Consenting Adult (32 page)

“Oh, Ken, I know that feeling. I’ve had it too.”

“I got thinking, what it would be like, to get old, if you hadn’t ever had somebody you’d shared your life with. I suddenly got thinking that about Jeff. I never did before.”

“I’m glad you did, Ken. I’m so glad you did.”

She had relayed the news of Nate’s sudden British assignment to Ken and they both waited for Margie and Nate’s return and their first chance to drop by for a drink to hear all about it.

Nate needed little prompting. The editor of
Orbit
was a man named Ian Harton and the magazine was “new and small and liberal and good.” They had met at a “sort of mobbed doubled-up party,” Margie said, “the one we missed because we had to put off our trip for two days, on account of Lynnie, and the one that was on the ‘shedule’ for that day, so we had two hosts and two hostesses, and nobody even tried to find out whom we knew and whom we didn’t.”

But Ian Harton didn’t seem to mind the confusion, Nate went on, guessing that they had “cottoned to each other.” Harton said that some people labeled
Orbit
a New Magazine of the New Left, while others insisted that it was a Young Magazine of the Old Left, but he himself rejected all classifications as glib and inaccurate. He looked far too boyish to be editor of anything but a university paper, but he struck Nate as being entirely in control of
Orbit’s
policies and entirely autonomous about making firm commitments for articles, even those still unwritten.

“He asked me if I had anything he might see,” Nate said, “or if I had anything in mind, that might make a transatlantic piece, and I said I didn’t Then I had this big impulse, and told him I’d had a yen for a long time to do a real big takeout on a subject my own paper grudges giving real space to, and his ears went up like a scottie’s.

“‘What subject is that?’

“‘Being gay. The whole thing of being homosexual today, getting analyzed, getting jobs, getting busted from the Army, or in bars.’

“‘God knows that’s transatlantic enough,’ Harton said. ‘It’s an assignment, if you’ll take it on. We don’t pay American prices, though.’

“‘How much space will you allow me? The real hang-up on my paper has always been space.’

“‘This much,’ Harton answered.” Nate showed the tip of his index finger and of his thumb squeezed close together, less than a quarter inch apart, relishing Tessa’s disdain. “But then when he saw the rotten look I gave him, he added, ‘Or this much,’ and flung his arms wide, as far as they’d go, a yard of air between his hands. I gather they’re pretty freewheeling about matters of length on
Orbit.
Then Harton said, ‘If it’s good, it runs long, longer, longest. Maybe two parts, maybe three.’ ”

“Oh, Nate,” Tessa said, “how wonderful. You must be proud of yourself.”

“You’re damn right I am,” he said. “But yikes, the work. It’s going to take some doing. Will you give me whatever you’ve got?”

“When do we start?”

I
hoped they meant a lot to each other.
Later, much later, it was these words of Ken’s that Tessa remembered most vividly whenever she thought of him and herself and Jeff, that special triumvirate as a special grouping in her memory, distinct from all the other groupings that were also forever there in the past, waiting to be picked up and looked at once more, like particular group photographs lifted out of a continuing album recording the years flowing backward.

I hoped they meant a lot to each other.
Actually she had again been thinking of it, she no longer remembered why, on that night in the middle of June when Ken had stumbled on his way to bed and she had cried out in sudden alarm, “What’s wrong, Ken?”

“Nothing, except I’m so tired.” His voice faded on the last word. He was leaning against the jamb of the door to his bedroom, slumping a little, as if his spine were refusing to hold him erect, and she caught at him, her arm suddenly steel-strong as she slipped it around his back below his shoulders, holding him up from that sagging, sliding motion. “I’ll call Mark,” she said. “Let’s get you in bed and I’ll get Mark.”

“Tes, let’s.” It was a whispered sibilance, and her supporting arm felt a tremor waver through his body as he stepped across the space between the door and his bed. He let himself down upon it, his hand going toward the knot of his tie but slipping downward ineffectively to lie helplessly beside him, the fingers dangling, curled, over the edge of the bed. He said something she could not quite hear, something, she thought, about his mother. She loosened the tie for him, undid the top button of his shirt, dialed Mark’s number and said to the answering service, “This may be heart, so if you can’t reach Dr. Waldo right away, please send an ambulance.”

The moment she hung up she thought, I never gave my name and phone number or address, and asked Ken whether she had. He seemed not to hear; he made no answer. She dialed once more and found to her relief that she had begun the first call with her name, address and phone number, had said that the patient was her husband, not herself, and that the answering service knew, despite her calmness, that this was an emergency. Three minutes later the service called once more to say they had been able to reach Dr. Waldo and that he was already on his way.

Only then did she realize that what Ken had mumbled about his mother was “My mother was eighty-five.” Old Mrs. Lynn had died four years before, the week after her eighty-fifth birthday, and several times since then Ken had remarked that he came from a long-lived family, that his mother had lived until eighty-five.

It was a thrombosis, Mark Waldo later explained, within the brain. It was a swift death, direct and kindly, if any dying could be called kindly. He died in the hospital at three in the morning, in the intensive-care unit, with Tessa and Mark beside him to the end. In the briefest possible time thereafter, following the directions he had set forth in his will some twenty years before, she had signed the necessary documents and left his dead body there, “for Science,” and then, in silence, followed Mark to his car and in silence let him drive her home. He went upstairs with her, waited while she called Margie and then Don, and agreed that since Jeff was probably in the middle of exam week, she would put off calling him until the morning. Only when Margie and Nate arrived did Mark Waldo leave. His final words were “Remember, Tessa, he couldn’t have known any pain.”

Don decided that they must tell Jeff at once, exams or no, but it was Margie who called him, Don shoving the phone at her as if it were hers by natural right, this difficult task of announcing the first death in their family.

“It’s pretty bad news, Jeff,” she began. “It’s about Dad.”

“What happened to him?”

“He had a thrombosis, a massive one, in the brain.”

“Then he’s dead.”

“It was very fast. No pain, Dr. Waldo says. He went into coma very quickly.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Tonight, around bedtime, I’m not sure. Mama just came back from the hospital and called us.”

“Is she all right?”

“Well, sort of. Stunned and—but she’s all right. Can you get here, Jeff? We’ll pay back your fare.”

“Sure, yes I can. Right away.”

“Your exams—”

“They’re over with. The last one was Monday. I’m hacking a cab again, but I can cut out anytime. I could get there sometime this afternoon or tonight.”

“I’m glad. It’s awful to think of Dad—” Her voice roughened. “Here, Nate wants to say something.”

Nate took the telephone from her and turned his back to the room, lowering his voice, talking tightly into the mouthpiece so that his words would not carry outward in any spray of sound.

“Jeff, may I put in a word here?”

“Go ahead, sure.”

“This time, I hope you decide to stay right here with her, not at our house.” There was a brief pause. He added, “You always have our place, but this time I—we’re over at your mother’s now, all of us, and I think your Uncle Will and Aunt Amy will probably be here in a day or so, but of course in a few days—”

“Yes, sure, I’ll be there. Tell Mama—can I talk to her?”

“Just a second.” He raised his voice. “Tessa, it’s Jeff.” As she took the telephone, he added, “Margie told him.”

“Hello, Jeff,” she said quietly. “So you know.” She was not crying; she had cried there in the hospital and again when she had called Margie and had to find the words in which to say it, but not since.

“Hi, Mama,” Jeff said. “It’s hard to believe.”

“I still can’t, I think.”

“I’m getting the first plane I can. I’ll get home this afternoon sometime.”

“That’s fine, Jeff. I’m glad.”

“I thought you might like me right there, for maybe a couple of weeks?”

“Oh, I would. That’s really good.”

“I’m sort of rocked—I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“He looked fine when he was out here.”

“When he got home, too. But he was always weary, so he went in early for his annual checkup with Dr. Waldo, and everything checked out the way it should. That was only two months ago, back in April.”

“I can’t seem to take it in.” He hesitated. “I could stay a while, if you want. Like two weeks or so.”

“I do want. Thanks, Jeff.”

“See you tonight then.” But he did not say goodbye and she waited. Then his voice came again. “Mama? I know it must be awful.”

“Yes, Jeffie.” Her voice broke and she whispered, “See you tonight then.”

There was no preparing for the death of a person you loved, Tessa thought often during the days and nights that followed. No arranging of mind or spirit was adequate, no foreviewing of what it might be like was near an approximation. She had always known that Ken would probably die before she did—his ten-year lead toward that finality was not to be gainsaid. Yet now she was in no way free of astonishment, in no degree able to accept this sense of his
nowhereness.
Perhaps those who did believe in heaven or hell were spared this one particular emptiness, which she could think of only as a spatial emptiness. Perhaps those who had funeral plots in cemeteries and vaults and mausoleums were also spared. They could visualize either a destination, like that famous bourne, or at least a resting place, with destination or resting place the available focus for thought or memory.

When there was only this sudden void that she thought of as nowhereness, it was harder to accept or manage the concept. There was no Ken. At the end of the week there were to be simple memorial services, arranged for by Ted Brannick, insisted on by all members of the firm, but finality had already fixed its icy seal upon her, and the memorial service would be a formality to be gone through for the needs of those Ken had worked with for decades.

Margie, Nate, Jeff, as well as Will and Amy, all felt as she did. Nate’s parents, of course, did not, and that was to be expected. But Don as well as Jenny and their children went into orthodox mourning in the sense of prayers and church attendance, and this surprising new turn in Don told her once again how one’s children could develop in unexpected new directions as they reached deeper and deeper into lives of their own shaping. In a way, Don’s new “churchiness,” as Margie called it, added another element to her sense of loss and disorientation: there were many surrogates for nowhereness.

Perhaps it was in part this that made Jeff’s continuing quiet presence in the house, even after the others were all gone again, so important to her. She wondered repeatedly whether she might tell him what his father had said after having seen him with Stuart Gerson, yet she kept shying away from doing it. She thought it Jeff’s due, thought it was something he might like to know and to have, an antidote to what there had been between him and his father, a keepsake as it were, a small legacy.

But even when she firmly decided that it would have to wait for some future day, she knew that having her troubled son there during a time of her own sorrow gave her a comfort she had not known with him for all the years since Placquette. His presence there for all meals, his considerateness in general, his totally unprecedented volubility about his work, all gave her an unexpected sense of support and understanding. Gone was the impersonal tone of the college thesis in what he said about his medical studies. He made everything intensely personal, as if she were a fellow student, sharing in his third-year work, so advanced now and so wide-ranging, going from obstetrics to ophthalmology, from neurology to hematology, going from classrooms and labs into hospital rooms and operating rooms. He made her see the hierarchies already existing and those ahead, from student to intern to first-year residency to second-year residency, and then on into general practice or specialization.

All of it fascinated her, all of it combined to make his stay a memorable experience. Toward the end of his two weeks, something akin to guilt invaded her. It was almost as if she were happy.

“I
T SEEMS TO BE
working out as a trio of pieces,” Nate said to Jeff, glancing over at his typewriter, where a half-written page curved back from the platen of his machine. It was part of his second article for
Orbit,
nearly ready to be airmailed to London. Ian Harton had liked the first one so much, it appeared, that though he was temperamentally unable to be lavish with praise, he had conveyed it clearly enough in terms that Nate found far more stimulating. “It sounds to me,” he had written Nate, “like the opening shot in a series, which I gather is just what you had in mind. So I’ll hold this one and then run in sequence in three consecutive issues, perhaps four, however it works out. Not to rush you but when you can guess at probable dates for completing the others, please say.”

“If you’d like to read the first piece,” Margie said to her brother, “Nate has a carbon.”

“I’d better wait till it’s in print,” Jeff said. “If there’s something in it that hits me the wrong way”—he looked uncomfortable—“well, I wouldn’t want to sound off, as if I were trying on a bit of censorship.”

It was a hot Friday night, the end of his second week at home, and he was beginning to feel impatient to get off to his own world again. Not that there had been any tight moments, not even with his mother when they were alone. Right after a death, all patterns altered. Certainly she had not once come close to her old trick of assuming that somehow or other,
this
time if she said something intrusive, it would not be intrusive, or if she asked something intrusive, it would not be what in his earlier days he used to call “digging.”