Then it was time to sit some more. Agnes pulled her recent pages out of her bag and fished for her pencil. No time to waste. She and Maud had an arrangement now, whereby Agnes would send her pages every Monday and Maud would respond by the following Sunday. Rinse and repeat.
She was on Chapter Seven. The girls, at eighty now, were girls again. Her feelings for all of them were mellow and magnanimous. When she was young, she’d been far more judgmental, and had mocked them deliberately and rather cruelly, ignoring the writing advice she’d read that claimed it was paramount to love your characters. What did love have to do with it? They were her talismans against making bad choices herself. She imagined being married, or working at a bank under bosses who saw her as a curiosity at best. At best! The stories she heard from women in her travels around Philadelphia indicated much worse than benign wonder, and she wrote them out, explored, exposed hypocrisy and sexism and racism in the City of Brotherly Love.
She’d always hoped her books were cautionary tales, and that real women would learn from the Franklins’ mistakes, many of which were attitudinal. She’d spent a lot of time demonstrating that no woman was ever going to be truly rewarded for quietly going about her work, hoping someday someone would notice. “Dick appreciates me, he just can’t show it,” Polly had often said. Agnes had seen Dick fawn over people whose approval he desired. He was capable of showing appreciation when doing so held a potential benefit for him. Polly supplied herself with approval of her efforts, letting him off the hook, and eventually leading to his inability to notice. Men were creatures of the culture as much as women were, and performed as expected, including taking the ministrations of women for granted. But they could choose otherwise. So could women. That was where she came in.
Or, had, in her heyday.
She’d put the girls through so much, and still they came back to her, wandering into her study in the mornings, coaxing her to move her pen across the page. They still wanted things. They were old, but they weren’t done. She very much wanted to portray their ongoing growth. Now when she sat at her desk every day she asked them what she could do for them. What would you like to think about today? Where would you like to go, what do you want to remember, who do you miss, what do you want to learn? Tell me your desires. I am at your service, my girls.
She had to admit, she was glad someone knew she was Pauline Schulz. Not someone: Maud. Maud, as it turned out, was the person she hadn’t known she needed. Maud understood. She completely understood. Agnes didn’t know how that was possible, but she knew why. Maud was interested in writing, in a deep, serious way. She had a feel for the possibilities, and an intuitive comprehension of the strange alchemy that occurred as imagination got hammered out on the anvil of the subconscious, the personality, the will. Maud had no interest in writing herself, but she was brilliant at seeing what was too much and what not enough. She was helpful. She would keep Agnes’s secret. Agnes hoped.
Agnes had never showed her writing to anyone before it was finished, but she was deeply enjoying the process. She’d trained herself to be her own editor, as writers do, but it was incredibly useful and bracing to be able to ask questions in medias res, and to discuss possible plot developments and have another mind seeing different angles. She was teaching Maud how to edit along the way. Maud was aware of this and asked a lot of questions about how to pinpoint what was wrong in a scene or chapter, and how to best communicate her responses. Agnes was touched by her ambition to become like one of the old-style great editors. A desire for intimacy and integrity. To truly understand an author’s deepest intentions and capabilities, and to foster them into a manuscript and then fashion that into an aesthetically coherent object—how high-minded that was! A pinnacle of human endeavor. Agnes had all the respect in the world for the intelligence of the other animals, but there were certain areas that separated them from humans, and the writing and editing of books was one of them.
Maud kept her word and dropped the subject of the memoir entirely, with the unsurprising result that Agnes thought about it more, and wondered if she should expand it. So far, the answer had been no, but it wasn’t as loud.
The door to the inner sanctum of the office opened. Agnes glanced over in spite of her belief in not staring. A person appeared feetfirst on a wheelchair footrest. He was pushed forward by a woman who looked more like a daughter than an aide. Aides always wore pants. The daughter was dressed in a skirt and stockings and Top-Siders. The father—at the end. Last days. Gaunt and gray, head hanging to the side. The daughter collected coats from the closet.
“All right, Daddy, let’s put this on you now. We’re about to go outside.”
She draped the coat over his shoulders. He moaned at its touch, and from the effort to tip slightly forward so it could be bunched behind him. A nurse stepped out behind them.
“Mrs. Lee?”
“It’s Miss, thank you.”
Agnes heaved herself up. Not easy anymore, just not so easy. Yet better than that guy.
She exchanged glances with the daughter. Agnes meant to commiserate, but the daughter offered her pity. Yes, of course. She was in his category, though she would always think of herself as the daughter of a father.
The nurse led her into an examining room. “Let’s get your weight.”
Agnes stepped on the scale with her shoes on. The days of peeling off clothes and even bracelets to weigh a bit less were way behind her.
“One thirty-one,” the nurse announced. She looked at the chart. “Down three pounds.”
“Bikini season,” Agnes said.
No response. She thought of a title for one of her magazine pieces: “The Oncologist’s Office: Where Jokes Go to Die.”
“Everything off except bra and panties, gown on with the opening to the back.”
“I’m not wearing panties, I am wearing underwear.”
The nurse suddenly looked at her as though she were a real person. “What’s the difference? I never knew.”
“Panties are for men. Underwear is for women.”
The nurse nodded. “That makes sense. I have both, I guess.”
“Thank you for sharing the state of your underwear drawer with me,” Agnes said.
The nurse blushed.
“I’m sorry,” Agnes said. “I have the British teasing gene.”
But it was too late. The nurse grew crisp. “He’ll be in soon.”
Agnes undressed. She was at the stage of writing her book where all her actions were filters for details she might include. She wasn’t herself undressing in a doctor’s office, or not only herself. She was also one of her characters. She observed the stiffness in her back as she bent over to retrieve her slacks from around her ankles. She folded her clothes carefully, for the benefit of Dr. Oswald. If she were neat, he’d let her live. Then she looked at the pictures on the walls. Thank God he didn’t have diagrams of innards or ads for drugs. Instead, Maine landscapes.
“I love Maine,” Agnes said aloud. “I love Fellowship Point. May it live forever.”
There was no one to overhear her, but she was pretty sure she’d reached the stage where no one would hear her even if they heard her.
When Dr. Oswald—Bill to her—came in, he looked at her carefully as he shook hands. She’d discussed this with him at an earlier appointment, this old-school way of doctoring by actually studying the patient and partly from experience and partly from intuition getting a sense of what the body was up to.