CHAPTER 26

Peter Frankl tried to explain it to Lesley again, but she stared and frowned at him irritably.

“You’re talking nonsense,” she said. “I want Louis. He’ll do it.” She was sitting upright in her hospital bed, which had been raised to its highest position. Her scrubbed face, without makeup, looked particularly ravaged when it expressed, as now, suspicious annoyance, and her hair, unprecedentedly long, stood upright in dark clumps that showed starkly white roots.

Peter tried again to make her understand, with shorter sentences. “Susan can’t come yet. She’s in a meeting until noon. Her meeting is uptown. She can pick up the things because she’s uptown. Louis is at work downtown. He’ll be there all day. He—”

“What work? Louis at work?”

“Louis works at Hartley Stanton Thornwick.”

“No one told me about that.”

“I think we did, but you’ve had a lot on your mind.”

The therapist, a thin young woman with two tiny silver rings in her left eyebrow, intervened. “Mrs. Frankl, you need to be quiet and rest. You’ve been talking all morning, and you’re wearing yourself out. I’m going to ask your husband to leave so you can eat lunch and have a nap.”

“No, he’s going to stay, because it’s not lunchtime and I’m bored silly. I just want a few things from the drugstore and from home, and I don’t see why that’s such a big problem or why someone can’t—”

“Susan has your list, and she’ll be here in an hour or so. Lesley, I have to go to the office now.”

When Lesley regained consciousness, Peter had taken almost two weeks off work and spent every day with her in the hospital. Now he had urgent business to tend to. His partners were pushing him harder on resigning from the Devereaux Foundation. He had just learned that for weeks Edmond Lockhart had been pressuring his aunt Emma, too, to resign from the foundation’s board. Columbia had received three letters of complaint from seminar members about the preliminary meeting in June. Tending to Lesley all day long, while coping with these anxieties, had exhausted him. Even Peter’s ample store of patience was almost depleted.

“But when will you be back? Not until seven? What am I supposed to do until then? Peter, bring me my flowered robe when you come, and call Becky. I need my cell phone so I can keep it in my lap. I can’t reach that one. Why don’t you think of things like this? I can’t believe you really have to work. Wait . . . oh . . . Oh, I have it, never mind the cell phone. It was under the sheet. What’s Susan’s number—wait, it’s on here. I don’t remember how to—”

Peter kissed Lesley on the cheek and walked out while her words still flowed. He had to, because they would not stop. As he walked to the subway, Peter thought longingly and guiltily of the peace that had prevailed in their lives during the time Lesley was unconscious. He had come to experience it as normal. Lesley had begun talking in a rambling way when her eyes were still closed. For several days, she lay there half-conscious, talking away, half-responsive to things that people in the room said, weaving phrases overheard into her stream of garbled words. Even now, she went into and out of sleep without seeming to be aware of it. She was half drowsing and muttering when Susan arrived and came alert when she kissed her cheek.

“You were supposed to bring me things: deodorant, lipstick, my purse. I need some magazines and some videos. I’m all alone in here, completely bored, completely—”

“I brought you all that,” said Susan, fishing in a large bag, “but I wasn’t sure which lipsticks you’d want. You’re pale, so lighter ones, right?”

“Oh, now she’s the cosmetics expert, too, besides the musicologist, whatever that is. My daughter is so much smarter than I am. I like bright lipsticks, of course. Anyway, why shouldn’t I be pale since I never get out of here? You can’t imagine how frustrating it is having to rely on someone for every little thing—give me . . .” And Lesley reached for the mirror and a lipstick. She was shocked when she saw the frame of pure white around her face. “What happened? How—”

“We’ll have someone in to color your hair, as soon as you’re strong enough,” Susan said. “If you want, I mean.” At first they had tried to keep Lesley away from mirrors. Fortunately, she forgot a great deal at the beginning. This was the third time she had discovered her undyed roots.

“Have I lost my memory? How long have I been here?”

“Mommy, they said it’s natural to forget for a while. You were in a coma since March and you woke up the second week in August. Today is August twenty-sixth.”

“Henry and Judy?”

Susan hesitated. “Judy’s at home. She’s fine. She’ll be in to see you any day now. She’s just waiting for permission from your doctor. Everyone’s been asking about you, all the neighbors.” Lesley looked frustrated and confused, but Susan, by chattering, succeeded in making her forget that she wanted to know about Henry. “Aunt Rita came for a while, and she’s been calling every day, and . . . You know, it’s a funny thing, Mom, but when you were unconscious, you know what you said? You must have said it a dozen times: Top drawer. Isn’t that funny?”

Lesley frowned. “I never said that.”

“You did—really. Ask Daddy. We’d come in and kiss you, and you’d say, ‘Top drawer.’ ”

“I didn’t say any such thing. Why would I say that?” Lesley grew irate. “Your father doesn’t know about it.”

“Well, maybe not.” I shouldn’t have said it was funny, thought Susan. That probably hurt her feelings, and I certainly didn’t think it was funny at the time. Nonetheless, Susan was surprised at how vehemently her mother denied what was obviously true. She supposed that Lesley disliked hearing how helpless and out of control she had been. Such trying interchanges with her mother had been occurring several times each day, and Susan was growing accustomed to placating her when she was irrationally obstinate. Lesley had been captious and demanding almost from the moment of awakening. After only two weeks, both Susan and Peter dreaded her ceaseless talking and her demands. The therapists, too, who had tended her so faithfully during her long unconscious period, now seemed to find the sessions with Mrs. Frankl difficult, and the neurologist who headed the medical team asked Peter, gingerly, after a long—unnecessarily long—examination of her, whether he had noticed any . . . personality changes.

Peter answered without embarrassment. She had always talked a lot, but he thought she talked even more now; she had never been quite so demanding, although she had leaned that way; she had always been sharp and impatient, but she had never been as angry and irritable as this.

“This could all reflect a high level of frustration,” said the doctor, “as well as unresolved anger about the accident or envy of people who don’t have her troubles—any number of things. Or it could be physiological. But whatever it is, in my opinion it’s likely to go away. What we have to do now is try to increase her strength and reduce her frustration. There’s no reason why she couldn’t be walking around in a relatively short time, using a walker, and that should help a lot. I can’t make any promises, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you have her home in a few weeks. I don’t know whether she’ll ever be one hundred percent. Only when we can do finer testing will we see if there are any worrisome deficits. But for now, confusion and forgetting are to be expected, and you shouldn’t worry unduly.”

Peter wondered privately whether Lesley’s volatility was in part a response to her family’s having fallen out of the habit of accommodating her. But he thought it wise to encourage the medical staff in its impression that the difficulties were the result of her injuries.

He did not know how he would bear to have Lesley at home, unable to go anywhere or entertain herself, demanding constant attention. He had contacted a home nursing agency but worried that Lesley would be so difficult that no nurse would stay with her. What would he do then? He might have to take a leave of absence until she got better. And what if she never did? What if he was forced to retire and devote himself full-time to nursing Lesley—and she continued her nonstop talking? In comparison with that, even his work at the firm seemed a life of ease and satisfaction.

“If there is a God,” he said to Rabbi Friedman a few days later, “He is unforgiving.” On this visit, he and Rabbi Friedman were strolling round the conference table in their usual pleasant room, arm in arm. They had decided that the conversation flowed better when they moved.

“Wait,” said Friedman. “She’s probably going to improve and get back to normal. Besides, you’ve got money. You’ll pay whatever it takes to have someone look after her—possibly a great deal if she continues to be so impossible. Be sensible, Peter. It’s you who are piling on the punishments for your sins. Quitting your job and nursing your wife full-time—completely out of the question. Now, what have you done about getting involved with a new friend, someone you enjoy talking to and like to spend time with? If you’re really interested in being good to Lesley, you’ll do this because, unless you do, you’re not going to be able to stand it. You’ll end up leaving her. Could it be that this is what you want? You’ll make it all as horrible as possible, so that it will feel as though you were forced to leave her?”

“I’ve actually imagined having an affair just so Lesley would find out and leave me.”

“Don’t be so sure she wouldn’t choose to overlook it. Many would overlook a great deal to keep their homes and the status of a married woman. Maybe she’d even want this for the children’s and grandchildren’s sake. Let’s turn and go the other direction.”

“Women like that don’t have such a keen sense of their rights as Lesley. Besides, having deceived her and deprived her of any chance of real love and real respect, it would be too much if I killed the marriage because the whole thing didn’t work out for me.”

They paused and looked out the window at a group of musicians walking past, carrying instrument cases. “Where is your father’s viola?” Friedman asked. “It was a good instrument. Why didn’t you ever learn?”

“It needs some work, but I have it. They couldn’t afford to give me lessons. He tried to teach me, but he was impatient, and I couldn’t get it.”

“Too bad. Well, now the topic is your children. That’s enough walking, don’t you think? It makes me dizzy after a while, going in all those circles. Let’s sit for a minute.”

The two took their regular places on the chair and the sofa, and Peter laid out the children’s history as uncompromisingly, when it came to his own defaults, as a tough-minded prosecutor.

“Rabbi Friedman, I wrecked my children because of my problems with Lesley. It was a bad thing to bring children into such a dishonest marriage. Susan is a good girl, but so unhappy. Louis has some devious quality to him. That was no way to bring up a boy, estranged from his father.”

“Well, I have to agree with you that there you’re to blame. You had no right to sacrifice your son to your sense of sin—even assuming that self-sacrifice made sense. And why are you so critical of him? There’s nothing wrong with working for Hartley Stanton Thornwick.”

“Of course, I never talk to him this way. For that matter, until all this happened with Lesley, I never thought things were so bad.”

“I don’t know if I think so now,” said Rabbi Friedman, looking at Peter with rueful skepticism. “I don’t know if I believe anything you say.”

“You have to believe that things are really as bad as I’m telling you,” said Peter. He was teary now about both his children, but mostly about Louis.