The big main rooms were farthest from the road. Their windows, and the front door, too, opened onto the porch and the sea beyond. The back of the house faced the road. Max and Thea’s boyfriend carried the suitcases under a trellised arch, and disappeared. They’d climb the steps of the porch and enter the house. Gail wrenched herself out of the Jeep. She looked up at the rear of the house, where she saw, in a high window — the back-stairs landing, wasn’t it? — a female form: Thea, carrying two pillows no doubt destined for their marital bed. Thea waved, continued upward. One story below, behind a window with purplish glass, stood Fox. He raised a hand. In the kitchen moved another female figure — Sophia. And in the now-open back doorway, which led into a kitchen of elderly appliances where the family took all its meals, stood little Hebe, hugging her own freckled arms in excitement. “Gail!” piped the Goddess of Youth, and ran down the wooden stairs and threw herself upon the unenthusiastic Gail.
And then, within the house, more greetings. Beauteous Sophia. Emaciated Fox. Thea, exhausted.
THEA AND GAIL had a long-established hideout. About two hours later — Fox asleep in his room, Max napping in his and Gail’s, the boyfriend gone, Sophia and Hebe shopping for groceries, like mortals — the women found each other there. The room had been a pantry once and perhaps a meat larder before that. No heat reached it. Though the afternoon was not especially cold and a thin layer of snow was shrinking in the sun, their little place retained the iciness of the previous months. Gail wore her parka, Thea her grand-mother’s patched sable.
“He looks awful, doesn’t he,” Thea said.
“Yes,” Gail agreed. Fox’s hair had turned the color of spume. His skin was nearly as transparent as the weak bulb hanging above their two sorrowful heads. He had joined them for lunch that afternoon without participating in it. He was kept alive on some canned medicinal nutrient to which he attributed his frequent vomiting. Treatments and their sequelae were what was killing him, he said; the disease itself had vanished, he claimed. “I’m cured and dead,” he said, in helpless fury. The sound of his vomiting — Gail had heard it twice — was not the cascade of a drunk; it was a prolonged, unproductive gagging.
“I brought fancy chocolates. What was I thinking?” mourned Gail.
“Hebe has already swallowed the entire box. Pa likes high-tasting stuff like spiced crab cakes, runny cheese, and smoked meats. He adores bacon. So for a while Ma made bacon every morning and Pa ate it and pretty soon he chucked it up. Finally she wouldn’t make it anymore and they started to have those fights they adore, shouting made-up footnotes at each other, Pa quoting from something medical—”
“A digestive tract.”
Thea managed a weak smile. “—and Ma invoking British novels, all those gentlemen gouty from port and pork. Also she quoted Deuteronomy—”
“Leviticus. ‘And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.’ ”
“Whatever. Then Ma started making the bacon in the middle of the afternoon, while he’s sleeping, like now. It’s a drugged sleep, bacon won’t wake him, the house burning to the ground wouldn’t wake him. So he started getting up in the middle of the night to fry it himself.”
“You could just not buy it.”
“Oh dear, Gail, do you think swine is unclean?”
“Of course not. The pig is fastidious if given the opportunity.”
“Oh good,” said Thea. “Anyway, Pa yells that gout is one of the few conditions he doesn’t have, and that Old Testament restrictions don’t apply to Whitelaws. There’s not a Yid in his lineage — sorry, Gail, it’s the word he used.”
“There’s a Yid in everybody’s lineage,” Gail said, evenly.
“ ‘Ergo,’ he goes on to say, bacon must be good for him. And Aunt Hebe is always his ally. She swears that bacon alone sustains her existence. What a useless existence it is … Oh, don’t listen to me, I love her.”
“Darling.”
Gail was sitting on a high stool and Thea on a lower one, and it was an easy matter for Thea to lay her cheek against Gail’s denimed thigh. They remained in this position for a while. Then Thea raised her head again. “Now I lock the bacon in the trunk of my car. So Pa goes without. But the fight isn’t over. They won’t stop fighting until he’s dead.” She swallowed. “He won’t die while a fight is on.”
“Then bacon is keeping him alive,” said Gail.
DINNER, COOKED BY THEA and her mother, consisted of chicken, salad, and wine for everybody but Fox, who again ate nothing and drank only his thick green medicinal liquid. Thea’s boyfriend returned. Hebe and Max gabbed about politics. Fox said nothing, focusing on the battle within. Sophia’s lordly attention, too, was elsewhere. She insisted on cleaning up without assistance. Fox went upstairs to vomit, and didn’t come down. The sea beat hard on the rocks. “I will take a walk in the perilous dark,” Hebe announced. The boyfriend left. Gail and Max and Thea sat reading in the living room. Hebe came home and told them she was safe. “Surprising: I am so prone to mishap.” The sea beat even harder on the rocks.
GAIL AWOKE in the middle of the night. She had forgotten to pack her Valium. Max was lightly snoring. It would be unkind to wake him, and for what purpose, anyway? She could tiptoe downstairs and into Fox’s room, rummage around in his pharmacopoeia until she found something that induced sleep. So what if she laid her hands on a lethal medicament. To awaken a dying man would be worse than unkind.
She got up, and pulled somebody’s oilcloth coat from a hook and put it on. (She’d forgotten to pack her robe, too. Sometimes it seemed that slippery places were forming in her brain.) She walked almost noiselessly down the back stairway and on the second floor switched to the main stairs, whose threadbare carpeting would muffle sound. But still every footfall produced a creak. She stopped, leaned over the banister.
Moonlight had entered the music room, brushing against disregarded heirlooms, dusting the Steinway with silver.
Fox and Sophia sat on chairs angled toward the broadest window. Their knees almost touched. Fox wore a striped hospital bathrobe, borrowed or stolen during one of his stays. Sophia was still in her corduroy pants and a ragged flannel shirt. But above their schmattes, what noble heads those aristocrats wore, even the one about to die. What enviable profiles. She tried to listen to the couple’s soft, low conversation — she wasn’t really a guest, after all; she’d been summoned to attend the dying, she had a schoolteacher’s obligation to eavesdrop. But all she could hear were a few syllables that might have been, that should have been, that probably weren’t “love” and “remember” and “afraid.”
MAX TRIED THE PIANO in the morning. Fox lay on a ratty sofa. The weary Gail, hoping to remain unnoticed, hunched on a chair in the corner of the dim dining room where the family took none of its meals. She held the novel she’d brought, still unreadable. She could see the music room in one direction through an archway, the kitchen in another direction through a narrow door. The piano was in perfect tune. Fox’s old cello case — the one he’d dragged from home to college and back again — stood in one corner.
Max left the piano and walked through the dining room. He didn’t notice Gail. In the kitchen he poured some coffee and sugared it heavily. Fox now got up from the sofa. He unpacked the cello and inserted its post like a prosthesis. He sat on a stool with the instrument in front of him at an exaggerated slant. The post dug into the Aubusson. Fox was still wearing his sleeping garments and that robe whose stripes Gail had noticed last night. Now she saw that it bore yellow stains.