We Are Not Ourselves

35

Connell passed through a long, dark tunnel and emerged into an enclosed courtyard, where he joined a buzzing mob of boys waiting, as per mailed instructions, for someone to usher them in. There were no adults present, so they were exposed to each other without buffering — boys used to being at the top of their class, each now merely one of many. One head towered over the others, and Connell heard speculation about the big guy’s basketball prowess, the city championships he might lead the team to by dunking on helpless opponents. It was thrilling to think of the havoc he’d wreak on their collective behalf, the revenge he’d enact for the years of slights and indignities they’d suffered as grammar school nerds. His size was a metaphor for the greatness promised to them. He would reveal the past to have been a prefatory period, a chrysalis of awkwardness.

In a sudden access of courage, Connell drifted across the courtyard toward the tall boy, who up close had a childlike face. When Connell introduced himself, a startlingly deep, though gentle, voice emanated from the boy, whose name was Rod Henni. He learned that Rod also rode in from Westchester, from a town called Dobbs Ferry. They were ushered into the auditorium, where they listened to speeches, filled out forms, and collected books, before heading to the cafeteria to continue buzzing through an excited lunch. At the end of the day, Connell and Rod took the 6 down to Grand Central together, steeped in the newness of everything they’d heard. They agreed to meet in the morning by the clock.

The next day, as Connell approached the clock, Rod waved to him and leaned his crane-like form down to pick up his backpack. Connell felt the nervous stirrings of new friendship, which offered the potential for mutual understanding but also for disappointment. He didn’t want to start out on the wrong foot and be unable to recover.

“What’s up, man,” Connell said, looking away to affect casualness as they slapped five. He tried to drain his voice of any character whatsoever.

“I’m so excited to be heading to school!” Rod said. “I never thought I’d say that!”

As Rod looked to him for confirmation, Connell realized that this boy was not going to be his salvation. Rod’s eyes were bright, his body hunched in an awkward question mark. Connell wanted him to stand up straight.

When they gathered in the gym that day for a free hour of play, Rod confirmed Connell’s suspicions. He couldn’t catch a pass or dribble. He certainly couldn’t dunk. He could barely hold the ball and jump in the air at the same time. The only damage he could do on the basketball court was to himself.

That first week of school, Connell couldn’t shake Rod, who came to the cross-country meeting with him. It was an open call; there weren’t any tryouts. If you came to practice regularly, you were a member of the team.

Cross-country wasn’t a cool sport. Waking early on weekend mornings to run for miles, running every day after school, and enduring the ribbing of “real” athletes kept people away. Connell prided himself on being a “real” athlete, a ballplayer, but no one would know it until spring came around. He joined the cross-country team to strengthen his legs for baseball, to increase his velocity and stamina. He learned to care about the sport and his performance at it, though, and to feel frustrated by his limitations. He had long, lean muscles and was trim and fit, and he was good enough to know what it felt like to hang with the really good runners for long stretches. As they pulled away, he could feel in his body what it would take to stay with them, to be great.

In practice, Rod was deadly serious, a grinder, Coach Amedure’s example for everyone else. Coach always talked about how he was going to make a hurdler out of Rod come winter. It was obvious that Rod lacked the coordination necessary to leap over a single hurdle, let alone a series of them.

Rod’s times in practice never fluctuated, no matter how hard he worked. He was always a minute behind the slow pack. He excoriated himself for his slowness. The source of this ruthless self-criticism became clear early in the season, when Rod’s father came to a meet. As Rod crossed the finish line, Mr. Henni screamed at him in full view of everyone else. Connell and his teammates gathered around Rod, patting him on the back, but that week at practice they took up the charge themselves, sensing Rod’s weakness. They made fun of Rod’s gait, his heavy breathing, his profuse sweating, even his shorts. Connell didn’t refrain from joining in. He knew it was wrong, and Rod knew it too. When he laughed at Rod’s expense, Rod searched him silently with his eyes. A modicum of natural ability was all that separated Connell from Rod; that and maybe the fact that Mr. Henni was sort of insane. It wasn’t easy to have a father like that, but Rod didn’t help his cause by walking around with an innocent, vulnerable look on his face. That was the kind of look that made people nervous, made them want to do something to make it go away.

• • •

When Connell got home from practice, his father was on his hands and knees in the kitchen, scratching at the brick floor with a metal brush to strip away the dingy varnish. He was making his way from the kitchen to the den and into the foyer, one brick at a time. Connell changed into an old pair of jeans and joined him. Hunched and silent, they worked side by side. As Connell pushed his weight into the metal bristles, he felt the ache of the five-mile run descend into his muscles.

“At this rate, we’ll be done in the year two thousand,” he said.

“Keep working.”

“The fumes are killing me.” All the windows were open and there were fans set up on the kitchen counters, but it was a hot day in September, and the solvent-smelling air barely moved. “I have a headache.” Connell sat up and rubbed at his hands, inspecting them for raw patches.

“You don’t want to help, don’t help.”

“I’m helping.”

“Then do it without commentary.”

They dug at the crannies in the bricks. The solvent ate at the varnish, but he had to work hard at each brick. He thought there must be a machine to do this, but his father was determined to do it this way, his way. He refused to rest, as if he was trying to make some kind of point.

Connell scrubbed another half brick clean of varnish. “I have a Latin quiz tomorrow,” he said.

His father waved him away without looking up. “Do your homework,” he said.

“I can help,” Connell said guiltily.

“Do your goddamned homework.”

• • •

That weekend, his father took him to Van Cortlandt Park for a cross-country track meet. The sunny morning, the expanse of sky, and the brisk winds all filled Connell with a feeling of possibility dampened only by his dread of what would come once the gun went off: a mile-and-a-half run through hell; acid respiration and an agony of fatigue. A little distance away on the meadow, locals chased after a soccer ball, indifferent to the impending torture.

Parents and siblings stood around in a groggy pack. On the edge of the group, Rod was bent over double, palming the ground with his long planks of hands, as diffident a presence as a six-and-a-half-foot-tall boy could be. One of Connell’s teammates, Stefan, who kept everyone on edge with sarcasm, snickered in Connell’s direction at the spectacle of Rod’s ungainly lankiness curled up in an awkward, striving stretch. The only one of Connell’s teammates who didn’t laugh was Todd Coughlin, whose natural dominance on the course allowed him to be generous.

Connell’s father took pictures of the team as they stretched. Lately, his father had taken pictures of everything. In protest, Connell looked away from the camera, tunneling into his stretches, concentrating on the useful burn in his hamstrings and the territorial defensiveness he felt at the fact that another team had started stretching nearby. They were hopping and flapping their thigh muscles out with an aristocratic ease.

After the gun there was some rough jockeying for position — elbows, furtive shoves — as the mob converged on a point in the middle distance. The pack winnowed quickly into a grim line; a natural order emerged. A long, flat expanse led to grueling back hills, where, except for human trail markers stationed at bridges and overpasses, he was on his own, taunted by the leisurely scrawled graffiti on the rocks, dodging horse manure, and trying not to twist his ankle in the jagged ruts in the path. The hills culminated in a precipitous downhill, which he took at a breakneck clip to avoid giving away too much ground. At the bottom, near cars whizzing by on the Henry Hudson Parkway, came a quick turn and a shock of open space, a quarter-mile straightaway flanked by spectators and hollering coaches, where he wearily approximated his best sprint to the finish, his heart and lungs in pure revolt.

He saw the distant mob at the finish line as though through the wrong end of a telescope and wanted to step to the side and vomit. A large pack of runners passed him, calling on some mysterious reserve. He could hardly keep his head up.

He heard his father’s voice before he saw him. “Come on, Connell,” his father shouted gently through cupped hands. “Come on, son.”

He took deep breaths and flung his legs out before him as though they didn’t fit and he wanted to return them to their rightful owner. He gained on the pack a bit. A wall of cheers rose up as the finish line neared. He wanted to come through with the others. There wasn’t much time left to catch them. It wasn’t the first pack; those guys were resting already, turning over spray-painted gold in their hands. What it was was a little cluster of competitors. There may or may not have been medals left to fight for. They always gave out so many: thirty, fifty, God knew how many. The top quarter, the top third. Gold ones, silver ones. Then bronze. Then nothing. Coach Amedure got annoyed if anyone asked how many would be handed out that day. “Why do you care?” he’d say. “Why do you want to feed off the bottom?”

He caught up to the cluster, barely. They were funneled into the rope cordon. Plenty of medals remained. Hunching over, trying to catch his breath, he watched the officials hand them out. Each subsequent medal cheapened his own a little. When the medals ran out, runners came in to less fanfare. Individual voices could be heard in the din. The crowd at the finish line began to thin.

The laggards came trickling in. Among them was Rod, upright and stiff, like a totem pole come to life. Rod’s reedy father screamed at him in frustration and the other voices around hushed at once. The harangue continued after Rod had crossed the finish line. People looked away, embarrassed for the boy, and Coach Amedure tapped his pen at his clipboard in impotent censure.

“What’s that boy’s name?” Connell’s father asked.

“Who, him?” Connell said. “Rod.”

“Stay here.”

Connell nervously watched his father go over to where Rod and his father were standing.

“It’s Rod, right?”

Rod nodded.

“What do you want?” Mr. Henni asked sharply. “I’m talking to my son.”

“I was wondering, Rod,” Connell’s father said, ignoring him, “if you wouldn’t mind posing for a picture with me.”

Rod looked surprised but answered “Not at all!” while Mr. Henni was stunned into silence. Connell’s father handed the camera to Stefan, who looked around in embarrassment before getting ready to take the picture. Connell couldn’t believe what was happening, how much awkwardness could attach itself to a single moment. He rushed over and took the camera from Stefan and framed the shot as fast as he could. His father and Rod were smiling; you’d never know what had been going on moments before. Connell pressed the button once; then he went to Coach Amedure to find out what place he had finished in. The coach looked away in disdain as he showed Connell the clipboard.

• • •

A kid from Connell’s grade, Declan Coyne, rode the train down from Bronxville with him. He started taking Connell around with him on the weekends.

“You look like a guido,” Declan said. “You need to look like a prep.”

“Okay.”

“That mock turtleneck, for one. You need to wear a different shirt. Something with an actual collar. Rugby shirts are fine. Polo shirts. Button-downs.”

Declan had grown up in town and had gone to St. Joseph’s. He knew all the Fordham Prep and Bronxville High kids in the area, and he fit in with them easily. They didn’t care that he was a distinguished piano player; what they cared about was that he’d been the goalie on the Empire State Games soccer team during eighth grade. They probably also noticed the MG Declan’s father parked in the driveway on sunny days.

“That spiky haircut — no way,” Declan said. “All that hair gel. Let your hair grow. Part it on the side.”

Declan’s unruly curls peeked out from under his cap, which said U.S. Open. Even Connell’s Mets cap didn’t make the grade; it was the height of naïveté to wear a baseball cap that represented an actual baseball team.

“And those pants. You look like you’re jumping out of a plane. Do you see anyone else around here wearing Z Cavaricci or Bugle Boy? You don’t want all these pockets and loops. You could be a construction worker in that outfit. Just buy jeans, regular jeans, not those acid-washed atrocities.”

Connell’s mother had bought him the jeans Declan hated. Connell couldn’t help noticing how Declan’s mother seemed to get every detail right: pressing his school pants neatly; wrapping his sandwiches tightly in wax paper so that they resembled Christmas presents; lining up, alongside a bright bag of mini carrots that practically screamed good health, two perfectly round, homemade chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. She even folded his napkins into neat triangles. And it wasn’t just when Declan was at school that no seams were visible: Connell couldn’t believe how neat and perfect-looking everything at Declan’s house was. His own house had never looked like the Coyne house. Then again, his mother had always had a full-time job.

“And don’t tight-roll the bottoms either. That’s totally guido.”

He imagined he looked to Declan like a member of an indigenous tribe that had just come into contact with civilization.

“Throw out those Reebok Pumps. Get some deck shoes. Bass is fine. And nobody wears tighty-whities. Boxer shorts. Only boxer shorts.”

“Boxer shorts.”

“No exceptions. I can’t be emphatic enough about this.”

“I’ll get them.”

“And get some soccer shoes. Adidas Sambas.”

“I don’t play soccer.”

“That’s because you don’t know what’s good for you,” he said. “Everybody plays soccer. Get some soccer shoes.”

“Won’t I look like I’m trying too hard?”

“Would you rather look like you’re not trying at all?”

• • •

The park ran alongside the Bronx River. Its western border was the Bronx River Parkway. Palmer Road lay to the south, Pondfield Road to the north. Trees lined its major path, and broad stretches of grass made up its main terrain. At night kids gathered in it to drink.

There wasn’t much crime in town. The police were always driving up onto the lawn from the Parkway to take the kids by surprise, sending an under-aged exodus toward Palmer Road. He’d seen them leaving the park in a hurry and wondered how he would ever hang out with these kids.

Declan led him to a large group gathered a little ways from the path. Most of the guys, Declan said, went to Fordham Prep; a couple went to Iona; a few went to Bronxville High. The girls went to Ursuline, Holy Child, or Bronxville. There were older guys too: college students, dropouts, guys who had never gone to college and were working jobs.

One guy held a flashlight up to his own face as Declan introduced Connell, so that his features jumped out spookily. He had a fleshy face situated atop a pink-and-white-striped Oxford shirt. His eyes looked bloodshot. Declan said he was a senior at Fordham.

“Here,” the guy said. “Have a beer.”

He pulled a bottle out of a six-pack sleeve and handed it to Connell, who felt he couldn’t refuse. He tried to twist off the top.

“Let me get that for you.” The guy popped the cap off with an opener on his key chain. Declan waved over a guy who looked about Connell’s age.

“Brewster, Connell,” Declan said.

“So you go to school with this kid?” Brewster pointed to Declan.

“Yeah,” Connell said, “but I’ll probably fail out. I’ll probably wind up at Fordham. I don’t want to work all the time.”

These kids didn’t need to know that Connell was pulling good grades. He didn’t want to start out in this town having everyone think he was just a nerd.

“You want another one?” the older guy asked, taking the bottle from Connell’s hands. Connell had drained it into the ground when no one was watching. With Declan looking at him with a slightly buzzed warmth, Connell felt the need to actually drink this one. He took a sip; it tasted bitter.

“You see that girl over there?” Declan was talking louder now. “The blonde? Her name’s Rebecca. She’ll suck your dick. You ever have your dick sucked?”

Connell hadn’t ever even kissed a girl. “Nah,” he said. “Not yet.”

“She’ll fool around with anyone.”

He couldn’t understand why a girl that pretty would fool around with just anyone.

“Did you ever fool around with her?” Connell asked.

Declan’s face spread in a slow smile. “It was great,” he said. “Feels awesome.” He finished off his beer. “Why don’t you go and talk to her?”

Declan pushed him in her direction. She was standing near the older guy who’d given him his first beer, and he chugged the bottle in his hand and went over and asked for another.

“My man,” the guy said approvingly. “Plenty to go around.”

He felt a burp coming up through his chest and let it out as the guy opened his beer for him. Rebecca had a cherubic face and a sweet smile. It was hard to imagine her being easy. Somebody made a joke and she laughed in a giggly way that made a wave of warmth pass over Connell’s body. Declan came over and introduced him to a couple of nearly identically dressed guys, and Connell returned their desultory handshakes. He could feel the alcohol settling in. He felt a strange boldness steal into him.

“Is it always this dead around here?” he asked, and felt Rebecca look interestedly at him.

“Pretty much,” one guy said.

“If I ever brought my boys from the city up here,” he said, “these cops would shit their pants.”

“Hard guy,” one guy said derisively; Connell saw him look at another guy and smirk.

“I used to be in a gang,” Connell said. He saw Declan shake his head. “I wonder what these cops would do if anything real ever happened here.”

The guy made a remark Connell didn’t hear, and the other guys started laughing. He wanted to say something witty, but nothing came to him. Rebecca walked off toward the trees by the river. Declan shifted his body, so he had his back to Connell as he talked to his friends. Connell couldn’t hear them. When the others walked off, Declan stood there with him.

“Please tell me that was ironic,” Declan said. “Please tell me you’re not that corny.”

Connell just drank his beer. When he was done, he went back to the flashlight guy for another.

• • •

People around him began to scatter before he realized what was going on. He was at the outskirts of the group closest to the cop car, and there was time to run and join the pack of kids leaving the park, but for some reason he just stood there. He was drunk, that was certain. He’d never been drunk before. The next thing he knew, an officer was removing the beer from his hand. “That’s evidence now,” the officer said. Another officer told him to stand against the car with his hands behind his back.

He’d played with handcuffs as a kid, but these were more substantial. They dug into his wrist bones. He felt himself being urged down into the car, and he sat back with a wince, the metal digging into his skin. The officers climbed in and they drove off. Through the grating he studied the impressive backs of their heads and felt strangely calm. The revolving lights illuminated the muddy grass outside. He knew he should probably be more upset, but something about this felt inevitable somehow. His parents were going to kill him.

They drove to the station house. One of the officers led him to a little room. “I’ll bring you a glass of water,” he said. “Have a seat.”

Connell sat in the desk chair the officer pointed to, his head pounding. Above him, a framed print depicted a seafaring mission. The officer walked in with a glass, and Connell drained it.

“What I’m interested in hearing is where you got the alcohol. Did you purchase it yourself?”

Connell shook his head.

“I’m going to need verbal responses from you.”

“I don’t know who gave it to me,” he said. “It was an older kid.”

The other officer stood. “This is going to be in the paper, you understand,” he said. “Your school is going to hear about this. Your parents are on their way here.”

“They are?”

“What was the kid’s name?”

“I just moved here, Officer,” he said. “I don’t know anybody’s name.”

“Do you remember anything about him?” the other officer asked.

“He was an older kid. A nice guy. He had on a collared shirt.”

“This kid is wasting our time.”

“You’re going to go to juvenile court,” the first officer said. “We take this kind of thing seriously around here. You should know that right now. This isn’t wherever you came from.”

“Jackson Heights.”

“Wherever the hell.”

• • •

A little while later, his parents arrived. When his mother walked in, she smacked his face. His father looked more concerned than furious.

He was grounded from everything but cross-country practice. At the juvenile court in Eastchester, the DA offered a plea deal: thirty hours of community service. Connell had to stand before the judge. “If I ever see you in my courtroom again,” the judge said, “you’d better have a toothbrush with you.”

On the way out, his mother added her own threat. “If you ever disgrace me like that in this town again,” she said, “don’t come home. And don’t even think of taking another drink until you turn twenty-one. You’re not even close to man enough to handle it.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Not even close to man enough,” she said again.

36

Because Ed’s floor project had taken over most of the kitchen except for a narrow path between the refrigerator, sink, and stove, they ate their meals in the dining room. She was going to have to give up the dining room when Ed turned his attention to the rotted-out floor beneath it, but in the meantime she was determined to enjoy it. She had pinned up a bed sheet to separate it from the living room, which was packed not only with its own furniture but also with the pieces destined for the den and the foyer when Ed was done with the bricks. The dining room was her sanctuary. She had brought it to such a fastidious level of completion that it looked like a little theater in which a nightly drama was staged. The china leaned against the back of the cabinet, the polished candlesticks stood sentinel on the breakfront, the crystals sparkled in the chandelier after a chemical bath, and the white field of the lace tablecloth suggested a pristine altar.

Ed took a seat, rivulets of sweat still running from his head. He dropped his drenched forearms on the table and wiped his brow with the napkin she’d folded neatly.

When the kitchen floor was finished, the new cabinets and countertops could be installed.

“I don’t know why you don’t let me bring a contractor in for the floors,” she said. “We have money for help.”

“I’m doing a fine job,” he said.

“I don’t want to live like this. We didn’t buy this house to live out of boxes. I want a real kitchen.”

They had some money to work with. After they’d paid the depreciation recapture tax (she regretted the low rents she’d charged the Orlandos all those years; the house had hardly generated “income” to speak of) and put 50 percent down on the new house, they’d pulled over forty thousand dollars out of the Jackson Heights house to make improvements with.

“You’ll have your precious kitchen,” Ed said. “The floor will be done soon enough.”

“We’re already two weeks from November, Ed. We could bring guys in and have this done in a day. They probably have machines that could do this in a couple of hours.”

He grabbed her by the wrist, leaned into her.

“One guy touches that floor — one single guy that’s not myself or Connell — and I’ve had it. Do you understand?”

She wrested herself free. “Have it your way,” she said bitterly, rubbing at her wrist. “But don’t expect any help from that boy. You’re going to be the hero on this, be the hero. He’s not helping you. He has too much work at school.”

“I don’t need his help.”

She could almost taste the disgust she felt. A curd of sarcasm gathered in her mouth.

“Good,” she said. “This is just beautiful. This is everything I dreamed it would be.”

37

At the gas station, when his father went inside to pay, Connell’s mother whipped around to him in the backseat.

“I just want you to know,” she said, “how much this means to your father. I would have preferred to stay in a nice bed-and-breakfast by the mountains and look at the foliage. But your father wanted to do this for you. You remember that, and be grateful. Do you hear me?”

“Fine,” he said.

“And I have a bone to pick with you. What did you say to upset him before we left this morning? He said it was between the two of you, but I could tell he was bothered by it.”

“Nothing,” Connell said.

“I’m sure it wasn’t nothing.”

“He’s right. It is between us.”

“Don’t get testy with me,” his mother said. “You live under our roof. Don’t you forget that.”

He didn’t want to tell his mother what he’d said. It would confirm that he was just the sort of brat she’d been implying he was. He didn’t know why he’d said it; it had just come out. He and his father had been standing near the sink together. Connell was rinsing his dish before he put it in the dishwasher, and his father reached across him for a hand towel, and as he did so, Connell said, “You have bad breath.” His father looked at him quizzically, and Connell said it again, a little differently this time: “Your breath stinks.” His father put his hand up to his mouth to blow some air into his nose, and then he looked at him with a look that could have been hurt, confused, or grateful, Connell couldn’t tell which. “Thanks,” his father said, again inconclusively, and he left the room and headed to the bathroom. He didn’t come out for almost an hour. Connell heard him brushing his teeth endlessly in there, the tap running while he brushed, and then silence, and then the tap running again.

His mother’s mood brightened when they got to Cooperstown, which was full of nice little stores. They parked and walked to the Hall of Fame, a red brick structure that looked like a university building or a large post office. Outside, at his father’s request, his mother took a picture of the two of them in front of one of the rounded doors. Then she left to go shopping. They arranged to meet back in front in two hours.

Inside, Connell and his father walked past the parade of plaques. His father pointed out players he’d loved in his day — Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese. He complained that Gil Hodges, his favorite player, hadn’t been elected along with the others. He stopped at the plaques of players he’d admired for their personal characteristics who hadn’t been Dodgers: Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, Roberto Clemente. It was cool to read the plaques and see how the writers of these brief biographies condensed players’ careers into a handful of statistics and a few pithy lines, but Connell would have liked it more when he was about twelve. He couldn’t get enough of this stuff then.

After a little while it felt like they’d seen a lot, and Connell was thinking about lunch and wondering whether his mother might have had a point about the foliage, which, boring as it was, at least wouldn’t have required him to spare his father’s feelings by pretending to be as interested in this stuff as his father wanted him to be. They were passing through a big room with glass cases on all sides and people crossing in every direction when his father stopped short.

“The next time we come here,” his father said, “they’ll be inducting you.”

Connell waited for an ironic chuckle, but it didn’t come. “Sure, Dad,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Okay.”

He was good enough to make his high school team, but he wasn’t going to get scouted; his father knew that as well as he did.

“I want you to listen to me,” his father said. “I’m going to talk to you seriously for a minute.”

A cute girl was standing with her parents and her little brother, looking at some old mitts in a case.

“Here?” Connell asked. “Does it have to be here?”

“I’ve noticed something in you that worries me,” his father said. “Maybe because it reminds me of me at your age. I made life harder for myself than it needed to be. I see you hardening yourself. That isn’t you. I see you closing your mind. You are open and beautiful.”

“All right, Dad,” he said, putting his hands up to stop him.

“Do you understand what I mean by that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I’m okay, Dad. I’m good. You don’t have to worry.”

“You are okay,” his father said. “You’re more than okay. You’re wonderful. I know that, believe me. But there’s something in you that is closing up.”

“Dad,” he said, “is this about me saying you had bad breath?”

His father laughed. “Listen. I’m going to ask you to do something you might find a little strange. Will you do it for me?”

“What is it?”

“You’ll have to trust me.”

“Is it going to be embarrassing?”

“Nobody but us will know about it.”

“All right.” Connell slapped his hands on his thighs in defeat. “Okay. Sure.”

“Life is going to give you things to be angry at. I don’t want you to be consumed by that anger or forget how much you’re capable of. So we’re going to do a little exercise right now.”

“Are you okay? I mean, is everything all right?”

“I’m fine,” his father said. “Are you ready?”

“Sure.” Now Connell was genuinely curious.

“What I want you to do now is to feel in your bones that the next time we are here, they will be inducting you.”

This was too much. “What does that even mean?” Connell asked as the cute girl passed him, meeting his gaze.

“Shh,” his father said. “Close your eyes.”

Connell closed them.

“I am telling you that we will be back here when they are inducting you. I want you to feel the reality of that for a moment.”

“Okay,” he said, relenting a bit. There was something sort of exciting in the way his father had said it. He sounded so sure. Connell wanted to believe his father could see the future or something.

“Feel it. Let yourself. You pitched for the Mets your whole career. You heard your name over the loudspeaker thousands of times. You heard the cheers. You heard the boos. You played on grass. You played on Astroturf. You killed your shoulder, you blew out your elbow, you mangled your knuckles, but it was worth it. You set aside seats at every home game. Your kids were in those seats. Your wife was. Now you’re looking at a plaque with your face on it. You’re thinking the portrait makes you look like someone else, but it’s you — those are your numbers, under your name.”

The way his father said it was like he’d been talking about more than baseball, more than the Hall of Fame. He meant it to mean whatever Connell wanted it to mean; he meant it to mean he believed in him.

And then, somehow, Connell did feel it: what it was like to have brought joy to people and done something extraordinary. He never let himself imagine outcomes like that. He didn’t want to open his eyes.

“I want you to really feel it,” his father said. “And I want you to remember that feeling, because it is as real as any experience you will have in your life. Will you remember?”

Connell nodded with his eyes closed.

“You have to use your imagination,” his father said.

Connell could feel his mind opening like a flower in bloom. If he wasn’t afraid to consider the impossible — that he would be a Major League ballplayer people would talk about for years — then in imagining it, he would not need to live it; he could have it, along with whatever else he wanted.

“Okay,” Connell said. He could hear people passing by. He didn’t peek, but he could see them going past, what they were wearing, the looks on their faces.

“Do you feel powerful?”

“Yes,” he said, and he did; he had stepped outside time.

“Are you angry right now?”

“No.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

“Do you know that I love you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Open your eyes,” his father said, but Connell waited a bit, because something told him they would never be back where they were. “Let’s go find your mother.”

38

The kitchen cabinets were installed on a Friday. When Eileen came home from work after a week that had threatened never to end, and saw their pristine white surfaces, she stood leaning against the island she’d always coveted, looking around in frank amazement. Then she began opening doors and running her hand for pleasure over the sanded interiors. She couldn’t wait to head to the Food Emporium. Ever since she’d emptied out the cabinets in preparation for their dismantling, she’d anticipated with great relish this restorative trip.

The next morning, she waited for the countertop man to arrive with his enormous slabs. She had settled on Corian, because granite was too expensive and she’d be damned if she’d live with Formica again. Then at the last minute she’d called and changed the order to granite.

She had thought she might like to watch them put the slabs down on the cabinets, but as the fabricator and his assistants hauled them up the back steps she realized she preferred that magical feeling of seeing the job complete, which she’d gotten as a child whenever she’d come home from school and seen the lines her mother had put in the carpet by vacuuming.

She snaked her way up and down the aisles of the supermarket, filling her cart with anything she could think she’d ever need. She hadn’t even gotten through dry goods before the cart was so full that she had to check out, bring the bags to the car and start over. After this second round of shopping, not only was the trunk full, but also the back seat, the passenger seat, and the floor areas. She couldn’t see in any direction except straight ahead and in the driver’s side mirror. She felt the engine laboring to get her home.

She pulled into the driveway and honked for Connell to come down and carry the bags. She went upstairs and gaped at the glossy countertops. She walked their length, running her hands over their cool surfaces, amazed at how they kept going and going.

Connell came up with the first bags and lay them on the island. “What gives?” he asked.

“What?”

“You planning for a disaster?”

“I bought some things,” she said defensively.

She started putting them away. Connell made an endless circuit from the garage to the kitchen. When he had nearly finished, and bags were arranged in a ring around the island, Ed walked into the kitchen and flew into a frenzy. He started grabbing items from the refrigerator and throwing them into the trash can.

“We eat too much!” he yelled. “This is too much food!”

“Would you please control yourself?”

“We need a new regime around here,” he said. “We’re getting fat. There are going to be changes. One meal a day! No more than one!”

“This should last us about a decade, then,” Connell said.

“Get rid of it!” Ed shouted as he left the room. “All of it!”

Eileen followed him out. “You can throw it all out if you want,” she called up the stairs, to his retreating back. “That’s fine by me.” She was trying to stay calm, not to sink to his level. “All it means is I’ll have to spend more to replace it. I want every inch in that pantry filled.” He disappeared into the bedroom. “I don’t care if you starve to death, the rest of us in this house are going to eat.” He didn’t answer. “Like kings!” she shouted. “We’ll eat like kings!”

39

In recent weeks, Ed had taken a hammer to places of rot in the drywall all through the basement, so that it looked like a target in a shooting range. In the minefield of the living room, he’d made a bigger mess, ripping up floorboards almost indiscriminately. The drainpipes were clogged. The garage door had stopped working. They’d suffered another flood in the basement after a heavy storm. And now that the cabinets and countertops were in, Ed refused to hire a single contractor to help.

He sat beside her at the wheel, seething in the mismatched outfit he’d passive-aggressively donned after she’d barked at him for half an hour to change out of his dirty undershirt and get a move on. They were going to the McGuires’. Ed was beset by distraction as he drove, drifting between lanes and slamming on the brakes to stop just short of stalled traffic.

“Would you pay attention? You’re all over the road.”

“I know how to drive,” he said. “I’ve been driving for”—he paused—“since I was sixteen.”

They’d left late and hit a bad jam, and by the time they arrived they were quite late indeed. Ed sat in the car after he’d shut it off. She stood outside the car, waving him out. Then she opened her door again.

“Are you coming?”

The light in the foyer went on; one of the McGuires would soon be at the door. She climbed back in the car. Maybe she had to try another approach. She drained the impatience from her voice. “What’s wrong?”

“Just give me a minute,” he said. “I can’t think straight with you talking.”

“Honey,” she said as gently as she could, “we don’t really have a minute.”

“Who’s going to be there again?”

“Just us. Us and Frank and Ruth.”

“That’s good,” he said. “We see too many people.”

They hadn’t seen anyone since they’d moved, but this wasn’t the time to argue. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll scale back. We’ll just focus on the house for now.”

“Thank God.”

“Now, can we get inside?” She handed him the bottle of wine. Ruth opened the door and gave them both kisses. Ed’s hand was shaking as he handed the bottle over; she saw Ruth notice it.

Dinner was ready and they took their seats right away as Ruth shuttled dishes in. Eileen tried to help her, but Ruth told her to sit. Frank opened the bottle to let it breathe. She felt herself begin to relax.

“How’s the money pit?” Frank asked. “You find where they buried the bodies yet?”

This was where Ed would say something snappy and the two of them would be off.

“It’s fine,” Ed said flatly. “Coming along.”

“Ed’s been busy trying to get rid of the rot from the flood.”

“Funny enough, I’ve been taking a continuing ed course in the history of water,” Frank said. “Irrigation, water transport. We haven’t gotten to floods yet. I’ll let you know when we do. Maybe I can give you some tips.”

Ed didn’t say anything.

“It must be nice to get back in the classroom and learn something new,” Eileen said.

“We’re not getting any younger,” Frank said. “We have to keep the brain going. Am I right?”

Again, Ed didn’t speak. Ruth came in just in time with the platter of roast beef.

“Please,” she said, gesturing to Ed. “Help yourself.”

Eileen felt an instinct to serve him, but he was sitting between her and the platter. Ed stabbed at a piece with the serving fork. The tines didn’t get a good purchase on the meat, which fell back to the platter with a juicy splash that sluiced grease onto the tablecloth. He went in again, stabbing with too much force, but managed to get one piece onto his plate, and then another. The third dropped into his lap. Ruth and Frank shot each other looks. Ed picked it up and put it on his plate. He didn’t try to wipe the marinade from his pants. The three little strips huddled on his plate. He handed her the fork, though protocol called for him to serve her or pass her the platter. She had to stand up to reach the meat. When she was done filling her plate, she put two more pieces on his. She looked up and realized that both of her hosts were watching this transaction intently.

“You want me to serve you?” she asked Frank.

“That’s fine, I’ll do it myself.”

“This all looks beautiful,” she said, handing over the utensils. She stayed on her feet. “Let me have your plate,” she said to Ruth. She felt like a chess player thinking several moves ahead. “I’ll serve the potatoes.” She spooned some out for Ruth; then she put some on her own plate, and then, as though it were a matter of course, on Ed’s. She did the same with the vegetables.

Ed looked skeptically at his plate. After having trouble gathering food onto his fork, he started pushing it on with his finger. He transported a few bites successfully to his mouth before one dropped on his shirt.

This was a good time for Frank to make a joke about Ed being drunk. It was impossible for Ed to take offense at anything Frank said. They ribbed each other all the time, and nothing was sacred; they fell into hysterics while she and Ruth wondered what was wrong with them. Tonight, though, Frank just sat there, looking at Ed until he saw that Eileen saw him looking and looked away.

They got through the meal with some effort. “You sit with them,” Ruth said, as Eileen tried to follow her into the kitchen to help clean up. “Sit in the living room and have a drink. Make sure they don’t get into any trouble.”

Eileen brought them drinks. There was less awkwardness in the living room. Frank helped by talking at length about the class he was taking. She was never more grateful for his long-windedness. Ed interjected here and there, and the exchange resembled an actual conversation. Ruth came in and they sat holding their glasses in the comfort that follows dining with old friends, the engine of one topic running down as the engine of another revved up.

“So how’s Connell?” Frank asked.

“His grades are good, but he’s struggling in biology, if you can believe it.”

“I was a horrible student in high school,” Frank said. “If it had mattered then the way it does now, I wouldn’t have had a prayer.”

“Me too,” Ed said.

“It’s a different world,” Ruth agreed.

“He’s in his second year already,” Ed said. “He’s got to settle down soon.”

Eileen flinched.

“I thought he was a freshman,” Ruth said. This was the danger of having friends like Ruth and Frank who paid attention when you talked about your kid.

“Yes, freshman,” Ed said. “That’s what I said.”

“He likes English,” Eileen said quickly.

“That’s great,” Frank said. “I love literature. I’m going to take a Shakespeare course next semester.”

“Ed’s disappointed,” she said. “He wants him to love science. He wants him to go to medical school.”

“Speak for yourself,” Ed said. “I want him to follow his bliss.”

“Maybe he’ll come around,” Frank said. “Listen, we were thinking of having him up for a weekend. Do you think he’d like that? Or would it be more of a drag for him?”

“He’d love it,” Eileen said.

“Maybe while he’s here you can talk some sense into him,” Ed said. “He’s having a hard time with biology, if you can believe that. He’s not applying himself, is all.”

“I don’t know how much help I’ll be,” Frank said. “I failed bio the first time I took it.”

“That sounds like Connell, I’m afraid. His biology grades aren’t the greatest. He’s focused on literature.”

“Is there an echo in here?” Frank asked, laughing. “I might have to cut you off.”

“Please do.” Eileen tried to sound authentically relieved. “For all our sakes.”

“Or maybe what he needs is not less but more.” Frank stood up and took her glass, then Ed’s, which was still full. He looked at it for a moment.

“Let me freshen this for you,” he said.

The business of getting drinks occupied a few minutes, and Ruth refilled the cheese and cracker plates.

“So tell Connell to think about what weekend he wants to come up,” Frank said.

“You’re having Connell over?” Ed asked.

“If he wants.”

“Do me a favor and talk to him about giving more of his time to science,” Ed said.

“Before I forget,” Ruth said abruptly, “I have to tell you the funniest story.” She embarked on a narrative about having had her car towed the last time she went into the city. It wasn’t funny at all, and it wound up being far shorter than Eileen had hoped, but she felt her eyes well up in gratitude.

Soon it was pumpkin bundt cake and coffee. The rituals of meals had never been more of a comfort. Ed ate his cake without trouble and they sat in the pleasant ease of digestion. She could see the distance to departure beginning to narrow. They might very well escape without further incident.

Ruth gathered the coats, and they said their good-byes in the hallway.

“Remember,” Frank said. “Ask Connell when would be good for him to come up.”

“I will,” Eileen said.

“Maybe you can talk some sense into him,” Ed said. “He’s slacking in science.”

Frank’s eyes widened. He broke into an awkward grin that looked more like a grimace. “Don’t let this guy drive,” he said.

Although she had had more to drink than Ed, she got behind the wheel. She felt exhausted, and more than once she had to blink away sleep. Ed snored the whole trip, like a child, oblivious of the danger he was in every time she let her mind wander.

40

The floors in the living room and dining room were still a mess. Not only hadn’t he begun to lay down wood, he hadn’t even bought any, and it was now the second week of December. He had put the floor job on hold to focus on the basement. It drove her crazy to have the most important rooms in the house be off-limits. She had given up on the dream of entertaining the first Christmas in the new house (when the Coakleys agreed to host, she was afraid she might have lost dibs on Christmas Eve to Cindy forever), but she wanted to be able to finally sit in her living room. He was kidding himself if he thought he was going to be able to handle it alone.

The noises of destruction and toil emanating from below made it sound as if he was overseeing a torture chamber. She never approached him when he was down there, and when he came up covered in plaster dust and dried concrete, he sat and ate in remorseless silence. When he was asleep she went down to check on his labor. The space was coming together somehow. A do-it-yourself home improvement book sat perpetually splayed on the floor, its dog-ears attesting to the concentration that had gone into making things flush and square.

• • •

She found a disposable razor on the coffee table in the den, sitting in a streak of shaving cream. She told herself that Ed had come downstairs to answer the phone while shaving and gotten distracted. When she picked the razor up, though, and saw that the book under it was his beloved fifth-edition copy of The Origin of Species, she let out a shriek. No one but Ed ever touched that precious volume, and it never left his study. The fact that it was on the coffee table at all was amazing enough, but for its front cover to be stained by a filmy dollop of Barbasol was simply unfathomable. Her first thought, her only thought, was to leave the razor alone so he could see he had ruined the book himself.

• • •

She’d written him notes lately — gentle reminders she would leave on his nightstand before bed, like a secretary laying out the next day’s agenda for the executive she was secretly sleeping with. We’re going out with the Cudahys tonight, or Don’t forget parent-teacher conferences at 6:00. There had been something pleasant about writing the notes; whatever tension still hung in the air after a given evening’s misunderstandings evaporated like a cup of water on a hot afternoon.

One note struck her as odd when she read it over. It grew more opaque the longer she looked at it, like one of those unfathomable koans. She couldn’t escape the sensation that she’d written the note to tell herself something as much as to get a message to Ed. Christmas is six days away, Edmund, the note said. Please don’t forget to get Connell a new baseball glove. I’ve asked you three times now. I’d take care of it, but I don’t know the first thing about them. It seems like the kind of thing a father should pick out. That is still you, right, a father?

How had they gotten to the point where she could write him a note like this? She thought of the hours he spent grading papers every night, how he never came to bed before eleven anymore, how just recently she’d spent a night helping him tabulate the grades for a lab report, as she’d done during the crisis at the end of the last academic year. She thought again, as she couldn’t help doing lately, of that inscrutable pile of wood with the sheet over it in the backyard in Jackson Heights. She recalled the scene with a strangely heightened clarity, as if it were an installation in a museum dedicated to preserving the unimportant details of her old life. She panned around it in her mind, studying it from every angle, attempting to understand why this nettlesome image hadn’t receded into the ether of the past.

The dawning came all at once, though it felt as if it had been heading her way for a while, like a train she’d heard whistle from miles off that was now flying past and kicking up a terrible wind.

Still, she couldn’t pronounce the sentence in her head, Ed has…, because it was impossible that he had it. He had a demanding job that kept him stimulated. Until recently, he had read constantly, done the crossword puzzle almost every day, exercised four times a week. He was still the fittest man in their circle.

Maybe it was a tumor. Maybe it was a glandular problem, a dietary deficiency, a failing organ.

Whatever it was, she would get him checked out.

It wasn’t going to be easy to bring it up. He was going to tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, that if something was wrong with his brain he’d be the first to know, being a brain expert, she could hear him saying. And part of her wanted him to dismiss her fears with an imperious wave and tell her she was behaving hysterically. But she couldn’t allow him to overpower her on this topic. She needed to find out if something was wrong with him.

She waited for an opening. She wanted him to forget something or say something demonstrably strange, but he just went to work and came home and started in on the basement like an indentured servant paying off his debt. He made runs to the hardware store and returned with Sheetrock, cinder blocks, and bags of cement that he hauled piece by piece from the car. She worried his body would give out on him.

When she called Ed’s doctor and suggested worry about Ed’s health, he told her she was crazy, that Ed was as healthy as a horse. “I just saw him, what is it, six months ago,” he said. “He’s got the lungs of a swimmer. Not a whisper when I put the stethoscope to him. Only thing is his blood pressure’s a little high. Let him put his feet up on the weekend. Give him a glass of iced tea and put the game on for him. And his cholesterol could be lower. Maybe no cheeseburgers for a while. No more shrimp.”

It sounded like an indictment of her, somehow. “We don’t eat any shellfish,” she said. “I’m allergic.” She tried to rein in her annoyance. “Did he seem fuzzy to you at all?”

“Fuzzy?”

“In the head. Slower on the uptake.”

“Maybe you’re expecting too much of him. Men aren’t perfect creatures. We get miles on the engine. We need repairs. The warranty runs out. Ed’s got a good engine. He’s got a lot of road left ahead of him.”

She watched him and waited for the mishap, the big slipup. He continued to make incremental progress, continued to refuse outside help, but every day, as he beat himself harder and harder to finish the work, as she watched patiently, intently, she could feel the ground shifting in her favor, Ed’s resilience weakening. As much as she needed to bring the work on the house to completion, as much as she couldn’t wait to have a team of workers laying down boards in her living room and dining room, and as much as she was glad to see the ground ceded to her, she found herself rooting for Ed and feeling sorry for this man who spent every night hammering away. She saw him on his haunches, head in a manual, hammer poised, his back a rounded stone, and she willed him to brilliance, though she knew she was willing the impossible.

She watched Ed grow more weary at each dinner, look more disheveled, push away his plate after a few bites.

One night he didn’t come when she called him to eat and she sent Connell to get him.

“He says he’s not coming,” the boy said when he returned.

“Tell him I said to get in here.”

“Maybe you should go in, Mom.”

“What is it?”

“He’s just sitting there.”

She went into the dining room and saw Ed surrounded by planks of wood. He had half a plank in his hands. Nails were sticking out of it, and its end was a comb of shards. She could see the other half nailed into the floor. He must have tried to rip it up in his hands.

“Get up, Ed.”

“I’ll be in when I’m done,” he said. He was hunched over, breathing hard. He looked like he’d been whipped. He lifted himself up onto one knee in a vaguely supplicating manner, and the sight of him there put her uncomfortably in mind of the Stations of the Cross. She wasn’t going to give him the chance to make some kind of poetical self-sacrifice, if that was what he was after. The only person who’d feel sorry for him if he did that would be himself. He’d had all the chances in the world to bring someone in. They had enough money for at least the floors and the kitchen. He was too damned stubborn.

“You’re done.”

“I have to finish this section.”

“You’re done,” she said. “Come and eat.”

But he didn’t follow. After she and Connell had finished, she brought a plate of cold sausage and beans in to him. She could barely stand to look at him as she left it on the floor by his feet. He hadn’t moved in half an hour. He was in the same place in the middle of the room, a perfect vantage point from which to survey the mess he’d insisted on making.

• • •

She made the phone calls and settled on a general contractor who could finish the kitchen, do the floors, put in high-hats, and plaster and paint all the walls on the first floor.

The night before the workers were scheduled to start, she told Ed they were coming, and he didn’t put up any kind of fight. She wondered whether she should have forced his hand sooner, but they gave out no manual when you got married, no emergency kit with a flashlight for when the power went out. You had to feel your way around in the dark for the box of matches.

41

The work began a couple of weeks after the new year, 1992. The bustle in and out of her kitchen was exciting. She offered them drinks and set out platters of cold cuts on the island, rolls, tubs of potato salad, bags of potato chips.

She brought home a couple of six-packs for them one day. Ed took one and threw it to the floor. One of the cans landed with a thud and shot a stream of beer all over the cabinets. A floor installer who had been using the bathroom stopped in the kitchen on the way back to the living room.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Mind your fucking business,” Ed said.

She hadn’t heard Ed utter that word in years. Maybe she’d never heard him say it.

“You okay?” the worker asked her, ignoring Ed.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Ed said.

“Whatever you say,” the worker said. “Whatever you say.” He backed out of the room, his hands up in bemused resignation.

Eileen followed him in, carrying the unexploded beers on the plastic yoke. “My husband has been under a lot of stress,” she said. “I’m sorry he spoke to you like that.”

“No worries,” the worker said. “We come across all kinds of people in this line of work.”

“He’s not the kind of man he seemed like back there.”

He gave his head a sage tilt. “Some guys just don’t like other guys in their house, doing work they think they should be doing.”

She felt a need to protect Ed. “It’s just that he’s losing his job,” she said, surprising herself with the lie. “Layoffs.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.”

He and the other worker looked at her as if they were waiting to see if she’d make another revelation.

“Please drink these,” she said, holding up the beers.

“You don’t have to tell us twice,” he said. “But we have to wait until we’re done for the day.”

It reminded her of her father, to hear him responsibly defer having a drink. They returned to laying in the boards, and she went to the breakfront to find the red velvet-lined box that held the set of crystal glasses with “Schaefer” etched into them that her father had received upon his retirement. She took them out and ran a cloth over them.

At the end of the day, when she laid the six-pack on the dining room table, she set out the glasses too, on a Schaefer bar tray she’d saved for years.

“Please use these,” she said.

“Oh, we don’t need glasses, ma’am,” he said politely.

“It would make me happy if you’d use them. They were my father’s. I’d like to see them filled with beer for once.”

• • •

The roof could wait for a couple of years. The rot in the basement would have to remain for now. The tile floors she’d pictured down there were a project for another time. So was renovating the half bath between the kitchen and den. So was moving the laundry room to the first floor from the basement. There was old wallpaper on the second floor that couldn’t come down, and there were walls that needed to be painted. She had pictured fresh paint and white tiles wherever she looked. She had flipped through design magazines for elaborate ideas, but in the end, white had seemed appropriate, the cleanest option, the only one she could deal with right now. She would have to wait for everything to be white. She would have to deal with gray and yellow and brown and a sickly mauve. She thought that a lot of her house looked like a waiting room. The path from kitchen to dining room to living room, though — the path that company would travel — this path was ready to go. She could keep them from going upstairs or downstairs. And as soon as she had a spare few thousand dollars, she was going to put a better half bath in for them and spruce up the den.

There was, on the other hand, the question of the furniture. She simply wouldn’t be able to live with the things she’d brought from the old house, not if she couldn’t fix this one up the way she wanted. Her furniture squatted shabbily and hardly filled the room. The scratched dining room table, the worn armrests on the chairs, the boxy end tables, the permanently depressed couch cushions: they were like placeholders for the real pieces to come. She saw now that she would need to replace nearly all of it. She would put it all on credit cards. Upstairs, she would create a sitting area, buy the desk she’d always lacked, and outfit each guest room with a stereo, an armchair, and a beautiful reading lamp. As soon as she got these bills paid off, she would replace Connell’s childhood furniture.

She knew she lacked the aesthetic sense necessary to give the house the ambiance it deserved. She would bring in an interior decorator. There would have to be new art everywhere, and the little touches that put one in mind of real discernment. She could pay for that with credit cards too. Ed would veto these expenses if given the chance, but he was past the point of possessing veto power. He was simply going to have to place his fate in her hands. They would pay it off. Ed would get another grant. Their salaries would rise. Once everything was in place, they would live frugally, sensibly, like Boston Brahmins. They would even find a way to build their savings back up. There was always a little more money to be had every year.

42

If nothing’s wrong with him,” Eileen told her own doctor, when she went in about a shortness of breath she’d been experiencing, “I’m going to divorce him. I can’t take it anymore.”

Dr. Aitken told her to bring her husband in. She sold it to Ed as his annual checkup, that she’d like him to try her doctor, and when he didn’t object in spite of having gone in for a checkup less than six months before, she knew she was doing the right thing. They sat in the discordant placidity of the waiting area before she led him into the examining room and went back out. She’d blustered about divorce, but now she saw that she would put up with anything in exchange for hearing that her husband had simply become an asshole.

After spending half an hour with Ed, Dr. Aitken came out to meet her.

“Don’t divorce him yet,” he said, handing her a referral to a neurology team he trusted.

• • •

She braced for the fit she expected Ed to throw once they got to Montefiore, but he sat docilely again on the papered, padded table, waiting for the doctor to arrive. His big, fleshy back looked like raw dough.

First came blood tests and a physical exam. Dr. Khalifa, the lead doctor, wanted to eliminate anything that might cause memory loss, so he checked Ed’s thyroid levels, as thyroid problems had run in his family. They gave him a CT scan.

His thyroid was fine. The CT scan showed no sign of a tumor.

She took him back for diagnostic exams. Dr. Khalifa sat Ed at a table and took a seat opposite him. She sat in the extra chair and felt nervous for Ed, as though she were about to watch his debut in a theatrical production that had limped toward opening night.

Dr. Khalifa told Ed to count backwards from one hundred. Ed got to ninety-seven before pausing. “Eighty-six,” he said, then ran off a few other numbers in accurate succession, until he jumped another decile, at which point Dr. Khalifa stopped him.

The obstreperousness she’d anticipated was starting to seem like a fantasy. Ed looked vulnerable and small. He was smiling, trying to ingratiate himself with his examiner, perhaps in unconscious pursuit of mercy in the diagnosis.

Dr. Khalifa told him to draw three concentric circles, and Ed put a good one down on the page, then drew another that was ovoid and attached to the first like a chain link. The third, a shaky line meeting finally in something more like a quadrangle than a circle, sat apart from the first two.

“Great, that’s great,” Dr. Khalifa said dully when Ed was done. The doctor was a picture of imperviousness. She watched his eyes: he betrayed no sign of surprise, gave away no clues as to whether this was a normal result or not, the product of mere aging or something more sinister. She didn’t know whether she herself would have been able to draw the concentric circles. Certainly it would be difficult under this kind of scrutiny. She had a sensation that she was watching a child take a test, and she felt a sympathy with Ed that made her question her decision to expose him to this. What right did she have to subject him in the quiddities of his middle age to a man who would be looking for any sign of deviation from a norm that was probably arbitrary in the first place? She wanted to whisk him back home and let him go at things in his own way. A category existed to describe men like him, a time-tested, venerated one at that: absentminded professor.

“I’m not an artist,” Ed said, laughing. “You should see my drawings of the digestive system.”

The doctor chuckled.

“This could be something abstract,” Ed said.

Dr. Khalifa looked at it and shook his head. She didn’t like his attitude. He was too glib, too detached. His hair was too perfect, his teeth gleamed too white. She had long wished Ed had pursued medical school, but now she felt she’d been too hard on him in her mind. She knew doctors like this at work; they thought they walked on water. The work Ed did might not have been as lucrative or flashy, but it laid the groundwork for guys like this to come to their conclusions. If Ed said nothing was wrong, then most likely nothing was wrong. She had insulted him by bringing him before this cipher who didn’t deserve to carry his briefcase, let alone pass judgment on him.

“We’re almost done with this part,” Dr. Khalifa said. “One more question and then I’m going to have you do some physical things.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me something. Do you know who the current president is?”

If he wanted to insult him, this was a perfect way to do it. She almost wanted Ed to answer sarcastically or deliberately incorrectly, but she didn’t want the doctor to have the satisfaction of writing it down on that little pad of his.

Ed sat with it; maybe he was coming up with a witty riposte.

“I know it’s a Republican,” he said. “I know that.”

“Can you tell me his name?”

Ed pulled on his chin. “Reagan?” he asked. “Is it Reagan? I can see his face. It’s not Reagan, is it? This is embarrassing.”

“You know this, Ed,” she said. The doctor gave her a look; she wanted to smack his face.

“I can see him,” Ed said. “I just can’t recall the name.”

Dr. Khalifa wrote something down. She wanted to call the answer out. The whole thing was so stupid. She couldn’t believe he was letting him dangle there like this. Ed looked ruined, as if he had failed a test not merely of memory but of character.

“Give it a second,” Dr. Khalifa said. “Sometimes it’s hard to think of a given thing when you have to. Think of something else. It might come to you.”

“White elephants,” Ed said.

“Something like that.”

Ed rubbed the top of his head, as if to massage the answer from his scalp. He let out a deep sigh. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Who is it?”

“Bush,” the doctor said. “George Bush.”

“Yes! That’s it! I knew it. God, I knew it! I could see his face. Of course! His running mate. It’s easy to confuse them.”

The doctor said nothing, just continued to write on his pad.

She thought of the time she’d had to memorize the presidents and their dates of service. She remembered Sister Alberta calling them up one by one to the front of the room to answer one question each, Sister asking her which president followed Teddy Roosevelt. So many W names surrounded Roosevelt — to this day she could remember them: William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding. Though she had memorized them conscientiously, at that moment they ran together in her mind. She was terrified of being called stupid in front of the class. Her heart began to race; then her mind went blank, so she could picture only the hazy outlines of names. “Now, Miss Tumulty,” Sister said, and when Eileen said,“William Wilson,” laughter exploded in the room.

“You’re right,” she said. “It is easy to confuse them.”

Ed looked guiltily at her, as if she were on Dr. Khalifa’s side and not his. She shifted her chair closer to him. The doctor seemed to write endlessly.

“Just one more thing I have to get down here,” he said, holding up a finger as he wrote. “Perfect. Now I’d like you to change into shorts. I’m going to have you do some exercises for me.”

They went into the next room and she helped him change. It felt like she was getting him ready for gym class. She wondered what humiliations awaited him. Dr. Khalifa came in and had him touch his toes from a standing position and rise from a seated one. He had him jog in place. He took notes throughout. Ed looked to her between exercises. She tried to give encouragement. When Dr. Khalifa told him to touch his finger to the tip of his nose, Ed had a hard time doing it.

“I’m not drunk,” he said. “I promise. Although I might get drunk after this.”

43

They were waiting for his father to pull the car up after Mass. It had snowed, and his mother didn’t want to walk in it. Another light dusting was coming down, and his mother held an umbrella over both their heads while they waited.

“You’re going nowhere with baseball. You know that.”

The comment might have stung more if Connell hadn’t known it was more about debate than baseball. His mother had been on him lately to join the debate team.

“I like baseball,” he said.

“Liking it is one thing. Spending your time doing it is another. You don’t have to like everything you do. Besides, you’d like debate. You’re naturally competitive. You get that from my side.”

“Why do you want me to do debate so badly?”

“I want you to make the most of your advantages. I want to see you use your talents wisely.”

“You want me to be a senator,” he said.

“I want you to be happy.”

“President of the United States.”

“Don’t try to make me out to be some fire-breathing dragon. So I want to push you a little. So what?”

He stood in silence, thinking about it. So what, indeed? The shoveled driveway across the street was getting recoated in a sheen of snow. It might be nice to own a house like that someday, to be able to hire someone to shovel. But he had no interest in joining the debate team. Those guys were always on the verge of cutting your throat.

“What does Dad say?”

“Your father and I both want what’s best for you.”

“What does he say?”

“What does your father say?” She laughed. “ ‘Leave the kid be,’ he says. ‘Let the kid do what he wants. Let him have some happiness. Let him have some innocence while he still has time.’ ” She was getting worked up. Some people walking past on the way to their car jerked up their heads. “ ‘All that matters is that the kid experience joy.’ If you must know, that’s what he says. And you know what I say?” There was a fierce expression on his mother’s face. “I say give the kid a chance to make a real mark. Those debate kids are the ones who get the best grades in the school. Get him among them, is what I say. Those are the kids who go to Ivy League colleges. Let him get into a topflight school with them, become a lawyer, a politician. Those are the kids who take home awards and scholarships. What’s wrong with his being one of them? What’s wrong with his making a nice living? Being comfortable?”

“It’s just debate, Mom.”

“They’re the best. You should be the best with them. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.”

“I like baseball,” he said.

“You’re not going to be a professional player.”

“Probably not.”

“Definitely not.”

“Fine. Definitely not.”

“Look,” she said, “there’s your father. Don’t tell him we talked about this. He just wants you to play baseball and not think about anything complicated right now. Or maybe not ever. He wants you to be like a horse in the fields or something. Unfettered.” She said it with a sharp little laugh. “I don’t think that’s real life, though. Maybe I want to tame you. Make you useful. I guess that’s just who I am. But I know one thing. You listen to me, you’re never going to want for anything in this life — not with your ability. I could guide you to the good life. If I’d been born a man, I’d be there myself.”

44

They went to several more appointments. Dr. Khalifa repeated some tests and added new ones. Six weeks after the first appointment — it happened to be St. Patrick’s Day — they went in for the results.

She was more nervous than she’d been since her wedding day. Ed seemed past nerves. He radiated an odd calm, like a man about to receive a lethal injection.

They waited in the room for the doctor to come in. She held Ed’s hand, but he patted hers as if she were the one getting the news.

Dr. Khalifa entered with a folder, giving off a vaguely metallic smell, and Ed bristled. The doctor walked quickly, without sufficient gravity. She thought, A turnip conveys more emotion than this guy.

“Well, I have good news and bad news,” Dr. Khalifa said. “The good news is, physically you’re healthy as a horse. A great specimen.”

She felt a jolt of excitement, then one of fear. “What about the bad news?”

He turned to her. “The bad news is your husband likely has Alzheimer’s.”

She gasped; Ed’s hand in hers seized into a fist.

“I take no pleasure in saying this, but from now on, it might be best to think of every day as the best day of the rest of your life. If I were you, I’d try to make the most of every day while you can.”

Ed squeezed her hand so hard she winced.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“If he didn’t have Alzheimer’s, he’d probably live to ninety-five. Heart, lungs, kidneys, circulation — all tip-top. But he’s got it.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“There’s little doubt,” the doctor said, with all the detached finality of one of those enormous computers in old movies that spat out answers on punch cards.

“I knew it,” Ed said grimly. She realized in an instant that he probably had known it, that he might have known it for years.

“How can this be? He’s barely fifty-one.”

“It’s early, but it happens,” Dr. Khalifa said. “I’m sorry.” He did look sorry, but not for her particularly, rather for himself for having to be the bearer of bad news. “I wish there were something more I could say.” She looked to Ed to explain it to her better than the doctor had. “I’ll leave you two alone.” The doctor slapped Ed’s folder on his thigh as he rose. “I’m sure you have a lot to talk about. I’ll come back in ten minutes to answer any questions and talk about our game plan.”

When he was gone, they sat mulling over the news. It was a paradox of sorts: nothing made sense unless it were true, and yet it made no sense whatever for it to be true. It was so obvious now that he had Alzheimer’s. The news felt old already, somehow.

“What are we going to do?”

“We are going to get a second opinion,” she said.

“We don’t need a second opinion. He’s the second opinion.”

“He could be wrong,” she said.

“He’s not,” Ed said, with an authority that made her heart pound in her chest. She felt such love for him that she had to look away.

They sat in silence. Ed’s grip on her hand hadn’t loosened since they’d heard the news, but now she could feel his fingers beginning to uncurl.

“What the hell,” he said. “What the hell.” It struck her that it sounded like both a lament and a promise — a promise to make the best of things. “What are we going to do?” he asked again.

“We are going to carry this with dignity and grace,” she said. “That’s what.” One point of his collar was upturned, and she flipped it down and pushed the button through the buttonhole for him.

• • •

They drove to Nathan’s on Central Avenue. Ed had grown up taking the train out to Coney Island, and she wanted to give him a little comfort. This landlocked outpost on an undistinguished stretch of local road was a pale copy of the faded original on Surf Avenue, but its young patrons seemed to project an aura of possibility onto it. A troupe of heavily cologned, spiky-haired Albanians in collared shirts and high-top sneakers preceded her in line, flirting with the counter girls. They hooted and clapped and spoke with great anticipation of the big night ahead. Through the window she saw a tricked-out Camaro dart into a spot in the lot, tailed by a Trans-Am.

She led Ed to the open expanse of the seating area. With a steady hand, he brought the hot dog up to his mouth and bit into the tower of sauerkraut, onions, relish, mustard, and ketchup that sat atop it. A squirt shot out and landed on his shirt. He wiped it off without a word. It used to kill him when even a fleck of ketchup fell onto one of his dress shirts, but it was as if he now saw through the ordinary frustrations of living.

They pulled into the garage. In the basement, she had him take off his shirt, then his undershirt. She sent him upstairs and went in to the laundry room. Passing the shelves along the stairway wall, she realized that someone had stolen his power tools.

Whenever the workers had been there and he’d been home, Ed had stayed in the study — working or sulking, she’d stopped caring which. They must have seen him as an easy target. In Jackson Heights, whenever they’d had workmen in the house, he’d watched over his tools with a diligence she’d always considered paranoid.

There had been two different crews in her house, the floor and kitchen guys and the painting crew, and it was impossible to ascertain exactly who had done it. It was the lowest form of knavery to steal a man’s tools, especially — the thought ruined her — when he couldn’t use them anymore.

She didn’t tell him they were missing. Instead, she left work early the next day and bought all new ones. She threw away the packaging and nestled them into place on the utility shelves. With their unscuffed surfaces and sharp corners, they possessed a newness that seemed unlikely to escape his notice, and yet his noticing now seemed equally unlikely. For the first time in their marriage, she found herself longing to be caught in one of her gentle schemes.

• • •

Ed was adamant about not telling the boy. They weren’t going to tell anyone at Ed’s work either. They wanted to stretch it out to the thirty-year pension. Including the job he’d held at the Parks Department while in college, Ed had been working for the City of New York in one form or another for twenty-eight and a half years. If they could get him to thirty, they’d have twelve hundred more dollars coming in every month than if he retired now. She was going to have to squeeze as much out of the system as she could, because someday the cost of caring for Ed was going to rise dramatically.

In the days after the diagnosis, Ed grew quiet and still. Overnight, the black-Irish touch of olive coloring in his face retreated, replaced by a gaunt, dusty pallor. His odor changed; she could almost smell the fear coming out of his pores. He had already been showering less frequently; now he stopped showering entirely, and he only brushed his teeth when she forced him to stand there next to her doing it. They both went to work as if nothing had changed. She wondered if the funereal air had settled in for good.

One night, in bed, he asked her if he was dying.

“Not yet, you’re not,” she said. “You still have plenty of life left in you.”

“I’m scared,” he said. “I am dying.”

“We all are, in a sense.”

“I have a clock on me.”

“We all have a clock on us.”

“Not Connell,” he said. “Not yet.”

She wanted to say, Connell too, because it was the truth, but she saw how upset Ed looked.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“I don’t want him to get this,” he said. “I want him to live in peace.”

She couldn’t help herself. “He may not get this and still not live in peace. There are no guarantees.”

“He’s not going to get it. Tell me that.”

“He’s not going to get it.”

Her answer reassured him enough to allow him to fall asleep. She lay awake for a long time thinking of the clock ticking toward its terminal moment.

Maybe Connell would get it. Maybe she would.

One never knew.

Now that was the truth.

• • •

Even the hospital wasn’t safe enough for some of the Alzheimer’s patients she’d seen over the years. Getting lost in the hallways or wandering naked out of their rooms was just the beginning. One man fell down the stairs and broke his back. Intake could be tragic. They came in with gashes, burns; once, a severed finger. She wanted to delay the onset of real symptoms as long as she could. The answer for that was drugs. There weren’t any approved drugs on the market, but there were drugs in clinical trial that might be helpful. She needed to get him into a research study. He would be helping the industry he had balked at working for, and he wouldn’t get a dime for it. She had once imagined getting a luxury car, foreign trips, and antique furniture out of the pharmaceutical industry; now all she wanted was a less-rapid diminishment of Ed’s besieged brainpower. She had to hope some clear-eyed pragmatist not immune to earthly rewards had expertly carried out the investigations Ed had refused to take up himself.

She called around to people she knew. She found an open study at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, in Orangeburg, forty minutes away across the Tappan Zee Bridge. The study was to evaluate the long-term safety, tolerability, and efficacy of SDZ ENA 713 in treating outpatients with probable Alzheimer’s disease, and it guaranteed Ed a supply of the drug as long as he wanted it, until it was either commercially viable or abandoned in the United States.

After the initial evaluation she was given a stack of official forms, one of which was a “Capacity Assessment for Participation in a Research Study.” It indicated that the examining doctor had determined that Ed lacked the capacity to understand the purpose, risks, and benefits of the research and make an independent decision about participation. She knew it was a pro forma thing, that they needed her to sign with his power of attorney, which she had secured, but it rankled her, because Ed so clearly understood what they were telling him, probably understood it better than they did themselves.

Her heart ached when she signed the “Assessment of Capacity to Choose a Surrogate Decision Maker” form, because during the evaluation, the doctor had asked Ed who she was. “My wife,” Ed had said, as if there were nothing plainer.

“Do you want your wife to have the power to make decisions on your behalf?” the doctor asked with exaggerated deliberateness, as if to convey the gravity of what Ed was signing over.

Ed laughed and asked the doctor if he was married. The doctor nodded.

“Then it won’t surprise you to hear that my wife has been calling the shots as long as we’ve been married,” Ed said, and the doctor chuckled in husbandly sympathy before checking the box beside “This patient has the capacity at this time.” It amazed her how winning Ed had been able to be even at a moment like this.

She signed with a certain stoicism a form consenting to participate on his behalf, but it was the “Record of Choice of a Surrogate Decision Maker” form that nearly made her lose her composure, because it was the only one Ed had to sign himself, and he started his signature an inch above where he should have and angled it down and through the line in a way that made it look as if he was falling down as he did it.

45

Eileen keenly missed Curt, her hairstylist, and not just because he knew how to handle her cowlicks. She missed Curt’s entertaining conversation, the way he indulged her interest in politics and made her keep a toe dipped in the ocean of popular culture, the tide of which receded from her as soon as she stopped seeing him. Every time she checked out at the Food Emporium, it seemed, she recognized fewer of the faces on the covers of celebrity magazines.

She wasn’t about to go back to Jackson Heights for Curt, though, so she couldn’t avoid the hairstylist in Bronxville, even though it intimidated her to go in there. The salon was fancier than Curt’s place, with a miniature Japanese pond and leather seats in the waiting area. She was afraid to get into political conversations there, as she never knew who felt what, or who was listening, and she wouldn’t read any of the offerings on the coffee table—People, Us, Premiere, Entertainment Weekly—because she didn’t want to give anyone a reason to look down their noses at her, even though everyone else flipped through them with guilt-free relish. She couldn’t escape the feeling that there was a different set of rules for her that she’d never had properly explained.

The Bronxville salon was practically a full spa, offering nail care, massages, facial treatments. As stylists, they were skilled technicians, giving her what she asked for and leaving her a little cold. Her hair would look great for a couple of days, with a chilly perfection to it, the cut preserved so unchangingly that it looked as if she’d been fitted for a wig. Then, one morning a few days in, it would refuse to fall in line with the brush, and she would have to wait long enough until she could justify going in.

Curt gave her what she didn’t know she wanted. His cuts were understated; sometimes she wondered whether he cut much at all or just stood there talking and making snipping motions with the scissors. He always swept the shorn locks away before he took the smock off her, so she never got to examine the evidence. Weeks after an appointment, though, people were still asking her if she’d just had her hair done.

• • •

One day in the last week of March, when she was waiting to have her hair cut, she heard the woman before her — who despite being a little older than her was wearing stiletto heels and had alternating streaks of chocolate, caramel, and butterscotch dye in her hair — tell the hairstylist about the miracle they’d performed cleaning her mink at Bronxville Furrier after she’d leaned against some wet paint. Eileen saw the fur hanging on the hook. It looked shiny and full, as if it had just gotten a cut, shampoo, and blowout itself. The way the woman discussed her fur, it was as though she were actually discussing something else, speaking in a secret code that Eileen could decipher only if she had the corresponding key. She’d had the thought before that a fur might just be the thing to make her feel she belonged in this town.

A week later, when she walked past Bronxville Furrier and saw that they were having a spring sale, she went in and purchased a mink. It was so plush and full and enveloped her so thoroughly that she felt as though she had shrunk down to her teenaged size just by putting it on. In some quarters, it wasn’t so fashionable anymore to own a fur coat, what with all the work PETA activists had done to stigmatize the wearers of them, but fur seemed to still have a foothold in Bronxville. She had the two important things — money to buy it with, or at least a still-viable line of credit, and someone to go out with in it. Who knew how long either would last?

“What about our rainy day savings?” Ed asked when he saw it.

“If it rains any harder than this,” she said, “not even Noah’s Ark would save us.”

• • •

The weather was too warm for her new coat, but the Saturday after she’d bought it was chilly, and she decided that this might be the last chance she’d have to put it on for half a year. She made a reservation for seven o’clock at Le Bistro on Pondfield, the fancy place across from the post office that she’d been wanting to go to for months. She and Ed parked a few blocks up, where Kraft met Pondfield, because she wanted to take a little stroll through town and be seen. As soon as she started walking, though, she felt overdressed. No one else was in fur, and the truth was that she hadn’t seen many women her age in fur since she’d moved.

By the time they reached the restaurant, she’d worked up such a sweat that she took it off before she went in. She’d had a vision of the maitre d’ taking it from her shoulders slowly, one arm at a time. It was heavy enough in her arms to feel like a sleeping child. She handed it over, hoping no one would see the transfer. She would have to try again next winter.

For as long as she could remember, she’d wanted to wear a mink coat. Women in minks always looked as if they had no problems in the world. She’d spent her own good money on it — the credit card payment, in the end, came from her own money. She’d pay it off as soon as the bills settled down. She was almost proud to think of how much the total had come to, even after the off-season discount had been factored in.

46

Connell’s uncle Phil was in from Toronto. After dinner, Connell’s father began telling a story everyone had heard before about the summer he’d spent in college doing service work in Peru. The punch line involved the drastic height differential between himself and the priest in charge.

“There I am, all six feet of me,” he said, “and—”

“You’re not six feet,” Connell interrupted. “You always say you’re six feet. You’re like five eleven.”

“I’m six feet tall,” his father said with dignity.

“You wish you were six feet.” Connell had just measured himself, and he knew he was five ten and that his father wasn’t much taller. He went over and squared up against his father back-to-back. Then he made him take his shoes off. He took off his own Doc Martens.

“Son, I’m six feet.”

“Maybe you were once,” he said. “Maybe you’re shrinking.”

“I’m not old enough to shrink.”

“Maybe you are,” he said. “Maybe you’re losing it early, Dad. It would explain a lot.”

His father gave him a quick, deadly stare. “Enough,” he said, and turned away. “Do you need a drink?” he said to Uncle Phil.

“I’ll come with you,” Uncle Phil said.

Connell followed them into the kitchen. “If you’re six feet,” he said, “then prove it.”

“Let it go, son,” his uncle said.

“Here,” Connell said. “The door’s right here. We’ll mark you off against it. Like we did for me in the old house.”

His father looked annoyed, but he stood against the door. Connell made him take his shoes off again.

“Five foot ten and three-quarters,” he pronounced as he made a deep score in the side of the door with the pencil.

• • •

Connell was emptying the dishwasher. He pulled up the handle of a knife whose blade had been broken off near the base. It was nothing but a stump.

“This has seen its last day,” he said, holding it up to the light. “I’m getting rid of it.”

He threw it out; his father walked over and quietly fished it from the garbage.

“That knife is guaranteed for a lifetime,” his mother said with matter-of-fact triumph. “That’s a high-quality knife.”

“I can tell,” Connell said archly.

His father rubbed the handle between his fingers like a worry stone.

“I’ve been meaning to call that company for a while now,” his mother said.

Connell was incredulous. “Can we just get rid of it? You’re not going to call the company. What could you possibly do with that knife, Dad? Seriously.” He strained for a tone he would take with a father he could spar with, a tone he knew would hurt him.

“You’d be surprised,” his father said. “I use this knife to stir my sauces.”

“I am too going to call that company,” his mother said. “They’ll honor their guarantee.”

“We have plenty of other knives. Why do we need this one?”

“Your father bought that knife when we got married. He spent a lot of money on it at the time. Is that enough of an answer for you?”

She looked on the verge of tears. He knew he shouldn’t have anything more to say.

“Doesn’t mean you have to keep it forever,” he said.

47

Eileen had helped Ed with his classwork here and there throughout the year, but as the end of the spring semester approached, she found herself grading more and more of his lab reports and tests. He looked over her shoulder, explaining things. They each took a stack and went through them, and she checked his work at the end.

For a year, he’d been gathering evidence toward a paper based on his government grant research, which he was going to present at a conference. After the diagnosis, he redoubled his efforts, staying late at the lab many nights. She knew she should have been proud of him for continuing to follow the faint trail of a fleeing ambition, and she was proud, sometimes, but she knew it would come to nothing — no new grants or appointments, no extra prestige, not even a completed paper — and she wished he were home with her instead. The nights were lonely, and it was a small compensation to imagine him sharing that loneliness with her from afar. She pictured him in his poorly lit lab, digging at his scalp as he scrutinized data skunked by faulty observations.

• • •

Ed took the study drugs twice a day. She wasn’t willing to risk his missing a dose, so she watched him swallow one every morning and every evening. After thirteen weeks, she brought him in for his first evaluation.

“I feel like one of my rats,” he told her as they sat in the attached orange chairs in the waiting room. She gave him a quizzical look. “In the lab,” he said.

“It’s not the same.”

“It is,” he said. “It’s okay, though. I can be the rat after all these years.”

“Stop that, Edmund.”

“Maybe it will help someone,” he said.

“Maybe it will help you.”

“I’m not the point of this. This is a trial. Other people are the point of this.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“It’s fine. It’s science. I’m here for science.”

She was silent for a while.

“I’m the rat,” he said, more definitely now.

“Fine,” she said. “You’re the rat.”

“They all died eventually,” he said. “I never liked finding them stiff. It never got easier.”

She imagined the stench from the cages, the dead eyes, the reduced bodies looking like cat toys. “It must have been unpleasant,” she said.

“It was sad. It was a thankless job they had.”

• • •

They weighed him and took his vital signs, drew his blood and collected his urine, gave him an electrocardiogram and performed memory tests. They monitored his ability to do certain tasks. They had him play with blocks. They had him cut meat. They had him write things. Writing was the hardest thing to get him to do. He hated his own handwriting. It was more proof than he was willing to look at.

At the end, they handed her enough drugs to last Ed the thirteen weeks until his next scheduled visit. There was a jolt of promise in the bag of medications. She wondered for a moment whether, if she gave him the whole bag at once, he would be his old self for a few days, an afternoon, a couple of hours. It would be worth it, even if the rest of the time he was a mess. She knew it didn’t work like that, though. His real self wasn’t hiding in there waiting to be sprung for a day of freedom. This was his real self now.

48

It was a Tuesday in early July. They were lying in bed with the windows open. She tried reading a novel but felt jittery and distracted until she gave up and retrieved one of her Alzheimer’s books from the pile she kept hidden under the bed. Ed was supposed to be reading, but he had his hands folded across his chest and was looking at the ceiling.

Four months had passed since the diagnosis. She had gotten swept up in the strange logic of that moment—Don’t tell a soul—but it was clear that Ed couldn’t be counted on to know when enough was enough.

She couldn’t just tell people herself, because she knew Ed wouldn’t forgive her for betraying his trust.

She closed her book and propped herself on her elbow to face him. “How about if we have a dinner? Invite our closest friends over. We can tell them all at once.”

“I’d prefer if we didn’t.”

“It would be easier than telling everyone individually.”

“Who says we have to tell them individually?”

“A nice dinner party,” she said. “It would make it feel like a team effort to tackle this thing. I’ll see if I can get it together for Saturday.”

He gritted his teeth. “You sound determined.”

“We’ll have to tell Connell.”

“That’s where I draw the line,” he said, almost growling. “I’m not telling him yet. I don’t want him to see me that way, reduced like that. I still want to be his father.”

“You’ll always be his father,” she said, but instead of soothing him she only disturbed herself with thoughts of what that “always” implied — the time when the disease would have tangled his synapses and hobbled him, when he would no longer be all there.

“In any event,” Ed said, “I want to wait.”

Connell was often playing baseball or in the city or at a friend’s house. When he was home, he stayed in his room. If she was extremely careful, she could keep it from him a little longer.

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll hold it back a bit. But you’d better prepare for it. We can’t keep it from him forever.”

“I could.”

“Honey, no offense — you couldn’t.”

“If I’m not alive,” Ed said darkly, “then he doesn’t have to see me like that. He can remember me as I was.”

“That’s nice. That’s just lovely. You get that goddamned thought out of your head this instant. You’re not going anywhere.”

“If it could just stay like this,” he said, his tone changing, “I could live with it.” He pulled the sheet up under his chin.

“Maybe the drugs will start working,” she said. “Or if these drugs don’t work, there’ll be others that work better. The science will catch up to this disease. And we’re going to do everything we can in the meantime. We’re going to be very busy. You’re going to stay alert. You’re going to read a lot.” She looked at his book on the nightstand, which he hadn’t picked up in days. “We’ll do the crossword together, we’ll go to plays and operas. We’ll go on trips. We’ll keep this thing at bay.” She took his hand; it felt stiff, a little cold. She put her other hand on his chest to feel his heart beat.

She didn’t know how much of what she’d said she believed, but it felt good to say it. She went back to her book. The chapter she was reading discussed how the disruption of context might accelerate the patient’s decline. Familiar settings and people, it suggested, could have a prophylactic effect on memory loss.

She thought of how strenuously Ed had fought leaving Jackson Heights. Had she exposed him to harm in moving him to Bronxville? A guilty feeling took root in her thoughts and blossomed into panic.

“We can’t afford to wait to tell Connell,” she said. “What if he finds out for himself? What if he overhears me on the phone?”

“Don’t talk on the phone.”

“We have to tell him tomorrow,” she said.

“Give it another week.”

“Fine,” she said. “This Saturday is the dinner. The one after that, we tell Connell.”

“He has a game that day.”

“You have his schedule memorized?”

“He plays every Saturday.”

“After his game, then. Trust me. It’s the best thing.”

“Okay,” he said. “I trust you.”

She was strangely disappointed to hear him give in so easily. She understood that this new relationship of theirs signaled the beginning of the end of the old one. He would have to become something like a child to her.

• • •

The afternoon of the dinner, as she was running around getting the last things ready, Ed came in and told her to call it off.

“It’s not true,” he said. “It’s a lie we’d be telling them.”

“Honey,” she said.

“It’s a lie.”

It was too late; the Cudahys, possibly the McGuires, were already on their way. Dishes were simmering on the stove.

“These are our friends.”

“It’s a lie.”

“Would it be easier for you if I told them myself?”

“Do what you want,” he said, waving his hand at her in a way that called to mind an angry old man.

“They’ll be here in a little while. Tell me what to do.”

“This is your affair,” he said. He ran the tap and put a glass under it. Water filled the glass and spilled up over the sides. He held it under for a while. It looked as if he was making a little fountain out of it.

“I think we should do it the way we discussed.”

“No!” he said sharply. “They don’t need to know anything. It’s all a lie.”

“Do you think they can’t tell anything?” she found herself shouting. “You think they can’t figure it out? You think they don’t have eyes and ears?” She paused. “And brains?” She regretted it as soon as she’d said it.

“They won’t see anything,” he said, seething. “There’s nothing to see.” He left the room.

She found him stewing on the front stairs and took a seat beside him. “We have to tell them sometime.” She reached to touch him, but he flinched away. The neighbors across the street were pruning their flowers. She hadn’t met them yet. She had wanted to wait to introduce herself until she felt herself to be operating from a position of strength, but that time hadn’t come, and she felt too self-conscious to go over there now that they had looked at each other so many times across hedgerows without waving.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Would you rather nobody knew?”

He didn’t answer.

“Because if you want to do this alone, just us and Connell, I can’t. Maybe I’m not as strong as you. I thought I was, but I need all the support I can get. Now more than ever.”

He turned and looked at her.

“I won’t say anything tonight,” she said. “We can do this when you’re ready. On one condition.”

He was blinking intently.

“Until then, don’t make me feel like I’m alone with this. Connell needs to know. Let’s deal with the reality of this. Other people, fine. But I need to know we in this house are going to deal in reality.”

“Fine,” he said.

“You have Alzheimer’s.”

“Don’t say that.”

“This is what I’m talking about,” she said. “We need to stick together on this.”

“Fine,” he said. “Good.”

“I know you know,” she said. “But I need to hear it from you.”

“I do know.”

“Say it, then.”

“Say what?”

“Say that you have Alzheimer’s.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “I’m not saying any such thing.”

• • •

She almost didn’t care if he didn’t join them. She could tell them he was sick, and if he chose to wander in, she could joke about a miraculous recovery. Maybe they’d think it strange; maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d notice things; maybe they’d have blinders on. She couldn’t worry about managing impressions anymore. She almost couldn’t care anymore whether they wandered upstairs and saw the state of disrepair her house was in, outside the carefully curated area for hosting guests.

Frank and Ruth, Cindy and Jack, Tom and Marie, Evan and Kelly: they arrived all at once, as if they’d rented a bus for the occasion. She tried to distract them with drinks and a flurry of hanging coats and shuttling dishes. She was trying to think of an alibi for Ed when he appeared in the door to a round of salutations.

She directed everyone to the dining room. She had decided to say that the occasion for their gathering was no occasion, that they simply wanted to see close friends and didn’t want to wait until Christmas to do so. It wasn’t a lie, exactly; she was very happy to have them there. For months now, she’d had to make excuses for not seeing them.

She used the proximity of Frank’s birthday as an excuse to stick him at the head, Ed’s regular seat. She sat Ed next to her. If Frank figured it out, she could count on him not to say anything. When the chatter was at its loudest, she filled Ed’s plate.

She was angry at Ed for putting off the telling of their friends. She didn’t care if he spilled food on himself or knocked his drink into his lap. He was on his own. She tried to absorb herself in conversations, but for the first time she derived little relief from the gathering of all these people. She ate distractedly enough to move even Jack to ask between courses if anything were the matter.

Deep into the main course, Ed tapped on his wineglass. She squeezed his knee instinctively. He struggled to his feet.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” he said as the voices lowered. She stood as well, to be beside him. “I wanted to have all of you here,” he said. “My good friends. It’s good to see you.”

He paused for long enough that it seemed he had stopped. She rubbed his back encouragingly. No one knew how to react. It was sort of funny, what he’d said; it was anticlimactic. She almost expected Frank or Jack to say, “Good to see you too. Now have a seat so we can eat.” They couldn’t, though, because Ed looked so deadly serious.

“I wanted to tell you that we’ve had some news,” he said. “It isn’t good news.”

Nobody moved; nobody said a word.

“We’ve had some tests done. And talked to some good doctors.”

It amazed her to hear him talk about Dr. Khalifa with such equanimity. Something deep in him was surfacing, some essential fiber in his character. Then he stopped again. His leg was shaking. He was steadying himself on the table. It struck her that he had tried his best. He had tried to spare her from having to tell them, but she would have to do it regardless. She put her hand on his shoulder to urge him into his seat.

“It looks like I have Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.

A second of stunned silence, then a round of gasps, hands held to mouths, looks of concern. Frank pounded the table and peppered Ed for details. Jack questioned the diagnosis. Evan and Kelly moved their seats closer together and pledged their support while holding hands. Cindy cried. Marie sat morose. Ruth made attempts at jokes. Tom drank whole glasses of wine in long quaffs and kept pulling his napkin through the circle formed by his thumb and forefinger. Nobody touched their food. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to serve dessert. She asked everyone if they’d like to move into the other room to sit with the news. They came up and hugged Ed one by one. He seemed more physically confident, quicker on the uptake, as if he had lanced a malignancy that had been draining his essence. She shuddered to imagine how much of his mental energy had gone into keeping everyone in the dark. In its own way, it had been a feat of fortitude.

Jack came up to her in the kitchen, chewing around his words as though they were a shell he was trying not to swallow.

“How could you do that? How could you embarrass that man like that?”

She had to hold her hand down to keep it from smacking his face. “This was Ed’s choice,” she said firmly.

“No man would choose that.” He turned and headed to the other room with the stiff uprightness of a former military man.

She had to remind herself that men took news like this differently than women did. She’d seen that for years working in hospitals. The bigger they were, the more uneasy they acted around revelations of disaster.

“It’s a matter of plaque deposits,” Ed was saying when she returned to the living room. Talking about the diagnosis had empowered him; he sounded professorial.

“Plaque deposits,” Frank repeated, a stunned vacancy in his voice. “I take care of plaque deposits.”

“Synapses get rerouted,” Ed said. “Brain mass decreases. Functionality suffers.”

Whatever had happened to his short-term memory, Ed’s long-term memory was, at least for now, an impregnable fortress. The clinical detachment with which he discussed what was happening neurophysiologically might have made you forget he was talking about himself. He seemed to welcome the chance to talk in this abstracted way. The faces of the people around him registered an appreciation of his aplomb, and a somber awareness settled into all of them of how terrible it was that such a fertile mind had been subject to this perverse accident of biology.

“Early-onset is the most virulent kind,” she said to Marie in the kitchen. “It dismantles motor functions and speech as it erases the memory.” She paused. “It’s the true Alzheimer’s,” she said, with something like pride at the thought that if her husband were to be destroyed by a degenerative neurological disorder, it would be the undiluted article, the aristocrat of brain diseases.

• • •

Everyone stayed later than usual. No one seemed to know when it would be okay to leave. Maybe they didn’t want to face the road yet, their dark thoughts, the reduced company of their spouses. Eventually Ed got cranky. “Is this thing ever going to end?” he asked, and went up to bed in a huff without pausing to say good night. Ruth raised her eyebrows, and Eileen raised hers back, and then Ruth started herding people toward the door.

After the other guests had said their good-byes and were making their way down the back steps, Ruth and Frank were all that remained. Frank filled a thermos with coffee for the trip back.

“I knew something was wrong,” he said.

“It must have been obvious.”

“I don’t know how to process all this. It’s like it isn’t real.”

“I feel the same way.”

“It scares me,” he said. “I think about it myself sometimes. When I lose my keys, when I forget where I parked my car.”

Frank did look scared. The pallor on his cheeks gave him a vaguely cadaverous look.

“You can talk to him, you know. He’s still your friend. He’s still here.”

“I don’t know how to talk to him about this.”

“Just open your mouth and see what comes out.”

Frank shuffled out the door with his thermos held like a lantern, and Ruth gave her a long hug, and then Eileen was alone in the kitchen. Dishes and glasses were scattered everywhere, and food had to be covered in plastic or scraped into the garbage. She had never before been relieved to see her house left in such a mess. She wouldn’t have to turn the lights off and head upstairs for an hour at least.

• • •

The following Saturday, they ate in the languid silence that followed games in which Connell pitched. His exhaustion passed to the two of them through some invisible membrane.

“How did you do?” she asked.

The gleaming newness of the kitchen hadn’t yet faded; it still felt like someone else’s room.

“Fine,” Connell said.

“Fine,” Ed said, amused. “He did more than fine. He struck out — what?” He looked to Connell.

“Thirteen.”

“And not one batter made solid contact,” Ed said.

“I also walked eight guys.”

“His control is an issue, there’s no denying it. He was pitching out of jams the whole game. He threw a ton of pitches.”

As if on cue, Connell rubbed his shoulder.

“But the sky’s the limit. A lefty with this kind of velocity? If he keeps working at it, he’s going to be a force.”

She waited for Ed to transition into the discussion of the disease. She caught his eye; he shook his head to say the plan was off. She tried to indicate displeasure, but he looked down at his soup to avoid her gaze.

“Ed,” she said, coughing. He looked up.

Connell’s eyes were heavy with fatigue. Ed stood up and put his hand on Connell’s head for a second and tousled his locks affectionately. He walked over to the sink and gazed out the window.

“What’s up? You guys fighting again?”

“No,” Ed said, still looking out the window. “Just listen to your mother.”

“You’re getting older now,” she said. “You’re getting to the point where you can hear adult things.” Connell sat up straighter in his seat. “The things adults talk about. What your father and I talk about.”

“Please don’t tell me this is about the birds and the bees. I’m way too old for that.”

She couldn’t hold back a thin, sad smile. She felt a lump in her throat. “We’ve got some bad news,” she said.

The boy’s jocular expression faded. “What is it?”

“It has to do with your father’s health,” she said after a bit.

Ed turned around and walked back toward the table. He sat. “What your mother is trying to say is that I have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Do you know what that is?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He looked back and forth between them. “It’s where you forget things.”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that what old people get?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Most of the time. But sometimes it happens to younger people.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“There’s not a lot of medicine out there,” he said. “I’m on some experimental drugs. We’ll see. But it’s going to get worse.”

“Are you scared?”

This was the first time she’d seen anyone ask Ed how it affected him personally. It had always been questions about the illness. She hadn’t even asked him herself.

Ed straightened up. His eyes got a crinkly, philosophical look in them. “Sometimes I am, sure,” he said. “That’s part of it, no question about it.” He looked at the sugar bowl, the top of which he’d been clacking like a cymbal. “I like my life. I love my life. I don’t want to lose it.”

“Aren’t you too young for this?”

“If you’re asking me, yes,” he said. “If you’re asking the disease, no.”

“How quickly will it get worse?”

“Honey,” she said to him, “don’t pepper your father with questions.”

Ed put up a hand to quiet her.

“It could be quick,” he said. “It could be years. Every case is different.”

Connell seemed to chew on what he’d heard for a little while.

“Is there going to be a time when you don’t know who I am?” he asked.

Ed’s face took on a fierce expression, as though the question had angered him. She thought to intervene, but then he rose from his seat and leaned down to put his arms around the boy.

“I will always know who you are,” Ed said, kissing the top of his head. “I promise you that. Even if you think I don’t know, even if I seem not to. I will always know who you are. You’re my son. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“You neither,” he said, rising to hug his father.

She started clearing the dishes.

“Mom,” Connell said. He held out his gangly arm to her.

She walked over and stood near them. Connell seemed to urge her to join them in some sort of embrace. She had wanted him to hear, and now that he’d heard, she wanted him to come to terms with it and carry on stoically, but he was a different kind of creature from her. She and Ed had worked to give him an easier life than they’d had. Sometimes she wondered if she’d erred in not making him tougher.

The idea of a group hug embarrassed her and she couldn’t comply. There was going to be more darkness than hugs could begin to dispel. She thought of this embrace he was offering as the come-on of a huckster selling a spurious remedy. She gave him three quick, sharp pats on the back, as if to punctuate some unstated conclusion, and headed upstairs.

49

After they’d finally told Connell, she could talk openly with her girlfriends about Ed’s condition. She called them every night — Ruth, Cindy, Marie, Kelly, Kathy, her aunt Margie — going through the lineup, dialing a new number the instant she’d hung up with the first. She didn’t want to be interrupted once she’d started, so she waited to make the calls until after dinner, when Ed was in his study grading lab reports and writing out lectures. Her friends invariably ended whatever calls they were on when she rang through. She didn’t always know what she was going to talk about when she picked up the phone, but the conversations followed their own rhythms, and they always had to do with Ed. She didn’t even try to talk about other things. She thought if she talked it out enough, she could make it more familiar, less overwhelming, less frightening.

Whenever she called the McGuires and Frank answered, he handed it right to Ruth. Once, about a month after the dinner at which they’d told Ruth and Frank and the others about Ed, Frank annoyed her with the way he rushed off, and she asked Ruth to hand the phone back to him.

“Where the hell did you go?” she asked. “Why haven’t you called? Why hasn’t he seen you? Why haven’t you taken him out for a beer? Why haven’t any of you goddamned guys taken him out? He’s in that study night after night.”

“I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

“He knows that. Just call him and say hello.”

“I will,” Frank said.

Frank didn’t call, though, and a week later she got Ruth to put him on. She pretended Frank had called and handed the phone to Ed. She was afraid Ed would notice that the phone hadn’t rung, but he just took the phone and started talking to Frank like a teenager, his excitement palpable. She listened to Ed’s end of the conversation, which lasted an hour. Nothing about the disease came up. That was one difference between men and women. Men got along fine without revealing anything. She almost admired them for it. The downside was that they retreated to their islands.

When she took the phone back from Ed, she made Frank promise to call Ed again soon, but Frank didn’t call, and the next time they went to the McGuires’, Frank hardly spoke at dinner, and they left right after dessert.

• • •

Eileen had been telling Ruth about the anxiety dreams she was having about all her teeth falling out and her skin peeling off her body, when Ruth surprised her by suggesting she see a psychologist. She was amazed to hear Ruth speak of the positive experience she’d had in therapy. She didn’t even know Ruth had ever been in therapy. It was nearly impossible to imagine. It wasn’t that Ruth was a stone; she was in fact tirelessly empathetic when listening to the troubles and pains of others, and she always made time for her friends. It was just that she herself never gave anything away. You wouldn’t catch her crying if you tied her up and strangled her cats before her eyes one at a time. For years, Eileen had taken at face value Ruth’s assertion that, having more or less raised her younger siblings, she’d decided she was done bringing children up. Then, late one night when the men were asleep, Ruth admitted she’d been terrified to wreck a kid’s life with drink the way her mother had done. Ever since, when Eileen saw Ruth looking at Connell with affection, she knew there was more in Ruth’s heart than she’d admit to anyone, including Frank.

Eileen had dismissed therapy as an indulgence for those with too much time and money and too few friends. Besides, Catholics didn’t go to shrinks; that was what the confessional booth was for. What were you supposed to do, though, when you hadn’t been to confession since your early twenties? She pictured herself enumerating her sins for an hour and a half, being handed an inexhaustible list of prayers to recite, and leaving with no more clarity than she’d had going in.

Ruth’s therapist was named Dr. Jeremy Brill, and his office was near Ruth’s, a block from the Flatiron Building. He greeted Eileen at the door and directed her to an armchair. Eileen looked around for the couch she’d been expecting, but there was only a mahogany desk, two armchairs, and a trio of reassuring diplomas — Harvard, Cornell, Yale — on the wall above a little bookcase. The room was dark except for a floor lamp and the little light that came through the slatted blinds.

Dr. Brill sat in an armchair and asked her to speak. She found it easier to begin than she had expected. She was talking about her mother and father, her youth in Woodside, her life in Jackson Heights, her career, even Mr. Kehoe, and after she’d been speaking for a while, she felt the first sprigs of unburdening bloom in her chest. After she’d subsided into silence, it gratified her to hear Dr. Brill — he insisted that she call him Jeremy, but that wasn’t going to happen, even though he was at least ten years younger than her — say that Ed must possess superior intelligence to preserve outward normalcy for as long as he had.

“A less intelligent man might have given himself up long ago,” Dr. Brill said. “Who knows how long he’s been keeping this hidden?”

He prodded her to speak about the way Ed’s illness made her feel, and though she’d vaguely decided beforehand to parry such questions, she began to speak with a pointedness and clarity that surprised her, until, many minutes later — it amazed her how silent Dr. Brill remained, how he seemed to draw the words out of her as though hypnotizing her with his eyes, which narrowed and widened to some hidden rhythm — she felt the engine of her thoughts wind down, midsentence. He told her their time for that session was up.

The next time, she didn’t feel comfortable talking. After an initial greeting, Dr. Brill didn’t say anything either. A long silence settled into the Oriental rug. It put her in mind of the silent treatment Ed sometimes gave her, or the standoffs Connell would enact as a little boy, when he stubbornly refused to speak.

“What’s your biggest fear?” Dr. Brill asked after a while.

“I’m not quite sure,” she said. “Probably being alone.”

Another silence.

“And why is that?”

“Who wants to be alone?”

“Some people might.”

“I don’t,” she said.

“Do you feel that your husband is leaving you alone?”

“Sometimes I do, I suppose. Yes. I guess I do.”

“I understand,” he said. “This is a disease where you never win. It doesn’t just take down the sufferer. It takes down the spouse, the children, the friends. It can feel tremendously isolating.”

It was feast or famine with him; either he didn’t say a word or else he said more than she wanted to hear.

She understood that she wasn’t going to win, that she couldn’t beat Ed’s illness, and yet she wasn’t about to sit there and let someone tell her she was going to lose. She decided right then that she was never coming back. That made it easier to speak, and she spent the next half hour holding forth on all sorts of things she had no idea she was thinking about. In the end she felt relieved for having had a chance to get them out. It was almost a shame to have to cut this experiment short, because she was beginning to see value in it, though only in small doses, and for someone very different from herself.

• • •

She could see the day coming when Ed would have to stop working, and she wanted to be smart. She went to the Alzheimer’s Association to find out what kind of resources might be available. The social worker told her to wait until she was impoverished and they’d be able to help her get assistance.

“Impoverished?”

“Medicaid only kicks in once you’ve spent down to the threshold. You can keep your salary, up to a certain dollar amount. Not your husband’s. That goes straight to Medicaid. You’ll have to liquidate investments. You can put your money into home improvements, even update your wardrobe. Buy medicines in advance, staples for the house. Set aside burial expense money for both of you. Necessary things. Not jewelry. Definitely not jewelry. Except for your wedding ring and your engagement ring, and his wedding ring. You can keep those. If you spend the money down quickly, the government can come in and ask where it went, and you might not get Medicaid. You can keep the house no matter what. And the car. The upside is, when you’re nearly broke, there will be assistance available.”

“You’re telling me that short of — going broke, as you put it — there’s nothing I can do to defray the cost of a nurse — or a home, if it comes to that?”

“At this point, no.”

“Everything in my savings account goes?”

“Yes.”

“All the stocks?”

“Indeed.”

“The retirement accounts?”

“Them too.”

“Let me tell you something,” she said gruffly, feeling pride rise in her like a fever. “I worked hard my entire life.”

“I’m sorry.”

The costs would be enormous; their savings would dwindle quickly. The cost of at-home nursing care (she refused to consider a nursing home until she absolutely had to) would be the equivalent of taking out a second mortgage, which would be expensive enough on two incomes, but when Ed’s pension kicked in at about 40 percent of his salary, it would be virtually impossible for her to pay it without dipping into their retirement money, which would shrink quickly.

“I should have done the cabinets in cherry,” she said.

“Come again?”

“I was too prudent. I should have had the bricks ripped up and marble tiles put down. I should have bought three mink coats instead of one on sale. I should have gone to Europe every year. I should have spent my money like a drunken sailor in my twenties and thirties when everyone around me was doing it. This all would have been a lot easier to swallow if I were poor.”

• • •

She went to see Bruce Epstein, a tax lawyer and the husband of her friend Sunny from work.

She sat across from Bruce in his Upper West Side office. Law books lined the shelves, as well as classic works of literature. “The best thing you can do is divorce him,” he said, offering her a bowl of chocolates. “Strictly financially speaking, of course. Separate your finances. Put everything in your name. Take all the money.”

Eileen fiddled with a loose string on the hem of her suit jacket.

“I know you don’t want to hear it,” Bruce continued, “but that’s the best thing you can do. If you divorce him, he gets Medicaid right away. It might be better to be unsentimental about it. You don’t have to actually divorce him in your heart. You can take care of him. Just get a different place.”

“What would I tell my son?”

“Your son doesn’t have to know until later.”

“What do I tell Ed?”

“Tell him you’re trying to be smart. Tell him you’re doing this for all of you. Nothing will fundamentally change, except that you’ll get assistance from the state.”

“I’m supposed to divorce my husband because he has Alzheimer’s?”

“I know it sounds bad,” he said, “but you wanted to know. From a financial perspective, divorce is the best thing. I’d be remiss if I didn’t apprise you of your options.”

“How exactly would this happen? How would I divorce him and get all the money?”

“You’ve got a minor child, so that helps. Make up something about infidelity. There are a lot of ways to get this done. You’ll get the house, so that’s taken care of.”

“I don’t think I could do it.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said warmly. “But I think you should give it serious consideration. My concern here — so that you avoid regret later — is that you make a deliberate decision and not let your emotions get the best of you. Or if you’re going to make an emotional decision, do that in a rational way. Decide that you want to weigh the emotions as greater in value than the financial particulars. If you were able to overcome some of the mental obstacles to proceeding in the way I’ve advised you, it would be the most sensible alternative. But then pure rationality isn’t always the compass we’re guided by. I can tell you this much: I would want Sunny to do this if she were in your situation. It would help both you and your husband. And remember: in the eyes of God you are married forever.”

What he was advocating was the exertion of radical control over one’s own life, even if it meant flouting cherished ideals. She had long prized the notion that she would have made a good lawyer if given the opportunity, but she realized now, as she listened to Bruce’s dispassionate appeal to the facts, that she lacked the ability to see things in the unstintingly logical way he did. She didn’t think she could divorce Ed just to preserve their stake. She’d rather spend the money down. She was going to have to work forever anyway.

50

Connell was in his girlfriend Regina’s basement. He wanted to lay her down on the soft carpet and get on top of her, but the best he could do was squeeze close to her on the couch, which sat flush against the paneled wall. He picked at one of the grooves between panels, preparing to make his move and drape an arm over her. He’d done it twice already that day, but it still made him nervous. The first time, after they’d made out for a while, the door at the top of the stairs opened and her mother shouted down, “Everything okay?” They sat at opposite ends of the couch after that, until he worked his way back over to her, inch by inch. Just when he got there, her mother — as if she had a special sense — called him upstairs to reach a serving platter from the top of the cabinet. Regina had said her mother only let them stay down there alone because she’d heard boys from his school were nice boys.

Regina’s family was Lebanese. Her father was so intimidating that Connell could barely speak to him. Connell didn’t like to be alone with Regina when her father was home; it wasn’t worth the anxiety.

He couldn’t remember the name of the movie they were watching. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but the way her hair brushed against him when she flipped it, or the way she pushed against him slightly with every intake of breath. She had kissed him dutifully for a few minutes, and now she was insisting on watching this movie, with an annoyed air that suggested she was trying to seem disciplined and mature and beyond petty lust, but really he could tell that she was just as nervous as he was.

He put his arm around her and let his hand settle on the knobby ball of her shoulder. He let it move a little lower, so that it rested on her collarbone. She was wearing a polo shirt, munching from a bowl of popcorn in her lap. He moved his hand to the triangle of skin her collar exposed and let it rest there. It was good that he had long arms, because the position was awkward. After a few seconds she shifted closer to him, leaning into his flannel shirt, but he knew it was only to move his hand away.

He had never put his hand up her shirt. He’d felt her over her shirt, but she’d always stopped him after a few seconds. One time he’d put his hand on her thigh and she’d picked it up and moved it away.

He’d told her about his father once because he hadn’t had anything else to say. As soon as he saw the sympathetic look that came over her, he knew he would have that topic to return to when he needed it. It might be useful for more than filling silences.

She was watching the movie so intently that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had to give her mother a report on it afterward. All he could think of was how much like spring she smelled and whether she could tell he had an erection.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey yourself.” She glanced at him and then looked back at the movie.

“I’m feeling sad.”

“What’s up?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing.”

She turned to him fully now. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s watch the movie.”

“You tell me right now.” She had a deadly earnest look on her face, and he couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. He felt bad when he realized she was serious. Her father’s bar, and his ghostly presence at it, looked on in silent disapproval.

He put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, which inflamed her.

“Either you tell me or I’m not kissing you anymore tonight,” she said.

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said. “I just don’t know how to talk about it.”

She put the popcorn bowl on the coffee table and sat on her legs, drawing her feet up under her. “Now you really have to tell me. What? What?”

“I was just thinking of my father. It makes me sad to think of him.”

Her features arranged themselves into a look of concern.

“Tell me,” she said. Her hand was on his knee.

“Just that he’s not going to be here. He’s going away. He’s going to forget me.”

She started shaking her head. She looked like she was about forty years old. “He won’t forget you,” she said in a way that was both dismissive and reassuring. It was like she could see what was actually going to happen.

“He will. Everyone’s going to go away eventually.”

“Not me. I’ll be here.”

“You’ll go away too.”

“I will not,” she said.

She went to hug him. He kissed her neck and moved up to her lips. The movie kept playing in the background, but now she wasn’t watching it either. She was kissing him long and with a different level of feeling. His erection now pressed painfully against his pants. He was running his hands all over her body. He put his hand under the bottom of her shirt and moved it up quickly when she didn’t shove it away. He ran his hand over her bra and slipped his hand under it. He felt his breath coming short. He moved his other hand up under her shirt, so he had one of her breasts in each of his hands. It felt like he had made it to the other side of some great divide. He started kissing her neck and ears, and eventually he had lifted her shirt up and was kissing her breasts. He would not try to do more than this. There would be other opportunities. He would keep something in reserve. His father had helped him. It was a powerful thing that he would have to use sparingly, what was happening with his father; he didn’t want to get addicted to it. But there was nothing wrong with letting some good come from it.

The room seemed to get darker. He sucked at her nipple like he was trying to draw something out of it, which he knew was all wrong. She winced a few times at the pressure of his teeth.

The door upstairs came open, and she rushed to pull her shirt down, which was just as well, because his kisses on her breasts had turned into something he was practicing doing, and he had begun to feel guilty about losing his innocence. There was no going back for it now.

51

Virginia was in the phone book, as she’d said she’d be so many years before. Or rather her husband was: Callow, Leland. Eileen had been meaning to reach out to Virginia since the day she’d closed on the house. She’d gone for the phone several times, but the idea of fumbling through the initial conversation gave her an anxious pit in her stomach and she always hung up before dialing. She didn’t want to degrade herself any more than she’d have to. She decided to show up instead.

She chose a Saturday. If they weren’t home, she’d leave a note and try again the next day. She put on a nice blouse and skirt and did her hair. Virginia’s address was in the town proper, up the hill, on one of those winding streets with houses set far back from the street on enormous lots.

When she was a block away, Eileen felt so jittery that she had to pull over and calm herself down. This was the encounter she’d been anticipating for years, though she hadn’t realized as much until she was on its threshold. The visit Virginia had made to the dressing room planted a seed in her mind that had broken through the surface and survived long winters. She wanted Virginia to see the tree in its full flowering. Would Virginia recognize it for what it was? She hoped it would seem to Virginia like the most natural thing in the world for Eileen to be standing there, a neighbor of sorts, even if she lived across town, dropping in unannounced, an old friend, a surprise visitor.

There were so many trees on the front lawns. They seemed older than the nation itself. It was early October; the leaves had started to turn, and the sight of the street in the lightly misty air made her stop and pull over for a minute before she could continue.

She pulled up in front of Virginia’s house. There was a car in the driveway. She put her own car in park and turned off the engine, and the old vehicle settled heavily. She regretted not stopping at Topps for a box of cookies, or at Tryforos for some flowers, but on the other hand it would have been strange to come bearing a gift after thirty years. She imagined handing over the rattling box of cookies and Virginia receiving it with a skeptical look, as though it were a store of keepsakes from an intentionally forgotten past.

She stood in the street, gazing at the house. It was almost perfectly beautiful. There was nothing about it she would change, nothing she could imagine anyone — even those tasteless people who ruined old houses by updating them — would ever dream of changing. The landscaping alone looked expensive enough to break a bank account. The house wore its affluence easily, though. There was a quiet about it, broken only by the low hum of a distant weed whacker. She imagined an old man roving the grounds in a pair of gloves, dragging a heavy garbage bag and filling it with weeds.

She couldn’t convince herself to approach the front door. The thought of sitting over tea with Virginia had gotten her through some lonely afternoons after everything had been unpacked. She had been waiting for the moment when her house looked polished enough to show it off, when everything had settled down long enough to allow her to operate from a position of strength, but that moment hadn’t come. She had kept alive the idea of a steadfast friend capable of great enthusiasm on her behalf, even after years of silence. She knew that seeing Virginia again might rob her of a consolation that had been more important than she wanted to admit.

She started up the stone path that transected the lawn. She had only taken a few steps in when a dog came running up, barking and freezing her in place. It looked harmless enough, a little Jack Russell terrier, but it barked so insistently and with such a strange, alert intelligence that she began to hear a message beyond a simple warning to stay away. The dog marked a half-moon around her, then left off its clamoring and stood with nose up and eyes narrowed, assessing her in a manner that unnerved her. She tried to hide her fear — not of the dog but of what the dog was thinking, what it saw and understood — because she thought it absurd to feel apprehension before such a diminutive creature. No one emerged from the house to call the dog off. The compact thing had an almost impossible solidity to it; its thick coat seemed to stand at permanent attention.

When the figure of a woman appeared from behind a hedgerow at the side of the house, Eileen felt her heart stop in a fear that made her forget about the dog. She thought to turn and walk away, but after she didn’t immediately take the first retreating step, she knew she couldn’t do so without seeming to scurry guiltily. The woman — it had to be Virginia — walked briskly to retrieve the animal, which hustled with a chastened dutifulness to meet her halfway and circle back by her side. Watching the woman approach from the middle distance, Eileen had trouble recognizing her as the gamine girl she’d last seen trying on bridesmaids’ dresses. She was nicely attired, in a pair of brown slacks and a mustard-colored blouse whose sheen glinted in the sunlight.

“Can I help you?” Virginia asked from a few feet away. Her hair had gone an ashen shade of gray that somehow looked sun-bleached and healthy. She wore it pulled back in a neat, attractive bun. She’d grown thinner with age, so that she appeared almost military in her bearing. She looked inquisitively at Eileen, and Eileen thought for a moment that Virginia had recognized her, until she realized Virginia was probably simply wondering what this woman was doing on the perimeter of her lawn.

“I hope so,” Eileen said. “I seem to have gotten a little lost. The road took a few turns, and I got off it somehow. I have to get back to the highway.”

“Where are you looking to get?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Where are you looking to go?”

“I was visiting a friend, you see. I just need to get home.”

“Where’s home?”

“The city,” she said, afraid Virginia would hear the nervous lump in her throat. “Queens. I believe I need the Bronx River Parkway to the Hutchinson Parkway.”

“Queens? What part?”

Her heart pounded. “Douglaston,” she said, the dryness in her mouth choking off the end of the word.

Virginia gave her very specific instructions, down to the approximate number of feet after the light till she’d encounter the turnoff to the Bronx River. She radiated none of the scattered, frazzled energy Eileen remembered, and Eileen felt a sudden crushing loneliness at the thought that she hardly knew Virginia at all.

She listened to Virginia describing the familiar route. She had bought herself time to catch her breath. She would never come back now, never be able to reveal herself to her or sit in her living room without a great deal of uncomfortable explaining. She searched Virginia’s face for clues to the story she’d never get to hear — whether she’d had kids, whether her husband was still around, whether she’d had a happy life.

“Thank you,” Eileen said when Virginia was finished.

“It’s my pleasure.”

“You have a beautiful house,” she said. “A very beautiful house. I really can’t help admiring it.”

52

After they left his grandmother’s apartment, they drove through the neighborhood, up Smith, along the Gowanus Expressway, and looped around to come down Court. When they hit Lorraine, they turned right and crept along.

He knew all the street names by now. This was the third weekend in a row his father had taken him to his old neighborhood to show him around. His father was trying to squeeze it in before he forgot what everything was.

They reached the Red Hook Pool. “This is where we swam when I was a boy,” his father said. “It’s hard to believe it’s been so long. Everybody was naked and nobody realized it. It was great. We spent the whole day here and at the end we were like prunes. It’s still being used today, you know.”

Connell nodded politely; he was missing a Halloween party for this.

“Not today,” his father said. “I know that. It’s too cold today. Today in general.”

His father stopped the car. There was an honest, open look on his face. Ugly thoughts flashed through Connell’s mind.

Do you know, really? What do you know anymore? You never really were like a normal father in the first place, were you? You were always more of a dork than the others. You and your obsessively catalogued cassette and VCR tapes, your long-sleeved shirts in the summer, your never wearing shorts, your old movies, your corny jokes. You and your lab coats and sharpened pencils. You and your insistence on perfect grammar and enunciation. You and your spazzy sneakers, your sweat-stained baseball caps, your ear hairs. You and your never exceeding the speed limit by more than a couple of miles an hour. You and your beakers, your clipboards, your briefcase. You and your boring stories of the old neighborhood. I could break your heart right now if I wanted to, you big dork, you nerd, you spaz, you geek, you herb, you Poindexter.

Then his father faced the road again and they turned onto Columbia. They came to a derelict building with a long, faded sign that spelled KOHNSTAMM in capital letters. “This is what’s left of the factory I worked at,” his father said. Graffiti dotted its surface, and weather had worn off much of the paint, so that the ghostly outline of the words MANUFACTURING CHEMISTS could just barely be distinguished below the name. “There used to be so much manufacturing in this city. Now those jobs are gone. Factory work was a — how do I say it? It was an incubator for the middle class.”

His father was having one of those extended moments of lucidity in which he could hold forth about some topic and it wouldn’t seem like anything had happened to his mind. Connell always got a little charge of hope from them, a sense that some part of his father might be able to make it back from the other side of the creaky rope bridge.

“I wouldn’t have gotten where I did if it weren’t for a manufacturing job. We don’t make anything in this country anymore.”

“We make missiles,” Connell said. “Movies. Hamburgers.”

His father seemed not to have heard him. “I worked here at your age,” he said. Then he looked at him searchingly. “No, a little older than you. In my early twenties. I keep thinking you’re older than you are. You look so much like my brother Phil.”

Connell turned the radio on, found WDRE. The beginning notes of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were playing and he turned it up. He didn’t even care if his father told him to turn it down, because in his mind he wasn’t really there. Maybe he wasn’t really there in his father’s mind either.

53

I need you to help me prepare for the tournament tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“The resolution has to do with whether euthanasia is morally justified. I have to develop both a pro and a con argument. Do you know how this works?”

“I think so.”

“I’m going to come at you with pro. I want you to be con. Then we can switch it up. I’ll make my first affirmative. Then you do a cross-examination. We’ll go from there. I’ll talk you through it. Okay? Ready? My first contention is that euthanasia is justified because every human being has the supreme right of self-determination. We uphold an individual’s right to determine where he lives, where he works. If we consider those rights to be sacred, then there is no more fundamental right a person can hold than when he chooses to die. Patients should have the right to maintain control over their own situations. By allowing people to make their own decisions, we preserve free choice and human dignity. Dad, you’re supposed to be taking notes.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re supposed to take notes, so you can come at my contention and try to take it down. Here. Write down what I say. You’re supposed to be scribbling fast. Come up with a counterargument. Try to find chinks in the armor of my argument. Challenge its underlying assumptions. You can argue that many people desirous of euthanasia who survive apparently terminal illnesses would wind up grateful they hadn’t been euthanized. Hit me hard, Dad. I need to practice evading without seeming to. It needs to look artless and artful at the same time. I need to stay calm and confident. Try to goad me into saying something stupid and mean. Last week I was a jerk, and even though I totally destroyed my opponent, the judge gave me a twenty-four — twenty-three, which messed up my seeding in the octofinals. Girls can be as aggressive as they want, which totally sucks. That Stuy girl couldn’t have been nastier, and she got a thirty — twenty-three. Then again, if I were a better debater, I could be really nice and get points for being so damned sweet. So that means practice, practice. I’m coming at you, Dad. Anyway, you can say, ‘It’s unfeasible. It’s impossible to put it into practice equitably.’ ”

“It’s unfeasible. It’s impossible to… what was that?”

“Never mind. Listen, conversations about efficacy are banned. So I say, ‘My opponent is making a policy argument that has no place in Lincoln-Douglas debate.’ Boo-yah!”

“What? What happened?”

“I need to come up with some better hypotheticals. Something from Plato, Jefferson. Those fluency whores at Stuy aren’t going to eat my lunch over a goddamned metaphor.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Stuy is running Locke on aff. I want to be neg. I’m practically begging for neg. Let them play their strong hand. I’m taking that girl down this week. I can taste it. My second contention: the ‘social contract’ argument. The individual sacrifices certain rights and liberties to live under the protection of society. If an individual sacrifices the right to harm other people in exchange for the protections of living in society, euthanasia is justified because it is an act that has no harmful effects on others.”

“I don’t believe in euthanasia, son.”

“This is why you should affirm the resolution that euthanasia is morally just.”

“It’s not just, son. It’s not just or right at all.”

“Dad! I’m talking to the judges. I can’t look at you. Eye contact with the judges is crucial. You need to rebut me. Make a ‘slippery slope’ argument. If we allow euthanasia, it creates a slippery slope where suicide is justifiable. There would be rampant eugenics. Coerced euthanasia. It would have a disproportionate racial and economic impact. People might be pressured to euthanize others for positive gain or else to avoid an economic hardship.”

“Nobody is pressuring anyone to commit euthanasia. Not in this country.”

“Say that it’s not within the rights of the medical field to help patients die. Say that it’s their responsibility to help them improve or at least continue life, no matter its quality. Because if you say that, then I can argue that many terminally ill patients suffer a great deal of pain and no longer wish to have their lives artificially prolonged.”

“You lost me.”

“My third contention is that at times of extreme pain for the patient, euthanasia is the most humane alternative.”

“People get through pain.”

“Argue that new and improved pain-relieving medicines are being discovered all the time. That the timeline for such decisions must be extended to reflect the speed of technological change.”

“All I know is I don’t believe in euthanasia.”

“My opponent never responded to my third argument, so you should carry that through and affirm the resolution.”

“What argument? Son, can we stop this? Can we just talk?”

“You want to know what’s the best neg example you could have, Dad? You are. With your Alzheimer’s. Think about it. If we euthanized people at will, maybe you would have been taken out already. For the good of the herd.”

“Or maybe you would, son.”

“That Stuy girl is going to wish I had gotten taken out when I run into her in the finals this week.”

54

Early in the spring semester, Ed’s chair, Stan Kovey, called her at work to let her know that they’d had several complaints from Ed’s students, including, though he assured her it wasn’t credible, an anonymous death threat.

“A death threat?”

“Not death,” Stan said mildly. “I shouldn’t have said death. Just injury.”

“Well, isn’t that a relief.”

“I’m not calling so much about the threat,” Stan said. “We’ve dealt with them before from disgruntled students. Some of these kids have learned not to trust institutions, due process, and the redress of injustices. What we need to discuss—”

“They were going to beat him up, Stan.”

“More likely they were going to hire someone to do it,” he said, an odd reasonableness in his voice.

“A hitman!”

“More like a thug,” he said. “Ed would have gotten a warning first.”

“The goddamned ingrates,” she said. “The filthy, degenerate sons of bitches. He gave the best years of his life to these animals. They don’t deserve him.”

“They’ll be disciplined,” Stan assured her.

“They should be expelled,” she said, and she wanted to continue, to say, They should be tarred and feathered. They should be run through with swords. They should be brought before a firing squad.

“They probably will be,” Stan said. “Listen. This isn’t about the threats, this is about Ed.” He paused. “And his work.”

Her heart was racing. It was the call she’d been fearing for a long time, and they still needed a year and a half to get to his thirty-year mark.

“Why are you calling me?” she said, thinking it safest to mask her anxiety as incredulity. “Wouldn’t it be better to talk to him directly?”

“I’ve wanted to talk to Ed for a while, but he’s stopped talking to anybody. He pops into the department office to check his mailbox and leaves immediately. He shuffles through the halls with his head down. I left a note in his box, but he’s ignored it. I tried to stop him in the office to ask him to sit down, and he just brushed past me. I wanted to talk to him as a friend before I have to talk to him as his department chair. So I thought to call you.”

“I appreciate that,” she said, though she burned with resentment at the thought of this thoroughly average man, whom she’d hosted for dinner several times in Jackson Heights when he was a junior faculty member, claiming to speak as Ed’s chair, when the only reason he held the position in the first place was that Ed had refused it.

“It seems,” Stan said, “from what we’ve been able to reconstruct, that Ed was assigning the wrong grades to students. I saw the papers. Something was definitely going on. His fall grades were a mess.”

She didn’t know how the semester grades could have been a mess, because she’d supervised their tabulation. Maybe Ed had lost the sheet with the grades and had made a new one up at the last minute.

“I’m calling you,” Stan said, “because, well, did you know anything about problems he was having? Did Ed say anything?”

She felt cornered. “No,” she said. “I had no idea.”

“I need to know, Eileen. We’ve been colleagues, Ed and I, for over ten years. You know that Ed’s like family to me. What’s going on with him?”

He might have thought himself a friend, but he was calling as the department chair. “He’s had some headaches lately,” she said instinctively. “Migraines. He’s going in for a brain scan next week. They want to check for a tumor.”

“A tumor? Jesus, Eileen. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said. “We’re hoping for the best.”

After she hung up the phone, she called Jasper Tate. Jasper was Ed’s protégé and partner on the grant research. His four-year-old daughter was Ed’s goddaughter. She told Jasper about her conversation with Stan but left out the part about the brain tumor.

“You must be shaken up,” he said.

“Can I trust you with something, Jasper? I mean, can I trust you not to speak to anyone about something?”

“Of course.”

“Ed loves you like a son,” she said.

“I feel the same way about him.”

She left a long pause on the line. “He’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“My God.”

“We don’t want anyone in the department to know.”

“Okay.”

“We want to keep him going a little longer. He wants to keep teaching.”

“Of course.”

“I lied to Stan.”

“What about?”

“I told him Ed’s being tested for a brain tumor.”

Jasper chuckled warmly. She felt the compression in her chest lift.

“I don’t mean to laugh,” he said, trying to pull the gravity back into his voice. “It’s just — Stan. He’s so… Stan.”

“No,” she said. “I needed that. This whole thing has been so unreal, so crazy.”

“I can cover for him,” Jasper said. “I’ll help him prepare for class. I’ll grade his things. His students can come to me for help.”

She knew what Ed would say to Jasper’s offer: I can’t do that to you, Tatey. You have important work to do. She felt at times as if she was on a long trek and had lost her compass many miles back. She knew she should probably not involve this lovely man in the dissembling.

“Maybe you can help for a little while,” she said.

“Yes. Great.”

“Do me one favor,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Play dumb. Don’t tell Ed we spoke. Just help him. He won’t notice the difference. With the grading, yes, you may have to say something. Let him feel like he’s doing you a favor. Maybe you want to compare the quality of work in different sections, I don’t know. I don’t need to explain Ed to you. So far as he knows, this conversation never happened.”

• • •

A week later, she called Stan and told him they had ruled out a tumor but had no lead yet about what else might be causing Ed’s sluggishness. She said she would get back to him as soon as she had a better sense of what was going on.

The next morning, she grabbed Ed as he was headed to work. “You leave there as soon as you’re done teaching,” she said. “You understand?”

He nodded.

“Don’t get into conversations with anyone. Not your students, no one. Only Jasper Tate.”

He nodded again.

“If you do find yourself in a conversation,” she said, “under no circumstances are you to tell anyone that you’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

“What’s Alzheimer’s?” he asked, and she felt her spirit breaking, until she looked at him and saw the outline of an impish grin forming on his face.

“Don’t you start with me,” she said, but she was thinking, Lord, don’t let this part of his personality die just yet. If you need ideas for other parts to take away first, I can make a list.

55

Ed was already asleep when the phone rang. She’d been dreading the call for a month.

“Things have gotten worse,” Stan said. “He’s got to come out of the classroom. For his sake, for the students.”

She put a pot of water on to try to calm herself down. The wind howled and rattled against the kitchen window.

“If you think that’s best,” she said. “What’s the administrative protocol? Do you have some rubber room you’ll put him in?”

“I was thinking he’d retire.”

“He has no interest in retiring,” she said. “He has fifteen years before he even thinks about retiring.”

“He can’t do the job anymore, Eileen.”

“He has rights as a tenured professor. He’s supposed to be given time to take corrective action, isn’t he?”

“It would be good for the department if he retired.”

She felt herself begin to shake, more in fear than in anger. She couldn’t help wishing she could turn to Ed for advice; he was always clear-sighted at times like these. She knew it would be hell for him if she forced him to keep going to work. He would be in an adversarial relationship with his department; they would be looking for signs of incompetence.

“I don’t give a damn about the department,” she said. “He’s given enough to the department. I’m interested in my husband.” Her mind was working feverishly. Every passing second would erode her bargaining position. She tried to think like Ed. Ed would have worked out some algorithm in his deep subconscious to produce the right answer. He would have seen it from the beginning. “He could probably sit there for two years,” she said. “That’s how long the review process would take, especially for someone with as exemplary a record as Ed.”

“Nobody wants to hurt Ed here,” he said.

Then it came to her, as if Ed had whispered it in her ear: a palatable option for both sides that would forestall a protracted fight. His preoccupation with getting to work every day no matter what shape he was in, which she’d always found frustrating and even a little insane, would benefit her in the end. It would get him to thirty years.

“I’m not asking for a review process,” she said. “He has over a year of sick days coming to him. Let him finish this year and then give him the sick days.”

• • •

Stan called back the next day to say that Ed’s colleagues had volunteered to fill in his classes for the remainder of the semester. The school would keep him on the payroll through the summer. The sick days wouldn’t start counting down until the fall.

“I wanted to do that much for him,” Stan said. “He won’t have to teach. He won’t have to come in at all.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing,” she said. “Like you don’t know how much he loves his job.”

“Everyone knows how much he loves teaching.”

She wanted to believe that, in his heart of hearts, he had never really loved teaching. That would bring them closer, somehow. She wanted to believe he’d pretended to love it, pretended to be patient in reviewing material endlessly with imbeciles, in order to get his students to respond positively and ultimately make a distasteful job easier on him. The truth, she knew, was that none of it had been a sacrifice. He’d been happier with his career than anyone she knew. It was she who had made sacrifices for his happiness.

“None of those kids will ever know how much he gave up,” she told Stan.

• • •

On February 13, 1993, Ed went to work for the last time. A week later, she went in with him to sign some HR paperwork and learned that she’d miscalculated. She’d been correct about the amount of unused sick time coming to him, but she hadn’t understood that it wouldn’t count toward his pension. By then it was too late to reverse course. She tried to call Stan about it, to feel him out about procuring Ed some kind of time credit, but she got nowhere. She signed off by telling him he was a jerk and slamming down the phone.

Ed would finish in June with twenty-nine years of service to the city instead of thirty, which meant he was due a lower percentage of his salary. And since he’d be retiring before the minimum retirement age, he’d see that number drop even farther. The fourteen hundred dollars a month or so he’d receive from Social Security disability would make up part of the difference, but they were going to have to adjust to new means.

Ed hadn’t had a raise in four years, due to a budget freeze. There was rumored to be a raise coming in the next year or two that would have bumped him up to where he should have been all along. He’d never see the raise he’d already earned. He hadn’t been holding on for just one raise, though. He’d been about to enter the period in his career in which he would make real money. He’d have taught until he was seventy or older, his salary rising every year.

He was also losing his grant from the government, which budgeted thirty thousand dollars a year for his efforts and was up for renewal for four more. The loss of the grant was the keenest blow for her. It was the surplus, the comfort fund, the dream of luxury, the symbol of his status.

As long as Ed was on the payroll, she’d be covered by his health insurance, but once the sick-day checks stopped coming and he started receiving his pension, that would cease.

When he’d chosen a benefits plan, a few years after they’d gotten married, he’d chosen the plan that would deliver them — and her, in his absence — the most after-tax money per month. The trade-off had been that this particular plan didn’t confer health coverage on her in the event of his retirement or death. They’d made that decision with conviction, anticipating that she’d get health insurance in retirement through some job or other. They hadn’t known then that something would keep her moving every few years: the promise of more responsibility; a better salary; a higher-up who took exception to a strong-willed woman; her inability to keep her mouth shut when she found something ethically questionable.

In order to retain health benefits, she was going to have to keep a full-time job, any full-time job. Thinking longer term, she was going to have to survive at NCB, or at another city hospital, for ten years if she wanted to qualify for the basic New York City pension and have health insurance in retirement. That wasn’t going to be the easiest task at her age and pay scale.

She wished she and Ed had foreseen the health-coverage issues that would arise later, but who could predict the future to that degree? They’d thought he was staring at decades of work ahead. They’d bet on the bigger payout and lost. The cost to her was going to be that she would have to hold on to her job at a time when Ed needed her there most, to care for him.

If she lost her job before she’d been at it ten years, and had to buy insurance, there wouldn’t be enough money to go around, because not only would she no longer have her salary, but now there would be insurance bills in addition to the mortgage payments, utility bills, food costs, Connell’s tuition coming up in a couple of years (Ed had made her promise early after his diagnosis that she wouldn’t let his illness stop Connell from going to the college he wanted to go to), and whatever nursing costs she’d eventually have to pay for Ed while she was at work (six hundred bucks a week at the going rate), not to mention the cost of putting him in a nursing home (four grand a month and going up), the idea of which she wasn’t willing to entertain but which she knew was a possibility. And that was if she could buy anything like an affordable plan. The reality was that because of an episode of cellulitis that had caused one of her calves to balloon up to nearly twice its size a few months back, she might not be able to buy private insurance without spending every available dime on it — if she was insurable at all. And if she got sick without benefits, she’d be looking at losing everything. She’d worked her whole life and diligently socked away, from the age of fifteen on, 10 percent of every paycheck she’d ever gotten, and still her family’s fortunes could be ruined overnight because the American health care system — which she’d devoted her entire professional career to navigating humanely on behalf of patients in her care, and which was organized in such a way as to put maximum pressure on people who had the least energy to handle anything difficult — had rolled its stubborn boulder into her path.

56

For years, Connell had heard his father talk up how much he looked forward to teaching him to drive, but when he turned sixteen and got his learner’s permit, he had to cajole his father into letting him behind the wheel. They drove through a whipping March wind to the parking lot in front of Macy’s in the Cross County Shopping Center. His father got out, went around to Connell’s side, and waved him to slide over.

His father sat calmly as Connell practiced accelerating, braking, turning, parking in a spot, and backing up. Once Connell worked up the nerve to venture from the lot onto the streets, though, his father looked terrified. As they approached the first intersection, he hit an imaginary brake. “Slow down!” he shouted.

“But it’s green!” Connell shouted back, though he applied the brake anyway.

At the next light, Connell signaled, slowed, and turned left.

“Watch the building!” his father said, his leg pumping the floor.

He accelerated, and his father jumped back; he touched the brake, and his father gasped; he passed a car, and his father clutched the handle in the ceiling.

• • •

The next time they went out, his father screamed at him practically from the moment they pulled out of the garage until the moment they pulled back in. He then sat there miserably, apologizing, saying he couldn’t help himself.

They went out a couple more times. The results were the same, and eventually Connell stopped asking to drive. He decided to wait until his junior year, when he could take driver’s ed through school.

• • •

One night, at ten o’clock, his father appeared in the doorway of Connell’s bedroom wearing his Members Only jacket.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Where?”

“Just come with me.”

His mother was drinking tea in the kitchen. His father headed past her to the basement.

“Where is he going?”

“I don’t know,” Connell said, and walked past her too.

His mother called down after them. His father didn’t answer, so Connell didn’t either. He followed him to the garage, climbed into the passenger seat. As they were backing out, his mother appeared in the doorway of the garage. His father didn’t lower the window, and Connell just shrugged. She followed the car out into the driveway, a look of mild concern on her face. She had a teacup in one hand and her robe clutched in the other to ward off the chill of the spring night.

His father backed slowly down the driveway and his mother turned and headed back to the house. The driveway was curved and bordered on both sides by hedgerows anchored in stone walls that ended in stone columns. It was difficult to negotiate forward, never mind backward, and his father had scraped the car so many times that his mother had given up fixing it. His father took it slowly and made it onto the street without touching the hedge, the stone walls, or the pillars.

They didn’t head down the hill toward town, but went the other way, taking back roads until they came to the entrance to the Cross County Parkway. They continued past it, turning under the overpass and taking the ramp up into the shopping center. The stores were all closed. His father pulled into a spot far from the entrance to Macy’s and turned off the engine.

“You’re going to drive.”

They both got out and passed in front of the car. The lot was mostly dark, the lighted store signs combining with ambient light from the highway and the low glow of the light poles to provide a mist of illumination. A few cars were scattered about, but otherwise the lot was empty. He had never driven under cover of night before. He knew the lot from his fledgling efforts behind the wheel, but there had never been so much open space, so little against which to establish a sense of perspective, and it was with a slight rush of breath that he turned the ignition over and put the car into gear.

“I want you to drive out of the lot, make a left and then a right at the light.”

He drove up Midland Avenue, which ran parallel to the parkway.

“Go through the first light. After the following light, you’re going to make a left to get on the Cross County East.”

“I’m not allowed on the parkway.”

“Do as I tell you,” his father said calmly. There were no spastic jerks or fake pumps of the brake. Lately his father drifted in and out of being his old self, like a wraith passing through dimensions.

The light before the entrance to the parkway turned red as he approached it, and Connell checked to see that his belt was securely buckled. When the light turned green and he inched forward and made the left to merge, he felt like the car was running away from him.

“I want you to build up speed as you merge. We’re going to head to the Hutch.”

“The Hutch? What if I get pulled over?”

“Hutch north,” his father said. “Get in the left lane. Don’t be nervous. Just relax. There aren’t many cars now. If you relax, you’ll be a fine driver. Just get up to about fifty, fifty-five.”

Connell pressed the accelerator. The speed was exhilarating, and he pressed it deeper, watching the needle climb to fifty, then sixty. He eased off. His father had his eyes closed.

“We have to get you used to real-world conditions,” his father said. “Stay left. We’re going to merge onto the Hutch north. I want you to look for signs for Mamaroneck Avenue, twenty-three north.”

It felt like all the highways in the country could be reached from this one, that he could go anywhere from here. He wanted to drive through the night.

“It’s coming up,” his father said. “Twenty-three north. When you exit, you’ll be on a ramp. As long as there’s nobody behind you, when you get to the light at the end, I want you to slam on the brakes. Anything can happen at any moment, and you need to stay alert.”

57

Before she could leave for work she had to get herself and Ed showered and dressed, fix breakfast, and cobble together a lunch and dinner for him.

She highlighted the start button on the microwave in pink magic marker. To the front of the microwave she taped an index card with an arrow pointing to “start” and a note that read “Press here.” The last thing she did before she left was put the plate in the microwave for his lunch and then set the cook time. She waited until the last minute, because she was hounded by the thought of those dishes sitting out for hours and spoiling.

She spent all morning worrying about him screwing it up. He needed perfect accuracy to pull it off. If he hit any button other than start, he ended up gnawing on frozen manicotti or choking down cold beef stew. She came home to the time unchanged on the microwave, half the meal on the floor, a broken plate under the table, the Times intact in its sleeve. He had stopped reading.

The microwave routine could work only once a day. She left a plated, covered sandwich in the refrigerator for his dinner. He ate dinner early, before she got home, due to the sundowning. It would have been easier to prepare him two sandwiches, but there was something disgraceful in the idea of his eating more than one cold meal in her absence. Connell always came home too late to heat anything up for him.

She couldn’t count on him to attend to a churning in the gut or notice the time on the cable box, so she called to remind him to eat and talked him through the steps.

In the morning she set the television to a channel that showed dependable series in syndication in mini-marathons. It was easier to pick a halfway-decent channel and make him stick to it than let him range off the reservation. When he wasn’t looking, she slipped the television remote and the one for the cable box into the end-table drawer.

He made chaos out of everything he touched, but she continued to let him handle the bills; it was a part of his masculine identity. Some bills he paid twice, others he threw out without opening them. The phone company called to say they had five hundred dollars of her money and she shouldn’t send any more for a while. When the next bill came, she squirreled it away, but the following month he beat her to the mail and wrote a check for the outstanding amount of their credit. They were almost a thousand dollars in the clear.

She couldn’t leave lists everywhere explaining how to do everything in excruciating detail, because it wasn’t clear how well he read anymore, and anyway, where did helpfulness end and absurdity begin? Was she going to lay out how to wipe his ass, how to aim his penis at the bowl? The easier thing was to clean the piss off the floor when she got home from work.

When they walked into town together, he avoided the bank with phobic deliberateness. He wouldn’t even go in with her when she went to withdraw money from the ATM. Maybe it was because he often heard her talking nervously about money, how it was a besieged resource in their household. She knew it was hard for him to feel so out of control. He didn’t realize that she would have loved to continue ceding responsibility to him, that she would have wanted nothing more in the world, but that had become impossible.

She decided to cancel the newspaper delivery and asked him to pick it up from the newsstand in town. It gave him some dignity to have a task to accomplish. He also picked up a quart of milk. She didn’t always need the milk, but routine made life easier; things got burned into his long-term memory. Most of the time the milk made it into the refrigerator. Sometimes it spoiled on the countertop. Connell ate cereal at all hours — it seemed to be the only thing keeping him alive at times — so she seldom had to dump it.

Ed also came home with a box of doughnuts every day. She didn’t know why he’d alighted on this fixation. She threw a lot away, but she also ate her share. She’d been eating more lately in general. Stress was driving her to it. She’d gone up a couple of dress sizes in less than a year. Ed ate half a dozen doughnuts a day, but all he seemed to do was get skinnier.

When the summer came, they walked into town together on the weekends. She couldn’t believe how many people he knew along the way. She learned that he liked to camp out on the bench up the block from the Food Emporium. It satisfied her to have been right in the end about the move. He would not have been able to live as freely in Jackson Heights.

She slipped money into his wallet when he was sleeping, as she’d done with her father after he’d retired, to keep him flush for his nighttime bar crawls. Most of the storekeepers knew him, which helped when he was at the register. He handed his wallet over and they fished out the right bills and put the change back in. She hoped they were patient with him. The guys at Gillard’s were kind enough to simply keep a tally. Once a week, she stopped on the way home from work to settle his debts.

He liked going to Topps Bakery for coffee and a bun because they had a table and a chair. Diana, the proprietor, brought it over to him personally. “If you never paid,” she told Eileen, “he’d still get it.”

Once, he came home from the Food Emporium looking distraught.

“I don’t think they gave me the right money,” he said.

She checked his wallet. The amount there didn’t match the change on the receipt.

“Did you stop anywhere else?”

He shook his head vehemently. The theft must have been obvious if he’d noticed it. Still, she didn’t know if she could trust his perceptions. She could never be sure anymore if what he was saying conformed to reality.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

She considered the scene that might result, the whole store craning their necks, the mortifying attention, the lack of proof. Her voice would get shrill; she would need to find another place to shop.

“It’s not worth it,” she said. “We’ll leave it alone. Don’t worry, that kid will have bad luck after stealing from you.”

Then she imagined the kid’s sniveling, triumphal expression, and she worked herself up into such a pique that she put Ed in the car and drove him back to the store. Ed peered into the plate-glass window, hands and nose pressed like a child.

“That’s him,” he said, pointing.

She stood staring in at the kid. He was black, and he wore his shirt untucked in the back. He moved gracefully, economically, his quick hands passing items across the scanner from the logjam at the end of the conveyor belt. He looked like someone used to moving faster than others, escaping undetected. He had probably had Ed in his aisle a few times. Maybe Ed had handed him his wallet and asked him to take the money out. Maybe this was the time the kid had taken advantage. Her blood pumped hard; there was a metallic taste in her mouth.

“Sit on that bench,” she said to Ed.

She went inside. The crisp, air-conditioned air in the store clashed with the muggy thickness of the August evening outside, and the shiver that overtook her inflamed her anger even further. She thought of going directly up to the kid’s aisle, but she didn’t want to appear hysterical; better to get the drop on him. She walked as casually as she could to the dairy aisle, where she picked up some eggs. When she got to the kid’s register, the man in front of her was paying. She plucked a pack of gum off the rack and set it on top of the eggs. She held up a crisp twenty.

“I want all the change,” she said as quietly as she could while still conveying the extent of her displeasure. “All of it. And I will have your job if you ever do that to my husband again. And if you think you can come into this town from wherever the hell you come from and steal from people, you’re mistaken. I will have the police on you.”

The kid gave the wad of gum in his mouth a few slow, aggressive chews as he slid the bills into his hand, gathered the coins, and snapped the receipt off the roll.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, handing them over and looking past her to the next customer, whose things he started to scan. She made a show of counting the change in front of the kid. She caught a glimpse of the customer behind her and resented the look he was giving her, which suggested it was she who was in the wrong.

She didn’t move, though. She felt like she was just getting started.

“I hope you live long enough to feel the shame you made him feel,” she said. “I hope you are a haunted, lonely old man someday. I hope you are sitting in a nursing home somewhere wondering where everyone is.”

• • •

He told her he went to church between Masses, when the doors were left open, and sat in the back. “It’s quiet,” he said. “Calm.”

She thought about all the tangled noise in his brain. What did it sound like in there? She imagined it to be like the static on a radio tuned between stations.

“What do you think about?” she asked.

“You,” he said. “Connell. I don’t want things to be hard for you when I’m gone, and I don’t want him to get this. I’d do anything to avoid that.”

The thought of Ed alone in that big church oppressed her.

“If I write a prayer for you, will you use it?”

“Sure,” he said.

He might have been telling the truth.

“Dear God,” she wrote, “I will offer this up to you without complaint, but please protect all I know and love.” She copied it out neatly onto an index card that she folded and put in his wallet.

She never heard Ed ask, “Why me?” but she couldn’t help asking it for him. Why Ed? Why now? Why so young? There was the obvious answer — it was random, senseless, genetic, environmental — but she didn’t like that one. She also knew she couldn’t sign on to any system that said it had all happened for a reason. So she took a third path, the pragmatic one. It hadn’t happened for a reason, but they would find something to glean from it anyway. There didn’t have to be a divine plan for there to be meaning in life. People’s lives will be better because of his illness, she told herself. They’ll appreciate life more. He’ll remind them that their lives are better than they think. It was as good a story as any, and it had the virtue of often seeming plausible, though never when she lay awake at night, when the public life faded away, and other people vanished, and she was left staring at the back of her hand and thinking, All of this is an illusion, even the consolations. She was taken back to her bed when she was a child, when she would lie awake listening to her parents in the living room rehearsing their fixed roles after her father had returned from the bar, and she thought, No time has passed since then. I’m there right now. She remembered examining her hand then as well, and the only thing to differentiate this moment from any of a hundred in the past — the only thing that reassured her that the loop of her life wasn’t about to start over again — was the crenellated landscape of wrinkles around her knuckles, which she ran her fingers over, feeling their washboard knobbiness.

58

They were staying home on New Year’s Eve for the first time in the twenty-eight years since they’d met. Last year all they’d done was drive to the McGuires’ to watch the Times Square telecast, but at least they’d left the house. This year she couldn’t face all the work involved in getting him out. She knew she’d spend the whole night minding him and wouldn’t have any fun.

New Year’s, being the anniversary of the night they met, meant extra to them. When they lived in Jackson Heights, they’d go to balls, Ed in a tux, she in a shimmering gown with pearls. She’d rush around in her slip, blow-drying her hair and applying makeup, and come up short when she saw Ed wrapped in a towel, staring into the mirror as he shaved. They’d leave Connell with Brenda Orlando and come back very late. She’d be contentedly exhausted the next morning as she got the three of them out to Mass.

She sat at the kitchen table in her housecoat and slippers, her hair pulled back in a plastic clip. Connell sat across from her, reading the sports pages.

“What are you doing for New Year’s?”

“Going to a party with Cecilia.”

“Where is it?”

“Somewhere in White Plains. I don’t know.”

“How were you planning to get there?”

“I thought I’d take Dad’s car.”

“Have you asked him yet?”

“I didn’t think I had to. I thought you were staying home.”

Something in his tone irked her. “We were,” she said. “But I’ve changed my mind. I think I’d like us to go out as a family.”

“I have plans.”

“The three of us are going to go to dinner. You can go out after that.”

“I’m supposed to eat with Cecilia and her parents before the party.”

“You’ll simply call her and tell her you’ll see her later.”

“Whatever. Fine.”

Connell left the room in a huff. She called to Ed in the den and told him to go shower. She went up and laid out a sports coat, dress shirt, tie, and neatly pressed pair of pants for him. She put on an evening gown and zipped the plastic sheath off her mink.

• • •

It was snowing out. The Caprice was in the driveway, blocking her car in the garage. Ed headed for the driver’s side door. She pulled on his arm.

“You have your car key?” she asked Connell.

“Yes.”

“You drive. Your father and I are tired.”

There was no way she was letting Ed drive in this weather. Even when it was perfect out, lately he gave her a heart attack any time he was behind the wheel. Backing out of the driveway once, he’d hit the stone wall, torn off the side-view mirror, and dragged an ugly streak down the length of the car. Outside church, he’d have run over an old lady in the crosswalk if Eileen hadn’t shouted and thrown her arm across his chest. She’d been trying to think of a way to take his car away from him without turning him against her. She didn’t want to be the one to tell him that that part of his life was over. She couldn’t just take away his keys or sell the car, but she couldn’t just let him crash it either. Someone could end up dead. Ed could end up dead. She would have to figure something out soon.

Connell hopped in. Ed got in the shotgun seat, she in the back. She watched him fumble with the belt buckle until Connell reached over and snapped it in.

Connell turned to her. “Where are we going?”

“Surprise us. Take us to the city. Someplace you like to go.”

“You wouldn’t like the places I go,” he said. “Diners. Pizzeria Uno. I went to the Hard Rock Café once. Ed Debevic’s. You’d hate that place.”

“Just drive. I’ll tell you where.”

The snow was heavier than she’d expected. The roads had iced over. Connell drove carefully, gripping the wheel with both hands. At one point he slid a couple of car lengths and stopped just before he hit a hedgerow-lined stone wall.

“We’d better not risk it,” he said. “We can go out in the neighborhood. The Tap. Town Tavern.”

“Keep driving,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”

“Tumbledown Dick’s.”

“We’re going downtown,” she said firmly.

“Buckle up, please,” he said.

She saw him glancing in the rearview mirror. “You just worry about the road,” she said. When he looked away, she fastened the buckle.

He crawled for another block before he lost control of the Caprice again. They slid a good distance and bounced, hard, off a BMW parked in the street.

The seat belt was squeezing her ribs; she got it unbuckled. Adrenaline made her feel as if she’d touched an electric outlet. “Everyone all right?” Ed looked shocked, but he wasn’t hurt. Connell was fine. So was she.

When she got out, she saw the other car’s rear end had been demolished, along with most of the front of the Caprice.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Connell said.

“Watch that low-class language,” she snarled, and then she softened her tone. “Oh, hell. ‘Shit’ is right.”

She picked her way carefully around the car, holding on as she walked from passenger-side door to the front fender, which was smashed into the wheel well. The frame on the chassis had buckled where it met the door. Ed sat shivering in the car, his hand fishing for the door handle.

“I knew I shouldn’t have driven,” Connell said.

“It’s not going to open, Ed!” she yelled, and shook her head at him. She turned to Connell. “Do you think it’s drivable?”

“It looks pretty bad,” he said. The right front wheel was bent sideways as if kneeling toward the snowy ground. Connell scratched his ear. “I don’t know how the wheel got so bent. I wasn’t going fast.”

“I’d say it’s done, wouldn’t you? A car this old?”

“Probably.”

“Go up there, tell them what happened. Ask them to call the police.” She pointed toward a house, atop a mound and recessed from the street, that looked like a mansion.

She slid into the driver’s seat and reached across Ed — who was slapping at the top of his head with the grim determination of a mortifier of the flesh — into the glove compartment. She pulled out the envelope they’d used for years. It said “Insurance and Registration” in Ed’s old handwriting. It was hard to imagine the man who now communicated in thunderous block letters writing in this fluent script.

She watched Connell disappear with the paperwork up the sloping stairs and started the car. The light from the one working headlamp diffused into the snow and reflected off the mangled BMW. She blasted the heat. When Ed reached to turn it off — it had to be unconscious, the force of habit, because no one, not even him, could be that absurd — she smacked his hand away and turned it up again.

• • •

She and the boy stood in the snow waiting for the tow truck to arrive. Ed was in the car.

“What a disaster,” Connell said. “This is going to be expensive.”

She’d fought endlessly with Ed over keeping collision on the Caprice. Time and again she’d said it was a waste of money on a ten-year-old car, but Ed had insisted.

“Maybe not as expensive as it looks. Anyway, that’s what insurance is for.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Nobody got hurt,” she said. “Nobody died. Cars can be replaced.” Or not, she thought. She felt a hint of a smile cross her lips but stifled it. “Well,” she said under her breath. “That’s one way to get rid of a car.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘That’s one way to ring in the New Year.’ ”

“Happy New Year,” he said glumly.

“Happy New Year.”

• • •

The AAA guy offered to drop them off at home before taking the car in. She sat on Ed’s lap in the seat, Connell between them and the driver.

When they pulled into the driveway, Connell asked the driver if he’d mind giving him a lift to the train.

She was flabbergasted. “You’re not still planning on going out?” He must have known that once inside, he wouldn’t be able to leave. The driver and Connell both looked to her for approval. “Go,” she said, annoyed, waving him off.

She climbed off Ed and helped him out of the truck. The snow was now a few inches thick. She held his hand as he navigated the fluffy terrain. She punched in the code for the garage door and watched the truck pull out.

Upstairs, she took off her string of pearls and changed out of her evening gown into a sweat suit. She got him ready for bed, in case he wanted to go up early.

She pulled a half gallon of ice cream out of the freezer and took two spoons from the drawer, though the second spoon was a fig leaf for her own guilt. Ed would have two spoonfuls, tops.

They sat through the lip-synched entertainment, waiting for the countdown. Ed fell asleep with his head back and his mouth open, hours before the New Year. She didn’t wake him.

As midnight approached, she thought of the night they’d met, the way he’d leaned in to kiss her when the hour struck. She’d been waiting for him to do it all night. They’d been in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by hundreds of couples. When he kissed her, she experienced a sensation she’d heard described a thousand times but always dismissed as malarkey: that everyone around had disappeared, and it was just the two of them. And now it really was just the two of them, and everyone had more or less disappeared. The ball made its languorous drop; “1994” lighted up onscreen. She tried to remember what it had felt like to kiss him that first time. All she could remember was that he had begun simply, almost politely, and then he had taken her face in his two hands and kissed her with a sudden intensity, as if he had been waiting to do so for longer than the few hours he had known her. She knew right away that she would marry him. So many years had passed since that night that it was almost a different man she was looking at now. Hairs poked up over the neckband of his undershirt. His chest rose and fell weakly, as if he were not really breathing. She leaned over him, touched her lips to his. His eyes were closed now, as hers had been that night. She was afraid he’d startle awake and scream, or throw her off him, but he just started to kiss her in his sleep.

• • •

The Caprice was declared a total loss. She took the insurance payout and added it to their checking account.

Maybe, she thought, she should use the money for a new car for herself. She was tired of buying American cars. Maybe she’d buy herself a sporty two-door BMW like the one Connell had crashed into, or one of those E-Class Mercedes that looked perfectly enameled and invincible. She wouldn’t have to cringe at the paint peeling from the roof, the felt bagging around the center light in the ceiling, the rusty creak and thunderclap of the door closing. She could get a car she wouldn’t be ashamed to park in the church lot.

The boy could be expensive, but there were times he returned something on the investment.

59

People came from all over for the funeral for Ed’s mother. It was the first time Eileen had seen Fiona leave Staten Island since the surprise party for Ed. Phil and Linda flew in from Toronto. Having Phil around seemed to add to Ed’s grief, not diminish it. It was as if Ed had finally realized that all the years they’d spent in different countries couldn’t be gotten back. The night before the funeral they’d sat at the kitchen table together for hours, Phil talking and Ed listening. Every time she went in there, Ed was crying big, unrestrained tears.

Cora had been a force in the parish, St. Mary’s Star of the Sea in Carroll Gardens, and so the church was packed with a lot of people Eileen had never met. Ed didn’t seem any more at home than she felt in his childhood church. His face was so red during the services that she kept reminding him to breathe. Cora had been ill for a while, and she’d had a good, long life, but it looked as if it had never occurred to Ed that his mother would actually die.

Eileen had always thought of Ed’s conscientious presence at his mother’s apartment, his willingness to go and change a bulb for her or pick her up groceries, as the fealty of a dutiful son, but the way he was responding to her death suggested a depth of feeling for her that Eileen hadn’t imagined. It might have had something to do with his condition. He was a step closer to death than an average person.

Afterward, as everyone hurried to their cars — it was a frigid day in February — her aunt Margie asked Ed for directions to the cemetery.

“Well,” he said, standing in front of the church, “where are you parked?”

“Around the corner.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He was kneading his hands together as if they might release an answer. “You need to take the highway.”

“Which one?”

“The highway around here. God, what’s the name of it?”

“You mean the BQE?”

“Yes! That’s it.”

“Where can I pick it up?”

They were a block away from the building Ed had grown up in. He might have driven a few thousand times to the BQE from where they were standing.

“It’s not far,” he said. “It’s only a few blocks.”

She cut Ed off and gave Margie the directions. She waited until Margie was out of earshot.

“You don’t know where the BQE is?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “It’s right around here.”

She looked at Connell huddling by the car waiting to go, then back at Ed, and she was overcome by the difference in age between father and son. Ed looked more like a contemporary of his mother’s than a husband to her. His shoulders hunched forward and his face was scored with new wrinkles, as if the trauma of his mother’s dying had aged him. She knew she would have to play nursemaid to him eventually, but she wanted to hold that off as long as possible.

That night, although they were in mourning, and although Phil and Linda were in the guest bedroom, Eileen got on top of Ed, leaning close to him as she moved back and forth. Afterward, she lay wondering how long he’d be able to perform in bed. The thought of the loss of consort kept her awake most of the night, and it was only toward morning that she realized it wasn’t the idea of physical loneliness that had been bothering her but an incipient awareness that she herself was going to die someday.

• • •

She kept a log of the first times he failed to do things. It was like a diary of a child’s development in reverse. Certain failures correctly augured great changes in his mental powers. Others were false alarms, momentary hiccups.

02/19/94: Couldn’t find the BQE after Cora’s funeral. Losing his sense of direction.

At Karen Coakley’s wedding, she turned her back on Ed to get a plate of hors d’oeuvres. When she next spotted him, he had joined a group arranged along the far wall for a picture with the official photographer. It was the groom’s family, and she didn’t recognize any of them, and yet Ed was smiling gamely among their number, as if he’d watched them all grow up. He was ruining the photo by his presence. When the photographer was finished, she whisked him away with a quick, pitiless jerk, hoping no one had noticed him, though there was nothing she could do about Karen and her husband seeing him there when they examined the matte prints.

A provocative beauty emerged from the group, looking flustered. “I got felt up,” Eileen heard her say indignantly. “This man put his hand on my ass.”

“Who?” the boyfriend asked. “Point him out.”

The girl motioned in Ed’s direction. The boyfriend, packed like a sausage into his suit, started punching his palm in a manner both absurdly unoriginal and genuinely frightening. Eileen shifted instinctively in front of Ed, holding up her hand to halt their advance like a crossing guard protecting a child.

“It’s not what you think,” she said as calmly as she could. “It’s not what you think at all.”

04/16/94: Grab-ass at Karen’s wedding. Be there when he meets people. Stay by his side at parties. That time he held onto Susan’s breast when saying good-bye? No accident.

They were invited to a party in Chelsea at the home of the chief of staff. They parked several blocks away and walked, soaking up the energy of a Manhattan evening. Ed had on a beautiful suit, she an expensive dress she’d bought a year ago and hadn’t had occasion to put on. She was enjoying wearing it. It fit a little snugly, with all the stress she’d been under lately, but it still framed her shape nicely.

She didn’t notice until she was a few paces ahead of him that Ed had fallen back like a recalcitrant dog on a walk.

“What is it?” She went back and tried to pull him along. “What’s going on?”

“You go without me.”

“This is absurd,” she said. “We’re a block away.”

“I’ve never met these people.”

“So what? They’re nice people.”

He shook his head.

“You’re going, Ed. I RSVP’d. I can’t mess around here. This guy, the chief of staff, he didn’t bring me in. He’s younger. I need to make a good showing tonight. I need you to rise to the occasion. Okay? I need to make it to ten years.”

“They’ll never know the real me,” he said.

It hadn’t occurred to her that Ed might think this way, but then they hadn’t spent much time around people who didn’t know him before.

“Half of you is better than ninety percent of people with a whole brain,” she said, and was surprised to find she believed it. “Even now, you’re funnier and smarter than most of those people in that room will be. Don’t forget who you are. Stick by me and they won’t notice a thing.”

He was at her elbow all night and no one was the wiser. The good thing about parties was that no conversation had to go that deep. If Ed didn’t answer a question right away, it fell back to the questioner. He only seemed more interesting the more time he took to answer. She held the plate and gave him only one-bite morsels. The dim lighting, the noise, and the crowd all helped. In his suit, Ed cut a dashing figure. He gave her an advantage with the chief, who talked with him for a long time about the research he’d done.

When they reached the street on departure, Ed was shaking so much that he could have been having a seizure. She saw that he must have exerted superhuman will to keep it together for her.

For several days, he seemed drained, and not long after, his conversation began to suffer.

05/20/94: Slurred speech after Chelsea shindig.

A few months after Frank had his stroke, they met Ruth and Frank at the Metropolitan Museum. Frank was in a wheelchair.

They’d only been there a few minutes when Ruth insisted she needed a break from her husband. Eileen understood; Ruth had Frank to herself round-the-clock now. They told Ed and Frank to wait at a bench and slipped away to a costume exhibit. Even though she was thoroughly utilitarian in her attire — a powder-blue cardigan was an extravagance for her — Ruth performed delighted astonishment at the beauty of the elaborate dresses. Eileen’s gaze lingered on the cascading folds of finger-thick fabric, which seemed almost big enough for a person to hide away in.

When they returned to the bench, their husbands were gone. Eileen felt panicked, but a hunch led her to the main gallery, where she saw Ed standing, hands on the wheelchair handles, in front of his favorite painting, David’s Death of Socrates. Between him and Frank they barely had a whole working body.

She and Ruth walked up silently behind them.

“This one in the middle is Socrates,” Ed was saying. Eileen and Ruth looked at each other. “And this man with his hand on his knee. I forget his name.” She wanted to say “Crito,” as she’d heard him say before, but she kept quiet. “And the man at the end. I forget his name too.” Plato, she thought. “You know the story?” Frank was nodding along. “They’re making him take the cup.” Frank’s head was nodding like a piston. “They’re afraid of the influence he’s had on people.” She was amazed at how much of this he remembered. Ed wheeled Frank closer to the painting, and she felt the guard’s eyes on them.

“Look at his finger pointing up,” Ed said. “He’s saying, ‘I know there’s more after this.’ The cup is filled with… with…” Ed grappled for the word. Frank started to say it but couldn’t get it out. He stammered a couple of syllables.

“Hemlock,” Ruth said tersely, but not without emotion, as she took the handles of Frank’s wheelchair and began the march out of the room.

6/11/94: Went to Met. Ed forgot Crito, Plato, hemlock.

He was haunting her in the kitchen. She could tell he wanted to feel useful. She told him to chop a turnip. She had her back to him cooking and heard a lot of noise. When she turned he had lodged half the turnip on the knife and was banging both of them, turnip and knife together, on the cutting board. Connell, who had been sitting at the table looking through philosophy books for quotes for the upcoming debate season, leaped up and seized the knife.

“Give me that!” he said. “Jesus! What the hell are you doing?”

She pulled Connell into the dining room. “I will smack your face,” she said, “if I ever see you talk to your father like that again. I don’t care how old you are.”

Ed sulked in front of the television until he went up to bed — at three thirty in the afternoon.

08/03/94: Bedtime today broke the 4:00 barrier.

60

His father stood bowlegged before the coffee machine, looking at once like a baby with a load in his pants and an old gunslinger who had walked through the desert and been struck by lightning. He was wearing a tie but it was backwards, the thin part in front of the thick part.

He shook the filter out what seemed like a hundred times, smoothed it against the swing-hinged filter holder, righting and rerighting with animal vigor what was already in place. Connell watched uneasily. His father worked as though everything depended on this, looking the way he used to look when sanding edges or sawing boards. He’d crumpled the filter, so it didn’t fit properly. Connell took a new one out of the box and put it in. He took the tie off him and retied it on himself while his father laughed meekly and looked at the floor.

When his mother came home, Connell went down to the car to help with the groceries, his father following closely behind. He could see his mother evaluating the bags she handed to his father. She made sure he only had cans, lunchmeats, and boxes, nothing that would roll too far away or break.

His mother pulled out a box of Ritz and opened it before the bags were even unpacked.

Connell tore open a bag of potato chips. “I can’t stop eating lately,” he said to his mother. Both their mouths were full.

“Don’t catch my disease,” his mother said. “I eat to fill the void.”

It occurred to Connell that the void was the house itself. It was too big, too empty; he could imagine eating himself into obesity in it.

• • •

He needed to go far away for college. The farther he went, the harder it would be to come back. The cost of plane tickets would be too high to make flying home a regular possibility.

He went through the list of colleges he and his mother had come up with together: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Williams, Amherst, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown, along with a couple of local safeties, Drew and Fordham. Every school on the list was less than five hours away. He decided he wouldn’t apply to any of them except the safeties. He made a new list: Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Stanford, Rice. Nothing small or that she hadn’t heard of or whose virtues he’d have to explain. Nothing, in short, that she wouldn’t pay for. He was going to force her hand. She’d never let him go to either of the safeties if he got into one of the better, farther-flung schools, even if the safety gave him scholarship money, which there was a chance they would: he had the grades, the SAT scores, and he had finished third in the state in Lincoln-Douglas debate. She would rather pay full freight and put a Notre Dame sticker on the car. She had explained how she was going to pay for his schooling: something about borrowing against the equity they had in the house and taking out private loans. All he knew was she’d told him she was going to make it so that he wouldn’t have to worry about paying the loans back. And if it didn’t work out, he would put the Drew sticker on the car himself — because what right did she have to be disappointed in him for going to Drew, when she’d only gone to St. John’s?

He felt like he could see the whole world, clearly, all at once. He was going to leave everything behind. He was about to be born again, but this time complete with all the defenses he would ever need. He would invent the world as he went along. He would pass through a thousand years in the blink of an eye.

61

Connell ran to catch the last train out of Grand Central, the one-thirty, but it was pulling out as he arrived at the platform. He sighed and kicked the big metal newspaper recycling bin. He had already seen that when you lived in the suburbs and you missed the last train, you entered a netherworld, a night town. It was going to be a long time until the five-thirty train.

He decided not to call to say he’d missed the train, even though his mother had told him to call no matter how late if he wasn’t coming home, because he felt too guilty to hear her voice. He had left that morning and hadn’t checked in all day. There wasn’t room in his mother’s overtaxed mind for her to enforce curfews and restrictions. She just counted on him not to get into trouble. He kept up his end of the deal, but he knew she wished he were around more. She had grown accustomed to his coming home late, but she hadn’t stopped feeling hurt by it. When he came in at half past two, after walking a silent path from the station, he sometimes heard her call to him quietly as he passed his parents’ room at the top of the stairs. Lately, though, she had learned to sleep through the night. Tonight he was going to take his chances that he’d get in before she awoke in the morning. It was easier to avoid conflict of any sort.

He walked across Forty-Second to the B, to head down to West Fourth. A girl he’d briefly dated had told him about a place on West Tenth called Smalls, where she’d stayed literally all night once. They let underaged kids stay as long as they didn’t try to order alcohol. It was a jazz club. He didn’t know anything about jazz, but it was better than sitting in a diner and having to fight to stay at a table.

He handed over the cover charge. The place wasn’t full. He sat at an empty table near the stage, under the lights, and ordered a Coke. The set was a mellow trumpet backed by drums, a piano, and a sax.

Faces in the crowd smiled warmly at him. The waitress didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t running up a bigger tab. When the trumpeter finished blowing a solo, the audience drizzled him with applause — a comforting pitter-patter, like a summer shower glancing off an air conditioner.

The crowd could have been anyone. He decided they were important people, decision makers. He imagined they were pleased to see a young person in their midst — that they endowed him in their minds with maturity and grace. He tried to look as keen as he could, though he didn’t understand the music. He performed the arousal of a true aficionado, twisting his face in agonized appreciation of a long-held note.

As the set wound down, the crowd dwindled. The performers seemed to relax. They nodded to people seated near him, spoke to a few. They took more time between numbers. He sensed that a different jazz was being cooked up, one that needed to marinate longer.

As four o’clock approached, people spread out on banquettes behind him. The players on the stage changed. His Coke glass kept getting refilled. The night felt full of possibility. Time was on his side; he could be anything he wanted.

His family, asleep at home, seemed a world away. He was ready to commit himself to the strivers, the lovers of life — these would be his new guides.

At five, the waitress began bringing out some trays of food. She left them on a long table by the front entrance. He watched a couple of people head over to them.

“Is this for us?” he asked the waitress.

“It’s for whoever.”

He’d never seen anything like it. First they let him stay all night. Now they were feeding him breakfast. It wasn’t anything special, but it was so strange and unexpected that it felt like a feast to him.

He piled his plate with rolls and butter, spooned out some eggs, and filled his cup with orange juice, looking forward to the little ritual of ceding his place in line, the brief exchange of shared enthusiasm, but the guy behind him just grabbed a roll and sat back down, and no one else followed. Connell hovered awkwardly, pretending to contemplate the spread, until he got self-conscious and walked back to his seat with his head down and ate a lonely meal.

• • •

When he walked in at seven, his mother was asleep at the kitchen table. Tins were piled up on the island; powdered sugar dotted the floor. He and his mother were supposed to have made Christmas cookies together that night. It was a little tradition they had. He’d gone out with his friends in the afternoon and never come home, so he’d forgotten all about it.

He counted the tins; she’d made as many as always. He lifted the wax paper in one and saw some cookies missing sprinkles, some misshapen ones.

She was hunched over the table, her head in her folded arms, looking as if her back would ache in the morning.

He shook her lightly. “Ma,” he said. “Go upstairs. Go to bed.”

It took a moment to rouse her. She rose slowly and began to head for the stairs. She stopped in the doorway, turned.

“I will never wait up for you again,” she said calmly, and his heart stopped for a moment. “I will never worry when you don’t call. I will never again worry about you. I promise. You are free.”

• • •

Connell drifted into his parents’ bathroom, the smell of Swedish meatballs giving way to lavender soap. It was Christmas Eve. The radio in the bedroom was tuned to the same Christmas station as the radio downstairs, as though his mother couldn’t be away from “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” for long enough to change her clothes.

His father had applied the shaving cream in a grotesquely liberal dose. He picked up a blue plastic razor, one of those bulk-pack, single-blade jobs he insisted on using and with which even a dexterous man could injure himself. Connell watched him raise the torture implement to his face and begin to make groping stabs at his jaw. He had to leave before the carnage began.

He went downstairs. His mother was checking on the turkey in the oven.

“Your father has informed me that he doesn’t like Christmas, that he never has, that I go overboard, that things are out of control.” She doused the bird with a baster and the juice that escaped from the tray sizzled on the bottom of the oven in loud hisses. “Do things seem out of control to you?”

All around were trays of prepared foods, folded napkins, polished silver, washed crystal, proliferating decorations, cookies she’d baked alone, scores of gifts she’d bought and wrapped herself.

“Not on your end,” he said.

“I try to preserve niceties like Christmas because it’s going to be hard no matter what I do or don’t do. The mind needs to be tricked sometimes.”

He had no idea how she withstood the deluge of inanity that flowed from his father. Connell couldn’t even be in the same room with him. He brutalized her, and when you confronted him on it he denied it like a scheming boy. He wanted her ready to attend him at a moment’s notice, yet he showed no sign of gratitude.

When his father came downstairs, bloody bits of tissue clung to his face like a swarm of exploded mosquitoes.

“You should use another razor,” Connell said. “The ones you use are cutting up your face.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my razor,” his father said.

“You should try the Mach Three.”

“Mine are perfectly fine,” his father said through gritted teeth, kneading his hands angrily.

“Or maybe an electric razor.”

“Why is everybody picking on me?”

“No one’s picking on you,” Connell’s mother said. “He’s trying to help you.”

“I don’t need any help. I do fine by myself.”

“You use too much cream,” Connell said.

“Goddamned ingrate!”

“Edmund!”

His mother followed Connell into his bedroom. “You should just love your father,” she said.

“I do,” Connell said. “I know.”

“These fights you’re having now — they won’t mean anything in twenty years.”

Connell cut her off. “And whatever I have to put up with is less than anything you had to put up with, I know.”

His mother seemed to be considering what he’d said. He couldn’t remember the last time she waited before reacting to him. It made him feel worse than when she just blew up.

“You need to think long and hard about what kind of person you want to be. That’s all I’ll say. Did you get your father anything for Christmas?”

Connell looked away.

“Here,” she said, and went to her pocketbook. She handed him a pair of twenties.

“What’s this for?”

“Go to the mall,” she said. “Get him an electric razor if you care about his face so much.”

• • •

On Christmas morning, after he’d given him the razor, Connell heard his father shaving with it. His father came down holding a Bic in his hands.

“This time, as it happens,” his father said, “I didn’t cut myself.”

“Good,” Connell said. “How do you like the electric razor?”

“I didn’t use it.”

“I heard it going.”

“You heard nothing of the sort,” his father said indignantly.

“I heard it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He jabbed the Bic in Connell’s direction. “This is what I used.”

“No way. I heard it.”

His mother sighed, then abruptly snapped, “Would you leave your father alone?”

“Fine, fine.” Connell got ice from the freezer. “No, you know what? That’s bullshit.”

“Watch it!” his mother said.

“I heard it. Why won’t he admit it? Why won’t you admit it, Dad? It’s stupid.”

“I used the Bic.”

“You didn’t!”

“I used it like this.” His father put the razor up to his face and started digging at his dry cheeks. He winced, kept going. “Like this.”

“Stop!” Connell’s mother screamed. “Stop, stop!”

Connell went to take it from his hand. A dewdrop of blood clung to his father’s chin. His father shifted and lunged the razor at him. Connell reared his head back.

“Ed!” his mother screamed.

“Okay!” Connell said. “You used the Bic!” He tried to wrest it from his father, but his father dropped it and grabbed him by the wrist, twisting it.

“I did use it.”

Connell was in pain. “Will you use the other one for me, Dad? Because it’s Christmas. I got it for you for Christmas.”

“Sure.” His father released his grip. “What other one?”

“The razor I got you.”

“I used it already,” his father said, smiling. “Works like a charm.”

Connell eyed the razor on the floor. It looked like a piece of bloody evidence. His wrist throbbed. He thought of picking the razor up and holding it at his father himself.

“I’m glad you like it,” he said quietly.

“It’s a great gift,” his father said, rubbing his chin and looking curiously at the blood on his palm. “A great gift. You’re a good kid.”

Connell saw his mother’s face twist up as she turned to the dishwasher. She seemed to be fighting back tears.

“Now can we please have a nice Christmas, please?” she asked. “Can we all forget everything and have a nice Christmas?”

62

In the middle of a Valentine’s Day commercial, his father stood and went out without his jacket. He was halfway down the driveway when Connell caught up to him.

“Where are you going?”

“It’s Val, it’s Valen, Valtine’s. I’m going to get a Valen-en-tine’s card for Mom.”

“We can go when Mom gets home with the car. It’s freezing.”

His father turned and headed down the street. Connell called after him, then ran inside, grabbed their coats, and caught up with him. His father was shivering as he walked with purpose. Connell could barely stop him long enough to get the coat on him.

“I’ll go with you,” he said. “Slow down.”

They walked into town, buffeted by wind. Connell took his father’s elbow and led him into the stationery store and to the aisle of Valentine’s Day cards. His father picked up card after card and made a pile of them in his hands.

“Wait, Dad.” Connell laid a hand on his shoulder to calm him down.

“I need it,” he said, panting.

“Let me help you.” Connell wrenched the pile of cards from his father’s hands. He led him to the cards for wives. “Everything from here to here,” he said, drawing an imaginary rectangle with his finger.

His father quickly made another pile. Connell tugged them from his hands.

“Do you want me to pick out a good one for you?”

“Yes!” his father shouted joyfully.

Connell found one embossed “To My Beloved Wife” in cursive above a bouquet of flowers. Inside was one of those generic sentiments that made him wonder how people ever brought themselves to purchase these things. It looked the part of the cards his parents had exchanged in the past, though, and he didn’t want to get too particular. He handed it over.

“That’s very nice,” his father said quietly. “Very nice.”

As long as he was there, he figured he might as well pick one out for Kaitlin. He found one that, oddly enough, more or less captured how he felt about her, and he knew he was going to have to undercut the sincerity of the message with a little humor, to make it less awkward, so he bought a joke one too.

63

She liked the Starbucks by the train station. She’d heard some grumbling when it opened; Häagen-Dazs had been the lone exception to the town’s embargo on chain stores. But she saw no reason not to patronize it. She liked the Italianate style of the building, the tiled roof, the real wood. The patio and its tables reminded her of one of the piazzas she’d seen on her trip to Italy with Ed. Sometimes she took her coffee out there and watched the professionals heading to the train and the purebred dogs pulling their owners forward, though usually she sat indoors.

She went on Saturdays, to get away from Ed for half an hour. She didn’t gravitate there for any caffeinated talk. She went because it was acceptable to sit alone among strangers and because order prevailed: the line moved quickly, pastries were stacked neatly behind glass displays, the pleasant smells of frothed milk and espresso grounds suffused the air, the music never hurt her ears, and the overheard conversations never devolved into table-slapping self-indulgence. She liked that it lacked the ambience of smaller cafés, with their intimate conspiracies. There wasn’t that feeling that she was missing out. People were islands even when they sat together. She liked that no matter how often she went in, the staff never seemed to recognize her. She wanted not so much to be alone as to be left alone. They let her stay as long as she wanted.

She sat inside, reading the Times she had brought from home. When she let her glance drift from its splayed pages to the neighboring table, she saw that the woman seated there had begun to cry. The woman was younger, perhaps in her midthirties; she was not unattractive, with her hair pulled back in a neat ponytail and a close-fitting business suit. She was sitting with her hands tucked under her knees, and her whole torso was heaving with sobs. Eileen tried to read but couldn’t stop looking over in embarrassed amazement. The sobs got louder. The people seated at nearby tables shot each other looks. One man raised his eyebrows at Eileen, as if to say, Can you believe it? It felt as if the calm waters of her reflecting pool had been disturbed by the entrance of a wild animal.

She thought about getting up to leave but sat, transfixed. She had all of five more minutes before she had to get home to Ed. She wondered what this woman expected anyone to do. Was Eileen supposed to say, “Whatever it is, it’s going to be fine”? Was she, a total stranger, supposed to press her to her chest and say, “There you go, that’s it, just let it out”? Maybe that was the right thing to do, the only thing. But how did she know it was going to be fine? Could she make those assurances?

She decided to bury her head in her newspaper again. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the woman stand up and leave, heading toward Pondfield. She had an impulse to go after her, but she didn’t want anybody to think she knew her. She waited a minute and then walked out slowly, throwing out her half-full cup.

Outside in the fresh air, she felt her resolution wavering. She headed toward her car in the train parking lot and got as far as the first row of cars before she turned around and started running toward Pondfield. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d run like this. She didn’t know if the woman would still be visible anywhere, but she had to at least look for her. As she ran she saw herself reflected in the shop windows and thought she looked ungainly and ridiculous flinging her tired body after so foolish a person, especially when she had no idea what she was going to say if she managed to track her down.

She got to the corner of Park and Pondfield and looked in all directions. She spotted the woman up past the drugstore, walking in the direction of the train station. She knew what she would say. She would stop next to her and ask if she could help in any way. She would say, “You’re not alone in feeling like this.”

She hurried toward her, feeling her heart pound. When she got within a few car lengths of the woman, who was past Cravens by this point, she slowed down so as not to seem hysterical when she started talking. She was only a couple of feet behind her now. She took a deep breath.

As she passed the woman, she picked up her pace and followed the curve of the block back around toward her car. She walked all the way there without turning around. When she got to the car, she had second thoughts and decided to drive around the block and see if she could find her. She could pull into a parking space and get out and walk up to the woman and just stand there in silence if she had to, if she couldn’t bring herself to speak. She could just stand near her and that might help a little. She saw the woman not far from where she’d passed her. She hesitated for a second and then kept driving. In her shame and embarrassment she found herself driving the back way home instead of her usual route. Whatever it was, the woman was going to have to work it out herself. That was just the way life was sometimes: you had to handle your own grief. There wasn’t any sense pretending otherwise.

64

Connell was leaving for college soon. His mother told him to take his father out for the day. Batting cages and driving ranges, their go-to spots for years, were out, and there wasn’t a game at Shea. He brought him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with him.

The lobby was aswarm with refugees from the rain. “It looks like a waiting room for a train station,” his father said, and the remark’s aptness took Connell by surprise. He was taken back to another time, years before, when the two of them stood at the top of the Met’s steps, about to go in. “This is what makes our country great,” his father had said as he rubbed two quarters together. “This is more than enough to get us in.” He had handed Connell the coins. “Bygone philanthropists, men of vision and character, gave something back to the people. To see all this priceless art, you pay what you feel you can.” His father had paid the suggested rate anyway.

Connell led him up the endless flight from the lobby. They stood in front of a painting called “The Gulf Stream” that depicted a lone man on the deck of a small, broken-masted boat in a little plateau between substantial waves on the open sea, sharks circling. The man leaned back against an elbow, looking like a champion of calm, or else like a man resigned to his circumstances.

“Homer,” his father said.

“You know him?”

“He’s one of my favorites. When I was a kid, I picked up a book on him in the library on Union Street. I didn’t know who he was. I just liked the picture on the cover. I kept that book for months.”

“I didn’t know that.” Connell was taken aback at the thought that his father remembered aesthetic preferences. He thought with a pang of the many afternoons they’d spent on different floors of the house. He wanted, one day, to be a person who went out of his way to find out what made other people happy.

“This looks like dire straits,” his father said. “I wonder what he did when he was in dire straits.”

“Who?” Connell asked. “Homer? Or the guy in the boat?”

His father only nodded. “Thank God all these artists did what they did,” he said, “or we’d have nothing.”

Connell laughed. “Maybe not nothing,” he said.

• • •

The rain was coming down in sheets when they left. His father’s hands were shaking. Connell put a hand in his armpit and guided him down the wet stairs, rain whipping at them from all directions.

At the bottom, his father stopped short, and Connell was annoyed. He wanted to get out from under the stinging droplets. In the thick gray of the avenue he could hardly see his father’s face behind the rain slicker’s hood and his wet glasses.

“You all right?” he asked, and then he saw the bright flash of a toothy smile.

“It’s so beautiful,” his father said.

“What is?”

“This,” he said, gesturing around. “Everything.”

• • •

He went looking for some tape in his father’s study and found him sitting there staring up at his diplomas. Some books on the ends of shelves had fallen over, and Connell stood them up. A fine layer of dust covered everything.

A couple of hours later, he brought the tape back and found his father in the same position. At first he thought his father must have fallen asleep, but then he saw that he was awake and staring at the wall. Connell asked him what he was thinking about.

“It must have taken a lot of work to get these,” his father said.

• • •

Connell’s mother was at work when it was time for him to head to the train to go to the airport to leave for Chicago for the first time. He wished she’d taken the day off. He slung an army duffel bag over each shoulder and got his backpack on and started walking. His father was walking into town to go to church, so they walked together.

When they crossed the overpass that stretched across the Sprain Brook Parkway, Connell saw cars streaming by in both directions and thought of how much a map of roads and highways, when it included all the little ones like this, looked like a map of rivers, or an illustration of the circulatory system. He stopped and watched for a while. He was having another of those inchoate ideas that he couldn’t entirely articulate to himself. He knew that these cloudy notions would come into sharper focus when he was away at college, where he would divest himself of the stultifying habits of personality and the false conclusions of biography and shine the light of pure reason on experience.

When they reached the bridge over the Bronx River a block from the train, his father was the one to stop. He leaned over the stone wall. At first Connell thought his father’s mind was just wandering, but then he wondered whether his father might not be imitating him from a few minutes earlier, so he put one of the bags down and tugged on his father’s sleeve as cars sped past. “Dad!” he said, more exasperated than he had intended. His father shook his head and pointed down at the water. “What is it? What’s up?” Then Connell saw a frog on a rock, lazing in the sun. Maybe this was the frog’s habitual spot. Maybe his father had seen it before and remembered to look for it. He seemed pleased that Connell had been there to see it too. He clapped, and it jumped into the river and left a ripple on the water.

He was half a block away when he saw the 12:23 train pull into the station. If he ran, he could make it. His father looked stooped and pale from the heat and uneasy on his legs. Connell could take the next train, at 12:55, or even the one after it; he had plenty of time to make his flight.

He led him under the tracks to Slave to the Grind, the coffee shop he had haunted all summer.

“Two brain freezers,” he said when they got to the counter. After he’d said it, he felt like a fool. If his father noticed, he didn’t seem to care. Connell bought a corn muffin for them to split. He led him to a table in the back, where they drank and ate slowly.

“I’m sorry to be going so far.”

“Have fun,” his father said. “Study what you want.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Forget that. Live your life.”

Outside, heat radiated off cars, and the sun pounded through a severely clear sky. The town thrummed with end-of-summer energy. He had another twenty minutes until the 1:23.

“You okay getting back by yourself?”

His father nodded. They walked to the station.

“You didn’t make it to church.”

“That was just as good,” he said, pointing toward the coffee shop.

He watched his father walk off to get the newspaper; then he took a seat in the shade on the cool concrete bench and pulled a book out of his backpack. Thoughts of his father walking home alone to the empty house kept distracting him, so that he had read only a single page when the horn announced the approaching train, but in his flurried efforts to put his book away and get his baggage settled before the train arrived, he was able to forget about his father entirely.

65

One morning in October, she went to turn the television on for him and found that there was no picture. The repairman couldn’t come in right away, and she had to go to work. She left Ed on the couch, knowing he’d have nothing to do but sit and think. She couldn’t imagine how he’d pass his day without television to distract him from his thoughts.

She hardly got anything done. She must have called him half a dozen times. Every time she called, he hurried off, saying very little, as if he had to get back to something.

When she came home, she found him sitting in exactly the spot she’d left him in on the couch. She wondered if it were possible that he’d sat there for nine hours straight. She checked the microwave and the refrigerator. At least he’d risen to eat. Evidence of urine on the floor of the powder room gave her spirits a strange lift. She was glad she’d called and made him get up.

Another day passed in the same way, and then the repairman finally came on the morning of the third day, before she went to work.

It turned out that all he had to do was reprogram something on the television and the cable box. She gave him a forty-dollar tip on top of the fee his company charged.

“If I ever need you again, please put me at the top of the list.” She tried to affect a breezy manner to hide the desperation she felt. “We simply can’t get on without television in this house.”

66

Connell stayed up all night trying to finish Crime and Punishment in time for class. In the predawn hours, as he battled fatigue and a fractured consciousness that felt, appropriately given the book in question, something like “brain fever,” the story took on a diabolical urgency, and his experience of it became more personal. It felt as if it could have been the story of the mental collapse of any college-aged kid under pressure, or at least any kid far from home, huddled under a Siberian chill.

At nine o’clock he put his head down to rest his eyes for five minutes. The next thing he knew, the clock said ten fifty and he was scrambling not to be late for his eleven o’clock class. He was once again grateful he’d put in for a single room, because the dorm with the most singles, while being a Brutalist eyesore, also happened to be close to campus.

He threw some clothes on and dashed down the stairs, jumping five or six steps at a time and coming down hard on the landings. He ran through the courtyard of the structure — which was designed by a prison architect and seemed to be made entirely of concrete — and marveled, as he did every day, at how violently it clashed with the neo-Gothic elegance of so much of the campus. He had missed breakfast again. With two classes back-to-back, he would miss lunch as well. He had wasted so many meals in his plan that he could hardly tell the difference anymore between hunger pangs and pangs of guilt. He ate often at the Medici, the Florian, or Salonica, because the theater people he hung around with went to those places before and after practice. They staked out a table and sat at it in shifts all night.

He ran past Rockefeller Chapel and onto the quad. The sprint across the length of the campus to Cobb took his breath away, and by the time he arrived he was panting hard. There was a time when this run would have been nothing to him, but when he decided to pursue the life of the mind, he stopped taking care of his body. He considered it a noble choice, except when he examined the evidence that he was falling apart. His muscle mass had melted away considerably. He was long and lanky and now almost certainly too thin. Instead of gaining the traditional fifteen pounds, he had probably lost twenty. He figured he looked like he was taking drugs, though in fact he was scared to try any. It would have been enough that his father had been a drug researcher, but on top of that, in his father’s Alzheimer’s he had an up-close example of the effects of haywire brain chemistry. He didn’t want to do anything to damage his brain. Of course, he understood that sleep deprivation was as ruinous as many drugs. The strongest drug he ever took was caffeine. He drank coffee throughout the day, enough to make him faintly jittery most of the time. He had a thick eraser of fifties-style hair, and his glasses were big, plastic, and chunky and looked like a stage prop. Once October bled into November, the weather provided the model for the persona so many around him cultivated: brisk, astringent, clarifying, with intermittent flashes of manic warmth.

He paused in front of Cobb to catch his breath and gaze at the indefatigable smokers, who stood in the mouth of the big stone C-Bench in any weather, puffing at Galoises and Lucky Strikes, anything unfiltered, to hurry the heat into their lungs. In the winter, with puffs of condensation escaping lips, everyone on campus looked like a smoker.

• • •

In class, he took a seat at the round table, and then he was snapped awake to see the class all looking at him. The professor had called on him to speculate about what motive Raskolnikov might have had for the killing, beyond his stated philosophical one. Connell replied that he wondered whether Raskolnikov might not have been struggling through some kind of Oedipal problem. His father was dead; there was tremendous pressure on Raskolnikov to succeed, to provide a life for his sister and mother. He had his landlady at his back, a surrogate mother figure. Maybe the pawnbroker was herself a surrogate for those unresolved feelings.

The professor, a Russian American with a Mephistophelian goatee, had an amused smile on his face. This had happened before — slumbers of Connell’s punctuated by sudden outbursts of insight. Connell figured either that the professor possessed that elusive quality, the so-called Russian soul, or else that he had been similarly sleep-deprived at one point in his career himself. Something had allowed him to understand Connell’s bizarrely derelict behavior as an expression of authentic scholarship. Certainly it would have been harder on Connell if he didn’t do the reading. But to fall asleep like that in class, in brazen view of the instructor, and spring awake to provide a take that the other students seemed to chew thoughtfully on, even if they wore looks of scorn or pity: this seemed to strike the professor as being a natural mode for the study of Dostoyevsky.

Connell couldn’t help it. He never got enough sleep. He would drift off standing up, sometimes midconversation. If he leaned against a wall too long he would lose his legs and nearly topple over. There was so much to read, and the conversations he found himself in often lasted deep into the night. He watched the night owls go to sleep and pressed on.

Class let out and he went outside for the few minutes between classes to stand in front of the building. He spotted that professor he always saw with his son, a redheaded boy about four or five years old. He watched them walk across campus hand in hand, the professor gesturing around at something, the two of them stopping to watch a squirrel slip down the sloped lid of a garbage can and land in a crash of plastic containers.

He wished he had his own father with him. They could share an apartment off campus. His father could wander the grounds all day and they could meet for dinner. His father could trail him to classes. He would love the state-of-the-art labs, the brilliant students, the sense of higher purpose. His father had never gotten to hang out on a campus like this, though he’d always maintained that all campuses, in spirit, were essentially the same, that the differences between classes of institutions were more in degree than in kind.

After his second class, Connell want back to the dorm and did a little work. Then he went to dinner and rehearsal. He had gotten the part of Orlando in As You Like It, because his experience as a debater had lent him a certain rhetorical polish. The problem was, he didn’t know how to be anybody but himself, and he wasn’t sure what that self was yet, so he studied other people for traits to grab and fashion a personality out of. He liked to think this was what all college kids did, but when he ran into one of those hale, relaxed young men whose character, in the Heraclitean sense, seemed carved out at birth for him, he felt foolish and guilty. It helped that the character he was playing in As You Like It was a little naïve, because he could be breathless and overwhelmed up there and it would just about make sense.

They had spent a week choreographing the fight scenes, which were the only parts of the play he had any mastery of. He hadn’t exercised in months — was it a full year now? — but he still had a wiry energy, and he executed the flips with an ease that made him embarrassed about the rest of his performance. His father would have enjoyed watching him practice the fight scenes. He loved swashbuckling movies about adventures on the high seas, and World War II flicks with buddies fighting side by side and striding into danger.

The cast went to the Medici afterward. He found himself in the middle of a spirited conversation about the nature of free will. Several people packed into the booth, jamming him against the wall. The girls, Jenna included — Jenna whom he’d made out with a few times and who was on the verge of agreeing to make it exclusive — doted on a stage crew member whose carpentry skills lent him a virtuous concreteness in the abstracted arena of campus life.

Hopped up on an endless series of coffee refills, Connell was eating a plate of baked ravioli and idly playing with one of the sugar packets in the little tray when he was overtaken by an insight into the nature of time and space that made his mind fairly crackle. All at once, he could see the whole chain of hands through which this packet had passed on its journey to him. He could see the sugar cane growing, being gathered, being refined. He could see its manufacture. He was about to enact its consumption. He could see the future too: the packet heading to the landfill, decaying in the earth, disintegrating. In one moment, the packet in his hands didn’t exist yet, and in another he was holding it, and in another its remnants were sitting in the trash bag waiting for pickup. He knew he wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone if he tried. The other actors were now carrying on some kind of debate about Williams, O’Neill, and Miller, and Connell was there and not there. He thought, Domino Sugar. Dad made the sugar that went into packets like this. He is holding one of these now, in the past. He could see his father looking into the future and seeing the blurred outlines of a life, a wife, a child. His father would be dead and in the ground. Connell would be too. The sugar would keep getting made.

He wanted to call his father and tell him his fevered thoughts, but he knew that even under the best of circumstances it wouldn’t have made sense to anyone, and it surely wasn’t going to make sense to his father now in the state he was in. Still, he wanted badly to share this insight, and he could feel it slipping away. There wasn’t even time to turn to the guy next to him and try to get it across, so he just formed a mental picture of his father as a much younger man, standing in a white smock, holding a clipboard, as he squeezed the sugar packet and sent the thought to that young man in his image, wherever he was in space or time. He ripped the packet open, poured it in, and watched it dissolve.

The director of his play had seen his polish and misunderstood. She hadn’t realized that polish was all he had. He could stand before people and make stentorian declamations, but the only reason he could project a convincing air of youthful ignorance was that he was stuck inside himself, and he knew he was — it was the one thing he could say with real conviction that he knew about himself — and he wasn’t playing a part.

• • •

The next morning, he woke up late again and bounded down the stairs, but this time he came down too hard on the landing and felt something snap. He hobbled to class and then to the hospital, and that night, when he showed up at rehearsal on crutches, with a broken foot, it was as if the director had been waiting for this to happen all along. There was no understudy, of course, so Connell had to play the part himself. They had to rechoreograph the fight scenes, which he and his counterpart had brought to such a high level of polish that someone suggested that when he recovered they should put on an avant-garde show that would consist exclusively of them playing out their grapplings over and over. They turned them into arm-wrestling scenes instead.

Connell felt safer, somehow, up on crutches. He had to practice walking around onstage in them, and the new physical demands of the part took the urgent edge off his desperation to remember his lines, which allowed him finally to get off book right before the show went up. It was pure chance that he’d broken his foot, but it was lovely to imagine that it wasn’t merely chance, that there was a higher order working in life, that the mystical flashes of insight born of staring at a packet of sugar in a noisy restaurant might actually connect to a truth of the universe. It was lovely to consider the possibility that he’d been somewhere else with his father, in another neighborhood of time and space, just because he’d been able to conceive of it while watching some crystals dissolve into a coffee cup.

He had to remember to give the old man a call.

67

After the eleven o’clock Mass, they took a walk through the neighborhood, then went to the Food Emporium. They were having the Coakleys over for dinner, and she needed to pick up a few things. As they passed through the first electronic door heading out of the store, Ed came to a halt in the vestibule and started yelling “No! No!”

“Not now,” she said. “We have to get home.”

“Not with her!” he yelled. “Police!”

She yanked his hand. He grabbed on to the sliding door to pull back. Somehow he managed to hold on to the bags.

“We have to go,” she said. “Please!”

“Not with you! Police! Police!”

She pulled harder. He stumbled two steps and threw himself to the ground. The cantaloupe he was carrying spilled out of its bag and rolled into the street. She couldn’t budge him. At first people gave her curious looks as they passed, but then a few stopped to gawk, and then a crowd gathered as Ed continued to call for the police. She offered them sheepish smiles as they thronged around her. Workers from the store came out. Someone must have called 911, because the next thing she knew two officers were parting the crowd.

“Police!” Ed shouted frantically when he saw them.

“The police are here,” she said desperately. “Shut up.”

The flash of anger didn’t help her cause. She told them she was his wife, but Ed’s continued shouting made them question her. A neatly dressed woman in a shearling coat whom Eileen had never seen before came forward from the crowd and said she knew who she was. “I see her around,” the woman said quietly, as if to downplay the connection. “In church. She takes care of him. It’s not abuse.”

Eileen was relieved, but she felt a profound gravity come over her at the thought of what a spectacle she’d become. The police were mollified by this character witness; one of the officers told the crowd to disperse, while the other asked what was wrong with Ed and whether she had anyone to call for assistance. In her confusion she could think of no one, not a neighbor, not a single friend.

“You don’t have anyone to call?”

“I don’t know anyone around here,” she found herself saying, to her own amazement. The officers looked heavily at each other, as if they had been conscripted into helping her move a roomful of books. They hooked arms under Ed and led him to the car.

When they got home, she called the Coakleys to cancel. He was raving about how he wasn’t going to eat anything from her, he wasn’t going to eat a single thing she gave him. Eventually she convinced him to go upstairs to the bedroom, and he fell asleep.

“Wasn’t it wonderful?” he asked a few hours later when she woke him to give him his medicine. “We had such a nice day.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t we have a wonderful day?”

After dinner, Ed went right back to bed. She returned to the kitchen and opened the wine she’d bought for the Coakleys’ visit. She’d consulted the salesman to make sure it was a bottle to satisfy an exacting taste. For the last few years, Jack Coakley had been educating himself about wine. He was becoming — he’d taught her the word — an oenophile. The salesman had handed her a Bordeaux whose label she didn’t recognize and said it had big mouthfeel, with strong but creamy tannins, a blend of fruity aromas, and a smoky finish. She’d nodded and tried not to seem lost. It had been more money than she’d planned on spending, and she’d thought about getting a cheaper bottle she was familiar with, but the way he’d looked at her, seeming to evaluate her, had made her carry it up to the counter.

When she was nearly done with the bottle, she called Cindy.

“I almost went to jail,” she said. “And he’s saying, ‘Didn’t we have a wonderful time?’ ” She drained the last glass. “This is the best bottle of wine I’ve ever tasted.”

She hung up and began eating her way through the food in the refrigerator — the hors d’oeuvres she’d bought for dinner, leftovers, the cake she’d made that morning.

She felt the tremors of an incipient headache. The headaches were the reason she stayed away from alcohol. She could see the appeal of it, though: the obliteration of the day’s concerns, the loosing of the reins of control, the preoccupation with something as simple as the next drink, the forgetting. The forgetting could be wonderful.

68

Eileen knew facing the crowds and the cold might not be a good idea — Ed was more sensitive to cold than he’d ever been, and the excess stimulation might put him in a frenzy — but she couldn’t help herself. Though they’d gone every year they lived in Jackson Heights, she hadn’t been to see the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue since she’d moved to Bronxville. She was loath to miss them again.

She parked in a garage close to the strip of stores. She expected him to gripe his way through the wall of humanity, but he didn’t pull against her as she led him by the hand.

They started at Lord & Taylor. “Jingle Bells” poured down from the hidden speakers above, and in the first window, figures revolved and bobbed mechanically in a mute and tireless tableau of Christmas morning. A boy moved up and down with his arms spread wide as though in a Cossack dance as he beheld the miracle of his new bike; a girl swung her new baby doll back and forth as if it were a model airplane; and their father forever pulled a stocking from the mantle above the fireplace. Ed jabbed her shoulder.

“Isn’t it the greatest thing you’ve ever seen?” he asked in a surge of enthusiasm more unlikely than any she’d seen from him over the course of their marriage. “Look!” he said. “Look!”

It was the same at the next window, and all the windows from Fortunoff to Macy’s. His childish wonder never abated, and his expression was blank with anticipation as she led him to the next garland-wrapped queue.

Later, in bed, she was disappointed not to be able to recall any of the scenes. Instead, all she could see was Ed’s huge smile and his glasses reflecting the lights of the displays.

Connell called the next day to let her know he wasn’t coming home for Christmas. He had decided to spend the holiday at the house of his new girlfriend. He’d had the same excuse at Thanksgiving.

“Who is this girl? Thanksgiving and now Christmas? Sounds like someone we need to meet.”

“You will,” he said, to her dismay.

“Well,” she said. “Your father will certainly be disappointed.”

She decided to cancel the little Christmas Eve party she’d planned. Ed wouldn’t know the difference; they could eat frozen dinners and watch television. She’d have followed through if her cousin Pat hadn’t called shortly after she’d gotten off the phone with Connell and said he and Tess and the girls were going to be able to make it after all. Pat was as close to a brother as she had. He used to come over to her parents’ apartment every year, starting in her late teens, to put up the Christmas tree with her father. He reminded her so terribly of her father. When he heard how upset she was that Connell wasn’t coming home, Pat said they’d come on Saturday the twenty-third and stay through the long weekend.

“The girls will help you get ready,” he said. “They’ll cook, they’ll clean, they’ll do whatever I tell them to.”

She knew she should have been touched, but it wasn’t as she would have planned it, and she wanted something, anything, to go exactly as she’d planned it.

• • •

Ed was there to greet Pat and Tess and the girls when they arrived, but a few minutes later, when it was time to eat the big lunch she’d prepared, he had disappeared upstairs. She found him sitting on the divan at the foot of the bed, looking confused.

“Are you planning to join us?”

“That lady downstairs,” he said. “I know I should know her. Who is she?”

“You mean Tess?”

“That’s her name?”

“Tess,” she said. “Yes.”

“Okay,” he said, rising. As they got to the door and were about to head downstairs, he stopped her. “Don’t tell her I don’t know her.”

“But you do know her.”

“Don’t tell.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Believe me.”

“Good.”

“Do you remember her name?”

“Don’t test me.”

“It’s not a test,” she said. “I’m trying to help.”

He stood there thinking. “What is it?” he asked after a bit.

“Tess.”

“I said don’t test me.”

“No,” she said, laughing. “Not test. Tess. Tess is her name.”

He repeated the name a few times. “And how do I know her again?”

“She’s Pat’s wife.”

He looked annoyed. “Pat, your cousin Pat?”

“Yes,” she said, unable to keep from laughing.

“Well,” he said, “why didn’t you say so?”

“You know who Pat is?”

“Your cousin Pat,” he said, as if she were being obtuse. “Of course I do.”

“Of course you do,” she said, chuckling. She straightened his glasses on his face and led him downstairs.

• • •

In the morning, Ed went for the paper. She was relieved to get him out of the house for a while. She had a lot to do for the party, and her nieces were there to help her. It was unseasonably warm, so she imagined he might take a seat on the bench by the Food Emporium.

Elyse helped her chop potatoes and Cecily polished the silverware. She showed the two of them how to make quiche. The Christmas music gave her movements an upbeat, cheery punctuation, and as she directed the girls she remembered the joyous way Ed, in the days before he switched over to headphones, would stand in the living room conducting along to the symphony recording with an invisible baton. She enjoyed watching him work himself into a frenzy. She loved how he laughed at his own ridiculousness.

She was happy enough that she could almost forget that Connell hadn’t come home. Watching Elyse and Cecily work in their purposeful way, she wondered what it would have been like to have a daughter instead of a son. Daughters didn’t leave the way sons did. Her friends’ daughters never seemed to move more than a few miles away from their mothers.

Ed had been gone an hour and a half. With his slow gait it wasn’t unreasonable to think he was still in transit, and anyway she was enjoying herself. A little while later, though, Tess asked, “Where’s Ed?” and Eileen began to worry: not that anything bad had happened to him, but that he’d gotten lost. She had allowed herself to get complacent.

“Topps,” she said. “The local bakery. They spoil him there. I’d better go and save the counter girl from him. He’ll haunt that place all day if they let him.”

She drove slowly down Palmer, stopping at storefronts to peer inside, feeling like a criminal casing them out. She did a circle of the town. He wasn’t on any of the benches. It had grown colder since he’d left; the wind had picked up. She regretted giving in to vanity, both his and hers, in not getting him a MedicAlert bracelet. He was wandering the streets with nothing to explain his situation.

She drove down Kimball Avenue to double through the back streets where he might have gotten turned around. When she got to Midland, she saw a man approaching a car at the stoplight under the Cross County overpass, waving his hands, and it took her a second to realize that he was her husband. She threw the hazards on and walked toward him, and when he saw her he started clapping his hands. She pulled him back by the sleeve. A blue Mercedes honked and slowed as it passed. At first she thought it was her neighbor from up the block, but she was relieved to see a gray-haired man she didn’t recognize. Still, had he recognized her? Would he recount the scene over dinner?

She was too angry to speak. She tried to imagine the melee Ed had caused since he’d gotten to the intersection. How long had it been? She was lucky the police hadn’t gotten to him yet.

She buckled him into the passenger seat and returned to the driver’s seat before saying anything. “What were you doing so far from the house?” she asked finally.

“You found me,” he said. “Don’t make a big deal of it. Let’s go.”

“Did you get lost? Were you disoriented?”

Ed looked at his feet. She noticed that the soles were separating from the leather of his shoes. He needed a new pair, or at least a resoling. She had been leaving details like this unattended to. Her secret thought, the shameful thought she’d been harboring more frequently lately, was that Ed wouldn’t notice anyway.

“I was trying to get to the mall.”

“What in the hell!” she shouted. “Tell me the truth. Did you get lost trying to get home?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“I need to know, Ed.”

“I wanted to get you something.”

“We decided about this. Remember? You and I aren’t exchanging presents this year. It’s just easier that way.”

“Not for Christmas,” he said.

“For what, then?”

“Our anniversary.” He stretched out his hands and poked at his ring. “New Year’s Eve,” he said.

“We got married on January twenty-second, Edmund.”

“But we met on New Year’s Eve.”

She was quiet. She pictured Tess’s concerned look when they got home. The look would say, in the most well-meaning way possible, Why did you let him go out in the first place? Ed sat heavily in the passenger seat. “We need to get back,” she said. “Everyone is worried sick.”

When they were nearly home, she looked over and saw him holding his wallet.

“I didn’t have any money anyway,” he said.

She hadn’t put any in his wallet in a while. She’d also taken the cards, to prevent someone from taking advantage of him.

She turned the car around and drove back to the mall, parked in front of Macy’s. She fished her own wallet out of her purse. A hundred-dollar bill flashed up at her, along with a couple of singles.

You stirred up emotions in a man when you gave him cash. She’d practiced defusing that ticking bomb during her father’s retirement years, when she still lived at home. When Ed handed her his wallet, she folded the hundred in briskly, economically, as though she were giving a flu shot.

They went inside. She told him she’d wait in the purse section and watched him amble off. He stopped to talk to a salesgirl, who pointed him toward the escalator. As he began to rise, clutching the thick rubber rail with both hands and looking over the side as though it were the edge of a ship, she decided to follow him from a distance. She trailed him into the women’s section. She had a vision of him throwing dress after dress over his shoulder in a frenzied spree, but he walked the aisles deliberately, like a big cat stalking its prey, looking at dresses without touching them. He moved from rack to rack, evidently making quick decisions, and stopped in front of a row of dresses along the far wall. He appraised them as she pretended to look at clothes across the aisle. A salesgirl came over and he waved her off. As if he had read Eileen’s mind about the dowdy-looking dresses in front of him, he headed to an adjacent rack and, after a sweep of those offerings with his eyes, held up a dress. She could see it shimmering in the light. The pattern was tasteful, the cut elegant. He waved the salesgirl over again with a frantic hand, holding the dress in front of him as though it were a banner in a parade.

She watched a strange exchange between Ed and the salesgirl. A look of patient confusion crossed the girl’s face as he passed her his wallet. She held it dubiously as he jabbed at a pocket behind where his credit cards would have been. Frustrated, he took the wallet back, removed a slip of paper, and handed it to her.

The girl nodded and returned with an identical-looking dress. He must have written Eileen’s size on the slip of paper. She couldn’t imagine the effort he’d expended in memorializing this detail. Still, there was little chance the number was correct. She needed a ten now.

As Ed approached the cash register, she realized that the dress must have cost well over a hundred dollars. She rushed over. She knew Ed would be furious, but she couldn’t worry about that now. She tapped him on the shoulder. He sprang forward, startled, and let out a little cry. When he saw it was her, he yelled her name a few times in manic excitement, the trapped heat of emasculation radiating off him.

“Funny meeting you here,” she said.

“You like this?” he asked. The girl, who had arranged her features into a beatific grin, handed it over for inspection.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. She glanced at the dress size: eight. He was closer than she thought.

“I like you in blue,” he said. The simplicity of the declaration put an ache in her chest. He directed no animosity at her for having rescued him in the transaction. He seemed to feel only a naked desire to please. He was being stripped of pride, of ego, ruined, destroyed. He was also being softened.

“We’ll use this.” She handed her credit card to the salesgirl before Ed could reach for his wallet, which was sitting on the counter. The girl passed her the index card Ed had written on. It said, “Eileen’s size,” with a big “6” crossed out and an “8” written in its place. When Ed turned away, she took a pen and crossed out the “8” and wrote “10” next to it in as close a hand to his as she could manage. She would come back and exchange it for a ten. She slid the paper back in his wallet and put the hundred into her own. There was no reason for him to be walking around with a bill that large.

• • •

The McGuires and Coakleys couldn’t make it that year. They had excuses — the Coakleys had been talking about heading out to Arizona to see Cindy’s brother for years, and Frank’s niece in Maine had just had a baby — but she couldn’t help being annoyed at their not trying harder to be in town. They’d been so strange around Ed lately, the women tentative, the men garrulous and impersonal, that she imagined they were relieved to have a reason to get away. It seemed to her that she had graduated from the ranks of ordinary wives into a rare stratum inhabited by widows whose husbands were still alive.

At one in the morning, she and Tess sweated to get the mess cleaned up. Just when it looked as if she might escape the evening without a major disturbance, Ed woke and wandered out of the bedroom. He paced back and forth in the upstairs hallway, screaming and flailing his arms violently. She couldn’t silence him. One by one the houseguests gave up the pretense of sleep and emerged from their rooms — Pat, Tess, the girls, her aunt Margie, who had also decided to stay. Pat tried to intercede, puffed up by macho gravitas, but she held him off and allowed Tess to help her corral Ed.

The morning saw no enthusiastic ripping open of presents; the girls handed them around with a perfunctory languor. As Connell had grown older, she’d worked hard to keep alive the Christmas morning ritual, and she tried to pump some life into the girls, but their exhaustion won out. They put in a lackluster effort at breakfast as well, nursing cups of coffee and leaving heaps of food untouched. She thought, Connell was right not to come home.

As she scraped scrambled eggs into the trash, she resolved to have one more real Christmas, with all the trappings and ceremonies of the occasion. Next year, the big green star would make its way to the top of the tree. She hadn’t felt safe when she’d been on the top step of the ladder, leaning over the branches, and she certainly wasn’t about to ask Ed to get up there and do it, and by the time Pat arrived she’d moved on to other tasks for him to do and had forgotten all about it. When she’d sat at dinner, though, all she’d been able to focus on, other than her anxiety about Ed’s embarrassing her, was the treetop sticking up like a tumor, even though it was out of sight in the den. It was in plain view in her mind’s eye. She hadn’t realized how important that star was in rounding out the scene she so carefully constructed. When the lamps were off, it winked with a hazy, emerald loveliness that seemed to pull you toward it. Next year, she would need Connell there to put it up for her. After that, he wouldn’t have to come home for another holiday if he didn’t want to. She was going to wring enough perfection out of next Christmas to last her the rest of her years on earth.