We Are Not Ourselves

90

She had a hard time leaving him at night. It was better not to say good-bye. She’d tell him she was going to run an errand or to take a nap — trying to imply, in the way she said it, that she’d be returning. “I just need to run to the store,” she’d say, and then mechanically make her way through the corridors and out the back door, the whole time telling herself she could turn around and go back.

Once, when she said, “I’m going to get something to eat,” he seemed to laugh sardonically, and she looked at him, trying to find a deliberate message in his expression, some chastening meant for her, but she saw only that familiar blankness as he stared at something she couldn’t see. This disease was making her paranoid too.

She went every day. She never accepted the invitations for weekends in the country or at the beach. Her friends said she was being too hard on herself. She thought she was being too easy. I could bring him home, she wanted to say. I could take care of him. They told her she needed to have some semblance of a life, that it was too much. And she thought, It’s not enough. I’m a nurse, for God’s sake, that’s what I do, but all she said was, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.”

• • •

His wallet was still on the mule chest. She rubbed her fingers on the worn, smooth leather, took out the driver’s license and looked at it, read the prayer they’d written together. Inside was everything she’d allowed him to carry in his final ambulatory years, and everything he’d been carrying on his last day as a full-dressed member of civilization: seven dollars cash; an index card listing his name, address, and phone number and her work phone number, written in her own hand; his Alzheimer’s Association Safe Return card (“If I appear lost or confused, please help me by calling…”); his Mobil and Amoco gas cards; his AAA card (“Membership year 27”); two different Board of Elections voter registration confirmations; his Waldbaum’s Valued Shopper Card with Check Cashing Privileges; his PriceCostco card under Jack R. Coakley Consulting; his AARP card; his ID from BCC; an index card with the number for the car phone; his Sears card (“Valued Customer Since 1973”); his Blue Cross/Blue Shield card; his GHI card; his PSC–CUNY card indicating he was a member in good standing of the AFT Local 2334 (AFL–CIO); his New York Academy of Sciences membership card; a picture of her from June of 1968, when she had been thin; a picture of Connell in his baseball uniform from his freshman year of high school; a picture of Connell from preschool; a picture of Connell graduating from St. Joan of Arc; and the edited index card with her size written on it. She opened the card. She was going to cross the “10” out and write “12” in its place, and then throw it in the garbage, but when she saw that the “10” was in her own handwriting, the tears came all at once.

• • •

His roommate was named Reinhold Huggins. Mr. Huggins had been a celebrated piano teacher. Now he pushed a walker around and refused to wear an undershirt under his hospital robe, his naked back bisected by the tight string, his steps tiny and shuffling, his posture slightly hunched. He was surprisingly alert. He didn’t say anything unprompted, except to ask for water, but if she asked how he was doing he would say, “Rather well, thank you, and yourself?” always quietly and gently, so that she had to lean in to hear him, and without the rising intonation that would have made the statement a question. Despite his manner of speaking, he was fearsome-looking, with a hoary, streaked beard and an unsmiling visage. The one time she had tried to direct him to the piano in the lounge, he gripped her shoulders with his long, bony fingers and squeezed hard. She didn’t do it again. Often when he spoke or sat in his chair, he raised his forefinger and beat it back and forth like a metronome. Other than that, he wasn’t a bad roommate; there were worse in the building.

Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Sonnabend liked to sit in the lounge and talk by the picture window. Eileen was surprised at how present they were. Watching from a distance, she became convinced, by their facial expressions, laughs, hand gestures, and the way they interrupted one another to make an excited point, that they were gushing over their grandkids. After she’d seen them there enough times, she grew fascinated enough to get up close to listen in. Mrs. Klein said, “My daughter, my daughter, she’s going to come, my daughter, with a hundred dollars,” and Mrs. Sonnabend responded, over and over, with something that sounded like “Gesundheit.”

• • •

On December 2, 1997, she made it to her ten-year pension. Before she left for work, she called Connell in Berlin, but he wasn’t home, and she was almost relieved not to get him. She wasn’t sure he’d have appreciated the full significance of the news, and she didn’t want to feel silly or diminished about it, so she left a message for him to call her and figured she’d hear from him in a week or so, when it would be just another curiosity to report. On this day, the actual day of the event, she felt too raw to mention anything about it and risk not hearing back from him. It meant more to her than she would ever have guessed it would. She hadn’t always been sure she’d get to this day, and it wasn’t even about health insurance anymore so much as having something to strive for, something that allowed her life to hang together.

She went to the home after work with a half bottle of champagne. A drum circle had been organized in the community room; Kacey the social director was standing in the center, her own drum suspended from a strap around her neck. Eileen stopped in the doorway to watch. Kacey was slapping at her drum, which was fancier than the others, and looking at the patients with a manic grin, trying to get them to imitate her. The gathering was mostly women, though a few men were scattered throughout. Eileen was glad Ed’s physical infirmity kept him out of activities like this. She watched long enough to hear the haphazard drumming peter out. Kacey slapped each hand down once in quick succession, generating a popping sound like that of a plastic cup hitting a hardwood floor. “Now you!” Kacey said, earnestly, casting about with imploring eyes. An old woman sighed and said, “Oh, come on,” and Eileen wanted to hug her in gratitude.

She found him in his room. The popping cork startled him; his eyes widened, though he didn’t move. She had to pour the champagne slowly into his mouth to keep him from dribbling it all out, but once he could feel the bubbles on his tongue he lapped it up. She could have sworn she detected a smile on his lips when she told him her news.

For years she had imagined she might be moved to retire the day she’d secured the pension, but as she sat there finishing off the little bottle, she realized that even if her financial situation had worked out better, and even if the cost of the nursing home didn’t go up every six months, to almost seven thousand a month now, she wouldn’t be giving a passing thought to quitting. If she retired she would have nothing to do but spend all day at the home, and she still had some life left to give. One of the inescapable facts of her existence was that she was good at her job. She had spent her life thinking of all the other things she might have been — a lawyer, she’d often concluded, or a politician, which was probably the best career for any child of Big Mike Tumulty’s, even if that child didn’t happen to be male — but now it struck her that she was doing what she did best. Her profession had been becoming hers the whole time she’d been looking away from it. The point wasn’t always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well. She had worked hard for years, and if she had nothing to show for it but her house and her son’s education, there was still the fact of its having happened, which no one could erase from the record of human lives, even if no one was keeping one.

91

The morning after Thanksgiving of 1998, Connell went up to the home alone. After his visit, he got halfway down the hall before he headed back to his father’s room and stood in the doorway looking in; then he left again. When he was about to turn the key in the car, he went back in again, but this time he entered the room. He sat in the chair next to his father’s bed and took his father’s hand as though he’d just arrived.

At noon, they went to lunch. The lunchroom was noisy with women calling for help or screaming incoherently, which pierced the fog in which his father was generally lost and caused him to tremble and start in his wheelchair. Connell attributed this to his father’s chivalrous nature. The men’s screams didn’t have the same effect.

After lunch, in his father’s room, Connell quickly came to the end of everything he could think to say. He told him about how the Mets barely missed the wild card after collapsing in the final week of the season, losing five straight, and about how the Yankees won the World Series again after winning the most games in regular season history. He told him how his last year of college was going. There was no way to tell whether his father understood anything. When his mother was there it was easier. She spoke as if he might answer her at any moment. She would tell him something that had gone wrong at the house and say, “You always told us not to do that,” or “You knew that already, didn’t you?” But he couldn’t bring himself to speak rhetorically to his father. He couldn’t suspend his disbelief that his father would answer, and he felt like he was disrespecting him if he phrased his sentences as questions. He sat with him in silence instead or put music on.

The room was quiet, peaceful. A small piano on Mr. Huggins’s side was the resting place for a flowerpot and a pair of framed pictures. He had never seen Mr. Huggins sit down at it, but then Mr. Huggins was almost never in the room. He walked the halls endlessly, pushing his walker as though trying to wear himself out.

“You know Mr. Huggins is German? I know I’ve told you about Berlin, but let me tell you about it again. Berlin is great. The art, the culture, the literature. The whole city is a construction site. They’re making everything new. They’re also trying not to make anything new, in the sense that they’re unwilling to paper over anything in the past without tremendous deliberation. They’re trying to deal with the legacy of the past in a thoughtful way. It’s not perfect, and they know they’ll never live down the atrocities of the Nazi era, but they’re trying to be the world’s historian, or at least the world’s agonized conscience. They look relentlessly inward. They guard ruthlessly against historical revisionism or sentimentality about the old ways of life or anything that smacks of even the slightest hint of the kind of thinking that led them down the road to hell. Sure, there are some neo-Nazis there, just as there are racists and xenophobes anywhere, but as a culture, at least the intellectual culture, they are tremendously deliberate about quashing that sort of thing before it gains a foothold. You can’t accuse the Germans, or at least Berliners, or at least intellectuals in Berlin, or at least the intellectuals at the Freie Universität that I came to know — you see? I learned from them to qualify my statements down to the point of the granite and the unassailable — of trying to pretend the Nazis never happened. They even guard against the idea of getting angry at having to be so thoughtful and conscience-stricken all the time. There’s a kind of unwavering discipline about their watchfulness about conscience fatigue. Consciousness fatigue. Conscientiousness — no; they wouldn’t say conscientiousness; that suggests something of ‘good manners.’ They’re almost brutal to themselves in their unwillingness to feel good about the fact that they remember to feel bad about the evils committed in the past, before they were born. They admit their lack of discipline and prosecute it even when it’s not there. We could learn a thing or two from them about how to address the legacy of slavery, or the treatment of Native Americans, or the Japanese internment camps, or Jim Crow, or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or any number of atrocious episodes that leave a stain on the soul of America.”

They sat in silence again until he put on some Mozart from the boxed set he had bought his father as an early Christmas present. He had decided not to fly back for Christmas that year, though he hadn’t told his mother yet. He figured it would force her to accept the invitation to the Coakleys’ instead of spending another depressing Christmas Eve at Maple Grove, as she had the previous year, when he’d been in Germany. If he came home she’d want the three of them to spend it together, and he didn’t want to do that to her, so he was going to force her hand, make her let someone — Cindy, whoever — take care of her for a change.

His father began to clap and cheer in the middle of a movement, and Connell clapped along, which reminded him of sitting next to his father in Carnegie Hall as a kid, when he would watch for his father’s hands to come together with authority to know when he himself should clap.

At the end of one movement — a check of the liner notes revealed the symphony to be Mozart’s fortieth — his father smiled deliriously and then started sobbing deeply enough that it was impossible to hear the music. Connell couldn’t tell if it was the symphony making him react so strongly or else something bubbling up from his unconscious mind. He began to get unaccountably angry. Rather than let that feeling come to the fore and allow the visit to turn ugly, he wheeled his father out to the television room and left, this time for good.

92

For weeks, she had seen the end coming. His color was ashen, his breath sulfuric. His gaze was vacant, without any bouts of clarity. His head was stuck in a permanent loll, as if the muscles in his neck had stopped working. The clonic twitches almost flung him out of his seat.

A month before he died, he did something that she turned over in her mind later whenever she wondered how much he was aware of in his last days. He often exhibited what looked like glimmers of awareness, but she knew they were more likely her own projections. It was less painful to believe he couldn’t remember all he’d lost, but another part of her — she knew it was selfish — wanted him to know who she was.

A few days before Valentine’s Day, she was wheeling him down the hall to his room. The home was decorated with pink streamers and heart-shaped cardboard cutouts, as though it were not a facilitator of human expirations but a middle school full of yearning adolescents. She had to walk close to the wall to avoid someone being wheeled in the other direction, and in that instant, Ed had reached out to one of the hearts on the wall and plucked it off. Reached was too strong a word; likely it brushed against him and his hand closed around it reflexively. He clutched it the whole way down the hall and into the room. It was only when she wheeled him into place and sat beside him that he dropped it and it fell on the floor between them. His hand twitched after it; he could almost have been pointing. She picked it up. She was on the verge of asking if it was for her when she realized she didn’t want to hear the lack of an answer, so she just placed it on the nightstand.

Glue pooled in the corners of his mouth and a pasty spackle of plaque sat on his teeth, which could no longer be cleaned effectively and which had darkened so considerably that they had gone past yellow to a necrotic shade of blue.

She wet a paper towel and wiped his face. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, and when she kissed him on the mouth for the first time in longer than she liked to remember, she was surprised at how sweet he tasted.

93

Something in his mother’s message compelled him to return her call right away and not merely resolve to do so before the weekend was over. She would never have delivered bad news on an answering machine, but there must have been a hint, a subtle quaver, and a hint was all he needed. For years, he had been tuned to the peculiar frequency of disaster. It was irrational, he knew; his father’s disease augured no sudden change in fortune, only a long decline; nevertheless, whenever the phone rang in his sleep, he awoke with a start and sprang to his feet.

“Your father is sick,” she said when he reached her.

He looked around at his apartment. Papers were strewn everywhere; a thick layer of dust had settled on every surface. Neither he nor his roommate had done any cleaning in weeks. It was their last stretch in college, and each of them was responsible for wringing as much as he could out of the dwindling days. He considered the smells: the faint ammonia reek of dirty clothes, the mildew musk that drifted out from dishes in the murky sink, which only got washed when his roommate’s girlfriend complained.

“He’s not going to make it through the night,” his mother said, with none of the bluster that entered her voice when she knew she was right. She sounded vulnerable. It might have been the first time he’d ever heard her sound that way.

“Are you sure?” he asked, but it was an idle question; she’d watched hundreds of people die.

“He has pneumonia,” she said calmly. “That’s bad for someone in his situation.”

“Why didn’t you call sooner?”

“I was waiting to see if he’d make it through. I didn’t want to pull you away unnecessarily. Anyway, I’m calling now.”

“How is he?” It was a dumb question, but he hoped, even half expected, that his mother’s answer would be different this time — modulated, hedging.

“Everything’s quiet,” she said. “I’m by the bed. I’m trying to make him comfortable.”

He could see the nursing home shrouded in darkness, the hallway dark but for the sliver of light shining out under his father’s door. He could see his mother’s hand on his father’s chest, the labored breathing, the terror in his father’s eyes.

“We’ll have to hope he lasts until you get here,” she said. “Call JetBlue. Put it on the American Express.”

He didn’t have a credit card of his own. His mother had given him the Amex the day he left for college. It listed his name in full caps, CONNELL J. LEARY, and above it, Member Since 67. “In case of emergencies,” she’d said as she handed it over before she headed to work that morning. The very last thing she’d said, as always, was “Be careful.”

• • •

It was with a sense of ceremony that he packed for his trip. The nervous excitement that attended any travel filled his chest, but he was preparing for a greater journey. They said that a father’s death was a defining moment in a man’s life, perhaps the defining one. He was about to be ushered into an immense and silent club of men who shared the knowledge of one of life’s singular passages. He was humbled by the possibility of waking up a different person, one with the stamp of legitimacy on him. Every shirt he folded into the bag, every pair of socks he picked out from the rest, he envisioned outfitting the better self that was, perhaps, being born into the world. A solemn suit, sensible slacks, his best shoes: the destiny for which he had been preparing was coming into focus. There were matters to attend to: taking out the trash, washing the dishes in the sink. He dispatched them with an intensity he had never been able to summon before. They were the precursor to the larger duties he was about to perform, as son to his mother and ambassador for his family — in short, as the man of the house. Every move he made had the imprimatur of purposefulness. There was no time for sentiment, only for the handling of tasks that a man ought to do well and uncomplainingly.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking out, for perhaps the last time with eyes of an adolescent, at the view of the street from his place. He breathed deeply the evening air, the smell of trees and car exhaust. His apartment seemed suddenly quaint; he felt a tremendous affection for the life he had been leading. He would leave it all behind. He would begin anew. Nothing could stop him; nothing could hurt him; he could walk on coals and get to the cool other side.

Before he left, he called again. “How is he?” he asked, because he couldn’t ask the obvious: Is he alive?

“He’s in pain,” she said, “but he’s still here.” Her voice broke. “I told him you were coming. He squeezed my finger.”

At Midway, he checked in, passed through the detectors, and took a seat at the gate. There wouldn’t be much of a wait; he had arrived shortly before departure. He settled in and tried to read a book, but he was seized by panic at the thought of his father dying. He had been living without his father for some time already, but he still made pilgrimages to him, for the advice he listened for in his father’s heartbeats, ear pressed to his chest; for the reassurance in his constancy; for the comfort he felt when he nuzzled him close and registered the soft, unconscious rhythm of his breath on his neck. He was still the standard-bearer; he was still his father.

They started boarding the plane. The back rows, his group, boarded first. He felt like a horse stomping at the gate, ready to dash off the plane when it landed. He hadn’t checked any bags; his uncle Pat would be waiting for him at the airport.

He was the first to his row. He put his book into the seat pocket, lowered the tray table, and drummed his fingers. Stragglers filed in slowly. Soon he would have to get up for the person in the window seat, or watch the one in the aisle stuff his things into the overhead bin. He wished he hadn’t rushed aboard. He didn’t need to use the bathroom, but he replaced the table and rose anyway.

He pressed close to the mirror, leaned his forehead against it. His breath collected on it. He would stay there as long as he needed to. He was looking for something, some confirmation, though of what he wasn’t sure.

Then he saw it. It was all there: his father’s aspect of perpetual surprise; his father’s widow’s peak, which seemed to climb his scalp in flight; his father’s nose, which flared out slightly at the nostrils; his father’s jaw, which gave ballast to the rest; the cavity in his father’s chin; the black hair; the slightly overlarge ears.

He bared his teeth. They were, against all odds, perfectly straight. As a kid he had avoided the nighttime headgear designed to supplement the corrective pull of his braces. He had faked the log that documented his wear time. At the panic-stricken last minute before heading to the orthodontist, overwhelmed by the enormity of so much squandered time, he had switched pens and varied the numbers, composing fictions that attested to his discipline and endurance. His father drove him to the orthodontist once a month for two full years; every time, Connell waited to hear the guilty verdict; every time, he was spared. His father never called him on it either; he was happy enough to take him for a ride, happy enough to shell out bucks he didn’t have for the sake of his son’s smile. The world of adults seemed to budget for the carelessness of children.

His teeth were not his father’s. His father had a bridge that he washed under the faucet and click-clacked for Connell when he asked him to. He had a cracked front tooth that he lost half of when he fell to the brick floor in the kitchen while Connell brooded in his room.

“You are flying home,” he said to the mirror, hoping to ground himself in the reality of what was happening. “Your father is dying. He is your best friend. You will never be the same again.”

It didn’t work. By the time he got back to his seat, he had forgotten what he had felt in the bathroom. An attractive woman around his age or a few years older had taken the window seat. In the aisle sat an older businessman who couldn’t be bothered to flirt with her. Connell squeezed past him, insisting that he needn’t get up, and the man didn’t flinch.

As they waited for takeoff, Connell looked at the tiny television on the seat back, which showed a map with their location, the plane icon as big as a state. It looked as if it could cover the distance in a quick sprint, but it just sat there.

“I’ve heard that’s good.” He gestured to the book in the girl’s hands.

“Oh, it is,” she said. “It’s beautifully written. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by her.”

“What brings you to New York?”

She seemed startled by the sudden shift, but he hadn’t read the book or any of the author’s others. “I’m going to see a friend,” she said. “My college roommate. She moved there to work for a fashion house.”

“My name’s Connell.” He jammed his elbow awkwardly against the seat as he tried to extend his hand.

“Karla,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

He thought he heard the businessman sigh.

“Have you ever been to New York?”

“I haven’t. I’m excited.”

“How long will you stay?”

“A week.”

“What do you have planned?”

“Not much,” she said. “I don’t even have a guidebook yet. All I know is I’m staying with my friend. I’m so busy, I haven’t had time to sit down and plan anything.”

“Make sure you ride the Staten Island Ferry. It’s the best view of the city, and it costs only fifty cents.”

The businessman coughed. “It’s free now,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“It was fifty cents. It’s free now.”

He resumed making notes on his stack of papers, but not before giving a look that said he knew what Connell was up to, that Connell had been away too long, that he was a fraud, that he was going to lead this girl astray.

“That sounds great, either way,” Karla said. “I love boats. And bargains.”

Connell and Karla looked at each other for a second. Her smile was charming, open. Then she resumed her reading and he took his book out of the seat pocket. After a while she asked whether New York was home, and he said it used to be, and she asked why he was going there and he told her his father might be dying after a long illness and she said she was very sorry. The revelation seemed to sink them deeper into silence, and part of him wished he had made something up. The plane took off with a rumble. He noticed she made the sign of the cross and pressed her hands together, kissing her fingertips lightly.

• • •

Near the end of the flight he asked if she liked Indian food.

“You know?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had it.”

“There are these two adjacent Indian restaurants,” he said, “at the top of this stoop on Second Avenue, off Third Street. They’re identical: the same décor, the same hanging lights. Strings of plastic chili peppers. They’ve been warring for years. A host stands outside each door, trying to usher you in like it’s Shangri-La on the other side of that door. You make your choice: right or left. Then you’re part of that tribe. They remember you. God forbid you go the other way the next time.”

“Which way do you go?”

“Right,” he said.

“Then how do you know they’re identical?”

“I never thought about that,” he said. “I guess I’ve been too scared to find out. You don’t know how intimidating those guys are.”

She laughed; he could feel interest stirring in her. For most of the flight, he had waited for that moment when the dynamic between them would change, when she would cease being a stranger. Maybe this was his chance.

“Maybe we should go while you’re in town,” he said. “We can go left, if you want. I’m willing to risk it.”

“I’m not one to tamper with loyalties,” she said, and she shifted in her seat. He feared he had spoken too soon. It could get uncomfortable; they still had a little ride ahead of them.

“You’re right,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

“Are you sure you have time? I mean — your father.”

“I can make time,” he said.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I’ll have enough to keep me busy. You’ve got things to take care of.”

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll be able to slip away. Besides, he’s probably going to be fine. This has happened before.”

“Well,” she said, “only if it’s not a disturbance.”

“I’ll give you a call to set something up.”

They exchanged numbers. There was a hint of bafflement on her face. She seemed shocked by him, the way one is shocked and refreshed by diving into unexpectedly cold water. The way she searched his look for an extended moment, as if to ask whether he were sure he wanted to entertain her with so much else going on that was far more important, cemented his belief that he had impressed her as a man delightfully open to suggestion, with an imagination large enough to find time, even in the depths of despair, for the important things in life, those accidents without which our existence was little more than a schedule of dry routines.

They landed and filed off the plane. She had to retrieve her things from the overhead bin, and a few passengers shot between Connell and her. He waited at the mouth of the corridor, averting his gaze from the other passengers, embarrassed at the thought they could see what he was up to. It felt important to walk with her to baggage claim. She was about to greet the rest of the city; he would become merely the first in a line of men she encountered in her travels. Whatever primacy he held was about to yield to the manifestly transient quality of their acquaintanceship. He could easily be forgotten. These last few hundred meters would make a difference in ensuring that that didn’t happen.

As they snaked their way through the terminal, he made some dry observations about New York that got her laughing. He was riding a wave of euphoria. His bag felt like nothing on his shoulders. She seemed to be taking quick steps to keep up with his longer stride. He was filled with a sense of possibility: this might be the prelude to something they could continue in the city they had just left. It was the first day of his trip; there was no way of knowing what was to come. And there was this woman striding along beside him, bursting with expectation. To an onlooker he could have been her boyfriend, visiting the city for the first time himself.

They were almost running when they hit the corridor that opened onto the baggage claim area. He was turning to look at her the whole time. As they headed down he remembered why he was there and looked for his uncle Pat through the frosty glass. He couldn’t yet distinguish any faces.

The revolving doors loomed at the bottom of the downward slope, and anxiety began to creep into him. He found himself slowing his pace and flattening his smile. He was looking less at Karla and more toward the revolving doors beyond which waited his uncle Pat. And then he was really slowing down, enough that Karla asked what was wrong. He could make out the faint image of his uncle and his mother through the glass. The fact that his mother was there could only mean one thing. He was drifting slowly away from Karla and not answering. He didn’t want his mother to see him talking to her, to see him as the frivolous fool he suddenly knew he was. Soon Karla had stopped addressing him and walked on, and he walked several paces behind her, knowing what he had seen through the glass but not admitting it fully to himself until he got right up to it and could not avoid any longer the sight of tears streaming down his mother’s face. That was when he knew that his father had died while he had forgotten him entirely.

He pushed his way through the revolving door. His mother was fanning her face with her hand as she tried to tell him what he already knew. His uncle stood by, saying nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

He had missed his father by two hours. His mother had gotten permission to keep his father there long enough for Connell to say good-bye.

His uncle Pat drove to the home like a Formula One racer, leaning into the turns. While his mother sat on the divan by the entrance, Uncle Pat walked him down the hallway to his father’s room and left him alone. His father’s eyes were open. Connell stared into their beautiful blueness awhile, though they stared at something else, and he smoothed his hair down as he always did when it stuck up. He kissed his forehead and cheeks. He was cold. He talked to him, though he knew he wasn’t there anymore. His mouth was open. He looked at his cracked tooth. He wouldn’t need teeth anymore. He wouldn’t need anything.

His mother came to get him after a while. “That’s probably enough,” she said.

He gave his father another kiss, and on the way out he stopped in the doorway and turned and looked back. He was about to return to his father when he saw the stern, imploring look his uncle was giving him. The expression on his mother’s face said it was painful for her to be in the room with his father, that she’d been holding out for Connell to come home but the time had come to say good-bye. It must have been difficult for her to look at his father the way she’d looked at the corpses of so many patients over the years. It must have seemed like there was no difference between him and the rest of the numberless dead. He closed the door with a quiet click and they all walked out to the car.

94

It was pneumonia that killed him. As the brain had deteriorated, the body parts had stopped working. His lungs filled with mucus. He drowned in it.

• • •

After he died on March 7, 1999, she decided that if there was such a thing as a next life, she wanted to return under another sort of banner entirely — something ebullient like “Holiday” or “Sunshine.” This time through, though, she was Eileen Leary; she’d never remarry. This was life: you went down with the ship. Who was to say that wasn’t a love story?

• • •

She slept on his side. She didn’t like his side particularly, but she couldn’t bring herself to sleep on her old one. Whenever she did, she lay there thinking of all the nights she’d slept facing away from him, and she wanted one of them back — a single one would be enough — so she could turn her body toward his.

• • •

She knew he would have wanted his remains to contribute to the body of knowledge. The neurologists who’d diagnosed him weren’t going to order an autopsy, though; they were convinced that it had been Alzheimer’s and had long ago closed their investigations. The team that had conducted the drug study wasn’t going to order it either.

She could have paid to have him autopsied anyway. She would have had to do a little paperwork to have the body moved from one county to another. The whole procedure would have cost eight thousand dollars, or about how much she’d been paying per month at the end to keep him at Maple Grove. It struck her as unseemly to attach any dollar amount to the privilege of peering into the riddle of a mind as fine as Ed’s. They should have been clamoring to do it for the honor alone.

In the end, she couldn’t bring herself to have it done. She couldn’t stand to think of someone cutting her husband’s head open. His teeth were broken, his gums had grown red and swollen, he had straggly hair, his once-proud muscles had atrophied to saggy sleeves, he had cuts and scabs everywhere, his skin had turned hoary from lack of exposure. She couldn’t imagine destroying his body any further. And the thought of his being dissected like that, when he had so often been the dissector himself, filled her with a palpable revulsion. He went intact into the earth, all the questions answered that would ever be answered, all the unasked ones forever unasked. Science had reached the end of its utility. All that remained was the body, and she wanted to give it tenderness.

• • •

After all that trouble she’d gone to to put a leather band on the LeCoultre watch, Ed had never worn it. It had sat in its box for thirty-two years.

She took it out of the case. Under the velvet platform in the bottom of the box the gold band lay like the desiccated skin of a snake. She went to a jeweler and had it put back on. The restored watch was worth a good deal of money, due to its pristine condition, its collectible nature, and the high price of gold, but that was immaterial now, as she buried him wearing it.

• • •

The new tools she’d bought after the workers stole his old ones had never been used. A few weeks after his death, she paid someone to haul them away, along with the contents of his office: crates of records, VHS tapes, his science textbooks. The books were outdated. No one listened to records anymore. The tapes were fuzzy recordings Ed had made on the black-and-white set, old movies and documentaries about cathedrals and bridges. Connell had no interest in any of it. It had all run out of currency.

• • •

In the surfeit of time that widowhood allowed, she had a recurring vision of her husband in the early days of the disease, after he’d retired. He was still handsome. His hair was thinner, but it had not lost its striking blackness, and his blue eyes coruscated in the light, though the whites had yellowed. He was smaller than he used to be; his clothes fit loosely on him. It was early afternoon, but the room was dark, save for the glow of the television and some sunlight filtering through the drapes on the patio door. When the trees shifted in the wind, the room pulsed with greater light. The lamp on the end table could have offered more lasting illumination, but in the flurry of activity that accompanied her departure she had forgotten to turn it on. He could not summon the fine motor skills to turn it on himself. He had been sitting there since eight in the morning, watching the channel that she had decided offered the best chance at diverting him for the length of her workday. He had, by then, seen every episode of the detective show he was watching, though his failing memory offered an ability to see familiar things afresh. He lost the plotline somewhere in the middle of the episode. What caught fire in his mind were the rudiments of narrative: a ringing retort, anguish on a face, a happy reunion. He could still feel. He could still cry. He did cry, without knowing he was doing so. He felt the tears drying on his face afterward, and it was as though he had awoken from an unhappy dream. He could no longer read. By the time he reached the end of a sentence, he had forgotten where it began. He could decipher headlines in the newspaper; from them he cobbled together a sense of what was happening in the world. He was left with television, and when she was around, listening to music or her reading to him. He was hungry. He tried to go to the kitchen. He had a hard time rising from the couch. It took a couple of attempts, but he eventually succeeded. When he returned he couldn’t find the remote control. He didn’t want to watch this channel anymore. He couldn’t follow the story. He knew there was something about a murder, some kind of investigation. Those detectives who were always there were working on the case. There had been some kind of theft. Something was missing.

• • •

There was a skull in a box in the closet. It was a specimen of Ed’s; he’d taught anatomy with it. He’d called it “George,” but she refused to call it anything but “the skull.” He’d taken it out every now and then to show it to Connell and his friends, a grisly spectacle she’d always insisted on cutting short. The boys poked their fingers through the eye sockets, dug their nails into the grooves in the pearly skullcap, probed the crenellations in the ivory teeth and clacked the hinged jaw in dummy conversation. One year — Connell must have been eight or nine — she threw a Halloween party for all the kids on the block. “George will be making an appearance tonight,” Ed said to Connell at the breakfast table that morning, and when the party was in full swing, all the kids assembled in the basement, Ed donned a black robe, charred the bottom of a pan, and spread the black char all over his face. He shut out the lights in the basement as he descended the stairs, and when he reached the center of the circle in which they’d been arranged in anticipation of some kind of surprise, he spoke in a deep voice and held the floating skull up to the flashlight. The kids shivered and screamed in delighted terror — including Connell, who knew it was coming.

Ed said once that when he died he wanted his skull to be used in anatomy classes. He had been delighted by the story of a classically trained stage actor who willed his skull to the company he’d been in, to play the part of Yorick in Hamlet, thereby assuring his immortality.

She took the box down from the closet and set it on her desk. She had never opened it. She lifted one of the cardboard flaps, then another, then the last two, slowly. She shuddered to see the top of that cranium, but she lifted it out of the box and set it facing her on the desk. Despite her years of nursing, her encounters with death, the anatomy classes she’d taken, she’d never been able to shake a basic awe in the face of relics of the body. She sat staring at that empty gaze. The whole time she knew Ed, there had been a skull behind his features. The man whose skull this had been, whose flesh had hidden this bone, had had his own ties of family and friendship. It struck her that she was much closer to the end than the beginning.

She thought of donating it to the science department at Saunders High School, then decided against it. There would simply have to be an orphan skull lying around after she was gone. Connell would find a home for it or take responsibility for throwing it out. He would be the arbiter of its fate, as he would decide what to do with her body, as she had decided what to do with her husband’s, as someone would decide what to do with his.

• • •

The more she thought about Ed’s turning down NYU all those years back, the more she began to entertain other, more mysterious possibilities: that he may have had reasons other than vocation for evading ambition’s prod; that he may have needed BCC more than they needed him; that he may have been afraid of changing his routine or exposing himself to closer scrutiny; that he may have known more than he let on; that he may have known it earlier than she’d ever thought possible.

• • •

The study had lasted three years. She’d kept him on the medicine another two, until it was too hard to get him to swallow the pills. It wasn’t entirely to spite her that he resisted: he had an instinctual fear of choking.

The drug didn’t have a name, just a string of letters and numbers — SDZ ENA 713. Later it acquired a name, Exelon, and could be prescribed. A lot of things were different later. Later they put patches on people so they didn’t have to take pills. That would have prevented a lot of trouble.

She asked herself, when she was feeling low, whether it was the medicine that had caused him to go so rigid that he couldn’t be picked up when he collapsed at the end. Rigidity was one of the side effects. Would she have been able to keep him home longer if she’d taken him off the drugs? Would he have avoided dying in a strange bed?

Sometimes she lay in bed thinking that somewhere they might be making drugs that would have changed everything. She knew she would find that bittersweet, though Ed would be thrilled. Advances in science were the things that made him happiest in life. Advances in science, and Connell. And herself, she had to admit. That was usually when she broke down.

• • •

Many nights, she worked herself into a panic trying to imagine what would have become of him in his last years if she’d divorced him as she’d briefly considered doing before an explanation emerged for his sudden cruelty. Try as she did, she couldn’t picture where he would have lived or who would have taken care of him. As time passed she came to believe that she had been fated to be there for him at the end, that being there for him was what everything in her life — her care of her mother, her career in nursing — had prepared her for, that it was, in a sense, her life’s great work. In this way she was able to sleep soundly again.

This was his final gift to her: to silence her regrets about the paths she hadn’t taken.

• • •

She kept going to the nursing home. She’d grown attached to seeing the other patients. She brought them cookies and sat in the television room with them, watching the evening news or reruns until it was time to go home. Some nights, she read to Mrs. Benziger from a magazine, but mostly she made herself useful by changing the channel when they grew restless with whatever program was on.

One night, as she was leaving, Mr. Huggins came toward her down the hall, pushing his walker. The overhead lights had been shut off for the night, and the only illumination came from a dim table lamp, which, reflecting off his stark white hospital robe, made him look like the herald of some malevolent spirit.

“Hello, Mr. Huggins,” she said as she neared him. He had stopped moving forward and was standing with both hands on the walker. He lifted a hand and pointed at her in apparent remonstration. He was saying something but too quietly for her to hear, so she leaned in closer.

“No more,” she heard him say, gently as a baby. “No more.”

She studied his face to see if he meant what she thought he meant. She couldn’t hear him without putting her ear almost directly up to his mouth, but she could read his lips. He was saying, “No more,” over and over, and he was shaking his head.

It occurred to her that she could elect to take this as a sign if she wanted to. No one was hanging on her decision; it was only her left with her life. Mr. Huggins was right; she couldn’t keep coming here forever. She had needed someone to give her permission to stop.

She kissed his hairy cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “Good night. Good-bye.” She passed through the barrier and out the door, where she stopped to turn and look. The last image she had of the place was Mr. Huggins’s gray-white back, like a glimpse of a surfacing whale, as he stepped in front of the lamp in his slow turn into the room that he had shared with Ed and that now was his alone. She wondered if he missed Ed too. She hoped he didn’t even remember him.

• • •

Everyone told her to sell the house, find someplace smaller, cheaper, sock away the difference. But she didn’t need the money. The life insurance payout allowed her to pay back the home equity loan she’d taken out to cover Connell’s tuition and the nursing home bills. It even let her put the new roof on that she needed. She had little in savings, but she had the house, and she had Ed’s pension and her salary as long as she worked. There was no more nursing home to pay. She wasn’t paying Sergei anymore. Connell was almost done with school.

Besides, where would she go if she sold? Back to Jackson Heights? Nothing was left for her there. When she bought the house, she had planned to die in it. Her plan hadn’t changed.

Cindy Coakley said, imploringly, “The ghost of your former life is here.”

Not my former life, Eileen thought. My former future life. That’s the ghost that’s here. The ghost of the life I almost had. As long as I don’t leave this place, that former future doesn’t have to die.

And then she thought, We move around too much in this country.

95

Heading into his final quarter of school, which began three weeks after his father died, Connell had only one course left to take in his major. He also needed to finish one science requirement, and he was taking a theater elective, the plays of Tennessee Williams. He had planned to write a thesis on Bellow’s influence on Amis, but he couldn’t get his act together to do so, and he’d stopped caring about graduating with special honors in the department. General honors in the college would do.

Shortly after the start of the quarter, he started dating a girl named Danielle and going to the Tiki or Jimmy’s with her and their friends. He played pool and foosball and Addams Family pinball and had long conversations deep into the night fueled by caffeine, and he had a lot of sex with Danielle. There were people crashing on his couch nearly every night, friends of his or of his roommates, and it felt like a single endless party. He started skipping classes. He still made it to the Blue Gargoyle tutoring center three times a week to meet Delores, the fifth-grader he’d been helping with her reading since September. He started staying in Danielle’s apartment while Danielle was at class. He would be there waiting when she got back, and because she always seemed happy to see him, he didn’t let himself wonder whether he was wasting his time. He worked on his role in Williams’s one-act, Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, a lonely play about a man who comes home to his quietly suffering girlfriend and narrates to her the story of his night spent wandering the streets, which felt quite a bit like his life, except for the part about coming home to his girlfriend, as it was always she who came home to him. His other classes fell to the side. There was a paper he didn’t do in the medieval literature class, and then there was a project he didn’t do in the science class, and then the halfway mark came and went and he knew he was going to fail, but he couldn’t stop himself from failing, and he couldn’t drop any classes because he was only taking three. He knew he was in a whirlpool, and he could feel himself going under, but he couldn’t grab anything firm. His mother wasn’t going to be able to come out for the graduation, because she’d gotten a recent promotion and couldn’t take time off, so he didn’t have to do a lot of explaining about why he wasn’t walking with the others, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing to let her think he had graduated. Danielle was still in her third year. She told him she’d had fun with him and left for a summer in Florence to study Renaissance art. He sold what he could, shipped his books, and got on an Amtrak train in honor of his father, because they had talked of riding the rails across America together. The Lake Shore Limited left at night, passing through Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it entered upstate New York. When the sun came up, he saw small cities, former hubs, gorgeous Hudson views. He read a little, didn’t sleep, didn’t talk to anyone. Mostly he looked out the window and thought of his father, who would have found it fascinating, the history of manufacturing in America written on abandoned factories, rusty buildings, heaps of scrap. Somewhere after Poughkeepsie he started crying, and he cried on and off for an hour and half until they pulled into Penn Station. He hadn’t taken this trip intending to mourn his father, but it occurred to him that that was what he was finally doing, that when he’d boarded in Chicago he’d undertaken a twenty-hour vigil of silence for him. It took seeing the haunted glory of upstate New York, and being unable to talk to him about it, for him to understand what it meant that his father was gone.

• • •

When he entered the lobby of the building on Park Avenue, he beheld a scrawny kid in an ill-fitting doorman’s uniform looking as if he was playacting in his father’s clothes, and another in a porter’s outfit giving a sopping mop a desultory pass over the tiles. “Where did you go to high school?” he asked the kid at the control panel, and he cringed to see that familiar mix of deference and condescension in the kid’s eyes that said that this was a pit stop for him. The kid confirmed his suspicion: there had been a steady stream of graduates since his own stint.

He asked for Mr. Marku. The kid spoke into the intercom in a muted voice that strained after maturity, and a few minutes later Mr. Marku emerged from his apartment and hugged Connell with a warmth that caught him off guard. They went into his office. The fish in the tank were smaller now, but there were more of them, and they were more colorful.

“You’re feeling well,” Mr. Marku said, lighting a cigarette. “You’re looking well. You finally shaved.” He rubbed his hand on his own chin, his eyes betraying his delight. “You came to pay me a visit.”

“And to see about something,” Connell said. “About work.”

Mr. Marku gave him a long look. “You’re finished college.”

Connell clicked a pen on his thigh. “Yes.”

“You want to come back here.”

“I do,” he said. “I’m sorry about how things ended.”

Mr. Marku waved his hand as if swatting away a fly. “Summer work.”

“I was thinking beyond that,” Connell said.

“You have other options. A smart kid like you.”

“I’ll do a good job,” Connell said. “I’ll do a better job than before.”

Mr. Marku stopped blinking, his lightly appraising gaze shifting into a harder stare.

“These guys have wives, families, bills. It’s a steady paycheck for them, a respectable job. Maybe not for you.”

“No more books,” Connell said. “I won’t read, I’ll wear the hat. I’ll shave every day. I know the ropes.”

Mr. Marku shook his head. Maybe he was remembering Connell’s flaws — the tardiness, the way he nosed his way into people’s business in the building, how he sat down at every opportunity.

“I’m not a kid anymore,” Connell said. “I get it now. I’ll never be late, I’ll keep my mouth shut and my nose down. I won’t ever sit down.”

Mr. Marku laughed. “Even I sit down.” He shook his head again, but this time it seemed as if he was trying to work it out. “I don’t have anything full-time.”

“Anything,” Connell assured him.

“You want to look somewhere else with your college degree,” he said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I like it here,” Connell said. “I don’t want to go to an office, sit at a desk all day, push paper.”

A long silence followed, punctuated by a sudden frenzy of activity in the fish tank.

“You’ll show up tomorrow at eleven forty-five,” Mr. Marku said finally.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Summer work,” he said, and Connell nodded. “That’s all I have. Then you have to move along.”

• • •

Connell covered for the doormen when they rotated out on vacation, or else worked by the service entrance gate, where he logged the entrances and exits of the crews and ran the A elevator line. He’d earned more money three years before, but since then the union had struck, and a concession had been made toward a hierarchy of seniority. The summer relief rate was now only eighty percent of the fully vested rate. He would have to wait a year to make what the other guys made, but he was fine with it; maybe they’d look at him as less of an upstart that way.

He kept his face shaved and his hair cut short and wore the hat. The high school kids deferred to his seniority, regarding him with wary politeness. They saw him, he suspected, as a man who’d fallen through a sinkhole in his life.

At the beginning of August, a beloved doorman and tribal elder known variously as Scottish John, the Scotsman, and Scottie, though never simply John, retired to a little salute of cake and coffee after thirty years on the seven-to-three shift, leaving a vacuum of leadership. Mr. Marku called Connell into his office.

“Tell me how long you plan to stay here.”

“How long can I? I thought my time ran out in September.”

Mr. Marku luxuriated in a pause. “You’ve come back to make things right.”

Connell felt an uneasy gratitude hearing this declaration and looked at Mr. Marku in silence.

“You’ll show up tomorrow morning at six forty-five,” Mr. Marku said.

“Scottie’s shift?”

Mr. Marku nodded. Connell nodded back, feeling as if he’d graduated into adulthood. Seven-to-three was the only shift that presented a modicum of complexity, with shareholders leaving for work and school, nannies and contractors reporting for duty, packages arriving, and mailmen dumping teeming bags of mail to be sorted into little cubbyholes in a big rolling sorter.

After a little while, he saw a subtle shift in the way the full-timers related to him, as if he were separating himself from the gently self-absorbed youths around him, whom he covered for whenever he could, masking their incompetence at practical matters and wringing what assistance he could out of them the way any doorman would. When they went to college in September, he felt he’d become one of the regular guys. The only difference between him and the other doormen was that during breaks he read books instead of the newspaper, and he didn’t bullshit in the locker room during lunch but took walks around the neighborhood, peered into the Guggenheim Museum, or sat at restaurants with a book open before him.

He became a reliable fixture in the lobby. He knew all the shareholders’ names and apartment numbers. He knew the names of their kids who came home from college on the weekends. He knew their nannies’ names, the names of their masseuses who arrived with portable tables, the names of the lovers they never discussed. He kept their secrets and knew the front desk like a mole knows its burrow. As soon as a familiar figure appeared in front of the building, he had his finger on the button to hold open the appropriate elevator door. When someone unfamiliar approached, he had the intercom receiver in his hand, ready to put it to his ear and hit the proper buzzer.

He could tell his presence made a few shareholders uncomfortable. It would have been easier for them if he spoke halting English or hadn’t gone to college or hadn’t gone to a good college or looked a little Balkan or Mexican. To avoid fanning the low flame of their unease, he talked as little as possible about himself. The summer kids were one thing; they caused a temporary ripple in the waters of class identity and were tolerated, even indulged. By collecting a decent check and moving along to good schools, sometimes even schools the shareholders’ children didn’t get into, they confirmed the rightness of the shareholders’ way of life and the durability of their meritocratic ideals.

His mother pressed him about graduate school or another line of work. How could he explain that he’d never finished college, after all the money she’d spent on his education? He heard her talking as though through a body of water, the sounds muffled by some mysterious viscosity in his spirit. He felt his mind working slowly, his imagination straining. He felt himself becoming thicker all over.

The one purely bright spot in his failed last year of college had been the time he’d spent tutoring Delores. He started giving time to Mr. Marku’s kid Peter, who was in eighth grade now and hadn’t gotten anything lower than a ninety since third grade. Connell drilled him on vocabulary words and sat him in the little room off the lobby and made him practice taking standardized tests.

Over Thanksgiving break, the college freshmen dropped in like conquering heroes and asked to see Mr. Marku, who came out and gave them big hugs that made Connell unaccountably jealous. They deferred to Connell like a cool older brother, but he didn’t feel cool, and their condescension stung.

He shared an apartment in Greenpoint with a guy he’d met through Todd Coughlin, his old cross-country teammate, whom he’d run into at a concert at the Bowery Ballroom and who lived across the hall. In the evenings, he went to galleries, parties, shows. He dated a girl named Violet, an actress who worked as a bartender. She never questioned his choice of a job, only assumed it was a temporary solution while he figured out the creative direction of his life.

He wrote a check to his mother to pay down some of the college loan principal. She ripped it up in front of him. “Don’t do this on my account,” she said. “I took this tuition on. Don’t think you can pay your loans back and not have to feel guilty about staying at that job.”

He couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t gone back to school in the fall. Partly it felt as if returning would be a lie; as if it would be making a promise to himself, or to his mother, that he couldn’t keep. Then there was the matter of telling his mother he hadn’t graduated in the first place. It wasn’t that he didn’t care to do anything ambitious with his life; he just wasn’t sure what that ambitious thing was yet.

After a few months had passed, the cup of guilt he’d been carrying around — for having gone away when his father needed him, for letting him go into a home — simply dried up, and he was left holding the empty vessel of his routine. He’d stopped feeling he was living someone else’s life, but he hadn’t started feeling he was living his own.

He never checked his bank balance, just kept depositing the checks. There was always enough to pay the bills. He didn’t want to consider the long-term implications of his financial decisions, because the idea of so many years strung together — twenty years, thirty years, forty years — filled him with terror.

In early January, when Peter Marku was admitted to Regis, Connell felt a surge of joy. He wanted Peter to grab the world by the throat, and he took pride in having helped him.

He was invited to a celebratory dinner at the Markus’ apartment. He found it remarkable how quickly he forgot that it was his boss’s quarters. It could have been any Park Avenue apartment. A couple of times the intercom rang, and Mr. Marku rose to answer it. Tony brought a large envelope to the door. Otherwise, it was as if Connell were a valued tutor who had been invited into their home as a reward for his role in securing their son’s advancement. They ate ravioli, shared a couple of bottles of wine, and polished off a delicious cake that Mrs. Marku said was traditionally Albanian.

As they sipped their coffee, Connell looked at Peter’s proud face. The boy’s gratitude was palpable, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it wasn’t, because Connell knew the difference he’d made. That was when it struck him, all at once, that he would very much like to be a teacher. The thing to shoot for, of course, was a college professorship. Even if he managed to get into a decent doctoral program, though — he would have to get his BA first — he wasn’t sure he could survive it. He had enjoyed writing papers in college, but he didn’t have the zest for the professional side of academia — the specialization, the obsessive focus on publication. The most he could hope to do would be to teach high school. That wouldn’t do, though: every generation was supposed to do better than the previous one; every man was expected to surpass the achievements of his father. If he were to become a high school teacher, he would have to accept that he’d never be as successful as his father had been. His mother wanted big things from him, and instead he was manning the door at a building. But at least at the moment he inhabited something that must have looked to the outside world like a chrysalis. If he did this thing he was now imagining doing with his life — which he could now see he might enjoy quite a lot, this helping people through the thorny thicket of adolescence — he would not only remain a disappointment, he would be a bigger disappointment than ever.

He was now a favorite son among the doormen. He had helped deliver the super’s kid to the doorstep of respectability. There would be privileges attached to his new status, something subtly easier about his experience on the job. And something like a home was available in the building — in the lobby, in the locker room in the basement, in this, the super’s apartment. He could come over for more of these dinners. He could live through Peter for at least four years, guiding his decisions, giving him the benefit of his perspective, sending him off to a good college on a scholarship. And when Peter came home from college, and later when he came up to visit from his loft apartment downtown, when he pulled up in front of the building in the company town car, dropping in for dinner with the folks, Connell would open the car door without resentment, because by then he would be old enough not to feel resentment anymore. All he had to do was bide his time. Everything would get simpler once enough years had passed. He wouldn’t need to go anywhere; he could stay in the lobby and the years would come to him.

If you had to pick a perch from which to watch the world go by, Connell thought, the lobby wouldn’t be the worst — especially on quiet summer evenings when you had all the doors open and you got a nice breeze going and dusk was overtaking the city, the setting sun reflecting off the windows on the other side of Park.

When Mr. Marku proffered the coffeepot, Connell held his hand over his mug. Mr. Marku looked determined as he asked if Connell were sure he didn’t want another cup. Mrs. Marku cut another piece of cake, and a queasy feeling of betrayal set in as Connell watched it cover his plate. He knew it was only cake, but it took on a strange, almost numinous power. It felt as if he would be giving up on an idea he had of how his life would go if he ate it. He would be declaring a new oath of allegiance. They were buying his future off for so little: a home-cooked dessert, the promise of further intimacy, a hint of family, an elder brother status of sorts. He had no energy to fight them, not when he had nothing better to argue for. His hand was drawn to his fork and he pressed down into the cake, watching a chunk separate from the rest. He took his hand away from the mug and let it be filled. Peter looked on quietly, taking everything in, an observer more than a person observed. Connell was surprised to suddenly see, with a piercing keenness of perception, that this was no longer his own experience. He was in the middle of an experience Peter was having. He hadn’t seen the usurper coming.

96

When Eileen was a teenager, she had dreamed of going to Death Valley and sleeping under the night sky and its canopy of stars. As a fifty-eight-year-old woman, she compromised and stayed at the Furnace Creek Inn, a luxury resort.

She went in February, during the cool season, because she’d never been able to stand the heat and didn’t want to bake her pale skin in the sun. Despite this precaution, after the first day, when she took a walk out into the immense emptiness of the desert and felt spooked, she found herself indoors most of the time. She stayed on the resort’s grounds, splitting time between the dining rooms, the fireplace lounges, and a deck chair by the heated pool.

One night she went with a group into the national park. She stood on the Racetrack Playa, which was cracked and dry enough to resemble the skin of a lizard. She didn’t need a guide, or even a rudimentary understanding of astronomy, to know what she was seeing when she looked up, because it was simply and unmistakably the Milky Way. The guide pointed out sailing stones: wandering rocks, he said, pushed along their lonely way by means that had never been explained to anyone’s satisfaction. One of the tourists held forth about how the movement of these rocks might be due to the effects of wind or ice. His grip on the science was shaky, Eileen could tell, his knowledge anecdotal and obviously derived from popular magazines, a pale shade of Ed’s earned erudition. Ed wouldn’t have spoken unless he knew what he was talking about. She would have enjoyed watching him soak it all up, the flickers of a theory in his gaze. She could have taken a lesson from his patience with this nattering tourist. He would have liked the way these stones left a long trail, never coming to rest, defying explanation.

97

On the first anniversary of his father’s death, Connell took the train to Bronxville to go to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery. His mother picked him up at the station and drove to Tryforos & Pernice.

“Get something nice,” she said.

He was overwhelmed by the choices and selected a premade, mixed-bouquet arrangement. When he returned to the car, his mother was annoyed.

“They didn’t have any roses?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just got what looked nice.”

“Those are mums and daisies. You should have gotten roses.”

“You didn’t say anything about roses.” His mother looked genuinely upset. “I can go back and get roses.”

“No, those are fine,” she said. “Your father wouldn’t know the difference anyway. He probably would have picked the same ones you did.”

• • •

Gusting winds rolled across the burial yard. His mother cleared her throat.

“Dear God,” she said, “watch over the soul of my dear husband Ed.” She looked at Connell. “Let him know that we miss him and love him.” She looked at Connell again. “I’ve never been much good at prayer. If there’s a heaven, your father is there. That’s one thing I know. Ed,” she said, turning back to the grave, “there’s not an hour goes by that I don’t have you on my mind. Maybe you know that already. Maybe you can listen in on my thoughts. If so, that’s a nice thing. That means I probably don’t need to speak at all. But I can’t stop talking now that I’ve started. Sometimes it feels like you never left. I go to tell you things and you aren’t there. I fold the paper down to tell you about an article and you aren’t sitting across from me. Connell misses you. I’d catch you up on everything that’s happened in the last year, but if you can hear me, then you know it all already. If not, I’d just be talking to myself. I love you dearly. I guess we’ll say the Our Father now.”

She started to say the Lord’s Prayer and Connell joined in. It had the soft familiarity of a bedtime routine. The words came easily to him; he wondered if they were stored so deep that they’d be among the last things he remembered when he died.

When his mother finished, she patted the ground in search of pebbles to leave on the gravestone. It was a Jewish custom she had picked up like a magpie building a nest of grief. The capillaries in her cheeks were red, but the cold seemed to have no other effect on her. She was tough, but as they stood in that astringent wind, Connell thought of her living in the house alone, so many empty rooms, all of them still and quiet. After he left the house later, after tea and cake, she would remain behind in it. He had been glad when she told him she was thinking of selling it, but in the end she hadn’t put it on the market; something held her back.

His mother put two pebbles on the gravestone and stepped back, buffeted by wind. “Your father picked this spot out,” she said. “We looked at the brochures right after we moved. This was before we knew anything about his illness. It sounds morbid, but it wasn’t. He wanted to see the plot of land, so we came out here and looked at it. This area wasn’t filled in yet, but they had it all planned out. Your father wanted to be on this hill. He would have loved a day like this, chilly and misty, the sky full of rain clouds. I don’t know if you remember, but he loved cemeteries. Any trip we took, we had to stop at a cemetery. He liked to read the inscriptions on the gravestones. Maybe I should have come up with something better.”

He considered the carved words: “Beloved husband and father.” It was boilerplate, but novelty wasn’t called for on a headstone, and it was a fitting summation of his father’s life, even if it fit a lot of men’s lives. Beneath that spare etching was a space where the inscription for his mother would go. She was standing with him now, and the day would come when she no longer would be, when he would arrange for the lowering of her into the earth. He wanted to put his arms around her and shield her from what was to come, and he felt a kind of panic bloom in his chest. The most he could do to try to chase it away was drape an arm across her shoulders.

“This was the only real estate your father ever really cared about,” she said, as if in answer to a private thought. It was a paltry plot, but the view was beautiful. If you added the adjacent space that Ruth and Frank McGuire had bought, it started to look like a little neighborhood. They’d been trailblazers when they’d secured the plots, but in the intervening years the march of mortality had swept past the area and filled it up, and another vanguard was forming a little way up the road. There wasn’t room there for Connell, which was just as well. He would make his own decision about a final resting place, or perhaps someone he didn’t know yet would make it for him.

Real estate. He couldn’t help hearing another meaning in the phrase. What was his father’s real estate? There was the investment portfolio, and the house and the things in it; there was the contribution to science; there were the altered lives of the students he’d taught, and the impacts those students had had, and would have, on others. And then there was him. He was his father’s real estate. At the moment he was an underwater asset.

He picked up a pebble and added it to the little pile atop the gravestone. They headed toward the car.

“Your father got a kick out of the fact that Babe Ruth was buried here.”

Connell remembered reading about ballplayers driving to Ruth’s grave to soak up some luck, but he hadn’t realized this was the cemetery in question.

“Where’s the grave?”

“Not far.”

“Did Dad ever see it?”

“He stood in front of it for a long while.” She chuckled. “Silent. Sort of solemn. The way you two get about baseball.”

They drove until they reached a tall marker set back from the road, with a plinth that said RUTH in big block lettering under a large central stone that depicted Jesus gesturing to a little boy. One smaller stone bore a quote from Cardinal Spellman: “May the divine spirit that animated Babe Ruth to win the crucial game of life inspire the youth of America”; another listed the years of Ruth’s birth and death, as well as those of his wife, Claire. There were baseballs stacked in a little offering, a solitary bat, baseball cards taped to the stone.

He thought of his father down the road, ignored except by family members. Death may have been the great leveler, but there were still hierarchies in cemeteries.

He went up and rubbed his palm on the gravestone. He wasn’t above asking for a little luck. He might even have knelt if his mother hadn’t been there. It felt for a moment as if he were back in church as a little boy, as if he’d placed a quarter in the box and lit a votive candle and now the time had come to say a prayer. Saying a prayer, making a wish, having a thought — were they all the same? Was anyone listening? Was there anything other than a void in the universe? Help me, he thought. Help. But the Babe just stood impassive in his frieze, a gray block, silent as the stone it was quarried from.

• • •

When they got to the house, his mother put on a pot of tea. Connell went into the study to use the computer. The study still smelled like his father, or at least like things he associated with his father — old books, pencil shavings, the heated metal of the desk lamp. His mother came in and picked up something from the desk.

“I was going through these file cabinets,” she said, “and I found this.” She handed him an envelope with his name on it. “Your father wanted me to give it to you a while ago, but with everything that was going on, I must have mislaid it.”

He tried not to let her see the anger that was coursing through his system like a poison. “What does it say?” he said, calmly as he could.

“Well,” she said, “I didn’t exactly steam it open. I remember he wanted to get some thoughts down for you. He wanted me to wait until he wasn’t compos mentis to give it to you. But obviously he didn’t want me to wait this long.”

Connell held the letter warily. “Thanks,” he said.

“Maybe you want to be alone for this,” his mother said, and left the room.

Instead of opening the letter, which sat like an unread verdict, he went to the filing cabinet and looked through the drawers. One was full of mementoes from his youth — report cards, honors certificates, birthday and Father’s Day cards he’d written his father, art he’d made in the early school years, a once-essential stuffed rabbit he’d forgotten about. As the years passed, his father had saved increasingly more things, no doubt as mnemonic devices, until he had stopped saving anything.

In another drawer he found shoeboxes full of those four-by-six photo albums that used to come free with a developed roll. The albums didn’t have dates, but one contained shots from a cross-country meet of his, so it must have been taken during his freshman year. They were mostly shots of Connell, though there wasn’t a single photo that depicted him looking at the camera. It was as though his father had been waiting for him to turn and look at him. A terrific loneliness came over Connell as he imagined his father looking through the camera and calling for his gaze silently with his own. He was relieved to see a few landscape portraits of the meadow at Van Cortlandt Park, but when he came to a photo of his father standing with his arm around his old teammate, a sensitive kid who left the school after an unhappy freshman year — he had to jog his brain to remember the kid’s name was Rod — he felt jealous. Rod dwarfed his father; he appeared to be leaning down to be in the shot with him. Their faces were close together, and they had such smiles on. It looked as if Rod was his father’s own child.

He was terrified to read the letter; he saw that clearly. He went to the bookshelves. All that remained of his father’s library were two shelves of reference books and some hardcover volumes of philosophy and literature that his mother hadn’t parted with. Another shelf held his father’s intellectual output — a shrine of published papers, notes, and notebooks. Connell remembered how much time his father spent in the lab just before he retired. He saw now that his father must have known he’d have to give up his lab soon. Was it possible to imagine him chasing an understanding of, even a cure for, the disease he was afflicted by? Whatever he’d been working on had come to naught, but maybe it would have had an impact on the larger world. If so, then these notebooks could hold the key to reclaiming him from the forgotten dead men on that hill. He wanted people to visit his father someday, paying posthumous respects.

Connell found a notebook from this later period, but there was no cache of revelatory notes, no raw materials from which he might fashion a second act for his father in death. There were only scribblings in a wavering hand and endless, unlabeled columns of numbers.

He sat back down and held the envelope before him. His fear of the verdict had waned as he read his father’s notebooks. He flashed with a juvenile hope that it contained something he urgently needed to hear, and now he hesitated to open it out of fear of disappointment. He wanted to preserve the seal of possibility on it; to reserve the option to project whatever he wanted onto it; to use his imagination to drag himself out of the hole he found himself in.

98

May 16, 1992

My dear son,

I wanted to take some time to tell you a few things that I think you should hear and that you can only hear from me, because a while ago I got some bad news, and to the extent that your knowing the things I will tell you here can answer questions you may have someday, I want you to know them. I don’t mean to insist on their importance by telling you them; I want my presence in your life when I’m gone to be a hand on the shoulder, not one around the throat; but if these things are important to you, then they are important to me to precisely that extent. I hope you can read my handwriting, let alone follow the train of my thoughts, which I fear may be hazier than I understand it to be at any given moment. I want to write this before the opportunity slips away.

I want you to remember me, but only if you want to remember me. I tried to be the kind of father that a son could recall with a full and open heart and not out of a sense of duty. The way you know me as your father is the way I most purely am. The understanding between us goes beyond words, and it is there that I live most fully, there and in the mental space I inhabit with your mother. It may be important to future generations to know the biographical facts of my life, to place some leaves on a bough of the family tree, but that is an abstract notion; you are the reason I am writing, you whom I feel in my blood and bones. I don’t want to leave you with questions. I want you to carry me around to the extent that it makes you happy to do so and gives you strength. I want you to forget me if you need to. I want you to suck the marrow out of life.

I am going to slow down. I am going to take a deep breath.

If you want to remember me, remember all the things we did together. The times we ran through words for your spelling bees, hours and hours of words. You used to sound like a monk chanting. We started before dinner, picked it up afterward, went until your bedtime. Remember the driving range, emptying buckets of balls. Remember the fishing trips, the canoe trips. The catches we had, the games we went to. Remember the radios we built together, the remote-controlled car. Remember the trips to the comic book store, the trip to Italy, the trip to Disney World. Remember us going through your homework together. All the times we went to the batting cages. When I taught you the names of birds and plants and animals. When we went bird-watching. The symphonies we went to. The plays. The Mobil games at the Garden. The time we watched the pole vault record get broken. The long-jump record. The mile-time record. The Knicks games. The wrestling matches. George “The Animal” Steele. King Kong Bundy. Andre the Giant. Hulk Hogan. The way I rubbed your back until you fell asleep. The Mets games we listened to on the radio together. The times we read together at night. The ground balls I hit you. The fly balls. The times I drove you all over the five boroughs and beyond to your friends’ houses, or picked you up from the train when you called. The trips to the museums. The trips to the barbershop. Getting our hair cut side by side. The way we went to get you your new baseball gear every year. The jogs we went on. The push-ups we did together. All the times we went out in the cold to throw the football around. The way we got you over your fear of the rope swing at the Coakleys’ summer house. The way we got you to jump off the train trestle. Making Easter eggs. The way you loved to watch the tablets dissolve and the cloud of dye suffuse the water. All the times we shoveled snow.

What matters most right now is that you hear how much I want you to live your life and enjoy it. I don’t want you to be held back by what’s happened to me.

I want you to know that I loved my work and did some good with it, and I believe that is worth more than any amount of money. I have not given you a lifetime of riches, but I have faith I have given you a father you can be proud of.

You will not have me there to speak to about the major events of your life, the ups and downs. But when the hardest times come, I want you to think of this:

Picture yourself in one of your cross-country races. It’s a hard pace this day. Everyone’s outrunning you. You’re tired, you didn’t sleep enough, you’re hungry, your head is down, you’re preparing for defeat. You want much from life, and life will give you much, but there are things it won’t give you, and victory today is one of them. This will be one defeat; more will follow. Victories will follow too. You are not in this life to count up victories and defeats. You are in it to love and be loved. You are loved with your head down. You will be loved whether you finish or not.

But I want to tell you: this is worth summoning some courage for. It doesn’t matter that you win; it matters that you run with pride, that you finish strong. Years will pass in an instant, I will be gone. Will you remember me on the sidelines, cheering for you? I will not always be here, but I leave you with a piece of my heart. You have had the lion’s share as long as you have lived.

When I am gone, I want you to hear my voice in your head. Hear it when you most need to, when you feel most hopeless, when you feel most alone. When life seems too cruel, and there seems too little love in it. When you feel you have failed. When you don’t know what the point is. When you cannot go on. I want you to draw strength from me then. I want you to remember how much I cherished you, how I lived for you. When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.

The world is closing in on me. I have begun a race of my own. There will be no laurels waiting at the finish line, no winner declared. My reward will be to leave this life behind.

I want you never to forget my voice.

My beloved boy, you mean the world to me.

99

His mother was reading the newspaper over a cup of tea. There was a plate of cookies in front of her. She had set him up with a cup and saucer.

“Well?” she asked. “What did it say?”

He stood in the doorway. “I didn’t finish.”

“Why didn’t you finish? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Here, sit down.”

He made his way to the chair. He had the letter in his hand. He placed it on the table next to his saucer.

“Why didn’t you finish reading it?”

“I read it,” he said.

“You just told me you didn’t finish it.”

“I finished it, Mom.” He could feel his lip quivering. “Give me a second to think.”

“Fine. Tell me when you’re ready.”

He took a cookie in order to do something. They were the jelly-topped ones she liked, butter cookies. He took a bite but didn’t chew it. He let the little chunk dissolve on his tongue.

“I said I didn’t finish,” he said. “I didn’t mean the letter. I meant something else.”

“Didn’t finish what? What the hell are you talking about? You’re not making sense.”

“College,” he said. “I didn’t finish college.”

“Of course you did,” she said quickly, taking a cookie.

“I didn’t.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I didn’t finish college. I was a couple of classes short, and I just came home.”

She gave him a long, hard look and chewed slowly.

“You’re telling the truth now?”

“Why would I lie about this?”

“You tell me. You’ve been lying all along, apparently.” She took another cookie and ate it quickly. He did the same, to distract himself from the anxiety he was feeling.

“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell the truth.”

“You’re telling me you don’t have a diploma?”

“I don’t,” he said.

She sighed, put her face in her hands. “Is that why you’re working at that goddamned building?” Her voice was muffled a little from talking through her hands.

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe. I don’t know anymore.”

“It is,” she said, practically shouting. “That’s exactly why you are.” Her face had brightened, not with joy but with the glow of an insight. “That’s exactly why. That’s not the kind of kid I raised. I knew it. I knew something was fishy. I should have seen this myself. I don’t know how I missed it.”

She had a faraway look in her eye, as if she was figuring out the solution to several problems at once. Her expression opened up in a way he hadn’t seen in a while. The stress of the last years with his father had taken some of the fullness from her face and left lines in its place.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re angry.”

“Oh, you’re damned right about that,” she said. “I’m furious. Make no mistake. You had no right to do what you did. I don’t care if it’s your life. There were other lives involved here. Not just mine or your father’s. My father’s, my mother’s. Your father’s mother’s. A lot of people worked hard to put you in the position you were in. There was a lot of money involved.”

“I’ll pay it back.”

“What you will do,” she said sharply, “is quit that godforsaken job immediately and go back to that school and take the classes you need to take to graduate. I don’t care if I have to drive you to Chicago myself. I don’t care if I have to sit there and watch you do your work like I had to watch you when you were a child. I don’t give a good goddamn what kind of reasons you thought you had for doing this. Let me tell you what those reasons were. They were bullshit, is what they were. You will get that degree, and you will make a real life for yourself. And I will be goddamned if you think anything will happen other than that.” She clapped her hands. “I can’t believe I didn’t see this. I knew this wasn’t you. I knew it.”

“What wasn’t me?”

“This ridiculous life you’re leading.”

“What if it is?”

“It’s not,” she said. “I carried you in my womb. I know a thing or two about you.”

“What’s wrong with the life I’m leading?”

“Don’t you get superior on me,” she said. “My mother pushed a mop around for thirty years. Understand? She cleaned up the vomit of snot-nosed kids. There’s nothing wrong with hard work. What’s wrong with it is that it isn’t your life. It never was. It belongs to someone else. You’ve been borrowing it. You’re simply not allowed to do that anymore, is all.”

“You can’t make me go back to school,” he said.

“I can, and I will, and I don’t care if you’re too thick to see I say that out of love. You can thank me when I’m dead and you’re not getting up to open the door for some goddamned punk. I will be damned if I let that happen to my son. I’m still your mother.”

100

When Eileen heard that someone at work was selling a pair of tickets to the Mets game, she remembered the time, the spring before they moved, when Ed told her he’d bought tickets of his own at work. Back then she’d thought of it as a subterfuge, but now she liked to think of it as a troubled man’s authentic attempt to give his family a carefree afternoon, even if he couldn’t share in it fully with them. She had been hard on him in those days, before she understood what was happening. There was room to be easy on him now.

She bought the tickets and went alone, the empty seat for Ed. It was the first day of October 2000. The leaves had begun to turn. It was warm and a little cloudy—A good day for baseball, she could hear Ed saying. It was the last game of the season. She had been told that not much was at stake. The Mets would be in the playoffs no matter what happened. She arrived late and found the stadium packed. They were playing the Montreal Expos, whom she remembered as being not very good, but it hardly seemed to matter who the opponent was. A palpable energy hung in the air, the kind Ed would have loved, especially if he’d had Connell with him.

She placed her pocketbook and coat in the empty seat and settled in. A hot dog vendor made his breathless way up the aisle, stopping a few rows below her. She watched him cradle an open bun, deftly spear a floating dog, sift through the bulging apron pocket for change. She was hungry, but she felt too raw for his sweaty humanity, the workaday intimacy of the moment of transfer.

She had been trying to clear her mind of the interfering noise of everyday life, including the loud silences when she was alone in the house, and this was a good place to do so. She kept her seat when the others stood. She didn’t clap along to the rhythmic thumping coming from the giant speakers, and she didn’t shout “Charge!” when everyone else did, but she allowed herself to siphon off some of their excess spirit.

The Mets held a narrow lead until the seventh inning, when the Expos tied it up. The score remained tied heading into the bottom of the ninth; after the third Met out, she slammed her hand down on her knee and looked at her bitten nails and realized that it mattered a great deal to her that they win this game, even if it didn’t matter to the team. It would have pleased Ed to see it head into extra innings: the decision of fate forestalled awhile, both teams working on borrowed time. The outcome’s importance rose with every out, as if all would be right in the world if the Mets prevailed.

She understood what had made these games so compelling to her husband: every day could bring the breaking of a new record, but the larger world would persist undisturbed. There was always news, even if little of it was newsworthy. Every pitch was different, every swing, and yet they all were variations on a familiar theme. The lines on the field, the fences around it, the neat geometry suggested that these, for a discrete but somehow infinite period, were the limits of the world.

The tenth inning gave way to the eleventh. A pair of base hits and a sacrifice bunt — she could never forget that term, because the sacrifice bunt, when executed perfectly, was nearly Ed’s favorite play, surpassed in his esteem only by the hit-and-run and the triple — put runners on second and third with one out, and they walked the next batter, but the Met pitcher got the last two men out without incident, and she allowed herself a deep breath. After two quick outs in the bottom of the eleventh, the next batter hit a single, and the one after him followed with a thrilling line drive to center, but the center fielder threw to the shortstop, who threw to the catcher, who tagged the runner at home for the third out. The Met pitcher struck out three straight batters in the top of the twelfth—struck out the side, she could hear Ed saying while pumping his fist — and the Expo pitcher retired them in order in the bottom half of the inning. No one reached base in the top of the thirteenth, and she heard someone behind her say that this was the longest game the Mets had played that year, and she thought, Of course it is, and that her heart would not be able to take it.

When the first batter up in the bottom of the thirteenth walked, she could hear Ed saying, It’s the leadoff walks that kill you, and then the next batter was the pitcher, and she knew pitchers couldn’t hit and the team usually pinch-hit for them in situations like this or had them bunt, but somehow he was swinging away, and somehow he got on base safely with a little ground ball that didn’t leave the infield, and she found herself standing and shouting “Go! Go! Go!” as her voice was swallowed in the mounting chorus of thousands of others. The next batter squared up for a bunt — she remembered Ed calling it that, squaring up, facing your fate head-on — and when he lay it down, the third baseman came rushing in for it and made a bad throw and the runner on second came all the way around to score. She squeezed her hands into fists and felt her throat constrict as the cheering cascaded around her.

It mattered so little that they’d won, and yet nothing mattered more. A fugitive joy stole through her as the players cleared the field. She sat in her seat and watched the fans leave, the emptying stadium growing quiet. Shades of runners lingered on the base paths. When the groundskeepers began sweeping dirt into piles and smoothing them out, she made her way to the car.

101

She rang the buzzer for the apartment number she had listed in her address book. A shy and small-framed woman answered the door, speaking Spanish. Eileen could see a crib in the living room behind her and a shirt spread out over an ironing board. She asked about the Orlandos, but the woman didn’t seem to know what she was talking about. Eileen excused herself and went back downstairs. The Orlandos’ name wasn’t anywhere on the lobby registry.

She went around the corner to the Palumbos’ house. Mr. Palumbo came to the door. In the eight years since she’d last seen him, he had aged considerably; he must have been pushing eighty by now.

“It’s me, Mr. Palumbo,” she said. “Eileen Leary. How are you doing?”

She couldn’t tell whether he didn’t recognize her or didn’t want to let on that he did. She’d never talked much to him, but he’d been her next-door neighbor for years, and she wanted that to count for something. When he extended his left hand, palm down, she took it gratefully in her own. The knuckles were like ball bearings, but the skin was smooth. He squeezed her hand tighter and started patting it with his other one. His hands felt like little furnaces.

He said his wife had died. Eileen offered condolences but couldn’t bring herself to tell him about Ed. He said his son had moved out of the apartment upstairs. “It’s hard to be a landlord at my age. My daughter wants me to sell the house and move out with her family in Hackettstown. I think about it, but what am I supposed to do out there, in the middle of nowhere? Watch the grass grow? The kid on the third floor, nice Colombian kid, he takes care of the handyman work. I go up there and play poker.” He laughed. “He takes all my money.”

She asked after the Orlandos. Mr. Palumbo started to speak about Donny and then disappeared inside for a long time. When he came back, he handed her a business card for an auto body shop in Garden City. He explained that Donny had opened it a few years back and now he had a few locations, with car washes.

“Very successful,” he said. “He got remarried too. Nice lady. He has two girls with her.”

She felt a joyful smile spread across her face. Beleaguered Donny of the inauspicious circumstances had made a miracle happen. Ed would have been so proud.

“Wonderful,” she said.

“I went out to see them. Beautiful neighborhood. Gary lives in a carriage house on the property. Brenda keeps the books for the shops. You should see Sharon. What a beauty. She could be a movie star.”

“My goodness,” she said. “And Lena?”

“She passed right after my wife.”

Mr. Palumbo crossed himself, so Eileen did too. When Mr. Palumbo asked about her family, she spoke vaguely, sparingly. She felt like a fool not admitting Ed was gone, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed this man to believe Ed was still alive.

They said their good-byes. As Eileen turned to leave the stoop, she heard the sound of something falling inside the apartment, and she had an eerie sensation that Mr. Palumbo had keeled over, dead. She knocked on his door again in a panic that surprised her. When Mr. Palumbo answered the door, she said the first thing that came to mind, which was that she wanted to wish him a happy Thanksgiving in case she didn’t see him before then. He looked a little bemused and thanked her for the wishes and she was left alone again. A sudden thunder overtook her heart and the tinny taste of fear stole into her mouth. She sat on his stoop to calm herself. She decided that she was afraid of getting left behind — but that was impossible; she had left before that could happen. Happy as she was for Donny, it unnerved her to learn that he hadn’t been living in the neighborhood all this time. She’d never imagined he would get his act together enough to make the radical moves he’d made. She had derived a certain comfort from thinking of him as living out the trajectory of his known life, keeping her past in place by staying put for her, even if he didn’t know he was doing it. It was much more frightening to think of the world in a state of permanent flux.

She hadn’t built a dynasty. She wasn’t even sure there would be a continuation of the line. Her son had gone back to Chicago to school, but she couldn’t help worrying about him, and in a more elemental way than she’d ever worried before. She’d begun to worry less about what sort of foundation he was laying for her future grandchildren — God willing, he would meet a nice girl and settle down and have kids — and more about his own future.

She wanted to rejoice with Donny, but she didn’t know how to begin to reach out to him after all this time and silence. She fingered the business card and then put it in her wallet. She thought, I hope you have a wonderful life. I hope you have a lovely big backyard. I hope you flip steaks and watch your daughters run around and think, I could die in peace.

She rose and walked over to stand in front of her old house. The new owners had let the garden grow up over the garden box and had restained the doors, and new drapes hung in the window in a style she didn’t prefer, but it was unmistakably her house. She’d stood so many times where she now stood, appraising it, and a surge of affection shamed the memory of her desperation to escape it. She stepped onto the stoop.

The lights had come on in the streetlamps, but the evening hadn’t yet submitted to night. She wanted to be transported back to a time when this had been her life. The birds in the trees made their entreaties, cars flew down the street, and the smooth paint of the banister brought the skin of her palm to life. She closed her eyes and listened to the familiar sounds of a disappearing plane and a distant horn and breathed in that strangely appealing mix of car exhaust and leaves. She could have been arriving back after a long day at Lawrence, or following Ed and Connell up the stoop after Sunday dinner at Arturo’s. She could go inside and find Ed on the couch wearing the headphones. She would say to him, Listen as long as you want. Listen to all your records. I’ll be right here when you’re done. I’ll wait years if I have to. She would take his hand in her hands and kiss the back of it with enough tenderness to show him it wasn’t a gambit. Let’s just stay right here, she would say. Let’s stay here forever.

She didn’t know these people, but she was beginning to feel she couldn’t return home without seeing the house. She’d spent a lifetime running, and she was tired. There had to be some way to fit the past into the present, even if she’d turned her back on it.

She took the knocker in her hand and gave the door three quick, emphatic taps. A young man answered. It was hard to reconcile him with the boy — he must have been seven or eight then — she’d seen standing out front when his parents were leaving the open house. He was tall and broad, and his hair was neatly brushed. He had the bright, white smile of an elected official.

“Can I help you?”

It unsettled her to be greeted as a stranger at her own house. She had to squelch the pride that threatened to ruin this venture before it had even begun.

“My name is Eileen Leary,” she said. “I used to live here.”

She felt like one of those furtive talkers who went from door to door proselytizing for obscure faiths and doomed causes. She wouldn’t have been surprised or blamed him if he’d closed the door before she finished her halting appeal. But he invited her inside.

“I don’t want to be a bother,” she said as she crossed the threshold.

“Not at all,” he said. “Would you mind taking off your shoes?”

It was a custom she’d long thought of putting into practice in her own home, but she’d never found a way to introduce it. The vestibule tiles were cold on her stockinged feet, but the plush carpet sank pleasantly under her as she entered the living room. They kept a television where her armchair used to be. The set looked so inviting that she wondered why she and Ed had deprived this space of one for so long. She watched the father, Mr. Thomas as she remembered it, slap his elegant hands on his knees and stretch his long body as he rose from the couch.

The boy began to introduce her, but his father cut him off. “I know who you are,” he said affectionately. “Welcome back! Does it look the same to you? My wife is making dinner. Anabel! Come in here.”

The décor was so different that she had trouble gauging the depth and width of the room; it seemed that the space itself, which had given her so much trouble in her decorating efforts, being always a foot too wide or too narrow, had compliantly shifted its dimensions to fit the needs of the new owners, finding its natural harmony in the process, as if it had been waiting for them to arrive. When she looked into the dining room, though, and saw the old wall-sized mirror, she was seized by a pang so strong it made her stomach lurch. There was a greater profusion of things both big and small, the kind that would have nettled her in her own home but that here suggested a fruitful multiplication.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” she said, and felt instantly foolish. It had been almost eight years. They hadn’t “done” anything with it; they’d simply made it their own, or what they’d done with it had been done so long ago that it was absurd to speak of it.

They stood around in one of those benignly awkward circles that obtained whenever men were responsible for making introductions. She saw the boy sneak a look at the television and felt her heart bloom with an instant affection, because it was what her son would have done in the same situation.

Casting about for something to say, she noticed, on an end table, a trophy capped with a winged figure arching her arms in triumph. “What’s this?” she asked brightly, picking it up. It was heavier than she expected, not like the flimsy trophies for dance recitals or participation in Little Leagues.

“He won it in debate,” the father said. She remembered that his first name was Thomas too. “The state championship. We’re very proud of him.”

“Don’t let him fool you into thinking I was the champion,” the boy said. “I came in second.”

“This year he will be,” the father said.

She saw that the boy was uncomfortable with the attention, and she put the trophy down. She remembered they were Catholic. “Did you go to St. Joan of Arc?” she asked.

“I did,” the boy said. “From third grade on.”

“So did my son.” She guessed the boy was attending the same high school as Connell, which was a powerhouse in debate, but she didn’t want to embarrass him by asking, in case he hadn’t gotten in. “You have a sister, I remember. Is she here?”

“She’s at Yale,” Mr. Thomas said proudly. “We don’t see her often. Only holidays — and every other weekend, when she needs to do the laundry.” He chuckled at the absurdity of her coming all that way to wash her clothes, but Eileen also heard delight in the fact that his daughter, while being a high achiever on her way to a rewarding professional life, was still, in the end, his daughter.

Just as a heavy feeling was about to settle into Eileen at how long it had been since her son had washed his clothes in her machine at home, which she now ran only about once a week, Mrs. Thomas emerged from the kitchen and let out a surprised cry at seeing a stranger there. She must have been so absorbed in her cooking that she hadn’t heard the knock at the door. Eileen knew that feeling well — the exigencies of household duties, the making of a meal for a pair of mouths that showed their appreciation by the way they wolfed it down. It had always moved her to watch her husband and son eat.

“Hello,” the woman said, turning to her husband for an explanation.

“Anabel, this is Mrs. Leary.”

“Mrs. Leary?”

Of course it was the husband, and not the wife, who recognized her, because her perpetual industry allowed him a clear head, and she barely had a brain left at the end of a day of housework. Eileen felt herself straighten up in respectful solidarity.

“Mrs. Leary, from whom we bought the house,” he added.

Her hand went to her mouth to stifle the sound of her shock. “Oh! Welcome! What brings you here?”

“I was in the neighborhood.”

“Forgive me, I’m a mess.” She gestured to the apron tied around her waist, a prominent, fresh stain on its front. “Vijay, please take Mrs. Leary’s jacket.” So that was the boy’s name. It had taken the wife’s entrance for this crucial detail to emerge. Thomas Thomas could have been Ed standing there in a somehow still-charming dereliction of protocol. The boy came over and helped the jacket off Eileen’s shoulders one at a time. “May I show you around?” the woman asked. “I’m sure you’re curious to see the house.”

Eileen was curious. She was so refreshed to behold how accurate the woman—Anabel—had been in her perception, how sensitive to nuance, that she almost didn’t answer right away.

“I would love to see it,” she said. “My name is Eileen.”

Their shake was firm, appreciative — collegial. Anabel led her to the kitchen, which smelled like cardamom and curry. They had turned it into a galley kitchen. There was much more counter space now. They had granite slabs, not unlike the ones in her house. There was even a space to eat, with bar stools pushed under it, but she could tell they ate their meals in the dining room. The renovations were tastefully done, the sort she would have approved of had she and Ed committed the money to making them — had she not known in the back of her mind that she was thinking of some other house every time she looked at her own. Anabel gave her a quick tour. They had redone the bathroom: new tiles, a new clawfoot tub, a beautiful pedestal sink. They had converted one of the closets in the master bedroom into a little bathroom. She’d always wished for an extra bathroom on that floor, so she wouldn’t have to walk down to the basement when someone else was using it. New baseboard molding lined the house. Everywhere were elements obviously Indian — silk tapestries, carved wood figurines, an enameled brass vase — but there were also crosses on the walls, and a picture of the pope in the master bedroom. It took her a moment to register that this had once been her bedroom with Ed. Nothing in it looked the same. The bed seemed to radiate the life and energy of years of a couple sleeping side by side in it.

“How are your husband and son?”

She didn’t have it in her at that moment to deflect the question in an obfuscating ramble. “My husband died last March,” she said.

“Oh! I’m so sorry! Mrs. Leary!”

“Thank you,” she said. “And please call me Eileen.”

“It must be strange to be back here.”

“It’s nice, actually.”

“Please stay for dinner. We’re just about to eat.”

She knew what to say when politeness was extended in the due course of decency: I have to get going or I really can’t stay, whatever made it easier for everyone to save face and return to their regular lives. But she didn’t want to say any of that right now. She was so very tired. She wanted to stay there with these people in the attractive home they’d made of what she’d left behind. Something about these environs struck her as oppressively and irreducibly different, and yet she could imagine never leaving them. She didn’t look forward to returning to her empty house, with the wind screaming, the branches shushing against the siding, and the fear of someone creeping in through the window troubling her sleep. So much life filled this home that there was no way to feel dread in it, but then she’d seen that there was no way to feel dread in anyone’s home but one’s own. Something was sacred in being a guest.

She was led to the dining room table and directed to sit. Thomas and Vijay shut the television off and made their way to the table with murmuring contentedness in their voices.

“Do you like Indian food?” Thomas asked, breaking the spell as Anabel slipped into the kitchen. Eileen froze in terror. She’d sat already, had begun to arrange her napkin in her lap, so there was no way out. The last thing she wanted was to act discourteously to these people, but the truth was that she hated Indian food, hated the very sight of it — its little lakes of earth-toned sauces, its hillocks of meat in blasted landscapes of mud. She had smelled the spices but thought of them as an inevitable detail — a tribal marker, not part of the daily routine. She had somehow failed to consider that the Thomases actually made Indian food at home. Wasn’t the way forward to assimilate? She didn’t know how to read these people who blended in but didn’t, who were like her but weren’t, whose kids got where her own kid got, or even beyond, but started somewhere else entirely.

How could she say she hated their food? She would have to explain everything — how she’d come to feel about the neighborhood, about her life, about the world as she’d wanted it to be: simple, predictable, familiar. It wasn’t about their food. It was the smell, the spices, the strangely proliferating condiments, the mystery of its preparation. It was the fact that she’d had no choice about it. So many Indians were there all of a sudden and so many of her friends were gone. At some point all the restaurants in the neighborhood had become Indian restaurants. Then the last of her friends had left, and the Indian restaurants had remained and seemed to multiply. She couldn’t stand the sight of the stuff, and now she was about to be served it.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had it.”

And that, finally, was the truth. For all her revulsion, for all the times she’d insisted she couldn’t take a single bite without gagging, she’d never actually tasted it. It had been easier to say she had, because there had been less to explain. It had been easier to say, “I don’t like it,” instead of, “I’m too angry to try it.” But you couldn’t lie to yourself forever.

Her throat was constricted and dry. She took a long drink of water, almost the entire glass.

“You’re in for a treat,” Thomas said upon the entrance of his wife bearing platters. He listed names of dishes; Eileen was too keyed up to register them. He spooned out a plate for her as Vijay passed her a bowl filled with bread that resembled thin, soft mattresses. After she had her plate, the others filled theirs in turn, and the scent wafting up at her was not as offensive as she’d imagined it would be; there was a sweet pungency to it. The mound on her plate was the color of Mars. There was no turning back.

Thomas said the name of the dish again, and she speared some on her fork. As she bit into it, she registered that it was chicken, and also that there was tomato in the sauce, and cream of some sort, as well as some indeterminate spices. There was something complex and contradictory about it, a mildness and a stoutness that competed for primacy, and on top of these a pleasing fullness in the mouth, the medley of textures bolstered by stray grains of rice. She was aware of how she had no competing memory with which to dull the vibrancy of this experience. If to taste forgotten foods was to reanimate the past, then a different kind of reminder, a reminder of future possibility, waited in unfamiliar flavors. She was making a new memory. She was eating Indian food. She’d never thought she’d live to see the day.

“It’s good,” she said, trying to be measured, until she couldn’t hold back. “It’s really very good.” She placed her fork on her plate, straightened up in surprise, and saw them looking at her warmly. It was only then that she registered that they were sitting in the same arrangement she and Ed and Connell had sat in in that room — the father nestled into the table’s head, his back to the window, the boy with his back to the mirror, the wife across from him, ready to shuttle dishes. Eileen was in the seat that had often gone empty at her own table. She’d looked at it in the middle of meals and thought how nice it would be to have someone drop in unannounced and bring the world to her. She’d never imagined the scene from the visitor’s vantage point, how complete a picture of life it might have presented, how much it might have looked as if everything that mattered in the world was there already.

“I didn’t know what I was missing,” she said, and because there was no way to say what she was thinking without telling her whole story, she picked up her fork, took another bite, and hoped they’d see something more than mere politeness in the smile that was spreading across her face.