“I could bring the price down a little,” said the witchy proprietress.
“Won’t you have a birthday one of these years?” said Hebe, fondling Gail’s upper arm.
“Filch the housekeeping money. Insist on a special gift,” advised Sophia. “Satisfy yourself,” she urged, this Yankee who didn’t wear even an engagement ring.
Gail slid the conspicuous shackle from her arm and shook her head: No. Some weeks later, Sophia, satisfying her own self, left husband and teenage daughter, Thea, and resumed her life of vagabondage — modified, this time; she was home as often as she was away. “No, I don’t mind,” Thea said, in her forthright way, when Gail asked. “It’s fun when she’s here, relaxing when she’s gone.”
II.
“SOMEONE IN YOUR LARGER COHORT has to die first,” Max had mentioned early on. “To start the avalanche.” In the first decades there were the accidents, the horrific early cancers, the suicides. And there were deaths of children, other people’s children, thank God, but Gail was never without fear for her own boy. Luckily, the Whitelaw daughter and the Chernoff son turned into healthy adolescents and then healthy young adults — nobody nowadays considered male homosexuality an affliction, not out loud, anyway.
After a while came diseases predictable by any actuary. Somehow Fox and Sophia and Max and Gail avoided them. They couldn’t avoid growing old, though. The men did it in differing ways. Neither stayed fit — neither had been fit to begin with — but Fox at least was naturally skinny. Max steadily gained weight — that was natural, too, or at least familial, or at least not pathological (he pointed out to Gail); extra flesh, his grandmother had assured him, is protection against various ills. A statistical analysis published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society supported this unlikely truth. Max’s narrow shoulders contracted through the years and his broad hips broadened. When, naked after lovemaking (an activity increasingly rare in their age group, studies show, while other studies show also that both members of an aging couple like to pretend that their partners are movie stars during the business), he walked from bed to bathroom, Gail sometimes imagined that she was watching the retreat of a satiated woman. But when he returned after the scrubbing he considered necessary — Gail would have lain around in sweat and jism until morning — with his member shrunken and a smile stretching his bushy mustache, he looked male again. Her man.
A few ailments did afflict them. Gail’s fibroids required a hysterectomy. Max had to have a hernia repaired. Various antidepressants gave Fox various side effects like constipation and patchy hair loss. But Sophia — she was never sick. And her gaunt attractiveness mutated into blinding beauty: the excellent bones and good teeth; the unlined skin that had never known a moisturizer; the pale hair, only slightly faded, bundled loosely at her nape. She still climbed, skied, went scuba diving. When she returned, frequently, to her Maine home, Hebe joined her. The Goddess of Youth had developed crow’s-feet like everybody else, and her little teeth were yellowing. Sometimes the Chernoffs were invited for a weekend. They’d find Hebe chattering at Fox. They’d find Sophia atop an un-trustworthy ladder, rewiring the porch lantern, or mounted on one of the gables as if it were a pony, shingling the roof. She had a boy’s daring and a man’s competence and a woman’s grace. She seemed to be at the beginning of a very long life. Gail found herself jealous, or was it desirous?
Back home: “Sophia will bury the rest of us,” Gail predicted to Max.
“Somebody has to be the last.”
Sophia wouldn’t be the last, she’d be the exception; but Gail kept this more precise insight to herself until she could share it with young Thea Whitelaw. One summer, Thea, working on her masters in teaching at Harvard, stayed with the Chernoffs between apartments. “Your mother may live for centuries,” said Gail.
“Oh, she will,” said Thea. “She’s part cetacean. Cetus is Latin, from the Greek k
tos …”
“Sea monster, yes. We grade-school teachers haul around a lot of facts. Pseudo-erudition.” Gail spoke in a stern voice — pseudo-stern. She had grown close to this young woman, dark eyes like a rain cloud, brown hair in one thick braid.
SOMEONE IN THE SMALLER cohort has to die first, too.
One of those usually curable carcinomas sought out Fox. But in his case … not so curable. Still, several years went by: treatments, time off, new treatments, everyone knows the drill.
There had been no Whitelaw-Chernoff visits since the diagnosis. Fox’s therapy took a lot of time. And the Chernoffs’ son now lived in Savannah; his parents tended to travel south when they traveled at all. Max’s weight hampered him a bit. Gail was frequently fatigued. Her eyelids had become pleated, but the rest of her face, she knew, was still lively, still pretty: the tilted chin, hers by right; the tilted nose, hers by rhinoplasty. She was glad they had sold their house and moved into a condo. Its kitchen had all the latest devices, and granite countertops, too. She didn’t care if she never cooked another meal, but she liked laying palms and then cheek on the cool stone.
Thea was back in Maine, living in her father’s house. Her mother was sometimes there; Hebe too. Thea was teaching fifth grade. She called one January morning.
“It’s almost over, Gail.”
“What do you mean? Max and your father talked just last week … well, last month … before Christmas. Is Fox in the hospital again?”
“No. He’s limping around, can do just about everything but eat, takes stuff for the pain. I don’t mean he’s dying. I just mean he’s dying.”
The difference between the imminent and the soon: yes. There was also the inevitable, but they all belonged in that group, even cetacean Sophia.
“Come up, please,” said Thea. “Bring music.”
“Well … which music?”
“Beethoven?”
“Oh, too difficult. Max hardly plays now. Some kid stuff, that’s all, for the neighbors’ daughter.” A brat, that little girclass="underline" or perhaps Gail hadn’t yet made peace with her own no-grandchildren destiny. “The other morning he did do a marvelous riff on ‘Oh, Mr. Sun,’ ” she admitted.
“What about the variations on the Magic Flute thing?”
“Ein Mädchen—”
“—oder Weibchen. Please don’t tell me I’m pseudo-erudite.”
“Okay,” Gail said, complying with the request, and also agreeing to the program: Beethoven’s Twelve Variations on Mozart’s A Maiden or Little Wife.
III.
BANGOR. The plane banked over pines, over water. Thea’s boyfriend was waiting for them at the airport. They got into his Piper, Max taking the copilot’s seat. This flight took just ten minutes. They landed on an oblong of earth with spruce trees at its margins. And then, in the boyfriend’s Jeep, they drove along a rutted road from island to island, across meager bridges, until they reached the last island in the series, the familiar outcrop with its fifty-odd houses. The easternmost house, brown-shingled like the rest, belonged to Fox. A deep porch wrapped around the three sides of it that faced the fierce sea. Inside were angles, odd windows, nooks, all grown familiar through the years. The music room held a Steinway bought on the occasion of Fox’s birth. In the attic stood a hard double bed. On it Gail and Max would make love as they always did here, as if it were a guestly obligation.