Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

he felt his limbs soften, under the flesh and the forgiving organ of the skin he felt the frame that held him up dissolving. She had been a first-generation Irish immigrant who had grown up in a farmhouse with a thatched roof in County Cork. He remembered her expressions, Cat got your tongue? and Jeeee-sus-Mary-and-Joseph, her busy movements in the kitchenette, a yellow-and-white checked dishtowel with a red embroidered apple and green leaf. The dishtowel had hung from the door of their small refrigerator and sometimes over her shoulder while she was cooking.

Then there were the shades later, stale smell of the sickness at the end that always made him think of her even though it shouldn’t, it had been something that was done to her, not what she was. But that was sickness, it turned the person into itself, memories of a mother into memories of a disease.

He had sat beside the bed and from the bedside table her colorful pictures of weeping saints held out their arms to him. Gone bald, face pasty as a doll’s, puttylike, she stopped moving once and for all, alive but motionless. To ease her pain they were told to put sleeping pills under her tongue. Later that night his father had been sitting and rocking in the chair, listening to the radio. Usually he listened to Golden Oldies but that time he had put in a cassette. No talking, she had said weeks before; at the end just play me the music to help me on my way. She liked the old folksongs sung by tenors of the first half of the century, “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” and “Down by the Sally Gardens.” Now whenever he heard the strains of these songs he remembered her death. He remembered home had vanished one afternoon, turned alien suddenly because she was gone.

She had been all that was warm, all the comfort known in the world, and then dead. Never die, he murmured to Ann sometimes, as though it was a decision to be made. Even in his sleep he would say it.

Then his father, fading: good man of few words, as the fathers often were, bound up and speechless. Their bodies were taut with instinctive defenses that kept them from opening their mouths.

And other than his father he had no one. Looking for evidence of an extended family, before he met Ann, he once attended a reunion in Aspen where second and third cousins milled around in a conference room. The formica-topped tables were decorated with dried flowers and the distant cousins wore nametags on their lapels, ate vanilla cake and drank watery nonalcoholic punch. Strangely the family had hardly reproduced at all in his generation so there were no children running through legs. Instead the family was simply aging, cousins and aunts and uncles dying off and the ones left alive growing more and more decrepit and sedentary until finally they could be gathered in this hotel room and displayed in all their infirmity, a sprawling and crippled gray horde.

But his father, trapped in himself, was even now alive, a good and kind man though always so silent as to vanish in plain sight. He should call him: it had been over a month. In fact now, he thought: this was the time. What if something had happened to him?

Heading in the back door to get his cell phone out of his bag he met Lynn. She was in a caftan, gold and green, and tottering on the usual four-inch heels. Her fingernails, which picked up the gold in the robe, were drying and she agitated her hands in the air as she walked.

—I showed your uncle where you leave your car keys, she said.

—Excuse me?

—Your uncle Leo? He said you were letting him use your little truck?

—Are you kidding?

—What I would advise is, he should go in the Zone. I had a fat decorator and it really helped her.

—He already drove off?

—Now she’s a skinny mini. Men, you know, can find it hard to commit to weight loss. But once they do the results are often very rewarding.

Ben’s cell phone answered after one ring, which meant he was probably talking on it. She couldn’t leave a message, so she waited to redial. In the meantime she set some ground rules for Oppenheimer.

—You can’t smoke in the house.

—I will be happy to step outside.

—And someone’s going to have to sleep on the sofa, in an area that doesn’t really have a door that closes, this room that’s between the study and the kitchen. We just call it the extra room, we haven’t done anything with it. Because there’s a futon in the study but other than that—you know, Dr. Szilard’s already set up in the guest room.

—I’m sure we can make do. I hope it won’t be too long.

—And we only have the one bathroom. So we’re going to have to set, I don’t know, schedules with that. I don’t want to irritate my husband.

—No. I do understand.

—It’s me, honey, she said to Ben, when he picked up. —How are you?

So reassurance is aimed at protection, thought Oppenheimer, but often it protects only the speaker, hiding behind itself.

In life Szilard was once approached by someone he had not seen for a very long time. This person exclaimed over the fact that Szilard had become a great man.

“I was always a great man,” said Szilard.

Ann waited outside La Fonda in her car while Oppenheimer went in to roust Fermi. She had detected some reluctance in Ben but all in all he was as patient as always, patient and open to a certain looseness of events, a shifting ground.

It occurred to her as she tapped her fingers on the wheel that she was missing a brown-bag lunch discussion of New Tools for a World Wide Web Research Etiquette.

Ben was holding himself in check. He had not revealed Szilard as the car thief he was to his credulous fan when she called;