A Gesture Life

16

WHY MUST ALL MY PATHS lead to the forlorn, unpolished wards of some hospital? Sitting here in Renny’s cramped but tidy office, I fear I am afflicted. Or even worse. For how can one slight, shrinking-in-the-bones fellow be such a lingering pall of sickness and mortality, casting darkly upon his associates and friends and recently discovered loved ones, who (almost) to the last profess their happiness for having known him, and for knowing him still? They phone him and say grace for him and invite him to their rooms, and then they even send flowers to his house when he should be bearing flowers tenfold back to them, a veritable nursery of grateful tidings.

Renny, thank goodness, will survive. Indeed, as I suspected, it was a first heart attack, and had not the paramedic unit arrived so quickly (having stopped for lunch, by chance, a few streets away at the time of the call), the damage to his heart muscle would have been dangerously severe, perhaps forever debilitating. He was napping this morning when I visited him, still propped up in the tilted bed, the lines to the various monitors and saline drip and his oxygen crisscrossing his wide, bared chest. The fluorescent light fixture above his bed had been left on, and beneath its cool, icy cast, he appeared as if he were alive but being preserved in a kind of science-fictional stasis, his hair unevenly matted from sleep, his skin dull of sheen, the beeps and hums of the machines standing in for the sounds of his living.

Thomas, whom I brought along with me, was initially frightened by the congealed, webbish sight of him, as was I. The boy wouldn’t step immediately into the room; he needed a moment or two to gather his courage. When I finally led him in he wouldn’t go past the foot of the bed, standing there as quiet and unmoving as a stone, as quiet as I have ever seen him until last week, when he was curled up in his own hospital bed after the jarring, frightening events at the pool. His mother, to my surprise, had been the picture of calm when she arrived in the ward. Thomas was by all accounts fine, solely in for a night’s observation and monitoring, and she had listened studiously to young Dr. Weil, nodding and even taking notes in a black leather organizer. She asked him questions about what to expect, what signs of complication might appear, infections and fevers and whatnot. She inquired earnestly after Renny, whom she didn’t know. I stood by and listened, not saying a word, though not avoiding her eyes, either, which weren’t accusatory or angry but rather relieved and a little frazzled, with the depth of that life-worn knowing, that hushing stare of all loving mothers and fathers. I would have gladly endured a fit of rage, or a frosty harangue of disappointment, and yet it seemed she was making efforts to assure the clearness of my conscience, despite the unavoidable fact of my momentary carelessness and lack of vigilance, which I didn’t attempt to diminish when I first phoned with the news. Why she should be so gentle with me I couldn’t figure, except for my obvious tender feeling for the boy, which I suppose anyone would see. But I heard something else, too, or so I wished I’d heard it, the willing sufferance of me in her tone, the first hint of a generous, filial allowing that I probably ought never to deserve.

In Renny’s case, I have deep regrets. He believes I saved his life, when in fact I likely endangered it by not going to him right away. But nothing I say will convince him; I’m his hero, his savior, his lifelong guardian angel. He sleeps much now, so I can’t educate him with what really happened. And then Liv, too, must be misremembering the scene, for she’s been equally grateful and then nervous, no doubt abraded by this rough brush with mortality.

“I still feel jittery, Doc,” she said to me this afternoon, in the corridor outside his room. I had taken Thomas back to Sunny and had returned to resume my vigil. Liv had arrived from her office in the interval, and she was not looking like herself; she was disheveled and not wearing makeup and drinking a non-diet Coke.

“I’m weak,” she moaned. “Terribly weak. I can hardly drive. God, I can hardly dial a number on my car phone. It’s all hitting me. Tell me it’ll soon go away.”

“I can’t truly say, Liv. But I wish I could.”

“Well, please just say something helpful.”

I asked what that might be.

“Something reassuring and wise.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I told her, “Then I am certain your strength will return. So will Renny’s. Completely for you both. And you will live together in contentment and happiness. You will grow very old together.”

“Please don’t say that, Doc!”

“Your strength is increasing already.”

“Ha!” she cried, squeezing my hand. “You’re a good doctor, Franklin Hata.”

“You know as well as anyone, Liv, that I’m not.”

“I know, I know,” she said, brushing lint from my shoulder. She sounded a bit arch again, though still tensed up, wound tightly with everything. “But you are, aren’t you? I mean inside, you are a doctor, whatever you actually know. I can tell. It doesn’t matter if you have a degree or not. You have the spirit of one in you. The essence.”

“I don’t know, Liv. I don’t know what that is.”

“Well, I do,” she said firmly. “And you have it. It’s not empathy, exactly. It’s just that you know what people are feeling, and what they want. You sense their pulses, I guess.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“You bet, Doc.” She hugged me and, to my surprise, kissed me on the cheek. I told her I would stay at the hospital and keep Renny company, so that she might go home and shower and change her clothes. She hugged me again, and on leaving she cried out, as if for the whole ward to hear, “I know the truth, Doc, and so does everybody else.”

But the truth, I am beginning to think, is not something that can be so clear. Not in even the best circumstances. My friend, Mrs. Anne Hickey, wherever her good spirit may be, would have been among the first in line to testify to the “truth” about me. And yet what have I ever done for her, then or now? For another passing hour her boy, Patrick, lies in his solitary ship of a bed with the clear vinyl curtains drawn down around him, unvisited by me since that first night I stole into his room. It’s not the chance of seeing his father I dread, but the hard posture of Patrick’s stillness, the limpid quality of his skin, the clocklike winding-down. His is an old man’s demise, a chilly lessening, which is not right for a child (if any end is), who in the terrible waiting matures with a bittersweet swiftness, a quickened growing up in order to die.

And how further depleted might he appear with his mother now gone? I wonder if he even knows. If I were Mr. Hickey, I wouldn’t tell him, I couldn’t tell him, I’d say his mother had to take a trip, that her old friend across the ocean had died. I’d keep up a lie for as long as he could bear. I’d tell him whatever story he would hope for and believe. I would pool about him a whole history of her absence, too wide to cross and too deep to plumb: a dusky, flooding water in which he might forever gently tread.

I watched yesterday, as she was interred in one of the two small cemeteries in town. I waited outside the chapel in my car and then followed the procession along Church Street and then up past Boling Street and McKinley, to the large memorial grounds where many years ago I purchased my own plot, and one for Sunny as well. It was a day when one suddenly thinks one should prepare for such a thing, automatically and immediately. And it was an unusual decision as well, I realize, to buy one for such a little girl, but I wasn’t married or expecting to be — the other plot one buys being normally for a spouse — and I thought that it would be something like insurance, that we would always have a place for ourselves in the end, which no one could encroach or buy back or take away. But I never told her about it, feeling it was morbid; and then later, when we were having so many difficulties in our relationship, it seemed inappropriate to mention, too easy for her to misinterpret or misunderstand.

Once there I parked just inside the entrance and let the hearse and the long line of cars wend their way to the burial plot; I didn’t want Mr. Hickey to have to see me or acknowledge me or have to consider my presence in any way, and so I walked slowly toward the site, keeping an eye on him so that I might turn or step away whenever he looked up from the ground. Of course he would have noticed me immediately, had he gazed about. But he didn’t. In the warm, slanting light of the autumn morning he appeared still quite pale, moon-faced, his dark suit rumpled at the armpits and shoulders, one collar point lifting. His son was not there, of course, and so Mr. Hickey appeared that much more alone, standing as he was some steps away from the other family mourners, upright in an almost military style, his feet set apart, his hands clasped behind him. He wasn’t angry-looking, as I selfishly expected; he was bewildered, as everyone there was, though his body seemed not to wish to know it, not bent over and miserable but unmoving, completely still.

The minister was speaking in a broad, calling tone, and though I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I felt sure from the waves of sound that his sermon was deeply and earnestly uttered and thus worthy of Anne Hickey, who was nothing but kind and straightforward and estimably ardent, the sort of woman I might wish for if ever I would enjoy the company of someone again, the sort of woman Mary Burns was to the core and that I’d always hoped Sunny would someday become, and perhaps is now.

The minister ended with a long prayer, and then he motioned to the undertaker and his assistants (they were no doubt his sons, from the facial resemblance) to lower the casket into the ground. He began speaking again, perhaps a final consecration, when Mr. Hickey broke from the rank and began walking away, down the hill, in my general direction. This is not acceptable, his body was saying, This is not something for me. Everyone turned to watch him, the minister and others feebly waving for him to come back. Then Mr. Hickey began to jog, then run, almost coming in a sprint down the grassy incline, his suit jacket still buttoned. He passed by quickly, and he must have noticed me, for he glanced back over his shoulder, and it was then his footing slipped on the dry sod, causing him to fall in an awkward, tumbling heap. Several mourners had rushed down to him, and when I reached him I could see that his leg was traumatically fractured at mid-calf, the splintered tip of the bone poking out through the bloody material. He was sitting up and gripping his thigh, puffing furiously through his teeth, and I thought he would soon pass out. An older man, whom I recognized as a retired physician from the county hospital, was urging him to lie back, to hold still so he could make certain the main artery hadn’t been severed, but Mr. Hickey saw me then and tried to rise, reaching out toward me, moaning, “Don’t anyone touch me! Don’t touch me. I want him to help me….”

Then he lost consciousness, and everyone was staring, wondering if I had even been part of the gathering, or if Mr. Hickey had momentarily lost his mind. They seemed to pause, so that I might actually do something, but the retired doctor had been regarding me most skeptically and then purposefully set about his business, asking someone else to run and call for an ambulance.

Under sedation, Mr. Hickey was transported to this very hospital, and one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the area, a Dr. Peter Milhoos, set the leg. I had followed in my car and informed the nurse at the admitting desk that I would cover all the expenses of his stay, writing a large check as a deposit. She thought it suspicious, but on calling the billing office she mentioned my name and Ryka Murnow remembered me and it was approved. I waited until the procedure was finished, and instead of going home I felt I should stay close by. Sometime late in the night, with a key Liv had given me, I came here to rest a moment and somehow fell asleep until morning in Renny’s wide, soft-seated leather chair.

I had dreams, many of them, all pressed upon one another like bits of photographs in a child’s scrapbook. And they were vivid to the extent that although I don’t remember their particular images or events — for I very rarely do — I still even now have the pulsing feeling in my head of near-exhaustion from the force of what must have been their great number and intensity. What is unsettling is that for so long a time my days and years flowed by with an estimable grace, the most apparent processionals of conduct and commerce, and yet in the last weeks the gradual downflow has loosed into a sheer cascade, an avalanching force that has caught me deep and sure.

And I think that like Mr. Hickey, I can hardly bear to be a witness anymore. I couldn’t watch for long as his wife’s casket was slowly cranked down into the earth, the ending-ness and rank finality brutally apparent, the nothing-more of that lowering. It wasn’t only poor Anne Hickey I felt going down into the ground, but her husband, and Patrick, and the mourners who stood there decently and stiffly over the fresh hole (if preternaturally leaning back), and then myself as well, who is afraid not of death but of the death of yet another living chance through whom I might reconsider, and duly reckon.

It seems in kind then that I am developing a quick nerve for whatever I happen to see, like the girl and her brother at the Ebbington Mall. It strikes me as almost pathological that I should be this low about Anne Hickey, whom in most every way I hardly knew, when in the past I could shed loss and leaving like any passing cloud of rain. I’m nearly afraid to leave this tiny office, for fear of what else I might see, what else might ensue, like any boy who is sure his very observation and presence makes the world hitch and turn; but in my case those turns are real and have come too ponderously, bearing ever heavily on my minor realm. Too much now I’m at the vortex of bad happenings, and I am almost sure I ought to festoon the facade of my house and the bumpers of my car and then garland my shoulders with immense black flags of warning, to let every soul know they must steer clear of this man, not to wave greetings or small-talk with him or do anything to provoke the hand of his agreeable, gentle-faced hubris. Now I finally think how much sense it made years ago, when perhaps without exactly knowing it herself, Sunny was doing all she could do to escape my too-grateful, too-satisfied umbra, to get out from its steadily infecting shade and accept any difficult and even detrimental path so long as it led far from me.

Now of course I fear darker chance lies ahead for her and Thomas if I don’t soon retract myself from their lives, that something terrible and final will befall them as did Anne Hickey, smash them without any sign of admonition. Even the thought of this makes my heart leap and hurdle, and I can say once and for all that if a guarantor came forward and promised their lives would be good and full and only sporadically miserable in exchange for mine, I’d tie a twenty-five-pound bag of driveway salt onto each of my wrists and ankles and fall one last time into the pool. One might argue that this would be no sacrifice to me at all, and yet I must confess as well to a strangely timed current of happiness, despite what traumas have just occurred and are occurring, and say that I have never before quite felt the kind of modest, pure joy that comes from something like simply holding Thomas’s hand as he leads us through some mall, or watching as he and Sunny orchestrate the pulling of a T-shirt over his head, his sturdy little arms stuck for a moment, wiggling with half-panic and half-delight. And it’s not just these sightings, of course, that elevate me, but the naturally attendant hope of a familial continuation, an unpredictable, richly evolving to be. For what else but this sort of complication will prove my actually having been here, or there? What else will mark me, besides the never-to-be-known annals of the rest?

There’s a knock at the door and to my great surprise it’s Sunny, holding a white paper bag of deli sandwiches and a cardboard tray with two cups of tea. It’s a little lunch for us, she says, stepping inside the cramped space. There’s only one other chair for her to sit in, and she sits in it, across Renny’s desk from me. She’s neatly dressed again, in business clothes, though I know she’s already stopped going to work at the mall.

“The nurse said I could find you here. I kept calling the house but no one ever picked up. I was starting to get worried. You ought to get an answering machine, you know.”

“I often mean to, but I never do,” I say. “I like to answer the phone in person, as I always did at the shop. Where is Thomas?”

“I left him with the neighbor.”

“He didn’t want to come along?”

“Of course he did,” she says. “But I think he’s a little frightened of hospitals. Like his mother, I guess.”

“You?” I say, accepting one of the turkey sandwiches from the deli I used to frequent. “You never told me this. All the times I brought us here when you were younger, while I was doing business, and you never let on.”

“That’s why I didn’t like being around the store, either,” she answers, almost smiling. “All those depressing devices. Before I came to you they had me in a place like this, but much worse, of course. I know they told you I was at a Christian orphanage, but really it was like a halfway house, I guess. I wasn’t put up for adoption. I was abandoned. I can’t believe you’re surprised. Did you really believe they would give you a wanted child?”

I answer, “They said I would be an ideal candidate, if it weren’t for the fact I wasn’t married. But they were convinced of my intentions, and so sent you to me anyway.”

But I feel myself addressing her in the lawyerly and justifying way I always employed when she was growing up, and I am quite sure I should stop speaking now, or at least speaking like this, and I suddenly say, “You probably wish you had never had to come live with me.”

Sunny looks down, slowly unwrapping the white butcher paper from her sandwich. Her short dark hair is combed back neatly, away from her temples and eyes, the soft, maturing shape of her ever-beautiful face.

She says, “I don’t wish that anymore. I used to. And I used to wish I had never been born. But all that’s natural, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Right. But with you, I just didn’t understand. I thought this even when I was very young, why you would ever want a child, me or anyone else. You seemed to prefer being alone, in the house you so carefully set up, your yard and your pool. You could have married someone nice, like Mary Burns. You could have had an instant, solid family, in your fine neighborhood, in your fine town. But you didn’t. You just had me. And I always wondered why. I always thought it was you who wished I had never come, that you had never chosen to send for me.”

“I never once thought that,” I tell her, “not for one moment.”

“It doesn’t matter if you did,” she says, with a gentle equanimity. “We’re here, aren’t we? Whatever has happened.”

I let the notion suspend, and even happily, for I’ve long wished to taste the plain and decent flavor of being with someone who is likewise content to be with me. It’s a feeling not necessarily happy or thrilling or joyful but roundly pleasing, one that I am sure most people in the world know well, and others, like Sunny and me, both orphans of a sort, must slowly discover, come to learn for ourselves.

“How is Renny, by the way? Was he awake?”

“He was,” Sunny replies. “We talked for a little while. He was very tired, and I wanted to leave him alone, but he kept asking me questions.”

“About what?”

“Guess.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose Renny was curious about you being my daughter.”

She carefully peels the tops from the cups of tea. She hands me one. “I think he knows you adopted me. But he wasn’t so interested in that. He wanted to know what it was like, having you as a father. Growing up together in the house.”

I tell her, “You don’t have to tell me what you said to him. I don’t mind.”

“How are you so sure you don’t want to hear it?” she answers. “You think I would say something bad?”

“No, I don’t,” I say, trying not to sound pleading. “It’s just that I see no reason to put you in a funny position now, when it was probably awkward enough with Renny. I know this will sound terrible, given what’s happened in the last few days, but I’m almost grateful for the way things have gone of late, by which I mean between you and Thomas and me. It’s certainly strange and unexplainable, but I can’t think of another time in my life that I have been as hopeful as I am now, and I am sure it is because you have come back here with your son. I will take that over everything else. So you see how you could have told Renny whatever you wished or felt compelled to, and it would be all right with me. With the misery that has come, there is some fortune. Perhaps even for me.”

Sunny says, “You’re not someone I ever think has had too little fortune in his life.”

I don’t answer, though I glance at her somberly, to try to tell her somehow that she’s both absolutely wrong, and right.

“I think that’s why Renny likes you so much,” she speaks up. “You’re a charm to him. He looks up to you. He’s obviously a nice man, too, and I could never tell him anything bad about you.”

“But you very well could.”

“I could,” she tells me straight, but without any malice in her eyes. “I could. I guess I could have told him a thousand things about you and about me, none of them alone so terrible and damning but taken altogether.”

“But there is that one thing….”

She lowers her eyes.

“I’ve been wishing it never happened.”

“Yes,” she very firmly and quietly says. “But we’ve talked about that already, haven’t we? I don’t want to bring it up again. Please.”

“Okay,” I say to her, though somehow I feel an impulse to lead us to some brink. So I say, “But in fact everything with Dr. Anastasia was all my fault. It was.”

Sunny doesn’t answer. There’s a cross wrinkle in her brow, but she somehow sloughs off my likely ruinous charge and asks instead if the turkey sandwich is all right for me. I can only answer that it is. Before I know it we’re on to something else entirely, namely, her round of interviews in Connecticut, and while she’s telling me how it doesn’t look promising that she’ll get the job or really want it if she does (the store being somewhere in northern Arizona), I see how far past those events and times my daughter is, how (whether psychologically healthful or not) she’s for the present moment put it well away, just a box in a trunk in an upstairs garret closet, this for her sake and Thomas’s and maybe even for mine.

We finish up with lunch and drink our tepid tea. We don’t say much of anything more, except to laugh about Thomas a little bit, as she tells me of his renewed love for all things on dry land. When she leaves I decide to go out of the hospital with her and escort her to her car, which she lets me do without a word. And I think a simple thought, that we can walk like this across wide parking lots, we can have a lunch together in a tiny basement room, and leave off mostly decent and all right.

I’m heartened on my own drive home, and yet I can’t seem to shake what I thought I had put well past me. For it was not in the hospital but in an affiliated clinic that I had arranged for Sunny to take care of her difficulty. She had returned once more to the house, after having been away for nearly a year. She was barely eighteen years old. She had been living with her friend Lincoln in a tenement apartment somewhere in Upper Manhattan. One evening as I was reading in bed the telephone rang and it was Sunny on the line. Her voice was very quiet and shallow, and for a few seconds I thought it was someone else, a prank caller of some kind. But then it was unmistakably Sunny, the reserve of her coming through even the anxiousness in her voice. Of course she would not say a word of how scared she was. But I listened and did not try to interrupt, and by the end of the conversation I told her I was glad that she decided not to go to one of the crowded, dirty clinics where she was living, and that she had nothing to be concerned with anymore. When I awoke I made several discreet contacts and by the afternoon the procedure was arranged and scheduled for the following Monday. Sunny would take the train up to Bedley Run on Sunday and I would meet her at the station and take us to the private clinic for an examination, which the doctor insisted upon before any procedure the next morning.

When I saw her step out onto the platform I was taken aback by the broad, curving shape of her. Her face was full. She hadn’t said how far the pregnancy had gone, and I had assumed it was but a few weeks past her date, perhaps a month or two, no more. Anyone else would have thought that she was too long with the child, that it was much too late, that there was nothing left to do. She was indeed quite near full-term. But when she came out of the train the first thought that came to me was that it was a Sunday and quiet, when there was hardly anyone about, and that I ought to spirit her to the private clinic and to Dr. Anastasia as quickly as possible.

In the car I didn’t speak. What was there to say? If anything, I had only criticisms, and though I chose not to air them I was feeling edgy all the same, driving brusquely, speeding and changing lanes without signaling. Sunny didn’t seem to notice, swaying on each turn, unseatbelted as always, and suddenly I was furious with her. How could she get herself into such a predicament? How long did she believe she could delay? Where now was her “lover,” whom she always talked of being so genuine and serious and gentle? Perhaps he had made a few recordings some time ago, but did he even own his trumpet anymore, or was it pawned for a few weeks’ phantom pleasure and delirium? And glancing over at her I felt my fury redouble, seeing that she had little need to apologize or excuse or otherwise explain, and I thought — darkly, for a bare millisecond — that I could unbuckle myself now, too, and let the car’s momentum carry us straight through the approaching sharp turn, into the stone farmer’s wall that bounded the old suburban roadway. I wanted an end to us, inglorious and swift, just another unfortunate accident on Route 9, to leave a few lines hardly noticed in the local paper concerning a longtime Bedley Run resident and his daughter, with no survivors.

And yet what did I do but nothing unusual, save elicit a sighing murmur from the tires as I wheeled us wickedly around that bend, the same one that I would grimly consider on countless future occasions, and that one rainy night years later my friend Anne Hickey would not survive. If only once I could cease imagining the various motions, and instead of conjurings and dummy musings that leave one subtly affected, take hold of some moment and fully acquit myself to it, whether decently or ignobly. This is not to say I wish I had smashed us into the wall, but that I might have at least stopped the car along the road and turned squarely and given her every last angry bit and piece of my mind. But what happened of course was that I drove home and let her inside the house where we separated until the appointed exam, Sunny upstairs in her old room stripped of everything but the bed, and I down in the family room, listening to the records of Chopin and Mozart I had bought for her to use as models and inspiration. And while I listened to those stirring, ambling notes I might have realized how frightening all this was to her, how overwhelming and awful, but I sensed instead only the imminent disgrace and embarrassment that would hang about the house like banners of our mutual failure.

At six o’clock I went up and had to rouse her. Her eyes were puffed and red; perhaps she had fallen asleep crying. I told her to come down to the car, and she said weakly she didn’t want to go to the doctor that night, asking if I could take her the next day. I reminded her that it was the waiting that had placed her in such trouble, that it was only an examination and she could talk to Dr. Anastasia about whatever she wished. Then she said she wasn’t sure anymore about going ahead. I didn’t protest; I only repeated that it was an examination and that nothing was yet determined. She finally nodded, still groggy, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. I fully noticed then the change in her as she walked down the upstairs hall, the outwardness of her feet, the slightest waddle to her gait. To remember that now makes me feel the way I should have felt, to brim at such a sight with sober pride and happiness, a grandparental glow, though then it was, I must recall, a most sickening vision to me, being the clearest picture of my defeats, familial and otherwise.

We arrived at the clinic well after dark, a few minutes before Dr. Anastasia. We waited in silence. When he drove up he got out of his car quickly and went straight to the doors, his keys out. He nodded at us and let us in and locked the doors behind us. I’d known him only casually; he was one of many obstetricians with privileges at the county hospital, but the only one I knew of who also worked at such a clinic. He was older than I, and not originally from this country, and he always seemed utterly purposeful and competent if not always warm, the sort of professional one could admire for his straightforward nature and his efficiency. I believe he sensed my appreciation and so obliged my request for an after-hours appointment. But when we were gathered in the brightly lighted waiting room, he looked somewhat put out, disturbed. I didn’t offer anything and then he asked Sunny if she was ready to be examined. They went into the next room. After a mere five minutes Sunny came out, and Dr. Anastasia called me in. Sunny walked past me and sat on the waiting room sofa.

When he closed the door the doctor said, “What are we doing here, Mr. Hata?”

“Excuse me, Doctor?”

“You told me she was around twenty-eight weeks. Are you mad? But then you, especially, should know better, being in your profession.”

“She was unsure of her dates.”

“Notwithstanding,” he said, thoroughly annoyed. “It’s not possible now. She’s no doubt past an acceptable point.”

“But you hardly examined her.”

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “Anyone with eyes can tell what’s the case. She has no option left but to carry to term.”

“I tell you she does not want it.”

“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Hata….”

“Let me speak, please, Doctor. I tell you she cannot have it. There are many unhappy reasons. She barely finished high school last spring and doesn’t have a job. The father is somewhere in Washington Heights, and he has practically abandoned her. He is a longtime drug addict besides. I’m afraid she has also begun taking the drugs with him. You well know there’s a chance the fetus may have grave injuries as a result, if not certain mental deficiencies. I’m here now to help her but I’ve run out of patience and willingness. I am sorry and ashamed to say that this is the last effort I have for her. But I will do this. So I’m asking you to help because of who you are and your experience and skills, so that she won’t go to someone else, which she will, and no doubt suffer terrible injuries. You will be preventing further trauma. I apologize for not being more forthright on the telephone, but you see I had to speak to you in person. I feel I must convince you.”

“I do not involve myself in the lives of my patients, Mr. Hata. I attend to them after they have made decisions. But this decision comes far too late.”

“It’s not too late,” I told him. “There can be medical necessities, as I have mentioned. I understand these operations can be very complicated, particularly at this stage, and much more costly than usual. I am willing to do everything I can to have you help my daughter. This is not to insult your professionalism but only to make clear how resolved I am. And I am resolved. We are desperate, sir, and I will do all I can to get her out of this trouble.”

He was quiet for a moment, and then said, “I have done them this late but not in this country. There are different standards.”

“Yes.”

“She appears unsure as well.”

“Perhaps she is,” I answered. “She’s naturally fearful, as I am. But she has confided in me, and I tell you she is ready. We are ready even tonight, if it’s possible.”

“My nurse won’t come here now,” Anastasia said. “I can anesthetize her, but I need my nurse to attend me. I believe, however, that she would likely not agree to assist such a procedure.”

I told him, “I’ll stand in for her.”

“You?”

“I was trained, once, in surgical methods and nursing. A long time ago, during the world war. I’m sure all you in fact need is another set of hands, to give you instruments and such.”

“This is mostly true….”

“I can do that for you. I’m willing to do that.”

“Yes, but Mr. Hata,” he said, considering me grimly. He spoke slowly and resonantly. “You understand what you will have to see. What you will look at. This will be an indelicate action, which I would not wish upon anyone.”

“I understand, Doctor,” I said. “I’ve witnessed such things. Similar things.”

“Perhaps you have. But she is your daughter, Mr. Hata. It will be different.”

I said to him, “I understand.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes, I do,” I said to him, as unwaveringly as I could utter the words, enough so that I was quite convinced myself. He took me at my word, and within an hour she was in her gown and he had given something to relax her. All I had asked of him was that she be heavily sedated, even before being administered the numbing spinal, so that she wouldn’t realize I was there, or much remember anything of what was done, which he did for me, and with success.

The following evening, in fact, when she was recuperating in her bedroom, she would ask if I had come into the operating room, and I told her that I had done so only briefly at the end, as she had called for me. This was true, for she did say, “Poppa,” out of the blue, and I had held her hand for some moments, patting her fingers gently to try to comfort her. It was the first time since she was quite young that I had caressed her so, and the final time, too — still right up to now — for she would leave again just as quickly as she arrived, having a taxi come to the house and take her to the train station for the first express of the morning. She didn’t know that I had been awake all night, or that I’d heard her walk down the hall and slip a note under my door, which read, “Sorry for all my trouble to you. Goodbye.” I almost went to her then, to plead that she remain, but I saw a beam of headlights sweeping up the drive, and before I could even pull slippers on my feet she was quickly down the stairs and outside, closing the cab door behind her.

If Sunny were to ask me now, I would not tell her I was in the operating room throughout the procedure. I would have to lie. For it was much more difficult than even Dr. Anastasia expected, and owing to his skill and great care he didn’t injure her at all, Thomas being proof enough of that. And so I remain grateful to the doctor, for the force of his patience and focus, as it was obvious how much heed he gave to each operation and step. I watched his face and the movements of his hands, his concentration and purpose astounding to me. Once he began he never showed even a shade of consternation, comporting himself with utter professionalism, as though it no longer mattered how much I would pay him (which I did, overgenerously), nor that she was much too far into her term. Sunny was eerily quiet while he worked, her eyes glassy and unfixed, though every so often she would gaze up at me almost searchingly, as though I were some faraway figure in her dreaming, this dimmed man in the distance, made of twilight and fog.

The doctor was right about my presence and participation. For what I saw that evening at the clinic endures, remaining unaltered, preserved. And if in my life I’ve witnessed the most terrible of things, if I’ve seen what no decent being should ever look upon and have to hold in close remembrance, perhaps it means I should be left to the cold device of history, my likeness festooning the ramparts of every house and town and district of man.

But it is not. And I do not live in broad infamy, nor hide from righteous pursuers or seekers of the truth. I do not mask my face or screen my doings of each day. I have not yet been banished from this earth. And though nearly every soul I’ve closely known has come to some dread or grave misfortune, I instead persist, with warmth and privilege accruing to me unabated, ever securing my good station here, the last place I will belong.