been well placed.
By contrast, Shep felt traitorous, cynical, and shallow for having been a doubter, a religious skeptic. His sudden groundswell realignment in relation to his wife’s disease was none too subtle, leaving him to wonder if all along he’d suffered from an attitude problem. He didn’t buy into this New Age business of sending out “negative energy”—or he didn’t think he bought it. Nonetheless, any atmospheric contribution he might have made to his wife’s convalescence (might they dare now to call it “recovery”?) had been to her detriment. Since the internist produced more tangible redemption than either Gabe Knacker’s traditional Presbyterianism or Deb’s barmy born-again sect in Tucson, it was time to convert. To become a loyal, tithing parishioner of Philip Goldman’s church.
Exercising his newfound faith, Shep regarded the doctor with fresh appreciation. You could tell from the assurance of his gestures that this was a man used to giving speeches to large audiences of rapt medical professionals. To having his articles published in The Lancet, and being sent lesser authors’ research for review. To having dying people beg him to take their cases, perhaps in tears. Yet he did not seem self-important; that is, he didn’t broadcast a compensatory bluster that would camouflage a private sensation of fraudulence. No, Goldman just seemed important.
The doctor pointed out the contrast between Glynis’s last CAT scan and the latest. To the naked eye, the differences looked depressingly slight; it would take work, this conversion, spurning a natural agnosticism and getting with the program. Throughout, Goldman employed the inclusive first-person plural: we’ve shrunk this, we’ve shrunk that. But the pronoun was over-generous. We had done nothing, as Goldman knew very well.
The doctor’s most conspicuous appetite was for accomplishment, and his drive for excellence put in the shade Shep’s sorry aim to match roofing patches with original slates. Maybe Goldman liked Glynis; he liked being liked, so it was hard to tell. But his primary relationship was with her cancer. She was therefore a vehicle for his own beatification. In taming her malignancy, he was probably pleased on her behalf; he was unquestionably pleased on his own. More project than person, Glynis was an instrument for the furtherance of this doctor’s galloping ambition, and not only to do good but to do well.
Her surrogacy was obscurely unsettling. Yet Shep couldn’t identify what was wrong with it. He was ordinarily an advocate of healthy self-interest. For Goldman to have conflated his patient’s survival and his personal conquest was in Glynis’s interest, too. She didn’t need another well-wisher, Shep told himself, another friend. She needed a competent, skillful technician who did the best job he knew how, and why the man made that maximum effort was his business. For that matter, maybe Shep should reverse who was using whom. He and Glynis were hijacking Goldman’s ego to serve their own purposes, and looked at this way the scenario seemed perfectly cheerful.
“Since it’s working,” the doctor wrapped up, “and you seem to tolerate the drugs better than the average bear, for now we should keep hitting the cancer with Alimta and—with ‘A Lift into Manhattan.’” As the doctor shot Glynis a conspiratorial smile, Shep tried valiantly not to feel wounded that she’d let Goldman in on their private joke. “I’m a little concerned about your blood count. But we have plenty of other options at our disposal if your tolerance slips, or your progress with Alimta flags.” He rattled off a list of alternative drugs, and then asked about the current side effects. Glynis played them down.
It was summer. For the first time that season, it felt like summer, and the luscious weather was not a mockery. In the long light of early July, the sun was only now setting behind Hackensack, flashing tangerine sheets across the Hudson. Driving with thrust, Shep recalibrated the future. Maybe she’d pull through after all. Maybe he wouldn’t have to go to Pemba by himself. Maybe there would still be sufficient funds in the Merrill Lynch, if not for the relaxed, luxurious second life he’d planned, enough to get by, to pick up a small house for a song and eat papayas. Maybe he would still have to prevail upon her to go, but maybe this experience will have changed her, given her a glimpse of how little time was left even for people who didn’t have cancer. Maybe he would order up that kingfish, by candlelight, for two.
“How’d you like to eat out tonight?” he proposed. “I could give you a real ‘Lift into Manhattan.’”
“It’s a little risky, with other people’s germs …” said Glynis. “But what the hell. Let’s celebrate. I’d love to go to Japonica, but sushi is probably pushing it.”
No matter how many restaurants he sampled, up against it like this Shep often drew a blank, and they’d end up at some heavily advertised tourist joint like Fiorello’s because it was the only name he could dredge up. But this evening was charmed. “City Crab?”
“Perfect!”
Bejeweled like a tiara, the George Washington Bridge had just switched on its lights. Undergoing maintenance, the span on the Manhattan side had been unlit for years now, leaving a single lit peak on the New Jersey end to dangle to darkness mid-river; the lopsided effect had been visually vexing. Tonight at long last the whole bridge was lit shore to shore. The renewed symmetry seemed to mean something. A rhythm and balance had been restored.
Being out in public was a novelty now. The evening got off to a rocky start when they noticed a patron coughing nearby, and insisted on being reseated. When the waitress acted miffed, Glynis played her trump card: “My immune system is compromised. I have cancer.” After moving them swiftly upstairs, the waitress brought a complimentary amuse-bouche with the establishment’s apologies. Once the girl left, Glynis muttered, “At least mesothelioma is good for something.”
Glynis hadn’t been strictly forbidden alcohol, and Shep scanned the wine list. He didn’t much care about champagne, interchangeable with Mountain Dew in his view, and Glynis would likely sip a single flute. Still he chose a pricey Veuve Cliquot. He wasn’t buying champagne. Like most people, he suspected, he was buying the idea of champagne.
“To your health,” he toasted, pleased to note that in low lighting his wife’s chemo-tinged skin color could pass for a tan. She looked fetching in her cream satin turban, which so suited her long, sharp face that onlookers might easily assume that she’d opted for the swaddling as a style statement.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” said Glynis, tucking into her crab cakes. “I’ve been getting loads of ideas for new flatware projects. Like in the car just now. I got an image of a salad serving set, two nested spoons—one larger and thicker, the other thinner and more sinewy, both different but perfectly cupped. Forged, not cast, all on a slight curve … It’s hard to explain.”
The picture was romantic. “If you get back to work,” he proposed shyly, “I wonder if you’d consider doing another fountain. With me. Not like the goofy ones I knock up, but classy, like the Wedding Fountain. We haven’t collaborated since.”
“Mmm … Maybe for the dining table? That could be fun. That’s a great idea. Because I’m aching to make up for lost time.”
In truth, her “lost time” in metalsmithing comprised not only the last six months, but most of her married life. The only sign Shep gave of this indiscreet observation was to rue, “I wish you’d never wasted whole afternoons making chocolate bunny rabbits.”
“That was the point.”
“You wasted your time on chocolate bunny rabbits to prove to me that you shouldn’t be wasting your time on chocolate bunny rabbits.”
“That’s about the sum of it. Or to put it another way, I wanted you to see that your resentment over the fact that I didn’t bring in much money was nothing in comparison to my resentment if you forced me to earn it.”
“I never forced you to earn it, or resented that you didn’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“Tell me some more. About your ideas for flatware.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Yes.” Dipping his jumbo shrimp into cocktail sauce, Shep hazarded the kind of thought from which he had protected her for months. Her delicacy was physical. Maybe he needn’t treat her with kid gloves in every other regard. “If the situation were reversed, would you have worked to support me, and the whole family, while I stayed home pursuing my passion? Fountains, for example? Willingly. Without a word of protest.”
“You’d never have been able to stand that.”
“Dodge. The question was, could you?”
“Honestly? No. I wouldn’t support you while you made fountains. Women … Well, we’re not raised to expect that.”
“Is that fair?”
“Fair?” She laughed. “Who said anything about fair? Of course it’s not fair!”
Glynis was in such fine form that Shep could have wept. She finished the crab cakes; she finished her lemon sole. She ate the parsleyed potatoes and two slices of bread. She was kind enough not to mention that the chic seafood was lost on her dulled palate. Instead she quietly drowned both courses in Tabasco to get them to taste of anything but that tongue-curling taint of nickel, which contaminated everything from crab to kisses. Conversational strictures seeming to have loosened, they finally talked about the fact that Amelia had made herself so scarce. Their daughter had driven up to Elmsford only once this spring, excusing herself after a single hour lest her mother grow “too tired.”
“I’m too close,” Glynis speculated. “She looks at me and sees herself with cancer, and she can’t bear it.”
“But she isn’t the one with cancer,” said Shep.
“She’s afraid.”
“I don’t mind her being afraid for you. I do mind her being afraid of you.”
“She’s young,” countered Glynis, who’d not made such an effort to project herself into someone else’s head since this whole awfulness began. “She’s not in control of herself. I bet she’s not even aware of what she’s doing.”
“Which is?”
“Avoiding me, of course. If you pointed out that she’s only visited once, I bet she’d be shocked. I bet she imagines she’s been up loads of times. I bet that when she finally makes herself call me on the phone? And she’s thought time and again about phoning and then something mysteriously always comes up and she puts it off til tomorrow? I bet that happens so often, if not almost every day, that she thinks she’s been calling all the time.”
“I worry that Amelia could feel bad, later—” Shep stopped himself. That was the old thinking, based on the old assumptions. The ones from previous to seven o’clock this evening.
“About what?”
He curved the thought. “Once you’re well again. She could look back and realize how inconsiderate she was. How uninvolved in such a big crisis in your life. She could feel guilty; you could justifiably bear her a grudge. I’d like her to get her act together, in the interests of your relationship out the other end. Maybe I should say something.”
“Don’t you dare. She should see me because she wants to, not because Dad gave her a hard time. Anyway,” Glynis continued with a sip of champagne, “at least Amelia’s shown up more often than Beryl. By threatening your sister with the specter of one person she has to feel more sorry for than herself, I may have single-handedly driven her to New Hampshire.”
“You don’t want to see Beryl anyway. And now, out of sheer cheapness, she’s cornered herself into taking some responsibility for my father. Couldn’t have worked out better. Might even build her character.”
“With her raw materials, your sister building character is like you constructing a bookcase out of cardboard.”
With disingenuous idleness, Shep raised over their cheesecake: “Now that the prognosis is looking bright, do you still want to go ahead with this asbestos suit?”
“Absolutely! I may be pulling through this, but I’ll still have endured agony in the process. The people who did this to me should have to pay.”
“Well, they’ll not be the same people …” he said dubiously. “In the thirty years since you were in art school, the corporate higher-ups at Forge Craft would have turned over two or three generations.”
“They’re still drawing salaries from a company that’s profited from evil. Best of all, now that I’m getting better I’ll have the energy to give that deposition, and to stand up under cross-examination, too. I’ll be able to take the heat if the suit goes to trial.”
Shep’s heart sank. He was desperate to escape the litigation. “Okay.” He shrugged. “If you say so. I have another appointment with that attorney Rick Mystic next week.”
He was careful to curl the conversation back to her metalwork over coffee and mint tea, thus ending the night on a high note. In the car, he suggested they schedule a dinner with Carol and Jackson to celebrate the scan. “A themed evening,” she agreed. “We could serve CAT food.”
Shep was pleased to catch Zach in the kitchen, whether or not his son was pleased to be caught. The boy was so intent on disappearing himself that for a moment he froze with no acknowledgment of his parents’ entrance, as if they might walk right through him. His posture had further deteriorated. But Shep was relieved to come home and for once not start abjuring the boy that if he couldn’t chip in by doing his laundry he could at least match his own socks, or chiding the kid to please turn down the music because his mother wasn’t feeling well. (“What else is new?”) Shep couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to deliver glad tidings, and the overpriced Mountain Dew at dinner had juiced his mood.
“Yo, I’m glad you’re underfoot, sport,” said Shep. Zach received the companionable clap on his shoulder grimly, as if withstanding a hard right punch. “We got some terrific news about your mother at Columbia-Presbyterian tonight.”
Zach flinched. He didn’t look like a boy about to receive good news. And he protected his turkey sandwich as if they’d caught him at something naughty. The boy was scrawny and still growing; why would he act guilty about a sandwich? “So what’s up?” he asked glumly.
Shep detailed the CAT scan results, describing the diminutions of the two cowering patches of foulness; since he omitted mention of the “stubborn” biphasic presentation altogether, he might rightly have been accused of the very rounding up he had feared from Philip Goldman. But there was nothing wrong with emphasizing the positive, especially with a sixteen-year-old kid who’d had to weather plenty dire turns of the wheel with little help from his distracted, harried father. “Uh-huh.”
Shep kept waiting for the boy to have a reaction, until he resigned himself that this slumping, passive, unaltered will to vanish was his son’s reaction. “Maybe you don’t understand the full implications of this. It means your mother’s getting better. That the chemo is working. That we’re beating this thing.”
“Uh-huh.” Zach raised his gaze from his favorite middle distance and looked his father in the eye. Sorrowful and pitying, the boy’s soft brown unbroken stare made Shep feel suddenly the younger of the two. Their son rotated toward Glynis, who was sitting at the table, and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder to give it a squeeze; his motions were jagged and halting, as if he were operating his arm by remote control. “That’s great, Mom,” he said leadenly. “I’m real glad things are looking up.” The gesture seemed to cost him, and he trailed exhaustedly upstairs.
Shep was about to mumble, “What was that about?” when the phone rang. It was late for a call. He had a queer premonition that he should let it go to voice mail. He and Glynis had not had such a fine night on the town together for the last year or more, and the interruption was unwelcome. He couldn’t think of anyone to whom he wanted to speak right now besides his wife, now restored to him in all her former dryness, perception, and good humor, a miraculous resurrection courtesy of the Church of Philip Goldman. He didn’t want to burst his own champagne bubble, and the night’s magic felt fragile.
His “hello?” was wary.
As the call proceeded Shep said little, asking a few questions, ambling to the porch. It was still a beautiful evening—Elmsford was far enough from the city that you could see the stars—but it felt less idyllic now. He should have let the damn phone ring.
Driving up to Berlin on what was, catastrophically, the Fourth of July weekend, Shep thought about his father. With the man’s professional devotion to more elevated matters, it had taken him years to notice that Gabriel Knacker was indeed concerned with money, which, when you kept track, consumed an astonishing proportion of the good reverend’s conversation. He’d long preached about turning off lights, not because he wanted to save the planet but because he was cheap. Back when he’d run a parish, the minister had been every bit as grasping as any CEO, shamelessly squeezing his strapped parishioners for fatter fistfuls in the offering plate in order to refit the quaint clapboard church with somewhat less quaint plumbing. In fact, the budget clash between rising costs and a dwindling congregation had dominated the majority of Sunday dinners when Shep was a kid. His father would be mortified by the inference, but in the minister’s scathing about wealthy mill owners, their second homes and sports cars, Shep had learned to detect a trace, just a trace, of ordinary envy.
In addition to some bashes and bruises, Dad had broken his left femur. He’d been buried in a Walter Mosley novel while walking downstairs. In point of fact, the accident was of a sort that any detective fiction fan might have suffered even at a younger age, and at least it wasn’t his hip, but any broken bone at eighty was serious. Fortunately, Beryl had been around at the time. Unfortunately, her immediate ministrations had quickly drained her wading pool of Clara-Barton altruism; or, as Glynis might say, the cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain. Any further wrangling with paperwork, bills, and the logistics of a disabled elderly parent—dealing with whether Dad could go home, and if not where—was now Shep’s problem. Honestly, talking to his sister last night, you’d think she was the taxi driver who’d dropped this geezer off at the hospital and wanted somebody to cover the fare.
He would have liked to wax sentimental. But like any sane modern-day American in the face of medical calamity, he could not afford to squander his energies on mere affection, mere concern. The costs of his father’s immediate crisis would be picked up by Medicare, but only 80 percent; Shep kicked himself for not buying his dad a supplemental Medigap policy when he’d had the chance. The greater anxiety was after the crisis had passed. In the face of a home aide’s salary or retirement community fees, it went without saying that Beryl would chip in her two cents solely in the figurative sense of the expression.
Rising on the river shore, the austere façade of St. Anne’s hove into view, the severe vertical lines of red brick bespeaking rectitude and a stinting forbearance. With the elongated point of its left-hand steeple rising asymmetrically higher than the right, the signal Berlin landmark had always put him in mind of a prim, upright spinster brandishing her umbrella. In the context of the disheveled housing stock rising behind it, the cathedral’s haughty grandeur looked out of place. For as the town’s fortunes had foundered, the fact that it was located at the confluence of the Dead and Androscoggin rivers had grown more fitting. Berlin may not have been literally a dead end, but it was at the end of the Dead.
Opposite St. Anne’s rose Berlin’s last standing smokestacks. Rumor had it that Fraser Paper was doomed. (God help his hometown should its survival depend on the proposed park for all-terrain vehicles. Whiny kids on whiny carts that sounded collectively like a swarm of mosquitoes: it wasn’t respectable adult salvation.) Sure, the soot-stained brick stacks of his childhood had pumped a hazy white stench into the atmosphere. Pulp workers had high rates of gut cancer and leukemia. In strictly environmental terms, maybe it was healthier for Berlin that most of the mills had closed. Still, he missed them. The poking skyline had been distinctive. During his boyhood, the fact that tourists heading for the White Mountains held their noses as they passed his hometown had been a perverse point of pride. The clattering, cavernous mills to which his classes had made awed pilgrimages in primary school had always been the real cathedrals of Berlin, New Hampshire. Besides, Shep had always appreciated coming from a place that made something tangible that you could hold and fold and write on. He didn’t care for towns whose economies were based on ephemeral “services” or elusive ingenuity like software. Shep didn’t really belong in this century, and he knew it.
When he’d first moved to New York, Shep had felt self-conscious about hailing from the boondocks, and had taught himself to say “tuna” instead of “tuner,” “color” instead of “coluh.” He’d practiced pronouncing the r in start, the l in palm, and had learned that caught was not strictly a homonym of cot. After only a few weeks, he was ordering “milkshakes” rather than “frappes,” “sodas” rather than “tonics.” But the shame had long ago worn off. It was interesting to be from somewhere so particular. Anyone who’d emigrated from a burg of only ten thousand souls was a scarce commodity; lots of people were from New York. He owed this bleak northerly outpost for a hardiness in cold weather. Slogging to school in three feet of snow, the driving sleet needling his cheeks and collecting in his lashes. The feeling in his feet already fading after the first two streets—how’s that for peripheral neuropathy, Glynis? Keeping his head down, brow to the wind, concentrating only on the next step and then the next … Well, the same grit instilled in his boyhood had come to his aid these last six months: how to knuckle down in the face of hardship, refrain from complaint, and hunker into a small, core, preservative self when hostile forces lambasted from the outside.
Even at half-steam, Fraser Paper was still exuding its heady perfume. In the parking lot of Androscoggin Valley Hospital, Shep took a big lungful of acrid air: nostalgia. Faced in flat polished granite, this wasn’t the grungy Victorian hospital of the same name in which he’d had his tonsils out at ten. With an atmosphere of suffering, stringency, and boiling sheets, the original Androscoggin Valley had seemed more honest, more like a real hospital. Constructed in the 1970s, the new one had a municipal innocence about it, less like a building where they’d cut off your leg than one where they’d renew your driver’s license. Neater, cleaner, and brighter, it also seemed deceiving—like the blazing sunshine of winter mornings in New Hampshire that could look so inviting, until you stepped outdoors and were slapped in the face with a wind chill of thirty below.
By the time he was directed to the room where his father was still sleeping off the anesthesia from surgery that morning, Shep was no longer thinking about Medicare. They’d had their disagreements, but Gabriel Knacker had always been formidable. His resonant powers of oratory had been mismatched with his modest congregation, the minister’s intense engagement with issues like world poverty and apartheid in South Africa out of sync with his parishioners’ more immediate concerns with keeping their jobs at the mills. As a father, he had wielded his judgment with the same heavy-handedness with which other dads had slapped their kids’ behinds, and the sting had lasted longer than any spanking. Shep’s greatest dread as a boy was of his father’s “disappointment.” As a one-time handyman magnate who had demoted himself to functionary in his own company, no doubt he’d become a permanent disappointment. But then, Gabe Knacker wouldn’t care if his son owned the company or worked for it. A corporate entity, if not outright wicked, was at best morally neutral, and good men doing nothing in the minister’s view was tantamount to wickedness. Arguments about how if the entire population of the Western world joined the Peace Corps we would all starve went predictably nowhere, though Shep had won grudging acknowledgment for having at least provided employment for numerous hard-up Hispanic immigrants. Considering that he couldn’t remember his father ever expressing sympathy for people of European extraction in his own country, it was a tribute that his white, American congregation had put up with the guy.
The moment must arrive for most grown children sooner or later: a startling apprehension that a parent is old. So abiding is the authoritative imprint from childhood that this realization might commonly descend years after said parent has appeared glaringly geriatric to everyone else. Yet however routine the epiphany, it did not feel routine. Washing his hands at the disinfectant dispenser outside his father’s door presaged Shep Knacker’s first belated reckoning with the stark, objective reality of paternal decline.
The looming figure of his boyhood took up an incongruously small amount of room on the narrow bed; maybe Shep should have tried to beef up his father’s steady diet of grilled cheese sandwiches after all. His father’s skin had a watery translucence that it had no doubt achieved years before and Shep had declined to notice; he did not enjoy noting it now. Well into his sixties, the Reverend had boasted a remarkably dark, full head of hair—which had somehow enabled his son to fail to observe that in the last decade the man had, finally, started to bald, and the wisps that remained had, finally, turned white. The hand that clutched the sheet was crinkled, spotted, and slight, and presumably this transformation of the broad, vaulting extremity once raised weekly in benediction had not happened overnight.
Shep and his father had fought plenty—over Shep’s “spurning of higher education” and thus “wasting his fine mind,” his selling out to Mammon, his tawdry pursuit of an apostasy of an “Afterlife.” (Saving up to help the Third World poor would have been one thing; hoarding cash to kick back with pineapple drinks was quite another.) Yet the clash between generations was a battle that no self-respecting son would hope to win. Shep did not want his father to capitulate by dint of mere years on the planet, which converted stealthily from advantage to handicap while your back was turned; victory through youth alone was cheap. He did not want his father to stop being frightening, or intimidating, or infuriating, or insuperable. If he did not want his father to be old, that was only by way of saying that he did not want his father to stop being his father.
Shep kissed the sleeping patient’s forehead lightly; against his lips, the thin skin was unnervingly mobile on the skull. He assumed a chair beside the bed. There he kept vigil for perhaps half an hour. He listened to the ragged breath, sometimes resting a hand on his father’s atrophied arm. It was a short session of the simple being-ness that he had long coveted for The Afterlife. What Glynis had called “doing nothing,” the smelling and seeing and hearing and small noticings of sheer animal presence in the world surely constituted activity of a sort, perhaps the most important kind. He wasn’t sure if his father knew he was there, and that was all right. This was a form of companionship that he’d been especially cherishing with Glynis of late: devoid of conversation, but so surprising in its contrast to being by yourself.
Shep pulled in the drive on Mt. Forist Street; little wonder he’d felt like a hick when he first moved to New York, coming from a place that couldn’t pronounce the capital of Germany or even spell forest. As ever, the sepia-shingled, two-story colonial with a wraparound porch was confusing. It fostered a warm, cozy sensation mixed ambiguously with depression, like a gallon of golden paint contaminated with few drips of greenish umber to become a queasy hue that didn’t have a name. Hazily idealized pictures from memory clashed with the more hard-edged perception in the present that the place was growing dilapidated. The chipped cedar shingles could stand replacing. The porch railings were warped. Still, it was a solid building from 1912, with some architectural distinction in the quirky round turret that rose on the right to a third floor. His old bedroom was at the top. While it was impossible to arrange furniture properly in a small round room, that wasn’t the sort of thing that bothered a boy. He’d treasured its spiral staircase and tree-house atmosphere, the sound of the brook down the slope trickling through the curved windows. Effortlessly convinced of occupying the center of the universe, as a kid you never seemed to notice that you lived in the back of beyond.
Beryl waved from the porch. The crochet weave of her misshapen chocolate-colored top was loose enough to expose her bra, an uncomfortably eye-catching pink. She no longer quite had the figure for those snug denim cut-offs. Then again, the days in northern New Hampshire when you could get away with shorts numbered a mere handful, and local gals were apt to drag on the hot pants the moment the thermometer edged above sixty degrees. Besides, he was in no condition himself to call the kettle fat.
“Shepardo! I’m so relieved you’re here!” She gave him a bear hug. “You have no idea … I’ve felt so alone. God, I just keep reliving that sudden boom-boom-boom from the staircase. Didn’t sleep a wink. And I can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t been home.”
“Yes, that was lucky.” Shep shouldered his bag inside while Beryl prattled about having done “everything she could” and being “frazzled” and “at her wit’s end”—with a two-handed clutch of her thick, curly brown hair for effect—and “really needing some relief here.” He couldn’t imagine what had been required aside from calling for an ambulance and getting their father admitted, but he shouldn’t be ungrateful.
Shep started up the stairs to drop his bag. “Oh, you should take my old room,” Beryl called. “I’m in yours.”
He stopped. “Why’s that?”
“You know I always wanted your room. It was the coolest. And I’m living here; you’re just visiting, right?”
He repressed an annoyance, one that resonated with an old twinge of resentment that at eighteen Beryl had to follow her big brother to New York City, like activating a touch of rheumatism when it rained.
Returned to the first floor, Shep took in the degree to which his sister had occupied their father’s house. Her whacky antiques from the apartment on West Nineteenth Street were crammed into every corner, cluttering what had once been an airy expanse of hardwood flooring. Film magazines and photographic equipment piddled every surface like dog pee. Her laptop computer enjoyed pride of place on the dining table, strewn with printouts. A sagging bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace in a mayonnaise jar was oblivious to the fact that their father suffered from hay fever.
“You saw Dad?”
“Saw is the word.” Shep collapsed on the couch. “He was still asleep. But the nurses say he seems to have come out of surgery pretty well.”
“I know, I know. I’ve been calling, like, every half hour.”
Shep wondered if his sister called the hospital with the same imaginary frequency with which Amelia may have called her mother. “Hey, do you have anything to drink around here? I’m beat.”
“Well, yeah … I guess I could find something.” Beryl shuffled reluctantly to the kitchen, returning with a depleted bottle of Gallo rotgut. The glass she poured was about three sips’ worth, so he got the message. In addition to having stopped by Nancy’s next door to make sure Glynis could turn to her in an emergency, making breakfast for his wife who just happened to have cancer, boning up on New Hampshire retirement communities on the Internet in preparation for taking full responsibility for what came next, and driving the length of New England for eight hours in thick vacation traffic, he should have remembered to arrive with a couple of (unlike this one) drinkable bottles of wine, a six-pack of micro-brew, and a family-size bag of Doritos, preferably Beryl’s favorite Cool Ranch.
“So where should we go for dinner?” said Beryl. “The Moonbeam Café? Eastern Depot?”
The Moonbeam was back down in Gorham, which he’d just driven through, and the trip back would constrain his booze intake to less than his mood required. The Eastern Depot was the swish place most folks reserved for anniversaries and birthdays, and Shep’s natural generosity was under strain. “What’s wrong with walking to the Black Bear?”
Beryl wrinkled her nose. “It’s all meat. I’ve gone back to being a vegetarian.”
“Since when?”
“Since that lasagna at your house. It made me, you know, totally ill.”
What had made her ill was not getting her way. “Thanks.”
“Don’t take it personally.”
“Why don’t we eat in? I’ll make a run to the state liquor store over on Pleasant Street, but that’s all I’m up for.”
As for not taking her out to eat, she would make him pay. One way or another, Shep ended up paying for everything.
“I’m starving,” Shep announced, putting the bottles on the counter.
His sister raised an eyebrow at his waistline. “You don’t look starved.”
“I have to make Glynis the heaviest food possible. I end up eating it, too.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, with all this stuff about Dad, I forgot to ask!” Beryl turned from the stove and creased her forehead, assuming an expression of deep, worried solicitation. “How is she doing?”
It was a look that Shep had learned to recognize. The very music of her question—drawn out, searching, dropped in pitch—was identical in timbre to the queries he’d fielded from ancillary characters for months now. Beneath the perfunctory, brow-furrowed performance lurked the hope that the answer not be awkward, that it not ask anything of them, and that most of all it would be short.
“Seems we may beat this thing,” he said, forcing himself to remember that he was a believer now, an evangelist, a zealot. “Chemo’s working.”
“Fantastic!” The cryptic, positive response had let her off the hook, and that was that.
Beryl cooked the way she dressed. Everything she prepared came out lumpy and brown. The concoction on the stove tonight was classic: a mash of soggy cashews, blobs of soy-stained tofu, and bloated pinto beans that were starting to disintegrate.
Abandoned on high heat, the gunk was clearly burning, but Beryl would never detect the singe in the air. Discreetly adding a little water, Shep reflected on the fact that his sister regarded her absence of a sense of smell as not a deficiency but a badge of honor. These days everything had got mysteriously turned around so that not being able to see, hear, learn, or walk made you superior. So he was bewildered by what to do with his sympathy. Wishing that his sister were able to savor the aroma of snapping pine logs was now apparently an insult.
Once they sat down, the serving on his plate looked like a meadow muffin from a cow with digestive problems. The Moonbeam Café served great homemade bread and fruit crumbles; maybe this sandy, sticky mass was what Beryl enjoyed, but he couldn’t help but feel he was being taught a lesson. At least the dumpy dinner would not distract them from the main agenda, although the main agenda was no more appetizing.
“You know, about Dad,” Beryl began. “I hate to say I told you so—”
“No, you don’t. So go ahead. Smugness is one of life’s pleasures.”
“I just mean, like I was saying in Elmsford, this was bound to happen—”
“Okay, you finished? It did happen. Next.”
“You don’t have to be so snippy. This is hard for everybody.”
“It’s mostly hard for Dad.”
“Well, of course,” she backpedaled.
Stirring the crust from the bottom of the pan had been a mistake. Black flakes turned up on his fork in sheets.
“I’m horrified by the reason, naturally,” Beryl continued. “But getting a break from Dad and me in close quarters will be a bit of a relief. He’s grown so persnickety! His day is super-ritualized, and everything has to go just so.”
Shep nodded at the computer at the end of the table. “He seems to have accommodated your stuff. That’s pretty flexible.”
“But I make him his grilled cheese, right? Trying to be nice? And it supposedly comes out too dark, and the cheese isn’t melted enough. You have to keep the heat at exactly this little point on the dial, and put a pan lid over the sandwich, a particular lid that’s exactly the right size for Branola. And God forbid you should forget the two dill pickle chips, or come back from the store with a brand that isn’t cut with ridges. I think of him as so frugal, but he actually threw the sandwich out and made another one!”
“Good for him,” said Shep. “How many more grilled cheese sandwiches is a man his age going to eat?”
“Man, the other thing that drives me nuts,” she continued, trying valiantly to draw him into filial cahoots, “is the paper. He still snips out all these articles—you know, about forgiveness of Third World debt, anything to do with Abu Ghraib, and obviously when anybody’s starving he gets excited. So I get to the paper and it looks like one of those lace snowflakes we used to make in school. I’ve told him, you know, if he wants an article we can print it from the website, but, no, he has to have the newspaper version. You’ve seen his office upstairs. It’s stacked with all these file folders full of ratty yellow articles. I don’t know; it’s a little sad. Like, what’s he going to do with that stuff, really?”
“Seems like a good thing that he still takes such an interest in the world,” Shep said staunchly. “Most folks at eighty wouldn’t even read the paper, much less clip it.”
Beryl didn’t take the hint that he wasn’t coming on board. “Do you realize he writes a letter to the editor practically every day? Sometimes to the Sentinel, but usually The New York Times or The Washington Post. They hardly ever see print. It’s like, every time something happens the whole world is waiting to find out what Gabriel Knacker thinks. Now, that is sad. I picture all these letters editors getting another envelope postmarked Berlin, New Hampshire, rolling their eyes, and tossing it unopened in the trash.”
Uneasy being apart from Glynis, Shep didn’t plan to stay up here long; a prolonged cringe-fest about their remaining parent could wait for another time. “So what’s the prognosis? Do you think he’ll be able to come back here?”
“That would mean hiring a nurse or something, since he’s likely to be bedridden for weeks. In fact, he could need round-the-clock care for, I don’t know, forever.”
“True …” Shep looked at his sister hard.
“And who knows what kind of person that would be. If she was some officious, bossy shrew, life around here could become unbearable.”
“From what I’ve read, full-time, live-in medical assistance can come to about a hundred grand a year.”
“I can’t believe that we’ve only talked about this, like, a minute, and you’re already talking about money.” Her smile tried to cast the goad as a joke, without success.
“Since he’s not here to tell us what he wants to do next, the only thing you and I can talk about is money.”
“Whatever it costs,” Beryl declared, “what matters is what’s best for Dad.”
“Don’t you expect that he’d rather come back home?”
“But I don’t think his living here is practical anymore,” said Beryl. “It might even be dangerous; he could easily take another fall. Besides, it would just delay the inevitable. This is the perfect juncture to make a decisive move to some sort of facility, where he has doctors, and meals made for him, and the company of people his own age.”
“Leaving you in this house. Is that what you picture?”
“Maybe I’d stay here a while longer. What’s so terrible about that? Somebody’s got to hold down the fort.”
“‘The fort’ is Dad’s only asset. It’s all he’s got to help cover what’s likely to cost a hundred K a year, whatever he opts for—whether that’s home care, a nursing home, or assisted living.”
“Are you saying you’d sell this place out from under me? Where the fuck would I go?”
“Wherever grown-ups go when they don’t live with their parents.”
“This is ridiculous! What’s all that Medicare and Medi-whatsit for, then?”
“I tried to lay this out when my lasagna was making you ill.” He shot a pointed look at his plate. “Medicare doesn’t cover long-term care, period. You’re thinking of Medicaid.”
Beryl waved a bored hand. “I can never keep that stuff straight.”
“Medicaid’s requirements are stringent, and it would take a lot of paperwork just to get him on the rolls. It only covers the destitute. Dad will never qualify while he still owns this house and draws a regular pension. So we either sell off the property, use up the cash, and liquidate his pension fund, or we’re”—he paused at the pronoun, but decided it was good for his sister’s moral education to keep it—”or we’re stuck with the bill.”
“What about my inheritance?”
“What inheritance?”
“Half of this house will be mine, and I’m counting on the proceeds for a down payment on my own place!” she wailed. “How else will I ever have a home of my own?”
“I don’t own a house, Beryl.”
“That’s your choice. You could buy whatever you want, and you know it.” She crossed her arms, sulking. “Shit, there has to be a documentary in this. Dad working his whole life, and paying taxes, and then when he needs—”
“The depletion of assets for end-of-life care,” Shep cut her off, “hasn’t gone unobserved.”
With evident discipline, Beryl unfolded her arms and placed her hands calmly on either side of her plate. “Look. We could do it this way. You cover Dad’s nursing home, or assisted living, whatever. Give me two or three years here, and I can save up some capital. Then once Dad’s passed away and we sell the house, your share of the inheritance would cover your outlay.”
Shep sat back. He could only regard such audacity as rather magnificent. Nobody could claim that his sister wasn’t entertaining. “My share goes to some nursing home. And you keep yours?”
“Sure, why not? And then I’m off your back. No more knocking on your door for cups of sugar. I could move back to New York.”
“Leaving aside whether I’d buy your Brooklyn Bridge, just how much do you imagine this house is worth?”
“The property market has skyrocketed all over the country. Everything’s, like, tripled in value in, like, ten years. Everybody but me has been making money hand over fist. Five bedrooms, three baths … This place must be worth a fortune!”
“I repeat: how much, exactly, do you think this house is worth?”
“What … five hundred? Seven-fifty? With that big backyard, I don’t know, maybe even a million!”
Shep knew his sister loved this house, and to some degree for good reason. The dark interior woodwork was all original and had never been painted over. It was spacious, and it had funk. The place had further appreciated in her head for being where she grew up, and her memories were pleasant; she’d always been the favorite. He hated to burst her balloon, but Realtors were not so sentimental. “I did some nosing around on property websites. Houses this big in Berlin are going for under a hundred grand.”
“That’s impossible!”
“Fraser Paper is closing, and everybody knows it. Haven’t you noticed how many vacant and derelict houses there are in this neighborhood? There’s talk of building a big federal prison and an ATV park, but even if they happen you’re talking a few hundred jobs tops. After making Reducing Paperwork, you of all people should know that everybody’s moving out. Property values in this area are falling.”
“They’re not falling anywhere! This house is the best investment Dad ever made!”
“Beryl, think about it. Who wants to live here? Exiled New York documentary makers who lose their rent control. That’s about it. And that’s the real problem. Even if we put this place on the market tomorrow, it could sit there for months or even years, and meantime Medicaid won’t touch Dad’s nursing home fees with a barge pole. So don’t worry about its being ‘sold out from under you.’ The worry is it won’t be.”
“Well … we don’t know how long he’s going to last, right? I mean, I’ve always heard that for a lot of old people a broken bone is the beginning of the end.”
This was ugly stuff. “Yeah, if only he’d die right away, you could get your inheritance.” He gave the last word a final hiss.
“I don’t appreciate that insinuation! I was just saying—”
Shep collected the plates. He stood beside the stack, debating. He almost let the proposition go, but—maybe it was having Dad down for the count at Androscoggin Valley—he was starting to feel less like Beryl’s brother than her father.
“The longer Dad is able to keep living at home,” said Shep, “the better it is for him, and the better it is for us. But live-in help would be expensive and, as you pointed out, intrusive. So I’m curious. There’s one possibility we haven’t talked about. What if he came back here and you took care of him?”
“No way!” she exclaimed. Clearly this option had never entered her head.
“You suggested Amelia’s old room in January—though that was before we told you that Glynis was sick. Back then, his living with you in Manhattan was out of the question, since you were about to lose your apartment. But now you’re ensconced here, and no one would be dislodged from their home, not you, and not Dad. You could make yourself useful.”
“I don’t have the qualifications! I’m no nurse.”
“I’m sure the hospital could provide physical therapy. But the main requirements will be cooking and shopping and keeping the house clean. Changing his linen, doing his laundry, keeping him company. Giving him sponge baths and helping with his bed pan. For all of which you’re qualified as anybody.”
“Dad would never be comfortable having his daughter wipe his ass. It would be totally embarrassing for both of us.”
“People change what they’re willing to accept when you change what you’re willing to give.” Shep smiled. The homily sounded so much like their mother.
“I can’t believe you’re asking me this! I don’t notice you volunteering to throw everything aside and take care of somebody else all day!”
“Oh, no? Throw everything aside and take care of somebody else all day—or all night—is exactly what I do for Glynis. While holding down a full-time job, which I loathe, and only keep to ensure that my wife has some kind of coverage.”
Any discomfiture her gaffe occasioned was short-lived. “You’re talking about my putting my whole life on hold, possibly for years! Well, you only have a job, but I have a career! It happens to be a career that Dad himself believes in. He’d never want me to sacrifice my filmmaking about important social issues just for his fucking sponge baths! In fact, maybe I will do a documentary on end-of-life care. In which case I’d do a whole lot more old people a whole lot more good than I could ever do by hanging around here asking if a single elderly man needs a drink of water!”
“So that’s it. No? End of story?”
“Better believe it. Not negotiable, a nonstarter. Absolutely, positively no, out of the question, forget it, period.” She seemed frustrated to have run out of negatives.
When he sold Knack of All Trades, Shep had never expected to be treated with greater regard—to be provided preferential seating in restaurants, to have his small opinions accorded any extra weight—merely for having made some money. But damned if he’d expected to be punished for it.
“So that leaves me paying for the alternative—whether full-time home help or some sort of institution. As for your free ride in my old bedroom, you’re lucky, since I’m not going to put this house on the market so long as Dad thinks there’s a hope in hell he might come back home. But I’d like you to understand that covering the costs of his care is not going to be easy for me. I have huge costs associated with Glynis, and I’m no longer the moneybags you think.”
“I don’t understand,” said Beryl with genuine bafflement. “You said you had health insurance.”
Shep laughed. It wasn’t a very nice laugh, but it beat crying.