At one point I passed near enough to Ivy Acres to consider (and feel the obligation of) stopping in to check on Pop, but I knew he'd be in the same unsettled mood he's been in since what happened to Bea, and I decided to keep on rolling. Bea, I should report, has made it, but not in a good way. In fact I can say without hesitancy that it couldn't be worse. After I and the staff and then the actual licensed medical personnel took our turns not getting out what was lodged in Bea's throat, she was rushed to the hospital, where the ER doctors finally removed the foreign object from her airway (a diamond-shaped patch of renegade turkey sternum that had somehow slipped through the boneless-breast-roll machines) and got her heart pumping again. Soon thereafter they put her on a ventilator and apparently it was touch and go that night. But she is now, a week later, finally breathing on her own, though it seems that she is no longer saying or thinking or feeling very much, or at least showing any signs of doing so, now or in the near future.
The near future being all Bea — and a lot of the rest of us—
has left.
What's a bit shocking is how thoroughly fine Pop seems to be with the whole thing, or how far he's already moved past it. I drove him over to the hospital and we had a decent enough visit with Bea but the next day before I was to pick him up again he called to tell me he didn't want to go. I said no problem, that I could take him whenever.
"Don't bother yourself," he said, his voice uncharacteristically hoarse, like a smoker's. "I don't want to see her anymore."
"You don't mean that," I said.
"Yeah, I do."
"You're just exhausted by all this. Sounds like you're coming down with something."
"Probably. I don't feel good."
"I'll come over and have someone take a look at you."
"Forget it."
"Let's talk tomorrow," I said. "You'll feel different I bet."
"I don't want to see her anymore, Jerome. I'm not kidding you. It's over between us."
I didn't quite know what to say to that last bit, which made it sound as though he and poor Bea had a falling out, a lovers'
quarrel, rather than the atmosphere-obliterating airburst that it was, and is.
"Okay. Maybe in a few days."
"No way. She's not for me."
"She's not herself right now, Pop. You know?"
"Not herself? Did you take a good look at her, Jerome, with her arms and legs as stiff as pipes? Who else do you think she might be? Esther fucking Williams?"
"I'm sure she'll get physical therapy soon. Maybe when she gets out of the hospital and they bring her back here, to the Transitions ward."
"Hey, buddy boy, I know the whole story. The nurses' aides will have to cut her toenails and fingernails and sponge-bathe her, too, but probably won't do a good job of it, so she'll start to smell bad and they'll resent having to deal with her even more than they do now So they'll treat her worse and worse until the last dignified remnants of the old Bea get so fed up that she won't open her mouth to eat or drink."
"You have to stop thinking like this, Pop."
"I'm not thinking!" he says, loudly enough that his voice distorts through the handset. "I don't have to think. I've got eyes.
And I've seen enough of what happens to the dried-out hides around here to know none of it is pretty. So don't expect me to put on a brave face and make the best of it, because that's all horseshit. I'm not a pretender, Jerome, I think you know that.
I've never run my life that way and I'm not going to do it now.
So listen to me. Bea is gone, gone forever. You can do me a big favor and not mention her anymore. Because if she ever does come back here from the hospital I'm not going to talk to her or visit her or go hold her hand or do anything else like that. She's kaput, okay? Dead and buried. I'm done with it, I'm finished."
"So what are you going to do now?"
"Whatdya mean, what am I going to do? I'm busy as hell. I'm gonna sit here and grow my nose hair. I'm gonna grind down my corns. If I'm lucky I won't slip in the tub and break my ass.
What's this I hear about Theresa maybe being pregnant?"
"Who told you that?"
"Jack. He visits me every week, you know."
"I didn't know that."
"He's no emotional deadbeat."
"She told him?"
"He thought she looked like she was showing at the party.
And now they're getting hitched sooner, right?"
"I guess."
"So what else is there?"
"Not much," I said, though at that moment I surprised myself by nearly asking for his advice, which wouldn't be advice so much as an opinion on what he would do and the blanket idiocy of any other course, probably to the tune of me putting my foot down and telling her that if she didn't jettison the baby and start treatments asap, she and Paul would have to pack up and leave and expect no support from me because I wasn't the kind of guy who would stand by tapping out the inexorable count-down of life while his daughter was ensuring her own doom, or something like that.
So I said, "It's early. She's not due for a while."
"Well, I decided if it's a boy I'd like him to be named Henry.
Or Hank. Tell her that. I don't care if he's got hardly any Battle in him. Jesus. How did our family get so damn Oriental? I guess you started it. Even Jack's kids — you'd think with that Nazi wife of his they wouldn't look like such little coolies."
As usual I didn't say anything to this, because there's no point, no point at all, though in truth I've thought the same basic thing countless times, if in somewhat more palatable terms, merely to muse upon the fact and not at all to judge, though whether that makes it generally acceptable or not I'll never be sure.
"I'll swing by later."
"Don't do anything on my account."
"Come on, Pop. Cut me a break, okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever."
"Tell me you're going to be okay."
"Tell yourself," he growled, and he clicked off before I could say anything else — our customary truncation, which is necessarily fine with me.
But I am bothered, and worried. I'd like to think that part of Pop's swift turn of sentiment is just a self-defense stratagem, or that it's because he doesn't have a long history with Bea, but to be honest I know of course Pop is right, that he has already dug right down to the core of the matter, as he does, alarmingly, most all of the time, for Bea as is — her limbs wooden and immobile, her pupils coal blue and unfixed, completely speechless and soundless save for the feeble high-pitched wheeze she'll make when the nurse shifts her in the bed — is really nothing but precisely unequivocally herself, the same "ain't nobody else" that Pop and I and you and yours will turn into (if even by a senseless accident) and instantly, wholly, embody.