فصل بیست و یک

TWENTY-ONE

The next day Louis called the intensive care unit at the EMMC. Norma’s condition was still listed as critical; that was standard operating procedure for the first twenty-four hours following a heart attack. Louis got a cheerier assessment from Weybridge, her doctor, however. ‘I wouldn’t even call it a minor myocardial infarction,’ he said. ‘No scarring. She owes you a hell of a lot, Dr Creed.’ On impulse, Louis stopped by the hospital later that week with a bouquet of flowers, and found that Norma had been moved to a semi-private room downstairs – a very good sign. Jud was with her.

Norma exclaimed over the flowers, and buzzed a nurse for a vase. Then she directed Jud until they were in water, arranged to her specifications, and placed on the dresser in the corner.

‘Mother’s feeling ever s’much better,’ Jud said dryly after he had fiddled with the flowers for the third time.

‘Don’t be smart, Judson,’ Norma said.

Jud offered a comic salute. ‘No, ma’am.’

At last Norma looked at Louis. ‘I want to thank you for what you did,’ she said with a shyness that was utterly unaffected and thus doubly touching. ‘Jud says I owe you my life.’ Embarrassed, Louis said: ‘Jud exaggerates.’

‘Not very damn much, he don’t,’ Jud said. He squinted at Louis, almost smiling but not quite. ‘Didn’t your mother tell you never to slip a thank-you, Louis?’ She hadn’t said anything about that, at least not that Louis could remember, but he believed she had said something once about false modesty being half the sin of pride.

‘Norma,’ he said, ‘anything I could do, I was pleased to do.’

‘You’re a dear man,’ Norma said. ‘You take this man of mine out somewhere and let him buy you a glass of beer. I’m feeling sleepy again, and I can’t seem to get rid of him.’ Jud stood up with alacrity. ‘Hot damn! I’ll go for that, Louis. Quick, before she changes her mind.’

The first snow came a week before Thanksgiving. They got another four inches on November 20th, but the day before the holiday itself was clear and blue and cold. Louis took his family to Bangor International Airport and saw them off on the first leg of their trip back to Chicago for a reunion with Rachel’s people.

‘It’s not right,’ Rachel said for perhaps the twentieth time since discussions on this matter had commenced in earnest a month ago. ‘I don’t like thinking of you rattling around the house alone on Thanksgiving Day. That’s supposed to be a family holiday, Louis.’ Louis shifted Gage, who looked gigantic and wide-eyed in his first big-boy parka, to his other arm. Ellie was at one of the big windows, watching an Air Force helicopter take off.

‘I’m not exactly going to be crying in my beer,’ Louis said. ‘Jud and Norma are going to have me over for turkey and all the trimmings. Hell, I’m the one who feels guilty. I’ve never liked these big holiday group gropes anyway. I start drinking in front of some football game at three in the afternoon and fall asleep at seven and the next day it feels like the Dallas Cowgirls are dancing around and yelling boola-boola inside my head. I just don’t like sending you off with the two kids.’ ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Flying first-class, I feel like a princess. And Gage will sleep on the flight from Logan to O’Hare.’ ‘You hope,’ he said, and they both laughed.

The flight was called, and Ellie scampered over. ‘That’s us, Mommy. Come on-come on-come on. They’ll leave without us.’

‘No, they won’t.’ Rachel said. She was clutching her three pink boarding cards in one hand. She was wearing her fur coat, some fake stuff that was a luxuriant brown … probably supposed to look like muskrat, Louis thought. Whatever it was supposed to look like, it made her look absolutely lovely.

Perhaps something of what he felt showed in his eyes, because she hugged him impulsively, semi-crushing Gage between them. Gage looked surprised but not terribly upset.

‘Louis Creed, I love you,’ she said.

‘Mom-eee,’ Ellie said, now in a fever of impatience. ‘Come on-come on-c—’

‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘Be good, Louis.’

‘Tell you what,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’ll be careful. Say hello to your folks, Rachel.’

‘Oh, you,’ she said, and wrinkled her nose at him. Rachel was not fooled; she knew perfectly well why Louis was skipping this trip. ‘Fun-nee.’ He watched them enter the boarding ramp and disappear from sight for the next week. He already felt homesick and lonely for them. He moved over to the window where Ellie had been, hands stuffed in his coat pockets, watching the baggage-handlers loading the hold.

The truth was simple. Not only Mr but Mrs Irwin Goldman of Lake Forest had disliked Louis from the beginning. He came from the wrong side of the tracks, but that was just for starters. Worse, he fully expected their daughter, who had been catered to with an almost religious dedication for the first eighteen years of her life and sent to the best schools money could buy, to support him while he went to medical school, where he would almost surely flunk out.

Louis could have handled all this, in fact had been doing so. Then something had happened which Rachel did not know about and never would … not from Louis, anyway. Irwin Goldman had offered to pay Louis’s entire tuition through med school. The price of this ‘scholarship’ (Goldman’s word) was that Louis should break off his engagement with Rachel at once.

Louis Creed had not been at the optimum time of life to deal with such an outrage, but such melodramatic proposals (or bribes, to call a spade a spade) are rarely made to those who are at an optimum time – which might be around the age of eighty-five. He was tired, for one thing. He was spending eighteen hours a week in classes, another twenty hitting the books, another fifteen waiting tables in a deep-dish pizza joint down the block from the Whitehall Hotel. He was also nervous. Mr Goldman’s oddly jovial manner that evening had contrasted completely with his previous cold behavior, and Louis thought that when Goldman invited him into the study for a cigar, a look had passed from him to his wife. Later – much later, when time had lent a little perspective – Louis would reflect that horses must feel much the same free-floating anxiety when they smell the first smoke of a prairie fire. He began expecting Goldman to reveal at any moment that he knew Louis had been sleeping with his daughter.

When Goldman instead made his incredible offer – even going so far as to take his checkbook from the pocket of his smoking jacket like a rake in a Noël Coward farce and wave it in Louis’s face – Louis had blown up. He accused Goldman of trying to keep his daughter like an exhibit in a museum, of having no regard for anyone but himself, and of being an overbearing, thoughtless bastard. It would be a long time before he would admit to himself that part of his rage had been relief.

All of these little insights into Irwin Goldman’s character, though true, had no redeeming touch of diplomacy in them. Any semblance of Noël Coward departed; if there was humor in the rest of the conversation, it was of a much more vulgar sort. Goldman told him to get out, and that if he ever saw Louis on his doorstep again, he would shoot him like a yellow dog. Louis told Goldman to take his checkbook and plug up his ass with it. Goldman said he had seen bums in the gutter who had more potential than Louis Creed. Louis told Goldman he could shove his goddam BankAmericard and his American Express Gold Card right up beside his checkbook.

None of this had been a promising first step toward good relations with the future in-laws.

In the end, Rachel had brought them around (after each man had had a chance to repent of the things he had said, although neither of them had ever changed his mind in the slightest about the other). There was no more melodrama, certainly no dismally theatrical from-this-day-forward-I-have-no-daughter scene. Goldman would have probably suffered through his daughter’s marriage to the Creature from the Black Lagoon before denying her. Nevertheless, the face rising above the collar of Irwin Goldman’s morning coat on the day Louis married Rachel had greatly resembled the faces sometimes seen carved on Egyptian sarcophagi. Their wedding present had been a six-place setting of Spode china and a microwave oven. No money. For most of Louis’s harum-scarum med school days, Rachel had worked as a clerk in a women’s apparel store. And from that day to this day, Rachel only knew that things had been and continued to be ‘tense’ between her husband and her parents … particularly between Louis and her father.

Louis could have gone to Chicago with his family, although the University schedule would have meant flying back three days earlier than Rachel and the kids. Still, that was no great hardship. On the other hand, four days with Im-Ho-Tep and his wife the Sphinx would have been.

The children had melted his in-laws a good deal, as children often do. Louis suspected he himself could have completed the rapprochement simply by pretending he had forgotten that evening in Goldman’s study. It wouldn’t even matter that Goldman knew he was pretending. But the fact was (and he at least had the guts to be up front about it with himself) he did not quite want to make the rapprochement. Ten years was a long time, but it was not quite long enough to take away the slimy taste that had come into his mouth when, in Goldman’s study over glasses of brandy, the old man had opened one side of that idiotic smoking jacket and removed the checkbook residing within. Yes, he had felt relief that the nights – five of them in all – that he and Rachel had spent in his narrow, sagging apartment bed had not been discovered, but that surprised disgust had been quite its own thing, and the years between then and now had not changed it.

He could have come, but he preferred to send his father-in-law his grandchildren, his daughter, and a message.

The Delta 727 pulled away from the rampway, turned … and he saw Ellie at one of the front windows, waving frantically. Louis waved back, smiling, and then someone – Ellie or Rachel – hiked Gage into the window. Louis waved, and Gage waved back – perhaps seeing him, perhaps only imitating Ellie.

‘Fly my people safe,’ he muttered, then zipped his coat and went out to the parking lot. Here the wind whined and zoomed with force enough to almost tear his hunter’s cap off his head, and he clapped a hand to it. He fumbled with his keys to unlock the driver’s side door of his car and then turned as the jet rose beyond the terminal building, its nose tilted upward into the hard blue, its turbos thundering.

Feeling very lonely indeed now – ridiculously close to tears – Louis waved again.

He was still feeling blue that evening when he recrossed Route 15 after a couple of beers with Jud and Norma – Norma had drunk a glass of wine, something she was allowed, even encouraged to have, by Dr Weybridge. They had moved into the kitchen tonight in deference to the season.

Jud had stoked up the small Marek stove and they had sat around it, the beer cold, the heat good, and Jud had talked about how the Micmac Indians had staved off a British landing at Machias two hundred years ago. In those days the Micmacs had been pretty fearsome, he said, and then added that he guessed there were a few state and Federal land-lawyers who thought they still were.

It should have been a fine evening, but Louis was aware of the empty house waiting for him. Crossing the lawn and feeling the frost crunching under his shoes, he heard the telephone begin to ring in the house. He broke into a run, got through the front door, sprinted through the living room (knocking over a magazine stand), and then slid across the kitchen to the phone, his frosty shoes skidding over the linoleum. He snared the phone.

‘Hello?’

‘Louis?’ Rachel’s voice, a little distant, but absolutely fine. ‘We’re here. We made it. No problems.’

‘Great!’ he said, and sat down to talk to her, thinking: I wish to God you were here.