“Let’s just go. Sometime.”
“Time is what I don’t have much of these days. Which is okay!” he exclaims joyfully. “I am not complaining. I am done with complaining.” He sees her look. “Well, for now. So I’m not saying no, but it’s not happening tomorrow. But sure. Let’s do it sometime. Just us.”
“That’s all I wondered.”
As they walk north, the broad Fifth Avenue sidewalk takes them past awning after awning, designed to keep the sun and snow off the rich tenants’ heads. Uniformed doormen idle attentively at their posts; it’s funny to imagine these men, many of them portly or older, none of them armed, as effective guards against any sort of intrusion or assault.
She can’t help remembering Dani’s stinging remark that she had been Lear’s “human moat.” But unlike these doormen, Tommy shared the life of the man she stood guard for. She was a companion.
So much in her life is still so unfamiliar that sometimes she mistakes fear or uncertainty for regret. Not that she can pretend she has no regrets.
She took the buyer for a final walk-through of the house in December, just before Christmas. All the furniture was gone, but across the wooden floors, dark, well-defined imprints remained of every bookcase and rug; every picture had left its mark on the walls. Had Tommy not spent so much time and care finding the right new place for each and every thing out in the wider world, she might have seen their phantom shapes as a collective scold.
She watched the woman’s eyes scan the empty rooms with a triumphant hunger, the child’s rapacious Mine, all mine. Even this did not give Tommy pause. But when they climbed to the second floor and the architect’s gaze (and it was an architect’s gaze) traveled in an arc, once, twice, and more from end to end of the long hallway, Tommy knew that she ought to have let the broker she used for the contract act as the buyer’s escort on this final inspection. They stood where the telephone table once lived, at the single window lighting this in-between space. Its view is the one Tommy faced on countless occasions while receiving momentous news of one kind or another: news of another award, of an illness or a death, of an elite invitation; even, from her father, a song or two. As Tommy took in that view for the last time, the woman said, “I am totally going to respect the bones of this great old house, but I was thinking that up here—”
“Wait,” Tommy said, her heart in a minor panic. “You know, I think let’s leave it there. I’m glad you love the house the way we—the way I did. But the changes you make are…they’re yours.”
The woman looked puzzled; Tommy’s expression was probably unkind. “Really, I’m glad you’re the one who’s moving in,” she said. They lingered in the hall for a few seconds and then, in awkward silence, went downstairs. Only after driving away, as she merged onto the parkway pointing toward the city, did it occur to Tommy that perhaps the woman’s passion was a ruse; perhaps she would hollow out and “upgrade” the house till it was unrecognizably symmetrical and spacious, and then she would sell it for twice the price.
Tommy nearly drove onto the shoulder when another thought struck her: the woman could probably sell off the back half of the property; there is enough land for a second house, a “buildable lot,” as the broker put it. To imagine the orchard leveled is painful enough, but what’s worse, the orchard is where, after much agonizing, she laid Morty to rest, burying the box of his ashes side by side with the box containing his mother’s. Tommy asked Franklin to be her witness; she had already dug the hole. “Is this cruel or weird?” she asked him.
“Maybe weird,” he said. “Probably illegal. But Morty was pathological about not expressing his final wishes—about the fate of his body. I asked him, obviously. He was sure that making that decision would hasten his end.”
Late at night, she can tunnel herself into a state of thinking that all her actions in the past year have been aimed, unconsciously, at punishing Morty. Franklin assures her that the choices she’s made have been fundamentally faithful to Morty’s desires. But she cannot ignore that fundamentally, even granting that hair-splitting modifiers are a lawyer’s stock in trade.
More than once, Soren has appeared in her dreams. He doesn’t speak; all he has to do is level at her his most disdainful look and she is suffused with guilt. Never Morty; always Soren. As if he’s a proxy for Morty—for Morty’s darker, less reasonable side. Waking recently from one of these visitations, she found herself reliving the evening on which Morty received the call from Soren’s father. It hadn’t been hard, once Soren was no longer there to object, for Morty to use his social security number to unearth Soren’s hometown, his parents’ address and telephone number. After much vacillation—was there a “proper” way to tell parents their child has died?—he decided to write them a letter with the sad news. Soren’s father called a few days later.
Tommy left the kitchen after handing Morty the phone, but she went no farther than the living room. So she knew that Morty hardly spoke, uttering only a few monosyllabic responses to the man on the other end of the line, and that it lasted no more than five minutes.
Morty came into the living room and stared at her, his expression blank. “That was brutal.”
He sat at the opposite end of the couch and addressed the fireplace. “He thanked me for seeing their son out of this world, but they fear for his soul in the next one. They will pray for him, and so will their congregation—and they hope I will, too! Christ. Then that son of a bitch asked if I needed money for ‘burial expenses.’ I said I’d had his son cremated, and then came this…black pit of silence. So I asked if they wanted me to send…” Tommy watched Morty struggle not to break. She just waited. “?‘No, thank you,’ he said. That’s all he said, that S.O.B. No, thank you. Jesus. Soren wasn’t exaggerating. For once.” That’s when Morty cried, finally really cried. And Tommy did no more than put a hand on his knee as they sat near each other on the couch. She was, in that moment, no more effectual than one of these overweight, brass-buttoned doormen, a functionary.
Hadn’t Tommy been, essentially, as coldhearted toward Soren as that father was? It didn’t matter what she had done, how much she had “helped” while he was dying. If she had been so irreplaceably devoted to Morty, she ought to have been loving to Soren, especially at the end. Did she need to believe that she was the only one who loved Morty enough to deserve his love in return?