Golden Age Page 11

  It went like that all day: Charlie and Arthur sitting here and there, chatting, while Andy eavesdropped. Charlie was a good listener, and so was Arthur. Arthur didn’t talk only about Tim, but he did tell Charlie about the time that Tim went with his friends the Sloan brothers when they sneaked out one night in their father’s work truck. They were driving along a country road at about 1:30 in the morning. Two other boys were in the back, and the truck went off the edge and rolled into a field. The boys in the back were thrown clear, and everyone was fine. They went to the Sloans’ place, and took the truck out behind the garage, found hammers in the workshop, and hammered out the dents. The dad, according to the older Sloan boy, didn’t notice a thing.

  Charlie told about how, when he was seven, he walked out of the house and took the bus to the pool without telling anyone. His mom had figured out where he was headed by the fact that his trunks and towel were gone. Instead of punishing him, she got him a bus pass and made sure that the driver for that route knew his name.

  Arthur told about his boarding school—Andy hadn’t known that Arthur went to boarding school. His favorite history teacher was a fellow from Belfast, who spoke with a liquid Irish accent. Instead of talking about whatever was in the textbook (though he did test them on that), he would give them poems to memorize—“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “O Captain! My Captain!,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” And Arthur said he could remember them still, all the verses, word for word; sometimes when he couldn’t sleep he recited them to himself. When he then, at Charlie’s urging, said a few lines from “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”—“And on my breast in blood she died / While soft winds shook the barley”—Andy’s eyes filled with tears, and she went out the back door.

  When she returned, they were laughing. Charlie was talking about how he would not be allowed to dive until he could show the coach that he had read his ten pages of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or whatever the book was. He was required to read them even if the book happened to slide off the diving board and into the deep end.

  Then Arthur told a story Steve Sloan had told him after Tim died, about how they would ride their bicycles to the local lovers’ lane, crawl along the drainage pipe to the manhole, and set off firecrackers under the lovers’ cars.

  They lulled her. She gave them sandwiches and drinks in the living room. Charlie went out for a run in the mid-afternoon, but came back after an hour (“Only six miles, but I can make it up,” he said). Arthur appeared to take a nap. It was Frank who noticed when he got home before supper that when Arthur stood up from his chair to go to the bathroom, he stumbled to one side, caught himself, and then stood there as if he was too dizzy to go any farther, and it was Frank who suspected what they discovered at the emergency room—he was having a little stroke, or what the ER doctor called “a transient ischemic attack” from a blood clot in his left carotid artery, and would need to stay in the hospital for at least a few days.

  —

  FRANK WAS NOT SURPRISED that the few days of Arthur’s stay at the hospital turned into something much more lengthy and dramatic. He was not lulled by day one, when Arthur seemed back to normal, sitting up in his bed, chatting with the nurses and the orderlies as if he’d known them for years, telling Charlie about how their house in McLean had so many doors and gates that it took him half an hour every night to make sure everything was locked up. He went along with Arthur’s refusal to call Debbie, but not because he thought Arthur was going to be all right. When Frank arrived on the morning of day two to find Arthur dressed, and busily, but quietly, getting his things together, he didn’t help him. He said he had to find the men’s room, then went to the nurses’ station and asked if Mr. Manning had been discharged. The nurse, very slowly, Frank thought, went through Arthur’s chart, and said, “No, sir. Mr. Manning is scheduled first thing tomorrow morning for a carotid endarterectomy.”

  “What is that?”

  “Apparently, Mr. Manning has about a seventy-five- or eighty-percent atherosclerotic plaque blockage where the left carotid artery forks. The right artery is not clear, but the blockage is only about thirty-five to forty percent, which is not critical at this point. Dr. Marcus will open the left artery and clear out the plaque. It’s a delicate operation, but not terribly—”

  “Does Mr. Manning know what the doctor’s plan is?”

  “They had a consultation about an hour ago, sir.”

  He told her that Arthur was ready to leave.

  Considering how thin he was, Frank discovered that Arthur was pretty strong. It was Frank who had to grab his elbow as he rushed the door, and retain his hold while Arthur tried to twist out of his grasp. The nurse kept exclaiming, “Mr. Manning! Mr. Manning! Please, sit down!”

  Finally, Frank simply embraced him and held him until he went quiet. He could see the two of them in the bathroom mirror—himself half a bald head taller than Arthur now, Arthur’s white hair fluffing upward, his own bulky blue-shirted arm across Arthur’s narrow back. The nurse—her name was Ernestine—said, soothingly, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mr. Manning. Dr. Marcus is a wonderful surgeon, he’s done this a thousand times.” Arthur said nothing. When the nurse went out to get him “a little something,” Frank leaned over him and spoke in a low voice. He said, “I know you’re not afraid.”

  Arthur shook his head. “That’s not it,” he said. “Why bother?”

  “Because something could happen to you that would be a major pain in the ass for everyone else.”

  Arthur sat down on the bed. Frank positioned himself between Arthur and the door, but Arthur didn’t make a move.

  That night, in bed, Frank said to Andy, “When Arthur and Lillian ran off, it was Joe who drove to the soda fountain to pick Lillian up when she said she was getting off that night, at eight. When was that, ’45? I was still in Germany, anyway. The fellow who ran the drugstore was dumbfounded: he hadn’t seen her all day, she wasn’t assigned to come into work, he said. He went with Joe around behind the drugstore and looked in the weeds, down by the river, for her body! Joe was afraid to go home. But by the time he got there, my mom had gone into Lillian’s room, noticed the bed wasn’t made, and found the note. Oh, she was beside herself, she didn’t know whether it was from fear or rage. Then, two days later, I got another letter saying that Lillian had written home to say she was married. Postmarked Kankakee. They were on their way to Washington, D.C., she was as happy as she could be, goodbye!”

  “Your parents never seemed to hold it against her.”

  “They were all set to see Arthur with horns and a forked tail—stolen the darling! But she wrote about how his first wife had died in childbirth, and the baby, too, and my mom couldn’t resist that, and then Arthur sent her a Sunbeam toaster and a hand mixer. Lillian was so good at detailing everything about him that my mom came around by Thanksgiving—what was that, six weeks by then. I’m sure a baby blanket was half knitted by Christmas, whether or not Lillian had told them she was expecting.”

  “He was born to deceive,” said Andy.

  “No,” said Frank, “he was a genius at keeping secrets, but he could not tell a lie.”

  After that, they lay quietly until Andy kissed him good night—two, three, four kisses, each softer and more searching than the last one, each one saying, We are old we are old, the end is nigh, yet each one so exactly like those kisses he remembered from when they were first married and living in Floral Park that he felt disoriented. Certainly, one of the punishments of old age was experiencing this decline, but with Arthur, Frank thought it was worse than that. He remembered Arthur more clearly from those early days than he remembered almost anything, because Arthur had been a peculiar phenomenon, almost sinister in his ability to be that affectionate, fun-seeking, all-American dad when he was near Lillian and the kids, and that ruthless, suspicious schemer when he was grooming Frank for some intelligence-gathering project that Frank only half understood but was always fla
ttered by, always game for. If domesticity was quicksand for a real man (and who in the fifties had not thought so?), then, to Frank, Arthur had held out the occasional lifeline, his only remuneration the satisfaction of being useful, feeling a frisson of risk. Frank was two inches taller than Arthur and must have outweighed him even then by twenty-five pounds, but they both knew that Arthur was the more unpredictable, the more dangerous, or that was how Frank had felt at the time.

  Had he liked Arthur? Felt real affection for him? Maybe, at first, only fascination, then dependence, then, now, yes, love. But Frank knew he wasn’t good at love. Andy was training him in their old age. That she was right this minute sleeping next to him was one sign that she was having an effect; that he had looked at the pictures of Jonah with pleasure when they came in the mail earlier in the week was another. He had appreciated Janet—there was one close-up of her face right beside Jonah’s, both of them grinning, that he had thought attractive, even affecting. Frank hadn’t expected to change at this age. Andy turned in his direction and put her hand on his shoulder. He thought again of Arthur as he was now, practically dead. The surgery would be over by the time Frank woke up. If he happened to fall asleep. But then he did.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, when Frank went with Andy to the hospital, they consulted first with Dr. Marcus, who said that he thought the procedure had gone well, a tiny bit more complicated than he’d expected, but almost every surgery was; he’d learned to live with that. He felt sure that they’d find Arthur in good condition in a day or two. Andy said, “What are the possible complications?”

  “Well, we do look for signs that the wound is not closing properly. Should there be any hemorrhaging, that of course is very dangerous, given the location of the surgery.”

  As he said this, Frank could feel the blood pounding in his own carotid artery, the right one. He didn’t even have to touch it.

  “And there is another possibility that perhaps Mr. Manning could be vulnerable to, given his slenderness, and that is any sort of hematoma that might cause a compression of the trachea. But the staff here is very attentive, and I’m sure everything will progress without a hitch.”

  It was as if the doctor had laid out the scenario of the next few days. There was a hemorrhage, and it did happen late at night, and Arthur did lose a lot of blood—he was asleep, and the night nurse discovered it only when she touched what might be a shadow on the pillowcase and the sheet and felt moisture. At that point, she turned on the light and saw that Arthur’s shoulder and hair were red, too. Back into surgery. The next morning, Debbie arrived, beside herself with the suspicion, Frank thought, that every doctor in New Jersey was a quack and every nurse an idiot, and there were no words for Frank and Andy that expressed Debbie’s fury at having all of this kept from her.

  It was Arthur who realized, four days after the second surgery, that he was breathless, that he was, in fact, starting to pass out, that he only had time to put his fingers to his neck and realize that it was swollen and hot. He then aimed his hand in the general direction of the emergency button. The hematoma required a third surgery, and the doctor let slip to Frank that maybe 6 percent of patients who underwent the carotid endarterectomy did not survive, and then, of course, if there was that much plaque in the carotid artery, how much was there elsewhere? But that was another question that could be addressed later.

  And so Arthur was in the hospital for two weeks, and when he was discharged, he and Debbie stayed with Frank and Andy for two more weeks (Debbie called Hugh about the children three times a day). When they left, it was well past the anniversary of Lillian’s death, something that, if anyone noticed, they did not mention, and, Frank thought, maybe that was a good thing.

  Andy and Frank slept for three days to get over the stress of the visit. Then Andy noticed that Frank’s revelations (or reminiscences, Frank would call them) continued at a relaxed but steady pace. Frank, she thought, would not have admitted that Arthur’s medical problems had confronted him with mortality. But it was not death that came over him, it was life, his life, and, for whatever reason, he could not resist talking about it. There was that first train trip to Chicago—’36. Maybe the passengers had been in danger of freezing to death, but what Frank most clearly remembered was seeing his first black person, the bartender. Andy had had a similar experience when her parents took the children to Minneapolis; she was six. A black woman was walking down Hennepin in the swirling snow. Her mother jerked her arm and told her to stop staring. Were their parents racist? Andy and Frank agreed, how were they to know? Race was one of the things no one had ever talked about, at least in Denby, at least in Decorah.

  Andy wondered if maybe this summer they should go back to Europe for the third time, and see something more out of the way—Crete, Tenerife, Corsica. Frank mentioned that he had been to Corsica, and before he said another word, Andy felt a tunnel-like space opening in her brain. He had told her about North Africa, and Sicily, about Anzio and Monte Cassino. When their friends talked about Normandy, he talked about landing at Saint-Tropez (he was teased for that). She had listened silently to arguments about Eisenhower and Devers, as if any of these former corporals, privates, and sergeants now shooting off their mouths had valid opinions. But in Corsica, there was peace, there was beauty, there was leisure. And, yes, there was a girl, and when Frank’s voice deepened as he talked about her, how she had called him “Errol Flynn,” Andy knew that whatever had happened there was a cherished and much-remembered experience, unmentioned until now. She said, “You fell asleep? That was all?”

  “Maybe that was what I needed at the time. She massaged my feet. She had all of my money in her hand, and she only took some of it.”

  He did not say that he and the girl had had intercourse, but Andy understood that they had, which reminded her of that last fall semester in college; when Frank was telling her—Hildy, as she was then called—that he loved her, he was doing something with her friend Eunice that could not be called rape, because it was mutually sought, but was hateful and violent. She knew that Frank thought that she knew nothing about that, and it was on the tip of her tongue to repay him for Corsica by telling him that Eunice had died in 1989 from complications of emphysema—after being on a ventilator for three years. But she didn’t say anything, and then she woke up in the night; she remembered standing in the entrance of the Memorial Union, just beneath the wall of engraved names of Iowa State heroes of the First World War, blubbering about the German invasion of Norway, and Frank leaning toward her with such kindness and strength. The other students were passing and staring, and Frank hid her face against his shoulder so she wouldn’t see them, and they wouldn’t see her, a loving thing to do. Yes, he had run away to the war weeks afterward, but she had forgiven that long ago. Maybe, she thought, it had taken Frank these many years to know that love and sex could intersect.

  One night, when they were laughing at the idea that there could be a street anywhere, even in Chicago, called “Wacker,” Andy said, “You know, that day, I saw you. I followed you for ten minutes. I was scared to get near you. You looked so old and hardened. My plan was, if you recognized me, I would say, ‘Hi, I’m Hildy, do you remember me?’ But I thought you might not recognize me, so I thought, if I introduced myself as Andy, we could start from the beginning. I would say that I’d gone to Iowa and my last name was Peterson.”

  “I didn’t recognize you,” said Frank.

  “No, you didn’t right at first, I saw it in your face, so I started in on my plan, but then you did, so I made up that story about changing my name. The next day, I had to tell everyone at the office and write my parents. I was Hildy until that moment.”

  Andy knew that it would seem unbelievable to her children, especially Janet and Loretta and Ivy, that she and Frank had not shared these memories before, and it was not only, she saw now, that ever since she’d known him she, and perhaps he, had been afraid of what might be said—it was also that they had no model. One night she said to him, “Do
you remember your parents talking about themselves to each other?”

  “My father fell in the well out by the barn and didn’t tell Mama for ten years or something like that. When Cousin Berta went to the insane asylum, no one said a word about it. She was at home one day and not there the next day. I think Joe asked where she was, and Mama said, ‘She had to go up to Independence.’ I think I thought she had moved somewhere to be on her own.”

  Andy said, “One time, my mother was really upset with my father for having the apple trees in the backyard cut down without telling her. She went out and drove the car around town for two hours rather than speak to him about it.”

  “But,” said Frank, “what would they tell each other? My parents were from the same town—different churches, but they had lived the same lives. What would they bring to a conversation? Nothing exotic, you can be sure.”

  “My parents and their relatives talked in code. Someone would nod and say, ‘Ah, you know what happened to Inga!’ And then everyone else would nod, and Sven or I would ask, ‘Mama, what happened to Inga?’ and, more often than not, she would say, ‘You don’t want to know.’ It wasn’t until we were much older—high school, really—that we began to put all the parts together.”

  “Or they would talk German,” said Frank. “ ‘Ja!’ and then blah blah blah, so fast that we could only pick out a word here and there. I would ask Eloise, and she would tell me, but I got to wondering after a while if she wasn’t making things up just to frighten me.”

  “I was very fond of your aunt Eloise,” said Andy.

  “I went through a period where I agreed with Eloise’s analysis,” said Frank. Andy thought he was joking, but then he said, “I mean, I was fifteen. I was very impressed by Julius. He was a communist. He had that accent that said, ‘I know things you will never even think of.’ It’s so ghostly now.”

  “What?” said Andy.

  “Soviet immortality.”