Brunonia Barry - The Map of True Places

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“If you have something to say, I’d appreciate your saying it straight out,” Melville replied. He didn’t like talking about Maureen. His guilt on that matter had almost done them in. He put a hand on Finch’s shoulder. “Tell me what this is about.”

“I don’t know,” Finch had said, suddenly realizing how confused he was.

Melville leaned over, taking Finch’s face in his hands. “‘This relationship has to succeed, not in spite of what happened with Maureen but because of it.’” He looked at Finch. “Those are your words,” Melville said.

“I know.” Finch was crying.

“You know how much I love you,” Melville said.

“Perhaps you had better keep reminding me,” Finch said.

He was losing Finch to this damned disease. It was a fact he seldom faced directly, yet there it was. He knew the inevitability of demise, but they had been together for so many years, happily together. Even after the Parkinson’s, they had been happy. He knew that the illness would rob him of Finch eventually. He’d found himself looking away when the shaking began, not wanting to see it. Luckily, shaking had not become a major part of Finch’s case, though there were many other elements of the disease that had taken their toll. He had to remove himself sometimes so that Finch wouldn’t see him cry.

He had read all the books, knew that there’d be a time when there was some crossover. If he were to look at things honestly, he would have to admit that it had already happened. Parkinson’s patients, if they lived long enough with the disease, often got what was called the “Alzheimer’s crossover” and started to show signs of dementia. When Finch had initially presented with a bit of dementia, Melville remembered how relieved they were to find out it was only Parkinson’s. Only. That was a joke. To say something was only Parkinson’s was like saying that Hurricane Katrina was only in New Orleans for a day. Parkinson’s was one of the cruelest diseases out there. If you lived long enough with it, if something else didn’t get you first, you’d end up in the fetal position in a bed in some institution, sometimes for years. Melville often wondered-often hoped, in fact-that he would have the strength it took to help Finch end things if it came to that. He knew Finch’s wishes, and he also knew that Finch had been saving pills for years against the inevitable.

But things were changing, and they were changing fast, with a look, an offhand remark, or a sarcastic tone of voice that he’d never heard Finch use before.

The night he kicked Melville out, Finch threw the volume of Yeats at him, hitting him in the head, leaving a bruise. Melville hadn’t seen the book for so many years-he and Finch had put it away after Maureen’s suicide, in a place where Zee would never find it.

“Get out!” Finch had screamed. “And don’t come back!”

Melville called a doctor he knew in Boston, a neurologist friend of a friend, and someone he’d had coffee with a few years back.

“Dementia is funny,” the doctor said. “Sometimes it’s worse when it starts. There’s so much anger involved. The patient is trying to hide his symptoms yet is clearly terrified. But then there’s a second stage, when things start to settle down. And usually that gets better for everyone for a while. I call it the honeymoon period. Of course there will also be a time when he may not even know you at all,” the doctor said. “But, hopefully, that won’t happen for a long time.”

THE PLAN THAT MELVILLE AND Zee had come up with today had been logical enough. He would drop by, ostensibly to pick up some of his belongings. Then they would see how things went. If Finch’s anger had been a product of the drugs, maybe he would have forgotten it by now. Melville would move back in and take care of Finch until the end. And if it were something else, some new progression of the disease, then they’d figure out what to do next.

It felt odd to knock on the door. He didn’t think he’d ever done that before. When he had first become involved with Finch, when Maureen was in the hospital, he’d almost never come into this house. He and Finch had always met elsewhere, usually somewhere in town. And later, after he’d moved his boat up here, when he thought Maureen wasn’t coming home, Finch had started leaving the door unlatched for him and he’d slipped into the house as quietly as possible late at night, so as not to wake Zee. In those first years, they had been very careful.

ZEE ANSWERED THE DOOR. “HE’S asleep in his chair,” she said. Melville checked his watch. “Three-fifteen.” Finch’s pill was due at four. He should have timed this better.

She was bundling papers in the hallway, her hands blackened, an old bandanna from Finch’s pirate days around her head.

“I’d been meaning to do that,” he said, remembering how Finch had talked him out of it every time Melville started to clear the newspapers. Finch had claimed he was going to read them all, though he couldn’t read anymore, hadn’t been able to for quite some time.

Finch was a bit of a hoarder by nature. Such was his respect for the written word that he could never bear to part with any printed material. Even the ad circulars from the weekend papers had to be kept for at least a month, with Melville sometimes sneaking them out of the house and down the street to throw them away, so that Finch, finding them missing, wouldn’t raid the trash and bring them back inside.

“Does your father know you’re doing that?” Melville asked Zee.

“He knows,” she said. “He doesn’t like it, but he knows.”

Melville helped her get the recycling bags to the curb. They were lucky-tomorrow was trash day, and in his current state Finch was unlikely to try to reclaim them.

They sat in the kitchen making small talk, waiting for Finch to wake up. She didn’t mention the Yeats book, and neither did he, though he wanted to. Part of him wanted her to have it. But years ago he’d made a promise to Finch, and Melville always kept his promises.

Zee checked her watch. It was almost four. “It’s nearly time for his next pill,” she said. “He should be waking up soon.”

As if on cue, she heard the sound of Finch’s walker.

“You got him to use his walker?”

“Yup,” she said.

“I’m very impressed.”

Neither of them spoke as they waited while Finch negotiated the long hallway.

Melville willed his heart to slow down. He couldn’t stay seated.

“I hired a carpenter to put some railings in the hall,” she said, sensing his nervousness, trying to calm him.

“Good idea.”

He took a breath and held it. He stared at the floor. When the walker paused at the kitchen threshold, Melville looked up at Finch.

Their eyes locked.

“Hello, Finch,” Melville said.

Finch stood still and stiff, his expression masked and unreadable.

“I brought you some sirloin,” Melville said. “I put it in the fridge.”

Finch lowered himself into his chair. Falling the last few inches, he winced. When he finally spoke, it was not to Melville but to Zee.

“I want him out of here,” he said quietly. It was almost time for his next pill, so his voice was gone. The sound scratched as if tearing his throat. But his words were unmistakable.

ZEE TOOK THE PHONE into the den. She’d been talking to Melville for the last half hour, trying her best to calm him down. By the time she hung up, Jessina had put Finch to bed and had left Zee a note.

“Get some sleep,” she said to Melville after they’d talked in circles for the third time. “We’ll figure things out tomorrow.”

The television was still on, but muted. Zee sat on the couch, flipped the remote, finding Turner Classics: Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. She didn’t turn up the sound but just sat staring at the screen. “Who is Grace Poole?” she said to the television set. It was a game they had invented, she and Melville and Finch, a kind of Jeopardy! for the literary set. Something Finch had tried on his lit classes. Who is Grace Poole? was the answer. The question was one she had written herself: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife in the attic. No one had talked about the parallel to her mother when the question was asked. She thought now about the way her question should have been worded: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife. There was never any mention of an attic in Brontë’s book, and, in the film, it was more like a tower room than an attic. She had always gotten it wrong. It was Maureen and not Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife who lived in the attic. And though both Finch and Melville had challenged wrong answers all the time and must certainly have noticed the error of her question, they had never challenged Zee on this one.