Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

“I say this,” Gerard proclaimed. “I say whoever it is who’s embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from the Biggus Diggus is perfectly within his rights.”

“His or her rights, Dad,” Patricia said. “We learned it in preschool.”

“I stand corrected, and hereby apologize to the legions of corrupt female construction magnates. Perfectly within his or her rights. An enterprise like this takes the old rusty elevated roads of our great city and does the only thing you can do with them: erases them from the collective eye. If a little money gets grafted in the process of giving us back our waterfront, there’s nothing un-American about it!”

“You’d make out fine on Beacon Hill,” Janet said. She was trying hard to join in the fun, but it seemed to take a huge effort for her to get the sentence out. Between words she made a couple of small grunting noises I’d never heard.

“I intend to run for public office,” Gerard told her. “Who was it who said, ‘If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve’? Bush?”

“Lyndon Johnson.”

“Well, I say: If nominated I will run, if running I will serve!”

Gerard went on and on with his nonsense, making faces for the girls’ amusement, turning to my mother with his most serious expression and scaring her half to death by shouting, “Read my lips! I did not have relations with that woman!”

Everything went along smoothly, if crazily, for a while. Soon we were drugged by the sheer volume of food. The adults ate in straight lines; Patricia and Alicia circled and wandered. They were at the age where they fidgeted a lot, getting up and down to check on their new dolls, dropping food, giggling, finding something remarkable in a mushroom cap or a blossom of cauliflower. Gerard oohed and aahed and spewed compliments in several languages. Janet’s mother encouraged and spooned and found reasons to go back and forth to the kitchen. My mother had always had a good appetite and she seemed to be following the conversation in a fairly alert and congenial way. And then, as if the fog in which she lived suddenly blew clear of the best-trained part of her mind, she realized, when the second round of plates was being removed, that Janet was sick.

Janet had been coughing. She’d left the table a couple of times for bathroom runs, for oxygen. She had eaten almost nothing. Twice I saw her set her fork down and sit very still. The second time she did this she looked up at the top of the wall and took a series of short quick breaths with a shadow of fear over her eyes. It was the shadow that caught my mother’s attention. I saw her stop eating and look across the table. “What’s wrong, dear?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Janet took a few slightly longer breaths, grunted, and gasped out, “I’m fine.”

The girls sat still for once, turning up their pea-green eyes.

“She’s alright, Mum.”

“No, Ellory, she isn’t.”

Gerard said, “Mrs. E., what I want to know is why you haven’t come out to see the gorgeous addition we’re building in Cambridge. Don’t you love me anymore?”

But my mother’s attention was locked on Janet and she didn’t answer.

“What’s wrong, Papa?” one of the twins said.

Mrs. Rossi brought something into the kitchen that didn’t need to be brought there.

“What is it, dear?” my mother asked.

“I have lung trouble,” Janet told her, almost in a whisper.

“Is Janet going to die, Papa?”

“Die? What are you talking about, Lishie?”

Patricia was clutching her rag-headed doll in a stranglehold.

“What is it?” my mother persisted. She started to get out of her seat and I put a hand on her arm.

“Janet has cystic fibrosis, Mum.”

“What is that, Papa? Uncle Jake?”

“It’s a sickness,” Janet gasped. “I’ll be alright.”

But alright wasn’t written on her face. Amelia was standing in the doorway now, behind Janet, watching my mother over the table.

“She was a doctor,” I explained.

My mother’s eyes had not moved. “How did you live so long?” she asked Janet.

“Just lucky,” Janet answered.

My mother kept staring, the girls sat stone still. Amelia had not moved from the doorway, but she’d started to cry again. She had her right hand wrapped tightly around her left wrist, and her left hand was squeezing open and closed in a quick, unconscious rhythm. Her pretty, oval face had completely changed and was painted in a shade of hope, a terrible species of tearstained hope, that I had never seen before and never want to see again. Over the top of her daughter’s head she was looking fixedly at my mother as if, there, hidden in the shadowed valleys of her brain, might lie one treatment or medicine or procedure or idea that none of Janet’s doctors had thought of.

She knew my mother was not in full possession of her faculties, but the word “doctor” seemed to have had some magical effect on her. I’d seen this before in my life, many times. It was part of the reason I’d dropped out of med school.

All of this was compressed into maybe three seconds, but they were an unbearable three seconds.

I said, “There are new treatments now.”

It was absurd. I’d meant it as an answer to my mother’s question, but it came out sounding as if I had good news to share, a latest development snatched from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation website just that morning. Janet’s mother turned the beam of her terrible hope on me, and it was like a sweeping searchlight that stops on you, picking you out of the anonymous blackness, freezing you there, blinding you. Janet fixed me with a look that was worse than that. She frowned and made a small shake of her head. But I could not stop myself. “She’s on the list for a lung transplant,” I announced stupidly.

Amelia was wringing her hands in that odd way, blinking and blinking, waiting for the news. I could not meet Janet’s eyes.

“What is that, Papa?”

Gerard started to explain, and my mother searched around in a buried history of a million lessons and terms and hospital rounds and patients and the families of patients, plucked one word out of her memory, and spoke it-“Cadaveric”-just as Janet started to cough. The cough was something monstrous and drawn out. It was half roar. She kept coughing and couldn’t catch her breath. All her concentration was focused on the act of coughing and then breathing a small gasp of a breath, coughing again, reaching for a bit of breath. Her eyes were down, but I knew she knew it was frightening the girls, and she pushed hard against the table and stood up, accidentally tugging on the tablecloth enough to topple her wineglass. The glass fell and cracked open against the platter of meatballs, splashing them with shards and Riesling. Janet was standing, turning away. Gerard took hold of her arm, but she shook free and made for the back bedroom. We heard the cough going on in there, a hideous animal sound. I waited for it to stop but it didn’t stop. My mother had lapsed into silence. Patricia and Alicia had both started to cry. Janet’s mother went into the room with her. Gerard said, “Tricia, Lishie, it’s alright. We’ll have cake.”

When I went into the room, Janet was “tripoding,” leaning straight-armed on the bed with the clear tubes clipped on underneath her nostrils, but the booming cough wouldn’t let her go. I knelt down in front of her on one knee so I could look into her face. She was making small shaking motions with her head. I thought she wanted me to leave, but when I stood up to leave she took hold of the fingers of my left hand and squeezed so hard that I winced. She shot her eyes up at me.

“Call an ambulance,” I said to her mother. “Now.” And I watched to see if Janet would make some gesture-No-but she only roared out another swampy cough and kept squeezing.