A Gesture Life Read online

  Mary Burns, I’m afraid, did not soon give up with Sunny. I saw how it was affecting her and tried to suggest that she cease, that she simply make an accommodation and not attempt to be intimate with the girl, who seemed to be growing more and more untouchable, becoming more and more distanced from her and myself and everything else.

  “You don’t understand, Franklin,” she finally told me one evening, at the end of yet another day. “She’s just a girl, and a girl needs a woman. To be there, if nothing else. I don’t care if she doesn’t love me. One day she’ll have a feeling for me, perhaps, but that doesn’t matter. I’m going to spend time with her, and that’s that.”

  She continued scheduling their weekend outings, and attended the after-school activities that I could never go to because of the store, the soccer matches and the Brownie meetings and, of course, the piano lessons and recitals. Indeed, she was there, and always there, and had they looked remotely like each other, had they anything physical in common, I’m sure they would have seemed like all the other mothers and daughters, but even more so, arriving and departing together hand in hand, with hardly a sign of rancor. In fact, some of the mothers who came by my store would make sure to mention how delightful the two of them were, how gracious with each other, how wonderful it was that a woman like Mary Burns and my daughter could be so “good” together. It was wonderful, yes, yes indeed, how all girls and ladies had things in common. Of course I always thanked them, was appropriately pleased and proud, not saying otherwise, but I also wished secretly that for once I’d hear about Sunny speaking insolently, that they had had a terrible row in front of everyone, that once and finally Mary Burns had been most cross and vehement and had scolded her with great wrath.

  But I never did hear that. Or ever would. And I remember vividly one of the last times Mary Burns and I spent together, this in the weeks before we drifted apart, when our relationship finally came to an end. She was sitting poolside while I swam in the August heat, her long fingers wrapped around a tall glass of iced tea. It was toward dusk but the air was still downy and insufferable and she was waiting for Sunny to come out. The two of them were going to a teen dance at the tennis club, Mary Burns having been asked to be one of the chaperons. She was of course dutiful that way. She looked pretty that evening, in a shimmering linen dress without sleeves and matching silken shoes. Her legs and arms had a glowing tan from all the tennis she played, and I thought she was the warm picture of goodness and health. She had been quiet on arriving, however, and as she didn’t seem particularly interested in talking, I suggested she come outside and keep me company while I did my laps, for in the warmer weather I swam extra lengths in the evenings as well. I had originally planned to attend the dance myself, as Mary Burns’s escort, but that afternoon Sunny had come to the store and asked me if I would be kind enough to stay at home.

  “It’s obvious you’re not going to dance anyway,” she had said right off. As she grew older, Sunny had a way of speaking unusually crisply, and with gravity, as if she were somehow in charge. Her English was of course impeccable, and had for a long time been much better than mine. “I don’t see why you’d want to go. It’s silly. You’ll just sit at a back table and sip punch and watch the whole night go by.”

  She was right, certainly, as that was just what I’d probably do. There were no good reasons for my presence, except to be there for Mary Burns, as all the other chaperons would certainly have the company of their partners. And yet it was not for Mary Burns’s sake that I pushed Sunny to explain her wishes.

  Still, I said, “But who will accompany Mrs. Burns?”

  “Mrs. Burns? She doesn’t need anyone. It’s her country club. She knows everybody there. She’ll be busy all night with her club friends. In fact, she’ll have a better time without you.”

  “But she’s asked me to come.”

  “I know,” she said, quite serious. “But I’m asking you not to come.”

  Her tone wasn’t petulant, or fretful, for she was possessed of a remarkable equanimity, more the way one thinks distinguished, older people to be than young teenage girls. The way Mary Burns would no doubt conduct herself were she living now. But then Sunny displayed a ferocity as well, a flinty, coal-like hardness that should have been beyond the ken of her years.

  I then asked her: “Are you afraid you’ll be embarrassed by me?”

  “Of course not,” she replied. She was idly binding her wrist with a roll of sterile gauze. Whenever she came to the store, she played with some item or another. “Why should I be embarrassed? You know very well how much everyone likes you. Even my friends. In fact, they like you better than they like me.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “It is true. And it’s the same with everyone I meet. But I don’t care about that. I would like to be there by myself, on my own. I know Mary has to be there at this point, and I wish she weren’t going to be, but if you come, too, I’ll be the only one with my whole family there. I think that’s a little strange, don’t you, to be with your family at a dance just for kids?”

  I nodded, for what she was saying seemed reasonable enough. I could understand the potential awkwardness of having the two of us present. Mary Burns and I went out together in public quite regularly, but rarely was it the three of us, the “whole family,” as Sunny had put it, a phrase which stuck out, unfortunately, because it seemed amazing that she should say such a thing. Certainly, I wanted us to be as much of a unit as any, a “whole family” in whatever sense was possible. But I knew Sunny had no feelings of the kind. I had done as Mary Burns had requested, never bringing up to Sunny her ill use and her selfishness and her cold spirit; and my silence, I will say now, was hurtful to me, for I did have a genuine feeling for Mary Burns, as genuine a feeling as I’d had for a long time, and to stand by and witness their relations caused me severe distress. I was simply angry at Sunny, and so, finally, I think, was Mary Burns, deeply angry and hurt, and though she never said a word to the girl, it seemed to happen that she was addressing me at the end, looking to me for the reasons why my daughter, after nearly four years, could still be so profoundly unmoved.

  That night of the dance, Mary Burns quietly watched me swim. She waited to speak until I was done and had pulled on my robe. I sat down with her at the outdoor table. The automatic lights on the stone paths had gone on, and there was a coppery glow rising against the early evening sky.

  “I wish we could have talked before you decided on your own not to come tonight.”

  “I called this afternoon,” I said to her. “But you were out.”

  “You know I was at the club, helping with the decorations.” She looked upset, though her voice was steady and low. “Though I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered, whether we talked or not.”

  “Sunny isn’t feeling so comfortable at the moment. You must understand that I wish to support her.”

  “Of course you do,” she said, exasperated. She brushed her hair with her hand. She had recently changed the color, from its silvery tones to a very pale golden color, and though it was handsome, I wasn’t certain it best suited her. She appeared much younger, and then not, and sometimes I was unsure how to think of her. “Listen to me, Franklin. She’s your daughter, and so you ought to do everything you can for her. If you have eyes, you’ve seen that I’ve tried to do my part.”

  “I know you have, and I thank you.”

  “That’s not why I bring it up,” she said sharply. She paused and took a breath. “I didn’t spend time with Sunny so you’d be grateful to me. I didn’t do it because of you, or even so much to help you. She seemed to need guidance, the kind of company a mother or aunt or grandmother can give, and I wanted to try to offer that. I guess I was terribly wrong. I was naive. But I’m also not sorry. I would do it again, without hesitation.

  “The reason I’m angry tonight is that I think you treat her wrongly. Perhaps you don’t know it, but you do. I’ve thought it from time to time, and I’m sorry I’m such a coward that
I can only say this to you now.”

  I cleared my throat and said, surprising myself, “I understand that I’ve not dealt with Sunny’s jealousy of you very effectively.”

  This seemed to irritate her. “That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not it at all.”

  “I try my best to treat her with respect,” I said.

  “Yes,” Mary Burns answered earnestly. “Yes, you do. You treat her like a grown woman, which I guess is understandable because she’s very mature for her age.”

  “You know how much I want her to be independent.”

  “Yes, she is,” she replied. “But it’s as if she’s a woman to whom you’re beholden, which I can’t understand. I don’t see the reason. You’re the one who wanted her. You adopted her. But you act almost guilty, as if she’s someone you hurt once, or betrayed, and now you’re obliged to do whatever she wishes, which is never good for anyone, much less a child.”

  “This is quite unusual, Mary, to hear, but I’ll think about what you say.”

  “For goodness sake, Franklin, you don’t always have to assent!” she said, her voice suddenly rising. I thought she would speak most sharply to me then. But she seemed to hear herself, and I could see the control she was exercising over her face. She took a sip of her iced tea. “I might be completely wrong, Franklin. I hope I am.”

  “I have always trusted your judgment, Mary.”

  “Yes. I know you have.”

  We sat in silence after that, the night fast approaching, the crickets just beginning to arise in song. Mary Burns glanced at the house, to Sunny’s bedroom window, which was still lighted. Shadows moved along a wall. They were already late for the dance, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was one of those moments that appear to take forever, though somehow everything was the better for it. I didn’t wish to go further in the conversation, nor did she, and if there was one true thing that we shared during our relations, it was that neither of us, for better or worse, had much stomach for these engagements, for taking certain issues to the necessary lengths. We rather floated the deep waters, just barely treading, although now I see how my friend Mary Burns held onto things more gravely than I, certain notions staying with her longer, more tightly clasped, so that in the end we were much farther apart in our feelings than I had ever imagined.

  Sunny finally came out the patio doors, dressed in a resplendent swath of white. She and Mary Burns had decided on the outfit together the weekend before, on a shopping junket down to the city. It was a very handsome choice. The dress came just up to her darkly suntanned shoulders, the delicate material clinging to her torso but not so tightly as to be indecent, the handsome drape conveying only the suggestion of the young woman beneath. But the young woman was certainly there, too, the near adultness of her, and the sight of that shape made me realize why she had asked me to remain at home. It wasn’t at all what Sunny had said in the store, about people liking me too much, or (as I had imagined it) her jealousy of Mary Burns, or even what was ventured of how I treated her, which was probably true enough. It was her bodily presence, the sheer, becoming whiteness of her limbs and skin and face and eyes. She was beautiful, yes. Exceptionally so. But it was also the other character of her beauty, its dark and willful visage, and with it, the growing measure of independence she would exercise over her world and over me, that she had hoped to keep hidden a little longer.

  4

  THE CANDY STRIPER, Veronica, finds me unusually good-natured. Almost everything I say makes her grin, and her full, ruddy face beams and blushes whenever she comes into my room with her cart. Most of the candy stripe girls are outgoing and talkative and even a little waywardly brash, which is naturally why they do the work. But Veronica, shyish and sweet, healthfully ample, with a shockingly full head of tight chestnut-brown curls, is the sort of girl you would wish upon all good people who have mourned the demise of that cardinal generosity of youth.

  Veronica, of course, has little care for such things. She is unfretting, unsevere. She understands how to hearten a patient with a wide smile. And now, after two days and nights, she finds me familiar and trustworthy, enough so not to bother to knock on the always open door. She wheels her cart inside the room and then up beside the bed railing, and greets me with cheer.

  “Were you able to sleep at all last night, Franklin?” she says, automatically fanning out the selection of magazines and books atop the cart. We are clearly on a first-name basis. She carries the usual periodicals, creased magazines of home and health and lifestyle, but the books are mostly crime novels and stories of the strange and the occult, all of which soft-spoken Veronica, it seems, has chosen for her selections. “The nurse said you were out of bed a lot, walking the halls.”

  “I was sure Dolly didn’t see me,” I tell her. “It looked like she was the one who was getting all the sleep.”

  “That’s her job,” Veronica says, and then adds, in a dramatic, mischievous tone: “She’s the nurse of the night.”

  “Very true,” I reply, wishing, all of a sudden, that I could change out of my hospital gown and accompany Veronica on her rounds. I say, “It appears she is also the nurse of jelly doughnuts. And perhaps of pastry and pie.”

  “Yes,” Veronica cries, almost gleeful with the gossip. “I thought I saw cherry filling on her shoes. I didn’t say anything, but I was half afraid it was blood!”

  “How do we know it wasn’t?” I say, knowing what it takes to goad her. “That she’d simply forgotten to hide a crime?”

  “Yes, yes,” Veronica cries, half-covering her mouth. “She raids the blood closet in the middle of the night. She’s a ghoul, a vampiress. She needs it to live, but only the blood of young boys and girls, which she can smell through the packets.”

  “I hope this means I’m safe.”

  “No one is safe,” Veronica states, almost seriously enough to alarm me. “But you, Franklin, you are. Even though you’re young at heart.”

  “You think I am? Young, I mean.”

  “Definitely,” she tells me, her voice buoyant again, the verve of fourteen. “But in a good way. Not like the boys at school, who are all incredibly lame and stupid. You’re young like things are always beginning. Which I think is great.”

  “I always thought people your age think being grown up is most fashionable.”

  “Not me, I guess,” Veronica says, handing me a stack of magazines, a book of word games, and an old jigsaw-puzzle box of the Mona Lisa, whose famous mien, I am beginning to think, is the expression of a young woman concealing a pure feeling of joy. “I don’t want to grow up yet. It’s too much trouble. And I don’t care if I’m not cool. I can wait.”

  And so this we do, together, in my private room. I’m lucky, for since cable television finally arrived at the hospital, the patients are reading far less, and as they don’t require that the candy stripers come around to them as often with material, I have Veronica’s company for pretty much as long as I (and she) wish. She lives in the town of Ebbington, just east of Bedley Run on the far side of a large county reservoir, beside which the two villages are situated. Though Ebbington is not at all the sort of place Bedley Run is; mostly it’s a working-class suburb of drab, unadorned homes and small motel-style apartment complexes. When you drive through town you notice how the trees hang a bit too closely over the streets, how the bushes and grasses are keenly in need of pruning and edging and clipping, how the main thoroughfare is rife with chain businesses and towering signs that glow and rotate and blink. In the older, quieter part of town, there are what seems a disproportionately high number of auto repair garages and beauty salons and churches and bars, all half-failed and dilapidating in their own fashion, and one’s perception is that whatever uniqueness and charms Ebbington once had are being inexorably absorbed by larger, external presences both unknown and invited.

  Veronica’s mother is a Bedley Run police officer, whom I’ve come to know casually in the course of being a village merchant; her father, who used to be an officer himself (an
d the police chief of Ebbington, in fact), lost his life in a somewhat notorious local incident in which he was caught in a crossfire between his own officers and a group of out-of-town gamblers and loan sharks with whom he was enjoying the evening. I remember in the newspaper articles the mention of his wife and infant daughter, who was Veronica, and the question of whether they would receive his pension benefit, given the unusual circumstances of his death. They did not, and I was one of the few who took an interest in their welfare and wrote and called in support of Veronica’s mother when word got out that she had applied for the officer’s position in Bedley Run (our town’s Chief Hearns being a longtime acquaintance of mine). After she got the job, Officer Como would often double-park her cruiser right in front of Sunny Medical while she got her lunch down the street at the deli or around the corner for takeout chicken, as if she was letting everyone know that she would be extra vigilant over my store, which mostly meant warning off the petty vandals. We rarely exchanged more than a few words, always simply a wave and a greeting, and it wasn’t until Veronica mentioned yesterday what her mother did for a living that I put together who they were.