Russell Banks - Affliction

Wade called me, as usual, late at night. Even before answering the phone, I knew it was he — no one else calls me at that hour — and I was ready to listen to another chapter in one or both of his ongoing sagas, which by now, as I have said, I was more than casually interested in. There was possibly a third story that connected the first two, but mainly there was the detective story concerning the shooting of Evan Twombley, and there was the family melodrama about Wade’s custody fight with Lillian.

But not this time. Wade was telling a different story tonight, or so it seemed then, one in which I myself was a character, for he had called to tell me that early that morning or sometime during the previous night our mother had died, and he had discovered the body when he had gone over to visit herand our father with Margie Fogg. Pop was okay but kind of out of it, he told me. Worse than usual, maybe, though no drunker than usual.

Naturally, I wanted to know the details, and he provided them, his voice growing thinner and thinner as he talked, as if the connection were fading. He spoke very rapidly, and I could barely make out what he was telling me anyhow, but I was moving away fast, which made it worse. I was in my old free-fall, losing contact, and soon I would be in deep space, unable to hear any human voice or perceive anyone’s emotion, even my own. I heard him say something urgent and slightly, almost inappropriately, gay about his friend Margie Fogg and the old house and Pop, and then he mentioned the funeral. I heard the word, funeral, and a few sentences about our sister Lena, but his words were coming to me from a much greater distance now and rapidly, like electronic signals blipping across a screen, and then there was nothing but static, and finally not even that. Silence, except for the cold wind blowing across millions of miles of empty space.

It was not until later — months later, actually — that I had assembled enough information to let me understand what, in his remarks about Margie and the old house and our father, Wade was trying to describe to me. That Sunday afternoon out at the house, Margie had called the fire department, and the emergency vehicle — a five-year-old rusted Dodge van outfitted with oxygen, splints, bandages and plasma and driven by Jimmy Dame, with Hector Eastman riding shotgun — had raced out from the Lawford fire station. The two told Wade and Margie to stand back and had tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation first, as they were trained to do, and then quickly gave up and carried Ma out of the house on a stretcher to the van and drove off to the Littleton Hospital, where she could be legally pronounced dead. Cause of death: hypothermia. Time of death: sometime between 1 and 7 A.M., Sunday, November 2.

After Ma’ body was out of the house, Wade slowly came back to himself. Pop had not once left his chair in the kitchen and throughout had continued to drink whiskey, a half inch at a time, from a water glass. Margie stayed away from the old man and tried to comfort Wade, which, oddly, was not difficult. He said, “I knew the second we pulled up in the car that something was wrong, and the only thing I could think of was that Ma was dead. I don’t know why, but that was the only thing I could think of.” He and Margie were sitting side by side on the sagging green sofa in the living room, the dead eye of the television staring at them. The room was still cold, in spite of the fire in the kitchen stove, and they had their coats on.

“It’s like I almost expected it,” he continued. “So that when I went into the bedroom and found her like that, I wasn’t surprised or shocked or anything. It’s strange, isn’t it?”

She said yes, but sometimes people had premonitions about things like this. So, yes, she said, it was strange, but not unusual. She stroked his back in slow circles across his shoulder blades, as if he were a child, and laid her other hand tenderly on his knee, and wondered what was really going through Wade’s head. His family relations, she believed, were very different from hers. To her, Wade seemed intensely involved with his various family members, even with his father, whereas she was not. She had a younger sister she thought was a lesbian, who was in the navy and stationed in the Philippines, and her older brother managed a video rental outlet in Catamount and had a wife and seven kids who kept him too busy to participate in her life in any regular way. Since both of her parents were still alive up in Littleton, she did not really know what Wade was feeling about his mother’s death, but God, it must be awful. Her mother, whom she never saw anymore (she had Alzheimer’s and had not recognized Margie in years), lived in an old motel converted into a nursing home and financed by the state; her father, whom she dutifully visited once a month, lived alone in a dark small filthy apartment over the Knights of Columbus hall and spent a lot of time in the VA hospital in Manchester. He had been a lifelong cigarette smoker and had lost one lung to cancer and was still smoking and coughing with every third breath. Margie knew that soon one and then both of her parents would die, and she wondered what she would feel then. Abandoned? Relieved? Angry? All three, probably. Maybe that was how Wade felt today, and maybe that was why he seemed to be feeling none of them. You must feel frightened too, she reasoned, terrified — because when your parent dies, you know that, even if you squeeze out a normal three score and ten, you are next. That seemed to be what Wade was feeling most, now that she thought about it— frightened. It must get in the way of grief, that thick mix of abandonment, relief and anger, which no doubt came later, when you got used to the idea of being the next one to die.

“I guess I’m the one who has to take care of things now,” Wade said. “Being the oldest and all.”

“What things?”

“The funeral. Calling folks, Rolfe and Lena and so on. And Pop. I’ve got to do something about Pop,” he said, and he turned in the couch and peered back into the kitchen at the old man, who seemed lost in his thoughts or, without thoughts, was merely counting out the seconds until he felt it was appropriate for him to take another sip of whiskey. Sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three …

“After us kids left home and he had to retire — from the drinking, I suppose — after that he was Ma’s problem. Now … well, now I guess he’s mine.”

“He’s a problem, all right,” Margie said.

Wade lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I think,” he said, his brow furrowed, as he stared thoughtfully at the burning cigarette in his hand, “I think maybe I ought to move out here to the house. Put my trailer up for sale. I’m going to need some money I don’t have, for that custody suit business, you know. And there’s no way Pop can live out here alone.”

Margie said, “He’s not easy, Wade. He’s especially never been easy for you.”

“He’s old. And Jesus, look at him, he’s out of it. But give him his bottle, put him by the fire or in front of the television, and he’s okay. I can move in upstairs, fix the place up a little, clean and paint the place, get the furnace working, and so forth. You know. Make it nice.” The picture in his head was filling out quickly with details: he saw the house renovated, almost elegant in its New England farmhouse simplicity, with his father peacefully semiconscious and more or less confined to Uncle Elbourne’s room and the kitchen and living room, and Wade free to do with the rest of the house whatever he pleased, as if it were his own. Rolfe surely would not object, and Lena would be relieved to hear it. One of the upstairs bedrooms could be decorated nicely for Jill, and he could share the other with Margie.

“What do you think?” he asked her.