And then he reached out to touch his son, to playfully slap him on the back, but he missed and paid the price for the awkwardness of the movement with another neon-bright rush of pain. He pulled some air through his teeth, he couldn’t help it, and Jacob paused, looking down on him from beside the bed, and then, gently, put a hand to his father’s shoulder. His face was white under his tan and his dark hair fell into his eyes. “Dad,” he said with some alarm, and then paused. And then, in another tone altogether, he said evenly, “What can I do for you?”
There was some comfort to be discovered, no doubt, in the odd connections, and repetitions, in the misapprehensions themselves, some pattern across the years that would convey assurance. He had said to that other Jacob, in a prayer, What can I do for you?-and now here was his own boy, that other’s impulsive namesake, saying the same. Some pattern in the coincidence, the connectedness, some thread of assurance that was woven through the passing years-but he was in too much pain now to discern it, if it was there at all. He put his fingertips to his son’s arm. “Get your shower,” he said. “I’m fine.”
When Michael returned, he leaned into the bedroom and said, “How you doing, Dad?” and “The Met game’s on” in the same breath. He turned on the television, sat on the edge of the bed. He, too, had the smell of the outdoors on him. The smell of the golf course. The smell of the wider world. At the first commercial break, Michael looked over his shoulder at the boot and the rope and the pulley and the wood, at his father’s suspended leg. He tested the rope a bit. “Maybe we should patent this thing,” he said. “We can write to the army and buy up their old boots.” He laughed. His father glimpsed the face Michael would wear as a grown man, the blue eyes and good teeth. It was handsome now, in its youth, but it would be no more than pleasant, perhaps, in middle age. “If they don’t all have jungle rot by now,” he added.
Jacob had joined them to watch the extra innings. He was in the chair beside his father’s bed. He was showered and dressed, a short-sleeved shirt and cutoff blue jeans. There was a girl who took up his evenings this summer, although it was Michael who, his father noticed, had a pink bruise on his neck, the shape of a small bite.
“Tony Persichetti,” Michael was saying, “said in his letter that the skin comes off with his socks.”
Downstairs, their mother and the girls were just coming in. Clare was the first to climb the stairs. She hesitated for a moment at the door of the bedroom before her father called her in, and then she leaped easily up onto the bed, rattling the mattress and the magazines, the plate with the untouched sandwich and every plate, it seemed, in her father’s fragile spine. He put a hand out, “Go easy,” he said. Michael turned from the game to say, “Watch it, nimrod.” Only slightly subdued, she perched herself on the pillow beside her father, patted his bald head. “We had fun,” she said.
Then Mary was in the doorway, in her skirt and blouse and stocking feet. Her hands on her hips. “Are you ready to get out of that thing?” she asked.
John Keane saw both boys bow their heads.
“No,” he said simply. “It’s helping.”
She looked to the boys, as if they would corroborate her skepticism. But they were having none of it. She looked especially at Michael, who might have been her surest ally, given all the times in the past he’d stood against his father, over politics, over hairstyles, over mandatory Sunday Mass. “Honestly,” she said, moving into the room, gathering the clutter from her side of the bed. “I hardly think this is the solution.”
“It’s helping,” he said again.
She only glanced at him. “You don’t look like you’ve been helped,” she said.
It was Clare who was absorbing the discussion unabashedly, through her wide eyes.
Now Annie appeared. She was talking-these days she was always talking-and both boys raised their hands to hush her. She walked around the bed to join them in front of the small screen. The runners scored. Michael leaned forward to slap Jacob’s hand, jostling the mattress. Clare threw her hands up in the air, and then around her father’s shoulder. Impatient, Mary Keane was leaning over the bed, gathering the magazines.
In fact, he would die alone, accompanied only by the high-pitched pulse of the hospital machine, his last breath missed even by the nurses who were distracted by the changing shifts. None of them gathered at his bed, no candles lit. The offending leg already amputated in the doctors’ routine efforts to save him.
With the plate and the magazines in her hand she said, “Do you want the boys to help you get to the toilet before dinner?”
He knew he would have to manage it sometime within the next twenty minutes (ten minutes, now that she had brought the subject up), but he said, “No. I’m fine.”
He recognized the tactic: she’d humiliate him into a doctor’s office. Using words like toilet when she never said toilet, thought it unrefined, just to get him annoyed enough to make an appointment.
“Maybe I could get you a little bell or something,” she said, as coy as she might ever have been at twenty-one. “You could ring it when you need to go.”
No doubt this was Pauline’s plan.
He glanced at the TV. He felt the pain roil a little, threatening a larger blow.
“Why don’t you all go downstairs and have your dinner?” he said, calmly. Because she would see every bit of it in his face, she saw everything in his face.
“Send me up a piece of steak,” he said.
Clare brought the tray, walking with it through the slatted rosy sunlight that now stretched slowly, leisurely, the stroll of time, across the ceiling and the far wall. He’d just returned from the bathroom and the old army boot, its tongue lolling, lay in its coil of rope at the foot of the bed. He had an impulse, in his daughter’s presence, to throw a blanket over it. It occurred to him that he had reached an age (he remembered Mary’s befuddled old father) when his surest convictions could be transformed into mere foolishness in the blink of an eye.
“Put it here,” he said, dragging the straight-backed chair to the side of the bed. She put the tray down, kissed his cheek. There was something of the metallic odor of the hot subway about her still, the odor of his own missed commute home. All of his children scented with the wider world.
She was talking about the day in the city and what the man at the token booth had said, and what Pauline had said, and who she swore she saw in the lobby when the intermission lights flashed though she couldn’t really be sure. He surveyed the tray. A piece of chuck steak and mashed potatoes and green beans. A roll and butter and a dish of canned pears. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with both feet on the floor, he was aware of a certain numbness taking over his leg. He couldn’t eat a bite.
“The Spanish Inquisition,” she said, and he looked up at her, thinking, perhaps, she was repeating Michael’s joke about the rack. Again he had the impulse to cover up the empty boot. But she was, he quickly gathered, talking about the play. The tickets had been a gift from Pauline. Someone in his office told him they could well have cost sixty dollars apiece.
“They’re all prisoners,” Clare was saying. “In a dungeon. And there’s this long staircase.” She raised her arms, illustrating it. Her skirt was short, too short (he resisted interrupting her to mention this), her knees still chubby although the rest of her body had grown lean. “And Cervantes comes down. The prisoners attack him and then they put him on trial. In order to defend himself, he tells them a story. And then he becomes Don Quixote and all the prisoners are the other characters. So the whole play is like the story he tells, while they’re waiting in jail.”
She pulled off the headband that held back her hair. Scratched her head. The sunlight from the window was on her back. “He’s this old man and he’s read so many books about chivalry that he goes crazy and thinks it’s all real. He thinks he’s a knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha. And only one of his servants goes along with him, Sancho Panza. And they go out on a quest. He sees a windmill and thinks it’s a monster.”