Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

“I understand, Howard. I know you’ve been depressed. That’s not unusual. I can prescribe something for it, you know.”

“It’s not like the heart’s adopted and she’s the birth mother.”

“It’s up to you. It’s not all that uncommon, you know.”

“What, being depressed after a heart transplant?”

“That, too. But, no, the donor wanting to meet the recipient.”

“She’s not the donor,” he said. All he knew about his heart before it became his was that it had belonged to a twenty-six-year-old man who had died of head injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. The man, a roofer in New Bedford, had been married, the father of a very young child. And a nonsmoker, Dr. Horowitz had assured him. Howard placed his right hand onto his heart and felt its sturdy beat. It’s my heart, damn it! It belongs to Howard Blume, not some poor kid who fell off his motorcycle, hit his head on a curb and died.

He said, “I’ve got to think about it.”

“Of course. She says she’ll meet you anywhere you want. She’s young, barely twenty-two, and I take it she’s alone in the world. Except for her baby boy. My guess is she still hasn’t accepted the death of her husband, hasn’t found closure. It’s not unusual.”

“Closure. I don’t know the meaning of the word,” he said. He was thinking of his divorce from Janice seven years ago, the end of a brief but perfect marriage — a marriage ruined by the affairs and dalliances that had resulted from his refusal to come in off the road and live and work close to home, maybe run a bookstore, turn himself into a domesticated man, a faithful husband because watched, a secure husband because watchful. But he’d spent twenty years on the road before falling in love with Janice, and after marrying her continued sleeping five nights a week away from home. Howard believed that he had married too late, when he was too old to change his ways. He was attractive to women, in spite of being a cold and selfish man, and he had betrayed Janice frequently, and finally Janice had betrayed him back and had fallen in love with one of her lovers, and now she was married to him and had two children with him, and that was that.

When a terrible thing happens, and it’s your own damn fault, there’s no closure, he thought. Whatever happened, you live with it. Alone, he had endured his three heart attacks and open-heart bypass surgery and a year later the steady deterioration of the organ itself. And now the transplant. All of it somehow the result of his having ruined his marriage to Janice, the one truly good thing that had befallen him. He believed that none of it, the heart attacks, the surgery, the transplant, would have happened if it hadn’t been for the divorce. It was a superstition, he knew, but he couldn’t let it go.

This young woman, though, had not caused her husband’s accident, the terrible thing that had happened to her. It was her husband’s fault. Maybe, for her, closure — whatever that meant— was possible. “I guess I owe her a lot, right? I mean, she’s the one who made the decision to donate his organs.”

Dr. Horowitz asked where he would like to meet the woman. Her name was Penny McDonough, she said, from New Bedford, less than an hour’s drive from his cottage on Cohasset Harbor.

“I don’t want her to come here,” he said. “I’ll ask Betty where’s a good place nearby, someplace she can drive me to. I’ll get back to you and set a time,” he said. “Tell her that I’m only good for a short visit.”

HE NEARED THE MONUMENT at the top of the hill, breathing hard, leaning heavily on his cane, his heart pounding: Whose heart was it, anyhow? Dear God, whose heart is inside me? It was not his own, but it was not someone else’s, either. Until this moment Howard had managed not to ask that question. Now, since agreeing to meet this woman, he couldn’t stop asking it, and he knew why he had avoided it for so long. There was no answer to the question. None. He was afraid that for the rest of his life he would not be able to say whose heart was keeping him alive.

He walked to the side of the monument where the woman in the yellow poncho stood waiting. She was very slender — fragile-seeming, almost childlike, with small hands and thin, bony wrists. Young enough to be his daughter, he thought. Instead of a woman’s purse, she held a green cloth book bag. She had pale skin and large blue eyes and wore no makeup or jewelry that he could see. Short wisps of coppery hair crossed her forehead, and he remembered her name, Penny, and wondered what her real name was. Not Penelope. Probably something Irish, he thought.

“I’m Howard Blume,” he said. “I guess you’re Penny? Mrs. McDonough, I mean.” He extended his right hand, and she gave him hers, cold and half the size of his.

“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Blume, for agreeing to meet with me.” She had a flattened South Shore accent. She looked directly at his eyes, but not into them, as if she had met him once long ago and was trying to remember where. “I’m sorry you had to walk all the way up here from the car,” she said. “I wasn’t sure it was you, or I’d have come down.”

“That’s okay. I needed the exercise.”

She made a tight-lipped smile. “Because of the surgery, yes. Are you all right? I mean…”

“Yes, I’m fine,” he said, cutting her off. “Listen, this is kind of uncomfortable for me. But I did want to be able to tell you how grateful I am for what you did. I don’t know why you wanted to meet me, but that’s why I wanted to meet you. To tell you… to thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me. It’s what Steve, my husband, it’s what he would have wanted.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I should thank him, too.” He paused for a moment. “He must’ve been a good guy. Thoughtful. Right?”

She drew her bag in front of her, as if about to open it. “Yes. I have a favor I’d like to ask you,” she said. “May I?”

“Yeah, sure. Why not?”

“I want to listen to your heart. Steve’s heart.”

“Jesus! Listen to my heart? That’s… I mean, isn’t that a little… weird?”

“It would mean a lot to me. More than you can know. Please. Just once, just this one time.” She opened the bag and withdrew a black and silver stethoscope and extended it, as if it were an offering.

“I don’t know. It feels a little creepy to me. You can understand that, can’t you?” Howard looked down the hill toward the car. He didn’t want Betty to see this. He didn’t want anyone to see this. A few yards beyond the parking lot the narrow road followed the rock-strewn shore. A thickening bank of clouds had blotted out the sun, and an offshore wind had raised a chop in the blue-gray water.

“Please,” she said in a low voice. “Please let me do this.” She pushed back her hood and laid the curved, rubber-tipped ends of the stethoscope over her shoulders and around her neck.

Howard said nothing. He merely nodded, and she placed the tips into her ears and stepped toward him.

“Will you undo your shirt?”

He pulled his flannel shirt loose of his trousers and unbuttoned it all the way down. Why the hell am I letting her do this? I could just refuse and walk away, he thought. “What about my T-shirt?” he asked. “Want me to lift it up?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to see it.”

The chest piece at the end of the stethoscope was the size and shape of a small biscuit, and swiftly, as if she’d rehearsed, the young woman placed it directly over the incision in Howard’s chest. Then she closed her eyes and listened. Tears ran down her cheeks. Howard put his arms around her shoulders and drew her closer to him and felt himself shudder and knew that he was weeping, too. Several moments passed, and then the woman removed the tips of the stethoscope from her ears and pressed the left side of her head against Howard’s chest. They stood together for a long time, buffeted by the wind off the harbor, holding each other, listening to Howard’s heart.