A Gesture Life Read online

  And so on a typical day of full appointments with the sick and injured and scared, who should walk in but an adolescent girl, unescorted, safeguarding with one hand an immense belly in that tender, cupping way, asking if she might see me immediately. My beleaguered but generous-spirited receptionist would try to explain the tight schedule, indicating the overflowing waiting room, but I’d come out in my white coat and her sallow face would brighten, the simple sight of me enough to lend some calm and relief. But just then the girl would shudder, momentarily swoon, and tip like a felled tree into the arms of the nurse, saying weakly that her water had long ago broken. We rushed her into the back room and laid her down, and when I lifted her long skirt the baby was already showing itself, not by its crown but with a tiny, perfect foot, unwrinkled and pink. I was alarmed but not nervous, as I was a doctor of long experience, having turned many a breech fetus and safely delivered a near-equal number. And yet this time I felt myself faltering, the little body inside somehow unfathomable to me, unreadable, my hands stricken with a sudden numbing weakness. I thought then to attempt a breech delivery, but here, too, I seemed to forget the delicate procedures. I still couldn’t sense the baby’s contours, the hip, the shoulder, the orientation of the head, and when my nurse warned that the foot was turning color, grayish blue, a hard tick of panic set off in my chest. The girl was writhing in pain, unable to listen to me and pushing too much, pushing when she shouldn’t have been, and as the precious minutes passed, the foot grew grayer and bluer and I knew I would have to open her up and lift the baby out. The girl was now delirious with pain. The nurse placed in my hand a shiny blade, and I realized then that it was a travesty and I was not a surgeon, that I had never cut into living flesh. That I was a fraud and a coward and should not have coveted and accepted as I had done the confidence of people, their singular regard and trust.

  At that point my conjuring would cease, and I would close up the store, go home as I did every evening, to a long swim and dinner in a bowl and a pot or two of tea. Of course it doesn’t require a psychologist or guru to figure the significance of my fantasy, and I don’t recount it here to suggest anything but the most simple truth. I felt guilt about Sunny, no doubt. But I know I was also truly concerned for her, and taken hold of by the worry a real parent must have, the kind that reaches far down into the gut, that wakes you from sleep and constantly breaks your thoughts and keeps you from sitting still. As much as I had hoped to, I never quite felt that way when Sunny was living with me, not when she fell down once and chipped several permanent teeth, not when she went off to sleep-away camp for the first time, not even when I let her drive alone to the city in my newly delivered Mercedes-Benz coupe. I was uneasy at those times, quite thoroughly concerned, but never gravely ill-feeling, never infected to the marrow as I assumed a real father would or should be, lying there in bed inconsolably perturbed, unable to think, to read, even to drink calmly from a glass. And though I never thought I would desire such a set of sensations for myself, in the days and weeks after she was gone from my house, in those cycles that seemed to pass like fast-turning epochs, as if I were some inconsequential rock hurtling past the warm blue sphere of human time and history, yet unseen and unknown, I finally wished I might remain in the sickness I was developing when I was sure Sunny was about to be a mother. It was not pleasant at all but somehow distinctly worthy and inhabitable, a nightly pool of deep worry and remorse and unexpected comfort that I could wade into and do my long-distance crawl, for once not forgetting who I was, for once not blacking myself out.

  And yet, eventually, this feeling passed as well. Routine triumphs over everything, as it always does with men like me, and I returned to the living of Bedley Run and its vested, untouchable ways. In truth I was beginning to understand my position after so many years, my popularity and high reputation, one that someone like Liv Crawford would say was “triple mint,” or “among the finest in town.” Because that in fact is what it was, and has been, and no doubt will be until I die. It was during Sunny’s absence that I finally awoke to this notion, that I was perfectly suited to my town, that I had steadily become, oddly and unofficially, its primary citizen, the living, breathing expression of what people here wanted—privacy and decorum and the quietude of hard-earned privilege. And so much so that my well-known troubles with Sunny were not a strike against me or a sign of personal failure but a kind of rallying point, silently demonstrated by somebody’s solemn, shut-eye nod at the lakeside gazebo on the Fourth of July, or a lingering handshake out front on Church Street, or a light, friendly honk from a passing car I knew.

  So why am I not fine now? I ought to be, for I’m unexpectedly driving over to pick up Thomas and bring him to the Bedley Run pool club, as the one in Ebbington has been derelict for several summers now, fenced shut and emptied of water. Sunny has relented on never letting him step back into my town, his eyes begging for a day in the water. The Bedley pool is actually a small man-made lake, chlorinated and filtered, and I’ve told Thomas I’ll teach him how to swim, a lesson a week until the season ends, and then indoors at the racquet club if he wishes to continue. I believe he likes me. He calls me Franklin now, and not Mr. Hata, after he asked what my full name was. I don’t mind at all. “Franklin,” he says, as though we have been associates for many years, “I think we ought to stop for a snack now.” He seems satisfied that I am a “family friend,” not questioning me any further.

  One day after that first shopping trip, I took him down to the city, to the natural history museum, where we toured the longtime exhibits, and then a new one on the development of mammalian sea life, in particular the evolution of dolphins and whales. All he could talk about after I read the accompanying plaques to him was how he would like to be a fish but breathe air, so that he would be jumping out of the water all day and all night. He was focused on the joys of leaping, of course, but I was thinking of the endless necessity of having to leave one’s element for another and so depend on the resource of another realm, that no matter how automatic and natural it was or became there should always be the pressure of survival, this pointed, mortal condition of being.

  I didn’t speak of this to Thomas, for obvious reasons. I didn’t tell him, either, of my other notions of the pastime, that in fact some of us longtime swimmers often wish for ourselves that submerged, majestic flight, feel the near-desire to open one’s mouth and relax and let the waters rush in deep, hoping that something magical might happen. Once, I will admit, during the very time I was thinking often of Sunny and her pregnancy, I attempted this, or let it occur, just a tiny inhalation, just a little taking in, and though my mind was clear and placid, every cell in my body at once objected, my limbs practically jetting me out of the water and onto the slate surround of the pool, where I lay on my side coughing violently. Did I wish to do away with myself? Did I truly wish to die? Or was I hoping for a transmogrification, complete and however strange, a wholly different heart and shell and mien that would deliver me over to a brand-new life, fresh and hopeful and unfettered?

  And here, perhaps, it is. I turn up the steep drive to The Conifers, a rental condominium in what might be described as the “better” section of Ebbington, a string of modern attached units set in a sparse stand of evergreens, each with a carport in front and a private balcony in back, overlooking the humble town below. There is a guardhouse halfway up, though it’s locked shut and unmanned, and the only thing preventing me from going through unchecked is an old speed bump worn down to a nub. This is the sort of place that in Bedley Run would have a clubhouse for the tenants with a large-screen television, a wet bar, an exercise room and sauna, perhaps even a pool and hot tub and tennis courts, where Liv Crawford or Renny Banerjee might privately and conveniently reside until they settled down and began a family. But here at The Conifers you see tricycles and candy wrappers strewn outside; you see perennials and shrubs aplenty but all badly in need of sprucing and pruning; you see the domestic cars and economy imports; you see the subtle and varied indic
ations of both decency and decline. By living here it’s clear these folk are aspiring to a more privileged life, though perhaps it’s true that most will never see better than the West Hill of Ebbington, which by all rights should be as good as any place in what really matters, just as righteous, just as valued, but isn’t all the same.

  When the door opens it’s Sunny, dressed in a smart-looking dark business suit and white blouse, fastening a string of pearls about her throat. The reason I have the chance to take Thomas swimming is that she has an interview in Stamford and two hours earlier was called by her sitter, who canceled for the afternoon. But I’m late when I needn’t have been, and I apologize.

  “I do appreciate this,” she says tightly to me, not having to add that I am indeed her last resort. “I had to send him to the neighbors so I could get dressed in peace. He’s absolutely crazy that he’s going swimming. I’ll call over there now.”

  While she rings for him I sit on the sofa in the living room, where she also has a comfortable armchair, and cocktail table, and mini-stereo on the mantel of the gas fireplace. There’s a small dining area next to the open kitchen with a pine table and four chairs, and then two bedrooms down the short hall in the back, the whole place perhaps just a bit larger than the family room of my house. But she’s painted the walls a creamy, warm peach and the trim a glossy white. There’s a nice rug here and under the dining table, and the kitchen is papered with Thomas’s handiwork, the career of his finger paintings and scrawls. A soft, sweet smell of lavender lingers from the bowls of dried flowers, and all throughout there is a sparkle to the surfaces, a steady gleam that goes straight to this old man’s heart, even as he knows it’s not in the least for him.

  “He’s having lunch over there, so he’ll be a few minutes. Do you want something to drink?” Sunny says to me, poking her head around the kitchen opening. “I have soda and tea. You probably would like tea.”

  “If there is time.”

  “There really isn’t,” she answers, but I hear her running the water in the kettle anyway. She calls, “I don’t have green tea. Just black, and herbal.”

  “I will have the herbal, thank you.”

  “I thought you never had anything but green,” she says, bringing out a saucer with three butter cookies. I want to say thank you but don’t because I’m afraid of being ardent and scaring her off. But this is her place and she seems only slightly disturbed by my presence, the way she might be if a small, tame bird had somehow flown in.

  “May I ask what you’re interviewing for?” I say, taking a cookie. “Is it in retail again?”

  “It is,” she answers, sitting forward on the armchair. “It’s to be a manager. It’s a chain store for younger girls, teens and preteens. It’s not exactly what I know, but I guess selling clothes is selling clothes.”

  “You’ll have to move out to Connecticut?”

  “No, they’re just interviewing there. The chain is actually out in the west, in California and Arizona and Texas. They’re expanding, and they need experienced managers, which I guess they don’t have enough of out there. I haven’t said anything to Thomas, nothing at all, so I’ll ask you not to mention it.”

  “I promise to be quiet about it.”

  “I’m sure you will,” she says, her old Sunny-soundingness almost sneaking back into her voice. But she catches herself, or I think she does, and she reaches over and takes a cookie, biting just the edge of it, a tiny nibble. It’s a nothing act but I’m taken back instantly, many years, when I would offer her those popular vanilla wafers and she would refuse, not because she didn’t want them but for fear I would think her greedy and selfish for taking more than one, this orphan girl. I would almost have to scold her to make her understand it was all right.

  “I know Thomas is going to want to see you more after today. He asked about you a couple days ago. Out of the blue he said he wanted to go to ‘Franklin’s house.’ Did you tell him you had a pool?”

  “I may have accidentally mentioned it. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want him to go over there. I’m firm on this. He’ll see the house and the yard and pool and he’ll go crazy. He’s difficult enough, and if he thinks he can go over there anytime he wants to play and swim, I don’t know what I’m going to do. He needs to work on his reading this year. He’s going to be left back this fall, you know. The school said he has to repeat the first grade, unless he passes a test next month.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I’ve been trying to read with him, but he’s not really picking it up very well, and I’ve had to leave him with the sitter while I’m finishing up at Lerner’s and interviewing, and we haven’t had much time for it. The sitter says she reads with him, but I’m pretty sure she does nothing but watch TV and call her boyfriend.”

  “Why don’t I help?” I say to her. “It’s a good situation for everyone. I’m home all day, or just doing errands, and though I can’t promise what kind of reading teacher I’ll be, I’d be happy to try my best with him. I certainly would be attentive, and I’ll only allow him to play and swim as much as you say. I’m free of charge, too, if that’s all right with you. It’s perfect, as far as I can see.”

  “It’s not exactly perfect, you know….”

  “But why? You can focus completely on your job search, and Thomas will have constant attention. I’ll come over here, if you don’t want him to come to the house. Or if you’re uncomfortable with that, we’ll go somewhere different each day. The zoo or museum, or the water park. I’ll take him to Jones Beach. You can think of me as his personal day-camp counselor. I’ll make sure he eats well, too, and healthfully.”

  “I doubt you’ll be able to do that.”

  “But I promise I’ll try. Please don’t invite more difficulty on yourself. I can help, and I ought to help, and I very much wish to. And there would be nothing in this that would be detrimental to Thomas, except that I might spoil him a little. But who shouldn’t do with a little spoiling, especially a good boy like him? I wish I could have done better by you when you were young, but I was just opening the store then and circumstances were spare—”

  “Please—”

  “I’m not trying to excuse myself,” I tell her firmly, enough that it’s a surprise to me. “I’m not so naive as to be ignorant of how you must feel about things. You have not been anything but generous. But I know I’m on tenuous ground, and I accept it.”

  “Do you?” she says, though not unkindly. And I note, too, that there is a certain give in her voice, a new gentility, and whether it’s from the passage of time or a heart of pity or just the automatic lilt of our line of work, I don’t care, I don’t give “two darns,” as Mary Burns sometimes allowed herself to say, I don’t want to understand anything but that I am here and she is here, and that there is a glimmer of gentle days ahead.

  She goes on, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that you do. I don’t want to fight today. Or really anymore. There’s just too much to do. I’m grateful for whatever you want to give to Thomas or do with him. I’m not going to be stupid about it. Not about him. But I won’t have you forget or conveniently put away how you felt back then.”

  “I simply didn’t want you to go off with that man and bring ruin on your life. You were too young.”

  “Of course I shouldn’t have gone with him,” she says with finality. “But I really don’t want to talk about him now.”

  “No, Sunny, we shouldn’t. Why don’t we speak about Thomas. It’s Thomas we are concerned with, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, what shall we do for him?” I say, thinking and meaning for the far future, his schooling and training and vocation, what shall remain after I am gone.

  But Sunny doesn’t answer, and I realize how much she is restraining herself, though for what reason I do not know. It is as if she has “gotten religion,” as they say, found some secret store of forgiveness in herself, even as I have long been depleting it. Or perhaps it
is truer that forgiveness is inexhaustible, that it is miraculously depthless and renewing as long as you so wish it, no matter what has become of it, no matter how residual and meager.

  “It’s funny to think now,” she finally says, “that if I had had that first baby, I probably wouldn’t have had Thomas. Or not exactly Thomas. Which is terrible to imagine.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But I didn’t wish for it. Tell me now. You had already paid him, hadn’t you? Doctor Anastasia. Before I even agreed.”

  “I did nothing of the kind,” I answer, sitting back a bit into the soft sofa. “I merely discussed possibilities with him, about options for you.”

  “It was only just one option.”

  I don’t answer, because again for me there is nothing to say.

  “I didn’t really blame you, actually,” Sunny tells me. “I certainly don’t now. It was my decision to do and live with. Most any parent would have wanted the same. I was afraid, and you were so certain as usual how my life should be.”

  “You seemed to be sure yourself.”

  “For you I was,” she answers, gazing right at me. “I wanted that baby more just to be against you. And I’m not happy that in some way, maybe, even though it was years later, that Thomas came from my spiting you. But often I think, where would I be now if I didn’t have Thomas? He’s always been a difficult kid but every day I think he’s saving me, too. I had him maybe for the wrong reasons and now he saves me. Over and over, a thousand times.”

  “Yes,” I utter, for in listening to her a bloom of well-being is opening immediately and fully in my heart, the kind of pleasure I have hitherto only read about or imagined, what must be the secret opiate of all fathers and mothers.

  Sunny says softly, “You know, I often think it was a girl. Sometimes I miss her. I didn’t know her at all of course but I miss her. But you always knew I felt this way, didn’t you?”