The Misremembered Man (20 page)

Jamie was glad to let Paddy talk; that way, Miss Crink wouldn’t have the opportunity to refer to the Ocean Spray incident. He still carried shameful tatters of her sister’s loud pronouncements regarding his savings account. The bad memory clung to him like chewing gum to a schoolboy’s sneaker.

He made some noncommittal noises, left Paddy with Mildred, and continued down the store in the wake of Mr. Harvey’s herring-bone-tweeded back.

“Any particular occasion, James?” Alphonse asked. “Funeral, wedding…?” He paused at a rail of cellophaned garments.

“No, just need something that would take me to Mass of a Sunday and the like,” Jamie lied.

“Hmm. Any particular color?”

“Och, the darker the better, I think. Don’t want anything too bright.” Jamie pulled on his ear again. In the background he could hear Mildred and Paddy blathering at great length. He was glad that he was not part of it.

“Now: size, James. Thirty-eight, forty?”

“God, I wouldn’t know, Mr. Harvey. I never bought a suit before.” He looked down at himself. “I’ve lost a bit, so a have, so a wouldn’t be too big. But then,” he added helpfully, “I wouldn’t be too wee either.”

“Medium, then perhaps. I thought you looked a bit failed, James. But no harm in that.” He slapped his own paunch. “Could do with losing a bit myself. I think it’s best that we measure you first, just to be sure.”

He whipped out a measuring tape, as a fairground magician would a length of knotted, colored handkerchiefs, and encircled Jamie’s chest, waist and hips in three swift, accurate movements.

“Forty-two, I’d say. And price range: What’s your limit, James?”

Jamie pondered this question deeply, not knowing what to say. He thought, however, that £30 might be the most he could afford.

“Good. Now let’s see what we’ve got.” Mr. Harvey went back to the rail, plucked out three suits—navy blue, brown and black—and stripped back the cellophane.

“Now, James, why don’t you just hop into the changing room there and slip into these. See how you go. And don’t worry about the price. I promise a good discount.”

Just as Jamie was heading behind the curtain, Paddy returned, flushed from his confabulation with Mildred. He raised a hand to Jamie and sat down on a leather chair to await his friend’s transformation.

The fitting room was small and Jamie felt like an elephant in a shoebox. His elbows knocked against the walls and he almost fell through the curtain a couple of times as he danced on one leg to get the trousers on. Paddy heard a series of grunts and groans and sighs.

“Are you all right there, Jamie?”

“Aye, be out in a wee minute, Paddy.”

After a sweating struggle with each suit and a parade for Mr. Harvey and Paddy’s benefit, Jamie could not decide which one he wanted most. All three looked good and all were around the same price. Finally, with Paddy’s approval and Mr. Harvey’s encouragement (the shopkeeper wanted to get home to his whiskey by the fire and England vs. Pakistan on the box), Jamie opted for the peat-brown one and returned to the changing room to try it one more time.

When he reemerged, his audience voiced their approval, but Jamie frowned, pulled back the flaps of the jacket and looked down at his fly.

“That was a stiff boy to get up, so it was.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Harvey, resisting the urge to laugh out loud. “Those zippers are a bit stiff when new, but just give it a good tug to get her going and you’re away.”

Jamie nodded, then went through a series of gymnastic movements, to test the suit’s flexibility and the strength of its seams at armpit and crotch. He stretched out one leg in front of him, then the other.

“Yes, she’s a good length in the legs, so she is,” he declared.

He squatted down suddenly then shot up again.

“Aye, and she’s a roomy boy as well.”

Finally he threw his arms high up above his head, then flung them back down again, then up again, like an orangutan performing some kind of bizarre mating ritual.

“Well y’know,” he announced from between his raised arms, “she just ketches me a wee bit in the armpits, so she does.”

Mr. Harvey was expecting this. He had witnessed virtually every farmer he sold a suit to go through this monkey routine before handing over their money. He was therefore ready with a pithy riposte.

“Yes, James, and if you were planning to hurl a discus or throw a spear in that suit, I’d see your point. But since you are only going to wear it to Mass, where an aptitude for rigorous sport is not a requirement, then there’s not much chance of that, now is there?”

He laughed and clapped his hands, hoping that his observation would clinch the deal.

“Yes, I s’ppose you’re right,” came the slow concession.

There was another hung silence while Jamie buttoned and unbuttoned the jacket, by turns advancing to the mirror then retreating from it in a puddle of indecision.

“I think it looks good and grand now, Jamie,” Paddy observed from his chair. “That suit would take you anywhere—Mass or a waddin’ or a funeral or whatever.”

Mr. Harvey had his eye on the clock. The first innings of the cricket were getting dangerously near. He went to a shelf of boxed shirts, pulled one out and took off the lid with a flourish.

“Sunshine yellow, James! Polyester cotton, crease resistant, perfect. Five pounds, but to you: three. Couldn’t do better than that.”

Jamie examined the shirt. “Not a bit bright, is it?”

“Nonsense! Bright colors are the whole go in America these days. Brown and yellow go together, like bread and butter, salt and pepper, me and the missus.” He laughed and rubbed his palms together, impatient with the realization that he’d have to dangle another carrot pretty swiftly if he were to get rid of the farmers.

“Tell you what, James,” he said, proffering another box, “I’ll let you have a pair of the latest brown slip-ons to go with the suit for half price.”

Jamie mulled over the proposal. He knew that he could not be wearing the mustard yellow pair again because they attracted too much notice. The embarrassing memory of them finally decided him to go for the whole lot. Mr. Harvey sighed with relief and the deal was done.

Jamie, for his part, left Mr. Harvey’s store completely satisfied. There was no doubt that in ten days’ time, a Miss Lydeea Devine would be meeting Mr. James Kevin Barry Michael McCloone looking “like royallity,” as Rose had predicted.

L
ydia, like most people, hated hospitals, yet never had cause to be admitted to one. She rarely had a need to visit one either, and felt now that this run of good fortune was being wrested back from her, as though she were receiving some sort of overdue comeuppance.

Her father had died in his sleep, thus ensuring that at a rather late stage in her life she had experienced bereavement, though not the terrible preamble that often accompanies the final decline of the elderly.

Her world for the past four days had become the polished floors and sanitized wards of the County General, with its nurses in starched uniforms and its serious-faced doctors. It was a world of hopeful and anguished beings, held for a time in that most intimidating place, to be either released back to their lives, or expelled to the unimaginable beyond.

She walked the neon-lit corridors where death waited, as cold and harsh as a winter sun, and tried not to dwell on the reality of what she saw and heard: the rapid footfalls on the vinyl flooring; curtains jerked swiftly about a bed, wailing cries at a damage done; the many lives altered forever by the extinguishing of one.

Four days following the stroke, her mother was out of danger. She was removed from Intensive Care and given a small private room in the geriatric wing.

Lydia hardly recognized the woman in the bed: an inert, mute woman with eyes that looked but did not see. She would sit there for long periods, just holding her mother’s hand and hoping for a response, but none was forthcoming. The stroke had paralyzed her right side. She had lost the ability to swallow, and was being fed intravenously. The disconnected world in which Lydia had found Elizabeth that fateful morning was still in attendance; the only difference now was that her mother’s eyes were open and she had somehow gained the strength to keep on living.

So Lydia’s days became a series of vigils which rarely varied in their routine: three hours of afternoon duty followed by three hours in the evening. Every so often during her visits, a nurse would enter and substitute an infusion bottle of medicaments on the drip stand, check the rhythmic graph on the ecg monitor, take the patient’s pulse. The daughter would look with hope to the nurse after each ritual, willing her to indicate improvement of some kind, but there never was; there was only a smile from the medical staff and the assurance that the patient was “stable.”

After a week, she went in search of the matron. Sister Milligan was a substantial lady in her fifties, whose manner was as clinical and starchy as the uniform she stood in. Her succinct analysis left Lydia in little doubt about the future.

“Your mother is seventy-six, Miss Devine. A full recovery from such a severe stroke at her age is unlikely.” There was no give in Sister Milligan. Her businesslike smile said it all.

“The most we can do is keep her comfortable. And pray.”

“She’s stable, Daphne. That seems to be the best we can hope for.”

Lydia stood in the hallway of the silent house, the telephone receiver in hand, trying to come to terms with the loneliness of this unthinkable situation.

Her words reached her friend down the telephone line, and Daphne could hear the fear and resignation in her voice.

“Oh, she’ll pull through,” Daphne said. “I know she will. Your mother’s as strong as an ox.”

“No, it’s not going to be like that.” She could feel her stoicism crumble as her words wobbled out of control.

It was the first time Daphne had heard her friend cry as an adult. “Look, I’ll come over and we’ll go out,” she said. “It’ll lift your mind. Give me ten minutes.”

Before Lydia had time to protest, she had hung up.

“Now I know you don’t drink,” Daphne said, holding up a bottle, “but I insist you have a glass of sherry. It’ll help calm you, I promise—medicine of the gods.”

She smiled widely for her friend’s benefit, trying to keep the atmosphere light. “Now, why don’t you fetch us a couple of glasses?”

They sat in the chintz sitting room, the room that was so much Elizabeth’s room. Her creative hands spoke from the embroidered peacock fire screen, the crocheted antimacassars, the lace doilies under the glass coffee table. Lydia’s eyes filled up when she looked on all those things that recalled a happier, fruitful time of keen-eyed attention and nimble-fingered mastery. An art that her mother had perfected over decades had been snatched away so cruelly in one night.

Lydia had the sherry and listened to Daphne’s accounts of acquaintances of
her
mother’s who were around the same age, and had suffered similar strokes. Each had made a full recovery, and this news cheered her. The dire predictions of the matron were forgotten for the present.

“Oh, I meant to ask you,” Daphne said. “Any word back from Mr. McCloone?”

“Oh dear! I’d totally forgotten about him.”

“Well, naturally. That’s understandable. You unfortunately had more important things to think about.”

Lydia got up. “His letter’s in the kitchen somewhere. I’ll get it.”

She was already scanning it as she returned.

“My heavens, it’s the day after tomorrow!” She handed the letter to Daphne. “What am I going to do?”

“Well, go of course.”

“But I can’t. It wouldn’t be right with my mother the way she is.”

She sank back on the sofa, remembering how carefree she’d been when she met—or rather refused to meet—Mr. Frank Xavier McPrunty, and how so suddenly everything had changed as quickly and dramatically as a pantomime stage set.

Daphne, seeming to read her thoughts, poured her friend another glass of sherry. Lydia protested.

“Go on. It’s got no alcohol to speak of.” She turned her attention to Mr. McCloone’s letter.

“Oh dear,” Daphne said, “you have to meet him. It would be terrible to let him down.” She reached for her sherry glass.

“Daphne, how’s it going to look if I’m seen running round the county after a man and my mother the way she is?”

“Now, Lydia, your mother is stable. The meeting will not take more than half an hour and you can visit the hospital afterwards. And believe me, no one could ever accuse you of running round the county after men; that’s just a bizarre way to look at things.” Daphne swallowed the last of her sherry and set the glass down with an air of finality.

“But I—”

“No, hear me out. The poor man says he’s been counting the days, so the least you can do is meet him and tell him about your mother and how things have changed. Tell him that you simply wanted someone to accompany you to a friend’s wedding and now you can’t go because of your mother’s illness.”

“But—”

“No ‘buts.’ You owe Mr. McCloone an explanation at least, which is more than you gave poor old Frank Xavier McPrunty.” Daphne pulled a face of mock censure which made Lydia smile in spite of herself.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right, when you put it like that.”

Daphne grinned. “Course I am. Now, get your coat. I’m taking you out for a nice meal.” She raised her hand. “And I won’t hear a word of objection.”

“I can’t eat, Daphne.”

“Now, now, of course you can eat, and if you really don’t wish to, you can watch me.”

There seemed to be no getting out of that one.