The following evening, in fact, when she was recuperating in her bedroom, she would ask if I had come into the operating room, and I told her that I had done so only briefly at the end, as she had called for me. This was true, for she did say, “Poppa,” out of the blue, and I had held her hand for some moments, patting her fingers gently to try to comfort her. It was the first time since she was quite young that I had caressed her so, and the final time, too — still right up to now — for she would leave again just as quickly as she arrived, having a taxi come to the house and take her to the train station for the first express of the morning. She didn’t know that I had been awake all night, or that I’d heard her walk down the hall and slip a note under my door, which read, “Sorry for all my trouble to you. Goodbye.” I almost went to her then, to plead that she remain, but I saw a beam of headlights sweeping up the drive, and before I could even pull slippers on my feet she was quickly down the stairs and outside, closing the cab door behind her.
If Sunny were to ask me now, I would not tell her I was in the operating room throughout the procedure. I would have to lie. For it was much more difficult than even Dr. Anastasia expected, and owing to his skill and great care he didn’t injure her at all, Thomas being proof enough of that. And so I remain grateful to the doctor, for the force of his patience and focus, as it was obvious how much heed he gave to each operation and step. I watched his face and the movements of his hands, his concentration and purpose astounding to me. Once he began he never showed even a shade of consternation, comporting himself with utter professionalism, as though it no longer mattered how much I would pay him (which I did, overgenerously), nor that she was much too far into her term. Sunny was eerily quiet while he worked, her eyes glassy and unfixed, though every so often she would gaze up at me almost searchingly, as though I were some faraway figure in her dreaming, this dimmed man in the distance, made of twilight and fog.
The doctor was right about my presence and participation. For what I saw that evening at the clinic endures, remaining unaltered, preserved. And if in my life I’ve witnessed the most terrible of things, if I’ve seen what no decent being should ever look upon and have to hold in close remembrance, perhaps it means I should be left to the cold device of history, my likeness festooning the ramparts of every house and town and district of man.
But it is not. And I do not live in broad infamy, nor hide from righteous pursuers or seekers of the truth. I do not mask my face or screen my doings of each day. I have not yet been banished from this earth. And though nearly every soul I’ve closely known has come to some dread or grave misfortune, I instead persist, with warmth and privilege accruing to me unabated, ever securing my good station here, the last place I will belong.
17
MARY BURNS once said to me, “You’re truly an unexpected sort, Franklin Hata. Like no one I’ve ever known.”
I’ve been reflecting on those words in recent days, as I’ve not felt like swimming much, opting instead to walk longer than usual, my new route taking me past her old house twice, coming and going. It was her compliment to me, spoken early in our friendship, in those heady though still reposeful weeks after we had become physically intimate with each other, if not yet as lovers. Later on she said something quite similar to me by the poolside, but of course it was meant then as a sober appraisal of our all-but-dissipated relationship, which was as critical as Mary Burns could ever be of me. I remember that day as being just as it is now, late one afternoon near the end of the season. She sat in the teak deck chair with a towel tied around her waist, her navy blue one-piece still wet from her twenty laps. When a chilly wind swept through she pulled on the rumpled white men’s dress shirt she often used as a wrap, her silver-golden hair swept back neatly with a velvety black band, the cast of her eyes opaquely shaded behind the large ovals of her sunglasses.
She was particularly laconic that weekend, for she’d had a most unpleasant phone conversation with her eldest daughter some days before. The young woman had been asking about her mother’s will for some time; she and her husband were apparently a high-earning couple who somehow still lived beyond their means and were constantly in debt. For several months once, Mary Burns had to make the mortgage payments on their Manhattan apartment, lest they lose it to the bank. Her daughter had called that week not because they were in trouble again, but rather because they were “looking ahead,” and wanted to know exactly how much Mary Burns would be leaving to them in stocks and bonds and cash, as well as whatever interest she could expect in the Mountview house and a large bungalow with acreage on Fisher Island. They wanted a financial picture for themselves, she told her mother, in order to plan their lives accordingly.
I was visiting at her house that day when she received the call. When she hung up she returned to the living room where we’d been reading together after lunch, and though I hadn’t heard her speak any way but placably to her daughter, I could clearly see that she was distracted. She sat down at the other end of the long sofa, and when I asked she briefly recounted to me what her daughter had wanted.
After a while I said, “I hope she was satisfied with what you’re leaving her.”
“What?”
“Her inheritance.”
“I don’t know,” she said, suddenly looking at me, stunned. “I don’t know how much it is.”
“Oh, you couldn’t tell her anything?”
“No,” she answered, with great somberness. “I never knew she thought about me that way.”
“Well, surely she will be pleased,” I said, something in me trying now to put the subject to rest, “no matter the amount.”
Mary Burns was silent, and despite the fact that for the rest of the afternoon we didn’t converse much at all, everything seemed mostly fine. She offered me as she always did a thick slice of her homemade marble pound cake to go with my tea, and when it was time for me to leave she let me peck her on the cheek. I felt all was well again, or at least as well as it had been during that last month, which I see now was a period of the most agreeable passivity, an inert state that neither of us — being alike in many ways — was willing to disturb. And yet the differences were crucial, too, for while Mary Burns was just the kind of woman I could have befriended and come to love, being exactly partnered for someone like me, for her I was perfectly wrong. Better for Mary Burns that I should be a man who could set her afire like a bowl in a kiln, better that I could so frustrate and anger her that I’d breach the thick jacket of her grace and unleash her woman’s fury, to make her finally crack, or splinter, or explode.
The next morning she came by to swim as she did most Sundays. She would simply walk around the side of the house and begin her laps while I was still in the kitchen preparing breakfast. She liked a plain meal of oatmeal porridge with diced apples and a cup of black coffee, and I was more than happy to make it that morning, seeing her there leaning on the curved stainless steel ladder as she tucked her hair inside her swimming cap. Her body was trim and fit, her longish legs tanned, and from where I stood she could have been a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, not yet even in the prime of her life. I was amazed and humbled. She looked toward the patio and the kitchen but didn’t wave back at me, and I thought the reflection of the sun against the panes of glass must be blocking her vision. The next I saw she was gone, the surface of the water gently rippling with the wake of a neat dive. I watched from the stove for her to reappear. When she didn’t I thought I had miss-seen her go in and quickly surveyed the rest of the property, and when again I didn’t find her I stepped out through the French doors onto the patio. The water was astonishingly calm. I kept searching the far end of the dark pool for the bob of her head, and yet nothing would rise. The seconds passed. A bubble of panic came up in my chest. I knew I should run and dive in but another feeling was holding me back, like tethered weights on my legs, this pulling-down horror of what I might see.