Jane Smiley - Golden Age

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THE NEXT DAY, when Frank went with Andy to the hospital, they consulted first with Dr. Marcus, who said that he thought the procedure had gone well, a tiny bit more complicated than he’d expected, but almost every surgery was; he’d learned to live with that. He felt sure that they’d find Arthur in good condition in a day or two. Andy said, “What are the possible complications?”

“Well, we do look for signs that the wound is not closing properly. Should there be any hemorrhaging, that of course is very dangerous, given the location of the surgery.”

As he said this, Frank could feel the blood pounding in his own carotid artery, the right one. He didn’t even have to touch it.

“And there is another possibility that perhaps Mr. Manning could be vulnerable to, given his slenderness, and that is any sort of hematoma that might cause a compression of the trachea. But the staff here is very attentive, and I’m sure everything will progress without a hitch.”

It was as if the doctor had laid out the scenario of the next few days. There was a hemorrhage, and it did happen late at night, and Arthur did lose a lot of blood — he was asleep, and the night nurse discovered it only when she touched what might be a shadow on the pillowcase and the sheet and felt moisture. At that point, she turned on the light and saw that Arthur’s shoulder and hair were red, too. Back into surgery. The next morning, Debbie arrived, beside herself with the suspicion, Frank thought, that every doctor in New Jersey was a quack and every nurse an idiot, and there were no words for Frank and Andy that expressed Debbie’s fury at having all of this kept from her.

It was Arthur who realized, four days after the second surgery, that he was breathless, that he was, in fact, starting to pass out, that he only had time to put his fingers to his neck and realize that it was swollen and hot. He then aimed his hand in the general direction of the emergency button. The hematoma required a third surgery, and the doctor let slip to Frank that maybe 6 percent of patients who underwent the carotid endarterectomy did not survive, and then, of course, if there was that much plaque in the carotid artery, how much was there elsewhere? But that was another question that could be addressed later.

And so Arthur was in the hospital for two weeks, and when he was discharged, he and Debbie stayed with Frank and Andy for two more weeks (Debbie called Hugh about the children three times a day). When they left, it was well past the anniversary of Lillian’s death, something that, if anyone noticed, they did not mention, and, Frank thought, maybe that was a good thing.

Andy and Frank slept for three days to get over the stress of the visit. Then Andy noticed that Frank’s revelations (or reminiscences, Frank would call them) continued at a relaxed but steady pace. Frank, she thought, would not have admitted that Arthur’s medical problems had confronted him with mortality. But it was not death that came over him, it was life, his life, and, for whatever reason, he could not resist talking about it. There was that first train trip to Chicago—’36. Maybe the passengers had been in danger of freezing to death, but what Frank most clearly remembered was seeing his first black person, the bartender. Andy had had a similar experience when her parents took the children to Minneapolis; she was six. A black woman was walking down Hennepin in the swirling snow. Her mother jerked her arm and told her to stop staring. Were their parents racist? Andy and Frank agreed, how were they to know? Race was one of the things no one had ever talked about, at least in Denby, at least in Decorah.

Andy wondered if maybe this summer they should go back to Europe for the third time, and see something more out of the way — Crete, Tenerife, Corsica. Frank mentioned that he had been to Corsica, and before he said another word, Andy felt a tunnel-like space opening in her brain. He had told her about North Africa, and Sicily, about Anzio and Monte Cassino. When their friends talked about Normandy, he talked about landing at Saint-Tropez (he was teased for that). She had listened silently to arguments about Eisenhower and Devers, as if any of these former corporals, privates, and sergeants now shooting off their mouths had valid opinions. But in Corsica, there was peace, there was beauty, there was leisure. And, yes, there was a girl, and when Frank’s voice deepened as he talked about her, how she had called him “Errol Flynn,” Andy knew that whatever had happened there was a cherished and much-remembered experience, unmentioned until now. She said, “You fell asleep? That was all?”

“Maybe that was what I needed at the time. She massaged my feet. She had all of my money in her hand, and she only took some of it.”

He did not say that he and the girl had had intercourse, but Andy understood that they had, which reminded her of that last fall semester in college; when Frank was telling her — Hildy, as she was then called — that he loved her, he was doing something with her friend Eunice that could not be called rape, because it was mutually sought, but was hateful and violent. She knew that Frank thought that she knew nothing about that, and it was on the tip of her tongue to repay him for Corsica by telling him that Eunice had died in 1989 from complications of emphysema — after being on a ventilator for three years. But she didn’t say anything, and then she woke up in the night; she remembered standing in the entrance of the Memorial Union, just beneath the wall of engraved names of Iowa State heroes of the First World War, blubbering about the German invasion of Norway, and Frank leaning toward her with such kindness and strength. The other students were passing and staring, and Frank hid her face against his shoulder so she wouldn’t see them, and they wouldn’t see her, a loving thing to do. Yes, he had run away to the war weeks afterward, but she had forgiven that long ago. Maybe, she thought, it had taken Frank these many years to know that love and sex could intersect.

One night, when they were laughing at the idea that there could be a street anywhere, even in Chicago, called “Wacker,” Andy said, “You know, that day, I saw you. I followed you for ten minutes. I was scared to get near you. You looked so old and hardened. My plan was, if you recognized me, I would say, ‘Hi, I’m Hildy, do you remember me?’ But I thought you might not recognize me, so I thought, if I introduced myself as Andy, we could start from the beginning. I would say that I’d gone to Iowa and my last name was Peterson.”

“I didn’t recognize you,” said Frank.

“No, you didn’t right at first, I saw it in your face, so I started in on my plan, but then you did, so I made up that story about changing my name. The next day, I had to tell everyone at the office and write my parents. I was Hildy until that moment.”

Andy knew that it would seem unbelievable to her children, especially Janet and Loretta and Ivy, that she and Frank had not shared these memories before, and it was not only, she saw now, that ever since she’d known him she, and perhaps he, had been afraid of what might be said — it was also that they had no model. One night she said to him, “Do you remember your parents talking about themselves to each other?”

“My father fell in the well out by the barn and didn’t tell Mama for ten years or something like that. When Cousin Berta went to the insane asylum, no one said a word about it. She was at home one day and not there the next day. I think Joe asked where she was, and Mama said, ‘She had to go up to Independence.’ I think I thought she had moved somewhere to be on her own.”

Andy said, “One time, my mother was really upset with my father for having the apple trees in the backyard cut down without telling her. She went out and drove the car around town for two hours rather than speak to him about it.”