Wolf at the Table, page 38
“Bruce will be thrilled to see his daddy again,” Myra says.
“I miss him a lot,” Ronan says. “I miss her too.”
“She loves you,” Myra says. “There’s never been any doubt about that.”
She can feel the sadness hanging on her son. It presses down on his left shoulder as if a sandbag has been set there.
She brings the oxygen mask to her face for a few breaths, luxuriating in its cool easy current. “You know the Toyota is yours,” she says, lowering the mask. “You’re already on the insurance and it’s all paid off. You just have to take it in to get the oil changed now and then. It still gets around thirty-five miles per gallon.”
“I’ll definitely come back for it,” he says.
The light through the living room window is fading even more. With all the cloud cover there’s not going to be much of a sunset tonight. The icy surface of the river is silver, like burnished sheet metal. The other day a group of teenagers were out there drinking and sliding around. They left their beer cans, which clattered about for a while, as well as a red scarf, which is still clinging to the skin of the ice. The wind, having picked up, rattles the dining room window.
“I know I’ve mentioned it before,” Myra says, “but I have to thank you again for sending the book. I was very moved.”
Months ago, at the start of her hospice care, she received a UPS package containing a first edition of The Catcher in the Rye. On the title page was a simple note in blue ballpoint ink:
To Mom
With Love
—Ronan
It’s a book they both adore; she’d given him a copy for his fourteenth birthday and he was instantly smitten. When he turned fifteen they started the ritual of reading it aloud to each other during the Christmas holiday, which is when Holden Caulfield is wandering through the streets of New York City. Until this past Christmas, the last time they were able to complete a full reading was during his final year of college. They stayed in Joliet that year and wound up reciting chapters aloud to each other on the sofa. It took them only a few days to finish it. Though Myra was quite tired and Ronan had to do a lot more of the reading, they were able to reprise the ritual the previous month, before he went to Chicago to be with Henny and Bruce. Lexy and Barry and their girls were able to come stay with Myra for the holiday.
“I read some more of it again after you left,” she says. “It only gets better with age.” Her mug of tea has cooled completely but she keeps her hands around it. After a long silence she asks Ronan to go shave. “Please,” she says. “I want to see your face.”
He tells her that he didn’t bring a razor.
“Keith has one,” she says. “He uses the upstairs bathroom.”
Ronan pushes away from the table and heads upstairs, lumbering on each step. How did this exceptional former sprinter come to be so slow-moving? So withdrawn? Her son will grow out of this depression. He will not become Denny. The drugs will heal him; she’s convinced herself of this.
While he’s gone she plants her elbows on the table, using them to push herself up from her chair, and manages to work her way upright. She then grabs her rolling IV stand and heads toward the living room, inching along at a glacial pace. It takes her nearly three minutes to go fewer than ten steps. Each smooth, wide pine floorboard is like a mile marker, a series of telephone poles along a country road.
Once in the living room she heads toward the cherrywood rolltop desk, a gift from Lexy, who found it a few years ago at an antiques store in northern New Hampshire when she and Barry were on their way up to help move Myra in. She sits on the wicker chair, raises the desk’s curved, slatted front, and removes a large stuffed manila envelope. Mustering her strength, she stands with the envelope, slow and steady, using every available muscle in her feet, her legs, her aching hips, and starts the journey back to the dining room. After three steps, she drops the envelope and it cartwheels in the opposite direction. Turning around and bending over to retrieve it would be an impossibility. She leaves the envelope where it landed and continues shuffling toward the dining room table.
With this illness time has become a ghoul that changes shape. It thickens, grows solid, transforms into a litter of cats that crowd her feet and claw at her shins. And then, just like that, they disappear and there goes another day with so few moments of relief. Seconds become thumbtacks of pain. Minutes, railroad spikes. An hour is an old iron cookstove hanging from the ceiling by a horsehair. She should’ve taken something for the agony. One depression of the morphine plunger’s little red button—a toy, really—would do the trick. Keith all but insisted on it earlier this morning, yet Myra, to use one of her mother’s favored terms, is bullheaded. It would be so easy to press that button, but she wants her mind clear during this important time with her son.
She finally makes it back to the dining room table and, using her wrists, forearms, and elbows, lowers herself onto her chair. Nothing in the middle of her body seems to be connected to anything above or below it. She’s like a wooden puppet that got flung into the street. She brings her hands to her mug of tea, which is utterly cold now. Myra checks her reflection in the spoon resting on the table and is glad she put on a bit of makeup when she was in the bathroom. Not too much, nothing garish. Just some lipstick and a touch of rouge. Since December her cheeks have become so sunken and sallow. Her hair has grown back from her last round of chemo, but it is thin, oddly curly, almost colorless, not the rich brown it once was. She started going gray only a few years ago, and if she hadn’t done the aggressive treatments she might still have her thick head of brown hair, even into the beginning of her seventh decade. No gray hairs but all this cancer. God might give you one good thing but seems hell-bent on blighting the rest of you. Sometimes she regrets the choice to have gone through all the chemotherapy, to have absorbed all that poison.
Ronan returns to the dining room. His flesh is pink from the shower. His hair is damp and he’s parted it on the side. This is how he wore it in high school. With the clean shave he looks like a boy again. Her boy. There are times, she can’t help notice, when he really resembles Denny. It’s an expression he takes on when he can’t answer a question, when he’s confused. It’s in the prominent brow, the way the eyes seem to deepen and fall prey to dark thoughts, to the wolves in his head. Or perhaps, though she doesn’t want to think so, it’s a cravenness, an unwillingness to face something. Ronan has also finally changed his clothes. He arrived in a pair of blue jeans and a loose gray sweatshirt, which he’s been wearing for two days, and now he’s in a thick cream-colored fisherman’s sweater and a pair of butterscotch-colored corduroys.
“What a difference,” she says as he enters the dining room. “Was the water hot enough?”
“The water was perfect,” he says.
She asks him to retrieve the manila envelope that she dropped on her way back to the dining room. He does so, his movements so fluid and easy it’s almost obscene. The shower has loosened him up, eased his mood. He hands her the envelope. Myra unclasps the top, removes seven white envelopes, and deals them onto the table. Each one bears a name:
MOM
FIONA
JOAN
LEXY
ALEC
RONAN
DENNY
She lets Ronan take them in for a moment, then says, “You’ll need to deliver these in person,” she says. “We can’t risk a postal date on the envelopes.”
He asks if anyone knows where his Uncle Alec is.
“Grandma Ava knows,” she says. “You’ll have to check with her.” She returns the envelopes to the manila mailer, pushes it toward him, then hides her monstrous hands in her lap. “Please don’t read yours yet,” she says.
“I won’t,” he says.
“Promise me.”
“I promise,” he says, meeting her eyes. He takes the envelopes out again, looks through them, one by one. “And where’s my dad?” he asks.
She swallows. Her mouth is dry, raw, as if she was forced to swallow a spoonful of sand. This incessant dehydration. No matter how much water she drinks she’s always parched. “He’s at a VA hospital in southern Illinois,” she says.
She knows that the mystery of Ronan’s father has always been difficult for him. There is an emptiness there. A dark, endless cave. Early on Myra made a choice not to tell him the story of his father. If for no other reason, it was to protect herself. She was so in love with Denny Happ. She would’ve done anything for him, suffered any humiliation, given a limb, a kidney, her life. Conjuring him was—and still is—just too painful. His unexplained departure, the years of silence, the discovery of him in Carbondale, his shocking explanation of his illness—taken together it’s easily the greatest sadness she’s known.
“He’s been an in-patient there for three years now,” she adds.
“I didn’t even know he was alive,” Ronan says.
“He is,” Myra says. “I’m sorry I haven’t told you until now. You know the subject of your father has always been a struggle for me.” Even talking about Denny now makes it feel as if she’s losing precious oxygen.
“How did you find him?” Ronan asks.
“Last year someone from the VA hospital contacted me because he had listed us in his will,” she says, gently bending the truth. The fact is that she was the one who tracked him down through the Veterans Health Administration in DC as she was writing her own will. She plans to send him three photo albums chronicling their early days living in Chicago and Wilmette.
“Is he ill?” Ronan asks.
“Not terminally, no,” she says. “At least not that I’m aware of.” She brings the oxygen mask to her face, takes a hit, and continues: “But he has schizophrenia, Ronan. Apparently he’s on a lot of medication.” She exhales, takes more oxygen. “The things that you struggle with—your condition—I think it’s inherited.”
Ronan’s face is beset by an expression he used to make when he was a little boy, after he’d wake up confused from a nap. She knows she could tell him so much more: about her visit years ago to Connie’s house; how Denny sat with her at her little kitchen table, how he confessed to being instructed by other forces to murder her and Ronan. But it’s just too excruciating. She doesn’t want to spoil these final moments with her son. It will have to be enough for him to know that his father is alive.
“What VA hospital?” Ronan says.
“The one in Marion,” she says. “It’s near Carbondale.”
There is a silence. Only embers popping in the wood-burning stove, which Keith made sure to light before he left.
“I’ll take him his letter,” Ronan finally says. Tears glaze his eyes and he tries to hide them but his face is so cleanly shaven that his cheeks glisten in the firelight.
She asks him to help her into the living room. He comes around the table and offers his arm, which she clutches with both hands and pulls herself up. After she gets her balance he slowly leads her and her IV stand into the living room, one step at a time, and eases her into her calico recliner, the same one she’s had since her earliest days in Chicago, her beloved reading chair. It used to be catty-corner to the matching sofa but a few weeks ago Keith set it beside the wood-burning stove so she could be warm while she read.
Beside the chair sits an old crate of vinyl records. As Myra settles in, Ronan crouches and flips through them: John Denver, Patsy Cline, Simon and Garfunkel, John Prine, Fleetwood Mac…
The fire hisses. A piece of kindling cracks. Ronan opens the metal door, feeds some wood into the stove, closes it. Then, from the wall over the crate of records, he removes a framed eight-by-ten autographed photo of baseball great Mickey Mantle.
“Grandma Ava brought that with her the last time she and your Aunt Joan visited,” Myra says. “My dad gave it to me for my fourteenth birthday. I had Keith put it up last week for me.”
“I had no idea you liked Mickey Mantle,” Ronan says.
“I met him once,” she says.
“Oh really? Where?”
“In Elmira. At this old diner where your extremely strict grandmother would let me go by myself after church. It was my first bit of independence. A few precious free hours following Sunday Mass. It was the summer after seventh grade.” She fits the mask over her face yet again, takes some oxygen, then lowers it. “He came over to my booth and sat down across from me. He ate half my sandwich and I shared my milkshake with him. I had no idea who he was. He’d just been sent back down to the minors to work on his swing and he was passing through town.”
“He just plopped right down across from you?” Ronan says. “Didn’t you think that was a little weird?”
“It was a little weird,” she agrees. “But there was something about him. Something I was drawn to. When I was walking home it started pouring rain and he gave me a ride.”
“Wow,” Ronan says. “You were, what, like, thirteen? He was an adult.”
“Believe it or not, it wasn’t creepy,” Myra says, though she knew even back then that she was too young for what she was feeling when she was parked with him in his yellow Chevy Bel Air with the whitewall tires. She wanted him to kiss her on the lips. She longed to taste the fullness of his perfect mouth. It would’ve been her first real kiss. He looked like a movie star. He was so handsome, with such a winning smile. “I used to have his rookie card,” she continues. “Another birthday gift from my dad. He gave me that when I turned sixteen. I’m not sure what happened to it. It disappeared when we lived in Chicago. The card would definitely be worth quite a lot now… The truth is, that boy from the diner probably wasn’t Mickey Mantle. But I’ve enjoyed pretending he was.”
Ronan places the autographed portrait of Mantle back on its nail and runs his hand along the spines of the books in the bookcase, which spans an entire wall. Hundreds of books. From the mahogany credenza opposite the sofa, beside the record player, Ronan picks up another picture frame: a three-by-three black-and-white snapshot of his father. Denny Happ is sitting on a park bench under a canopy of trees. He’s wearing a dark sport coat over a white button-down Oxford with the collar open. His hair is neatly combed, parted on the side, almost identical to Ronan’s now. Denny is looking directly at the camera, smiling. He couldn’t have been happier, Myra remembers.
“I’ve never seen this one,” Ronan says.
“That was after we got back from our honeymoon,” she says. “The day we moved in together. He’s twenty-six there. After he carried his things up to my apartment we walked over to Humboldt Park and had a picnic lunch. I made tuna fish sandwiches and we drank warm Cokes. It was so hot that day.”
“They look alike,” Ronan says, holding the framed picture of his father beside the Mickey Mantle portrait.
“Your father was a very handsome man,” Myra says. “You get your looks from him.”
“That’s not the only thing I got from him,” Ronan says, and taps on his head a few times, a reference to their shared madness.
“You’re going to live a great life,” Myra says. Her voice has gone even fainter. It’s as if she gets an allotment of words each day and now she’s starting to run out. She takes another hit of oxygen and continues: “You got help when it mattered. Your father wasn’t able to.”
“Do you still love him?” Ronan asks.
“Some version of him, yes. But it’s been a long time since that person existed. I don’t know who he is anymore.”
Ronan looks out the window. His attention has drifted off, as if his eyes are following something blowing in the wind.
“You have your writing,” Myra says, “your beautiful son… and Henny. You have so much. You have an opportunity to be the father that yours never was.”
“I want that,” Ronan says, returning his gaze to her. “I really do.”
“Then it will happen,” Myra says.
He sets the framed picture of his father back on the credenza and then goes into the dining room and returns with a chair. He places it a few feet in front of her, sits. Only the hissing of the woodstove now. More crackling.
After a silence Myra says, “So Keith walked you through everything?”
Ronan nods.
“And you’re still up for this?”
He nods again. It’s as though each nod is marking time, signaling the inevitable.
Myra takes another hit of oxygen and begins going through all the basic household things that need to be fixed: the pendant lights above the kitchen island keep shorting out; better gutters are needed for the garage; new windows are a must for the living room; the upstairs toilet runs—the flap probably has to be replaced; one of the screen panels on the back porch is torn and could use a patch or two. The water heater is over twenty years old and he’ll eventually have to get a new one; Lexy and Barry agreed to take care of that. And they said they wanted to repaint the exterior. He and his cousins can work out the main color and the trim. The hummingbird feeders are in a box in the basement.
She tells him about the bookstore in town. “They have a great contemporary fiction section,” she says. “They even have a few shelves dedicated to modern drama. Last time I was there I told them about you and Henny, how they should be ordering your plays.”
She loves his smile. She knows he’s doing his best for her.
Her words continue tumbling out. She loses her wind again and has to speak through the respirator.
She’s prepared lists, put all the bills in order. Keith has cleaned the place top to bottom. He even hired a couple of housecleaners to help him. They spent an entire weekend scrubbing the floors and washing the windows inside and out and organizing the kitchen.
She reminds Ronan that she wants to be cremated. Despite knowing it will upset her mother, she doesn’t want a religious service. She wants him to put together a memorial back in Joliet, in Pilcher Park, in the spring. He should invite Lexy and Barry and the twins. And Fiona. And her mother and Joan, of course. She also mentions Marna, and her husband, Dale.
