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  Jean was about to send and then she hesitated. She wondered about Mark’s helping Sophie. Jean thought she was creepy, but maybe Mark was touched by her. “Vulnerable” was his type—he loved a project. Or maybe he was merely intrigued by Sandrine’s daughter, her modern replacement. A young citoyenne of the European Community not bound by too-early motherhood; a postcard from the unlived past. Or the insufficiently lived past—with its inexpungible allure. She’d listened countless times to his reminiscences over the years, summer of ’67, definitely his summer of love, lying on the bottom of a moored and wind-rocked boat with sodden life preservers for a bed, madly kissing.

  The scene had expanded, whether in fact or just in her mind she no longer knew, to encompass a mist of desperate daily couplings on the beach after dark, protected from the violent wind by the great stone wall, the mighty ramparts of St. Malo. A month or two of blissed-out first love, which of course meant first sex, before the fête that would turn up the solid Breton who would win Sandrine away from him—a much more promising mate (a man and not a boy)—before the wind grew too strong and blew skinny seventeen-year-old Mark back across the Channel.

  Perhaps, who knew, he saw in Sophie the woman Sandrine might have become if he’d stayed—rowed the boat out with his slender French bride, fishing net for a veil. Who didn’t have such fantasies? Their French children, in striped sweaters and ribboned berets, playing on a beach in winter. Helping Sophie was possibly no more than his way of thanking the mother for that first love; Jean understood exactly how its glow only increased with time—no different, say, from her own recent thought for Larry on the Circle Line. Experimental nostalgia, not a game plan. It was part of being their age now, picking over the past like a shoreline, searching out the good shells and the green glass and (always ambitious, ever curious) the bottled message. The future was kids’ stuff: lost in space.

  Jean canceled her reply. Instead, in the message box she wrote: Something for you, and forwarded it to Mark’s office address. Three months after her initial, and useless, reply to Giovana’s letter, Jean was done mediating.

  When Jean and Bill were alone for the first time, he waved her over: come close. It took her a while to understand what it was he wanted, his speech smudged by drugs and, she suspected (but no doctor would confirm), another stroke. Dad patted his beard stiffly, and he kept on patting it, swatting at it, his round eyes staring at her intensely, Father Time. His expression suggested this might be an involuntary spasm of the hand, and one that was scaring him.

  Jean’s difficulty in understanding him was increased by her own fear—this sudden leap into great age and no way of knowing if it would go quiet again or accelerate. Like a speeded-up film, she thought, tracking the decay of some soft fruit, peach or plum, time burrowing toward the irreducible stone. She was also hampered by inexperience; they had always understood each other effortlessly. So who was he, this old man with the fearful darting eyes? Maybe an ancestor, blue-eyed Confederate general, but not Dad.

  Finally she got it. She held up his razor and gestured like she was shaving her own neck—without realizing, she had adopted his muteness. That was it. He wanted her to shave him. He nodded vigorously, humorlessly, head bobbing in accord or active senescence.

  As she cranked his bed, then pulled and pushed the pillows at his back, she caught the flash of impatience in his eyes, as different in Dad as the beard: Bill, who had never shown anything other than infinite and witty tolerance. She hurried. A hot towel to loosen his pores; soap not cream. She steadied her right hand with her left and began, drawing down from cheekbone to jaw, desperate to live up to this honor—he might after all have asked Phyllis. Maybe he only had the beard because he was waiting for her to shave it off. And this turned out to be more difficult than she imagined. Like changing a diaper, it was a simple task that nevertheless could not be intuited.

  Bill’s skin had no spring and, afraid of scraping too hard, she pulled the razor gently, ineffectually, and repeatedly until he called her off, flapping his big hands in distress and irritation. Jean only managed to clear a single strip, like snow shoveled from a narrow walkway. She wiped the remaining soap, but the nurse who came in to give her a message looked doubtful—was this a rash, or an outbreak of alopecia? The note said Larry Mond had called, and he’d left a number. Jean had no idea how he knew she was there, but the mystery was soon explained, for after the nurse came Marianne.

  It was the first she’d seen of her sister since her arrival, and Marianne’s indifference had hardened whatever soft pockets remained between them. So Jean was surprised, when the dark head with a new boyish haircut appeared, by how pleased she was to see her. She could only attribute the shift in her feelings to their old man’s humbling state, and to the memory—inescapable in this hospital setting—of Billy’s death.

  They sat with Dad—Marianne didn’t comment on his patchy beard, presumably because she thought it his own handiwork—until he visibly tired, his lower lids drooping, wet and red rimmed as a hound’s. They kissed him and went outside the building so Marianne could smoke. Another pleasant surprise—for once she wasn’t hiding it from Jean in a bid to seem more perfect.

  Her sister had lost weight, and not all of it from her head. She asked if Larry had gotten through to her. Sitting on the steps, Jean was reminded that Larry knew Doug Micklethwaite, Marianne’s lawyer husband, and all this seemed so promising she didn’t notice that everything was promising compared with intensive care.

  “What do you say we have dinner, tonight, à quatre?” Jean said impulsively. The phrase itself conferred an air of festivity, she thought. “Or maybe we should include Mom—if she can be persuaded to come out.” Jean was high with restless inactivity and the discovery of a possible friendship with her sister, hardly daring to think about the chance to see Larry, and in the safety of a family gathering.

  They called Doug, who’d get hold of Larry: the dinner was arranged. And then Marianne, looking in no way motherly in her tight prefaded flares, started to giggle. Jean knew it was partly the nervous tension from worry over Dad, but still she wondered if her usually downbeat sister could possibly be having an affair—how to account for this change of mood and shape and style, the pixie hair, the plausible hipsters?

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know why I’m thinking of it,” Marianne protested, waiting to be begged some more.

  “Come on—what’s so funny?”

  “Well, remember that vibrator you made me steal?”

  “Yeah?” She hadn’t made her steal anything, although it was true she’d encouraged her. And for admission into one of Jean’s clubs, she’d also required that Marianne “get” a Playboy magazine and then plant it in the raincoat pocket of Desmond, the doorman. And yes, once, in a mad rush of power, she’d also stipulated a vibrator. When Marianne miraculously produced the thing, ivory plastic and about a foot long, Jean evinced a step-motherly annoyance. She wouldn’t accept it—clearly labeled on the package, as she pointed out, a “massage wand”—and that had been their last club.

  “You know—that time you refused to acknowledge my most fabulous feat? Well, you were right. In a way.”

  “How do you mean, I was right?” This was information Jean wanted to have.

  “I didn’t steal it.”

  “What? But I remember it. Vividly. It was about this long.” Jean held her hands up, rigid, a yard apart. And soon they were convulsing—with tension and dread and nostalgia, intermittently gasping for breath, rocking, Marianne releasing the occasional honk through a new high-pitched laugh. She must be having an affair, Jean thought, recovering herself. And this new trill has met the approval of her lover—it was probably an echo of his own laugh. Other smokers looked at them and smiled; this wasn’t the usual mood on the hospital steps.

  “No, I didn’t steal it. Didn’t you ever notice they were kept on the wall behind the counter, along with the rainbow-swirl, corrugated, and chocolate-flavored condoms—you don’t see those any
more.”

  “Hey, you’re right. Weird they didn’t catch on, huh?”

  Marianne was fighting to go on with her story. “I bought it!” she said triumphantly.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah—I told the guy, do you remember the old guy at Drake’s, the one with the walrus mustache?”

  “Course. Mr. Drake.”

  “Well, I told him it was for my father.” Both girls shrieked. “I told Mr. Drake that Dad had a sore back from tennis and needed a massager.”

  “I can’t believe you had the nerve,” Jean said, calmed by admiration, thinking of the sober, grandfatherly figure of Mr. Drake. “What did he say?”

  “He stared at me for a while like he didn’t know what to do and then finally he turned around and got it off the wall and handed it over. He said…it was nonrefundable.”

  Both girls burst out again, jammed snorts escaping as they tried to get themselves under control. “What did you do with that thing anyway?”

  “Well, I tried it out, of course. Or tried to try it out, then I was so scared Gladys or Mom would find it I tossed it. In the laundry room—I stuffed it into someone’s basket. And get this…” She had to pause again, her eyes tearful slits. “Turned out it was Mrs. Wiedermann’s laundry basket!” They were actually slapping their knees at the thought of this widowed neighbor with her antimacassared slipper chairs (the girls sometimes went over there for Mrs. Wiedermann’s poppy-seed cake) uncovering such a thing among her fresh-laundered doilies.

  Jean thought for a moment of confiding in Marianne about Dan—a ludicrous impulse. Should she not tell her about Bill’s affair? No, indecorous here on his hospital steps, and anyway she didn’t need to know. Jean thought that even as an adult her sister would be devastated by such news. But in the urge to draw her close, to somehow commemorate the drama they were all struggling through, she ventured an intimacy. “Can you imagine having an affair?”

  “God no” came the automatic reply. Marianne was a person blessed by absolute certainty and a plan for everything, and for once Jean didn’t sneer. Marianne was admirable—and she was right. “Imagine pawning your family for some lousy roll in the hay—yet you hear about people doing it all the time. Pathetic. Low-IQ behavior. Not to mention totally wrong and gross and lame. No, I think Mrs. Wiedermann’s wand is the only solution.” Jean, who was tiring of all this, saw Phyllis, one step up. Neither sister had seen her coming.

  “I thought I’d find you two out here—what’s so funny? What’s this about Mrs. Wiedermann?” Phyllis asked, cautiously delighted by this new and public ease between her daughters. “Died last year, you know. Eighty-two years old. She had quite a sizable obituary in the Times. It said she was a survivor of the camps, I can’t remember which. Lost her entire family. Arrived alone on a boat at sixteen without a word of English and not a soul in the world and got a job at Saks… Mr. Wiedermann was a big store executive. And to think all those years we had no idea. Your father’s asleep,” Phyllis said, just the smallest touch reproachfully. “And what may I ask is so darn funny?”

  “Listen, Mom, we’ve got a plan,” Jean said.

  “Yeah,” Marianne chimed in, “and you’re coming. Dinner with Larry Mond.”

  “Oh my goodness, is he in town?” Phyllis asked. “I can’t think when I last saw Larry. In the flesh, that is. It would be fun, but really I don’t think I can,” she said.

  “You need to get out,” Jean appealed.

  “Dad would want you to,” Marianne said. “The three of us and Larry, and Dougie is going to join us later. When will we have another chance?”

  “They don’t let you in here at night anyway,” Jean added.

  “Well,” their mother said, still puckered with worry but clearly basking in this consideration from her girls, “all right.” She glanced up at the hospital as if Dad could overhear.

  That evening, the sisters marched Phyllis down Third Avenue, arms hooked as if in custody, the three of them chirruping all the way to the small French bistro on East Sixty-ninth. As they approached, Jean spotted Larry across the street: sage-green summer suit blown open, blue shirt flattened against his lean shape, a triangle of tan skin below the neck. First he embraced Phyllis, whose arthritic bejeweled hand tightly clasped his neck, then Marianne, and then, briefly, Jean, looking directly at her as he stepped back and just said, “So.” He pushed aside a bit of hair at the front—longer now, Jean noted, more like the old days.

  It was only seven-thirty and fully light outside, but the restaurant, semiunderground like Jean’s kitchen, gave a feeling of the night unfolding—the waiters in their formal black and white, the vellum glow of a dozen low-watt sconces, the red banquettes and many mirrors; a French chanteuse piping a wartime memory through hidden speakers. Bien sûr, ce n’est pas la Seine…mais c’est jolie tout dé même, à Göttingen…

  When Doug arrived, straight from court, there was renewed champagne, though there was nothing to celebrate, and the mood remained vaguely hysterical. Nobody talked about Bill’s predicament. Any anecdote that brought in at least three people at the table was told and retold like a famous joke, producing grateful guffaws and a revelation for Jean: she’d been wrong all these years, hiding away. Her sister looked glamorous in a shiny green dress, and happy, Jean noted, once again impressed by Marianne. She seemed to be having an affair with her husband.

  In fact, it was all going so well that when Jean heard her mother hoot and slam down her glass, she thought Phyllis was launching a raucous toast.

  “I really don’t give a shit anymore.” She was practically shouting. “But don’t, if you please, tell me it’s not about tits and ass—I mean, honestly, Bill Warner is not going to say it’s about tits and ass, now is he? Mainly tits, I can tell you. I don’t care what he said. He said she was his intellectual equal. He said she’s a person who can understand what you’re saying. A person who listens, a person who hears. Well, I say, hear this, William Walton Warner, and understand: I’m—still—here.”

  Jean felt all her mother’s humiliation—a sexual jealousy intact, and raw, after twenty years—is that how she herself would sound about Giovana when she was sixty-six? But her empathy was challenged by the cruelty of her mother’s timing: unburdening herself with Dad hooked up on the fifth floor of the hospital, unable not only to reply but to speak at all. Was that why Phyllis had climbed in beside him in the mechanical bed? Now that he was helpless, she could reclaim him.

  Doug looked at his plate and slipped an arm around Marianne’s shoulder—which she didn’t appear to notice, her brown eyes glassy with unshed tears. To think Jean had nearly told her, only this afternoon. Larry put his arm around Phyllis—brave man. And suddenly Jean knew exactly who her father’s lover had been. The woman she’d called Auntie Eunice, her conservation-minded marching partner. It was true—once such a feature in their lives, she had disappeared completely, as if banished. The silence was so heavy, even the waiters were waxworks, an improvement on their ostentatious background tinkling throughout the evening.

  Larry signaled for the check and Jean walked around the table. “Come on, Mom,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  Outside, Doug and Marianne, picking her way in spike heels, walked west arm in arm—rare night alone in the city, and he’d booked a hotel on the park. Watching them go, Jean hoped they’d recover their date.

  Phyllis, steadied by the night air, claimed she wanted to walk but was easily persuaded to accept a lift. Larry had driven—a green Land-Rover Defender, totally unsuited to civilian urban use. After he helped Phyllis into the front passenger seat—she may as well have been mounting a horse—he opened the backseat door for Jean, and before she could hoist herself in, awkward with her unyielding sateen pencil skirt, he touched her wrist and spoke quietly.

  “Have lunch with me tomorrow. I’d like to see Bill, if he’s receiving—I could pick you up.”

  Jean could only nod in reply—no energy for confidences. She felt palpably weak. Things losing their force,
Jean thought; this time the thing was ourselves.

  “Call me in the morning and tell me how he is. How you all are.”

  “Yes,” Jean said, pulling herself in. “Mom is in the library tomorrow morning,” she added, hatching a whole plan without secrets. “Maybe you could bring her up when you come to visit Dad.” She wasn’t going to leave Phyllis alone.

  They settled on one-thirty, giving Larry time to dispatch what he called his morning load, which made Jean think of laundry, and therefore of the two of them encumbered, last December in the Paradise. Larry hadn’t once mentioned his wife, presumably in Princeton while he toiled through his summer, alone in the city.

  Outside Phyllis’s building they said a quick good night, and Jean shepherded her mother, smaller than ever, into the polished lobby. He waited until they were inside before pulling away, and the groan of his army engine, even this reminded her of Dad. The moment Larry was gone she returned to worrying. Bill’s difficulty breathing today, how long could it possibly go on? Instead of getting better he seemed to be breaking down, in sections. Phyllis slumped on the elevator bench and Jean closed her eyes and leaned against the mirrored wall, thinking about the morning and the drive up to the hospital, wondering if she should call Marianne when she got in. She buried a crazy impulse to find Auntie Eunice, as if she alone could make Dad better. If she was even still alive.

  The next morning Jean got up to the hospital a little later than usual, her head pounding. She was intercepted in the hall by Joe, their ally among the nurses in the ICU. He explained that Bill had been taken downstairs to have a breathing tube inserted into his throat: intubation.

  “Why couldn’t they do it here?” she said, fearing a surreptitious tracheotomy. “Is there some more intensive care somewhere else, like a breathing department?”

  The nurse, who admitted he didn’t know why, got no credit for his straight talk, and Jean’s blood pressure rose sharply when she saw her father, feet first, being wheeled back into his cubicle. He was unconscious—sedated—and ashen, with his flaccid mouth open and drooling around a blue plastic pipe, looking as if he’d swallowed a snorkel. But eventually Jean was persuaded that, although it was violent, at least they were finally acting like they were trying to help him. How much of this he was aware of, no one could tell them. She left the hospital early, desperate for air herself and convinced that he was out cold for the day. She’d perch in the sun on the gleaming micadusted wall and wait, to warn Phyllis about Dad’s tube before she went up to him, and to head Larry off.