seventeen

THE DAY AFTER THAT

On Saturday, I woke up to the news that Fidel Castro had died overnight, which meant I would have to go to work and make one final update to the obituary I had updated over and over, every time the former Cuban leader was seen in public or was said to be ill. The trick with the obituaries of famous people is that they have to be done well before the individual actually dies. No newspaper or television network would dare wait until the death is announced because it would be practically impossible to assemble all the necessary interviews and pictures fast enough to do a decent job. I was assigned my Castro obit a good five or six years before the fact, prompted by one of the many rumors that Fidel was dead or dying. It took weeks to research, write, and put together. The producer, the video editor, and I joked after every false alarm, after being called in to make changes every time there was a new “Castro’s dead” panic, that it was our doing that the guy was still alive, that we’d given him multiple new leases on life. At the rate we were going, we told ourselves, he would live forever.

But he didn’t. Our obituary was running on CBS Sunday Morning the following day. Our executive producer would want to screen it again and approve our tweaks, but my shift at Carol’s bedside was from two to six P.M. There was a schedule by then, informal, but the idea was to make sure that some member of her self-appointed family was with her most of the time, except during the overnight hours. Lissa kept track. She had become the gatekeeper. I texted her that I would go early and stay as long as I could.

Carol was alone when I walked into her room. The lights were off. In the gloom, all I could see were her giant, black glasses on a motionless mound at the far end of the bed, but she was awake. On the blanket beside her was a square plastic basin three times the size of the kidney-shaped stainless steel one it had replaced. For vomiting.

I talked about the dogs. “The city has been doing roadwork on Twenty-second Street between Tenth and Eleventh,” I said. “Drilling. They’ve been pumping some sort of mucky slime into a tree pit on our route to Chelsea Piers. It’s like a shiny black slurry. Harry couldn’t resist. Yesterday morning, he walked right into it, all four feet. He sank down almost to his stomach. He was covered in it. His bootie was a mess. I had to use a wire brush to scrub it clean. Fortunately, my hose hasn’t been turned off for the winter yet. You told me he hates hoses. Well, like it or not, he got hosed down yesterday, and the water was cold.” I heard myself and thought, Too many words.

Carol opened her mouth and seemed to laugh at half speed. “That’s my boy.”

She told me she was uncomfortable. “Your back?” I asked. “No, my whole being.” I cleared off her tray table, raised her bed, and brought her fresh water and ginger ale. Slowly, she lifted the plastic basin to her chest and waited, but nothing happened. Just as slowly, she lowered it. I poured her some ice water and held it up for her, but she grasped the cup and inched the bendy straw toward her lips. It collided with the oxygen tubes in her nose. For a good thirty seconds, she tried to guide it into her mouth. After a couple of small sips, she moved the cup back to her tray table, her hand shaking, as if it took all the effort in the world.

I didn’t know what to say. I had used up all my words. Finally I asked, “When you’re not overcome by your pain and discomfort, do you think about happy times or adventures? Do you relive parts of your life?” It was a question to fill the silence. I didn’t expect much of an answer, but after a long pause, she mumbled something. “What?” I asked. Her voice came out a faint, high murmur. I heard, “Not really … pedestrian things.” “Like what?” I asked. “The woods,” she whispered, and went quiet. “Any woods in particular?” Pause … “The Adirondacks,” she said, and smiled, just as she had on Thanksgiving talking about the Four Seasons restaurant, but now, two days later, she was much weaker.

Her story came out in breathy bursts that were hard to understand. Her ex-husband’s family had a small house in the Adirondacks. She fell in love with the area when she went there with him. “There’s a book.” She strained to point toward a chair. I looked and saw a spiral notebook, on its black cardboard cover the words Adirondack Days, spelled out in twigs that had been glued on. One of the Three Graces, Kate or Cecilia, Lissa probably, must have brought it. I opened it and found a welcome letter. “Dear Miss Fertig and Violet.” It was dated August 4, 1996. The letterhead said “LAKE PLACID LODGE. A Classic Adirondack Retreat.” On the page opposite the letter was a picture of Violet, Carol’s first bull terrier, an over-the-shoulder shot taken from behind, a blue ball in her mouth. The image had been cut out and stuck to the lower right-hand corner of the page, arranged with a collage of other photos so that she appeared to be staring at a panoramic view of a building. A covered balcony extended over the porch. The railings were made of tree branches arranged to spell out: LAKE PLACID LODGE. On the next page was a photo of the word PINE mounted on birch bark and framed by twigs, the name of Carol’s cabin, I guessed, because pictures of a stone fireplace and rustic plank walls came next, then lots and lots of Violet posing for the camera in bed, nestled against piles of pillows. The headboard, too, was a tangle of branches. Some folded note cards fell out as I turned more pages, each one printed with the same engraving of a deer next to a lake, Lake Placid probably, and a poem or quotation inside. From Samuel Johnson, for instance: “I would rather see the portrait of a dog I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.” The cards must have been placed at Carol’s bedside every night when the maids turned down the sheets. Several said “Sweet Dreams.” The one with the Samuel Johnson quote was signed “Happy Trails, Violet” in the same handwriting as the welcome letter from the hotel manager.

And sure enough, there were photos of Violet on a trail in the woods, bounding ahead of the unseen photographer (Carol), in some, looking back, seeming to beckon her, “Hurry up! Follow me!” And one of Violet crouching next to a dock. “She was objecting to my going in the water.” I realized Carol must have been in the water looking back at the shoreline when she took the picture.

“What was Violet like compared to Harry?” I asked. Long pause. “She was a bitch … out for herself.” That startled me. “They’re very alike in some ways but very different. Harry is nicer.” But clearly, she loved Violet dearly. Paging through the scrapbook, I found a snapshot of Carol on a bench, cradling Violet like a baby. It was the only picture of the two of them together. It wasn’t glued in, so I turned it over and saw that it was taken in 1993, three years before the trip to the Lake Placid Lodge. Selfies didn’t exist then, and there were no pictures of just Carol, which told me that she and Violet had gone there by themselves.

I understood and recalled the sweet, contemplative melancholy I felt on trips I took alone. Loneliness scared me at first, but the loneliness didn’t last. I found myself wider awake, seeing and smelling and hearing in a heightened way. For a change, I could pay attention to words and thoughts, worries and dreams, as they came and went in my head. Time felt like poetry. I could eavesdrop. I could pretend. I could forget. I could remember. I allowed myself the luxury.

Once, when I lived in England, I brought my first bull terrier, Piggy, with me on a long weekend. We took the train southwest from London to Dartmouth, a picturesque village in Devon tucked just upriver from the English Channel. Carol took a picture of Violet sitting in the front seat of a car as they drove to the Lake Placid Lodge. I took a picture of Piggy sitting across from me on British Rail, FIRST CLASS embroidered on the linen cloth velcroed to the seat behind his head. We stayed in a nice small inn. Piggy padded up several flights of stairs and, once we got to our top-floor room, picked out a red armchair as his. Instead of a walk in the woods, he and I took a public footpath that led us across a farmer’s field full of sheep. Piggy had never seen sheep before. Sheep were among the great discoveries of his life, right up there with horses. He raced after them, straining at the end of his retractable leash, dragging me running along behind, holding on as best I could. The sheep had his number. They stood in twos and threes, staring at him as he approached. Whenever he got in lunging distance from any of them, they’d calmly trot a few feet to one side or another safely out of reach. Do sheep laugh? I had my camera with me. As I pitched and staggered, I managed a couple of one-handed shots of my crazy dog lurching out of control, truly at the end of his tether. In one, all four of his feet are off the ground. Suddenly, I saw that the field was about to come to an end. The horizon appeared just in front of us. It dawned on me almost too late that we were about to go over a cliff. I hauled Piggy back with all my strength and managed to reel him in a couple of yards from the edge. I looked down. The sea crashed over rocks hundreds of feet below us. When I saw how far we could have fallen, surely to our deaths, I felt faint.

The picture of Piggy in first class is in a frame next to my bed. I have no idea where the photos of our near-death experience in the farmer’s field are now, in an envelope somewhere, stashed in a drawer probably. Why hadn’t I ever made a scrapbook? Admiring Adirondack Days, I thought about how Carol told stories, and how I did. So different, the artist and the writer.

Carol struggled to breathe, gasping occasionally. She tried to reposition the little oxygen hoses in her nose. Finally, she asked me to get the nurse to increase the flow and to give her more of her nausea medicine.

Lissa arrived and gleefully announced she had gossip from their mah-jongg group. Cecilia’s teenage son had been caught with his “fast” girlfriend attempting to undress her in his bed. When Cecilia discovered them, the girl ran to the bathroom half-naked. A serious discussion then took place between the parents. The Three Graces may have been goddesses, but they apparently hadn’t given birth to angels. I saw a glimmer of devilment cross Carol’s face. I stroked her arm, said goodbye, and went to work.