The New Yorker Stories

Sigrid was wearing the gray sweater, the necklace with the cross. Her son had blown apart her world. And Keller was not going to be any help: he would not even consider trying to help her put it together again. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men . . . even Robert Penn Warren couldn’t put Sigrid together again.

Keller had tried that before: good intentions; good suggestions; and his wife had screamed that whatever she did, it was never enough, never enough, well, maybe it would be enough if she showed him what strength she possessed—what strength he hadn’t depleted with his sarcasm and his comic asides and his endless equivocating—by throwing the lamp on the floor, his typewriter against the wall (the dent was still there), the TV out the window. These thoughts were explained to him later, because he had not been home when she exhibited her significant strength. The squirrels had eaten every bulb. There was not going to be one tulip that would bloom that spring. He suspected otherwise—of course the squirrels had not dug up every bulb—but she was in no state of mind to argue with. Besides, there were rules, and his role in the marriage was not to be moderate, it was to be provocative. His daughter had said so.

And there she was, his daughter, rushing to his side, accompanied by a nurse: the same person who had once been shown to him swaddled in a pink blanket, now grown almost as tall as he, her face wrinkled then, her face wrinkled now.

“Don’t squint,” he said. “Put your glasses on. You’ll still be pretty.”

He stood quickly to show her he was fine, which made the nurse and a doctor who rushed to his side very angry. He said, “I don’t have health insurance. I demand to be discharged. The gun got discharged, so it’s only fair that I be discharged also.”

The nurse said something he couldn’t hear. The effort of standing had left him light-headed. Across the room, Sigrid appeared in duplicate and went out of focus. Lynn was negating what he’d just said, informing everyone in a strident voice that of course he had health insurance. The doctor had quite firmly moved him back to his gurney, and now many hands were buckling straps over his chest and legs.

“Mr. Keller,” the nurse said, “you lost quite a bit of blood before you got here, and we need you to lie down.”

“As opposed to up?” he said.

The doctor, who was walking away, turned. “Keller,” he said, “this isn’t ER, where we’d do anything for you, and the nurse isn’t your straight man.”

“Clearly not,” he said quickly. “She’s a woman, we assume.”

The doctor’s expression did not change. “I knew a wiseass like you in med school,” he said. “He couldn’t do the work, so he developed a comedy routine and made a big joke of flunking out. In the end, I became a doctor and he’s still talking to himself.” He walked away.

Keller was ready with a quick retort, heard it inside his head, but his lips couldn’t form the words. What his nearest and dearest had always wished for was now coming true: his terrible talent with words was for the moment suspended. Truly, he was too tired to speak.

The phrase nearest and dearest carried him back in time and reminded him of the deer. The deer that had disappeared in the Hollywood Hills. His own guardian angel, appropriately enough a little mangy, with hooves rooting it to the ground, instead of gossamer wings to carry it aloft. And his eyes closed.

When he opened them, Keller saw that his daughter was looking down at him, and nodding slowly, a tentative smile quivering like a parenthesis at the sides of her mouth, a parenthesis he thought might contain the information that, yes, once he had been able to reassure her easily, as she, in believing, had reassured him.

In appreciation, he attempted his best Jack Nicholson smile.

Find and Replace

True story: my father died in a hospice on Christmas Day, while a clown dressed in big black boots and a beard was down the hall doing his clown-as-Santa act for the amusement of a man my father had befriended, who was dying of ALS. I wasn’t there; I was in Paris to report on how traveling art was being uncrated—a job I got through my cousin Jasper, who works for a New York City ad agency more enchanted with consultants than Julia Child is with chickens. For years, Jasper’s sending work my way has allowed me to keep going while I write the Great American I Won’t Say Its Name.

I’m superstitious. For example, I thought that even though my father was doing well, the minute I left the country he would die. Which he did.

On a globally warmed July day, I flew into Fort Myers and picked up a rental car and set off for my mother’s to observe (her terminology) the occasion of my father’s death, six months after the event. It was actually seven months later, but because I was in Toronto checking out sites for an HBO movie, and there was no way I could make it on June 25, my mother thought the most respectful thing to do would be to wait until the same day, one month later. I don’t ask my mother a lot of questions; when I can, I simply try to keep the peace by doing what she asks. As mothers go, she’s not demanding. Most requests are simple and have to do with her notions of propriety, which often center on the writing of notes. I have friends who are so worried about their parents that they see them every weekend, I have friends who phone home every day, friends who cut their parents’ lawn because no one can be found to do it. With my mother, it’s more a question of: Will I please send Mrs. Fawnes a condolence card because of her dog’s death, or, Will I be so kind as to call a florist near me in New York and ask for an arrangement to be delivered on the birthday of a friend of my mother’s, because ordering flowers when a person isn’t familiar with the florist can be a disastrous experience. I don’t buy flowers, even from Korean markets, but I asked around, and apparently the bouquet that arrived at the friend’s door was a great success.

My mother has a million friends. She keeps the greeting-card industry in business. She would probably send greetings on Groundhog Day, if the cards existed. Also, no one ever seems to disappear from her life (with the notable exception of my father). She still exchanges notes with a maid who cleaned her room at the Swift House Inn fifteen years ago—and my parents were only there for the weekend.

I know I should be grateful that she is such a friendly person. Many of my friends bemoan the fact that their parents get into altercations with everybody, or that they won’t socialize at all.

So: I flew from New York to Fort Myers, took the shuttle to the rental-car place, got in the car and was gratified that the air-conditioning started to blow the second I turned on the ignition, and leaned back, closed my eyes, and counted backward, in French, from thirty, in order to unwind before I began to drive. I then put on loud music, adjusted the bass, and set off, feeling around on the steering wheel to see if there was cruise control, because if I got one more ticket my insurance was going to be canceled. Or maybe I could get my mother to write a nice note pleading my case.