Читать книгу A Clean Heart - John Rosengren - Страница 9

Chapter 2

The wet snow had greased the roads. The other drivers braked and jerked as though they had never driven in winter. Carter cursed them through the windshield. The six-mile commute to his apartment, which usually took ten minutes, took nearly an hour that evening. All the stops and starts on the highway must have taken their toll on his ’82 Prelude because the engine rattled with a strange and probably malignant new symptom. By habit, he turned up the volume on the radio. Sting’s new hit took over. He sang along on the chorus, “All this time the river flowed endlessly out to sea…”

Stuck in traffic, he felt like he was stuck at sea. His thoughts returned to work. That morning, when Sister Mary Xavier had entrusted him with Oscar’s intake, she had told Carter how pleased she was with his work. His thoughts skipped past that moment to the conflict with Judy. By the time he pulled up to his apartment building, a knot gripped his shoulders.

He parked, checked the mail—a telephone bill and a coupon for pizza delivery—and climbed the two flights to his apartment. Slipping the key in the lock, he felt a fleeting wish for someone on the other side to ask about his day.

After dinner—curried chicken reheated in the microwave, leftover from an immemorable date the previous Saturday night—he sought relief in a hot bath by candlelight. No sooner had he settled into the comforting warmth than the phone split the mood. He resisted the impulse of curiosity to get out of the tub and pick it up. The machine answered it on the third ring.

“Carter?”

Mom.

“It’s Thursday night, March first. Remember March first?”

Damn. He had thought of it earlier in the week, jotted a reminder on his desk blotter to send a card, but the clutter of papers had obscured the note.

“Your brother called this evening, had Kelly Jr. sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ We didn’t hear from you and wondered if something might be wrong. It’s not like one of you boys to forget. With all that bad weather we hear you’re having up there, we got worried. We thought maybe you’d gotten into an accident or something. I almost called the hospital to see if you’d had the sense to stay there and wait out the snow, but—”

Carter snapped off the machine. He trudged along the wet trail of carpet back to the tub.

She called back. He counted seventeen rings before she gave up. He braced himself for the phone to ring again. It didn’t, but it might as well have. The expectation shattered the serenity he had sought in his bath.

Carter used to crawl into her bed to have her scratch his back. While his dad snored in the room next door, she ran her fingernails across his back and told him stories of the pretty little girl who grew up an orphan. She had never known her father. When she was two, her mother died of cancer, and she was placed in the local convent, where the Sisters of Mercy raised her. Sequestered in a small town, she knew she didn’t want to be a nun. She liked boys. Summer afternoons she wandered the convent gardens and fantasized about living the glamorous life pictured in magazines. To wear a fur coat, have a purse for every outfit, a closet just for shoes; to go to dinner parties that did not start until eight, the theater, the symphony, her husband dashing in his black tie; lazy summer afternoons lounging at the country club pool, winters at the beach. Her hand would rest idly on Carter’s back. As her dreams grew, so did her intolerance for the small town and convent. She still attended daily Mass, but she stopped going to the soda fountain, shunned school dances, and only dated boys with cars who could take her to the city.

When she was eighteen, she met a medical student doing his residency at the county hospital. He was not dashing, but he was stable and dependable and handsome enough. He could promise her the good life. She fell in love. For a period, while they lived in a five-bedroom, four-bath house in Edina, she was happy to watch her dreams spread out before her: the dinner parties, the country club, her two sons. Then, when Carter was three years old, his dad accepted a position at the Mayo Clinic. Rochester, another small town, reminded her too much of her childhood.

The rest, Carter had to fill in for himself. Somewhere after the move, probably not long after, the drinking escalated. He remembered coming home from school and learning to look for her cognac glass about the house as a predictor of the evening. Often, if the bottle itself was in plain view, she would fall asleep in the den before fixing supper. He would put out her cigarette left burning in the ashtray and take off her shoes. On those evenings, his dad made dinner in the microwave and told the boys to let her sleep, that she was worn out, but Carter could never figure out from what.

Some days when he came home from school, the house would smell of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven and she would have two glasses of milk waiting on the table for the boys. She met them at the door and hugged them until they begged her to please let go so they could eat the cookies. But if the slightest thing went wrong, say Carter accidentally knocked over his glass, she might scream hysterically and disappear into the den, leaving the spilled milk to drip over the table’s edge onto the kitchen floor.

Some evenings, she woke up in the den and argued with their dad. Carter would find her later sitting at her vanity, the top to her crystal decanter missing among the perfumes, her cheeks streaked with mascara.

“Don’t cry, Mommy.” She sniffs and hugs him. He can feel her cheek moist against his. Finally, the tears cease, and he leaves her alone with her decanter. He walks out of the bedroom feeling big and proud inside, the smudge of black on his cheek a badge of her love.

Seared into Carter’s mind, more vivid than any memory, actually a feeling rather than a specific event, are those days when he is five years old and his older brother is away at school. He spends those days with her walking in the arboretum, among the fragrant stalks of flox, the colorful beds of azaleas, and the sweet-smelling honeysuckle vines, just he and his mom, alone together with the day all theirs. Carter climbs trees, but she is never far away, always watching him.

One day, while he waits for her to return from the restroom, he picks a bouquet of different colored roses, carefully snapping the stems. When she walks out, he pulls the bouquet from behind his back. “Here, Mommy.”

She stoops to accept the bouquet. “Carter, I told you to wait for me here without moving.”

He thinks at first he may have done something wrong. He had been afraid of it when he picked the flowers, knowing she wouldn’t let him do that if she were watching. But when she smells the flowers and he sees a tear slip down her cheek, he forgets where one of the thorns had poked under his fingernail. He has made her happy.

She takes him up on a hill where they can see the many pretty colors of the valley below—poppy red, jonquil yellow, iris purple—and they lie down on the grass and watch the clouds float lazily from one side of the sky to the other. He feels as warm and full as the bright sun in the clear, blue sky.

For perhaps an hour, nestled in the water up to his chin, Carter involuntarily played thoughts of her through his mind. She wanted him to be more like Kelly, whom she referred to in small talk with other doctors’ wives as the “ambitious one,” not because he was happy, but because he inherited her drive. He went to Harvard on a hockey scholarship and stayed to finish law school. With his specialty in mergers and acquisitions, Kelly had profited handsomely from the eighties. Carter had other ambitions, though they were less clearly defined. He knew they had something to do with living freely, but he was not always clear about the free from what or free for what. The freedom he had first glimpsed in sobriety had somehow gotten away from him over the years. When he had been in treatment, the barriers had seemed so clear. Now that he had removed the alcohol and drugs, what held him back was more elusive.

He shivered. The water in the tub had chilled. He didn’t want to call. By this hour she was probably blitzed. But he figured that talking to her might be the best way to get her off his mind.

She answered. His dad never did, even if he sat within arm’s reach of the phone. “It’s never for me,” he said, and he was usually right.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Where are you?”

“Just got home.”

“They said you left the hospital hours ago.”

“I stopped at the gym on the way home.”

“There’s something wrong with your machine. It cut me off then didn’t answer when I called back. Did you get my message?”

She sounded coherent. He couldn’t hear her smoking. Carter thought he might still be able to redeem himself. “No, I just walked in. I wanted to talk to Dad.”

“He’s here. We just finished some birthday cake. I wanted to eat out, but he said he was too tired, so what could I do? Fortunately Meyer’s had an extra cake. He picked up some Chinese on the way home from the clinic.”

How romantic. “May I talk to him?”

He heard the click of her lighter. “Are you angry with me?”

“No, Mom. I simply wanted to wish him a happy birthday.”

“Well, you sure waited long enough to do so. It’s almost over.”

“Mom,” he whined. He hated when it got to the point where he whined for her to stop. “May I please talk to Dad?”

“The doctor wants me to go in for some tests this week.”

So that’s why she called. She was often sick, not in a serious way, but usually with some minor condition that required a doctor’s attention and excused her to submit herself to his care. That made her feel better.

“What for?”

He heard her inhale on her cigarette. “It’s fairly routine,” she said vaguely.

Probably a biopsy. Her own mother had died of cancer. She wouldn’t say the word.

Some people grind their teeth. Carter chewed his tongue. When he didn’t know what to say—or, worse, when he knew but couldn’t bring himself to say it—he moved his molars up and down over his tongue, a motion that made it appear he was chewing gum. He found himself chewing his tongue now.

“May I speak to Dad?”

“You’re angry with me?”

“No, Mom. I’ll say a prayer that the tests turn out okay.”

Silence, then his voice, weary but not angry. “Hi, Son.”

Always “Son.” Carter couldn’t remember the last time his dad had called him by his name. Even with Kelly around, they were both “Son.”

“Happy birthday, Dad.”

“Oh, thanks. Not much to do about it, I guess.”

Carter heard the newspaper rustle on the other end. Already at a loss for words. He groped for the mundane. “How’d you celebrate?”

“Hmm? Oh, the nurses baked me a cake, made me wear a silly hat and blow out candles. Chocolate, my favorite.”

“Mom said you just finished cake there.”

“Lemon.”

He never stood up to her, but he always managed to make clear his annoyance. Stay away from that. “Have you taken out the Porsche yet?”

“No. Roads are clear of ice, but still too much salt and sand down.”

A silver, mint condition ’74 Targa was his baby. He moped in the winter when he had to drive a Mercedes 350 sedan.

“You’ll be out there soon.”

“Say, one of the nurses had this joke. Masochist says to the sadist, ‘Tell me my faults.’ Sadist says, ‘No.’” Pause. “Masochist says, ‘Tell me again.’”

He chortled. Carter gave him a courtesy laugh. “Not bad, Dad.”

Silence weighted the line.

“So, what’s the weather doing down there?” Carter asked.

“Steady rain. Snow’s almost gone. Guy on TV says you’ve got rain mixed with snow.”

“Mostly snow. Wouldn’t be so bad if people would learn how to drive.”

The newspaper rustled. Carter made an excuse about having to take something out of the oven, and his dad sounded relieved.

Later, Carter lay awake in bed staring into the darkness at the ceiling he couldn’t see and listening to the couple in the apartment above his. He had never met either one of them but had come to know them through the sounds he overheard. Theirs was a faithful pattern of shouts, sometimes thuds, followed by her sobs. Finally, he listened to their bed grunt and groan with their love.