What Remains (24 page)

We go to Suffern for dinner in January to watch the Super Bowl at my parents’ house, and Carolyn insists she come along. “I can’t believe you’ve never invited me there,” she says, indignant. “I want to see where you grew up. I’m coming.”

Tonight, my brother Anthony is here with his wife. My sister Terri is here with her husband. My father makes a big pot of pasta, and we eat at the table, passing sodas around.

After dinner Carolyn looks through all of the wedding albums. “You look like Cary Grant!” she says to my brother. She has all of them tell her their stories. Jeff, my brother-in-law, just got his pilot’s license, and they talk about John’s plane. “I don’t know if I’ll want him to fly when we have kids,” she says.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Terri tells her.

My sister-in-law is pregnant, and Carolyn dishes up her plate, makes her a cup of hot chocolate. She adds a pillow under her feet, then scolds my brother for not doing all this himself.

Driving back to the city, she sits in back leaning over the front seat, her head between us. She makes me tell her stories. My crush on Paul Merrick across the street; the gay guys who lived down the block; Linda and I lip-synching to Captain and Tennille in the Suffern Junior High talent show.

“Oh, my God,” she says. “Is there videotape?”

Then we sing along with the radio, loudly, until we cross the bridge and Anthony begs us to stop.

A week later the hospital delivers the dialysis machine and sets it up in our home office. I buy a black-suede recliner at Bloomingdale’s, a comfortable, stylish-looking chair that gives not the slightest indication of
function
—the sort of chair we might have bought anyway. I bring in a television. The office is small, so we move out my desk to make room for the recliner, the machine, the television, and a chair for the dialysis nurses who come three times a week.

On Presidents’ Day weekend we fly to London. Anthony has the urge to revisit his childhood—the schools, the house on Buckingham Place where he grew up, the church his father built, and the country home in Henley. The house in Henley still has the wooden benches around the oak tree and the covered gypsy wagon on the lawn. He tells me it was a Christmas present from his mother to his sister and him when they were kids. He can’t believe it is still here.

It is a great comfort to him to find it all the same. We pull into the drive at Henley, and the caretaker rushes out. But then Anthony introduces himself, and he walks us around the grounds. He offers to show us inside, but Anthony says no. He is content just to see it the way he remembers. We go to the small church that his father built on the property of the Polish school. We go inside to the crypt where his father lies and say a prayer by his coffin. We drive to the Old Stoner Pub for lunch, and he tells me about the day his mother and sister were driving on the winding roads from the pub back to their house and had an accident, and he and his father were called panicked to the hospital. He remembers the damaged car, the spattered blood, hairs stuck in the wispy threads of a smashed windshield. The horrible feeling of driving to the hospital with his father, of not knowing.

Then we go to the house on Buckingham Place—a redbrick townhouse, in the shadow of Buckingham Palace. We walk down the road and stand across the street and talk about ringing the doorbell, but he decides against it. He goes to William and Mary’s hospital for dialysis the next day by himself, as he prefers, and I wander around the city. It is a bittersweet visit.

In March we go to the Oscars to root for
Swear to Tell the Truth,
a documentary on the life of Lenny Bruce. It is the last project Anthony produced for HBO, and it has been nominated for best documentary.

We stay at the Peninsula Hotel, and we watch the ceremony on a big television in the hotel room with our friend Mark, an editorial producer at
Primetime,
who books all the big interviews.

There is a picture of Lenny Bruce that HBO used for marketing the film. He is looking back over his shoulder, with his eyebrow cocked. His right hand carelessly dangles a cigarette, like a man who holds one longer than he smokes it. The left side of his mouth is tipped just slightly into a smile. It looks exactly like Anthony. It’s the eyebrow, I think. The reflex of a man who is on to everyone and everything—death, life, pain, taxes. He’s on to polite conversations, carefully chosen words, and finds it all a bit ridiculous. The smirk of a man who knows he gets it more than the person taking the picture. It’s not arrogant, this smirk, not mean or sneering, just the look of a man who has seen some things. He is handsome and suave in this picture, like Anthony. He’s confident, dapper, smart.

HBO wrapped the film when Anthony was still going to the office on a regular schedule. He is excited about the Academy Awards. The film doesn’t win the Oscar, but we go to the after party at Morton’s and squeeze into a banquette. They are parading Monica Lewinsky. She sits in the center of the room near Gwyneth Paltrow. Anthony is in a tuxedo that doesn’t quite fit; it’s big on him now. He wears his father’s cuff links, inscribed in antique gold. One with
Luck
and one with
Love
. We’re at the Oscar party. We will enjoy this. I can’t help myself, though, from briefly hating the other people in the room.

In Year Five we entertain. We bring out the good silver, the Baccarat crystal, and the Limoges china plates. It isn’t like us, and we get caught up in it, something different. It’s sort of fun.

Marta has started coming to cook a few nights a week. She has worked for John’s family for thirty years. We have no formal arrangement; nothing was ever said, but Anthony is sick, and food is more difficult for him. She has known Anthony, taken care of him, since he could crawl; it’s almost a reflex. She purees the vegetables; she steams the fish. She brings home fresh, fat strawberries from Marche Madison. And some nights when we know she’s coming, we invite friends.

We have my brother and his wife, some friends from work, but mostly John and Carolyn. John is making a point, I notice, of coming over more, or getting together. He calls more with plans. He is taking a stab, I think, at slowing this whole thing down.

John is given to musing in Year Five. “Who would have thought,” he asks Anthony in our apartment one night, “we’d both end up with these girls? Two girls from, what was the name of that store?”

“Caldor,” we remind him.

“Yeah, Caldor. Don’t you think it’s a little odd, Anthony?”

Anthony has no patience for this. For searching conversations, anything that eats up time.

“We were wearing yellow smocks while you water-skied off the
Christina
,” Carolyn says, and the three of us laugh. We compare their yacht, with the waterslide from the top deck into the Mediterranean, the jet boats at their disposal, to the stale air of the department store, the sticky heat when you walked out after a shift to the asphalt parking lot.

Anthony says little. He is losing patience, I think, with all of us. We are going through much different things.

On another night Anthony recaps the Oscar party for John and Carolyn. He describes it much differently than I remember. His anecdotes are off slightly. “Carole,” he says, teasing, “was starstruck.” He looks over at me, inviting me to join in. He describes a night I didn’t see. One in which we mingled and worked the room, watched Madonna dance. I sit quietly, not sure what to add. The truth is we barely spoke at the party and hardly moved from our table. It was loud, and Anthony was too weak to work through the crush of people. It’s disconcerting, his retelling. But then John breaks in and saves us with a story about the night he had dinner with Madonna, and she barked at him suddenly to eat, and he wolfed down his food, terrified. We all laugh, and I am grateful to be on to something else.

The next week Carolyn and John come with Hamilton. We are sitting down to dinner when John says, “Let’s have some wine.” We have a few bottles in a rack, and I pick one out and open it. Anthony’s reaction is instant and startling. “God, Carole! That’s an eighty-dollar bottle of wine! What the hell are you doing?” The anger comes, it seems, out of nowhere, but I have lived enough to know now that is never the case. It was red wine, and John had asked for red; my selection had been arbitrary. I set the wine on the table, and Anthony keeps his frown, sitting down quiet and angry, but John jumps right up. “Don’t yell at her! Leave her alone, you’re smothering her!”

It is quiet for a few long moments, and then Hamilton changes the subject. We dampen it with simple small talk, safe things about family and food—
Marta, the halibut is perfect. What has Tina been up to?
—until the food is eaten, the dishes cleared, and it is an acceptable time for them to leave. Emotions are spilling over. We’ve crossed a line that we’d all prefer not to have crossed.

Tragedy, when you look back on it, is not sudden so much as a series of small rumbles. Something had to happen; it was inevitable. The perpetual dying was taking its toll.

When Carolyn and I imagine the Townhouse this summer, sometimes it’s a house in Snedens Landing, with dogs and kids running in the backyard.
Carolyn’s
townhouse. We are both playing with a future that for now is on hold.

We are on the Vineyard. I am reading
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and wearing see-through dresses on afternoon trips alone into town. John’s business is failing. He is keeping up appearances publicly, and privately meeting with bankers. Carolyn smiles and says everything will be okay. It all screams of dramatic flair.

Anthony goes to see Dr. Wong at the Strang Clinic, and I spend nights boiling tree bark and dried mushroom stems. He chokes down the broth. John starts traveling more, flying around the world now at the whim of advertisers and investors. Selling his face and hers to keep his business going.

We spend Easter together at the Vineyard. Anthony, John, and Carolyn go to church, and we meet back at Mike and Diane’s house for an Easter egg hunt. Diane has hidden colored plastic eggs with gifts inside—press-on earrings, peel-off tattoos, fake eyelashes—and we run around the house, shrieking, to collect them. We have dinner and play parlor games until late in the evening. These moments of calm delude me.

A week later Carolyn calls from London. She sounds tired. She doesn’t want to be there, at a store opening for Ralph Lauren, a business trip for John. She does not want to be traveling, and neither does he, and the whole trip goes badly.

“What is Runnymede?” she asks me.

I know Runnymede because we have a leather-bound book about it given to us by Anthony’s aunt. Runnymede is the memorial garden for John’s father in England.

“He wants to go to Runnymede and I want to come home. I think he was mad because I didn’t know what Runnymede was.” History bumping up on us, like the rocker and the framed sheet music of the Marine Band’s “General Radziwill” march, which hangs on my living room wall.

Nothing slows when they return. There are more events: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the Profile in Courage Award at the Kennedy Library, the
George
magazine awards. I try to distract myself with work but sit in my office staring out the window.

In May we are back at the NIH for elective surgery to remove a rib. Of all of the operations, this is the most painful. It is not encouraged by Dr. Rosenberg.
Why would you,
he must be thinking,
so close to the end
? But the tumor is pressing against Anthony’s rib on the right side, and he can’t get comfortable sleeping or sitting down or standing up for very long because of it. He is in pain, but he won’t take painkillers. Unless he is in the hospital, on an IV drip, he takes nothing for pain. I keep it all anyway, fill all the prescriptions. I have dozens of bottles of Percocet, Vicodin, and Demerol. They are neatly grouped in our bathroom—sorted by drug, labels facing forward.

Two days after the operation, Anthony checks out of the NIH with a walker. The doctors would like for him to stay longer, but he won’t. “Stay in the area,” the on-duty nurse warns me. “Change the bandage every four hours or before if needed. Here is the number for after-hours care.” She hands me a card with the bag of bandages. “Call if he develops a temperature.”

It is sunny and quiet when we leave, the beginning of a three-day weekend. I give the nurse at the station the number to the Four Seasons in Georgetown. There is no question of staying at the Hyatt in Bethesda; it is too closely associated with his illness. He wants to believe, when we leave, that we are on holiday in Georgetown, not waiting to be officially discharged from the NIH.

I drive to the hotel, and we make our way up to the desk. Anthony is moving slowly with the walker. I can see he is trying not to grimace. We stand out in the glistening marble of the lobby.

“Room 1405,” the pretty desk clerk says. “It’s in building two. Go to the end of that hallway and you’ll see the elevators.” To the left of the desk, where she is pointing, there is a long, glass-domed hallway that connects to another building. “Enjoy your stay,” she says, smiling.

I ask if there is something in building one, but there isn’t.

It is endless, this hallway. It is heartbreaking. But Anthony will be horrified if I keep standing here. If I insist on a different room, if I say what I want to say.
Look at my husband, you fucking idiot! Do you think he can walk to building two?
He is watching me now, eyes narrowed.
Don’t make a scene, Carole.
The clerk hands me the room key tucked into a card. “This one is for the minibar.”

We take a few steps and stop. A few steps more, then stop. And this is how we wordlessly get to the elevators at the end of the hall. The porters passing by us stare. Hotel guests walking by us stare. If I fantasize about saving Carolyn’s life, I also dream of rescuing Anthony from this hallway. In a way in which I am funny and strong, and he does not feel embarrassed.

We have a nice room, a suite, and I turn on the television to cover the silence. It is nerve-racking in this room all alone. He feels warm, so I check his temperature. It reads normal, and I am sure it must be wrong. There is a risk of infection, they told us, so I keep checking. I try to space it out so he won’t think I’m worried. Bloody gauze bandages fill up the short, boxy trash containers.

“It’s still bleeding,” I tell the night nurse when I call at midnight.

“Are you changing the bandages?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Well, keep changing them and come back in if it gets worse.”

When she says,
Come back in,
all I can think of is the hallway. We will never make it twice in one day.

The night goes on like this. I wake up to change bandages. I am relieved the next morning when we check out and drive back to Bethesda for dialysis. They examine him quickly and sign his discharge papers.

Mike and Diane have sent a small plane to take us to the Vineyard. It is waiting for us at Dulles Airport. There are two steps to get on to it from the ground, and it might as well be a hundred—the Four Seasons hallway all over. It takes everything he has left to take a step, to walk, to climb up these two stairs.