Wolf at the Table, page 37
When it snows this much—nearly a foot has fallen over the past three days—Myra knows to park her Toyota on the street in front of the house, which gives Bogdan access to the driveway. She was feeling too weak even to navigate the steps of the front porch, though, and so she had to ask Keith, her full-time live-in hospice nurse, to move the car to the street for her.
But two days ago, when her son pulled up to the house in his rental car, despite her acute fatigue Myra was sure to greet him from the front porch, not only to properly welcome him but also to warn him against parking in the driveway. Ronan duly beached his car on the other side of the street. When he emerged, shouldering his weekend bag, and crossed the street, Myra was a bit shocked at his general appearance. He had visited just before Christmas, but something had obviously taken hold in him even since then. At first she thought it was merely the long drive from New York that was affecting his usually pleasant temperament and spirit, but there was something in his eyes that suggested otherwise. He hadn’t shaved. He needed a haircut. When they hugged he felt hollowed out, full of ache, like the world has started to get the better of him. And he didn’t smell very nice.
“You’re thin,” she said as they entered the house.
“I weigh the same,” was his curt reply.
In addition to his slightly haggard look, he also seemed more remote than usual, a little guarded and lost within himself, which hadn’t been the case during any of their recent phone calls. Since the birth of her grandson, Bruce, Myra knows that things have been difficult for Ronan. He never had the example of a father to draw on—Denny had left when he was still so young—and he has confessed to her that he often feels a bit out of his depth. But he is trying and she has faith in him. After all, she did raise him well.
Bruce will be two in March. The mingling of Ronan and Henny’s blood has produced a beautiful copper-skinned boy with curly peach-colored hair and unusual, inquisitive eyes that preternaturally shift between the color of green tea and something altogether silver. Myra is thrilled to be a grandmother. After Bruce was born, despite her declining health, she took the train down to New York City for the christening and she’s been able to see them a handful of times since. She’s grateful that Henny and Ronan have twice made the trip up to Waitsfield, but since Henny accepted a two-year professorship at Northwestern University, visits haven’t been possible. For the past year Ronan has been splitting his time between Chicago, New York, and Vermont. And now he is here after having driven for nearly six hours from the city. No wonder he seemed hollowed out.
Although Ronan hasn’t spoken much about it, Myra has a hunch that there is more to his current semi-separation from Henny than the simple fact of geography. She knows that for most of their relationship Henny has been the primary breadwinner. Her salary at Northwestern is very good and the university also provides health insurance as well as extra financial assistance for childcare. Ronan’s career has been on a steady climb for the past few years, and he’s reached the point where he no longer has to work a day job. During the early days, after he quit the world of book publishing, he would take whatever odd job he could find. He moved office furniture. He did part-time paralegal work. He temped for a financial magazine. For over a year, he tutored a boy from a wealthy Upper East Side family twice a week, for which he was paid handsomely. But then the boy’s parents sent him away to a boarding school in Bern, Switzerland, so that job ended. However, while that part of the struggle is over, according to Ronan his playwriting advances and commissions are modest compared to the salaries of other young New York City professionals. Money is still unpredictable, and even when it comes, after agent and lawyer fees, the checks are always much less than he thought they would be.
For the past few hours he’s been encamped at her dining room table with his laptop, working on a TV pilot. His agent has been encouraging him to take a crack at writing for television, as it pays much better than the theater. It doesn’t seem like he’s enjoying it much and when she asked him what the pilot was about he said something about pretty, well-dressed people saying pithy, ironic things to each other for two or three pages at a time.
During last night’s dinner Ronan explained that in order to get Writers Guild insurance, which has excellent medical and dental coverage, he has to sell something to Hollywood, be it a television pilot or a screenplay. He also revealed that Henny’s been pressuring him to pull more weight financially. Then, after a long silence during which he drank a great deal of wine, he told her he’s been struggling with his meds. Since his first psychotic episode, which happened in London a couple of years ago, he’s been seeing a psychiatrist once a week, who prescribed him Clozapine. Dr. Cantor is a British woman in her sixties. When Ronan first told Myra about the doctor, she felt the slightest pang of jealousy, knowing that he tells Dr. Cantor things he can’t bring himself to share with her. That’s how therapy works, after all.
Dr. Cantor is expensive, as is the cost of Ronan’s meds, and Henny has been paying for all of it. Ronan admitted to Myra that in recent weeks there have been a few mild episodes, which are more likely to occur when he forgets to take his medication. There was a three-day period during which he just stopped taking the pills to see what would happen. He confessed that he saw some things that weren’t actually there: a car, a bird, a ten-speed bike. Nothing serious.
Seeing people who aren’t actually there is the truly scary part of his condition, he said. He shared with her the handful of characters he’d hallucinated prior to his meds program: the director from London; a strange, very thin naked woman with large white wings—a kind of human swan—who was perched on the arm of the sofa in Henny’s apartment; a child sitting on top of a government mailbox in their neighborhood, holding a giant turtle.
“So I really need to sell this pilot,” he added. “Being crazy is expensive.”
Myra wishes she could give him some money to lessen the burden, but everything she had in savings went toward buying the house. At the time, if she had known anything about Ronan’s impending mental illness she would have thought twice about it.
Nevertheless, she is so happy that he made the trip north, and she’s almost giddy that their plan is still intact. Soon it will be time.
IT’S JUST AFTER THREE o’clock. Bogdan has finished plowing the driveway and the light outside is already starting to wane. The river has frozen over and as she peers out at its thick mother-of-pearl surface she wonders when the ice skaters will start coming. It’s already the final week of January. Last year they started showing up the week of Christmas. Even in the Vermont winter air, which can sometimes feel like a vast, solid, freezing rectangle that gets colder with each passing minute, she enjoyed watching them from her dock all the way into early March, when the Mad River finally thawed. As the darkness would roll down over the hills from the east, they would skate with lighted hurricane lamps and flashlights, so that from a distance it looked like the fireflies of her youth pulsing over the Chemung River. Maybe it’s just been too cold for the skaters this year?
As Myra shuffles from the bathroom into the hallway she can see Keith sitting with Ronan at the head of the dining room table, their backs facing her. In addition to being an excellent hospice nurse, Keith is a former semiprofessional hockey player, which must be one of the most unlikely backgrounds in the history of the caregiving profession. She feels a special bond with him. Perhaps it’s as simple as being cared for by another nurse. Keith has long blond hair, an enormous leonine forehead, and deep brown sunken eyes. His shoulders are as wide as a bookcase, and his hands are large and somewhat disfigured, as his fingers have been repeatedly broken from hockey. At first glance he’s downright scary-looking; he could easily be cast as a ruthless Viking warlord. But he’s actually one of the kindest, gentlest people Myra’s ever known. He moved into one of the two upstairs bedrooms three weeks ago—not long after Ronan’s previous visit—and since then he’s been nothing less than a godsend. There are evenings when, after reading by the woodstove in the living room, she is too weak to stand and he will carry her to bed here on the first floor, where she moved before Christmas. She knew the stairs would be more and more difficult as her condition worsened, and it has made things easier for her to stay on the first floor. She has lost quite a bit of weight in the past few months—she’s under a hundred pounds again—so it can’t be that difficult for Keith to carry her, and she prefers this to her dreaded wheelchair, which rests in the corner of her bedroom.
She has come to view the wheelchair as an abdication. Even as her body slowly dissolves, she refuses to give in to the will of that damn chair. Perhaps there’s something in the act of being carried that brings on the possibility of being transformed into a child? An improbable reversal of her fate. She could be the subject of a fable: the woman who drew so near to death that her life started over. But if she ever gets in the wheelchair the magic will end. The spell will be broken and she will shatter like a cheap dinner plate thrown against the wall. So the wheelchair remains wedged into the corner of her bedroom, untouched.
She knows the substance of what Keith and Ronan are discussing and elects to give them space. They’ve talked on the phone a number of times in recent weeks but this is the first time they’ve met in person.
Remarkably, Myra’s hospice care is into its seventh month, which is far longer than anyone could have anticipated. Fortunately for her, the benefits she earned from her tenure at Stateville Correctional cover the costs. She makes seldom use of the morphine plunger to manage her pain, which is constant and considerable. What started out as an intestinal ache accompanied by occasional sharp cramps, at the beginning of her hospice program, has become an all-consuming state of agony, at times almost abstract in its paralyzing power. Yet she hardly ever turns to the morphine, as she knows it will overtax her liver and further toxify her already compromised system. And despite not having much of an appetite, pairing this strategy with the consumption of lots of fatty foods, like McDonald’s cheeseburgers, which Keith fetches for her during his daily trip into nearby Montpelier, seems to satisfy the tumors and keep them from feasting on whatever healthy tissue might remain in her stomach and colon. Myra has become her own biochemistry experiment. She knew it would get to this point—that she simply wouldn’t give in to the cancer—so after learning she could trust Keith, she hatched the plan with him.
Keith is in his third month of service. Toward the end of his initial assignment with Myra he requested to stay on with her and the agency agreed. Myra couldn’t be more grateful. Tonight Keith will be staying in a hotel in Montpelier so Myra can be alone with her son.
“She’s up!” Keith says, rising from the table and coming to meet her in the hallway.
Myra has given nearly all of her weight to her IV stand, which is outfitted with a small oxygen tank. Sometimes she feels as if she competes with the small iron vessel, whose density is hard to fathom. She has to stop for a moment and fix her respirator mask, which has slipped off. She is suddenly light-headed, short of breath. Her right palm finds the wall as Keith takes over fixing her mask. She stares at her hand on the wall. It looks somehow prehistoric, reptilian.
“Thank you,” she says to Keith. Under the mask, her voice sounds far away, girlish.
Keith simply smiles and tends to her oxygen line, which has worked its way under one of the wheels of the IV stand. She lets her body lean into him. He smells like woodsmoke. She’s tempted to drape herself over his back, which has formed a perfect, welcoming tabletop, but she resists. Although she would never admit it, there are times when she secretly enjoys this rag-doll existence, Keith as her dominant dance partner, the effortless strongman. She doesn’t indulge in this pleasure here in the hallway, though, as she wants to appear as able-bodied as possible in front of Ronan.
Lately, until Ronan arrived, she’s been able to make only one of these trips away from her bed per day. She usually aims for around four p.m., so she can sit at the dining room table, warm her hands around a mug of chamomile tea (at this point she can stomach only a sip or two), and catch the sun setting over the Mad River. After all, she moved up to northwestern Vermont for these very reasons: the hummingbirds and the rolling green hills and the magnificent sunsets over the river. It’s a far cry from the iron sky of Joliet, where she’d spent more than two decades of her life.
Keith helps her to the table and before he eases her into her chair that faces the dining room window, she gives him a long, wordless hug. When they break from the embrace there are tears in his eyes.
“It might snow,” she tells him. “Please be careful driving.”
“My Subaru won’t let me down,” he says, wiping his eyes and putting on his puffy winter coat. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow,” he tells Ronan.
Ronan nods and thanks him and then Keith leaves through the front door. Myra remains very still as she listens to Keith cross the deck of the screened-in front porch and descend the steps. His boots crunch in the snow toward his car, parked across the street, behind Myra’s Toyota.
“He’s a good man,” she says after his car pulls away.
“He cares about you a lot,” Ronan says.
Her tea has already been set on the little square denim coaster. Keith always makes everything so easy. She’s caught her breath and feels comfortable removing the respirator, which she lowers to her chin.
“You didn’t want any tea?” she says, forming her hands around the mug.
“Not right now,” he says.
“Are you hungry?”
“I had a sandwich earlier.”
“Keith might have already told you this but the fridge is stocked with things you like. There are a few different frozen pizzas in the freezer too.”
“Thanks,” he says.
He’s having a difficult time taking her in, and she says, “I know I’m not so easy on the eyes these days.”
“Mom,” he says. “Don’t.”
“Well, it’s true,” she says. “You can hardly look at me.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It has nothing to do with your appearance. You’re still pretty.”
“You’re ashamed of something,” she says.
He can’t respond. It’s as if he’s been forced to hold a sharp stone in his mouth.
“If you don’t want to go through with this—”
“We’re doing this,” he says, his eyes finally meeting hers. “It’s just not easy.”
“I know,” she says, “but you’ve always been brave. You’re one of the bravest people I know.” She drinks from the tea. Her wrists are so weak she can barely bring the mug to her lips. She manages to take a sip and lower the mug back to the coaster.
“Do you need a straw?” he asks.
She shakes her head. Her skull feels too large, as if her brain is sliding around inside of it.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“Everything tastes awful,” she says. “Like ground-up pencil lead. Cheeseburgers, chicken soup, ice cream—doesn’t matter, it’s all pencil lead. I can smell the chemicals coming out of my pores. We chose a good night.”
“Let’s talk about other things,” he says.
She looks to the woodstove in the living room and sees that Keith was sure to bring in plenty of wood from the shed. At least two or three days’ worth.
“Did you talk to Henny?” she says.
“We spoke earlier,” he says. “She said Bruce got excited when he heard my voice coming through the phone, so that’s something.”
“It sounds like you guys had a nice Christmas.”
“Evanston was a tundra,” he says. “New York City has spoiled me. I don’t know how you and I managed all those winters in Joliet. New York City winters are mild compared to what we went through in the Midwest. The windchill alone.”
“But things between you and Henny were better.”
“It was a start,” he says. “We’re definitely trying again. After we got through the first night…” He can’t complete the sentence.
Myra knows that Ronan and Henny separated for nearly the entire pregnancy. The incident in London had caused him to have a breakdown. He flew back to New York the day after his play opened and had to be hospitalized. Ronan spent nearly a month in the psych ward at Beth Israel (a stay that Henny paid for), where he was heavily medicated and under constant psychiatric supervision. Then he moved back to the Ukrainian woman’s apartment in the East Village for most of the pregnancy. Henny let him come home for the final two weeks and he was beside her during the birth. The photos make it seem as if they are the happiest couple in the world, with baby Bruce between them, his little turtle arms swimming out, but things never seemed to quite get back on track for them. There was Ronan’s second hospitalization a few months later. Henny found him in the kitchen in a kind of fugue state, stabbing himself in the thigh with a fork repeatedly. The stress of becoming a father had obviously triggered something in his brain. He had to return to in-patient care for a few weeks until his medication was correctly adjusted. If they would only forget their progressive ways and get married once and for all it would probably solve most of their problems. Since he started the Clozapine he’s been doing much better. She’s glad that he and Henny just spent Christmas together.
Ronan swallows and starts again: “When everything’s wrapped up here I’ll go to Chicago and spend another few weeks with Henny and Bruce. That’s what we agreed upon.” He adds that there’s a little storefront theater on West Belmont that wants to do a reading of one of his plays, and that should keep him occupied for a few days. When he speaks it’s only after a deep breath, as though the words themselves are exhausting him.
