Читать книгу In Hovering Flight - Joyce Hinnefeld - Страница 13

MAY 2002

THIS MORNING’S SCENE IS a familiar one: Cora at the small table on the screened porch in back, glasses perched on her nose and paper spread in front of her, distractedly petting Lucy, her old collie, who’s flopped down at her feet. For as long as Scarlet can remember, Cora has been gray, her hair cut sensibly short. She’s also always been pretty. The sweetness and openness in her face and in her wide blue eyes have always somehow invited Scarlet to bare her soul, to share her deepest hurts and most ridiculous longings with Cora—though Cora will never, under any circumstances, do the same. If Cora has ridiculous longings, Scarlet hasn’t heard about them; she knows for certain about the depth of Cora’s particular pain—but she never hears about this from Cora either.

The two women are bundled in sweaters because it’s cool on the porch in the early morning. Sunlight streams in, the early fog burned off by now, and the long, grassy slope down to the beach is wet with dew. A rope clangs against a flagpole several houses down. Tom has been at his scope for an hour or more; Scarlet has been watching him. She knows he’d rather be elsewhere—in the marsh near the lighthouse, for instance—but everyplace screams with Addie’s presence now, and there is so much to be decided today. But for now no one can bear to begin that process, and Scarlet sits with Cora, as if it were a year or two ago and she’d just arrived, sleepless and distraught over her love life, whimpering over the mess she’d made of everything. Worlds away from everything she is feeling today.

At the sound of her oven timer, Cora disappears into the kitchen. Minutes later she returns with a tray and sits down across from Scarlet. “Coffee?” she asks, as always. When Scarlet declines, she cocks a surprised eyebrow, then pours juice into a smoothly glazed mug—one of her own—and waits for Scarlet to speak first.

“Lucy’s looking tired,” Scarlet finally says. She longs for a sip of Cora’s marvelously strong coffee but tries to act like she hasn’t noticed its intoxicating smell.

“She’s an old girl, like me,” Cora says as she pats the dog again. “Like all of us, your mother and Lou and I were saying, just a few nights ago. We had the strangest conversation, about all the pets we’ve had fixed over the years. Wondering if an animal feels something about that, what that means to these poor girls, never to bear young. If it means anything at all.”

As Cora bends over Lucy, Scarlet watches the play of morning light and shadows on her face, on the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She knows this face nearly as well as she knew her mother’s, before Addie grew so gaunt, if still achingly beautiful, over the past few months, and she knows this comfortable old house nearly as well as she knows the cottage on Haupt Bridge Road. No wonder Addie wanted to die here, she thinks now, with Cora’s soothing presence filling every room—the smells of her baking, the fresh salt air blowing through her windows, the dark glazed surfaces of her pots and vases and mugs, beckoning one to grasp and stroke.

And for a moment she is ashamed of her peevish reaction to Addie’s asking to be brought here, six weeks ago. “Why not at home?” she’d whined to Tom. At the time she’d felt strangely jealous, reluctant to share both her dying mother and Cora in this way.

“So somehow we got going on animal reproduction,” Cora says, “and suddenly we were back in Tom’s class, learning about k-selected and r-selected species. Do you remember when we used to talk about that? We would tease Addie when you were four or five, and she would say she couldn’t imagine sharing her love with any more children. ‘You’re the ultimate k-selected mom,’ Lou would say, missing the point about species of birds altogether, of course. But Addie loved that. ‘Yes!’ she’d say, ‘I’m a wood warbler! Sharing the planet, taking less space, only taking what my child and I need. No competitive exclusion principle, no intraspecific competition for me!’ ”

Cora seems lost in the memory. “Then Lou would say, ‘But watch out for that Tom, he’s a strutting blue jay, don’t you think? Don’t blue jays have babies everywhere and then leave them to fend for themselves? Or is that grackles? Cowbirds?’ ” Cora isn’t a particularly good mimic, yet Scarlet can hear Lou saying this, the edginess, the whiff of sarcasm always there in her voice.

“Addie’d correct her,” Cora goes on. “ ‘No, no,’ she’d say. ‘Cowbirds are brood parasites. Which just means they don’t build their own nests. They leave them for someone else to raise.’

“And then one of us would make that silly joke about phoebes. ‘For phoebes! They leave them for the phoebes!’ ” Cora’s eyes are dancing now, glittering. “ ‘Phoebes are acceptors!’ And we’d all cackle then because of course at Burnham there was a girl named Phoebe we didn’t like, and so we all scribbled that down in our notes right away the day Tom said it in a lecture, and then after that, every time we saw that poor girl—well, I say ‘poor girl,’ but really she was a horrible snob, truly a nasty person, it was more her nastiness that bothered us than her reputation for sleeping with everyone on the football team—every time we saw her, we’d whisper, ‘Phoebes are acceptors—oh yes, phoebes are acceptors!’

“And then we’d howl. Just like a pack of twelve-year-olds or something. Good Lord.” She laughs a little sadly and wipes her eyes.

Scarlet smiles; she has heard this story many times, and she’s always loved it—this image of Addie and her friends being trivial and petty, human. A side of Addie she rarely saw. The whole idea of Tom as a strutting jay is mysterious to her, though. Scarlet has always been puzzled by this view of her father, the notion that he was the restless one, the one prone to wander. An Irish rover. That seems to have been his image, in lots of people’s eyes, but it’s always seemed to her that it was Addie who grew restless, not Tom.

Cora is staring at the table, still picturing the past. “Of course at this point Lou would be off and running, making some off-color joke of some kind, something about cowbirds and deadbeat dads. Something racist or something, you know, faking a Southern drawl. ‘Down where ah come from they like to say the cowbirds live over there, over on that side of the tracks.’ As if she lived in the heart of Alabama or something, instead of the suburbs of Washington.

“She’d do it to get your mother started, of course. And it always worked. ‘See?’ Addie would say. ‘That’s what scientists do. Make so-called impartial observations and then let the rest of the world go to hell with them, segregating schools, dropping bombs, dumping chemicals all over rice paddies.’ ”

Scarlet shimmies out of the sleeping bag she’d kept wrapped around her legs; the sun is growing brighter, reaching in to warm the porch. “She’d say things like that even back then, even that early on?” she asks.

“Oh, sure. I was always glad Karl wasn’t around to hear her, working up steam and maligning everybody from Einstein to Oppenheimer. Never mind that the whole thing started with our completely distorting scientific terms to suit our own ends. K-selected species are just animals that mature later and care more intensely for their young because they have to compete more for resources. ‘K’ and ‘r’ are just mathematical symbols that zoologists use to talk about animal populations. As far as I know, they’ve got nothing to do with how many children a human mother decides to have.”

Cora smiles, a little sheepishly. “I’m amazed I still remember that,” she says. “See how well your father taught me? Anyway, understand that we were just joking around back then. We’d all be laughing the whole time—even Addie. Back then.”

“Right,” Scarlet says. “That was the difference, wasn’t it?”

Eventually Addie didn’t find it funny anymore. Scarlet too can remember her mother’s raging against what she called k-selected humans acting like r-selected beasts, squandering resources, sending their young off to die in wars. Tom had always hated it when she’d used scientific theory like that. Turning science into sociology, he called it.

“Tom has always said that scientists are far more optimistic than artists,” she says, remembering her parents’ endless debates. “He’s certainly more of an optimist than Addie was, which I guess isn’t saying that much. More optimistic than I am too—as he’s always reminding me. ‘Poets, painters, musicians, all of them—artists are horrible cynics beneath that pretty facade,’ he says.”

“And what do you say when he says things like that?” Cora asks. She is staring pointedly at Scarlet.

“Oh, I usually just agree with him.” Scarlet feels tired of this conversation suddenly, unnerved by Cora’s curiosity. Actually, I think I may be more of a cynic than even Addie was, she considers saying, but doesn’t. And that frightens me, now.

“You know,” she says instead, maybe just to change the subject, maybe because of all the questions she herself has now, “all those conversations and jokes about k-selected species always kind of puzzled me. Maybe this was just a kid’s egotism, but it always seemed like those remarks were somehow about me. About the fact that Addie and Tom didn’t have more children, about how everyone assumed I was dying for a brother or sister. And I didn’t really see why. Or was I missing something?”

Cora looks puzzled. Understandably, Scarlet thinks; she knows she’s being vague. She takes a breath and tries again. “I guess I’m asking if there was more going on there. More than Addie’s personal quest to save the planet, I mean—you know, doing her part to stem the tide of overpopulation.” She pauses again, but still there is no response from Cora.

“Okay. Here’s what I’m asking. Did Addie want another child, maybe? Or, maybe I’m asking this: Did having me make her decide she really didn’t want more children? Was it all too much somehow? Was there some kind of secret I never got to hear about?” Scarlet stares at Cora now, forcing herself to stop, to hold back from revealing more than she’s ready to reveal. She tries to decipher the look on Cora’s face. Is it changing subtly? Is there some hint of realization there behind her furrowed brow?

After a moment Cora shakes her head slowly. “No, no,” she says. “No secrets that I know of.” She continues to stare at Scarlet, her eyes full of other unasked questions. “You know, everyone just always thought you were supposed to have at least two, so I suppose we always talked about it because we were just curious or something. And Addie had her blue days, just like all of us did—home all day with a cranky baby, no adult conversations for weeks at a time, that kind of thing. But she never showed any signs of regret, Scarlet.” Her voice is tender now, and Scarlet feels, suddenly, embarrassed by her questions, by the silly self-involvement Cora must be hearing there.

“No, no. I didn’t really mean regret,” she says. “I’m not exactly sure what I mean. It’s just, well, all that k-selected species stuff, all the ‘singleton’ jokes and whatnot. I just was curious about it, I guess. I know I’m not being clear. . . .”

“Well, who is right now, right? What’s being clear got to do with Addie’s dying? Was she being clear, giving up on treatment like that and—” Cora stops herself, takes a sip of coffee and looks out the window for a moment. She turns back to Scarlet and tries to smile. “Anyway, you didn’t seem to suffer for being an only child. There was your friend Peter, and then our boys . . .”

Her voice catches, and suddenly Scarlet wonders why she’s doing this to Cora, insisting on this topic of mothers and children. “Yes, right,” she says, then tries to steer things to safer ground. “Just thinking about the only-child thing to avoid other thoughts, I suppose. Or, well, I don’t know why. It’s funny what these last days with Addie have brought up. Apart from all the big stuff, I mean.”

“Yes, it is funny. It’s funny what we found ourselves talking about. I mean really, under normal conditions when do we ever wonder about what female dogs think about their own reproduction, or lack of it?” Cora looks down at Lucy, trailing her fingers along the dog’s soft white belly. “But that’s what you talk about. Things like that, things that seem so silly and irrelevant—and then you realize they really aren’t.” She folds her paper then and starts to tidy the table, a brisk habit Scarlet recognizes. She braces herself for what will come next.

“Addie worried, you know, that she might have somehow turned you away from marrying, or from having children,” Cora says when she’s wiped away a tiny trail of milk. “She ended up in tears that night we talked—well, of course we all did. Lou kind of fell apart . . . you know how she feels about her girls now, so convinced they blame her for everything.”

How, Scarlet is wondering, does Cora always know what she’s really thinking? She has done this for years now, greeting Scarlet at the breakfast table, after those long drives and a few hours’ sleep, with a fresh pot of coffee and, before long, a seemingly innocent and indirect observation that was meant really as a pointed question.

But Addie has been dead for only seven hours, and Scarlet has slept for maybe three. Though she was sidling up to the topic herself only moments before, she’s just not ready, she thinks now, to launch into things like Addie’s fears for her. Or what Addie’s life might have taught her about love or marriage or having a child. She can’t ask the questions she needs to ask, and she can’t answer Cora’s questions either. Not now.

So instead she asks Cora something else, though here too she’s afraid of where her answer could take them. “And what did you cry about, Cora, that night with Lou and Addie?”

Cora looks at Scarlet intently for another long moment. Then she waves her hand in front of her face and shifts her gaze to the window. “Not what you’d think, Scarlet,” she says. “I cried because beautiful young girls grow up, and grow old. Isn’t that silly? I look at my granddaughters now, and they take my breath away. Bobby’s girls are eight and five now. Can you believe that?”

Scarlet raises her eyebrows, feigning surprise, though in fact she’s well aware of Cora’s granddaughters’ ages.

“They remind me of you,” Cora goes on. “Of course they’re younger than you were when you started coming here with Addie and Tom, but already Lindsey, at least, makes me think of you. She’s long and lean like you were, with that same wild, long hair. I love just watching her walk, just like I used to love watching you. Young girls are like colts really. Silent and watchful, and restless, under that calm on the surface. Restless and ready to break free.

“And that night I thought, for the first time—can you believe this?—I thought, My Lord, we were like that too, and it seems like it was just yesterday, and now Addie is here in my house, on this huge hospital bed in the middle of my studio, and she’s dying. And I thought, How can this be? We were so young, so happy, tramping through the woods and riding horses and kissing our boyfriends in the moonlight. And then suddenly Addie seemed to leap ahead of us—well, I mean she was always so passionate and intense, but then boom, she was doing this very, very grown-up thing, falling in love with Tom and moving in with him. And then before we knew it we were all doing it—getting married, having families, buying homes, all of it—buried in work, and debt, and caring for children. . . .”

Her voice breaks ever so slightly, and she pauses. Scarlet reaches for her hand, but Cora only lets her hold it for a moment before she pulls it away and goes on. “And through all of that, all those things that seemed to wear the rest of us out, Addie stayed as passionate as ever. Oh, I know she had her low periods. But she never lost all that hellfire and fury that seemed to be burning inside her, keeping her going.”

“Remember when Lou told her she should have been a Southern Baptist preacher?” Scarlet says, and they laugh at the memory, briefly, before Cora grows serious. She is quiet, looking out the window again. Morning light like this isn’t kind to anyone, but Cora’s face has grown lovelier with age; its lines reveal depth, resolve, but there’s a softness there too, and it never goes away. Addie had the same softness, Scarlet realizes suddenly, and it hits her like a stabbing pain. It was just hard to see it sometimes.

“You know,” Cora says, “it stunned me to look at Addie over these last few weeks, to see all that passion drained from her face. It seemed like she finally wasn’t interested in fighting anymore. I still can’t decide whether to call that peace, whatever it was she felt at the end. I can’t bear to think that she felt resigned, or defeated somehow. Not Addie.”

When she says this, both women begin to cry quietly. “I think it was peace,” Scarlet says, her voice a hoarse whisper that she can barely hear herself. She isn’t sure of this at all. But if it wasn’t peace, she thinks, maybe it was still something good, something close to peace, something as close to peace as was possible for Addie. And far, very far from resignation—of that Scarlet is certain, based on Addie’s last request. But she promised Addie, when she made that request two weeks ago, not to burden Cora or Lou with this information.

And so she clears her throat to say it again, without necessarily believing it, because she wants Cora to believe it: “I think she’d found a kind of peace, Cora. Resignation wasn’t really in her repertoire, you know?”

There’s a pause then, a heavy one—a quiet between them that, Scarlet knows, Cora would like her to fill with news of what was said, late last night, when Cora and Lou left Tom and Scarlet with Addie. But she isn’t ready to relive those last hours that feel, now, like she must have dreamed them. She would like, for just a little while, to pretend that Addie’s just asleep—that it wasn’t her body they wrapped up and carried down the street a few hours ago, then fussed over ridiculously, as if about her comfort, as they laid her out on the cot.

When they’d gotten her to the restaurant cooler, there, inexplicably, had been Dustin, ready with a plastic sheet and bags filled with dry ice—an “extra precaution,” he’d said, in case they needed extra time. He helped Tom and Scarlet position the bags below Addie’s head and back, at the sides of her legs, her feet. Scarlet shakes her head at the memory: Could she have dreamed it? Had they really laid out her mother’s dead body in a walk-in cooler just hours ago? And were they really going to move that body, and somehow bury it on their own, a few short hours from now?

She is not ready for this, not ready for what will come next, not ready for all the questions, not ready for the full wave of Cora’s sadness, much less her own. So Scarlet is relieved and surprisingly grateful when—conveniently, miraculously—the sound of an old handsaw grinding through wood rises from the lawn below the screened porch, and she and Cora both turn to look out the window at Dustin, back at work on the coffin he is making for Addie.

“Who is that guy?” Scarlet blurts out, her voice rising above the saw’s steady hum, and they both laugh, silly with relief. But Scarlet also hears the petulance in her voice. She hears it because she’s felt it—petulant, overlooked, hurt—for a good part of the last twenty years.

Who is that guy? It’s a rhetorical question really. Earnest, idealistic young people like Dustin have been trailing in her mother’s wake for years, ever since she started staging her own forms of protest in the face of overdevelopment and loss of habitat—camping out on the sites of planned subdivisions and shopping malls, erecting angry art installations in response to things like pesticide use and declining populations of birds.

Addie has been a darling of radical environmentalist types since she hid out to avoid arrest in connection with a supposed act of ecoterrorism sixteen years ago. She caught on with the art world too, after her run-in with a conservative senator eight years ago. Then, when her cancer returned last year, the news quickly found its way into the publications and listservs and chat rooms favored by both those groups.

She would have nothing to do with traditional treatment this time, she said. No chemotherapy, nothing. Despite the time it might buy her. No more battling the cells exploding everywhere inside her, growing fast and furious—her own internal suburban sprawl.

“There are too many toxins inside me already,” she said, her voice clear and steady as a bell, that day in her oncologist’s office eight months ago. “I’m finished.” And with that she stood and walked out the door, leaving Tom and Scarlet to thank the good doctor for his suggestion of another round of full-scale chemotherapy and shake their heads no. No, no—they wouldn’t be trying to persuade her. Not this time. No.

Thirteen years before, they’d sat together in the same office, between the rounds of chemotherapy and the radiation. Addie—pale and slim and bald, looking younger than her forty-five years—was a striking presence; it shocked Scarlet to realize that the oncologist seemed almost afraid of her.

Addie’s dark eyes flashed, but that time she said nothing as the doctor urged her to “cover all the bases”—radiation next, followed by hormone therapy: a daily tamoxifen pill for the next five years.

Tom took her hand and kissed both her cheeks. “I know you hate this, Addie. But please, love, let’s try it. Please.”

“ ‘Let’s’?” she snapped. “ ‘Let us try it ’? Who exactly is us?”

And then, Scarlet couldn’t help herself: She started to cry. No, to sob. The chemotherapy had already made Addie so sick. Scarlet and Tom had insisted on that, refusing to listen when Addie had proposed looking into alternative therapies first. But what were they supposed to do, Scarlet had asked herself then. Sit back and watch her die?

Addie could never bear to see Scarlet cry. Past the age of four or five, she’d seldom done it in her mother’s presence.

“I’m sorry,” Scarlet whimpered, reaching into her bag for tissues. “I’m sorry, Addie.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Addie looked at Scarlet and opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again.

“All right,” she said, her voice hoarse. Tired. “Yes, all right.” She started gathering her things—her bag, the book she was reading, her jacket. “I’ll do whatever you say. We’ll call to schedule it. Right now I’m tired. I need to go home.”

And Scarlet and Tom walked out behind her, after wordless handshakes with the doctor.

And she had the radiation therapy, and took the tamoxifen.

And now they all know that in some cases additional hormones—so-called adjuvant therapy—eventually lead to changes in the uterine wall. The place where Addie’s cancer showed up next.

Oh, but Addie, Scarlet imagined saying to her, so many times: We were only doing what we thought was right. Just a few big bombs to blast that overdevelopment in your tissues. Then a pill a day to stanch those strip malls and Wal-Marts and drive-through pharmacies in your lymph nodes. It all seemed so sensible at the time.

And then she imagined Addie’s response: Right. Kind of like Hiroshima.

They did talk briefly about the tamoxifen two weeks ago, the last time Scarlet visited before these last few days of gathering again in Cider Cove for Addie’s imminent death. “I don’t blame you for that,” Addie said to Scarlet and Tom then. “I’ve made my own decisions, all along. I took the damn pill each morning. No one held a gun to my head. I just filled a goddamn glass of water and swallowed the stupid thing. Of course I wanted to fight it then, of course I was going to do what they told me to do. It’s all as simple as that, isn’t it? You can’t think of anything else to do. You assume they know what’s best. You follow instructions.”

“And then you die,” Tom said. And they all laughed.

“Right. No surprises there,” Addie said through her laughter. And then she coughed, painfully.

“And now I’ve made this choice,” she went on when the coughing subsided. “And I ask you, please, to honor it. And not out of guilt. Simply out of your love for me.” That was when she told them where she wanted to be buried.

But guilt and love aren’t so easily separated, Addie. Another thing Scarlet considered saying, but didn’t.

Both Cora and Lou knew, early on, that Addie had refused to consider any treatment this time around. Lou fought valiantly, via an endless stream of phone calls, to persuade Addie, then Tom, then Scarlet, to try to change her mind. “Stupid, misguided, namby-pamby environmentalist bullshit,” were her exact words, her parting shot at Scarlet at the end of their last phone call. Followed by this: “You’re letting her commit suicide, Scarlet. I hope you can live with that.” It was clear she’d had quite a lot to drink.

But what could anyone do? This time Scarlet stayed out of the way. This time she didn’t want her tears to force her mother back into the multiple agonies, for her, of chemotherapy. For most of the fall she hid out in her apartment in New York, tending to other things there. Eight months ago—even two months ago—she never would have dreamed that she’d be in Cider Cove the morning after Addie’s death, longing for her, physically longing for her, as if she were a child again. Eight months ago, before a series of unexpected events, Scarlet had told herself it was Addie’s decision, no one else’s.

What is it, when someone says no to all her doctors have to offer? Some pinpointable stage in the process of dying? Angry self-destructive-ness? Resigned despondency? Peaceful acceptance?

Probably a bit of all those things, Addie had told Scarlet and Tom two weeks ago, clearly uninterested in pursuing the question further. And then she’d laid out her instructions for what she ardently hoped they would do with her body when she died—making it clear, when she’d finished, that she didn’t wish to talk about her death any longer.

So now they are left to decide for themselves what to make of it all. For people like Dustin, Scarlet imagines, it’s easy: Addie’s death was a suicide, yes—a deeply principled one. Martyrdom, actually, in the eyes of Dustin and Addie’s other followers. It’s easy for them to see her death this way, Scarlet thinks, because, of course, she isn’t their mother. Which, at this moment, she desperately wishes these scattered children of the art world and the environmental movement would remember.

The sound of Dustin’s sawing—now a steady whine—has become grating. Scarlet desperately needs a cup of coffee.

“Doesn’t he have a mother of his own?” she asks, her voice cracking.

Cora just looks at her, saying nothing. Waiting. There are more tears, Scarlet can see, at the corners of her eyes.

She has always waited like this for Scarlet.

And as always, in the warm light of Cora’s gaze, Scarlet begins—rapidly—to melt.

“I’m pregnant,” she says.

“I wondered,” Cora answers.

And then Lou opens the screen door and pulls a chair up to join them.