Which made him a co-conspirator with Gail, since she’d already told me that she’d cornered the hospital nutritionist and designed a diet for me. Notions of raw tofu and cold bean gruel filled what was left of my panicky imagination.
Initially, I’d planned to return to Brattleboro, transfer my records, my case, and my outpatient status to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, and recuperate at home on Spam and fruit cocktail. But that, it had been made clear early on, was out of the question. Not only did Leo use the excuse of a prolonged and long-overdue visit with our mother as a pretense to torture me-but Gail also had seemed eager to stay away from Brattleboro. I didn’t begrudge her the tactic; I also didn’t miss the irony that I felt more useful to her as an invalid than as a friend during her time of need.
As partners, however, Leo and Gail made a distinctly odd pair. As exuberant as Gail was thoughtful, as boisterous as she was quiet, and as physical as she was cerebral, my brother-on the surface-seemed made of the very stuff Gail was not. In addition, his passion for cars from the fifties and women with short attention spans were precisely those qualities which Gail tended to view with suspicion. And yet the two of them had hit it off from the first time they’d met, some fifteen years before.
Gail was not alone in her generous view of Leo. I think most people saw him in the same light that my mother’s generation had revered Will Rogers, he who’d never met a man he didn’t like. Leo was one of the world’s optimists. A butcher who ran his own shop far off the beaten track, just down the hill from where he’d always lived with our mother, he’d created such a reputation for honesty and goodwill that people drove dozens of miles to do business with him. To enter his shop was not only to be guaranteed good meat at fair prices, it was to have your anxieties momentarily washed away by his nonstop cheer and compassion. He greeted everyone equally, with enthusiasm and an eye for their troubles. He had an encyclopedic memory for names and, more important, remembered from visit to visit the course of people’s lives, which imbued in his customers the same trust they might have reserved for a respected psychologist. For a small-town, high-school-educated meat man, his was an impressive aura, all the more so since he was totally unaware of its effect.
So I was tucked under the wing of these two oddly compatible friends, and driven across the Connecticut River to the Thetford farm where I’d grown up.
It wasn’t a farm any longer, actually. The fields had been sold off to a neighbor after my father’s death. But my mother and Leo still owned the house and barn, and we all three still referred to it as “the farm.” It was located off the connector road between Thetford Hill and Thetford Center, where Leo had his shop, and despite its proximity to the new interstate, it retained for me all the isolated sweetness of my early memories. Before and during the Second World War, when I and certainly Leo were too young to enlist, we’d been the closest knit as a family-my youthful, vigorous, well-read mother, who’d injected in her sons a love of books and a respect for all people; my much-older father, soon slated to pass away-taciturn, hard-working, undemonstrative, and gentle; and the two of us.
That, however, was then. Now, my mother was in a wheelchair, restricted to the ground floor and reduced to watching TV, her cherished reading victimized by failing eyesight, and Leo, for all his charm and parochial success, was running the risk of becoming an overage roué, tooling around in rough-looking vintage cars and dating women who shared his disinterest in commitment.
That, in any case, was my dour state of mind as we drove up to the place. It was a mood that Leo, Gail, and my mother-when at last I was wheeled into the living room to greet her, wheelchair to wheelchair-worked instinctively to overcome, filling the evening with good food and chatter, almost to excess.
When it was finally over, and Leo was putting our mother to bed, I looked over at Gail sitting on the same sofa I’d bounced on as a child, her long legs stretched out, her head tilted back against the pillows, her hands slack beside her. She looked like a loosely assembled collection of tired body parts.
“Well, I guess that’s done.”
She gave me a sad smile. “Was it that bad?”
“No,” I admitted. “Maybe a little unreal.”
“It’s a lot to deal with, Joe. You and I aren’t the only walking wounded around here.”
I realized my sadness earlier had a secret sharer-one who’d been living here for several weeks now.
“So what’s the bad news?” I asked fatalistically.
She smiled to lighten my concern. “It’s nothing dramatic. Your mom’s starting to slow down a lot, and pretty suddenly. She has to go to the doctor more often, she gets tired more easily, her innards aren’t functioning as well as they used to… ‘I’m just winding down’ is how she put it to me-but I also think what happened to you sort of brought it into focus for both of them.”
I sighed and shut my eyes momentarily. So much happening in so short a time, leaving everyone at loose ends.
“That’s not to say she won’t live another twenty years,” Gail added hopefully, if without much conviction.
I opened my eyes and looked at her again. “And Leo?”
She paused, searching for the right words. “I think he’s worried he might lose the center of his universe.”
I thought about the butcher shop, his adulating clientele, his unending string of girlfriends, the car collection in the barn-Caddies, Mustangs, Corvairs, what-have-yous, all under tarps, all used for special occasions, like a selection of suits hung in a closet. So much window dressing for what had always been Mom and Leo. I saw for the first time the fragile thread by which Leo’s life was held together. Not that my mother’s dying would destroy him-I gave his inner strength more credit than that. But Gail was right-it would break his heart, and perhaps leave him ruing some of the choices he’d made along the way.
In that, I realized watching Gail, he wasn’t alone.
Gail had moved a double bed into what my mother had proudly titled the library, knowing that few other farmhouses in the state had an entire room that could be so called. My father had catered to this one presumption and had lined the walls of an erstwhile parlor with floor-to-ceiling shelves, which my mother had eventually filled with an eclectic, much-read collection-a passion for the two of us of an evening, my father being content to watch the fire and smoke a pipe, while Leo built models and read car magazines.
It was the heart of the house, as far as I was concerned, and I was grateful Gail had thought of it.
I did notice, however, as I slowly and laboriously undressed, that I was not to sleep here alone. A night table by the left side of the bed had a small collection of Gail’s things, and some of her clothes were neatly piled on a nearby chair. I could tell by the wrinkled pillow next to mine that she’d been using this room for some time.
I was pleased by that, but it made me wonder how to behave. Amid all the trauma that had befallen her, and the emotional, legal, and public uproar that had attended it-not to mention what my mishap had contributed-we’d never had a chance to get privately reacquainted. The prospect of sleeping with her, along with the sexual implications that carried, made me wary.
I climbed under the covers, naked, as was my custom, the bed’s embrace a mixed blessing. Gail moved about the dimly lit room, busying herself with her few belongings, avoiding looking at me, and finally broke the palpable tension in the air by grabbing her pajamas and leaving for the bathroom down the hall.
I lay on my back, my eyes on the ceiling, listening. The couch in the living room was long and wide enough to accommodate either one of us, should the need arise. There was even my old bedroom upstairs, which is where I’d thought she’d been bunking all along.