And yet it was an argument he could not resist.
He swallowed the aspirin without water, tossing them one at a time into the back of his throat, the second one catching on his tongue. What he was hoping to put off for as long as possible was the inevitable slipping out of the boot and off the bed, the awkward, gimping trip across the hallway to the bathroom.
There was an old hockey stick on the other side of the bed, another basement resource the boys had fetched for him, meant to serve as a crutch, although using it had made him feel like some Old Testament prophet leaning on his staff.
“Like Charlton Heston,” Michael had said from the doorway of his own bedroom last night. It seemed to John Keane that over the past two days, one or the other of his sons was always lounging casually in the doorway whenever he got himself up and hauled himself across the hall to the bathroom. Had he been a younger father, they might have simply thrown him over a shoulder and carried him across.
He lifted his hand to wipe the perspiration from his lip, raised and lowered his good leg and then slipped both hands under the thigh of the bad one and slowly raised it until he could feel again the weight pulling against his foot.
And then the pain again, wire thin this time, through his leg and into his gut and reaching up to hook the corners of his mouth.
He turned his head, waiting for it to pass. The fan on the dresser was humming, though it offered no breeze. The Saran-wrapped sandwich and the pile of magazines his wife had left for him on her side of the bed, the damp bedsheets themselves, gave off a nauseating yellow sheen and in his impatience with it, with the pain itself, he pulled at the leg again.
The pain answered in kind.
It was a ridiculous argument. A stupid fight. And yet, he raised his chin defiantly at the speckled boot. There were white dots of paint from the living room, bits of pale green from when he had done the boys’ room, pale pink from the year Clare was born. Other colors, no doubt, were he to examine it more closely, two decades’ worth of housekeeping chores done in these boots, painting and gardening and leaf raking, the very peacetime pursuits the army, in giving them to him, had sought to insure. Pursuits that the pain, on this hot still morning, now easily reduced to foolishness. He had wasted his life with painting and gardening and leaf raking. He had squandered his time.
With his hand under his thigh, he lifted his leg again. The pulley squeaked a little, slowly turning. Foolish man, Michael had said. Ve have other ways. Well, no, not squandered. There were his children, after all.
In the mirror above his wife’s dresser, he could see the reflection of the crucifix that hung over their bed, the tiny gold Christ curled against the thick cross. Thick in this particular case, he knew, because behind the tortured figure on the ivory cross there was a secret compartment that contained two candles and a vial of holy water, the accoutrements of Last Rites. It had been a gift from the priest who married them, a reminder, no doubt, that their marriage bed might also be the bed in which they would breathe their last. It had not been difficult for them, bred-in-the-bone Catholics, Irish Catholics, even at the beginning of their lives together, to imagine the final scene: the candles flickering on the bedside table, the holy water glistening on his forehead, the hushed air, the dim lights, the children kneeling at his bedside, and his wife, her hand over his, assuring him, assuring him, forgiving, in the last minutes left to them, assuring and forgiving. Certainly, they had said till death do us part, but it wasn’t until they’d opened the priest’s present (he recalled the wrappings of the other gifts spread across the living room of her father’s apartment, her pretty beige going-away suit, the nervous anticipation he had felt, opening a few packages while they waited for the cab that was to take them to the city) that the scene became vivid for them both-the crucifix spread apart, the thin white tapers lit, the dim room where he would breathe his last.
It was a scenario he no longer deemed likely. His brother had clutched his heart and hit the pavement on Thirty-fourth Street, already gone.
He lowered the leg again, heard the pile of thick books, tied together like a schoolboy’s satchel, hit the floor. Pain such as this had a tendency to reduce everything, every effort, every belief, to brittle plastic, easily shattered. It could shatter the notion of Paradise opened by a single, wracked body hung on a cross. It could shatter any hope you had that you were worth more than the bustling of your ordinary days. It could remind you easily enough that death was no more or less than the choke and sputter of a single muscle, the sudden exposure of gut and bone, your skin turned black in the cold.
If you didn’t argue against it, the idiot pain, the very things you’d based your life on could shatter.
His eyes went from the reflected crucifix to the blank gray face of the television. He could make out his own reflection there, sitting up against the headboard. His chest and shoulders in his pale pajamas, his bald head, his face, which in the reflected shadow and distorted sunlight caught by the blank screen, was suddenly the face of his brother.
It had happened before: one of his sons would be talking in another room and he’d hear, for a moment, Frank’s laughter. His niece once raised a hand, turned her head, and it was Frank’s gesture. He would raise his own chin shaving and there he’d see his brother, briefly, briefly.
Even now his own reflection in the blank gray face of the TV set had become simply his own again, too bald, too gaunt for Frank. But the glimpse, nevertheless, had been well timed, and as if to acknowledge it, small gift that it was, he pulled at the leg again. He held his breath again as the pain flared. No realistic person expected a full-fledged visitation, or even hoped for one-it was, surely, what they meant when they said “laid to rest”-but still there were tricks of the eye or of the mind that could satisfy even someone like himself, who, steeped in superstition as a child, had long ago learned to resist it. Surely there were assurances, even for the most reasonable of believers, that pain wasn’t all, in the end. That something would trump the foolishness of body and bone, day after day. Frank’s face, glimpsed briefly, assuring him, his own heart, his spirits, rising at the mere possibility of once again seeing his brother’s face.
He recalled that all the pain of that rainy day-the endless Mass at Incarnation, the traffic-choked ride to the cemetery-had been for Catherine, Frank’s daughter. All the dignity, resignation, joyful hope of resurrection the rest of them had mustered, as one must, to get through the day, undermined by the poor girl’s tears. She cried a torrent through it all. Thin as a willow in her dark sweater and skirt, bent over in the pew or under her mother’s arm at the cemetery. A scrap of tissue in her hands and the pale red hair falling over her face. Too young to be so wracked by grief. Too pretty, too newly formed to know that particular kind of disappointment. Afterward, back at the house, he had knelt beside her chair and said, “Your father will be with you for the rest of your days,” and she, nineteen at the time, had looked at him with her red eyes and said, “I’ll never stop missing him.”
Six months later, when he gave her his arm on the day she was married, he felt himself a poor substitute, although she had whispered her gratitude, leaving the scent of her lipstick on his cheek and his ear. She had married a kid from Greenwich, a wealthy boy who had a seat on the Stock Exchange now. They lived in Garden City and had refused so many invitations, to Clare’s christening party, to her first Holy Communion, to confirmations and graduations, even to a few odd Sunday suppers, that he and Mary had simply stopped asking. “She moves in different circles now,” Ellen, Frank’s wife, had said, with more pride than disappointment, although many of her invitations were also refused.