An Available Man (13 page)

“She’s dead,” Edward said. “She died more than a year ago.” Their exchange struck him as bizarre, a crazy reversal of roles. But his confusion was dissolving as a feeling of dread developed. “Is this about her mother, Gladys Berman? This is her son-in-law. I’m the next of kin now; we never changed it on her papers.” Next of kin—such an oddly ominous phrase, suggesting closeness and separation at the same time.

It
was
about Gladys, who still lived alone. “Ninety is the new seventy,” she had gaily told Bee when she’d urged her to move into an assisted-living facility. “Yes, and death is the new ninety,” Bee shot back. Gladys finally gave in to wearing a medical alert device on a chain around her neck. “My baby monitor,” she’d said, mockingly, declaring it a waste of money and ugly besides. “It will probably strangle me in my sleep,” she warned, but Bee had wheedled, and then insisted. “For
my
sake, Ma,” she’d said, “for
my
peace of mind.”

And just like the old woman in the television commercial, Gladys had fallen on her way to the bathroom and couldn’t get up. When the police came, they’d found the extra key she had “hidden” in the soil of a small potted evergreen outside her door and let themselves in. She had broken her hip.

Edward got dressed and drove to the hospital. The emergency room was jumping with activity and brilliantly lit. It might have been a bar in purgatory. He was led to the curtained cubicle where Gladys lay, looking child-sized and cadaverously pale. A
mummified child. She managed a faint smile for Edward before the tears fell. “Honey,” she said. “Look where I am.”

She had been given sedation for the pain, but as the resident informed him just outside the cubicle, Gladys would have to have surgery as soon as possible to repair her hip. If she didn’t, pneumonia would undoubtedly set in. Her age, the resident explained, was a negative factor in either scenario.

Edward decided to call the children before the surgery, which was scheduled for 10
AM
. He woke everyone, but at least it was already morning by then, and they seemed less dazed than he had been in the night. And it was Saturday, so no one had to think about going to work. They were grateful to have been summoned, to get to see their grandmother, who was still in the emergency room when they arrived.

Julie was especially upset, though. “Is she going to die?” she asked Edward, after visiting briefly with Gladys. “I don’t know. She might, Jules,” he said. “She’s very old.” When Julie’s face crumpled, he added, “But they wouldn’t operate if they didn’t think she had a chance.” And she hung on to that and to Edward’s hand, twin lifelines.

By the time they came to wheel Gladys away, her speech was slurred from the drugs they’d given her. “Some country,” she announced loudly to the room at large. “Assisted living, but no assisted dying.” She sounded a little drunk. “Good luck, dearie!” a voice called from another cubicle. Someone else said, “Shut up, I’m trying to sleep.” The wheels of her gurney shrieked, and Gladys murmured, “A little 3-in-One for that, honey,” and closed her eyes.

Amanda brought coffee in a cardboard tray to the waiting area, where they sat huddled along with other families. Gladys’s surgery would take about two hours, they’d been told. As he was making muted, distracted conversation with the children, Edward
was suffused with shame about his first impression when he’d answered the phone, that it was some strange woman calling him from a bar. Who did he think he was—an irresistible Lothario? This dating business had severely distorted his perception if he believed he was being pursued even as he slept.

And although Bee had died at home, the hospital’s anxious atmosphere had sent him reeling backward to that whole horrific time. Julie and Nick were probably having similar thoughts from which he could not defend them. He remembered blithely telling Roberta Costello that he had inherited Bee’s children, and he looked at them now as rare treasure, a bequest that couldn’t be stolen by any interloper, floozie or not.

Gladys didn’t die during the surgery. After a few hours, they were each allowed a couple of minutes with her in the ICU. Edward went in last. She seemed deeply asleep and older than Methuselah now. All that paraphernalia. They had brought her back from the edge of somewhere she both wanted and didn’t want to go. How extraordinary she was. His own mother had followed his father into death within a year, the way she used to nervously follow him around the house.

Once, after Bee’s diagnosis, Gladys had said, “When she was a little girl and she got sick, you know, an earache or a fever, I would take care of her and she got better. But what can I do now—stroke her forehead, give her a little soup?” “Yes,” Edward said, and she did.

He stood next to her bed in the ICU and said her name. She opened one eye and then the other, like a battered doll. “Is Beattie coming?” she said, and Edward pressed her hand, but couldn’t speak.

He was beyond ordinary fatigue by the time he got home again. It was evening by then and starting to snow. He had taken the children out for a meal, something between lunch and supper.
“Lupper,” Julie called it, making everyone, including herself, smile. “No, slunch,” Edward said, and they actually laughed. If Bee had been the glue that held them all together, then he was the Velcro. Not as secure, maybe, but there would be an awful tearing sound if he pulled away.

He must have fallen asleep on the sofa. The television was playing, some police procedural. A murder suspect was being given the third degree. It was a little past ten, according to the cable box. An empty brandy snifter was on the coffee table next to Edward’s feet. The telephone was ringing again. It took him a moment to realize the sound wasn’t coming from the television set. He stumbled into the kitchen and picked up the phone. “Hello?” he said, hoarsely and with trepidation.

A woman’s voice again, but there weren’t any noises in the background. “You’re no gentleman,” she said.

“Frances?” Edward asked. It didn’t sound like her, but hadn’t she recently said something about his being a gentleman? And then Bernie said that Edward needed to get laid.

“No, this is Sylvia,” the woman on the phone said. When Edward was silent, groggily scrambling to come up with a face to match the name, she said, “Sylvia Smith, the date you stood up tonight.”

Third Date, Postponed

E
dward apologized and explained about Gladys’s emergency. “In all the excitement,” he said, “I simply forgot.” He offered to set up another date with her later that week. “No,” Sylvia said. “Let’s wait until she’s out of danger and you feel more relaxed. Why don’t you call me when you’re ready.”

“Thanks,” Edward said. “That’s very kind of you.” It
was
kind of her. They’d arranged to meet at a bistro she knew in Chelsea, close to where she lived, and he imagined her waiting for him—looking at her watch, sipping water or wine, becoming self-conscious and finally angry. He was relieved by her instant forgiveness, and he liked the sound of her voice with its trace of a southern accent.

“Not at all,” she said. “And just think—we’ve had our first quarrel and we haven’t even met.”

Gladys’s recovery was slow and bumpy. First she spiked a fever; it wasn’t pneumonia, as everyone feared, but a urinary tract infection that was soon brought under control with antibiotics. Then there was a false alarm about a blood clot in her leg. And for the first time since Edward had known her, she had moments of confusion, especially in the evening. She called him “Doctor” once when he peeked into her room. What she said was, “Doctor, honey, please let me go home now.”

“It’s only Sundowner’s syndrome,” a nurse explained. “Lots of older folks get it. A strange environment, shift changes, the meds. Just try and keep her focused.”

Edward and the children took turns being with Gladys, so that she had at least one visitor every day during her stay in the hospital. After that she was scheduled to be moved to a rehab center for physical therapy. They put the overhead light on as soon as the daylight dimmed, and read the newspaper to her, omitting the most aggravating items. They hung a large-print calendar on a wall near her bed and crossed off the days she’d spent in the hospital. “Just like in prison, Gladdy,” Nick said.

“Only the food is worse,” Gladys answered, rallying. So they brought her treats from outside, despite her flagging appetite, coaxing her with morsels of smoked salmon on toast points and spoonfuls of frozen yogurt.

Gladys had been a milliner and then the millinery buyer for Bamberger’s many years before, and liked to say that women looked half naked without hats. She spoke with nostalgia about Jackie Kennedy’s pillboxes, Hedda Hopper’s flamboyant toppers, and a certain sequined beret she’d sported on her own honeymoon in Havana, which she still owned. In fact, she had a whole assortment of vintage hats, several of which she’d made herself. Gladys claimed that if you held on to something long enough, it always came back into style.

Nick picked up an assortment of silly hats, from a giant, striped stovepipe to a fur cloche with bunny ears, and shoved one of them onto his head each time he entered her room. He made her laugh and he encouraged her to get out of bed for excruciatingly slow walks in the hallway, using a special, padded walker.

The kids kept her up to date on their lives, in which she had a keen interest. Was Julie seeing somebody nice, for a change? Yes, she said, even though it was still only the odious Todd. And were Nicky and Amanda thinking about “you know what”? A baby was what she meant, which wasn’t on their immediate agenda. But they told Gladys that they certainly thought about it.

She wasn’t as invasive with Edward, asking mainly about his health and his work. He felt grateful and guilty at the same time. He’d sent flowers to Sylvia Smith and reread the letter she’d written in response to the ad. She seemed like the most promising candidate so far—a widowed social studies teacher in the city school system, who said she hoped his politics were liberal, and that she enjoyed the natural world.

Maybe he hadn’t contacted her first because she seemed too good to be true, or because he wasn’t prepared to meet someone that compatible. He might call her again that evening, just to say hello. Here he was, sitting with his ancient, feeble mother-in-law and chief co-mourner, daydreaming about a woman he’d never seen. He cleared his throat, as if that might also clear his mind. “Gladys,” he said. “You’re really doing well. They call you Wonder Woman out at the nurses’ station.”

“Pooh,” she said, but she couldn’t suppress a smile of pride. Then her brow furrowed. “Sometimes, lately, I get a little mixed up,” she admitted.

“Me, too,” Edward said, thinking about the date he’d forgotten. “Just today, I was teaching Mendel’s laws of inheritance—”

“The peas,” she said, “right?”

“Right. I must have given that lesson a few thousand times. Yet I said ‘recessive’ when I meant ‘dominant’ characteristics. A student corrected me.”

“ ‘And a little child shall lead them,’ ” Gladys said. “That’s from Isaiah.”

“See, you’re still pretty sharp.”

This time her smile flickered only briefly before it went out. “Honey,” she said, “I’m so sad. I’m always going to be sad.”

“I know,” Edward said. “I am, too.”

“Do you believe in God?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I’m not sure. How about you?”

“Oh, I still believe in him. I just don’t like him very much anymore.”

Edward felt a pinch of envy; maybe even an unlikable, vengeful God was better than none. Darwin, he remembered, had started out as a cleric. And Mendel, the Augustinian monk, had managed to keep his faith and his scientific work separate and intact, a fact that both stymied and impressed Edward.

During the lesson that afternoon, one of the boys made the usual joke about Mendel peeing in his garden, to the raucous appreciation of his buddies. But they all looked at one another with fresh interest when Edward spoke about the genetic determination of eye color and height. Maya Lin, the Chinese girl adopted by Caucasian Americans, drew some curious, sympathetic glances from other girls. And Brandon, the only biracial boy in the class, received even more furtive and inquisitive notice.

Edward’s thoughts wandered to his own blue-eyed parents. He remembered his mother telling him that the doctor who’d delivered him had shaken his finger at her playfully, warning that the baby, Edward, had better have blue eyes, too, unlike the milkman. He was the dead end of his particular genetic line,
although his fair-haired, blue-eyed sister, Catherine, had passed on some of the familial traits—selected by dominance over rather than blending with those of her dark-eyed, dark-haired husband—to her children.

Edward had no biological connection to Nick and Julie, yet occasionally someone who didn’t know their story remarked on Julie’s resemblance to Edward. People who lived together, he knew, often began to resemble each other. Facial expressions and mannerisms are inadvertently copied—nurture transcending nature. Some people even grew to look like their pets.

When he mentioned that to his gifted seventh-graders, there was an eruption of laughter and barking that he waited out before he continued. He drew a generational diagram of Mendel’s peas on the blackboard and began to explain the sequence of genetic inheritance, while he idly wondered what Sylvia Smith looked like. That’s when he said “recessive” instead of “dominant,” and the hands, even of the most inattentive students, flew up.