Electric City: A Novel (30 page)

Sophie watched for a second package from Martin that never arrived. Returning home at the end of a long day of classes—molecular biology, organic chemistry, anatomy, statistics—she would reach for the mail, hopeful and hungry. Month by month, she pretended not to care that the letters were never from Canada.

New Year’s Eve was a landmine, an explosion waiting to happen.
You could have at least called from an anonymous pay phone
, Sophie thought.
Or you could have invited me to visit, even for a day. I would have used an alias, climbed on a northbound bus in a heartbeat
. She
blamed Martin for losing track of the difference between courage and cruelty.

Simon told her he had tried hitchhiking to Electric City from California, but turned around again almost immediately, claiming that the West Coast was the only sanctuary he wanted.

“I’m never coming back,” he confided to her. She couldn’t help feeling that the sentence might have been Martin’s too.

When the wet spring of 1968 bloomed in silence, not even a picture postcard with a pretty stamp, she grew convinced he must be happy to have disappeared. Giving up one home for another: people did it all the time.

One Friday night after dinner with her parents, her father said that the only way he knew to avoid despair was to put himself to work in the service of something greater.

“Apply the gift of your mind,” he said.

She touched the lacquered edges of the sign on the wall of David’s study, the one that said
THINK
. There was a small fluorescent desk lamp that her father always turned on before the Sabbath began; he left the light burning throughout the night. Standing close enough to touch it, she had to resist the urge to switch it off.

“I thought that’s what I’ve been doing,” she said. “Mind over matter.”

David sat down on the cot that was used for overnight guests, causing a complaint from the springs. “Edison always kept a couch in his office,” he said. “He believed naps were necessary for problem solving.”

“Maybe I should try sleeping in here,” Sophie said, only half kidding. In fact, she had finally begun looking for a studio apartment
within a block or two of Union, a long-delayed decision to move out of her parents’ house. They could all stop pretending it was convenient and inexpensive for her to keep living at home. A change of scenery might shake off the stupor of inertia once and for all.

Miriam stepped into the study, handing an orange to her husband and another one to her daughter. She had her own beliefs about problem solving, usually involving the taste of something sweet.

“I just heard on the local news,” Miriam said. “Instead of being torn down, the Van Curler Hotel is being redesigned as a community college.”

Sophie’s belly tightened at the mention of the name. She had always assumed that one of these days she would bump into Gloria or Arthur somewhere in town—but so far, nothing. Once she was supposed to attend a dance performance at the Unitarian Society, a gleaming white building located alongside the Steinmetz property and nearly opposite the Van Curlers’ house. She planned on arriving early and sitting on the stone bench under the trees, waiting for a sign. The performance had been canceled due to a blizzard, and Sophie never saw the fox again.

“You see?” Miriam said, while Sophie deliberately avoided her mother’s eyes. “The world goes on.”

A week after the death of Robert Kennedy, whose assassination followed too close on the heels of the death of Martin Luther King Jr., Sophie made a decision to talk to the river.

If Martin could make a new life, so can I. If my parents could do it, so can I.

She sat on a slab of shale at the edge of the water and gave herself a stern lecture as though Martin were admonishing her, cheering her on.

“Get yourself through premed, then medical school, all of it. There are always going to be sick people and you might as well be one of the healers.”

She chanted words like
photosynthesis, leukocytes, autoimmune system. Electrocardiogram
. As if the syllables themselves could keep her from giving up.

In her blank new apartment on Jay Street, for the first two nights in a row, Sophie dreamed that Martin was climbing steel towers while she was the one on the ground, holding someone’s life in her hands.

S
OPHIE WAS ASSISTING
a research project in Ellis Hospital, wired on caffeine and too little sleep. It was a late July afternoon in 1969, when everybody in Electric City was talking about the Apollo space mission. Late that night there would be an astronaut landing on the moon.

Following a stainless steel trolley being pushed down the hall on the fourth floor, Sophie watched the candy striper move so slowly that the five vases were shivering but not toppling. Roses and daisies and plenty of ferns, not original in the slightest, but designed to add something representing nature within these otherwise sterile and bland walls. She saw the way the volunteer’s cheerful silhouette promised comfort, and flashed back to that brief phase of her own life, viewed from a vast distance, as if through a telescope instead of a microscope.

The entire floor was eerily quiet. Even the nurses’ station was in a kind of stasis, no code reds or blues on the intercom. Just a steady beeping from several monitors, and Sophie’s rubber-soled shoes on the waxed floor, the hushed wheels of the cart ahead of her. In each room she passed, visitors were sitting bedside with televisions turned to low. In place of war images, the screens were all depicting the anxious hopeful faces of the team at NASA, who were in turn mesmerized by their own screens tracking the path of a fragile capsule in space.

For a moment, Sophie perceived the brick hospital building with its numbered wings and hallways, its beige walls and fluorescent lights, as though it were the entire planet. Someone was giving birth and nearby someone else was dying. Strangers lay asleep in identical beds, while others lay awake in pain. X-rays and bandages, blood and saline. Machines were pouring light through bones and extracting toxins. No wonder people brought flowers when they visited this place, an attempt to bring reminders of life inside. And maybe to remind themselves that they were the ones who could step back outside the elevators and return to the world.

In the neuropsychiatry ward, most of the patients were sleeping. With special permission arranged by her psychology professor, Sophie was allowed to read charts as long as she didn’t disturb the silence. It was the fourth room that startled her. A sad woman in a lavender nightgown, IV pole on one side of the bed, its thin line disappearing under the sheets. Her wide open blue eyes didn’t blink when Sophie walked into the room. The volunteer placed a vase of six pink roses on the nightstand and left without a word.

Though much older and paler, mouth downturned as though wearing a mask, she was unmistakable: minus pearls and makeup, minus cashmere sweater and elegant upswept hair.

“Hi, Mrs. Van Curler,” Sophie said gently, and the woman’s expression seemed to snap into focus, some shift of thought or emotion bringing her back to the present. She looked at Sophie and smiled, but it was more like a question than an acknowledgment.

“Hello,” she said, and then, “Do I know you?”

Sophie was embarrassed now, for both of them, and regretting her awkward use of Henry’s mother’s name; after all, she was just a premedical student with a chart in her hands. She tugged at her nametag and
leaned a bit closer to her bed so it could be easily read. Gloria shook her head and lifted one hand out from beneath the sheets to wave it weakly in the air.

“No reading glasses, my dear.”

“Sophie Levine,” said Sophie.

Gloria waited, giving no sign of recognition.

“I’m—I mean, I was—a friend of Henry’s.” Speaking the words out loud, her cheeks felt hot, and she wanted to grab the sentence out of the air. Nothing to do but keep going now.

“You gave me my first glass of champagne. I was seventeen. It was my birthday.” Then her throat constricted. She couldn’t say it had been the day before New Year’s Eve, not to Henry’s mother.

Gloria shut her eyes, and a long moment passed. Sophie feared that the stricken woman might actually want her to go away, and she looked toward the door where the cart had already moved on.

“I remember,” Henry’s mother said, her eyelids fluttering but still closed. “Of course I do.”

The IV bag dripped so slowly, like the end of a rainy day. A call button beeped from the room next door.

“Sophie Levine,” Gloria said, and then whispered something to herself, far too softly for Sophie to understand. She looked toward the ceiling. “Can I ask you a favor?” The one free hand waved again, and Sophie saw her veins through her nearly translucent skin. She gestured toward the closet. “My bathrobe?”

Sophie retrieved it, lavender silk that matched her nightgown, filmy and soft and exactly what she would want Gloria to have, even here in the hospital. The IV made it impossible to put on the sleeves, though, so the robe draped like a shawl across her shoulders, and she winced a bit when Sophie fluffed the pillows. Her sparse white hair floated
about her. There was a deep purple bruise on her chest, spreading in an oblong just below the neckline of her gown. No complaint, however, just that glimpse of pain, followed by her smile, restored.

“Such weak hearts we have,” she said.

Sophie’s own heart pounded fiercely in reply.

“Your heart seems fine,” Sophie said, pointing first to the monitor’s steady rhythm and then at the chart she held in her hands.

“On Arthur’s side,” she began, and then paused in search of the missing detail while the equipment beeped into the empty space. Here was a woman who had lost both of her children, first and last. What chart could make any sense of that?

“When the cardiologist located Arthur’s blockage,” Gloria said, “he discovered that my husband’s heart had repaired itself.”

Sophie felt her pulse racing, as she suddenly pictured the four of them seated around Henry’s dining room table. The large chandelier. The color of the lobster bisque with saffron. The somber-faced paintings on the walls and the linen napkin twisting into a knot between her hands.

“Repaired itself, like a bypass?” she said.

Gloria nodded.

“I didn’t know that was possible,” Sophie said.

Gloria lifted her colorless hand again. “It can only happen at a certain age,” she said. “That’s what the doctors explained. The heart has to have enough time—”

Sophie’s breath caught again, and Gloria’s mind seemed to turn a corner.

“I need to ask one more favor,” Henry’s mother said. She paused, held Sophie’s gaze with her own. “Will you stay with me?”

M
ARTIN WAS UP
high on a telephone pole, canvas vest full of pockets and tool belt so familiar after almost two years that he could hardly remember wearing anything else. There was heavy weather visible on the eastern horizon, far enough not to be dangerous but dark enough to observe. Wires stretching in both directions against the pale sky looked like sheet music waiting for notes.

He remembered the time his entire freshman class had made a simulated thunderstorm in the high school gymnasium. Everyone sat on the polished wooden floor, arranged in a circle so they could see each other, and the phys ed teacher at the center turned with open arms to gesture and guide the transitions. A few hundred students rubbed their palms together, snapped their fingers, slapped palms on their thighs, stamped their feet. From sprinkling to dropping to pounding to rumbling, and then reversing their way to hushed calm. Conducted like a choir, hands and feet as instruments, becoming a force of nature, imitating—as if they could summon it—rain.