CHAPTER 3 #11
Eddie nodded. “I was thinking of who I could go to. I didn’t want to go back to Altoona, to my family. I didn’t think I should ask anyone from Houghton since I’d be leaving the job.”
“You called us,” Polly said. “Of course you came to us.”
“I wanted to be near the girls,” Eddie said. “I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore. I thought if I went to Buddy’s—”
“He would have said yes,” I said, speaking for my father, a man who might have dropped the ball on many fronts but spent his life in the service of generosity and hospitality, no questions asked.
“I know that,” Eddie said. “It’s quite an exercise, thinking about who would take you in when your ankle’s been crushed.”
“How is your ankle?” Jonathan asked, as if it had recently mended. We were all tumbling into the past.
Eddie raised his left leg and made a couple circles with his foot. “Never bothers me at all. Time is the great healer.”
“We took you in,” Polly repeated, adamant that her service be acknowledged.
Eddie leaned across the open space between their chairs, picked up her hand and kissed it. “And I am forever grateful.”
We ate our lunch in the sunroom, moving to a table that was already set.
Eddie and I helped Polly bring out the food that we no longer wanted while Jonathan held down the fort with Skip.
The conversation moved to real estate prices and the long arc of human migration between Manhattan and the suburbs of Connecticut: first the exodus from the city, then the exodus from the suburbs back to the city, then back out to Connecticut at the start of the pandemic, and finally to Ibiza and Bergen and wherever else people wanted to live because they could get their work done anywhere.
“People should be made to come to the office,” Skip said, stabbing his fork against his plate for emphasis. “There’s a culture to office life, and that culture holds the company together. If you don’t show up, you aren’t part of the culture.”
We understood the futility of correcting him and so we didn’t, and anyway, it made him happy to have the last word.
Later there were tender strawberries that had reached their full potential earlier that same day, and a cold lemon pie to accompany them. Then Skip announced they were going out on the boat. He dropped his crumpled napkin on the table. “Come on, men.”
“Daphne’s going to help me clean up,” Polly said, handing me Jonathan’s dessert plate.
I was happy to clean up, I would even say I was born to clean up, but I couldn’t remember my services ever having been commandeered by someone who was not my mother. I didn’t want to be alone with Polly. “I’d love to see the boat,” I said.
“You go,” Jonathan said, taking his plate back from my hand. “Polly and I will knock this out in a minute.”
“No, no,” Polly said. “Skip wants to show off his boat. Humor him.”
“I’ve seen the boat,” Eddie said. “I think I’ve seen the boat a thousand times. I can clean up by myself and then everyone can go.”
I realized then my glass was empty. So deft! I’d never seen it happen.
Skip gave a single clap. “Here’s the edict, sailors: you’re coming and you’re coming.” He pointed to Eddie and then my husband. “So says the captain. Let’s go.”
But in this complex entanglement, Jonathan remained his own man. He put his arm around my waist and pulled me to him. “I am not leaving my wife, sir. I have been in Wisconsin for more than a week. I came here today to be with Daphne. We’re a package deal.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Polly said, annoyed. “Skip, you and Ed take the boat out. The Fullers and I will clean up. Is everyone happy with that?” She was not happy with that.
“I could not be happier,” Jonathan said, and kissed the side of my head, which seemed to annoy Polly further.
“Happy,” I said.
“Happy enough,” Eddie said.
“Well, that’s what I get,” Skip said. “One mate and one mutineer. Let’s go.”
Eddie and Skip went through the glass French doors and crossed the flagstone patio, following a wide set of stone stairs down to the water.
Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me, looking at the two of them as they receded into the afternoon light, that they moved more easily as they reached the Long Island Sound.
Jonathan and Polly were stacking plates while I picked up the glasses. Only Polly’s glass was full. “A lovely, lovely lunch,” Jonathan said. “Couldn’t have been nicer.”
But Polly wouldn’t look at him, and she didn’t say a word. She picked up her stack of plates and left for the kitchen.
I looked at my dear husband, mouthed the words thank you.
“I will never leave you behind,” he said quietly, and the two of us went to the kitchen.
Polly’s boxy carnation-colored top had belled sleeves, and one of those sleeves had dragged through a plate or possibly into one of the bowls of salads. When we came in, she was standing at the sink, scrubbing.
I asked her if I could help.
“With the stain?” she said. “No, thank you, I know how to do this.”
I put the glasses down. Jonathan put down the plates.
“I planned the whole thing,” Polly said. “I worked it out with Skip. After brunch he would take the men down to the boat so you and I could talk.” She was crying now, holding her sleeve beneath the running stream of tap water.
“You can talk to me.” I took two steps towards her and stopped. I was supposed to comfort her.
“It’s the leukemia, isn’t it?” she said.
“My god, when he told us, we thought it was the end of the world, but then you go along year after year and nothing changes and you start to think that maybe it’s okay, maybe we can just forget about it, and then you do forget about it, you really do.
But it’s not okay, is it? That’s why you’ve come back.
I said to Skip, the only reason she’s come back is his leukemia’s gotten worse.
Maybe you’ve got some score to settle or maybe you think there’s money, which there isn’t, but if there’s something going on, you have to tell me. We’re his family. We deserve to know.”
A large wooden table took up the center of the kitchen, the place where Skip and Polly no doubt ate when the two of them were home alone, the place we had set the dishes down.
Now my fingers curled around the edge to keep me standing.
Given the chance, I would have said I had no idea what she was talking about, because I didn’t.
I didn’t know anything. But before any of that, Jonathan went to Polly, reaching over to turn off the faucet.
He took her wet hand from the sink. I could see her shaking.
“Ed is fine,” Jonathan said. “Nothing’s changed. We’ve got the best people keeping up with it. If anything, the numbers look better than they did last month.”
Polly Hotalling looked at my husband the way you look at the person who is telling you what you wanted to hear, the thing you weren’t expecting to hear. “He’s okay?”
“Well, he has chronic lymphocytic leukemia, it’s nothing you’d want, but he’s managing it. For the most part, it doesn’t affect his life. Someday it will, but that’s not what’s happening now.”
Polly took a small step towards him and Jonathan put his arms around her. “Are you sure?” she asked. Her voice came out as a small croak from the front of his shirt.
He patted her back like a baby. “As sure as anyone can be under the circumstances. This is emotional stuff. We all love Eddie, we all want what’s best for him.”
“I just thought ...” she began, but she didn’t feel the need to finish. She had already said what she thought.
“Go put yourself together and let Daphne and me handle the kitchen.” Jonathan took off his blazer. “They’ll be back before you know it. No boat ride lasts forever.”
She looked up at him and smiled, wiping her eyes on a dish towel. “You won’t tell him I said anything?”
Jonathan held her eye. “Not a word.”
She left the room relieved, the dish towel still in her hand. I don’t think she remembered I was there, though she walked right past me. When she was gone, Jonathan and I stood there, trying and failing to make sense of it all.
“How did you know it was chronic lymphocytic leukemia?” I asked him, when what I wanted to say was, Eddie? Leukemia?
“Because if it were some other kind, he’d be dead.” Then Jonathan rolled up his shirtsleeves and started on the dishes.
In other circumstances, seeing my husband lie with such fluency might have alarmed me, but in these circumstances, I felt nothing but grateful.
How do we talk about death but to lie about it?
I had asked Eddie if we were going to die in the car up at the raspberry farm.
“I don’t think so,” he had said to me that night.
“I mean, of course we will eventually, everything does, but I don’t think you and I are going to die in this car. ”
I wondered if this would turn out to be the eventuality of which he spoke.
I carried the glasses and plates to the sink, then hunted around until I’d found containers for all the leftover food, then I put the food away.
Nearly an hour passed and still the boat did not return.
We had no idea what had become of Polly.
We had cleaned up and put away every trace of lunch and then gone back to the sunroom and out those same glass French doors to sit on a wicker love seat that looked out over the water.
Jonathan and I agreed to say nothing about Skip or Polly or Eddie for as long as we were in the house, or, better still, for as long as we were in Connecticut.
To pass the time, we looked at the housing prices in Darien on Jonathan’s phone, and when we got tired of that, we looked at the water.
“We could go home,” Jonathan said. “Leave them a note.”