Chapter Six
By the time Susannah ran into her mother outside the Café, Ivan and Garnet had been gone more than a week. She was, Susannah told herself, getting used to it. The empty bed, the painting taken down, the space in the closet, the shocked, rootless feeling—all that was easy enough to get used to, the way an invalid comes to accept the hospital, the nurses, the injections, the pain, as natural and proper. What was difficult wasn’t the actual loss, or the lies, or even the dreadful truths the lies had masked, but the knowledge of her own capacity for foolishness. This is life, she had said contentedly to herself: this is what it is to be happy—and all the while the truth had been going on, picking away at her silly happiness like termites eating the heart out of a beam until it’s nothing but a husk, and can crumble.
But Susannah refused to think in such melodramatic terms; she would not consider herself a husk, and she would not crumble. She knew what she was, it was simple enough, she’d known it for years—a silly, blind woman married to a philanderer. Even Ginger couldn’t turn her into a heroine—but then Ginger didn’t know the whole truth. “So you threw the bastard out,” Ginger said, and sighed. “I suppose you know what you’re doing.” Susannah imagined Ginger saying to people—to her beleaguered sister Sheila—“She puts up with his goings-on for years, and then all of a sudden, wham! She’s fed up, and she kicks him out. Not that I blame her, looks aren’t everything, God knows, but it’s a shame.” And what would Ginger say if she knew all the truth? Would words fail even Ginger? Would the mechanics of coping grind to a halt? The Dear Abby wisdom run dry? The rueful laughter stick in her throat?
Garnet had come over and told Susannah. “I think you ought to know,” she said. “Ivan is having an affair with your mother. She lives over in East Chiswick? On this dead-end street? He’s over there all the time. They go upstairs, and a light goes on, and then a light goes off. He stays late.”
The conversation took place one afternoon in the kitchen of Duke’s house. Garnet stopped by after work. Susannah had made her a cup of tea, had commiserated with her about her sore feet, had asked about school, and then Garnet had said, “I think you ought to know.”
“How did you find all this out, Garnet?” Susannah asked her. Oh yes, it was true, she had no doubt of that. It explained any number of things; they pounded at her temples, those things, giving her a headache. She felt like throwing up. But she sipped her tea calmly, keeping Garnet in her stern gaze. Garnet was a pretty thing—young, with smooth tanned skin, braless bouncy breasts, big brown eyes, muscular brown legs and dainty ankles. Cow, Susannah thought.
“I followed him,” said Garnet. She didn’t avoid Susannah’s eyes, and her voice was defiant. “I had to know where he was. And then I asked him, and he told me.”
“You asked him, and he told you.” A light goes on, and a light goes off. “He actually told you he’s sleeping with his mother-in-law.”
A smile flickered around Garnet’s lips. “Yeah.”
“He’s been sleeping with you, too, I suppose.”
“No!”
“Come off it, Garnet.” Susannah wondered at her own bravado. She had never actually seen one of Ivan’s teenage tramps before. Garnet was precisely what she had expected—a pretty, stupid, sneaky cow.
“We’ve never done anything,” said Garnet.
“Then why in hell did you follow him, you little bitch?”
She spoke the words with clenched teeth, gripping the edge of the table. Garnet recoiled, and then the sly suggestion of a smile returned to her face. “I have a crush on him,” she said. “Of course. Who wouldn’t?”
“Don’t lie to me,” Susannah said, but she spoke more coolly. Her mind was racing ahead. He was sleeping with this waitress, sleeping with her—Rosie—God knew who else he was seeing, what else he was capable of. It was as if a light clicked on, illuminating her life, and she could see for the first time how impossible it was. Who could live like this? I must be crazy. And her: she remembered the dead-end street, the house, the flowers, the figure passing the window. The light clicked on, and the light clicked off.
“Only once, then,” Garnet was saying. “Once or twice, I forget.”
“Get out of here, Garnet,” Susannah said, but the girl was already on her feet, on her way to the door.
“Don’t worry, he doesn’t love me or anything,” she said. “I mean, it’s not anything like that. He doesn’t love her, either. He wants to stay with you. That’s why I thought you should know. I’m trying to do you a favor.” Her voice rose at the end, approaching a wail.
“Just get out of here,” Susannah said wearily. She didn’t get up; Garnet’s well-meant malice took all the strength out of her. Was she, then, to be grateful for Garnet’s prying? For Ivan’s failure to love all his women?
“I hate you,” said Garnet, and sobbed once. “I just hate you so much. You never even go to his softball games. I go to his softball games. You don’t even care about him.”
“Go away.”
She did so, crying and muttering. Susannah imagined her sobbing behind the wheel of her little Datsun all the way to—where? Ivan? Ivan would still be busy at the restaurant, and then he would—supposedly—be home, unless Garnet waylaid him.
Susannah knew as she sat there drinking her tea that something would happen. It would be like Edwin, finally, dying; like Margie—something final, something horrible. She wondered for a moment if she would kill him. The light in her mind hadn’t gone on for nothing. All these years, she thought, taking the cups to the sink. Garnet hadn’t touched her tea. Susannah found it difficult to think straight, though she knew she needed to. Everything whirled in her mind: Garnet’s bouncy bosom, Rosie’s house lit up in the dark, mother-in-law jokes, Garnet’s sly smile, Ivan going off in the van, the Silvergate Café, Duke. Standing by the sink, she looked out the window at the summer afternoon and tried to see a straight path through the maze. She had a quick vision of herself sticking one of Duke’s sharp kitchen knives into Ivan’s beautiful stomach. The sun shone brightly, equally, on everything, and she stood there a long time without the faintest idea as to what she should do.
In the end, though, she threw him out. He came home early, with Duke, and while he was out weeding in the garden she approached him and asked him to leave, and told him why. She hadn’t known, until she looked out and saw him bent over, in shorts, pulling weeds, with his whole filthy secret life curled inside him, that what she wanted was for him to go. But of course that was what must happen. It didn’t move her or impress her or flatter her that he begged her to change her mind, and that he professed to love her, and that tears even came to his eyes.
“I’m so mixed up right now, Susie,” he said. “Can’t you see me through this?” She said she couldn’t. “I can change,” he said, and she said he could change somewhere else, she wanted him to leave. He said it hadn’t meant anything, and she said it had meant everything, and she would be very grateful if he would leave. He could have money, she didn’t care if he took every cent out of the savings account, so long as he left.
They went over it and over it. “I don’t care where you go,” she said. “Or what you do any more. Eventually, I’ll want a divorce.”
She left him in the garden. She went inside, to the twins’ playroom, and sat on one of their little chairs playing with a toy tool chest, hammering in wooden pegs and screwing in plastic screws. She heard Ivan come in, go upstairs, open drawers—how sounds carried in the old house—then come down and talk to Duke in the kitchen. She timed it on her watch; they talked for eight minutes, in low voices. It seemed a very long time. She tapped in a peg. The hammer was painted blue, the bench yellow, the pegs red. She turned the whole thing over and tapped the peg through the other side. Finally, she heard Ivan leave—not banging the screen the way he usually did, but closing it quietly—and then the van started up, and crunched down the driveway, those familiar, depressing sounds. I must be crazy, she thought, to have loved someone like him. To love a monster, to be content all these years, and gave the red peg one last whack that sent it skittering to the floor.
“Susannah?” It was Duke, at the door. “Oh Jesus, honey, I’m sorry about all this.” She stood up, the hot tears running down her face, and he put his arms around her. She cried, it seemed, for hours. Everything made her cry: every word of comfort, every thought that came to her, even the sound of her own sobs. They sat in the kitchen, in the rocking chairs by the cold woodstove. There was a plant on it now, a nice old sansevieria Duke had had for years; the sight of it made fresh tears come, and so did the cup of coffee Duke made for her after a while, and the plate of fruit and cheese he set out.
“It’ll do you good to eat, Susannah,” he said, and, sitting down at the table, he began to nibble cheese, looking over at her in a worried way. The late afternoon sun shone through the window in a stripe across his pink cheeks. “Come on. It’s good Vermont cheddar and nice fresh grapes. Here. Have a peach, at least.” He cut one in half and held part of it out to her, biting into the other half himself.
She couldn’t help smiling. She took a fresh tissue from the box Duke had provided, wiped her eyes and blew her nose twice. He continued to watch her steadily, eating fruit. “Wait,” he said, and got up to wet a dish towel with cold water from the sink and kneel beside her with it. “Wipe your face with this,” he instructed, and then did it for her, gently, as if she was one of the twins and had fallen off her bike.
“Duke,” she said, leaning her face against the rough cloth, inhaling the faint bleach odor, and the curious warm-bread smell that was Duke. “I’m sorry to be such a pain.”
“You’re not.”
He patted her shoulder. She took the towel away and looked at him. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Can I stay here until I figure things out?”
“Susannah! Of course you can. How can you even ask?”
She gave a long, shuddering sigh, and stood up, leaning on him. She had a vague idea that she should do something, reject his hospitality or at least prove herself worthy of it: do the dishes? call a lawyer? get a job? “I suppose I had a nerve,” she said. “Throwing him out of your house. He’s your friend, after all.”
“You’re my friend, too, Susannah. You know that.”
“I hope so.”
“You know that,” he said, and made her sit back down at the table and drink coffee.
“I must look a sight.”
“You look all sort of flushed and pretty,” he told her.
“Oh, stop.”
“No—you do. Except your nose is kind of red. And your eyes are pink.”
She laughed and drank more coffee. It was black and strong. She hardly ever drank coffee, and it seemed to go straight from her stomach to her brain, clearing it. She started to speak, but he stopped her.
“You don’t need to think about what you’re going to do yet. Don’t worry about anything. Stay here and take it easy. Stay as long as you want. Hell, stay forever.” She gave him a quick look, and touched one of her long braids. Rapunzel, she thought. “The twins’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he said hurriedly. “It would be nice having you here. They’d sure miss you if you left.”
“I could go to Ginger’s,” she said, feeling she must. She started to get up again. He put one finger on her wrist, and dropped a bunch of grapes into her palm.
“Stay here, Susannah. We’re friends. This has been your home. Please.”
“All right. I will, then.” She ate a couple of grapes, to please him, and cut herself a piece of cheese. “And thanks, Duke,” she added, taking pains to keep the disappointment out of her voice, and the fresh jolt of misery that choked her, so that the cheese stuck in her throat and she had to will more tears not to come.
Ivan left for California two days later. He phoned Duke at the restaurant, and Duke passed the news to Susannah, along with the fact that Garnet had gone with him. She took the news out to the porch, where she sat with her feet up on the rail, chewing her cuticles and contemplating the view of road, brook, trees, and beyond them the gently meandering smoke from the factory.
That was it, then—the black hole gaping, the nightmare come true. She had told him to get out, and he had gone, headed west with a teenage waitress—such docility, such last-minute regard for his wife’s wishes. She imagined him and Garnet on the van’s narrow bed, the fierce lovemaking when they stopped for the night at campsites in Tennessee, in Louisiana, in Texas. She hoped Garnet’s raunchy good nature disguised the soul of an axe-murderess.
Duke stood in the doorway, keeping her silent company, and then he came out and sat on the railing facing her. “They’re not going to L.A.,” he said after a minute. “They’re heading for someplace up near the Nevada border.”
“Spare me the details,” Susannah said, meaning to sound merely sardonic and detached, but her voice came out harsh, and Duke winced, mumbled “Sorry,” and went back inside, leaving her feeling lost, and sad, with the urge to throw something.
She took down the “Cloud House” painting and carried it up to the attic, leaning it against a dusty pile of boxes. She wondered how long it would take for the painting to get its own dust covering, how long before it was just another old piece of attic junk, like the bushel basket full of spidery mason jars, or the stack of rotting leather suitcases. The wall in the bedroom looked huge and bare. Lying there at night waiting for sleep, with the cats stretched out, hot, on the floor or on the windowsills, she was conscious of the empty wall, and she decided she would, in time, get to like it better—far better—than the cheap prettiness of Ivan’s painting.
But it didn’t help her to sleep—that blankness, and the blankness all around. The old litanies, the beautiful words, the bits of poems, none of it helped: Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka, willow-wood, prairie, heliotrope, mallow pink, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.… They no longer hypnotized her, conjuring up the visions that entered her dreams and, eventually, her stories. And her old reveries of Silvergate, plagiarized from her mother’s memories, didn’t help either: the roses, the hedge clipped into turrets, the goldfish pond and the lilies, all seemed irrelevant, more distant than Pemberley. She lay awake, crying sometimes, or trying to plot herself a future, more often simply lying with her eyes open and her mind numb. The house was so still she could hear, from down the hall, Duke turn in his sleep.
Duke became hesitant with her, and shy. He was, she knew, worried about the fate of the Café. She told him not to be, that the capital was hers, and that she still considered them partners. Ivan could fend for himself; as for her, she had bound herself up with the Silvergate Café and she would gladly, willingly, stay bound.
“The money is there,” she said to Duke. “And I’m no business genius, but it’s obvious that it’s not going to be long before we start pulling in a profit—especially if we expand in the fall. I’m not worried.”
“All the same,” he said. “We should have a lawyer. Get it all put into writing.”
“I don’t really believe you’re going to cheat me, Duke.” Susannah wondered whether Duke had ever read Bleak House, and imagined him explaining earnestly to some Vholes, or Tulkinghorn, the tangled tale of Susannah and Ivan and Duke and the Silvergate Café.
“You never know,” he said stubbornly.
“Yes, you do,” she said, and smiled. “Sometimes you really do.”
It struck her, talking to Duke, that she should tell Peter, and her father, about Ivan’s departure. A broken marriage, like a death in the family, was an event that had to be communicated. Peter, however, had gone to Vermont to work on his dissertation; another friend, with another rustic cottage, had invited him. Not that she could have told him anything but the bare bones of the truth; how do you tell your brother that your mother has been sleeping with your husband? It was like that old song, “I’m My Own Grandpa.” Edwin used to sing it to her; she had a vivid memory of him sitting in a camp chair somewhere—in Mexico?—with a drink in his hand and his head thrown back, singing.
That evening she telephoned Edwin, intending to tell him about the breakup, but he couldn’t come to the phone, he was sedated, he was having a bad night.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Mrs. Panza said. “Just pain.”
Just pain. Susannah hung up, knowing she couldn’t have told him and added to it. She remembered the tears in his eyes when she had promised to give him a grandchild, the slackness of his cheek when she wiped the tears with her finger. She was tempted, for one weak, perverse moment, to fly out to California, kneel by Edwin’s bed, and cry—just cry into his shoulder, blubbering “Daddy,” for the comfort of his trembly hand patting her back, his reedy voice breaking into some corny old song to cheer her up.
Duke hired a new waitress, a friend of Ginger’s called Lois. “She’s forty-one, and she’s got three kids,” Duke said.
“You’re not going to run off to California with her?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, not smiling. She laughed, inappropriately, in confusion, and changed the subject. It was easy, now that they lived alone together, to stumble close to what wasn’t going to be said.
The summer days went by, long, slow, hot, silent days that seemed to Susannah unreal, days that hovered like bees, tentative and waiting. The longer hours kept Duke later at the Café—that, or Susannah’s desperately faked good humor—and when he did come home, at night, the house felt huge around them. Ginger kept inviting the two of them down to dinner at her place that first week, and they accepted each time, as if their crisis was so immense it precluded normal life. It was the house’s silence they were fleeing from, and the awkward intimacies it pressed on them.
“You should marry Duke,” Ginger said bluntly to Susannah after dinner one night. Duke was watching the Yankees on Ginger’s color TV, and she and Susannah sat in the kitchen over second cups of tea. The joint grumblings of the dishwasher and the air conditioner enclosed their words.
Susannah flushed, and decided to be honest. “I think about it sometimes, Ginger,” she said, and wished immediately that she hadn’t. No: this was nobody’s business; she briefly disliked Ginger’s warm niceness that had dragged even that much out of her. “But it’s absurd,” she amended. “Duke and I are friends. I think about it only because I feel so lost. It’s hard to be married so long and then all of a sudden be alone.”
“Don’t I know,” Ginger said with feeling.
“But I’ll get used to it.”
“I’m sure you will. I did, in about three days. Got to like it a lot.” Ginger grinned, leaned forward and said softly, “But I still think it’s a good idea.” She jerked her head toward the other room where Duke sat in front of the television.
She and Ginger went in to join him. The Red Sox beat the Yankees 4–2.
“Damn,” said Duke, then got up to snap off the television. “But I can’t complain. At least the strike is over.”
He was getting paunchy, Susannah saw. She thought of Ivan’s perfect movie-star body and couldn’t tell whether the emotion she felt was revulsion or longing. The paunch made Duke seem genuine—not someone she’d made up. Her fantasies about Duke were all of comfort, ease, simple pleasure. She must have been crazy to love Ivan; how sane it would be to love Duke. And how right, of course, Ginger was. And yet there was Duke, as brotherly as Peter, patting her shoulder and making her tea, and going off to bed each night early, with a smile at her that was almost apologetic, faintly embarrassed, fond maybe, but certainly not inviting. The idea stuck in her mind, though, tempting her, affording a kind of comfort—assuring her, if nothing else, that she was sane, and capable of judgment. Sometimes she summoned up the fantasies herself; sometimes when they filled her head she tried to force them out, but they persisted no matter what she did, inventing themselves right along with scenes for her story.
Her story: it was another new one, about a science-fiction writer whose tales came true. It was called “Ashes and Sparks,” a phrase from a poem she had read long ago. After the first few rough days, she was, incredibly, working well again, and the story filled her time, progressing with a logic of its own, originating from a part of her that was unaffected by events, a part that had its own life and its own emotion. She worked every day, with great concentration and very slowly, for hours. Then she went outside to sit, reading, on the ragged, shady grass by the pond or, sometimes, to work in the garden in the sun. She had to force herself, at first, into the garden. It was Ivan’s job; she had driven him away, therefore it became her responsibility. But she was beginning to like it, at least in short stretches. She was getting a pinkish tan; she had never had a tan in California, and she looked in amazement at the distinct white line on her wrist where her watchband went. She mulched the lettuce with straw to keep the moisture in; it seemed to flourish, and she was pleased when Duke said he’d never been able to keep it from bolting in August. She read somewhere that once a string bean is left to rot on the stem the whole plant withers and dies, and she inspected the beans daily, picking them before they got big and mealy.
The cats stayed near her, stretching themselves out between the rows and going to sleep on the warm straw. What a solace animals were, with their affections based on food and warmth, such simple, sensible creatures. She wondered whether Ivan missed them, driving across the country—into the sunset this time, how unpleasant it must be driving with the sun in your eyes—without the cats, without her, with only Garnet, a stranger; whether he thought of her weeding his garden back east, and of the cats looking up at her with their trusting yellow eyes. She patted them, murmuring their names, saying, “Hmm? Hmm, kitty-cats?” as if they might supply some sort of answer, but they only blinked at her, and when she squatted down to pull weeds they tried to climb into her lap.
She kept Ivan in her mind as she pulled weeds, dutifully, almost as though she was cramming for a test. It was vital, she thought, to comprehend Ivan, and what had happened. She wondered what he used to think about when he took himself out there to work in the garden. His deceptions, most likely; how to keep his stories straight and his women happy—all of the teenage tramps, the secretaries and hairdressers he picked up in bars, the idle housewives he amused after work or before dinner or whenever he could catch a free moment. She imagined him, during his five months in Connecticut, in a frenzy of lust, speeding from one assignation to another and then coming home to bury himself in his acquiescent wife. How she had loved him, that poor wife—years of stupid love. And then how quick the end had been—Garnet and her untouched tea, and herself crying in Duke’s arms. She closed her eyes in the sun, and Ivan smiled at her, the tiny wrinkles fanning out from his blue, blue eyes. She remembered what a pleasure it was simply looking at him; he was like a god in the garden with his lean back bent in the sun. And probably, she told herself, he hadn’t been thinking about any of them; the ultimate insult, that none of them—us, Susannah thought, none of us—mattered to him at all. Maybe he thought about baseball, or the California coast, or his childhood, or the day’s take at the Café. He doesn’t love me, he doesn’t love any of us, Garnet had said. It’s you he loves. Had she said that? If so, she had been wrong. Poor stupid Garnet. What would become of that poor cow? She hoped they drove each other crazy. Your husband is sleeping with your mother, she had said. A bombshell. Susannah told herself, from time to time, that she should talk about it with someone. Was it healthy to keep such a loaded fact to herself? Shouldn’t she defuse it by spreading it thinner, collecting reactions and opinions and advice? Should she at least give Ginger a crack at it? But she kept thinking: not yet. She had never, she felt, needed so badly to spend time alone. She had never had so much thinking to do, so many threads to sort, and the most extravagantly tangled thread, the one that kept knotting itself in her mind, was the one Garnet had presented her with—the unthinkable fact of Ivan’s affair with Rosie.
She thinned the lettuce and weeded the beans, and let that fact run through her consciousness until a coherent idea emerged: the reason she could tell no one about Garnet’s revelation was that it had become a private matter—not between her and Garnet, or her and Ivan, but between her and Rosie. It was nobody’s business but theirs, and—like it or not—it made a bond between them. Susannah looked up from the vegetables when this idea came to her, and squinted into the sun. For the third time in her life she felt an alien idea, even a monstrous one, take over her life and illuminate it: something will happen. She had, years ago, decided to leave her mother’s house and follow Edwin, and she had thrown Ivan out, and now it was clear to her, there in the garden, that some sort of circle was on the verge of completion. Edwin would die, Ivan was gone, and Rosie and she were tangled tight together. Like it or not.
She recognized that an immense curiosity about her mother had been collecting in her for years, incorporating the remembered mother, the unreal television mother, the unknown woman in East Chiswick, the fun mom Peter described. What on earth kind of woman was she, who would seduce her daughter’s husband? Or who could seduce a man fifteen, sixteen years younger? Not that Ivan was hard to seduce—and, in fact, Susannah wondered who had seduced whom. She could think about this more easily after her revelation in the garden, could speculate on the details of their affair without disgust. She remembered that Ivan had always liked Rosie. They had watched her television show together and seen that opinionated, funny, gypsy woman on their old black and white TV set, Ivan sitting beside her on the floor telling her what an incredible woman her mother was, how they should look the old girl up and surprise her. Recalling this, Susannah recognized that one part of her feeling about the whole mess was a sort of childish resentment at being left out. There they’d been, her husband and her mother, bound in whatever curious kinship they’d forged, and there had been no place for her. Had they discussed her? Had Rosie, triumphing over her daughter, made fun of her? She imagined Ivan detailing her sloppiness and dreaminess and incompetence, and Rosie coming up with all the old complaints. And she’d never had a chance either to defend herself or to join in their camaraderie—for they must have been comrades before they became lovers. She felt lonely, thinking of what she had missed. She was tempted to go and see her mother and tell her how she felt, but was half afraid that, face to face, the complicated emotions of curiosity and loneliness would be canceled out by pure jealous rage at the woman whose unnatural lusts had destroyed her marriage. Better to leave the bond unspoken, untested, though this didn’t satisfy her either. The idea of Rosie replaced Ivan in her head, and with it came a great longing to see her mother, to have a look at the woman Ivan had risked their marriage for—because he must have known that would be the end. Who was Rosie, Susannah wondered—and what could she tell her? And what would it be like to clasp the hand of a woman like her? And what could they say to each other?
Then she did run into Rosie. There she was, a coincidence out of Thomas Hardy, walking out the door of the Café, looking old and confused and haggard, and Susannah was shocked to find that it wasn’t contempt or anger or disgust or curiosity that filled her but plain pity. Surely this woman—it was Rosie, her mother, wasn’t it? this tanned aging lady in a girlish sundress and too much rouge?—surely she had no power to hurt. She looked as if life had battered her so badly she had no powers left at all. Susannah held the door for her in silence and watched her walk past Wendell’s and across the concrete to her little tan car, tottering slightly on her high heels, looking frail and run-down, like a person who has lost too much weight too quickly. If it had been anyone but Rosie, Susannah would have been tempted—only shyness would have prevented her—to go after her, touch her arm, and say, “What’s the matter? Can I help?” and take her home and give her a shot of brandy and a shoulder to weep on. As it was, she only stood and watched, while this unexpected and futile pity invaded her, muddling everything worse than it was already muddled.
So she told everything to Duke that night. It was their first real dinner alone together—pasta with the fresh tomato sauce Susannah had made that afternoon when she returned from the encounter with Rosie too agitated and unhappy to read or to write—and afterwards they sat on the porch drinking beer.
“No, I didn’t know,” Duke said. “He didn’t ever tell me much, Susannah. God. Your mother.”
They sat side by side, in ancient, broad-armed wicker chairs that creaked, and looked at one another. There was a full moon, low in the sky, straight ahead of them like a piece of fruit. In its light Duke’s glasses hid the expression in his eyes. “I don’t even know what to think about that, much less what to say.”
“Did you happen to see a woman in the Café this afternoon? Just before I came in?” She had gone over there for lunch—had looked up from her notebook and craved company all of a sudden, and food; she liked to get there late, and nibble on scraps. “A short woman, very tanned, middle-aged? in a sort of bare dress? curly black hair?”
“Long hair?” He gestured vaguely around his own neck.
“No. Short.”
Duke shook his head. “I guess I didn’t. Why? You don’t mean that was her?”
“It was. She must have had lunch there.”
“Pretty gutsy, considering.”
“She was looking for him, maybe. She may not even know he’s gone.”
“Well, that’s true,” Duke said. “Ivan wouldn’t waste much time on good-byes, I don’t think.” They each drank a gulp of beer, looking at the moon. “So what did you say to her, Susannah?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t say a word. Neither could she. She was mortified or horrified, I don’t know what. Overcome. She was suffering, Duke. I’ve never seen such blatant suffering.”
“Guilt. When she saw you. After all—” He held out one white hand and waggled it; it encompassed everything. “She’s your mother,” he said.
“Yes, but she’s not only my mother, Duke. She hasn’t even been my mother, not for years. And she’s getting old. She’s fifty, I think. Fifty.”
“You mean Ivan was her last grab at it. Before she gives in.”
“I suppose.”
“And you’re worried about what Ivan’s done to her.”
She looked out at the dark trees, darkening sky, bright moon, but what she saw was Edwin, a few years ago, before his illness halted him, at a swimming pool with one of his young women—his hair thinned, his face lined and jowly, his waist thickened, his legs spindly. He would be in swim trunks—it would be Mexico, this memory—and the girlfriend would be—who? It didn’t matter. And why hadn’t he been pathetic? While Rosie and Ivan …
“Yes,” she said. “I guess that’s it. That’s exactly it. I’m afraid for her. She didn’t look good, Duke.”
“Call Peter.”
“Peter’s in Vermont.”
“Maybe he got back. Call him.”
“I will.” Yes: Peter. It was the favorite son who was needed, not the errant daughter. Peter, she assumed, could handle Rosie—and she imagined Rosie in hysterics, Peter calming her, giving her brandy, saying, “Now, Ma, don’t take it so hard,” patting her shoulder; and Rosie gulping brandy, getting older and older, turning into a crone, a strega, an old lady bundled in shawls with a long sharp nose and bright eyes.
“My mother’s almost seventy,” Duke was saying. “I remember when I first noticed she was getting old. She didn’t look any different, I didn’t think, but she started calling everyone dear. Waitresses, clerks in stores—strangers. ‘No, dear, that’ll be all, we’ll have the check, please.’ That sort of thing. You have an awfully young mother, actually.”
“She was a child bride.”
They were silent again, but the quiet night seemed full of words, and what they said, the careless intimacy of it, seemed like the breaking of a long silence—even though in their week together there had been chatter enough whenever they met, Susannah’s full of forced good humor, Duke’s all encouraging facetiousness.
“I want you to tell me about yourself sometime, Susannah,” Duke said in the darkness.
“Tell you what?” she asked, surprised.
“Anything. I want to know who writes those stories. I don’t know how to say this, but I’m so grateful to you for letting me read them.” He had read “The Cage With Glass Walls” just before the crisis and pronounced it great. “Our Dukey dear is a man of few words,” Ivan had said. Magnificently creepy, Leslie Merwin had said of the story, and urged her again to come to New York and have lunch.
“I’m the one who’s grateful,” Susannah said. “Ivan would never read my stuff. My stories bored him silly.”
“I really love them, Susannah,” Duke said.
If only the pronoun was different, she thought, wondering if she could say this aloud—why she couldn’t, why they got this far and no farther, this close.
“Let’s go someplace tomorrow,” Duke said. “You and me.”
“What about the Café?”
“Monday tomorrow. We’re closed.”
“Monday. I forgot. Of course, today’s Sunday.” Early on Sunday mornings, if the wind was right, she could hear church bells as she lay in bed; she had heard them that morning, sleepily, and thought: the holiness of the heart’s affections, and had worked on her story, and then had run into Rosie at the Café. All on a Sunday. Ivan used to hate Sundays; he was unsettled all day. “You’re a shepherd without his flock,” she had teased him, once, gently, years ago, and he had told her to leave him alone. Even lately, he was uneasy on Sunday mornings. At the sound of the distant bells he had pulled the pillow over his head, swearing. They had made love, once, awakened by the bells, and Ivan had taken a grim pleasure in the rhythm of their tolling. “Yes—let’s,” Susannah said. “Let’s go somewhere—get away again for the day.”
Get away again: the word stood out in the dark, recalling the conversation in Stonington, Ivan’s hostility, Duke’s fear, Susannah’s sorrow, and the fun they had had in spite of everything. A wisp of cloud, like a dust-kitten, crossed the moon and was lost in the thick gray sky. Susannah waited for Duke to speak, and when he didn’t she said, “You know, I used to think of Ivan as my savior. Maybe because he had just left the priesthood—I don’t know. He seemed to take on that role—always trying to improve things.” She could see Duke nod; his glasses glinted briefly in the moonlight, then went dark again. “And he did save me, Duke,” she went on. “He really did. I can’t tell you what a messed-up kid I was when I met him. And for a while we were both messed up. We just kept drifting along. But he finally got things together, and he did sort of save me, and I’ll always owe him that. And now I’ve sent him away. There’s something wrong with that—don’t you think?”
“No,” he said. “I can’t see where it was wrong, what you did.”
“I don’t mean it was wrong. I just mean there’s something wrong with it.” She laughed briefly. “If you see what I mean.”
“I suppose I do. But, Susannah—”
“No,” she said, answering. “I would never, never, never take him back.” She thought of all the resolutions she had broken; this one, she knew, was unbreakable. “Never.”
They sat in silence. They had lived together a week. It was beginning to seem more natural. They had agreed, wordlessly, to go to bed and get up at different hours. It saved the awkwardness of meeting in the bathroom, of wishing each other good night at their bedroom doors, and the absurdity of parting there. And meals, too, would fall into their pattern: a late, simple dinner, followed by a companionable beer on the porch before Duke, who had to get up early, took himself off the bed and Susannah stayed up to read. Could people live that way, Susannah wondered—a man and a woman who were fond of each other live simply as roommates? She hadn’t realized, while she was living it, how sexual her life with Ivan was—not just screwing, but how much day-to-day touching there had been. Could two people live without that? Oh yes, of course, she said calmly to herself in her head, and at the same time she felt a deep, damp depression, like fog, settle around her.
She spoke. “I’ve got to tell you, Duke—there’s something else on my mind, and I need your advice.” She was determined to make her way through the fog, now, quickly, before Duke yawned, stood up, stretched, said, “Well—” and headed for the stairs, calling back a goodnight.
“Oh, good,” he said. “I love to give advice, and I hardly ever get asked for it.”
She looked at him. He sat slouched, with his feet up on the porch railing. He waved away a bug. She could see, just, that in spite of his light tone he was frowning. “Well, I’m asking for it,” she said. “Because I seem to be pregnant.”
The frown smoothed out, and he closed his eyes and lifted his face to the moon. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus H. I. J. Christ, Susannah.”
She touched his arm. “I don’t even know what kind of advice I’m asking for, Duke. I want this child—that’s the trouble, I suppose. I intend to have it. I never should have let it happen, of course, but I didn’t think we’d actually break up. I swore I’d never let my marriage get so bad it would have to end. And a child would have helped us—it would.”
“You don’t have to apologize for it, Susannah.” His voice was thick with emotion—but what emotion? She didn’t know. “It’s just—oh, Jesus, what a mess.”
The fog swirled around her and she thought she might scream, smash her glass against the porch rail and with the jagged pieces slash something, anything—her wrist, her chair, the rolled-up awning. Duke stood up suddenly, and looked down at her, holding out a hand. “But you stay with me, of course. You stay right here.”
She sighed deeply, set her beer glass down gently on the floor, and took his hand. He pulled her up to stand beside him, and took her in his arms. She felt his glasses against her temple. “You’re always having to comfort me,” she said. Her hands, in fists, pushed against his chest, resisting any more comfort beyond his words.
“Not enough,” said Duke, holding her tight. “Not enough, Susannah. You go ahead and cry if you want to.”
But she didn’t cry. She unclenched her fists and put her arms around his neck. His hand on her shoulder blades moved down her back, pressing her closer, and he kissed her neck and her cheek, and when she turned her face toward him he kissed her lips, and she sank against him, circling his pudgy middle with her arms. After a while they went inside, locked up, fed the cats, and climbed the creaky stairs together to Duke’s bedroom. Duke lit a candle. There was a copy of Walden on the table by his bed.
“I’ve imagined this so many times,” said Duke.
For a moment astonishment overcame her, but all she said was, “So have I,” and stepped out of her skirt, wondering what the catalyst had been—her abject need, or the simple passage of time, or the yellow moonlight, or the little fish of a baby swimming in her womb.
It began to rain in the night, and the sound woke Susannah. She got out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom. When she returned, Keats and Byron were on the bed, and she removed them gently to the hall, closing the door on them; she didn’t yet know if Duke minded cats on the bed. She curled up close to his back and pulled the sheet over them both, and, wide awake, listening to the rain tapping, she began patching together what she knew about him: he was gentle and humorous but he took life seriously; he wore glasses; he came from Ashtabula, Ohio; he was a good cook, good with his hands … Susannah smiled, with her cheek against his broad soft back. She liked him. He suited her. He smelled of sweat, soap, sleep. A good man. She wondered whether Edwin, who would never meet him, would have liked him; he had considered Ivan, she knew, a bum, but he’d half admired Ivan’s coarse flamboyance, and she wondered whether he would find Duke dull by comparison—a bit too earnest, too self-effacing. And would he and Peter become friends? And the baby—the baby. Her period was two weeks late, the baby might not be real at all, she must go to a doctor. She wouldn’t let herself hope, wouldn’t even think about it until she had a test. She remembered when Carla thought she was pregnant. Susannah had gone to the clinic with her, sat in the waiting room while Carla went in, comforted her when she came out crying, gone through the months of waiting with her, visited her in the hospital with flowers, and there was Tyler, Carla’s little son. It had all been worth it; Carla got along fine, taking in typing at home so Tyler wouldn’t have to go to daycare, she thought children should be with their mothers, and there was always a man around, what Carla called a “father figure.” It was all right; it worked. Even in the days when Susannah didn’t want a child herself—refused to let herself want one—the sight of Carla and Tyler could bring a lump to her throat. She could still remember the time Tyler fell asleep on her lap and she laid her cheek against his soft yellow hair.
Duke stirred, mumbled something—half a groan. Often, before, as she lay awake down the hall, miserable over Ivan, she had heard Duke turn in his sleep, and once he had cried out, calling what sounded like “Hatchet!” and then sighed loudly, snored once or twice, and quiet returned. His bed squeaked horribly, an old metal thing with springs; they’d have to do something about it before the twins returned. The twins: what a good father he was. Better than a father figure: a father. She remembered Carla saying, “If I only had a father for my baby”—as if a father was some expensive baby gift, like an English pram. Susannah was half asleep. He’s from Ashtabula, Ohio, she thought. He’s chubby around the middle. His name is Ellington James Foster. He reads Walden. He imagined this.…
She didn’t hear the phone. What woke her was Duke leaping out of bed and opening the door to the hall. “What—” But then she did hear it ring, and Duke answer it, and come back and say, “It’s for you. It’s Peter.”
He put on the overhead light—the look of emergency, Susannah thought fleetingly, lights on in the middle of the night. She went naked to the landing, self-conscious, shivering a little. She could still hear the rain.
“Peter?”
“Susannah. Listen, this isn’t serious—I mean, she’s all right now, but she’s in the hospital, and she wants to see you. I know it’s early—”
Even though she knew perfectly well, she said, “You mean Mom?”
“Yes—I’m sorry. I’m probably incoherent. I’ve been here all night.”
“Peter, what time is it?”
“Six-thirty. I don’t even know why I’m calling you so early, it’s just that she keeps asking for you. But she’s asleep now, they gave her something. You can’t even see her until eight or so, I think. Visiting hours start at eight, something like that. But it’s been a long night, Susannah.”
She rubbed her eyes and sat down on the top step, forcing herself awake. Duke came up behind her and put a bathrobe over her shoulders, and she thanked him with a smile. She could see dawn, now, through the window; it was the rain making it so dark. Duke went by her, down the stairs, touching her hair lightly as he passed.
“Peter? I’m sorry, I don’t understand this. She’s in the hospital and she wants to see me. What’s she in the hospital for?”
“She shot herself, Susannah.” The words hung in the air, distinct as bells. She put her head down on her knees. Her hand holding the phone went limp. The phone dropped to her lap, cool on her bare skin, but she could hear Peter’s voice, high with the held-back hysteria she realized had been there all along. “She tried to kill herself.”
“Oh God, Peter,” she whispered. Distantly, she could hear Peter cough—she wondered if he was crying—then resume talking in a more controlled voice.
“Her neighbors heard the shot, and broke in, and called an ambulance and took her to the hospital. By the time I got here they were operating. She aimed for her heart but apparently she was holding the gun at an angle because it missed her heart and got her in the shoulder and tore some cartilage, and the bullet lodged in there. The surgeon said she was damned lucky.” He paused, took a deep breath, and was silent.
Susannah could hear Duke in the kitchen, making coffee. She said, “Peter, why did she have a gun?”
“She won’t tell me. She won’t tell me anything. She wants to see you.”
“Why me?” Susannah asked, but she knew; she remembered Rosie’s sorry, defeated face, the look they had exchanged.
“I don’t know. She just cries and says she has to see you. It was the first thing she said when she came to.”
Susannah tried and failed to imagine this, her mother weak and bloody, wrapped in white, groaning out her daughter’s name. Oh God. “I can’t come ’til eight?”
“I don’t know, Suse, let me check. I know visiting hours are—wait. Let me go ask a nurse.”
“You’re calling from her room?”
“Yes. I got her a private room. She’s asleep. Just a minute, I’ll go find someone.”
She heard him put the phone down, and imagined it lying on the stand beside the bed—tan metal, the stand would be, like Edwin’s, with a box of tissues and a styrofoam pitcher of ice water. And her mother—white, withered, hollow-eyed—lying on the bed, the bed cranked up to an angle. Susannah strained to hear her breathe, but could hear nothing. Her arm would be in a sling, perhaps? or her shoulder bound round with bandages? Would she be hooked up to tubes? Susannah tried to picture Rosie peaceful and sleeping, but all she could see was her mother’s ravaged face, too much makeup, the eyes looking straight at her and away, the mouth compressed by grief and shame and fatigue. Or did she imagine all that? And then to go home and shoot herself, aiming for the heart.
“Susannah? You can come any time, they said.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can get dressed, Peter. She’s at Yale-New Haven?”
“Yes—wait—let me—it’s room 553, in the Trauma Unit.”
“You’ll be there?”
“I’ll stay until you come, at least. I’ll stay until she wakes up and I see how she is.” He chuckled a little, and his voice lightened for the first time. “I thought we could all meet under slightly more pleasant conditions—over a drink somewhere, maybe.” He sighed. “I’m sorry about this, Susannah. Dragging you in.”
“I want to be dragged in, Peter. It’s time I was.” It seemed, as she said the words, as if all winter, and spring, and summer had existed to culminate in this.
Duke drove her into New Haven in his Volkswagen. They took their coffee with them in plastic “commuter cups” Ivan had picked up somewhere and Duke made her a piece of toast. She nibbled at it as they drove, absently, agitated. “I’m trying to imagine,” she said, “putting the muzzle of a gun to your heart and pulling the trigger.” The idea made her want to scream, wail, carry on somehow. It was a monstrous, vile idea, something to read about in books or see on the news. She remembered Kennedy shot, covered with blood; she had seen it on television, not long before her parents broke up, blood in the car, on his wife’s pink suit. She had cried all that night—she and Peter. She felt she should be crying now, but she sat in the little car watching the cat’s-paw raindrops and the half-moons left by the windshield wipers, trying to see her mother doing it: placing the gun, taking a breath, closing her eyes, thinking—what? this is the end, good-bye, good-bye, what does it all matter—and squeezing the trigger. And then oblivion, and blood, and coming to in the hospital asking for her daughter. “If she was a person in one of my stories I could understand perfectly,” she said. “But my mother.”
“You said she looked depressed, worse than depressed.”
“She did. But then to do that, with a gun.” She looked out the window. A gray curtain over everything: fog. “I think to shoot yourself takes a special kind of brave soul. It’s different from pills or cutting your wrists or drowning.”
“Violent, you mean.”
“Yes, and reckless. There’s no going back.”
Duke leaned toward her slightly. “But in this case there was, thank goodness.”
She looked away from the bleak landscape to Duke’s gray eyes behind his glasses. In the little car they were very close together. “I’m sorry about wrecking your day off. First keeping you up so late, then dragging you out of bed at the crack of dawn.” It was a brave speech, and she said it with difficulty; they had been brisk and busy since the phone call, dressing quickly, gulping coffee; he hadn’t even kissed her. There had only been that touch on her hair, the bathrobe thrown over her.
Duke smiled, his face very distinct in the clear, unfogged morning light inside the car: the scar on his cheek, neat triangle of nose, soft hair, the wide thin mouth with its funny smile. “Don’t you dare apologize for last night,” he said. “Some things are a lot better than sleep.”
Thinking, she didn’t answer. Were his words a shy declaration? And was she a heartless woman, to be pondering that instead of her mother’s bloody deed? It was the baby, it was the maternal instinct, she told herself, then looked at Duke’s oddly bony wrists, his square hands on the wheel, and knew it was something else besides that. Tenderness for Duke filled her heart, suddenly, and at the same moment she saw Ivan’s face smiling at her, his teeth so white, his beard so dark—false smile, true smile, it had never mattered. She remembered how she had thought of sticking a knife into him, and thought of her mother in a pool of blood. “Duke,” she said suddenly. “Will you marry me? After I divorce Ivan?”
There was a long pause, during which she considered opening the car door and throwing herself out on Route 95. She held back tears, and more words, waiting. This is the end, she thought wildly. What does it all matter?
Duke spoke finally. “I’m going to say something so sappy and awful it’s going to make you sick, Susannah.” Don’t say it, she thought, and pressed her palms to her temples. “I’m still in love with my wife. She’s been dead two years, and I still dream about her. I dream she’s still alive, and when I wake up and she isn’t I wish I were dead, and I think if it wasn’t for the twins I would be, Susannah. I can understand the gun.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and put her hands over her eyes and bent over and began to cry.
He touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry, too, Susannah. Don’t cry. I’m sorry.” The car swerved, and she looked up, rubbed at her eyes, but he had pulled over to the side, stopped the car, and he put his arms around her, awkwardly, in the bucket seats. There were tears in his eyes, too. “Stay with me, Susannah. You can stay as long as you want. Stay forever. I’ll take care of you and the baby and everything. You can write your stories.” Her ear was against his cheek; his voice buzzed like a radio. “It’s just that I don’t have a lot to give.”
They sat in silence for a while. She stopped crying. It was very hot in the car with the windows closed against the rain. She imagined cars passing them, the commuter traffic beginning, people seeing them with their arms around each other, people smiling or envious thinking: Lovers. She sat up straight, ran her fingers through her hair, wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Enough of this,” she said.
He touched her cheek with his rough hand. “Susannah,” he said, and it seemed to her that he looked at her with love. And yet he said he had nothing to give. I’m always crying, and I’m always wrong, she thought. She smiled, trying for jauntiness, and reached for her coffee. “For years I didn’t cry,” she said. “Ever. My father discouraged it. I got good at not crying.”
“I thought the first thing everyone learned in California was not to repress things,” Duke said, smiling back, and put the car in gear. They slipped back on the highway.
“Maybe I never had anything much to cry about before.”
“I’m sorry, Susannah.”
“Oh, don’t keep saying it.” He looked even sorrier, and she regretted her words. “Now I’m sorry,” she said, and they both laughed. She looked at him, and saw Margie, with gold stars in her ears. “Life is but a paltry thing,” she said. He glanced over at her, raising his eyebrows. “A tattered something, I forget. It’s a quote.” You always forget, came Ivan’s voice. The coffee was lukewarm and tasted of the plastic mug.
At the hospital there was no place to park, even at that hour of the morning. There was a parking lot, not open yet. Duke drove around, swearing, and finally dropped her off at the entrance. “I’ll find a spot and be back,” he said.
“What a pain in the neck this is for you.”
“Let’s make a deal. I’ll stop apologizing if you will.”
Love means never having to say you’re sorry, she thought; that dumb movie. She almost said it, a joke, but she couldn’t say love. She wondered if he thought it, too, and kept it back. “Okay,” she said, kissed his cheek, and got out.
At the main desk they gave her a pass, and she went upstairs in the elevator with a woman about her age in a wheelchair pushed by a man in a light blue suit—dressed up for the occasion. The woman smiled and smiled, as still as if she was sitting for her portrait, her hands limp in her lap. No one spoke.
On the fifth floor Peter was waiting in a chair by the elevators. He hugged her tight. “Am I glad to see you,” he said. He looked dapper and fresh except for brown circles under his eyes. “I’ve read all their Time magazines and drunk their wretched coffee and talked to their bloody psychiatrists all night. One of them keeps asking me about her childhood, and the other one thinks she might be allergic to dairy products. Dairy products! Jesus! She decided to shoot herself because she had a milkshake and a grilled cheese for lunch.”
“How is she, Peter?”
“Sleeping like a baby. She’s fine—physically, I mean. It really did scarcely any damage, considering.” His buoyance drained away as he talked, and when they reached the door of Rosie’s room, down a corridor where the chemical stink of medicine was strong, he stopped and looked at her with his mournful eyes. “But I’ll tell you, Susannah—I don’t look forward to her waking up. I mean—” He waved a hand. “Not that I don’t want her to wake up, I just—”
“I know what you mean. I dread it, too. And I don’t know what she wants from me.” But I do, she thought as they went in: absolution, as if she were a priest. “You won’t leave, will you, Peter?” she asked. “I know you’re tired, but I don’t want to be alone with her. I don’t even know her.”
He looked amused. “I’ll stay, Sister Sue. Curiosity would keep me here if nothing else. And the chance to be in on a no-holds-barred emotional scene.” He rubbed his hands expectantly, yawning through a grin.
“Oh, Peter,” she said, glad he, at least, was his usual self. She felt exhausted already; it wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning, and she seemed to have gone through days and days of scenes and tears and sorriness.
And there in the room was Rosie, the woman at the Café, her arm in a sling resting outside the white blanket, her short unbrushed hair in snarls on the white pillow. She looked dead, unless you went close and saw the faint rise and fall of her chest, the blanket over it, the brown hand at the end of the cast draped over it as if for a left-handed pledge of allegiance.
Susannah shrugged and sat down in a chair by the bed. “I guess we can’t do anything but wait.” She looked at Rosie. At that instant her eyes opened and she and Susannah stared at each other. Susannah wondered if she should speak, and what. She had forgotten her mother’s eyes were so brown, like dark bitter chocolate. Up close, her face free of makeup, she looked strangely young, she looked like Peter. “I’m here,” Susannah said, almost involuntarily, and the heavy lids dropped over Rosie’s eyes again, and she lay still.
Susannah glanced at Peter, who gazed back at her expressionless, then at her mother again. Was she still asleep, the brief awakening a false one? Or had she closed her eyes again as a sign—all she could manage in her weakened state—of rejection? Susannah felt a stab of panic just as she had the night she drove to Rosie’s in the van. Maybe it wasn’t forgiveness Rosie wanted. I’m always wrong, Susannah thought. Maybe it was more curses she wanted, more hate. Her right arm wasn’t in a sling: maybe she would raise it, and slap her, hard, and disown her again, pour out the venom saved up all these years, Mount St. Helens; it would all come out, and it would kill not Rosie who had tried to die but Susannah who was trying to find a way to live. Good-bye, good-bye, this is the end. If she couldn’t kill herself she would kill her daughter.
Peter spoke softly in her ear. “I’m going down to get some more coffee.”
“No!” she burst out, too loud, and looked fearfully at the silent figure on the bed. “Don’t you dare leave, Peter. You promised.”
He sat back down, looking unhappy. A fat nurse looked in, brought a tray from a trolley, and left it without a word. Peter lifted the metal cover over a plate, grimaced, and put it back with a small clank. “No coffee,” he said. Time passed. After a while, he whispered, “Where’s Ivan?”
“Duke brought me,” she whispered back. Later she would tell him.
They were silent again, and then Peter asked, “Where’s Duke, then?”
“Parking the car. Then he’ll be up.”
Peter rolled his eyes, acknowledging the parking problem, and after a while whispered, “I think they only give out two passes at a time.”
“What do you mean?”
“For visitors. Duke’s probably down in the waiting room.”
“Oh hell.”
“Shall I go see?”
“No! Peter—” Rosie’s eyes were shut, her eyelashes two thick even lines on her cheeks, her mouth slack. She breathed evenly. Susannah didn’t trust her. “Please stay here.”
Peter was already up. “I’ll be right back.” He spoke with the exaggerated gestures and lip-movements people use when they whisper. “I’ll just see if he’s there and I’ll tell him to get some coffee or something and then later he can use my pass and come up.” He pointed—down, then up.
“Oh, hell.” She thought of Duke forlorn in the waiting room. “All right. But please hurry back.” She put her palms together in a prayer. “Please.”
He nodded and left, then stuck his head in the door. “Did you tell him what happened?” he asked in a stage whisper.
Susannah nodded, Peter disappeared, and immediately Rosie’s eyes opened again. “Susannah,” she said in a clear voice; Susannah, startled, said nothing; how strange it sounded, and familiar—her mother saying her name. “You don’t need to be afraid of me,” said Rosie. Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m your mother.”
Susannah leaned forward, instinctively, and took Rosie’s good hand. The tears spilled over and made a track down her cheeks, one on either side. Susannah thought of Edwin. “Don’t cry,” she said, and wiped first one side, then the other, with her finger. “It’s all right.”
“I went into the store and bought a gun. He asked me what I wanted it for.” Her voice got weaker. “I said I wanted it to shoot myself with. He laughed.”
“Ssh,” Susannah said, and clasped her mother’s hands tight. “It’s all over now.”
Rosie closed her eyes; tears seeped neatly out the corners, and her mouth tightened over a sob. Susannah stroked her hand. She could think of nothing to say. If it were Edwin, she could tell him she was pregnant; she didn’t think that was what Rosie wanted to hear.
“They keep asking me questions,” Rosie said finally. “They make me so tired. But I wanted to see you.”
“I came right away. But we can talk later. They’ve given you something to make you sleep.”
Rosie nodded, the tears still running without interruption down their tracks. Susannah took a tissue and wiped them again. Rosie kept her eyes closed, and before long Susannah could see she was sleeping, with a half-smile on her lips. Susannah took away her hand, and Peter returned.
“I was wrong,” he whispered. “You can have as many passes as you want for a private room, but Duke thought he’d better not come up. He said this should be for relatives only. I left him in the cafeteria eating a cheese Danish.” He looked at Rosie. “She moved.”
“She woke up for a minute.” Susannah put Duke out of her mind. She felt sick to her stomach: morning sickness? The medicinal smell didn’t help, and the faint smell of egg from the breakfast tray. “She said she was tired.”
“Is that all?”
“She told me not to be afraid of her.”
Peter waggled his head and widened his eyes, an Eddie Cantor face. “Just what I’ve been telling you all along.”