Independence Day

12

Ann is standing in the emergency room lobby all alone, in her buttoned-up tan trench coat, bare-legged, wearing worn white running shoes. She looks as if her mind is full of worries, none of which can be solved by seeing me.

“I’ve been standing here watching you through those doors as you crossed the lawn. And it wasn’t until you got to the door that I realized it was you.” She smiles at me in a daunted way, takes her hands out of her trench coat pockets, holds my arm and gives me a small kiss, which makes me feel a small bit better (though not actually good). We are less joined than ever now, so much that a kiss can’t matter. “I brought Henry Burris with me. That’s why I’m so late,” she says, immediately all business. “He’s already looked at Paul and his chart, and he thinks we ought to fly him down to Yale right away.”

I simply stare at her in confoundment. I have indeed missed everything important: her arrival, a new examination, a revised prognosis. “How?” I say, looking hopelessly around the apple-green-and-salmon waiting room walls, as if to say, Well, you can see what I bring to the table: Oneonta. It may be a funny name, it may not even be the best, but by God, it’s reliable and it’s where we are.

“We’ve already got another helicopter coming that can transport him. It’s maybe already here.” She looks at me sympathetically.

Behind the admissions desk there is a new crew: two tiny, neat-as-pins Korean girls in high Catholic-nursing-school caps, working over charts like actuaries, plus a listless young blond (a local), engrossed by her computer monitor. None of these knows of my case. It would encourage me to have Irv waltz in, take a seat in the back row and be my ally.

“What does Dr. Tisaris say?” I’m wondering where she is, wishing she would get in on this powwow. Though possibly Ann has already dismissed her and Dr. Rotollo both, put her own surgical team in place while I was out having my “dip.” I’ll need to apologize to her for a lack of faith.

“She’s fine about releasing him,” Ann says, “especially to Yale. We just sign a form. I’ve already signed one. She’s very professional. She knows Henry from her residency” (natch). Ann is nodding. Suddenly, though, she peers directly up at my eyes, her gray, flecked irises gone perfectly round and large, shining with straight-ahead imploring. She is not wearing her wedding ring (possibly for the wit’s-end, nerves-stripped-bare look). “Frank, I’d just like to do this, okay? So we can get him down to New Haven in fifty minutes? Everything’s all set there. It’s a half hour to get him prepped and an hour or so in surgery. Henry’ll supervise it. Then the best that can happen will.” She blinks at me dark-eyed, not wanting to say more, having played the big card first — though she can’t help herself. “Or he can be operated on in Oneonta by Dr. Tisaris or whoever, and she may be fine.”

“I understand,” I say. “What’s the risk to him of flying?”

“Smaller than the risk, in Henry’s opinion, of doing retinal surgery here.” Her features soften and relax. “Henry’s done two thousand of these.”

“That oughta be enough,” I say. “Is he a classmate of Charley’s?”

“No. He’s older,” she says curtly and then is silent. Possibly Henry’s our mystery mister; they almost always fill innocent roles as cover. Older, in this case; experienced in treating the ravaged victims of human suffering (such as Ann); uncannily bears Ann’s father’s name as a karmic asset. Plus, once he saves Paul’s vision (days of soulful waiting for the bandages to be removed and sight to re-dawn), it’ll be a snap to lay it all out to Charley, who’ll wryly, maybe even gratefully, stand aside, outmaneuvered round the final buoy. Charley’s a sport, if nothing else. I am much less of one.

“Do you want to know what happened?” I say.

“He got hit with a batting cage, you said.” Ann produces a business-size envelope from her trench coat pocket and moves back a step toward the admissions desk, indicating I should come with her. It is another release form. I am releasing my son into the world. Too early.

“He got hit with a baseball, in a batting cage,” I say.

Ann says nothing, just looks at me as if I’m being overly fastidious about these large-scale events. “Wasn’t he wearing a helmet of some kind?” she says, inching back, drawing me on.

“No. He got mad at me and just ran in the cage, and stood there for a couple of pitches, then he just let one hit him in the face. I put the money in for him.” I feel my eyes, for the third time in less than twenty-four hours, cloud with hot tears I don’t want to be there.

“Oh,” Ann says, her envelope in her left hand. One of the Oriental micro-nurses looks up at me in a nose-high, nearsighted way, then goes back to charting. Tears mean nothing in the emergency room.

“I don’t think he wanted to put his eye out,” I say, my eyes brimming. “But he may have wanted to get whacked. To see what it felt like. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”

“No,” Ann says, and shakes her head, staring at me.

“Well, I have, and I wasn’t crazy.” I say this much too loudly. “When Ralph died. And after you and I got divorced. I’d have been happy to take a hard one in the eye. It would’ve been easier than what I was doing. I just don’t want you to think he’s nuts. He’s not.”

“It was probably just an accident,” she says imploringly. “It isn’t your fault.” Though she is meticulous, her own eyes go shiny against all effort and instinct. I am not supposed to see her cry, remember? It violates the divorce’s creed.

“It is my fault. Sure it is,” I say, terribly. “You even dreamed about it. He should’ve been wearing protective eye covering and a suit of armor and a crash helmet. You weren’t there.”

“Don’t feel that way,” Ann says and actually smiles, though bleakly. I shake my head and wipe my left eye, where there seem to be too many tears. Her seeing me cry is not an issue in my code of conduct. There is no issue between us. Which is the issue.

Ann takes a deep unassured breath, then shakes her head as a signal of what I’m not supposed to do now: make things worse. Her left, ringless hand rises as if by itself and places the envelope on the green plastic admissions counter. “I don’t think he’s crazy. He just may need some assistance right now. He was probably trying to make you notice him.”

“We all need assistance. I was just trying to make him do something.” I am suddenly angry with her for knowing but knowing wrongly what everybody’s supposed to do and how and why. “And I will feel this way. When your dog gets run over, it’s your fault. When your kid gets his eye busted, that’s your fault. I was supposed to help manage his risks.”

“Okay.” She lowers her head, then steps to me and takes one sleeve again as she did when she gave me one small kiss and talked me into agreeing for my son to fly to Yale. She lets her face go sideways against my chest, her body relaxed as a way for me to know she’s trying — trying to slip back between the walls of years and words and events, and listen to my heartbeat as a surety that we are both now alive, if we’re nothing else, together. “Don’t just be mad,” she says in a whisper. “Don’t be so mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you.” I am whispering too, into her dark hair. “I’m just so something else. I don’t think I know the word. There’s not a word for it, maybe.”

“That’s what you like, though. Isn’t it?” She’s holding my arm now, though not too tight, as the nurses behind us politely turn their faces.

“Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes it is. Just not now. I’d like to have a word now. I’m in between words, I guess.”

“That’s okay.” I feel her body grow taut and begin to pull away. She would have a word for it. It’s her precise way of truth. “Sign this paper now, won’t you? So we can get things going? Get him all fixed up?”

“Sure,” I say, letting go. “I’ll be glad to.”

And of course, finally, I am.

Henry Burris is a dapper, white-thatched, small-handed, ruddy-cheeked little medico in white duck pants, more expensive deck shoes than mine and a pink knit shirt straight — in all probability — from Thomas Pink. He is sixty, has the palest, clearest limestone-blue eyes and when he talks does so in a close, confidential South Carolina low-country drawl, while keeping a light grip on my wrist as he tells me everything’s going to be all right with my son. (Zero chance, I now believe, that he and Ann are playing sexual shenanigans, owing chiefly to his height, but also because Henry is famously attached to a highly prized, implausibly leggy and also rich wife named Jonnee Lee Burris, heiress to a gypsum fortune.) Ann has in fact told me, while we waited together like old friends in an airport, that the Burrises are the touchstones for everyone’s glowingest marital aspirations there in otherwise divorce-happy Deep River; and likewise in New Haven, where Henry runs Yale-Bunker Eye Clinic, having given up Nobel Prize-caliber research in favor of selfless humanitarian service and family time — not an obvious candidate for a roll in the hay, though who’s ever not a candidate?

“Now, Frank, lemme tell ya, I once had to perform a procedure just like the one I’m going to do on young Paul when I was down at Duke twelve years ago. Visiting Professor of Ophthalmology.” Henry has already drawn me an impressive freehand picture of Paul’s eye but is spindling it now like an unwanted grocery store circular while he’s talking (secretly condescending, of course, since I’m his friend’s second wife’s first husband and probably a goofball with no Yale connections). “It was on a big fat black lady who’d somehow been hit in the eye by some damn kids throwing horse apples right out in her yard. Black kids too, now, not a racial matter.”

We are on the back lawn of the hospital, out beside the blue-and-white square landing pad, where a large red Sikorsky from Connecticut Air Ambulance is resting on its sleds, its rotor gliding leisurely around. From out here, a modest hilltop and perfect setting for a picnic, I can see the shaded Catskills, their hazy runnels plowing south to blue sky and, in the intermediate distance below, a fenced cube of public tennis courts, all in use, beyond which I-88 leads to Binghamton and back up to Albany. I can hear no traffic noise, so that the effect on me is actually pleasant.

“And so this black lady said to me, just as we were about to shoot her up with anesthetic, ‘Doctah Burris, if today was a fish, I’d sho th’ow it back.’ And she grinned the biggest old snaggle-tooth grin, and off she went to sleep.” Henry rounds his eyes out wide and tries to suppress a whooping laugh with a phony mouth-shut grimace — his usual bedside performance.

“What happened to her?” Gently I free my wrist and let it dangle, my eyes drawn helplessly back to the copter thirty yards away, where Paul Bascombe is right now being professionally on-loaded by two attendants, in advance of waving good-bye.

“Oh, golly, I’m tellin’ you,” Henry Burris says, whispering and raising his voice both at once. “We fixed her right up like we’re going to do Paul today. She can see as clear as you can, or at least she could then. I’m sure she’s dead now. She was eighty-one.”

I have complete faith in Henry Burris, due to our talk. He in fact reminds me of a younger, vigorous, more intelligent and no doubt less slippery Ted Houlihan. I have no reluctance about letting him darn away on my son’s retina, no sense of this being a terrible blunder or that regret will rise in me like molten metal and harden forever. It is the right thing to do in all ways and, for that reason, rare. “Discretion,” Henry Burris has said to me, “is our best route here, since what we worry about in these things are the problems we can’t see.” (Much like a house purchase.) “We’ve got some doctors who’ve seen it all down at Yale.” (Which I’ll bet is true; possibly I should ask what causes wincing.)

My problem is only that I don’t know where to attach my own eyes to Henry, can’t sense him, and not even that I can’t tell you what makes him tick. Eyes make him tick: how you fix ’em, what’s wrong with ’em, what’s good about ’em, how they make us see and sometimes fail to (similar to Dr. Stopler’s contrast between the mind and the brain). But what I can’t tell, not that it even matters except for my comfort, is what and where his mystery is, the part you’d discover if you knew him for years, learned to respect him professionally, wanted to discover even more and so decided to take a dude-ranch vacation with him up to the Wind Rivers, or went on a twosome freighter trip around the world or a canoe exploration to the uncharted headwaters of the Watanuki. What are his uncertainties, the quality of his peace made with contingency, his worries about the inevitability of joy or tragedy out in the unknown where we all plow the seas: his rationale, based on experience, for the advisability of discretion? I know it about Irv, by God, and you could know mine in 8.2 seconds. But in Henry, where a clue would speak volumes and satisfy much, no clue’s in sight.

It’s possible, of course, that he lacks a specific rationale; that for him it’s just eyes, eyes and more eyes, and secondarily a commanding wife with a statuesque bank account, all topped off by his own damn positive attitude. Discretion, in other words, is a standard, not optional, feature. His is the same glacially suitable, semi-affable medical emanation I sensed around Dr. Tisaris, though there was in Dr. T. that whiff of something else under her doctor smock. However (and I’m quitting thinking about it now), this is undoubtedly the very emanation you want in a healthcare provider, particularly when your son’s in need of serious fixing and you’re sure never to see the guy again.

Ann is waiting a few yards away beneath the helipad’s red wind sock, talking overattentively to Irv, who’s still in his sandals and gold Mafia sweater and is all curled up in his own folded arms and a slightly feminine hip-in, knees-out posture, as if he feels in need of protection from the likes of Ann. They have discovered some mutual cronies from the “Thumb,” who went to the same glockenspiel camp in northern Michigan in the Fifties and frolicked like monkeys on the dunes before they were bulldozed to make a park, on and on. For Irv, today is a banner day for continuities, and he seems as engrossed as an Old Testament scholar, although conscious that Ann’s and my continuity is kaput and he should therefore hold some measure back (his snapshot, for instance).

Ann has continued to pass a weather eye my way as I’ve stood with Henry, occasionally signaling me with a faint and faintly puzzled smile, once even a little one-finger wave, as if she suspected me of plotting a last-second dash in under the rotors to save my son from being saved by her and others, and hoped a twinkle in her eye would be enough to head me off. Though I’m not so stubborn and am a man of my word, if allowed to be. She may only want a small gesture of faith. But I feel a change is now in motion, a facing of fact long overdue, so that my good act toward her will be my faithful forbearance.

I have, of course, had a last chance to reenter Paul’s brightly lit hospital room and say my good-byes. He lay, as before, seemingly painless and in resolute spirits, his eyes still patched and taped, his feet spraddled over the end of his gurney — a boy grown too big for his furnishings.

“Maybe when I get out of the hospital and if I’m not on probation, I’ll come down and stay with you a while,” he said, blindly facing the light and as if this were an all-new subject he’d dreamed up in his sedative daze, though it made me light-headed, my arms featherish and tingling, since chances seemed iffy.

“I’m looking forward to it if your mom thinks it’s a good idea,” I said. “I’m just sorry we didn’t have a very good time today. We didn’t get into the Hall of Fame, like you said.”

“I’m not hall of fame material. It’s the story of my life.” He smirked like a forty-year-old. “Is there a Real Estate Hall of Fame?”

“Probably,” I said, my hands on the bars of his bed.

“Where would it be? In Buttzville, New Jersey?”

“Or maybe Chagrin Falls. Or Cape Flattery, B.C. Maybe Sinking Springs, PA. One of those.”

“Do you think they’d let me in school in Haddam in a pirate’s patch?”

“If they’ll let you in with what you’ve got on today, I guess so.”

“Do you think they’ll remember me?” He exhaled with the tedium of injury, his mind flickering with vivid pictures of school commencing in an old/new town.

“I think you cut a pretty wide swath down there, if I remember it right.” I looked studiously down at his nose, wrinkled by the bandage, as if he could know I was concentrating on him.

“I was never really appreciated down there.” And then he said, “Did you know more women attempt suicide than men? But men succeed more?” A smirk fattened his cheeks under his bandage.

“It’s good to be worse at some things, I guess. You didn’t try to kill yourself, did you, son?” I stared even harder at him, feeling my posture suddenly sink with the awful weight of fearsome apprehension.

“I didn’t think I was tall enough to get hit. I screwed up. I got taller.”

“You’re just too big for your britches,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t lie — to me anyway. “I’m sorry I made you stand up there. That was a big mistake. I wish I’d gotten hit instead.”

“You didn’t make me.” He squinted at the light he couldn’t see but could feel. “HBP. Runners advance.” He touched his bandaged ear with his warty finger. “Ouch,” he said.

I put my hand on his shoulder and pressed down again, as I did in the batting cage, my fingers still bearing a scuff of his blood from my rough-up of this very ear. “It’s just my hand,” I said.

“What would John Adams say about getting beaned?”

“Who’s John Adams?” I said. He smiled a sweet self-satisfied smile at nothing. “I don’t know, son. What?”

“I was trying to make up a good one. I thought maybe not seeing would help.”

“Are you thinking you’re thinking now?”

“No, I’m just thinking.”

“Maybe he’d say—“

“Maybe he’d say,” Paul interrupted, fully involved, “‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him blank.’ John Adams would say that.”

“What?” I said, wanting to please him. “Swim? Water-ski? Windsurf? Alias Sibelius?”

“Dance,” Paul said authoritatively. “Horses can’t dance. When John Adams got beaned, he said, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him dance.’ He’ll only dance if he feels like it.” I expected an eeeck or a bark. Something. But there was nothing.

“I love you, son, okay?” I said, suddenly wanting to clear out and in a hurry. Enough was enough.

“Yep, me too,” he said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll see you soon.”

“Ciao.”

And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting.

I leaned and kissed his shoulder through his shirt. And it was, luckily, then that the nurses came to make him ready to fly far, far away.

Rotors, rotors, rotors, turning now in the warm afternoon. Strange faces appear in the open copter door. Henry Burris shakes my hand in his small trained one, ducks and goes stooping across the blue concrete to clamber in. Thwop-thwop, thwop-thwop, thwop-thwop. I give a thought to where Dr. Tisaris might be now — possibly playing mixed doubles on one of the cubed courts below. Well out of it.

Ann, bare-legged in her buttoned-up trench coat, shakes hands like a man with Irv. I see her lips moving and his seeming to mouth it all back verbatim: “Hope, hope, hope, hope, hope.” She turns then and walks straight across the grass to where I stand, slightly stooped, thinking about Henry Burris’s hands, small enough to get inside a head and fix things. He’s got a head for eyes and the hands to match.

“Okay?” Ann says brightly, indestructible. I no longer fear or suppose she could die before I die. I am not indestructible; do not even wish to be. “Where will you be tonight so I can call you?” she says over the thwop-thwop-thwop.

“Driving home.” I smile. (Her old home.)

“I’ll leave a number on your box. What time will you get there?”

“It’s just three hours. He and I talked about his coming down with me this fall. He wants to.”

“Well,” Ann says less loudly, tightening her lips.

“I do great with him almost all the time,” I say in the hot, racketing air. “That’s a good average for a father.”

“We’re interested in him doing well,” she says, then seems sorry. Though I am delivered to silence and perhaps a small catch of dread, a fear of disappearance all over again, a mind’s snapshot of my son standing with me on the small lawn of my house, doing nothing, just standing — canceled.

“He’d do great,” I say, meaning: I hope he’d do great. My right eye flickers with fatigue and, God knows, everything else.

“Do you really want to?” Her eyes squint in the rotor wash, as if I might be telling the biggest of all whoppers. “Don’t you think it’d cramp your style?”

“I don’t really have a style,” I say. “I could borrow his. I’ll drive him up to New Haven every week and wear a straitjacket if that’s what you want. It’ll be fun. I know he needs some help right now.” These words are not planned, possibly hysterical, unconvincing. I should probably mention the Markhams’ faith in the Haddam school system.

“Do you even like him?” Ann looks skeptical, her hair flattened by the swirling wind.

“I think so,” I say. “He’s mine. I lost almost everybody else.”

“Well,” she says and closes her eyes, then opens them, still looking at me. “We’ll just have to see when this is over. Your daughter thinks you’re great, by the way. You haven’t lost everybody.”

“That’s enough to say.” I smile again. “Do you know if he’s dyslexic?”

“No.” She looks out at the big rumbling copter, whose winds are beating us. She wants to be there, not here. “I don’t think he is. Why? Who said he was?”

“No reason, really. Just checking. You should get going.”

“Okay.” She quickly, harshly grabs me behind my head, her fingers taking my scalp where I’m tender and pulling my face to her mouth, and gives me a harder kiss on my cheek, a kiss in the manner of Sally’s kiss two nights ago, but in this instance a kiss to silence all.

Then off she goes toward an air ambulance. Henry Burris is waiting to gangway her in. I, of course, can’t see Paul on his strapped-in litter, and he can’t see me. I wave as the door slides slap-shut and the rotors rev. A helmeted pilot glances back to see who’s in and who’s not. I wave at no one. The red ground lights around the concrete square suddenly snap on. A swirl and then a pounding of hot air. Mown grass blasts my legs and into my face and hair. Fine sand dervishes around me. The wind sock flaps valiantly. And then their craft is aloft, its tail rising, miraculously orbiting, its motor gathering itself, and like a spaceship it moves off and begins swiftly to grow smaller, a little, and then more, then smaller and smaller yet, until the blue horizon and the southern mountains enclose it in lusterless, blameless light. And everything, every thing I have done today is over with.