The Ninth Wife (42 page)

Herbert?
she thinks.
Pancho Villa’s name is Herbert?
“Didn’t he come with you?”

“He’s got his motorcycle.”

The ambulance pulls out of the lot, leaving Bess several feet in front of Herbert. By the front door of the McDonald’s, a cashier in a red baseball hat and a few remaining patrons linger to watch the ambulance depart. It is early evening and suddenly quiet enough to hear the scraping of a shoe on pebbles or the shaking of ice cubes in a paper cup.

“Interesting turn of events,” says Herbert. He leans over and spits onto the pavement.

Bess follows Herbert’s motorcycle out to the interstate. He obeys the speed limit in the right lane, unfazed, it seems, by the cars and trucks passing him by, turning his bulbous black helmet slowly from side to side like a gigantic carpenter ant.
Interesting turn of events.
What the hell does that mean?

The Rocky Mountains in the distance are pink in the waning daylight. She wonders for a moment where she is. Somewhere west of Denver. She dials Rory’s home number, gets his voice mail. Now her tears come. She attempts to wipe them and notices there is blood on the sleeve of her tunic. The fatherly attendant had asked her about the blood. An elderly man collapses and bumps his head, not an unfamiliar occurrence he had hinted. But there’s a scratch on his forearm.
I was outside
, she had said.
It’s true
, the manager of the McDonald’s confirmed, having given his statement to ensure his branch wasn’t liable.
But her
, he had added, pointing at Millie.
She was here
.

M
illie and Bess reunite outside Irv’s hospital room and are told to have a seat in the waiting area. It is a windowless corner with rows of mauve seats facing different directions and end tables with scattered magazines boasting the best sex positions and light summer recipes. The only other person in the waiting area is a teenage boy, belching out a song lyric in a straining falsetto.

Bess looks over at Millie. It had been heart-wrenching to see her so scared, crying and wringing her hands and saying over and over,
He’s going to be okay, isn’t he going to be okay?
But now Bess feels familiar eruptions of anger and suspicion threatening the love and support she knows she should be bestowing. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” she says quietly into her lap, only half committed to the desire for an answer.

Millie brings her hand up to cover her lips and turns away from Bess. She breathes in two quick, congested breaths, as if holding back an outburst of tears.

Bess squeezes her grandmother’s shoulder, then lets herself be distracted by the TV mounted high in the corner. She reads the subtitles unfolding in blinking misspelled words: something about the IRA renouncing violence. Next up: Larry King.

“Excuse me,” says a weary man in a lab coat, standing in front of Bess and Millie, offering an outstretched hand. “My name is Dr. Higgins.” He is balding, potbellied, and sad-eyed. His appearance is distinctly middle-aged with an emphasis on the old age he’s headed into rather than the youth he left behind. He stoops like a beaten-down bureaucrat counting the days until retirement.

“Oh, Doctor,” says Millie, standing with great urgency. “How is my husband?”

“We don’t know yet, Mrs. Steinbloom. Please have a seat. I can assure you he is under the best of care. Ms. Gray?” he says, turning to Bess. “May I speak with you privately, please?”

Bess can feel her attitude toward Millie start to shift back to what it was in the parking lot. “Anything you have to say to me you can say to my grandmother.”

Dr. Higgins hesitates. “You don’t understand. I’m a staff psychologist with the hospital’s social services division.”

Bess nods. Millie looks down at the carpet.

Dr. Higgins removes his rimless glasses and uses them to point toward the corridor where he and Bess stroll out of sight of Millie. “Ms. Gray,” he says gravely, “your grandfather has bruises on his arms and a fresh scratch, as if from a fingernail. There are witnesses who say they heard your grandparents arguing before he blacked out. Can you explain?”

“I’m . . . not sure.”

He scratches his ear. “I’d like to speak to each of you. Separately. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Of course.”

“In your opinion, if I grant your grandmother’s request to see your grandfather under supervision, she won’t—”

“No! I swear. She loves him. I know that’s not how it seems, but it’s true.”

“Okay. These situations are always complicated. I’m going to ask her into my office, and then I’ll talk with you, all right?”

She accompanies the doctor back to her grandfather’s room. Irv is asleep. Bess examines his aged, sagging, sweet face. She is hungry for answers and bloated with a fierce protectiveness. He had been awake, they told her, but was dizzy and dehydrated, so they had him drink water, take a pill, and stay still while they dressed his wounds and scanned his brain waves. Then they told him to relax, which sent him back into a soporific state. His heart, as it turns out, was intact, though they wanted to keep him overnight to make sure. She sits quietly by his side and thinks about frail marriages.
How did it come to this?

A copy of
Coastal Living
magazine rests on the shelf by the window. On its cover are two empty deck chairs facing an endless, sunny future. “Tell him I’m here, okay?” she says to the nurse who has come in to close the blinds. “I mean, if he wakes up and I’m not in the room. Tell him he’s not alone.”

B
ess stands in Dr. Higgins’s office, a cluttered lair with shades drawn and a lamp lit in the corner. “So what did my grandmother say?” she asks.

“Let’s you and I talk first, okay? Have a seat.” He points to the couch and drops into a matching armchair. “Tell me what brought you from Washington.”

Bess sits. She explains that they had driven into Denver late Thursday from Chicago; that
they
means her, her grandparents, her friend Cricket, and Cricket’s dog; that Cricket’s ex-wife had passed away and they had to make the funeral. “I slept until noon yesterday, and felt disoriented when I woke up. My grandparents haven’t exactly been getting along and I get nervous leaving them alone for too long so that’s the feeling I woke up with, like
Oh no, they’re right next door and I don’t hear them.
”

“What do you mean by not getting along?”

“They argue, they bicker. You know, like a typical old married couple.”

“Is that a typical old married couple?”

“Look,” says Bess, readjusting herself in her seat, “their bodies are failing them, their friends are dying off, they just sold their house where they’ve been living for over twenty years and are moving thousands of miles away from home. How do you think you’d be?”

Dr. Higgins shifts his weight to his other elbow resting on the arm of his chair. He lets silence ensue the way therapists do until it turns uncomfortable.

Bess doesn’t care that it’s all just paperwork to him. She wants to tell her story. “This was mostly for them, this trip,” she continues. “But I guess I turned it into my trip, my needs, and Cricket’s needs, too. Though he didn’t know we’d have to rush to Denver for a funeral, and I didn’t really think through what I was doing.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was just looking for certain people. All I’ll say is that I found some of them. And actually it was my grandfather who found one. That’s where things started to go wrong.”

Behind his glasses, Dr. Higgins’s eyes look small and round and seem even closer together when filled with surprise. His eyebrows, arched up, look like little hats on round faces or circumflex accents on the letter O. “Go ahead,” he says. “I’m listening.”

Chapter Thirty-two

S
ee the plan was, Cricket and his dog would fly home from Denver, whereas my grandparents and I would spend a couple nights in Santa Fe, then head to Tucson to their new place, their
independent living
place the Web site calls it, right next to the
assisted living
apartments, which is next to a nursing home. I picture these places all in a row, the people just moving on down the line if they fail their checkup or something. You know, to
beyond assistance
and then to the
dying place
. There’s probably a cemetery at the end of the street, making the whole thing oh so convenient.

Sorry. It’s been a long day.

Anyway, like I said, I got up late yesterday. They were both in the room when I knocked. My grandmother was reading her book; my grandfather was resting on the bed. It felt too quiet, so I assumed they’d been arguing. I can usually tell. My grandfather does something with his lips, like this: sort of pushes his lower lip up, holds for a moment, then drops it, over and over again. Dead giveaway. My grandmother won’t look at me. I asked what was the matter, but they didn’t say anything.

It was nice out, so I suggested we go for a walk, which we did, and it
was
nice, until I yelled at a mime. You know the kind, with the baggy pants and suspenders and his face painted white? He was following people around, mimicking their mannerisms. We walked past him in a park and he sort of latched on to my grandparents. He . . . captured them perfectly. My grandfather’s slow gait, his hands clasped behind him, his distant look, his sloped shoulders, his frown. I don’t know, he seemed to encapsulate all the pain and sadness my grandfather is carrying around. And my grandmother’s anger he nailed—her tight lips, her tense, proud walk, the way she clutches her bag to her side. He was going back and forth, first her, then him, and people stopped to watch and point and laugh. I couldn’t stand it! So I screamed,
Stop it!
I remember the people who were laughing stopped laughing, and he backed off with the saddest expression, like he was so sorry for me. My grandparents didn’t think much of it. They didn’t see what he’d done; they only heard me yell and didn’t ask. I’m not sure why they didn’t ask, but they didn’t.

And that’s about it for yesterday. This morning my grandmother and I went with Cricket to Isabella’s funeral. I told her she didn’t need to, especially since neither of us had the right clothes. Cricket did, just in case. That surprised me, but I guess he’s like that. He expects death. My grandfather didn’t want to go and that was fine with us. So we went, and when we got back to the motel, my grandfather was missing.

We looked everywhere and were about to call the police when I found a note from him under my door. All it said was not to worry, he’d be back later. It didn’t say where he was going. The hotel clerk said he saw him earlier, sitting outside with one of the cleaning ladies. I knew the one—this nice Latina woman who liked to hum.

My grandmother was moving pretty slowly by now, so I let her rest in her room while I found another woman who told me she did see this Latina woman leave with an older gentleman. I knew that was my grandfather even before the nurse described him. I went back to their room, not knowing what to say to my grandmother, when I saw some of my papers I had left on their bed and I knew exactly where he had gone.

Let me back up, because this is important. There’s this woman, Fawn Gilman. She’s in her early seventies, and she lives not too far from here. I know her, or know of her, because she . . . knew my boyfriend. Actually, I don’t think they knew each other all that well. They met in Las Vegas about twenty years ago, got completely blitzed one night and ended up getting married. And of course divorced the next day. Or something like that. It was a mistake, in other words. She was twice his age—a washed-up barfly, according to his version of the story. And that’s kind of the amazing thing about different people’s perspectives, because when my grandfather heard her name—I was talking about her with my friend Gabrielle back in D.C., on my cell phone, in the van on the way to Denver—when he heard her name, his eyes got all wide and animated.
Fawn Gilman?
he said with such reverence it made me stop talking mid-sentence.
Fawn Gilman, the dancer?

Turns out, he was a big fan of hers back in the day. According to my grandfather, Fawn’s mother was a Russian Jew and well-known dancer in the Ballets Russes in Paris and Monte Carlo. But she got pregnant with Fawn and had to drop out, ended up coming here, I think, in the mid-1930s. Somehow she got acquainted with Lincoln Kirstein—the guy who founded the New York City Ballet. He was the one who brought Balanchine over from Russia. My grandfather knew of the Kirstein family, either through the Jewish community or because Kirstein’s father owned Filene’s department store. My grandfather was in the dress business.

So Fawn, through her mother’s connections, joined the New York City Ballet when it opened in ’48; she was fifteen. My grandfather first noticed her when she followed another one of Balanchine’s protégés to Philadelphia to start up the Pennsylvania Ballet in the ’60s. He said she was a pretty Jewish girl with long legs that could stop a rocket. He’d take the train from Baltimore to go see her performances.

So here’s what I’m getting at. Gabrielle sent me an e-mail that I printed out that had all this information on it, including the breaking news that Fawn lived not too far from Denver. See? The e-mail was missing. I had printed it out because I thought I might visit her, but then I decided that was a bad idea. But I knew my grandfather had taken the e-mail and sure enough, he got his cleaning lady friend to give him a lift out there. I didn’t know for sure, I mean, I had a hunch and it just proved to be true. So I opened the e-mail again, got directions, and my grandmother and I went to find him.

Fawn’s house was in this community of small stucco homes, which was surprising given that Rory—my boyfriend—had described her as being wealthy. We went to the main building, where there was a TV room and Ping-Pong table and coffee. It looked like a place where residents congregated so they wouldn’t be lonely. That’s where we found them, Fawn and my grandfather.