Saving Grace (41 page)

“Do you want me to go on?” Barrows asked.

Jonathan nodded.

“It’s a type of tumor called glioblastoma multiformi. We were able to debulk the primary lesion, but the tumor has spread. It’s probably metastasized to other organs, but that’s not going to matter. It’s the damage to the brain that’s critical.”

Gracie closed her eyes. For a moment she was back in the wadi with the water rising around her.

“What can you do?” Jonathan asked.

“We’ve bought some time with this procedure. Radiation therapy could buy some more.”

“How much time?” He felt outside the scene, above it, watching like a spectator at a play.
 

“With radiation, a couple of months. Maybe less. A lot depends on her willingness to fight.” And to endure, Barrows thought but did not say. There was only so much people could absorb at one time. In this case, the ultimate prognosis was grim enough without bringing in the stages of the disease.
 

“If we’d caught it sooner... ” Jonathan began.

Barrows interrupted. “Wouldn’t have mattered.
 
This kind of tumor, by the time it’s symptomatic, it’s already spread.”

“What now?”

“First, she’ll need to recover from surgery. Then we’ll see where we stand. There are several options.”

Grace emerged from her stupor to turn a dangerous look on Barrows. “Options?” she echoed.
 
“You sound like a goddamn stockbroker.”
 

“It’s not his fault,” her father said. “He’s trying to help.”

“Why operate on her if it’s hopeless? Why put her though all this, if he can’t save her?”

“We couldn’t know until we tried,” Barrows said gently. “And today’s surgery has prolonged her life.”

She looked him up and down. “Tamar said you were a great doctor, but I think you’re a fraud.”
 

“Gracie,” Jonathan said, “that’s unjust and uncalled for. You’re not helping.”

“How can I help? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it, whatever it is.”

“Just be with her,” the doctor said.

* * *

Barnaby nursed his fourth whiskey and flipped channels with the remote. Lily Fleishman’s surprise surgery led the eleven-o’clock news on all three networks, each of which ran identical footage of the family leaving the hospital, followed by old clips of Lily looking vibrant and lovely. “Tragedy strikes the Fleishman household.” “Hospital sources described Mrs. Fleishman’s condition as ‘guarded’ after surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.” “The family remained secluded in their Highview home tonight following...”

Sympathy dripped from their tongues. The anchors shook their heads, looked grave, and sighed.

“Goddamn pack dogs.” Barnaby felt sick. Those shots of Fleishman leaving the hospital with his arms around his children (yes, Gracie was back, but he wasn’t going to think about that now) were utterly beyond the pale. Had the man no shame? Did he need to grovel for pity, degrading not only himself but also all those who once believed in him? It was pathetic, and so was the manner in which the media pandered to this blatant bid for sympathy, instead of examining, analyzing it. There was, despite Roger’s denigration, a natural and enlightening analogy to be made between cancer and corruption. But did they make it?

He switched off the television, picked up the phone, and punched out Hasselforth’s home number.

“Did you believe that shit?” he said.

Roger sighed. “What shit?”

“Lily Fleishman’s alleged cancer.”

“Alleged? You think they made it up? They cut her brain open, asshole.”
 

“There’s a great story here, and you’re missing it as usual. Corruption as political cancer; the conflation of the public and private realms.”

“What are you, married to that metaphor? You ought to get off the sauce and start thinking again.”

“Fuck you too.” Barnaby hung up. He tried to roll a joint, but his hands were shaking. He lay back, and thought of Gracie as she’d appeared on his television screen. She looked like she’d been beaten up. There was a bandage on her forehead and a cast on her foot. None of the networks so much as mentioned her injuries, which had to be Fleishman pulling strings as usual. What the hell had he done to her?

Gracie had stared into the camera almost as if she were searching for someone. Barnaby had no doubt it was him. He thought about calling her, just to make things right. He knew exactly what he’d say. “We fucked each other over; now we’re even. No hard feelings, kid.”
 

He ought to rescue her, take her away from Jonathan. The idea excited him, though he knew it was premature. In the meantime, no point wasting a perfectly good hard-on. Too smashed to get up for his phone book, Barnaby dialed the one number he knew by heart.

On the fourth ring, a slurred voice answered.
 

“Hey, Ronnie,” he said.

“Who the fuck is this?”

“Your lover, babe.”

“It’s two fucking o’clock. What do you want?”

“I want you, babe. I’m willing to forgive and forget if you are. Why don’t you hop in a cab and come over?”

Silence. Then: “Are you out of your mind?”

“I miss you, Ronnie.”

“Try jerking off.” She hung up.

30

LEAVES CLUNG TO THE WINDOW SCREEN like drowning passengers to a ship’s debris; then the wind’s tide swept them away. The framed sky was patchy gray and white, the ivy brown against the terra-cotta walls. Lily scorned the waste of precious time that was television, and spent her rare hours alone gazing out into her garden, watching the season change.

She lay under three blankets, for the room was chilly. Once, her friend Margo had come to visit. As she bent to kiss Lily, her face crinkled with repugnance, an expression gone in a moment but not before Lily registered it. Cancer had an odor all its own, a sickly- sweet stench like rotting flesh that exuded from the mouth and pores; and though she herself, immersed in the disease, could not sense it, others could. From then on Lily had insisted that the bedroom window remain open. Even so, her son rarely entered the room, and didn’t stay long when he did.

She had come home over Dr. Barrows’ objections. He’d pressed her to stay for radiation. “Will it save my life?” she’d asked him flat out. He seemed surprised by the question, but Lily waited him out, her ostrich days over.
 

“It’s not a cure,” he said. “It will prolong your life.”

“Prolong my death, you mean. No, thank you.”

The doctor appealed to Jonathan, but her husband would not oppose her wishes; if Lily wanted to come home, he said, then home was where she belonged. The couple had, in these last days, reverted to the posture of their first. They were partners again, back to back against the world, as if all the years of growing apart had never been. Jonathan turned to Lily for counsel and comfort, she to him for strength and reassurance.

“I’m a coward,” she told Jonathan matter-of-factly. “I’m not afraid of dying, but I’m scared to death of pain. I want you to promise me... ”

He promised.

Their rediscovered intimacy was an anodyne to the second passing of her mother, excised by Dr. Barrows’ scalpel. No more sweet lullabies to smooth the passage into sleep, no more the sense of someone close behind her. Was Greta’s voice really no more than a side effect of Lily’s disease, an effluence of cancer? Lily could not think it. Perhaps it was the imminence of the end, or an inability to conceive of her own nonbeing, but Lily had come to imagine death as a barrier to perception, not being. She believed the cancer had not generated the voice, but rather blocked the censor that kept it from being heard. Thus, unseen, unheard, her mother yet lived on within her, as Lily would in some sense live on in her children.

But these were thoughts for the empty hours when she gazed out at her garden, idle speculation, for soon enough the issue would be proved, and if she was wrong she would never know it. Far more absorbing, far more pressing, were the problems of the living, and herein lay the bitterest pain of all, that Lily was not to know how their lives turned out. There was no greater sorrow than the loss of a child; and whether it was the child or the mother who died, the severance was the same.

Thus Lily mourned for and was comforted by her children, especially Gracie; for contrary to all reasonable expectation, it was her difficult and distant daughter who cleaved to her, her loving son who stayed away. When he did visit, Paul acted as if he were angry with her. Though he spoke all the right words of encouragement and sympathy, his eyes accused her of desertion. But Lily’s relationship with Gracie was utterly changed, for the awful constraint of time had eradicated all others, and together with sorrow came moments of lightheartedness, laughter, and love.

Not only in relation to Lily was Gracie changed. The whole family marked it and wondered. Clara walked into her own room one night, after Lily had fallen asleep, to find her granddaughter sitting on the floor with tears on her cheeks. A photo album lay open on her lap. “My rough, tough Gracie, crying over pictures?” the old woman said in amazement.

Gracie scrubbed at her face with a sleeve. “I didn’t know you saved all these old photos.”

Clara sank heavily into her upholstered rocking chair and laid her knitting bag beside her. “So who told you to go snooping in my room? You want I should go snooping in yours?”

This, in Clara, was a mere hiccup of ill humor, a conversational tic that Gracie ignored. She said, “Yaacov was a smashing man, wasn’t he?”

“Jacob,” Clara corrected. She looked down at their wedding photo and snorted. “A million years ago I wasn’t so bad myself.”

“You were beautiful. He’s still a good-looking man, you know.”

“And I’m an old bag. Life’s unfair.”

This seemed too self-evident to invite comment. Gracie turned to a photo of Clara and Jacob holding a newborn baby girl. All three stared solemnly into the camera, he in black, Clara stout in white with a high ruffled collar, the infant in a stiff white bonnet.

“How come neither of you ever married again?”

Her grandmother laughed deep in her throat. “Once is enough.”

“That’s the same thing he said.”

“Shows what a fool he is,” said Clara, not without a note of self-satisfaction.

“If he’s a fool, what are you?”

“It’s different for women. Women marry for
kinder.
I already had my children.”

“They marry for husbands too.”

Clara sniffed. “Men
are
children.”

“My father’s not.”

“No. But look what it took for him to grow up. What is it all of a sudden with the questions? Eighteen years you didn’t care, suddenly you got to know everything?”

“It interests me, that’s all. I’ve been thinking about families and what makes them stick together or fall apart, and I thought about you and Yaacov, how you’re not together but not really apart either, since you never got divorced.”

“It’s not so easy, divorce.”

Gracie said, “I just wish they were here, that’s all. I wish our family was together.”

The old woman rocked and sighed, and after a while she said quietly, as if speaking to herself, “So do I,
maideleh.
So do I.”

That Gracie had changed was as apparent to her family as its cause was obscure. Something had happened in Israel, that was certain. Was it Tamar’s effect they were seeing? Israel’s? Was it Gracie’s ordeal in the desert, or some unknown factor, a secret lover, perhaps? When Lily asked, Gracie just smiled.

“Will you go back to Israel?” she asked.

Gracie looked amused. “Someday, maybe. I was asked.”

“By whom?”

“Tamar, for one.”

“What is she like,” Lily asked, gently mocking, “this paragon aunt?”

“Tamar? Solid. I have an image of her as a kind of ancient Indian fertility figure, short and squat, with a center of gravity right around the pelvis. Don’t know why, since she’s neither squat nor particularly fertile.”

“Was she good to you?”

“She didn’t mother me, if that’s what you mean. She liked me.”

“She always did. And Micha,” Lily said slyly, for little had been said of Micha, “did he like you too?”

Gracie laughed. “Strangely enough, he did.”

“Nothing strange about it, my darling.”

“I wasn’t very nice to him.”

“Just as well. If you’re too nice to men, they get ideas above their station.”

They laughed, two women together, allies at last. Then Grace asked: “Were you too nice to Dad?”

The smile faded from Lily’s face. Gracie was still Gracie after all, with the same instinct for the jugular.

“Maybe. Things might have turned out better if I’d been more forceful. You, my darling, on the other hand, are much too hard on him.”

A ghost of her old truculence crossed Gracie’s face. “We’re doing better. Mostly I stay out of his way.”