A Gesture Life Read online

  But before she could answer, her husband brusquely put down the phone. “He’s not having a good morning,” he said to her, interrupting us as though he had been in our conversation all along. He was looking straight at his wife. “The new doctor is going to see him at one-thirty. I better get up there now.” He regarded me for a long, awkward moment. Then he said, “What do you want here, old man?”

  “James!”

  “Hold on, Annie. I’d just like to know what he wants from us. It can’t be an accident that he’s come today. Your buddy Mr. Finch at the bank didn’t ask you to drop by, did he?”

  It was a strange notion, and I had no reply.

  “Well, you can tell him anyway he’ll have the whole place soon. Lock, stock and barrel. We wish we could sell it, but do you know what the place is worth? I bet you have an idea.”

  “I can’t say, Mr. Hickey.”

  “Sure you can’t. You only say nice things, I guess. Should I tell you? About two-thirds what you sold it to us for. I’d have to find another hundred grand to clear the mortgage, after selling it. So it looks like foreclosure instead.”

  “He’s not in the least at fault, James,” Mrs. Hickey scolded. “So just please shut up now.”

  “This isn’t blame, dear. I’m not blaming anybody,” Mr. Hickey replied. He was regarding me with much umbrage. “This is just information. Mr. Hata appreciates knowing what’s happening in his town. We don’t need a mayor because we have Mr. Hata. I’m sorry—Doc Hata. I never understood why you’re called that when it’s obvious you’re not a doctor.”

  “I don’t refer to myself as one.”

  “That you don’t. That’s true. But you seem to like the title. And I think it fits you, too.”

  Mrs. Hickey said, “Sometimes I despise you, James.”

  “Sometimes I despise me,” her husband replied, suddenly looking hurt. He stared down at his feet. Then he tried to embrace her, but she turned away. “Oh, hell with it,” he said, snatching his windbreaker from the rack on the wall. “Hell all.” He marched out, leaving the door wide open.

  Mrs. Hickey gathered herself and shut the door behind him. She was quite angry, though it was clear she was also deeply embarrassed and sorry for me. I told her she shouldn’t worry about my feelings being hurt, for it was obvious her husband was under a terrible strain. Mrs. Hickey thanked me for my kindness, and though I assented, I didn’t truly feel that it was kindness, on my part. Not really at all. It was an understanding, if anything. For I should say that I know from experience that the bearing of those in extreme circumstances can sometimes be untoward and even shocking, and we must try our best to understand what is actual and essential to a person, and what is by any indication anomalous, a momentary lapse that is better forgotten than considered time and time again, to little avail.

  Mrs. Hickey asked if I might stay and talk a little while, and I was glad to. She told me more about her son. It was true what I’d heard, that his heart was congenitally diseased, and he was now in urgent need of a transplant. He was on the national registry, of course, and because of his age and condition almost at the top of the list, but the dysfunction had accelerated, and the doctors now told them that he was in real danger, that it was coming down to a matter of months, if a suitable donor wasn’t located. This besides the fact that after two and a half years, they were almost out of insurance.

  I had also visited on the day they were to inform the bank what their decision was about refinancing their mortgage, which was six months in arrears. Business wasn’t booming, given that the local economy was in recession (which seemed to befall the area, unfortunately for the Hickeys, a short time after they bought my store), and that Sunny Medical Supply now had to compete with a franchise of a large regional supplier, which had opened in the neighboring town of Highbridge.

  And yet with all this negativeness, Mrs. Hickey was still cheerful, joking and kidding and trying to put the best face on things, telling me how she took strength from Patrick, who never once complained about sleeping at the hospital, or eating the food. I had never actually met the boy, though I thought I could see him easily in his mother, whose sanguinity and resolve I admired without bound. I pictured him with her fair coloring and giddy spray of freckles, and the same sea-blue eyes, and then, too, possessed of the odd calm that very young children can sometimes have, even when they understand that dark fates may be near.

  Eventually some customers came in, and I urged Mrs. Hickey to attend to them, while I should be getting on home. But before I could leave the store she had come over to see me out.

  “Would you like to come see him sometime?” she asked me. “We take shifts, so you wouldn’t have to worry about James, if you came when I was there. I could call you from the room.”

  “I’d be very happy to meet him,” I said. “Anytime you wish to call me.”

  Mrs. Hickey seemed pleased, and she stepped outside. It was a social custom, strangely enough, that she’d picked up from watching me years before, the polite duty of a host or proprietor in bidding a respectful goodbye. It brought a warm feeling to my chest to have her come out accompanying me. But the customers were still inside, and I asked her please to go back and attend to them. I very nearly bowed, as if that might convince her, but then she did go in, and I’d already turned down the street when she called out to me once more.

  “I just remembered,” she said, her face brightening as she approached me. She was holding a dusty box, the kind photographic paper comes in. “I was cleaning out the storeroom last week, and I found this in an old briefcase. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but look inside. There are all kinds of neat pictures in there.”

  I could hardly remember leaving anything personal behind in the store.

  “I noticed there’s a young woman in many of them,” Mrs. Hickey said. “She’s very pretty. She’s in quite a few, with you. Is she a relative?”

  “Yes,” I heard myself reply, accepting the box from her. “You must be talking about Sunny.”

  “Sunny? Did you name the store after her?”

  I said, “I suppose I did.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She came from Japan,” I said, “many years ago, and stayed for some schooling. She went back.”

  “Well, she’s certainly lovely. She must be a grown woman now.”

  “Yes,” I said, taking my leave. “I haven’t seen her in quite a long time. But thank you.”

  “Will you call about our walk?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Patrick, too?”

  “Yes.”

  Before she could say any more I quickly made my way down Church Street, following it to the traffic square where it meets River and then Mountview, which is the street I live on. As I climbed the gentle rise of the old road, I wished that I hadn’t spoken inaccurately about Sunny to Mrs. Hickey, but the moment, like so many others, passed too swiftly, as I didn’t feel I could explain things without further complication and embarrassment. I went the half-mile to the road’s crest, where the house I bought nearly thirty years ago stands amid a copse of mature elm and oak and maple. Inside, the house was warm and lighted. As usual I’d left the lamps on in the hall and kitchen, and I turned them off before going upstairs. I often prepared myself an early dinner of soup noodles or a casserole of oden with rice, but I decided to go straight up to my bedroom and read. It wasn’t until the middle of the evening that I stopped, when it occurred to me that I should at least have a snack, so that I wouldn’t toss in my sleep or wake up famished. I put on my robe and went out to the stairs, but instead of descending, I wandered down the hallway, to the far door, to the room where Sunny once lived.

  For some moments I stood before the door. When I finally opened it, I was surprised by the sudden chill; the heating ducts had long been shut, and an icy curl of air lapped past my bare feet. I remembered, then, how it had taken longer than I expected to clear the room completely: it was crammed full of her furnishings, every sort of bric-a-brac and
notion and wall hanging. She had left the house in a hurry. In the following weeks I worked on the room in my spare time, in the evenings and on the weekends. I remember patching and repainting the ceiling and walls, making sure to fix all the mars in the plaster. There were larger pocks, into which I found it easy enough to spade the filler. But it was the smaller ones, particularly the tack holes, which seemed to number in the hundreds, that took the greatest part of my time. In the end, I found myself doing the work in half-foot squares, pressing in the paste with the tip of a finger, smoothing it out, and it wasn’t until much later, as I’d drift into the room to inspect for missed holes, running my hand over the surfaces, that the whole project was quite satisfactorily done.

  2

  MY HOUSE ISN’T THE GRANDEST in our town, but it’s generally known that of the homes on Mountview, one of the original streets in Bedley Run, the two-story Tudor revival at number 57 is one of the special properties in the area. It seems it’s every other week now that I receive a card or note from a realtor, asking if I might consider putting it up for sale. The local ones, of course, know my situation, and as I’m retired and live alone in this large house, with its impressive flower and herb garden, and flagstone swimming pool, and leaded glass and wrought-iron conservatory, they are right to hope that I might do as Mrs. Hickey had thought I’d done, and move to one of those new developments in a welcomingly warm place like Boca Raton or Scottsdale.

  “Now come on, Doc,” Liv Crawford of Town Realty said to me on the phone very early this morning, “that immensely beautiful house of yours is also very high-maintenance. You don’t want to be worrying about clogged gutters and foundation cracks anymore, do you?”

  “I don’t mind so much, actually,” I told her.

  “But how are you going to feel twenty years from now?”

  I reminded her that I would be in my nineties by then.

  “All the more so,” she answered brightly. I thanked her for her very optimistic wishes for my health, and said I would let her know when I was ready.

  “You never know until you are, Doc. But sometimes it’s too late.”

  “Goodness, Liv.”

  “Just saying, Doc. Listen, I’m about to meet some buyers, and I think they’d just love your house to death. They’re young and high-powered, and they’re very desperate to find a place on a Mountview-type street. They’re already talking an overbid, for the right kind of place, which yours is in spades.”

  “But it’s not for sale, there’s no price—”

  “I know that, Doc. I’m just doing a drive-by with them, the whole neighborhood, but when I slow down in front of your place, can I at least tell them you’re considering?”

  “I don’t think this is the best time for me, Liv….”

  “Fine, Doc, thanks. Gotta go.”

  Then click, she’s gone. But really, in fact I don’t mind her opportunism, her wishful pluck, the way her voice positively rings with the joyous vibrancy of commerce (a note I sorely miss). In fact I’ve had several market appraisals done in recent years, with the consensus being that my house hasn’t fallen in price (as everything else in the county has, especially commercial properties like my former store), but has even appreciated somewhat; it seems that older, “vintage” homes in as pristine condition as mine rarely become available, and when they do there’s not even time enough to stick the sign on the front lawn before they’re sold.

  If I were to leave this place, where would I go? Mr. Stark, who seven years ago bought Murasan’s Smoke and Pipe, recently asked why I didn’t think about going back and living out the rest of my days in Japan. I stop in at his shop some afternoons, near the end of my day.

  “Imagine,” he said to me, almost musically, waving his Churchill-length cigar, “spending one’s days by a serene lake somewhere near Kyoto, wearing silken white robes and sipping rare sake served by knowing maidens. I can see you there, Doc. Like a dream I can see you.”

  Mr. Harris, a retired insurer who seems to pass most of his waking hours in Murasan’s, added, “I’m drawn to the old country myself, Doc, though mine, of course, is Wales. Every year I wonder whether I should sell out and pilgrim there, to claim my ancestral seat.” He took a lengthy, pensive drag from his pipe. “But then, of course, I realize my Muriel already has it.”

  “And in a sling,” Mr. Stark added. They both cackled like old women, blowing smoke every which way.

  I appreciated their interest, and what I took as their friendly concern, and I bore the notion with me for some days. Sometimes I still think of Japan, though much less in recent times than in my first years in Bedley Run, when it seemed it was every day I wondered how long I could last, and which morning I’d rise and know I’d have to return, though of course to what I couldn’t know.

  The other question in any retirement is, what would I do? These are things Liv Crawford cannot address deeply. But even if she can find me, as she says, a “prime zero-care condo with a 180˚ view of the ocean,” her job stops there, for while I might have a decent place to live, I’d have to figure out for myself how to live there, and why. And the retirement lifestyle doesn’t immediately draw me. I don’t fish, for example, and I don’t play bridge. I’m not a collector of figurines, or exotic birds, or antique toys. I’m not a connoisseur of drink. I don’t really dance, and the related idea of companionship for someone like me seems at once complicated and vague. There are lectures at the junior college, and reading in bed, but most of what I come across seems to suggest that older folks like me might be better off just falling asleep forever.

  What’s left, perhaps, is golf, but I’ve played the game no more than a dozen times in my life, and then it was always with the same group of medical-supply wholesalers, who for several years in a row invited me on a spring junket to Myrtle Beach. I do remember there being a certain relaxation to those trips. We’d wake up late and stay on the course until dusk, and then eat a heavy dinner at a raucous lounge or striptease club where the others would drink like madmen until the early hours, when I’d have to drive us back to the hotel. And as much as I understood that they probably liked me well enough and found my company (and convenient stewardship of them) pleasing, what I looked forward to each year with genuine fondness was being with fellow businessmen, and passing those easy, jocular hours of camaraderie by the pool or greenside or in a smoky bar, when we spoke of nothing profound or consequential but still seemed to make the time somehow worthwhile.

  I sometimes miss those trips, and others I took regularly when I was younger and more actively involved in the more social aspects of the business, the three-day Bahama conference cruises and the large, frenetic conventions in unusual cities like New Orleans and Minneapolis. All those many boisterous, various folks. I didn’t crave their company as much as the opportunity to watch them in their enjoyment and reverie. But I suppose I also took easy comfort then in joking and laughing with pretty much anybody, and people seemed to respond with a surprising warmth, and I was often invited to late-night suite parties and next-day city tours with this group or that.

  Once, I even met a Japanese gentleman from the San Francisco Bay area, who owned a store that sounded much like mine, and had opened in the very same year. He was American-born, his grandparents among those who had long ago settled in Hawaii and then California. I think we both brightened on sighting each other. And yet there was an unexpected awkwardness. You would think we would have plenty to discuss, being of like race and age and occupation, but our conversation was oddly halting and strained. There was a very difficult moment, on being introduced to each other, when it was unclear whether we would shake hands or bow. Neither of us wished to offend the other, and being peers, it was especially difficult for one man to assume a posture of natural authority, or acquiescence. Perhaps had we been alone, and not standing in front of the other conventioneers, we might have bowed or shaken hands or done both without a flinch, and gone on to be friends. But as it happened, we exchanged only the mildest pleasantries, and I s
ensed that he was immediately unsettled by my accent (which was much stronger twenty years ago than it is now), for he seemed to speak with increasing softness, as if to diminish his perfect American-sounding voice. I first wondered if he felt he wasn’t Japanese enough for me, or whether I thought myself not American enough for him. But later on, after returning home, I thought perhaps it was that we felt different from everyone by virtue of being together (these two Japanese in a convention crowd), and that it was this fact that made us realize, for a moment, our sudden and unmistakable sense of not fitting in.

  I remember all this now because it seems to me the truer feeling of the time was somehow that uncomfortable one, rather than the collegial atmosphere of the convention or of my golfing trips, and it makes me now consider my many good years here in Bedley Run in a slightly different light. For what I didn’t let Liv Crawford know this morning is that I’m probably nearer to actually selling my house than I’ve ever been before. I know I told Mrs. Hickey otherwise in the store last week, but more and more the time feels right to me, not so much from a financial viewpoint but from a sense of one’s time in a place, and that time being close to done. It’s not that I feel I’ve used up this house, this town, this part of the world, that I’ve gotten all I’m going to get, but more that this feeling I’ve come to expect, this happy blend of familiarity and homeyness and what must be belonging, is strangely beginning to disturb me.

  What used to concern me greatly about leaving was the awkward impression you can sometimes have, say when you find yourself on an everyday street, or in a store, or in what would otherwise be a shimmering, verdant park, and you think not about the surroundings but about yourself, and how people will stop and think (most times, unnoticeably) about who you may be, how you fit into the picture, what this may say, and so on and so forth. I’ve never really liked this kind of thinking, either theirs or mine, and have always wished to be in a situation like the one I have steadily fashioned for myself in this town, where, if I don’t have many intimates or close friends, I’m at least a quantity known, somebody long ago counted. Most everyone in Bedley Run knows me, though at the same time I’ve actually come to develop an unexpected condition of transparence here, a walking case of others’ certitude, that to spy me on my way down Church Street is merely noting the expression of a natural law. Doc Hata, they can say with surety, he comes around.