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“I’ll talk to the deejay,” said Ray. He turned to his cousin. “Georgie—put something on that the doc might enjoy dancing to.”
“Will do,” said George.
A little human warmth generated from a clean-shaven jaw can go a long way. I may have exaggerated my ineptitude on the dance floor; any able-bodied person can follow another’s lead when his technique constitutes nothing more than swaying in place. It helped that he didn’t talk or sing, and that his cologne had a citric and astringent quality that I found pleasing.
If Ray said anything at all, it was an occasional entreaty to relax. “You’re not so bad, Doc,” he said when the first song ended. “In fact I think you might like another whirl.”
He hadn’t let go of my hand. I looked around the room to see if we had an audience. Leo was consolidating trays of hors d’oeuvres, but watching. He arched his eyebrows, which I interpreted to mean, Need to be rescued?
I shrugged.
A nurse with closely cropped hair dyed at least two primary colors took Leo’s hand and led him out to the patch of hardwood that was serving as the dance floor. “Having a good time?” Leo asked me.
“You better believe it,” Ray answered, flashing a thumbs-up with my hand in his.
A PHONE CALL woke me. Was I in my own bed or in the on-call cot? It took a few seconds to orient myself in the dark before remembering: I had the weekend off. Good. This would be the hospital calling the wrong resident.
But it wasn’t. It was my mother, her voice choked.
“Is it Daddy?” I whispered.
“It’s Nana,” she managed, discharging the two syllables between sobs.
“What about Nana?”
“Gone! One minute she was alive and the next minute, gone! Pneumonia! As if that wasn’t curable!”
My grandmother was ninety-four and had been in congestive heart failure for three months and on dialysis for nine. I said, “The elderly don’t do well with pneumonia.”
I looked at my bedside clock: 3:52 A.M.
“My heart stopped when the phone rang because I knew without even answering,” my mother continued. “Here it was, the phone call I’ve been dreading my whole life.”
“Is Daddy there?” I asked.
My father came on and said, “I told her not to wake you. What were you going to do at four in the morning except lose a night’s sleep?”
“Ninety-four years old,” I said quietly. “Maybe in the morning she’ll realize that it’s a blessing.”
“I tried that,” he said. “Believe me.”
“Tried what?” my mother asked.
“To point out to you, Joyce, that your mother lived to a ripe old age, was healthy for the first ninety-three of them, and any daughter who has a mother by her side at her sixtieth birthday party is a pretty lucky woman.”
“It’s not the time to count my blessings,” I heard. “I’m crying because she’s gone, okay? Do I have to defend myself?”
“Be nice to her,” I said.
“I am,” he said. Then to my mother, “I know, honey. I know. No one’s mother can live long enough to suit her children. It’s always too early.”
My mother raised her voice so I could hear distinctly, “Some daughters hate their mothers. Some mothers hear from their daughters once a week if they’re lucky. I talked to mine every day. Twice a day. She was my best friend.”
“When’s the funeral?” I asked.
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” said my father. “She still has to call her sisters.”
“I called you first!” I heard from the far side of their bed.
“Sorry to wake you,” my father said. “I couldn’t stop her. You’re on her auto dial.”
“I have to get up in two hours anyway,” I said.
I BRING UP this relatively untraumatic and foreseen death because Ray counted my grandmother’s funeral as our third date. He was a genius at being there for me when I didn’t want or need him. He called the Monday after the party and got Leo. “Her grandmother died, so I don’t know when she’ll get back to you,” he said.
Ray paged me at the hospital, and without announcing himself said, “I’m driving you wherever you need to go.”
I said that was unnecessary. I had relatives in Boston who were going to the funeral, and my father had worked out the arrangements.
“Absolutely not. What are the chances that they’ll want to leave when you can leave and return when you have to return? Zero.”
I said, “But, Ray: I don’t know you well enough to bring you to a funeral.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” he said.
“It’s not an hour or two. There’s the service, then the burial, then I’m sure there will be a lunch for the out-of-town guests back at my house.”
He said quietly, “I know all too well the number of hours that a funeral can consume.”
I said I couldn’t talk. Someone’s ears needed tubes. To end the conversation, I yielded. I said he could pick me up at six A.M. And just in case he didn’t spend the whole time waiting in the car, he should wear a dark suit.
I also said, “Ray? I don’t want you to construe this as anything but what it is—transportation. I’m being completely forthright here. If you want to drive me all the way to Princeton as a friend, I’d appreciate it, but otherwise I’ll make arrangements with my cousins.”
“I get it,” he said. “I think I was a little too pushy at the party, coming on too strong in the kitchen. But I know that. That’s why I called your apartment—to apologize. Besides, I have my own guilt to deal with.”
“Guilt? Because you went to a party?”
“More like, if I ever told my parents that I had feelings for a woman so soon after Mary died, they’d be furious.”
I asked, “Your parents? Or are you talking about your parents-in-law?”
Ray said, “Let’s not talk about parents, especially with your mother just having passed.”
“Not my mother, my grandmother.”
I heard a low chuckle in my ear. “You did sound kind of blasé for a gal whose mother just died.”
“She was ninety-four and comatose,” I said.
“God bless her.”
I was at the nurses’ station on Fletcher-4. I caught one nurse rolling her eyes at another. They’d been listening.
I hung up the phone and stated for the record, “My grandmother died last night, unexpectedly.”
“We heard,” said one, not even looking up from her fashion magazine. “Unexpectedly, despite being ninety-four.”
“No one’s sympathetic when they hear ninety-something,” I said. “They think that makes it easy, as if it’s overdue and you should have been prepared.”
They exchanged looks again. I wanted to say, What am I doing wrong? Did I sound brusque or unfeeling? Have we met before? Instead I said, “I’m Dr. Thrift. This is my first night in ENT. You probably know my housemate, Leo, from pediatrics. Leo Frawley?”
The younger one sat up straighter and hooked stray blond tendrils behind her ears. “I know Leo,” she said.
“And you are?”
“Roxanne.”
“I’m Mary Beth,” volunteered her deskmate. “I used to work in peds.”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” said Roxanne. “I’d be, like, devastated if my grandmother died—no matter how old she was.”
I took a tissue from their box, touched it to each eye, and said with uncharacteristic aplomb, “I’ll be sure to tell Leo how kind you were.”
5 A.k.a. the Transportation (#ulink_3c63d3f8-f06e-526b-8cc2-afce5dfc732a)
HAD I REALLY thought that Joyce Thrift’s social reflexes and nuptial dreams would fail her on that January day, just because she was laying her mother to rest?
Ray whistled appreciatively when we pulled up to my parents’ house, a sprawling Dutch Colonial, previously white, now yellow with pine-green shutters—a new color scheme they’d forgotten to tell me about.
“How many square feet in this baby?” Ray asked, squinting through his tinted windshield.
I said I had no idea. One doesn’t think of one’s childhood home in mathematical terms.
“How many bedrooms?”
“Five.”
“Five! For how many kids?”
“Two. But one is a guest room, and another’s my mother’s studio.”
“For what?”
“Fiber art,” I confessed.
Ray looked engaged, which was his psychological specialty: filing away facts that would later make him seem uniquely attentive. “You mean like weaving?” he asked.
“Weaving’s part of it. She incorporates different elements—wool, feathers, newsprint, photographs, bones.”
“Human or animal?”
I said he could ask her himself. She’d be thrilled to discuss it since her relatives and friends had grown tired of her shaggy wall hangings, both as a topic of conversation and as an art form.
“Maybe on a future visit, but I certainly wouldn’t bring it up today,” said the master of funereal etiquette. He pointed to the silver van in the driveway and read approvingly, “Fêtes by Frederick.”
“The caterer. People will be coming back after the cemetery.”
“Buffet, you think?”
“Something low-key. When my grandfather died, we had finger sandwiches and petits fours.”
“So what’s the plan? I meet you back here?”
I looked at my watch and calculated aloud, “Funeral at eleven, then to the cemetery, then back here for an hour. How does one-thirty sound? I’ll come out to the car.”
“Doc,” said Ray. “That’s terrible. You’re not going to run in and run out like you’ve been beeped. This is your grandmother who died, not some second cousin twice removed.”
“Two-thirty, then?”
“I wouldn’t mind going to the church,” said Ray. “I find that even if I don’t know the deceased, I get a lot out of it.”
What could I do but include him after the gas and mileage he’d invested in the trip and his curiosity about fiber art? I said, “I think I’ll be riding with the next of kin in the limousine. But if you want to go to the church, I’m sure that’s fine.” I reached for the door handle. “I should probably have this time alone with my mother, though.”
“Absolutely,” said Ray. “I don’t want to be underfoot while she’s getting dressed.”
I wasn’t worried about my mother, who could be gracious in any tragedy. But I needed to take her aside and explain that the rough-hewn man in the red car was a mere acquaintance and—not that she’d ever entertain such thoughts on a day like today—wholly unsuited to any other role. And the Swarthmore sticker on the back windshield? Not applicable; a relic from the previous owner.
“Mind if I run in and use the toilet?” Ray asked.
I said okay. There was a powder room just inside the front door.
“Thirty seconds, and that includes the hand-washing,” he promised.
He took his gray pin-striped jacket from its hanger, put it on, tugged at his cuffs, smoothed his silver tie against his sternum. “Not bad, huh?” he asked.
Already on my way up the stone walk, I didn’t look back. I opened the front door and called, “Anyone home?”
Ray was right behind me. “Wow. Nice place.”
There was a party-sized coatrack in the foyer, bearing so many wooden hangers that I stopped to ponder the scope of the after-funeral fête. I pointed to the half-bath and Ray darted toward it.
My father appeared at the top of the stairs in a black velour bathrobe and hospital-blue terry-cloth slippers. When he reached the bottom step I gave him a hug that was slightly longer than our semiannual perfunctory squeeze.
“You okay?” he asked.
I said I was, of course, sad, but still, when one saw as much untimely and sudden death as I did, then it’s hard to view ninety-four as—
“We were able to get Frederick on practically no notice at all,” announced my father. “I mean, we only wanted tea sandwiches and a few salads, but he was Johnny-on-the-spot.”
