A Gesture Life Read online

  “That’s right, mister,” Thomas pipes in, though now sweetly again. “We’re all going in the water, aren’t we? We’re going to have a swimming contest.”

  “You got that right!” the girl replies.

  I begin to peel off my shirt but the girl in braids shoots me a stare and Thomas immediately cues on this, holding up his solid little hand. “Sorry, Franklin, but it’s just kids only.”

  “Yes, Thomas, I understand. But I promise I will remain off to the side. Or I’ll swim in the deeper water, if you don’t mind, and watch from there.”

  “Adults have to stay on the beach, Franklin,” he tells me, as though it’s out of his hands. And he points to my folding chair with a silencing finger and an almost wry smile, and it’s all I can do but sit down again as they stomp and leap their way into the water.

  One of the mothers declares to me, “You don’t have to worry, Gramps, they’re all like little seals,” though this only serves to alarm me more, as I know exactly what Thomas can and cannot do. I tell him to go no farther out, and he nods. But he’s already chest deep, and one of the boys is behind him, pushing down on his shoulders in order to dunk him. I call out for them to stop, but against the din of play and constant reverberation along the shore my weak voice thins, and I lose sight of who’s who among this brace of kids roughhousing in the water.

  “Hey, there!” I hear, and I turn to see Liv Crawford, wearing oversized cat-eye sunglasses, stunningly trim in a cream-white one-piece, a batik wrap smartly knotted about her waist. “You look really good, Doc. This convalescence is doing the job.” She quickly scans about. “Are we really sitting here?”

  Renny comes up, carrying chairs and towels, and says, “Yes, darling, we are.”

  “I prefer the sun,” she answers, casually looking over at the mothers of Thomas’s friends, who are passing around a plastic container of BLT sandwiches. “But if you two insist.”

  “We do,” Renny says brightly, unfolding a chair on either side of me. He doesn’t wear a hat or sunglasses. He flicks at one of the seats with the towel and then spreads it out for her, holding her hand as she sits.

  “So who is this young person you’re looking after today?” Liv asks me, taking my hand, too. “Renny wouldn’t say anything more.”

  “He’s in the water,” I say, pointing to the group of them some fifteen yards from shore. Having already tested it, I know the water deepens very gradually, though past the line of buoys it drops off quickly, as if off a shelf. “Perhaps you can tell which one he is.”

  “I’m not sure how.”

  “Isn’t he your daughter’s son,” Renny says, “the one right there?”

  “What? Where?” Liv says with a sort of pleased alarm, craning forward, her hand over her eyes. “Your daughter is back in town, Doc? You didn’t mention it to me. She must be staying with you at the house.”

  “She lives over in Ebbington.”

  “Ebbington? Oh goodness, but why?”

  “She’s probably making a living and supporting herself, that’s why,” Renny scolds her. “Not everybody in the world, Liv, has to live in this over-blessed, over-prosperous duchy of a town.”

  “I one hundred percent agree with you, dear, but for Doc Hata’s girl, who I must say I didn’t even know existed until last week? I won’t say for her to go live in your house because it’s against all my interests, but really, Doc, you ought to set her up in an apartment in the village. My office holds the few good listings, you know. Especially if she has a boy who goes to school. There’s nothing much going on in the Ebbington school system except gym and metal shop and prenatal classes.”

  Renny groans and says, “You can be the most terrible snob.”

  “I’m thinking of the welfare of the boy, Renny. Anyway, you’re the one insisting on my marrying you.”

  I turn to Renny and he nods, half-grinning, half-grimacing, a difficult state of being which I know more and more finds its own measure of dignity, and joy. “I wanted to mention it on the phone, but then Liv wanted to see you in person to tell you, and I guess so did I.”

  Liv says, “Renny and I realized that you were really the only person in town, Doc, who could extend his mature and wise blessing over us. You’re our private elder, you know, neither of us having parents still alive. Really, that’s only if you think it’s a good idea, for us two to get married.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I say, dumb and glad that I am affirming both notions of Liv’s, especially because they immediately occur to me as somehow off, not at all wrong or terrible but perhaps improbable; and I feel, too, suddenly overwhelmed with the wide flows of information that have come to me today, the flash flood after the rains, and perhaps naturally I imagine good Anne Hickey again, though more clearly now, in her white turtleneck and leaf-colored sweater, greeting me on a wondrous autumn afternoon in front of the beveled glass door of my shop, her hair and eyes aglow in the lovely, burnishing light. The sight isn’t so romantic or sentimental, it’s merely a picture, caught in my memory, the nearest thing I have to something remotely real.

  “You don’t seem convinced, my friend,” Renny murmurs sheepishly to me, his fingers raking the soft sand.

  “No, Renny, I’m very happy for you both. I’m very happy and I think you ought to get married as soon as possible.”

  “I’m not pregnant, Doc,” Liv croons.

  “I know that but I would hope you two don’t let pass any more time. Why I should be the one to heed I don’t know. But it seems you two have a special love for each other, and despite some of your difficulties in the past and whatever ones that may arise again, I believe you ought to use this time for best advantage.”

  “Who knew you were such a carpe diem sort of guy, Doc?” Liv asks.

  “But I am not,” I tell her, practically arguing with her. “I am not at all. I’m simply excited for you both.” And though the implication is that I am the sort who is always careful and preparing, I think that’s not right, either; in fact I feel I have not really been living anywhere or anytime, not for the future and not in the past and not at all of-the-moment, but rather in the lonely dream of an oblivion, the nothing-of-nothing drift from one pulse beat to the next, which is really the most bloodless marking-out, automatic and involuntary.

  Renny says, “I suppose Liv and I are relenting, which I hope is as good a reason as any.”

  “It is, Renny, it perfectly is,” I listen to myself say. “Please understand me. There are those who would gladly give up all they have gained in the world to have relented just once when it mattered.”

  He gazes at me curiously, and though he hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about (nor, in truth, do I, at least in a pointed way), he knows enough of me to note the brief fervor in my voice, and this quiets him for a moment. Liv is stretching out her long, thin legs and rubbing lotion on them from the ankles up, and if she doesn’t seem to be listening there’s no mistake she hasn’t missed a word. But she’s atypically reserving comment as well, and I think I must be sounding something unusual indeed, to quell Ms. Crawford and Mr. Banerjee, affable gabbers both. I want to engage them further, I want to tell them the first thing that comes to mind, whatever history of my days, when a commotion erupts next to us.

  “Tess!” one of the mothers cries sharply. “Where’s your little brother? Where is he!”

  “I don’t know! I’ve been looking for him….”

  “What do you mean! I asked you to stick by him every second! I told you to keep a hold on him.”

  “I know! I know!”

  Her mother frantically scans the water but the kids are splashing wildly, so much so that it’s impossible to tell who or how many there are. Then she see a lone yellow float that attaches to the arms.

  “Bobby! Oh my God, Bobby!”

  Renny immediately leaps up from his beach chair and goes to the woman, asking what has happened, and then he runs into the water, his knees high and dragging, shouting out the boy’s name. The woman starts yelling for the lifeg
uards, most of whom are stationed where the people are crowded in the sun. The playing in front of us has stopped for the moment, the kids frozen as though there were something lethal in the water. I see right away that Thomas is nowhere apparent, being neither among the group of them nor farther out near the buoys nor anywhere along the shore. I check again and again. Renny is searching in the water, ducking his head under and then coming up. I take off my hat, my sandals, my eyes offering only slow-motion vision, and I take the deepest breath I can and dive in among the bodies standing about.

  The water is clear and silent and surprisingly refreshing. I see the green-tinted legs and feet and resting hands up at the surface, the child limbs rooted on the bottom like an otherworldly forest. I go past them and deeper and I’m terrified of what I might see, a limp figure floating in the mid-level, the mouth agape, eyes unfixed and cold. But my chest is burning and though I want to stay under I have to rise. And it’s now that confusion and unrest ripple over the water. Young lifeguards are swarming about, and I cry to them that there’s another child in trouble—another who is mine—and they order me to go ashore and leave the water clear. But who can? The mother and her friends are knee-deep in the water, Renny is somewhere I can’t see, and even Liv has waded in to her waist, her silken wrap ruined, her hands waving spastically in a way that frightens me; I think I have never seen her like this, anything but perfectly poised and comported. And I hear what must be Renny, the tenor bell of his voice, letting out a small cry of pain. I’m the closest to him, and I watch as he begins to slip beneath the surface, where the water is not even over his head: He is having, I murmur to myself, a heart attack. But at the same time the lifeguards are diving and rising near the line of buoys, searching for Thomas and the other boy, not aware of Renny’s distress. I can’t tell if he sees me. He’s grimacing, and his hand comes up weakly as if to say, I’m here, I’m here.

  Everything is happening instantly and simultaneously; his hand seems to be a sign not only from Renny but Thomas, too, and the long knives of panic pierce my chest and belly. I want to have faith in the lifeguards but they’re so young, and not turning back to check Renny, I swim as fast as I can out to the line of red-and-white floats. It’s deep out here and I realize that this is where Thomas would be, this is where he would put himself, and when I dive I am absolutely sure I’ll see him. And I do: a stocky little figure, crouched as if sitting, his shape hardly discernible. I kick and swoop under him and then lift us upward. When we surface, two lifeguards take him and swim him quickly to shore. I let them because I think I wish to have faith, because there is really nothing but that for someone like me, and because of Renny, because I can’t stand yet another abandonment in my life, even if it’s for a brief moment.

  Just as I reach him, Renny’s mouth dips beneath the water. I brace him and he coughs weakly. His rich brown skin is muddy, grayish about the neck and face and hands; his breathing is labored. His eyes are glassy. On the beach Liv is bleating something in a tiny voice, shuffling back in half-steps. It is in fact a natural reaction, one of the many that people can have. Against my back I can almost feel the thrum of Renny’s heart racing, then arresting, then racing again. I shout ahead to an onlooker to call for an ambulance. Some steps away the lifeguards are working on Thomas, and I hear his gasp and hack and he instinctively sits up and looks about. I nod, and he begins to cry. The presumed missing boy is walking up the shoreline with a hot dog in his hand; he’s not been in the water for some time. But Renny spasms then, as if he’s hugged me, a broad, low electric shudder, and somehow I carry his big frame right up onto the shore.

  “Oh my God, he’s dying,” Liv says, collapsing to her knees. “He’s dying.”

  I do not answer, not from fear that she is right but that I am so certain she is wrong, for there will be no dying for him today, I think, I cannot allow it—in the way a doctor, perhaps once or twice in his career, might not simply abide—and if I have to reach inside his chest I shall, reach inside and roughly clasp his heart and will it back alive.

  16

  WHY MUST ALL MY PATHS lead to the forlorn, unpolished wards of some hospital? Sitting here in Renny’s cramped but tidy office, I fear I am afflicted. Or even worse. For how can one slight, shrinking-in-the-bones fellow be such a lingering pall of sickness and mortality, casting darkly upon his associates and friends and recently discovered loved ones, who (almost) to the last profess their happiness for having known him, and for knowing him still? They phone him and say grace for him and invite him to their rooms, and then they even send flowers to his house when he should be bearing flowers tenfold back to them, a veritable nursery of grateful tidings.

  Renny, thank goodness, will survive. Indeed, as I suspected, it was a first heart attack, and had not the paramedic unit arrived so quickly (having stopped for lunch, by chance, a few streets away at the time of the call), the damage to his heart muscle would have been dangerously severe, perhaps forever debilitating. He was napping this morning when I visited him, still propped up in the tilted bed, the lines to the various monitors and saline drip and his oxygen crisscrossing his wide, bared chest. The fluorescent light fixture above his bed had been left on, and beneath its cool, icy cast, he appeared as if he were alive but being preserved in a kind of science-fictional stasis, his hair unevenly matted from sleep, his skin dull of sheen, the beeps and hums of the machines standing in for the sounds of his living.

  Thomas, whom I brought along with me, was initially frightened by the congealed, webbish sight of him, as was I. The boy wouldn’t step immediately into the room; he needed a moment or two to gather his courage. When I finally led him in he wouldn’t go past the foot of the bed, standing there as quiet and unmoving as a stone, as quiet as I have ever seen him until last week, when he was curled up in his own hospital bed after the jarring, frightening events at the pool. His mother, to my surprise, had been the picture of calm when she arrived in the ward. Thomas was by all accounts fine, solely in for a night’s observation and monitoring, and she had listened studiously to young Dr. Weil, nodding and even taking notes in a black leather organizer. She asked him questions about what to expect, what signs of complication might appear, infections and fevers and whatnot. She inquired earnestly after Renny, whom she didn’t know. I stood by and listened, not saying a word, though not avoiding her eyes, either, which weren’t accusatory or angry but rather relieved and a little frazzled, with the depth of that life-worn knowing, that hushing stare of all loving mothers and fathers. I would have gladly endured a fit of rage, or a frosty harangue of disappointment, and yet it seemed she was making efforts to assure the clearness of my conscience, despite the unavoidable fact of my momentary carelessness and lack of vigilance, which I didn’t attempt to diminish when I first phoned with the news. Why she should be so gentle with me I couldn’t figure, except for my obvious tender feeling for the boy, which I suppose anyone would see. But I heard something else, too, or so I wished I’d heard it, the willing sufferance of me in her tone, the first hint of a generous, filial allowing that I probably ought never to deserve.

  In Renny’s case, I have deep regrets. He believes I saved his life, when in fact I likely endangered it by not going to him right away. But nothing I say will convince him; I’m his hero, his savior, his lifelong guardian angel. He sleeps much now, so I can’t educate him with what really happened. And then Liv, too, must be misremembering the scene, for she’s been equally grateful and then nervous, no doubt abraded by this rough brush with mortality.

  “I still feel jittery, Doc,” she said to me this afternoon, in the corridor outside his room. I had taken Thomas back to Sunny and had returned to resume my vigil. Liv had arrived from her office in the interval, and she was not looking like herself; she was disheveled and not wearing makeup and drinking a non-diet Coke.

  “I’m weak,” she moaned. “Terribly weak. I can hardly drive. God, I can hardly dial a number on my car phone. It’s all hitting me. Tell me it’ll soon go away.”

 
; “I can’t truly say, Liv. But I wish I could.”

  “Well, please just say something helpful.”

  I asked what that might be.

  “Something reassuring and wise.”

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I told her, “Then I am certain your strength will return. So will Renny’s. Completely for you both. And you will live together in contentment and happiness. You will grow very old together.”

  “Please don’t say that, Doc!”

  “Your strength is increasing already.”

  “Ha!” she cried, squeezing my hand. “You’re a good doctor, Franklin Hata.”

  “You know as well as anyone, Liv, that I’m not.”

  “I know, I know,” she said, brushing lint from my shoulder. She sounded a bit arch again, though still tensed up, wound tightly with everything. “But you are, aren’t you? I mean inside, you are a doctor, whatever you actually know. I can tell. It doesn’t matter if you have a degree or not. You have the spirit of one in you. The essence.”

  “I don’t know, Liv. I don’t know what that is.”

  “Well, I do,” she said firmly. “And you have it. It’s not empathy, exactly. It’s just that you know what people are feeling, and what they want. You sense their pulses, I guess.”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “You bet, Doc.” She hugged me and, to my surprise, kissed me on the cheek. I told her I would stay at the hospital and keep Renny company, so that she might go home and shower and change her clothes. She hugged me again, and on leaving she cried out, as if for the whole ward to hear, “I know the truth, Doc, and so does everybody else.”

  But the truth, I am beginning to think, is not something that can be so clear. Not in even the best circumstances. My friend, Mrs. Anne Hickey, wherever her good spirit may be, would have been among the first in line to testify to the “truth” about me. And yet what have I ever done for her, then or now? For another passing hour her boy, Patrick, lies in his solitary ship of a bed with the clear vinyl curtains drawn down around him, unvisited by me since that first night I stole into his room. It’s not the chance of seeing his father I dread, but the hard posture of Patrick’s stillness, the limpid quality of his skin, the clocklike winding-down. His is an old man’s demise, a chilly lessening, which is not right for a child (if any end is), who in the terrible waiting matures with a bittersweet swiftness, a quickened growing up in order to die.