Sophia and Thea and Hebe sat on the porch. The weather was still unseasonably mild. Or perhaps seasonably — Gail knew that the Maine coast had experienced balmy winters two years in a row during the nineteenth century and also in 1929, another of the remembered factoids from her days of teaching. The boyfriend had not yet appeared. Gail could not remember his name. Did he remember hers? Was there anyone on earth who remembered 1929 and the daffodils that had perished by Valentine’s Day? Fox drew the bow across the strings. He played a Bach suite, the stuff cellists warm up with. He ignored wife, daughter, and sister-in-law trooping in from the porch. They found Gail immediately. Sophia announced that the girls would skate while the boys practiced.
“I forgot my skates,” Gail said.
“I have an extra pair,” Thea said.
“They’ll be too big.”
“We’ll stuff them.”
“With what,” Gail said, following the others to Thea’s car. They drove from island to island until they reached the mainland. There they drove to their favorite pond, black, sprinkled with nubbles of ice like kosher salt. Thea’s skates, with the addition of a pair of mismatched socks she’d snatched from the line, fit Gail as if made for her. Gail thought of the winter she’d taught her young son to skate; for a moment it was as if no time had passed since then, as if he were still that merry little boy and she his delighted mother.
She executed a few turns. Thea and Sophia were waltzing. But the Goddess of Youth was the star. In a long skirt salvaged from a Whitelaw trunk and a tight jacket and a top hat — Fox had worn it to somebody’s inauguration — Hebe twirled, raised one leg and then the other, leaped, landed like a butterfly. Gail, quickly tired, watched her from the edge of the pond. How kind it would be of some real deity to shrink that scrap of a person, transform her into a piece of porcelain, and set her atop a music box to spin forever. “She rents a one-room cottage on a New Hampshire horse farm,” Thea had said. “She comes up to prattle at Pa, takes buses to get here, about seventeen of them.” But now Hebe’s right blade seemed to catch on a protrusion of ice, or perhaps it was a root that had worked itself upward during the thaw, like a child throwing off its blankets. The top hat fell off and rolled in a wide arc toward the center of the pond. Hebe fell flat on her face.
Well, not really. “The body will do almost anything to protect its eyes and nose,” Max had once said. “The hands shoot out — a lot of broken wrists happen that way. Only an unconscious person forgets his face. One night in the emergency room I saw …” and he’d gone on to tell her about a drunk whose tumble had resulted in total shattering; he mentioned the bones by name, like friends. Max’s capacious memory had stored everything he’d seen during his internship, before he abandoned the urgency of clinical work. Last night he’d told her that he thought Fox had at most a month to live.
Hebe lay still. But her face was turned to one side, so her nose probably wasn’t broken. Sister and niece sped in her direction. She pushed herself into a crouch (her wrists weren’t broken, either) and curled into a half-sitting position, legs (also unhurt) swept beneath her. Gail reached the threesome. Thea was kneeling beside her aunt. One side of Hebe’s face had been severely scraped, but there wasn’t much blood. “Okay?” Sophia inquired.
“We ought to attend to that skin,” said Gail.
“I was all at once nauseated,” said Hebe. She took Thea’s hand and scrambled to her feet. Gail followed them to the shoreline. She turned her head once and saw Sophia gliding to the middle of the pond to retrieve the top hat, like a gentleman’s gentleman.
THEY FOUND MAX ALONE at the kitchen table. “Fox is sleeping,” he said. “What happened to you, Hebe? Let me see.” Thea fished keys from her jeans and ran outside again. Gail saw her open the trunk of her car and lift out something wrapped in unyielding white paper. She came in again, threw the keys onto the counter, and opened the package, uncovering a slab of pink, glistening bacon. She sliced the meat and handed the slices to her mother, who was already standing at the old stove, already shifting a big black pan on the burner. The slices curled, puckered, bubbled. The aroma slowly filled the kitchen.
Gail set the table. Max advised Hebe to wash her face gently in lukewarm water. No emollient was required. Hebe went off to obey. Sophia served the first slices.
The fragrance grew stronger — the smell of defiance, of sumptuous caloric energy, of treif. Before the rage for standardization, Gail’s fourth-grade class had done happy units on farm animals. Gail had of course prepared thoroughly. The sow is particularly motherly, she learned and then taught her charges; pigs of most breeds are prolific and also efficient at converting grain to flesh. Your pig has a small stomach within his ample frame. His fossil remains, the ur-peccary, were discovered first in China … This may explain the glory of Chinese food, she had silently speculated, though glory could not be explained, any more than life or death or sexual preference could. Once, when her son was about three, they had come across a toy pig in a store, a very small sow, scrupulously realistic. They counted the teats: twelve. “Here is where the milk comes out,” she said. And they hugged each other in sweet remembrance of lactation …
“Trichinosis,” Hebe said when she came back. “You get it from pigs, don’t you?”
“You do,” Max said. “Pigs get it from rats, though. But, yes, Hebe, if you eat raw pig meat you may ingest the encysted larvae of a roundworm and get very sick. So we cook bacon thoroughly, and it releases that tranquilizing scent.”
“No wonder Fox craves it,” Gail said, and suddenly she could no longer open her mouth.
Hebe said, with unaccustomed earnestness, “Maybe it really is bad for him.” And Gail, lips pressed together, saw that Hebe loved her sister’s husband in her arrested way — that those two sometime housemates must have a fairly good time together: one skating, one fiddling; one talking, one with his fingers in his ears; no need to bother with sex …
“Bacon’s not bad for Fox,” Max said. “Nothing is bad for him anymore.” For all his lardy softness Max wasn’t a man to cry. But the gentle voice broke and the narrow shoulders slumped and a pudgy hand covered the twitching mustache.
Sophia kept the slices coming for a while. Finally she stopped. Upstairs, Fox slept his assisted sleep. Thea stacked the dishes. Sophia handed bacon and keys to Gail, who went outside, locked the package in the car trunk, and then, bending, holding on to a stunted pine, threw up. Under her palm the bark felt like a tweed arm. She straightened and returned to the house.
NIGHT CAME AT LAST. They gathered in the music room after the dinner that everyone but Fox had eaten. To be festive he had poured his noxious nutrient into a champagne glass. He had inspected Hebe’s face. “You will have a splendid bruise in the morning,” he assured his fellow sufferer.
Beyond the dried eucalyptus situated in a tarnished pitcher on the piano, Max’s face looked metallic — pewter mustache, pressed-tin skin. His eyes seemed like disks of aluminum under their sparse lashes. A stranger walking into the room would have fingered him as the dying man, not Fox, head bent, spindliness concealed by his cello.
They played. Two old men, their instruments older still but destined for a longer stay on earth. Perhaps the piece had rarely been played so faultily, perhaps never under such circumstances. The Twelve Variations on Papageno’s tune had been written as a salon exercise for amateurs. Gail knew that. She knew that the opus was lesser Beethoven, unambitious Beethoven; she had learned much about music during the long decades of her marriage. Max messed up a passage. If she had been chosen by a man with an interest in modern art, in football, in cooking, she would have learned about those things. She herself had brought to the union a passion for teaching, and also a cigar box of pins and buckles and clips. She’d planned to add to the collection, to sell, to trade. A dolce vibrato by Fox went sour. Gail’s hobby, neither encouraged nor demeaned, had failed to develop. The musicians got through all of the variations in a quarter of an hour.