The Oriental Wife (22 page)

“Not now. She’ll wake up in a minute. I need to talk to you alone.”

Reluctantly, he sat down. “I really can’t concentrate while she’s crying.” But just then the crying stopped; they could hear Mrs. Sprague cooing to her. In a minute, he knew, she would appear in the living room with Emma, on the way to the kitchen to heat up a bottle. He willed her to come soon, to rescue him.

“What are we going to do?” Louisa asked him, her voice low, and then, desperately, “Look at me.” But he could not do even that much; he was too full of dread. He was only waiting for Mrs. Sprague to emerge with Emma in her arms; otherwise it could not be averted, something terrible was going to happen.

“Very well,” Louisa said, harsh with contempt. There were no more sounds from the bedroom, Emma must have gone back to sleep. “There’s nothing we can do, that’s what you mean, isn’t it?” And still he could not answer.

“Look at me, for God’s sake, can’t you even look at me?” Finally he raised his eyes; he stared at her, growing more and more frightened, waiting. This was the moment when he had to beg her forgiveness, when he had to swear he would be different. Only he could not do it.

“All right then,” she said fiercely, “that’s that, isn’t it,” and shut her eyes. When she opened them again she told him she was leaving. She would go to Mrs. Sprague’s friend, she would do whatever she had to, go anywhere. She could not stay there any longer. He knew he should say
Don’t go
, he should cry, or cry out, he should stand and put his arms around her, but he could not manage any of those things. All he could do was sit there, with limbs heavy as stone and molten heat deep in his belly; his mind was stripped of words. There was silence for a long minute.

“What are you thinking? Tell me.”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t say that. You must be thinking something.”

But he wasn’t. With immense effort, he ran his tongue around his mouth.

“Maybe …”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe you can come back after a while.”

She laughed shrilly, rocking back and forth, her bad arm folded across her chest. But just when it seemed she might lose her balance and topple over, she straightened up and met his eyes, her face full of such bleakness he had to turn away. The door to the bedroom opened; Mrs. Sprague was emerging. In the few seconds before she appeared, his brain woke up again; realization came like jolts of black lightning. He saw that some failures, some cruelties, were irrevocable; some harm could never be undone. That he was nothing like the man he’d thought himself to be. That he would carry this knowledge for the rest of his life.

H
er daughter came every Saturday. All week she longed for these visits, as she had longed for the arrival of her first lover when she was young; every morning she told herself how many days it would be until Emma came. But as with her long-ago lover, whatever she was hoping for never happened; afterward she always felt bewildered, with a heavy sense of having failed. Sometimes she remembered her mother, twisting her hands helplessly in her lap, and thought she finally understood.

Weather permitting, they went walking in the scruffy park across from Mrs. Rafferty’s house, where a row of benches overlooked the water. They headed for the farthest one, next to an abandoned boathouse, and sat looking out at the Palisades while Emma entertained her with little stories she had saved up during the week: the landlord’s wife had shown up at her door again, to complain of her husband’s stinginess (he had given her a can opener for her birthday); a fat man had chased a bald little dog back and forth across East Tenth Street, crying, “Come to me, my angel.” Emma told her nothing about her real life, the things she reported were never what mattered to her. Louisa suspected there might be complicated troubles with a man. On one of those Saturdays in the park some months before, she had announced, in a brisk summary way, that she had quit the graduate program
at Columbia and taken a job. Her boss was a Cambodian, a refugee, with slightly mysterious funding for publications about his country, which Emma was to edit. “You will detect many missing articles in these manuscripts, both definite and indefinite,” he had told her at the interview, and said she must be firm with his authors, who would try to gain her sympathy by describing their sufferings. “They are lucky to be published at all,” he’d said, adding, “Is good you are an American. They will behave in more civilized fashion, because of feeling intimidated.” He had studied at the Sorbonne and wore extremely elegant ties. All these things Emma had told Louisa in the first few weeks, sounding amused, but now she never mentioned him.

When they reached their usual bench that day, there were two skinny young men in sunglasses standing in tense attitudes beneath the tree opposite, seeming to argue in low voices. They glanced briefly, contemptuously, at the women and went back to their conversation. “Dope dealers,” Emma said, in the brittle voice she assumed for making such statements. Then she began adjusting Louisa’s scarf, a plaid woolen square left behind by some former resident (all the residents were former now, except for Louisa). Mrs. Rafferty had given it to Louisa, as she gave her many things that nobody else wanted. Emma was trying to make it cover Louisa’s ears without slipping down onto her forehead. The longer she fiddled with it, chiding Louisa to keep still, the surer Louisa was that something was wrong. Emma never fussed like that: she hated fuss almost as much as her father had. “Stop now,” Louisa begged her. Emma’s hands stopped moving.

“Listen,” she said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

•   •   •

He had waited too long.

The doctors told him this outright, to show their respect. They had served with him on the steering committee of the local hospital; at his urging—it was a nice irony—plans were under way for a state-of-the-art oncology unit. He knew all about Betatrons, cobalt-60 machines, orthovoltage. He knew too about the special, rarefied toxins they were using now at Johns Hopkins and Dana Farber. But it seemed that in his case the prospects for halting the disease were clouded. Already the cancer was in his lymph nodes. They would do what they could, they were ordering some of those very toxins to be shipped to the Connecticut suburbs in refrigerated cars, but they would be honest with him. He must not expect too much. He must be prepared for the worst.

What he never said was that he had to stop himself from hoping for the very thing they were warning him of. In that first moment he heard the news, he had felt a surge of relief, a lightening of the spirit such as he could hardly remember experiencing before. Of course he repressed this immediately.

And so he dutifully took up the job of staying alive.

For years Louisa had been tormented by thoughts of him, there was no room for anything else. Every morning, when she opened her eyes, the storm of grief and shame and disbelief began all over again, knocking her back with the same force. She imagined him at his desk, working his way methodically through stacks of papers, wholly absorbed in the world’s business; at night, sitting in her airless room, with the
birdcage and the ancient dressing table and the window overlooking the alley, she thought of him in their old bedroom, six blocks away, waiting for Connie to come to bed. At least, when they moved to Connecticut, she no longer had to know what their bedroom looked like.

It was at about that time—when Emma too was removed from her, to that house in the suburbs she had never seen—that something had given way, she seemed to have shed the self she knew, and other people became vivid to her again, in a different way from before. The people themselves were different from the ones she had known: the woman who came with the mobile library van, whose daughter had spina bifida; the wife of a former resident at Mrs. Rafferty’s, who came to tea sometimes, and told Louisa, in an anguished voice, of wishing her husband would die. At about the same time, as though to make up for the loss of Emma, who would henceforth come only on alternate weekends, Rolf had a television installed in her room, word of its delivery having been sent her by his secretary. The people on the screen, victims of earthquakes, tornadoes, racial hatred, came to fill her thoughts. When she lay awake at night—since her operation she slept badly—she grieved not for herself but for Korean orphans, cerebral palsy victims, lepers in India. She adopted, through a charity, an impoverished child in Peru; she shopped for toys for her at the Woolworth’s on Dyckman Street and used her typing skills to write long encouraging letters when the little girl began learning English in order to correspond with her. She even volunteered to work at the charity once a week, typing up envelopes with her good hand. Her sorrow had become vast, impersonal, and then she understood that in some sense she had come through, though there was no point to it.

But since the news of his cancer she’d been remembering him again, the gruff child he had been, the early days in New York, his struggle not to look at her. And then when they were married, and she had brought him tea in bed on a Sunday morning, and sat there chatting to him in the green brocade dressing gown he had bought her: she had been heady with the weight of his desire, savoring it, until he had pulled her down beside him. Maybe she had loved him only for wanting her so much, maybe what had happened was a punishment for that. There was the Sunday she had coaxed him into going to Bear Mountain for a picnic, when he wanted to stay behind and work: she had dropped the lunch she’d brought for them into a muddy stream, and the mosquitoes had assaulted them, but instead of being angry with her he had found it charming, as he found everything about her charming then. She had believed she would always delight him like that.

In February, Emma told her that the poisons from Baltimore had failed to produce the desired results. It was too cold for the park, she announced, as soon as she arrived, and then asked if they could go to Louisa’s room. Louisa knew that meant there was bad news. She could feel Mrs. Rafferty watching them as they went upstairs. Usually, if the weather kept them indoors, they sat in the parlor, and Mrs. Rafferty served them tea and biscuits while filling Emma in on the latest news about her niece, who worked for Hewlett Packard and was getting a divorce: her wicked husband had sold her jewelry to pay his gambling debts. When Emma was younger she had formed a dislike for Mrs. Rafferty, and sometimes been rude to her, but these days she only smiled tightly if Mrs. Rafferty told her how Louisa should get more fresh air or eat more vegetables, and she always remembered to ask about her niece.

Up in Louisa’s room, Emma did not sit down when Louisa did, but remained standing, avoiding Louisa’s eyes. She picked up a paperweight made of smoky glass from the top of the dresser and straightened out the embroidered cloth underneath, both the cloth and the paperweight being remnants of Jeannette’s trousseau. Then she went to the pine bookshelf in the corner and blew on the photograph of herself, aged five, to remove the dust. After that she proceeded to straighten the pictures on the wall above the bookcase. Many of these too were framed photos of her as a child, taken by the school photographer in Connecticut: her third-, sixth-, eighth-grade pictures, for which Louisa had purchased frames at Woolworth’s; Mrs. Rafferty had helped her slip the photos inside. Already, by age eight, Emma’s eyes had been watchful, though when she was very young, back in the days when Mrs. Sprague had brought her to see Louisa, she had been full of laughter, hugging Louisa around the legs, singing merrily as she whirled around the room. When she was seven—shortly before the move to Connecticut—she had discovered Louisa’s old photograph album at the bottom of the bookshelf, and hauled it out on every visit, making Louisa tell her about Julian, and the estate in Norfolk, the café in South Kensington, peering intently at each photo, looking from them to Louisa and back again. She had dissolved into giggles whenever she got to the last picture in the book, the one taken on the steps of city hall on Louisa’s wedding day.

“The chemotherapy didn’t work,” she said now, and again straightened her third-grade photograph. “But they’re going to try something new. Some new kind of radiation they’ve been experimenting with at Grace New Haven. High-voltage
Sagittarius something. One of the doctors gave him a bunch of articles about it, from the
New England Journal of Medicine
or something. You know how he loves shit like that.” She turned around then, to look at Louisa. “You need a haircut,” she said abruptly, and went into the bathroom to get the scissors and a towel. As she started to snip away, she told Louisa about a girl in the supermarket who’d been saying to her husband, “My daddy told me I was crazy to marry a poet.” And then, when Louisa was silent, “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” Louisa said, lifting her head. “I’m listening to you, that’s all. I always like listening to you, you know that.”

Emma removed the towel and flicked away the hairs from Louisa’s neck. “I don’t want you to worry, okay? He’s going to be all right.” But her voice was high and thin; for the first time Louisa understood how frightened she was. Poor Rolf, she thought, reaching up to squeeze Emma’s hand. She almost felt he needed her now, to grieve for him. He would be no good at doing it for himself.

They could not keep the fevers down. There were the blisters on his skin, from the radiation, and then the burning inside his body. Even his eyes were hot, and his lungs, and his kidneys, and his brain. The doctors had faded out of the picture, replaced by nurses who dressed his burns and held his head while he threw up thin bile into metal basins; they checked his drips and adjusted his pillows and emptied his bedpan. Some of the younger ones, unfamiliar with the new treatment he was being given, seemed more distressed than he was. Once he heard two nurses talking in the hall outside his room.
“You want my opinion, it’s sinful, what they’re doing,” one of them said.

“They spent so much money on that thing,” the other told her, “they got to keep using it on everyone so they can justify the cost.” It was strange how acute his hearing had become, when everything else seemed to be shutting down; they spoke in low voices, almost whispers, but he heard every word.