Anatomy wasn’t altogether strange to them. In sex education, they had seen a coy diagram of a sperm shooting up toward his partner, the ovum; and they knew there were times he would fail to reach her — because of her monthly, maybe, or fate, maybe. “But fate may be against you,” the teacher warned. In the anatomy book they had seen artists’ renditions of various tumors, some like sacks of vermicelli, some like furry fungi. And when a popular football player injured his knee, the television anchor informed them — separately, for each was at home, though they conferred about it later — that the knee was one of the most complicated joints in the body. Certainly it seemed loaded with ligaments, menisci, tendons, and cartilage. The whole apparatus looked untrustworthy, Acelle told Joe.
“Interdependent,” he corrected.
Her father’s knee gave him a shitload of trouble. She’d wanted to borrow the book for a night and bring it home to Camilla, who could have looked at the various two-dimensional drawings and carved a knee in her own peculiar style. But Joe would never permit the book to leave the room. So one day Acelle herself tried to draw versions of the joint. Joe was muttering the names of the facial nerves, probably memorizing them. Zeph’s book was open on the bed, and they were kneeling before it. Joe kept repeating his sequence, and she kept drawing. Then he turned toward her. “Lacrimal, lingual, mandibular. Aren’t you through yet? Ophthalmic.”
“Yes,” she said. She would come back to the knee.
They turned a few pages, and found the circulatory system.
And there it was, just what she’d been waiting for: a lumpy device with chambers and ventricles and arteries and atriums — atria — looking nothing at all like a valentine. Yet in one of those ventricles love got born, and then leaped to somebody else’s ventricle, from one heart to another, that’s how it was, it happened in every story she’d read. It happened in palaces and cities and farms and in the neighborhoods. You could be a princess lying in a Castle bed, you could be stuck in a wheelchair, you could be a security guard, you could be a woman with hair like a boy’s. The anatomy book did not identify which chamber was the seat of love, but the anatomy book was shy, like Zeph, like Joe…
“It’s getting dark,” Joe said.
“I’d better go home.”
“Tiptoe,” he warned.
Catherine would receive her useless chemical infusions as an inpatient — fetching her with an ambulance every day, meanwhile trying to slow the failure of the other organs, was too impractical even for the nitpicking insurance company.
“So I’ll die here,” she said, “of one thing or another.”
It was their five o’clock visit — the only one of the day. This was her most alert half hour. By the end of the first week they knew everything about each other — her long deteriorating love affair; his compliant mother, who followed Old Walking Stick from commune to commune, Zeph in tow, until she died of exhaustion; his difficulty talking to anyone who wasn’t on the table; her disappointment with the trajectory of her life. He described special places in the Castle. There was a memorial tomb containing a Civil War soldier in the basement, so big you could sleep on it yourself — he sometimes had done so. The residents’ crash room, where anyone with a free quarter of an hour could lie undisturbed on the bed. (“I kept Treasure Island under the pillow,” he confided.) The hospital chapel, so plain and undenominational that, when empty of sobbing people, it seemed like the waiting area of a railroad station at two in the morning.
He always brought pastry from Victoria, who saved it for him. Catherine managed a bite; after a while Zeph ate the rest. One afternoon, after leaving Catherine, he went into the gift shop and bought the suffering doll. “Preeclampsia,” he diagnosed. Victoria quietly took down the Not for Sale sign and wrapped the thing. Zeph put it on a shelf in his room.
The time came when Catherine’s organs insisted on failing — kidneys, liver. “Without the chemo I might feel less sick,” she said.
“You might.”
“I think I’ll order it stopped.”
He didn’t reply.
“What would you do if you were me?”
“If I were you? If I were you I’d marry me.”
IV poles were their best men. Zeph had invited Joe and Joe had invited Acelle. The justice of the peace ignored the ages of these witnesses — they could write their names, couldn’t they. Through the three narrow archers’ windows a pale sun illuminated Catherine’s pale face. The groom had remembered to supply the bride with flowers, and he had bought rings for both of them. His “I do” was firm, surprising everyone but Catherine. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Her breath was bitter.
He had signed up for vacation beginning that day, and as a family member he was permitted to sleep on a folding cot beside her bed. The walking stick stood aslant in the corner. It did conceal a sword, as Zeph knew. One night Zeph drew the sword from its sheath and swished at the air, back, forth. Catherine laughed a little. He reinserted it.
From the cot he held her hand as both pretended to sleep.
She died a week later of renal failure — more or less peacefully, as such things go.
Camilla didn’t become the rage, but she acquired a small reputation in the city, and she banished the crook who called himself a dealer. Victoria persuaded her to entrust her work to a small respectable agency with a good publicist. Camilla agreed, on the condition that her own photograph never appear and her disability not be mentioned. Pride, Victoria expected, could be overcome as time went on. Money came in. The Bahande flat was gradually improved until it looked like a home.
“But what about your ten percent?” Hector argued one day after dinner.
He and Victoria were now sitting on the porch, Hector’s painful knee elevated on a wicker stool. Victoria had cooked the meal for everyone in the Bahande kitchen — fish, a salad, fruit, walnut bread. Joe had spent the rest of the evening reading Richard Dawkins; Acelle, working on her knitting: a scarf for someone. Zeph watched Camilla carve a cat’s head for his walking stick; one feline eye had a congenital droop. Only Camilla knew that Zeph was planning to give the stick to her father. When Joe said he was going home, Zeph had interrupted his silent concentration to keep the boy company on the walk. The girls had gone to bed.
“Your ten percent,” Hector said again.
“I’m aging, not an agent. I’m glad someone else is doing that hard work. I’m suited to a gift shop.”
“You have been a gift to us,” he said softly.
How handsome he looked in his new shirt — though no more handsome than in the security officer’s uniform he put on every day.
“As for old — you are not much older than me,” he said, leaning forward but not yet touching her.
“I’m sixty.”
He nodded without surprise. “I’m forty-five, and my bad joints make me fifty. Come live with us.”
She considered this suggestion. Her sisters would never speak to her again — that would be a blessing. She was an experienced caretaker. The family’s nutrition would improve. She could keep an eye on the romances developing in the neighborhood.
“Together we can walk to the Castle,” she said. And he took that as the acceptance it was.
Stone
She had come south from New York City to live with a small family in a stone house in a flat town. There was lots of wildlife too. She wasn’t much of a naturalist, or someone who craved companionship, or a gifted cook. She must, then, be something of a fool.
The flat town was surrounded by low mountains and contained a small college and a river and a single movie house. The family was a decorous threesome. And she, Ingrid? A woman of a certain age, twice widowed, made rich by the second spouse. Member of several boards; at home, always a telephone call away from any one of her interesting friends if she wanted a brief spurt of company; possessed of a little den lined with books when she wanted to be alone. Admired for the arresting angularity of her face; and for her height (she was very tall and her extra-long neck added a few inches); and for the melancholy curve of her smile; and for her golden eyes, halved by bifocals, turning their gaze nowadays toward distant hills, though their usual view was the row of brownstones across the street from her Upper West Side apartment. She lived on Sixty-Third Street.