from other women in the complex dwindled to nothing within a year. Since a housekeeper-cook came every afternoon to clean and prepare dinner for seven-thirty, she didn’t change sheets, dust books, scrub a bathroom, learn new cooking skills. Even Saturdays were rigidly scheduled, at least the mornings were. David jogged on Saturday morning; she took him to the Amazon Trail at eight-thirty and picked him up again exactly one and a half hours later.
They seldom entertained or accepted invitations, although they did go to an occasional concert or play, and once or twice a month they had dinner with his mother.
He could be tender, and even passionate, she also wrote in the journal. His passion during sex had excited her to an extreme. It was the passion and abandon of stories, of dreams, and she thought that was why she had been determined at first to make it work. She had felt certain that that passionate other would come to the surface all the time, that he would unfreeze, relax, that his rigidity was caused by fear that she would desert him the way he said Lorraine, his ex-wife, had done. After the second year she had abandoned that hope. Not Jekyll and Hyde, but rather Don Juan in bed and Cotton Mather out of bed. Medicine was his god, the operating room his church, the scalpel his scepter.
What she could do, she had decided, was spend time at the clinic, where she felt comfortable and relaxed, and where the only friends she had in Eugene could be found. In many ways being a volunteer was better than working full-time at a salary that barely paid subsistence wages. She had told Naomi years ago that she planned to work and save for a number of years, and then take time off, travel, see New York, Paris…. Working full-time, she had been able to save nothing.
Gradually she had come to realize that she was changing, not David. She was the indentured servant, she thought, a bonded servant whose reward would come after serving for a certain number of years.
She would be thirty-two when the ten years were up; she would still be young. Think of it as working and putting money aside to fulfill dreams later, or like being imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit, she told herself. You can endure anything for a limited time, if you know when the end will be. She endured and followed his schedule and rarely was late, and she counted the months ahead, the months already passed. She kept a faithful record of her days, which were blameless, virtuous, along with his deeds and words and her accommodation.
And when her servitude ended, she reminded herself now and then, she would make his first wife look like a piker.
3
Three afternoons a week Erica walked to the clinic to read to the patients. Her audience changed from week to week, sometimes from day to day, but those who attended were almost excessively grateful.
Since she arrived so late in the afternoon, she had reflected during the first week, her chances of meeting many people were limited. Accordingly, she began to get there by four-thirty, sometimes earlier. She had met Dr. Boardman, a tall craggy man, with prominent bones, big hands and a kindly, somewhat abstracted manner that suggested he was paying little attention to those around him. A mistake, she had come to realize. He and Naomi were parents to the clinic and he was looked on as a mentor, a guru or confessor, to whom people—staff, as well as patients—took their problems, whether personal or medical. She had met people in the offices, nurses, everyone in the kitchen, a number of volunteers. She saw Annie now and then, but never to talk to her. Although she was apparently there every day, Annie always left at just about the same time that Erica arrived.
Erica made it a point to stop by the reception desk to chat with Bernie Zuckerman often. Bernie was a stout woman, dimply and cheerful, in her forties. Bernie was always the first to know anything happening at the facility, and although she might have been able to keep secrets, it had not yet been demonstrated. Most people at the clinic visited with her habitually, and that was where Erica had met the ones she knew. But she had not met many of the therapists yet. They were usually gone by the time Erica finished reading.
That day, the first of August, Erica stopped at the kitchen, as she always did, to get a glass of ice water and chat a moment with Stephanie Waters. When Bernie introduced her as the cook, Stephanie had said indignantly, “I am not a cook. I am a nutritionist.” She was fifty-plus, stately, with burnished copper-colored hair, a figure that was without a curve from shoulders to hips, and she was a dictator in the kitchen.
After leaving the kitchen, while passing a therapy room, Erica heard Darren’s low voice from beyond the door that was ajar.
“See, it’s like this. You already learned all this stuff once, and your brain said, that’s it, done. Then whap, the part of the brain that knows how you walk got zonked right out of business. We’re going to teach some other part to take over its job. Most of your brain, everyone’s brain, is just sitting there not doing a thing until there’s some learning to do and then lights go on all over the place. Let’s watch the video now. See that little fellow crawling around? He’s decided it’s time to get up and walk. That’s hard-wired in, to get up and walk, only the brain doesn’t know yet exactly how legs and feet work, or just where they are, or how to keep balance. Watch. There he goes…. Whoops. Wrong move.”
Erica hardly dared to breathe, listening. Darren’s voice was deep and low, not laughing, but amused and easy.
“Up again, try again…Whoops, down again. He’s starting to get frustrated. Don’t blame the little guy. That’s hard work he’s doing, and he keeps falling down. Whoops. Okay, he’s making progress. He’s learned not to let go of the chair, I see. That’s good…Too bad, down but not out…Uh-oh. A temper tantrum. Back to crawling…And up again. He can’t help it, he has to get up and learn to walk….”
Darren laughed, and after a brief pause a child laughed, too. “He’s got quite a temper, doesn’t he?” Darren said. “And a great throwing arm. Up again. What’s happening is that his brain is learning all the things that don’t work, and trying other things. Ah, he let go of the chair. One, two, three…and down he goes….”
Reluctantly Erica moved on. Bernie had said that Darren had magic in his hands; he knew exactly what the patients needed by feeling them. And magic in his voice, Erica thought, as she made her way to the broad staircase to the second-floor lounge, appreciating the many lessons Darren was giving that child: he was going to work hard; his brain could be reeducated; he had to learn to walk all over again; frustration and even a show of temper would be acceptable. And the most important lesson: he was going to walk again. Darren was a superb teacher, she decided.
In the Boardman residence that afternoon Naomi and Greg Boardman were having a drink with Thomas Kelso. Every week or so he dropped in for a chat, for a drink, just to poke his big nose in, he sometimes said. He was eighty-two, and his nose was indeed very large. It seemed that everything about him had become more and more shrunken except his nose. It was hard to imagine a more wrinkled face and he was stooped and inches shorter than he had been years ago. He had no hair left and wore a yachting cap indoors and out, year round.
He sipped wine and nodded. It was a good claret. “Joyce isn’t going to make it,” he said. “David will agree tomorrow to pull the plug. No point in his pretending otherwise.”
David McIvey’s mother had suffered a massive stroke a week before and had drifted in and out of a coma for several days, then she didn’t come out of it.
“I’m so sorry, Thomas,” Naomi said softly.
“There are worse ways to go,” he said.
She suspected he was thinking of his wife, trapped in the ever worsening dementia of Alzheimer’s.
“What’s going to happen,” Thomas said, “is that David’s going to push to change our charter as soon as he has Joyce’s shares. Next month, six weeks. He won’t wait long.”
“If we lose the nonprofit status,” Greg said after a moment, “we’ll lose the volunteers and there isn’t enough money to pay new staff for the work they do. Christ, we don’t pay the staff we have what they could earn anywhere else. They’ll move on and we’ll have to drop half our patients.”
“I