Nora Jane (38 page)

“I’ll sell the store, Nora Jane, if that’s what you want. I’ll call a broker and put Clara Books on the market. Say the word.
If you want me to, I will.”

“I don’t know. Let me think about it.”

“Are we going to New York still?”

“Yes. I think we are. I have a lesson with Delaney this afternoon. She’s been calling every day. She thinks you should give
in and take the books out of the store. It’s not as if they were asking you to quit selling Shakespeare.”

“It’s the principle. I’ll sell the store but I won’t refuse to stock books because of terrorist threats.”

“Then sell it. Principles are abstractions. I’m talking about live children, live lives.”

“Then I’ll sell it.”

“Then I want you to.”

They were in their bedroom. The drapes were drawn back. A cool blue sky was visible through the windows. It was eleven o’clock
in the morning.

“Arabs and Palestinians have their side to things,” Nora Jane said. “They have families. They eat and sleep and need houses
and security, they need part of that goddamn sand the Jews were crazy to want in the first place. Peace is never going to
happen over there until the Israelis give back some of the sand. But I live here, in Northern California, in the richest country
in the world and I won’t be involved in that mess. I have one political idea. To protect my children. You can help me with
that or I’ll go away and do it by myself.”

“I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

“This is it, Freddy. This is how the world works.” She opened the sliding glass doors that opened onto her walled garden,
which was modeled on the Japanese garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She went out and sat upon a bench and looked at
the designs in the windows of the wall and she thought about the carpenter who had made them for her and she thought about
design and patterns and how space was bent into time and the heart of matter and the universe of stars and all the work there
was to do to get ready to go to New York and the reality of evil and how it never leaves the world, never, never, never goes
away. Greed, envy, cruelty, hunger, disease, and death.

And in the face of that, beauty, “the frail, the solitary lance.” I will sing my heart out for that audience, Nora Jane decided.
I will walk out on the stage in my blue velvet dress and for a moment beauty will win and I will be its helper.

The old lion could still smell the dog treats on the stone. The two pieces Little Freddy had left in the crevice were still
on the ledge where he put them. The lion had bloodied his paw trying to get them a few days before so now he just climbed
up on the flattest stone and rested in the smell and the warmth from the sun. He had eaten well the night before, a snake
he caught by the falls and a crippled rabbit he found in the woods. Hunger was leaving him alone on this fine September day
and he fell into a light sleep. A memory of spring came to him, waking up and moving out into a field deep with grass. The
smell of flowers and a den high on a bluff.

It was some days later. Nora Jane was in her house being talked to by a man in a suit who had once been the star of a college
track team. It was very hard to be in Nora Jane’s presence without being distracted, but the man was trying. “You are being
guarded twenty-four hours a day by the best and most highly trained men and women in the world,” the man was saying.

They were in the sunken living room with the pianos. There was a tray with tea and cookies. There was a pitcher of lemonade
and tall frosted glasses and a plate of lime and lemon slices. Nora Jane was wearing a yellow play dress and her hair was
pulled back into a bun like a dancer’s. A yellow flower was in the bun.

Tammili and Lydia were listening from the upstairs balcony, sitting very quietly on the floor, not hiding, just being quiet.

“You are being guarded as if you were the president of the United States,” the man continued. “This is the treatment we give
federal judges when they are threatened. We don’t think there is a threat to you. We think we have most of the group. The
one named Davi is talking his head off. An Afro-American preacher got to him on a television show. We’ve been letting him
watch television as long as he keeps on cooperating. I don’t think he’s playing us. We think he’s spilling his guts. It’s
a huge windfall. It’s what we wait for. We’ve got this shrink talking to him. Davi’s telling him about the camps where he
was raised. He’s crying all the time. Everything he’s told us so far checks out. The position of the camps, the number of
personnel, everything. We think we have rounded up the entire group in the United States. I don’t think you have anything
to worry about, Mrs. Harwood. We think we can keep you safe.”

“If we go to New York?”

“You’ll be safe there. We’ll have personnel in the hotel. We will stay on this. We have orders to stay on it.”

“Please have lemonade. I made it an hour ago. It’s very good, I think. Please let me pour you some.”

“There’s one other thing.” The agent took the lemonade and sipped it. “The man in New York City who found the list is a retired
surgeon. He knows about your concert. He asked if he could meet you when you’re there, after your concert, of course. It’s
unprofessional of me to give you this message but he’s been hounding us to get in touch with you. He’s from New Orleans originally.
He knew your father or something.”

“My father died in the Vietnam War.”

“We know about that. Well, I just wanted to give you his name if you ever want to call him.”

“Okay. Give it here.” She waited, here it was, the part she hated about performing. But this man had been instrumental in
saving Freddy’s life. And he had known her father. It might be all right to talk to someone about that at last.

“His name is Dr. Rivers. I’ll write it down for you.” The agent took a pad and pencil from his pocket and wrote down a name
and address and handed it to her.

“I’ll write to him,” Nora Jane said. “Thank you for giving this to me.”

“This lemonade is fine. I haven’t had a lemonade in many years. It’s good. It’s really good.”

“Let me pour you some more.” Nora Jane leaned over and poured the lemonade. She was so near the agent that for a moment he
thought that he might faint. It was all right for someone to be that beautiful, he decided, but it takes some getting used
to for a working man.

“We’re going to New York,” Tammili declared. “She’s going to do it.”

“I knew she would. She’s brave, Tammili. She only worries because of us.”

“Let’s call Grandmother Ann and get her to take us shopping. She’s the only one who’s going to let us buy something we really
like to wear up there.”

“She’s the best one to shop with.”

“Let’s call her now.”

“Okay.”

A NOVELLA

N
ORA JANE
was swooping around the room picking up coats and gloves and hats, pushing pillows back into place, scowling so deeply she
wasn’t even pretty anymore, much less one of the most beautiful women most of the people in the world had ever seen.

“Slow down, Momma,” Tammili said. “Go out in the kitchen and find us something for lunch. We can’t cure Daddy’s cancer this
morning. We can’t do anything now but wait.”

“Right,” Lydia agreed. She always agreed with her twin sister about how to handle their mother. “Little Freddy’s coming home
at noon today. We’ve got to get our act together before he gets here. He’ll go crazy if he thinks we’re worried.”

“He knows we’re worried.” Nora Jane put down the pillow she was holding and sat down on a sofa beside her daughters. It had
been an hour since they had returned from the internist’s office with the really bad news that the white-cell problem Freddy
Harwood had been fighting for twenty months was now officially and finally leukemia, and it was time for chemotherapy and
radiation and the search for a bone marrow donor.

“Donor, dolor, as in grief and sorrow,” Tammili had said on the drive home. Tammili was deep into a poetry-writing mode and
was learning words by the hundreds. The problem with learning them was finding ways to use them in conversation. “Little Freddy
knows we were going to Danen’s office this morning because he answered the phone when the nurse called. He wanted to stay
home from school because he said we didn’t look ‘wite.’”

“He has to stop doing that or he has to go to speech therapy. You and Daddy are indulging him by laughing at it,” Lydia said.
Lydia considered herself in charge of her five-year-old brother. She thought she was the only person in the family who took
Little Freddy’s future seriously. Actually it was her own future she was really worried about, due to a very poor showing
on a
PSAT
test she had taken in the spring. Lydia thought she was dumb. Compared to her fraternal twin, Tammili, she was dumb, but
compared to the rest of the sixteen-year-old people in the world, she was way up there in the ninetieth per-centile for verbal
skills and the eighty-fourth for math and science.

“I’m going to make some tuna-fish salad and some slice-and-bake cookies,” Nora Jane said. “Who wants to help?”

“I will,” Tammili said. “Lydia needs to do her homework. We have to go back for fourth period. We shouldn’t cut geology and
history.”

“Come on, then.” Nora Jane got up. Tammili stood up beside her and took her arm and they walked into the kitchen. Lydia sighed
deeply and went into her room to study plate tectonics. It was really pretty interesting given the fact that they lived right
on top of the most active fault line in the United States, maybe the world. Their neighborhood in Berkeley was so exactly
on the fault line it was almost a joke.

“It’s live or die time,” Freddy Harwood’s best friend, Nieman, was saying. He and Freddy were on the balcony outside Freddy’s
study. Nora Jane had called Nieman from the doctor’s office and he was waiting when they got home. Nieman was teaching at
Berkeley now, but he had canceled his day’s classes and walked out without remembering to tell his wife, Stella. She had found
out he was gone and canceled his class cancellations and was teaching them herself. She hadn’t called Nieman to find out the
details. She already knew. She had known for five months that Freddy’s “problem” was going to end up being called cancer,
but she had kept her mouth shut about it except for one night when she was drinking wine. “That’s leukemia you’re describing,”
she had said to Nieman.

“No, it is not!” Nieman said. “My God, Stella, don’t even say that.”

“Okay,” she said. “All right, whatever you say. I’m sorry. What do I know? I’m not a medical doctor.”

“You’re the best biochemist on the West Coast,” Nieman said. “But he doesn’t have leukemia, Stella. It’s a blood disorder
and they’ll fix it with cortisone. He eats health food, for God’s sake. He works out.”

Stella had let it go at that. She wasn’t taking a chance on harming her marriage to Nieman by being the harbinger of this
bad news.

“Denial’s not going to work on this one, is it?” Freddy was saying. “It’s trenching time, old buddy. Dig deep, and all that.
I don’t think I’m going to die. I can’t imagine dying, never have been able to, never have believed anyone’s dead — Shakespeare,
Leonardo, Daddy, your dad—anyone who was really here. I’m not making much sense yet.”

“Tons of sense.”

“So it’s definitely live. I wonder who they’ll find for a donor. It’s painful. Imagine anyone doing that for a stranger.”

“What if it’s one of the girls?”

“It won’t be. Danen’s ruled them out.”

“It might be me. Our ancestors came from the same part of France. I’m sure everyone at Touro Synagogue will try out.”

“It’s not a play, Nieman.”

“Don’t be so sure. It might turn out to be. What if it’s someone we don’t like, Joe Diel or old Leo Thalberg? That would be
a nice turn.

“How did you get away on a Wednesday, Nieman? Don’t you have classes?”

“I canceled them. I’m staying for lunch. Come on, let’s go join Nora Jane. Don’t have that look. I haven’t missed a class
since I started teaching at Berkeley. I have so much accumulated leave I could go to the Galapagos for a vacation, something
we should think about doing very soon.”

Freddy touched his best friend’s arm, not much, and not for long, just a touch, then he held the door and let Nieman precede
him through the two-million-dollar architectural dream in which he and Nora Jane lived their perfect life with their good
children. “Live,” he kept saying under his breath. It was going to be the mantra. He had tried “Om Mani Padme Hum” all the
way home in the car and it had held up, but he thought maybe now he’d just get something quicker. Breathe? Live? Please?

“What Salinger book has that Jesus prayer that Franny Glass kept using?” he asked. “You know, where she’s having the nervous
breakdown on the sofa while the painters are painting the apartment?”

“Franny and Zooey
,” Nieman answered. “Remember when Janie Gugleman was writing that paper on Salinger and she got obsessed with counting the
times characters lit cigarettes in the book? She’s president of a women’s college in Georgia now. Can you believe that? She
sends me the alumnae magazine. She’s always on the cover looking beautiful beside some visiting dignitary.”

Freddy was quiet, watching Nieman spin out anything he could find to fill the awful reality of the day. “We’ve had enormous
lives,” he said, looking at Nieman without hiding anything he was feeling. “We’ve had the best lives anyone could imagine
and we’re going to have plenty more. I’m not going to die, Nieman. They’re letting me do the chemotherapy as an outpatient.
If it was really acute they’d put me in the hospital right away. So stop worrying and let’s go cheer up those women.”

* * *

They went into the kitchen and pretended not to notice the scared faces trying to pretend they were normal people putting
together a lunch, and then Freddy’s mother’s chauffeur, Big Judy, came in the back door with Little Freddy. It was two weeks
before his sixth birthday. He had curly blond hair and deep blue eyes and a kind and serious demeanor. “He takes dominion
everywhere,” Nieman was fond of saying of Little Freddy. “He’s a force of nature,” his grandmother said.