Footfall was steady outside in the hallway. Occasionally a nurse or orderly would slow and glance in, having been informed about the very old man visiting in room 511.
“I am an arrogant man,” he whispered. “I thought this would be easier.”
It was a nice room, bigger than any he’d had here. There was something comforting about hospitals now. He liked the ambience, the voices on the intercom system, calling out names of strangers, the steam coming out of the oxygen tube, the bright light of the buzzer near the bed, the rolling of carts and chairs in the hallway, the clean sterile smells. He felt safer here than at home where accidents were waiting, where help was across town. Here, death felt far, far away.
The chair was comfortable. A light rain began to tap at the window. He could feel the extra oxygen in the room and took it in gratefully. Sleep came over him, thick and slow, and just before he surrendered to it, he felt the rhythm of his breathing falling into Charlie’s, falling into an easier, simpler place where they might finally reach each another.
MANSARD
Frances flew out to greet her.
“Audrey!”
They all had names like that then, out of old storybooks.
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” Frances said.
“When did you call?”
“Five minutes ago.”
“Well, I was driving here, wasn’t I?” Audrey had never seen Frances so wild. Out in the gravel without shoes. The bottoms of her stockings torn, most likely. Hair in tufts in the back. “What is it?”
“I have to cancel. I’m sorry.”
Audrey looked toward Frances’s house. It was new, hideous. But inside there were framed articles about its architect hanging on the walls. Audrey’s Larry said it looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to a perfectly good house and scattered the bits.
“Is someone sick?” Audrey said.
Frances had four children, each with their own separate “module” for a bedroom. Who knew what they would get up to when they were teenagers.
“No.” Frances was holding one red shoe. “My father showed up.”
“Your father?”
“I got a hold of Elinor but I couldn’t reach— Oh.”
It was Sue, checking her lipstick in the rearview as she pulled in, veering away just in time.
“You nearly killed us!” Audrey felt a sort of wildness herself now, a hysteria she would for once like to give in to.
Sue got out of the car in a new suit, baby blue plaid.
The suit calmed Audrey. She’d helped Sue on the phone last week decide about it. “It’s darling,” she said, plucking the sleeve before they kissed. “Bridge is off, I think, Suzie.”
“What are you talking about?”
They never canceled Friday bridge. And it had only been cut short that once, two years ago at Audrey’s house, when Larry had called home and told her the president had been shot in Dallas.
“Bridge is definitely off! Everything’s off!” Frances said. She was tearing out the grimy insole of her red pump.
“Her father’s here,” Audrey said.
Sue looked around for an unfamiliar car. “How’d he get here?”
Of all the questions to ask.
“I don’t know,” Frances said.
“The train? A lift? Did he bring luggage?”
“Sue,” Audrey said.
“No.” Frances turned toward the house. “No luggage. I have to go in now. He’ll be watching. You all should go.”
“We’re staying,” Sue said. “Aren’t we, Auds?”
Frances had spoken of him only once, three years ago at Sue’s house when their afternoon tea had bled into cocktails and Sue’s housekeeper had taken all the children up to the bath. They were talking about their parents’ marriages, how they were trying to do things differently. Upstairs the children were shrieking. Audrey worried about them getting too wound up and hitting their heads on the edge of the tub. Frances said that her parents were divorced. Audrey had never known anyone with divorced parents. They split before the war, Frances said. In ’39, when she was three. She had no memory of them together. How awful, Elinor said. And Frances said, No, it was for the best. Her father was dangerous. He had aliases. A spy, Frances said. A double agent. Maybe a triple agent. Audrey wondered if she was making that up. A triple agent? Frances had heard him one time on the phone when she was very young, she said, speaking a foreign language. She didn’t know which one. Just that her father had turned into a different person. He had no idea I was in the room watching. His whole face changed when he spoke. My mother hadn’t let my sister and me see him again till we turned thirteen. Then we were allowed once a year to have lunch with him in a park in Maryland, an hour from our house. My mother made the lunch. Always the same thing, tomatoes and cream cheese with chives. There was never a scene. He came down a path and left the same way. He came to my wedding reception, briefly. Stood in the back. Didn’t make a toast or ask me to dance. I haven’t seen him since, she said.