PIECE: Silk throw-pillow cover made from Chinese brocade.
Cindy opened the drapes in the bedroom, and Betsy blinked in the summer sunlight streaming in. She’d already been awake for nearly an hour, but didn’t have the strength to get out of bed on her own. Lately she’d been waiting for the arrival of Cindy, the hospice nurse who cared for her in the mornings, before attempting to go to the bathroom or get dressed, if she even got dressed. Many days she didn’t.
“How are you feeling today, Mrs. Barrett?” Cindy asked.
Betsy cleared her throat and sat up. “You know the phrase ‘I feel like a million bucks’?”
“Sure.” Cindy gave her a funny look.
“Well, I feel like about five bucks. Maybe four fifty.”
Cindy laughed. “You know, we can reschedule today’s interview if you’re not feeling up to it.”
“Absolutely not. The night nurse brought up the idea of moving to the hospice inpatient facility again.” Betsy sighed. “And I think she’s right about that. She said they can administer around-the-clock care there, plus better pain management. Which sounds good to me.” She rubbed her side, which radiated pain from where she knew, from her most recent doctor’s appointment, the tumors had spread. It was hard to pinpoint, though, where the pain was coming from. She hurt all over.
“Perhaps we can do the interview up here, then?” Cindy suggested.
“No way. There will be pictures.”
“I could tidy up the room a bit.”
Betsy looked at the crumpled tissues on the nightstand, the clutter of jars and tubes and pill canisters. No matter how many creams and balms she applied to her lips and skin, they still felt dry as desert sand. And no matter how many medications she took, she knew she was not getting better.
“I’ve put so much thought, time, and money into my sculpture garden over the years,” Betsy said. “I want to sit outside. And if that means you have to throw me down the stairs to get me there, so be it.”
Cindy gave her a conciliatory look. “Well, then I guess we’d better get you dressed.” She went to the closet and brought back the outfit Betsy had chosen—a slub silk suit in the palest shade of ice blue.
Betsy didn’t like needing help to go to the bathroom and get dressed, but there was no way around it. She could barely even get up from the bed without having to grab the night table for balance. By some miracle, though, Cindy managed to help Betsy into the suit, with its zippers and hooks and buttons. She applied makeup to her face, bringing color to her pale cheeks and lips, and brushed the gray-blond wig that Betsy had special-ordered as soon as her hair began to fall out from radiation.
“Think of how much more time I’m going to have on my hands, now that I don’t have to get my hair colored every eight weeks,” Betsy had said when the wig arrived in the mail. Little did she know that the time she gained was quickly filled up with chemotherapy and doctors’ appointments.
Then, after Betsy chose to stop radiation treatment, she finally recouped her free time. But “free” was a misnomer, because she spent almost all of it in bed. Betsy had never been good at being idle, though, so even when she was bedridden she made the most of her time, writing down ideas for the artist-in-residency program she’d be leaving as her legacy. When pain and fatigue prevented her from writing her own notes, she dictated them to Cindy or one of the nursing assistants on duty. Betsy also had them read reviews aloud to her, of art exhibits she’d never see and performances she’d never attend. Somehow it gave her comfort to know that creative expression would continue in this world long after she’d left it.
“There,” Cindy said, holding up a hand mirror.
Betsy tried to look at her reflection, but the image was blurry. “I need my glasses,” she said.
Cindy pushed aside papers and bottles on the nightstand until she found a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, round and oversized. She handed them to Betsy.
“That’s better,” Betsy said when she’d put them on.
“You look like Iris Apfel in those,” Cindy said.
Betsy laughed. “Or maybe Mr. Magoo.”
“I just watched a documentary about Apfel. If I live to my nineties, I hope I have even a smidge of her energy. Here she is, this woman famous enough to have her clothing displayed at the Met, and she’s running around a flea market with her cane, pawing through tables of bargain accessories.”
“Normally I’d say it’s dangerous to tell a woman she looks like someone older than her,” Betsy said. “But in this case I’m flattered by the comparison. I’ve always thought it was a shame that I never got to meet Apfel when she lived in Madison. But she graduated from art school at UW in the forties, and I was just a kid then. I didn’t move here until the late fifties, after I got married.”
“Well, it’s her loss as much as yours.” Cindy straightened Betsy’s wig. “Are you ready?”
Slowly, deliberately, they made their way to the hallway and down the stairs, where every step seemed like a mile. Betsy clutched the smooth handrail on one side and, on the other, she leaned her weight against Cindy’s sturdy shoulders. They inched downward like that, pausing to rest on the landing where the staircase curved.
“I feel like we’re in a three-legged race,” Betsy said. “Good thing no one’s racing against us, or else we’d surely lose.”
Cindy laughed, then supported Betsy the rest of the way downstairs and out the front door.
Betsy leaned on the white wooden rails of the front porch, taking in the view of the sculpture garden at its midsummer peak. Bush roses in white and peach hues bloomed in the beds that bordered the front porch. Clustered around the mother-and-child statue Betsy loved so much were bunches of hydrangea in shades of purple and blue, their puffy, carefree blossoms swaying in the mild breeze off the lake.
Cindy led her to the wrought-iron bench in the yard, positioned for perfect views of the sculptures. Throw pillows in various colors and textures had been placed on the seat—Betsy had had Cindy bring them all upstairs so she could select patterns that complimented one another.
Betsy played with the fringe on a rust-colored pillow with a silk brocade cover. “I bought this fabric in China,” she said. “At a gift market near the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall.” She closed her eyes. “Oh the steps! I know you’d never believe it now, after having to practically carry me down a single flight of stairs, but Walt and I climbed hundreds of steps that day. It was autumn, and from on top of the wall you could see miles and miles of orange and red treetops. That’s why I picked out this particular fabric, actually, at one of the market stalls on our way out of town. It reminded me of the color of the autumn leaves.”
A warm wind blew up from the lake, rustling the grasses in the garden. Without even opening her eyes, Betsy could picture the fronds of green and yellow ornamental grass that flanked the stone footpath leading around the side of the house. She inhaled the sweet, heady scent of the roses near the porch.
When Betsy opened her eyes, Cindy was no longer standing in the yard with her. Instead, she saw a gray-haired woman in overalls making her way up the front walk with a camera slung around her neck.
“Annie Beck?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to photograph you,” she said. “If it’s okay with you.”
“Of course. I didn’t put all this on just to sit out here in my own garden.” Betsy swept her hand to indicate her made-up face and tailored attire. “Did the magazine send you?”
“There’s no magazine,” Annie said. She knelt down in the grass and started snapping pictures.
Betsy sat silent for a moment, trying to put everything together. Had she mixed something up? She wouldn’t be surprised. Her head felt so foggy these days, floating from the effects of one medication to the next. But Cindy was usually pretty good at keeping track of details.
“I don’t understand,” Betsy said.
Annie had climbed on top of the berm that separated Betsy’s yard from the neighbor’s, to shoot from a different angle. From her perch Annie said, “I’m the one who called about doing a magazine article. But I made the whole thing up.”
“Why?” Betsy asked. “If you’d just asked to photograph me, I would have said yes.”
“We wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Robbie and me. That night, after my show at his gallery, I mentioned something to him about how much I’d enjoyed talking with you, and whether you’d be invited to the retrospective we’re planning for a future date. He said he didn’t think so. That you were sick. And once I heard that, I suddenly understood why my pictures of people who were dying—like the professor with her Proust books—resonated with you so much. I asked Robbie what he thought about me photographing you, and he liked the idea. So here I am.”
Betsy scratched at her scalp, which was starting to itch from the combination of the wig and the humid summer air. She wasn’t sure how to feel about all of this. On one hand, she was flattered by the gesture, but on the other, it felt like an invasion of privacy. Betsy had often kept details of her personal life private, even while publicly taking on causes she believed in. And nothing was more private than dying.
“I never told Robbie about my relapse,” Betsy said. “I’ve hardly told anyone.”
“You didn’t have to. He knew you had cancer once before and said he could tell you were sick again as soon as he saw you that night, from how much weight you’d lost.” Annie sat down on the bench beside Betsy and removed the camera from around her neck. “Look, we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. Robbie said there was a chance you might not be up for it or that you might even be offended. But the risk of offending people usually doesn’t stop me from doing something I think is worthwhile, so I figured it was at least worth a shot. Not for my series, but just because I sensed you had a lot of spirit and personality, and that you might enjoy all of that being captured while you’re still here, by someone who could see it. Who could see you. Not for my series.”
“I’m not offended,” Betsy said. “I don’t even care if you want to use the photos. Use them however you want. You just caught me by surprise. I was expecting an interviewer and photographer from a local magazine.”
“Are you disappointed there’s no magazine article?”
“Lord, no. I’ve done so many interviews. I don’t need another article saying all the things I’ve already said dozens of times before: when I started collecting, what my favorite pieces are, et cetera.”
“If you let me, I think I can capture something about you that hasn’t been said yet,” Annie said. “Or at least I hope I can. That’s why I came.”
Betsy thought about the photographs she’d seen at the show in New York—the beauty and grace that shared space in the images with pain and death. It was a complicated combination that many people shied away from even talking about. Annie, instead, chose to focus a lens on it. It was exactly the kind of creative courage that Betsy hoped could be nurtured by the residency program she’d dreamed up.
“Okay,” Betsy said. “Let’s take some pictures.”