Joseph Caldwell - Lazarus Rising

“Oh?”

“I get so—well—so self-absorbed thinking about myself all the time. Just in case you hadn’t noticed. We all—all of us—well, all of us dying like this—we forget to think about anything else. Anyone else. But watching you with him—the strangest thing—I remembered something I don’t want to forget.”

“What’s that?”

Dempsey gave a short laugh that heaved her chest up, then quickly down. “How much I love you. Imagine. How could I ever forget a thing like that?” She shook her head, unable to believe such an unbelievable fact. “Oh—and by the way—yes, of course I’ll marry you.”

Johnny burst into tears.

“Well,” Dempsey said, “nothing like making a man happy.”

Johnny sniffed, then laughed, then sniffed again, laughed some more, and let the tears fall where they may.

This was Dempsey’s favorite part of a trip to Staten Island. The ferry was getting closer and closer to the slip but was headed full throttle toward the thick weathered planking that framed the manmade cove where the boat would dock. The motor stopped; the ferry kept its course at a barely lessened speed toward the pilings. Dempsey decided to stay exactly where she was, at the rail of the bow—if a ferry can be said to have a bow—and experience the usual crash.

She wished Johnny had joined her by now. He’d wanted to study and had found himself a bench—they looked more like pews—about a third of the way back, away from the front deck but still not too close to the concession stand. Other passengers were already streaming through the forward doors, not to disembark, it seemed, but to witness along with Dempsey the boat’s slam into the planking. She turned to look for Johnny but saw only a late-morning crowd of overweight people, two women with strollers, one tall man wearing a baseball cap backwards even though he was close to fifty, two teenage boys, their legs spread, their feet braced firmly on the deck, eager to test their balance against the coming crash. Everyone except Dempsey seemed to be staring at the two metal claw-like suspensions reaching out over the water, ready to snatch the boat the minute it came within their grasp. They were, she knew, the mechanical gangplanks that would connect the docked ferry to the terminal, but they seemed more predator than welcoming arms at the moment.

The ferry rammed into the piling. Everyone on deck took two quick steps to the right, then one step to the left, between which each had made a half-step toward the cabin and a half-step toward the terminal. The planking creaked and squealed, leaning back at a twenty-degree angle, complaining rather than accusing, almost bored at this repeated indignity. In retaliation the planks shoved the boat into position for proper docking. By now, equilibrium had been re-established among the passengers and there was the general stir toward the gates. The boat’s engines reversed, sending a heavy shudder through the entire vessel as if the ferry were loath to do what it must do now: touch the Staten Island shore.

The shuddering stopped, the ferry glided silently, obediently, into the rounded slip. The metal claws lowered, making their claim. A sandy-haired man wearing workman’s gloves shoved half the accordion gate back against the rail, then shoved the other half in the opposite direction. The gateway to Staten Island was open. The passengers, neither eager nor reluctant, began the climb across the humped metal gangplanks, no one pushing, no one pausing.

Someone took Dempsey’s hand. It was Johnny, the dog-eared manual gripped in his other hand, held against his thigh, the masculine way of carrying a book. They let themselves be caught up into the orderly throng that was skirting the sides of the terminal building, nosing themselves toward the bus stops with the unhurried collectivity of cows or sheep. (Johnny’s car, a fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Rabbit he’d bought from his brother-in-law, had muffler problems. In Manhattan, this was no special difficulty, but Johnny, as a native of Staten Island, could hardly be expected to pollute the township’s quiet with the explosive chugging of a motor unmuffled. The car was left behind. They would take the bus.)

“You learn anything?” Dempsey asked.

“A forty-point-three-cubic-foot Air Pac tested at three pounds of air pressure will weigh thirty pounds.”

“How fascinating?” She yawned and then laughed.

Today Dempsey would meet Johnny’s family. As the only child of a single mother whose full-time career was playing the horses, she had not all that often wondered what it would have been like to be a part of a family—a real family. She had been more curious than envious, but now she would finally find out.

She and Johnny had agreed not to mention the intended marriage, or Dempsey’s illness. The family, in each instance, would be informed all in good time. And yet, relieved of even these specific concerns, Dempsey must expect some assault on her nerves. His family could despise her. She and Johnny were, after all, living together, unmarried—and Johnny was, to begin with, the baby brother; they could despise her. She could be questioned beyond her patience—her parentage, her past, her religion, her art, how she did her hair. Anything might happen. It might be a disaster for everyone.

And there was, as well, her illness and the not always suppressed concern about its unpredictability. Since her diagnosis, the least gurgle in her intestine, the slightest whistle in her breath, the first hint of bloat, anything at all could convince her that another skirmish had begun or, quite possibly, that the final onslaught was underway. A name forgotten, the sudden realization that there had been a moment for which her memory could not account, the reluctance of a word to surface in her brain—all this had come to announce the arrival of dementia. An unearned weariness, a yeasty thickening in her mouth, the sudden soiling of her underclothes, all were warnings—sometimes blared, sometimes whispered—that the next great battle might already be engaged, ready or not. And today could be the day.

At the moment, there was no gurgle, no whistle, no incipient bloat, and words seemed to be there when she needed them. As a matter of fact, lately she’d been having some better days. But she knew from experience these respites were too good to last. A fact was a fact. But something was always about to happen. And when it did, she must be prepared if not to avoid it, then to accept it with as much good grace as the occasion might allow. If anything related to her illness happened, Johnny’s family could easily learn more about her than had been planned for this initial visit. That would be fine with her. Anything, she decided, would be fine with her. Ahead of them now, on a rise directly behind the terminal, was Borough Hall, a cement-columned red-brick building with sad pretensions to stateliness. Behind that the island rose at a steep pitch and, Dempsey had been told, Johnny’s mother’s house was almost at the top.

“You shouldn’t have! Maury, come look. From Dempsey. You really shouldn’t have. But, oh Patricia, come look. It’s the most gorgeous ever. A treasure. An absolute treasure. Theresa, don’t you want to see?”

Johnny’s mother was holding against her wrist the antique bracelet Dempsey had brought her, a silver rose intricately woven into a braid of stems and leaves. (No thorns.) Dempsey wasn’t sure about the “gorgeous” but she did know that it was a treasure—and had the receipt to prove it. She’d found it—after a lengthy search—in a shop on Canal Street where the owner, one remove from a pawnbroker, claimed to be a dealer in “antique jewelry.” Johnny’s mother was named Rose, and Dempsey had been unable to avoid the obvious.