At Le Paquis, he was waiting on the patio. She pressed herself against him, kissing the spot where her mouth fell against his neck. A warm wind stirred the meadow, beginning to green at the edge.
“It feels like a Santa Ana,” she said.
“The foehn. You brought it with you.”
She closed her eyes against it. “At home they said the Santa Anas drove people insane. I remember one winter our cook slit her mother’s throat then killed herself.” She turned to Tim. “She had the most beautiful long-handled French knife.”
Tim burst out laughing. He reached for her, his fingers playing at her neck, and she folded herself once again into the tight wrap of his arms, the rising, licking need to get inside. He pulled her down against him on the chaise, her hands already inside his clothes; the newspaper he had been reading fell away in leaves.
“I’m starving,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
Something stirred in him to hear this, starving. Why would she neglect to feed herself? He put his hand on her knee and guided her back in the chaise as though she were a lithe craft under his sail.
* * *
Spring was coming. They started seeds in the perfect cups of eggshells and lined their sunny windowsills. They drove to the casino at Chillon for a dinner dance, for blackjack, took the funicular and hiked the mountain ridge. They strolled the market in Vevey, these last moments of leisure stretching out on the cusp of the season to come.
They listened to the news when Hitler walked into Vienna, the ringing of church bells, the cheers and singing, to the royal suite at the Hotel Imperial and the throngs in the plaza, their palms raised to greet him. Men climbed trees to see him on the balcony, people raised their children overhead. Mary Frances clicked off the radio. It was all so close. Tim stared out the window, his cigarette burning to his fingers.
Late that night, his arms wrapped around her: “What if we have to go?” he said
“Go where?”
“That’s my point. What if we can’t stay here anymore?”
Mary Frances pushed herself up to look him in the face. He loved to see the edges of her suntan; he traced them with his fingertip.
“Poland, Austria. France has left the doors open. What’s left but here?”
“But there’s nothing here to want.”
“There are the banks.”
“Are you serious?”
Tim let his hand drop. He looked at her a long time.
“I won’t stay here through another war, darling. Not again, and not with you. I couldn’t.”
They would wait and see. There was time, and outside their window, the garden was coming all to life again. Soon the radishes and peas. Soon the tomatoes, the peppers, the corn, the berries and apples, the plums. The grapes, their skins hollowed out by bees; she stepped close in the vines to hear them rattle in the husks. Soon Norah and David were coming, the chance to show all this again to people she loved, to show herself, finally, for the first time, happy. Herself. There was too much here to leave behind.
They would, of course. It was only a matter of time.
* * *
But before they left, the children would come to visit from California, one last great Kennedy gathering, and they would tour the Swiss countryside, they would have a grand night in Berne.
When she thought back on the evening, she swore she could tell the moment it happened, the moment their lives changed forever. The table was loud. They were all drunk, the wine light and full in everyone’s glass, dinner long ago eaten, and some other kind of hungers rising. There was a band swinging, clarinets and brass. Norah danced a tight little circle on the seat of her chair, and the boys at the next table looked up at her with wonder on their faces; Mary Frances had been thinking about the wonder of boys, about David across the table, laughing for the first time since his horrible girlfriend slunk off to Austria and god knows whatever might happen to her there, and she turned to Tim, his hip pressed against hers in the banquette, and she was about to tell him what all she would do just to see such wonder on his face, but something else beat her to the punch.
She saw everything in him shudder to a stop, and start again.
The sound he made was awful. The band stopped playing. The solid parts of Tim sheared away, in exchange for pain that seemed to dim the lights in the room. He wouldn’t let her touch his leg. Someone called an ambulance; she heard it roaring toward them in the dark.
In the Viktoria Hospital, a surgeon opened a vein in Tim’s thigh and removed an embolism the size of her thumb, then went back the next morning and removed another. Somehow, and at tremendous cost, his blood kept making more.
The surgeon’s name was Dr. Nigst: he was square and Swiss. He explained what they had found, explained the process of the surgery, and then explained it again another way. Mary Frances was quiet, looking at Tim’s leg. A blood clot. A blockage. The wound seeped through its white bandage.
“Why?” Mary Frances said. “What is it?”
“I can’t tell you these things, Madame. I can only tell you what I’ve done.”
“But why again? And why his leg?”
“I do not know.”
She was grateful somehow, for this small honesty. “Then when will it be over?” she said.
Dr. Nigst lifted his heavy shoulders and explained the surgery again. They didn’t know what was wrong with him, what was making this happen, only that if one of those clots stopped the blood to his leg, he would lose his leg. To his heart, a cardiac arrest. To his brain, he’d have a stroke. It was the worst story Mary Frances had ever heard. In her head, she began to write another.
* * *
In the morning, Tim’s foot was blue, then white. He thrashed and moaned but never seemed to rise above the morphine; he sweated through his sheets. The children came and went. David brought newspapers. Norah brought her notebook, some chocolates and clean clothes, but Mary Frances’s silk party dress was like a wilted corsage; to take it off would be to give up in some way. She left the clothes folded in their bag.
David asked Dr. Nigst if he thought there would be another war.
Again, his shoulders rose and fell. “They say it is a pact in Munich, but yes. Yes, it feels like war again to me.”
“Yes,” David said, as though he could feel it, too.
“But who knows?” Dr. Nigst said. “Who knows.”
Rex and Edith knew. A cable came from California; the children’s passage home had been arranged. Norah’s German lessons, the accordion she hoped to learn to play, David’s last pining thoughts of his horrible girlfriend, they would have to leave it all behind.
“But Dote,” Norah said, “we can’t leave you alone with this. We can’t.”
Mary Frances looked at Tim, still and white under the wash of drugs.
“It’s already done,” she said.
Norah wept. David stood tall between the women, his hands clasped behind him, and Mary Frances could imagine him in the uniform he’d worn in school, perhaps another uniform, if things took the turn they seemed to be taking. Before all this, she would have cried with Norah, she would have begged David not to do anything rash. She would have gathered their thoughts into a neat package to take with them, all sorted and saved for later. Now it was all she could do to get them to their train.
* * *
In the morphine, Tim lay perfectly still. He sighed and hummed and slept, he ground his teeth until his jaw clicked against itself, but he did not move. When the morphine wore off, he prayed. He wept. He writhed as though someone had set the sheets on fire. When she touched his hand, he yelped as if she had struck him, and she had to learn not to touch him anymore. It was a whole new kind of horrible conversation they could not stop having.
She hovered near the bed, waiting. They could not tell her why he was still in pain. Sometimes she held his water glass while he slept, waiting until the same thing started up again.