Electric City: A Novel (33 page)

“I miss apple picking with you kids,” Miriam said. The car wheels’ music changed notes after getting off the bridge.

“I remember,” Sophie said.

“Your father doesn’t even like to visit California,” Miriam said, jumping to a topic she was evidently brooding about nonstop. “He thinks everyone out there is a little crazy.”

Sophie laughed, but her mother did not. “It’s true,” Miriam said. “He said as much to Simon and by now he’s talked himself into it completely.” She turned toward Sophie in her seat, allowing a glance at the worried look on her face. “Did you know that Simon’s wife, I mean, his girlfriend, is going to have the baby at home? Without a doctor? What do you think about that?”

Sophie hesitated, keeping her attention on the road, watching for signs marking the orchard entrance. Hardly anything looked
recognizable after she crossed the bridge. There were brand-new houses along the road flanking the river, oversize and ugly, with three-car garages on display. She wondered who was moving here, from where, and why. It was a strangely optimistic act, given how everything in town seemed so emaciated.

“Are you sure about their plans?” she asked her mother. Finally, a series of small red arrows appeared, and then the familiar faded painting of a Red Delicious apple, which was still nailed to the same telephone pole. Riverview Orchards.

“A midwife!” Miriam exclaimed. “She’s using a midwife.”

Sophie had delivered her first baby only two months earlier, a routine birth but with plenty of standard hospital drama nonetheless. There were fetal monitors and epidurals and she remembered thinking there was nothing all that “natural” about it. The mother was twenty years old, her husband had to be escorted from the delivery room when he almost passed out, and the healthy baby boy weighed seven pounds exactly.

After it was all over, Sophie changed out of her scrubs, went home to her apartment, and immersed herself in a bath where she sobbed for nearly an hour. She had no idea if she wanted a baby of her own, now or ever. She was happy for Simon and his girlfriend, happy for the couples whose babies she had helped guide into the world. But some part of her kept mourning for Gloria Van Curler, losing both of her sons.

What courage it takes
, she thought,
to become anyone’s mother
.

During her four years of medical school, Sophie had fallen mostly in love twice. The first man, named Winston, was a year ahead of her in school but somehow felt like a younger cousin; he lived with two other
medical students and an ancient, overweight cat to whom she became increasingly allergic. Alistair the cat was her excuse for ending the relationship, although both knew she wasn’t adequately smitten to overrule the problem.

“You just want to be somewhere else,” Winston said, on what turned out to be the last morning he and Sophie woke up together.

He was right, and she admitted as much, sliding back into her clothes while he regarded her ruefully from the disheveled bed. Neither of them mentioned the idea that he could have moved into her place, or that they might have found a place together without the cat.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and then after sneezing eight times in quick succession, she kissed him goodbye without regret.

The second time, she found herself in something more convincingly serious with a man she met at Roosevelt Hospital while interviewing for her internship in New York City. Paul was French Canadian and Jewish and a visiting specialist in radiology; Sophie was attracted by his accent and his thick head of dark curls shot through with silver. His brown eyes twinkled and his teeth were charmingly crooked. They dated steadily as soon as she moved to Manhattan; two months later, he shocked her by asking her to marry him, and she shocked herself by almost saying yes.

It was when Paul turned stone-faced in response to Sophie’s request for a long engagement that she realized the idea of moving with him to Montreal had been a significant factor in her desire. Maybe even more important than she was letting either of them know.

“You know I don’t speak French,” she said, apologetically and repeatedly in the days following his proposal.

Paul replied the same way each time, frowning. “But you’ll learn; you’re an exceptionally smart girl.”

Sophie flinched at the word
girl
, and began to feel scraped by the edge of superiority in his voice; she wondered how quickly they would grow tired or at least resentful of each other as soon as they crossed the border.

“And my medical training?” she said. “I have to complete it here in the United States.”

Paul demonstrated his favorite shrug. “Are you so very certain of your need to be a physician, Sophie? Would we really need two Jewish doctors in the family?”

Which was, of course, the kiss of death. He went back alone to Montreal and she discovered that her weekends filled up perfectly well with long late shifts at the hospital and a half-serious passion for reading mysteries to help her through her solitary nights.

I am waiting while pretending not to wait
, she admitted to herself.

Wedding announcements featuring various high school classmates proliferated for a while in the copies of the
Electric City Gazette
sent by her well-meaning parents. Miriam gradually gave up on her practice of asking Sophie if there were any new men in her life.

At the end of Rosh Hashana, Sophie headed back to New York City on the last train, watching the light from the moon on the Hudson. The playful dance of it mesmerized her, moving like time-lapse photography—a city at night viewed from space or at least the altitude of a mountain, the crazy-rapid movement of cars or beings or life inside illuminated buildings. She kept thinking this was some kind of language, a coded conversation between herself and the future, or the past, or everything at once.

Was time sticky like amber? She hoped it was.

M
OONLIGHT GUIDED JOSEPH
Longboat through the woods surrounding the Steinmetz house: yellow birch, white ash, cherry oak, birch again, pine, pine. There was an owl, then its mate, then silence unbroken by footfall. The melody of Great Creek sang in his right ear, a steady companion.

His friend Proteus was dying; they were the only two who knew how close the moment really was. The Hayden family slept soundly in their beds; they would barely feel his presence in their dreams. Joseph had a key that he rarely used, but tonight it let him open the heavy front door, slowly, slowly, so he could climb the carpeted stairs toward the room whose soft lamplight leaked under the door.

Steinmetz, lying on his distorted back under a goose-feather blanket, was disappearing, shrinking beyond even his smallness. Joseph recalled the first time he saw him and thought he was a child. Now the barely visible rise and fall of his chest assured Joseph he wasn’t too late; there was time to say one last goodbye.

The strained heart was tired, and the lungs had compressed too much to sustain; all of this Joseph comprehended without quite knowing the medical facts. The strenuous cross-country journey with the Hayden brood turned out to be more costly than anyone expected. Now the Wizard’s eternal spirit was ready to depart its temporary vessel; that’s what Joseph understood.

While he positioned himself in a wooden chair next to the bed, Proteus’s eyelids fluttered open once, twice, then closed against the exertion. Joseph placed a hand on his dear friend’s wide forehead, leaned in to touch his lips there too. Nothing needed to be said anymore. Their decades-long conversation was complete.

Holding the four directions as a cluster of eagle feathers in his left hand, Joseph waved imaginary ceremonial smoke with his right hand, allowing it to remain unlit for the sake of remaining imperceptible to the family. He beckoned forgiveness from the gods who were already waiting, already here to receive.

After Brother Proteus exhaled his last breath, Joseph stayed a little while longer, moonlight shifting its subtle angles in the vast night sky. This agonized body had let go. Matter transformed again to energy, restored to itself.

Joseph Longboat returned the way he came, through the forest of pine, yellow birch, cherry oak, white ash.

Y
ET ANOTHER AUTUMN
had nearly come and gone, and Midge was starting to recognize one or two of the fellow mourners who visited the cemetery at this season’s edge—or at least the ones who brought flowers and decorations. The bicentennial year of 1976 was mostly over, but some of the veterans’ graves were still being draped in stars and stripes. She had long ago given up trying to understand why she readily made this pilgrimage to Daddy Steinmetz’s grave year in and year out, while the graves of her own parents were looked after more randomly, if not indifferently. Perhaps because their death dates were in spring, making it easier to treat the anniversary as something more like a sweeping meditation. She would scrape away the dirty residue of leaf-mold under snow, nurture the new growth of grass around the headstones.

But it was here at the Vale Cemetery, each 26th of October, that Midge felt a curious blend of gratitude and loss that resonated with the extinguishing colors overhead. No one had ever filled the enormous space this small man had left behind when he died. She held to the conviction that every person owned a kind of energetic fingerprint—a wave like light? a molecular portrait?—and when they were gone, this unique signature disappeared forever. If she closed her eyes and listened, she could almost conjure the strange way Steinmetz pronounced her name—
Meedge!
—and yet, so many decades on, his dear face could only be accurately remembered with photographic assistance.

Today the thought once again crossed her mind that her adopted grandfather’s presence didn’t really need to be visited here, at the cemetery. Surely in the afterlife his ghost would be happiest floating near the river, smoking cigars at his long-vanished cabin; maybe playing poker or entertaining a group of departed friends in the equally ghostly house on Wendell Avenue. And what made people think they could only resume incomplete conversations with the dead at the place where their empty bodies were last seen? The idea made about as much sense as waiting for a garden to seed and resurrect itself, yet still Midge stood at the familiar grave marker, paying her respects.

Chalk it up to habit,
she thought, allowing a fleeting smile.
If Martin were still here, maybe we’d take a walk and tell each other stories. Maybe we’d spot an eagle above the river.

She was pretty sure that Martin had tracked his own anniversaries of loss, at least when he was still in Electric City. But it had been almost nine years since she’d even received a postcard from him, Canadian-stamped and greeting her with deliberately vague descriptions of his whereabouts. The Vietnam War hadn’t killed him, that was a blessing, but exile was itself a kind of death, when she thought about it. She hoped that Annie had been able to see her own grandson one last time before she died, even if it meant Martin had managed to sneak into town and out again without Midge knowing a thing. Everyone had to be so careful, it seemed, just to stay free.

After kneeling down to scoop her bare fingers into the soft earth, removing just enough dirt to make room for her offering, Midge settled the single white orchid so that its roots could find purchase. Now adorning the lower corner of the Steinmetz gravestone, the flower seemed to regard her with its own face, as if in quiet acknowledgment of their history.

She returned to her feet and felt a throbbing in her shoulder, accompanied by tightness at the small of her back—her body’s usual chorus of minor annoyances. A neighbor had recently told her she ought to consider seeing a chiropractor, but Midge explained that she had tried that once, when she lived in California, and found she greatly disliked the sensation as well as the sound of her own bones being shifted around. She thought of all the years Daddy Steinmetz had lived with his own spine bent into the form of a question mark. The pain must have been unbearable, and yet he never complained.