The Promise

Emory

For four years and nine months, he was the best son in Maine.

It was not difficult. That was what nobody understood, afterward, when they sat in the front rooms of Port Ellis with their cups of tea and said it over to one another, in the low reverent tone of people at a wake: he was so good to her, wasn’t he, he was so good. It was not difficult at all. It only required that he arrange for it to arrive. A man who sets out to be well, and keeps the rule in a notebook, and does not look away, will find in about a month that he has become, to all outward purposes, a well man; and in about a year he will find that no one has asked him a question since the spring.

His mother read the scan on the sixth of November.

He knew the date because she told him, on the eighth, in the kitchen at Fennimore with her coat still on. She had come up from Portland in the afternoon, and sat at the table where the cloth had been, and refused tea, and looked at him across the corner with the particular flat bright composure of a woman about to give a patient bad news. There’s a mass, she said. In the head of the pancreas. It’s about the size of a walnut. Then, very precisely, as if reading it off a card: It’s a neuroendocrine tumor, Em. It is, if you must have one, the better kind of bad. It’s slow. It’s been there some time. It’s possible I’ve had it since the summer.

He remembered that. Since the summer. He had stood with his hand on the back of a chair, and thought of the weight she had lost, and the drag on the left, and the way she’d pressed her back in a dark kitchen with a crowbar in her hand and a syringe in her sleeve. He thought: she went through the cellar with that in her. And he found, to his great surprise, that he was weeping again, for the third time in a week, after eight years of not.

She held him. She said, “There. There. I know.”

It was the only thing about that winter that he never examined. He moved in with her in the first week of December, to the narrow house in Portland with the marigolds withering on the sill, and slept in the spare room, with the door ajar. He drove her to Maine Med at five in the morning in the dark and the sleet. He sat in the corridor outside the theater for eleven hours with a paper cup of coffee that he did not drink, as he had once sat across a road from a hospital garage, and when they wheeled her out, small and gray and furred with tubes, with her mouth drawn and one hand open on the sheet, he walked beside the gurney and kept his fingers on her wrist and counted. Sixty-two. Sixty-eight. Seventy-one. He counted her all the way to the recovery bay.

He fed her. The first week, she could not hold a spoon, and he sat on the edge of the bed with a bowl of broth and a napkin tucked into her collar and fed her, a mouthful at a time, with the whole of his attention, and she let him. She looked at him over the rim of the spoon with her pale hazel eyes in her thin gray face, and she said one night, when the lamp was low, and she had had a little more morphine than she liked: “You know what you’re doing.”

“I’m feeding you.”

“You’re doing it very well.” She swallowed. “You do everything very well. It is the most frightening thing about you, and the finest. Don’t think I don’t see you, Em.”

“I know you do, Mom.”

“It’s why I’ve never been able to leave.”

He wiped her mouth. He didn’t say anything. He thought that it was the truest thing she’d ever said to him, and that she would not have said it if she hadn’t been drugged. And he thought, with a coldness he did not admire: she is the only person alive who does see me. If she dies, there’ll be nobody.

It occurred to him that this was the reason she had given him, a week later, for the promise she had asked of him in the hospital. She wanted him to see a doctor. A woman called Fenn.

* * *

Dr. Marguerite Fenn had an office on the third floor of a brick building on Exchange Street, with tall windows that looked down on the harbor and a green carpet worn in a path between the door and the chair.

She was sixty, small, spare, and grayly elegant, with reading glasses on a chain and a way of sitting very still with her hands folded in her lap, like a woman waiting for a train she knows is late. She asked him in the first hour about his father. He told her. He told it well: the quay, the loon, the dark water, a heart that had stopped at forty-six in the parking lot of Hadley’s Hardware on a wet Tuesday afternoon, with a paper sack of washers on the seat, while his son was doing homework. He gave her the funeral. He gave her the twelve shoulder-pats. He let his voice go thin at the right place and his eyes fill. She listened with her chin lifted, not nodding, and at the end she said, in a voice as dry as a leaf, “That was beautifully told.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean that as an observation. It is also, of course, a criticism.” She took off her glasses. “I’ve been in practice thirty-one years, Emory. It has been a long time since anyone gave me the whole of a story in its proper order, with the weeping in the right place.”

“I’ve told it before.”

“I’m sure. To whom?”

He thought. “My mother.”

“And what did she say?”

“That it wasn’t my fault.”

“And did you believe her?”

“Yes,” said Emory, and heard the beat go through him before it left his mouth, and shut it, and found it shut. He had been practicing for six weeks. He had practiced in the shaving mirror, with a stopwatch, on the cot in the oil room, with a recording of his own voice. He had found the trick. It was not a matter of will; it was a matter of breath. You took the breath earlier, before the question, and let it out into the answer, and there was no place for the gap to go.

She looked at him for a long time.

“Interesting,” she said.

They met on Tuesdays. For four years and nine months, at four in the afternoon, in the room with the tall windows, with the harbor going gray and gold below. He was good at it. He was the best patient she had ever had. He brought her the dreams she wanted, in order, and the memories she wished for. He expressed insight at suitable intervals. He grew his hair a little longer, and let her see him hesitate. He said that he had been very afraid of losing the people he loved, and that he understood now how that fear had made him do things. He spoke of the girl at school. He spoke of the year he’d lost. He did not speak of anyone else.

“There was a woman,” Fenn said once, in the second spring. It was not a question. “You’ve mentioned her, I think, once. You said she left.”

“She lost a baby,” said Emory. “She went away to grieve. My mother took her.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Every day.”

“What would you say to her, if she walked in?”

He looked at the harbor. Out on the gray water a ferry was backing from the quay, with its wake spreading in a long silver V, and a gull riding the rail. He thought of the footage, and of a face turned toward a table with its chin up and its hands flat on the oak. Pip’s right.

“That I’m sorry,” he said. “And that she was right.”

“About what?”

“About me.”

It was the closest he had ever come to it. It frightened him. It frightened him with a clean cold fright like the first breath of a winter morning, because it was not a performance, it had come out of his mouth unplanned, and Marguerite Fenn had heard it. She sat quite still. Her hands did not move in her lap.

“I think,” she said, slowly, “that is the first thing you have said to me in fifteen months that you did not mean me to hear.”

“Is it a good thing?”

“It is a true one. That is not always the same.” She put her glasses on. “I’m going to ask you something, and I’d like you to answer without thinking. Do you want to have a window open?”

“I don’t mind.”

“That isn’t an answer. Do you want the window open? Yes or no.”

He felt the room. The tall glass. The late sun. A thread of salt air in the gap. “No,” he said.

“Thank you. Why not?”

“It’s loud. The harbor.” He stopped. He looked at her. “Why are you asking me?”

“Because you have said okay to me, Emory, forty-one times by my count since we began. And you have said I don’t mind sixteen. And you have said no once, now, to a window.” Her voice was perfectly mild. “I wonder what it is that you do mind. I’d very much like to know.”

He sat looking at her, with his hands loose on his knees, and found that he could not think of a thing to say.

* * *

There were four good years. He was fair about that, afterward. He never said otherwise.

He rejoined the Port Ellis Rescue in the spring, at Ned Pratt’s urgent request, and was made lieutenant in the autumn, and captain at twenty-six when Ned finally retired to a chair on his porch with a blanket and a transistor radio and a standing invitation to all the squad on Sunday afternoons. He ran the drills. He taught the new boys to read a sea. He restored a lobster boat for Cody Pratt’s wedding, a lovely thing in cedar and white oak, with a brass bell, and was best man, and gave a toast that made the entire hall weep. He worked at Tilden’s from seven until three. He gave his Saturdays to the lamp.

That was the thing everyone loved, in the end. The Coast Guard had come in the second year, a gruff pair in blue with a clipboard, and walked round the tower, and the lantern room, and the lens, and stood a long time with their hands on their hips. They’d registered it as a Private Aid to Navigation. They’d issued a number. It was lit at dusk now, legally, every night of the year, by a keeper in a gray sweater who climbed the stair at five with a can of oil and a polishing cloth, and came down at six; and in the summers, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the Friends of Fennimore Light brought the tourists in. He took them up himself. He told them about the lens, and the mercury bath, and the French glassmakers of eighteen seventy, and the keeper who had gone out in a blizzard to save the Annie Rose and was found, in the spring, leaning against the rail with his hand still on the lamp. The women dabbed their eyes. A man from Ohio offered him a job.

There was a woman called Jo. She was a vet at the Rockland clinic, tall, freckled, abrupt, with a laugh like a dropped tray, and he was with her for seven months in the third year. He was, by every account, perfect. He remembered her mother’s name. He knew how she took her coffee on a Tuesday and on a Saturday. He found a lost glove of hers under a bench in the park and returned it the next morning, washed, and she cried. She left in October, standing on the porch of the house with her key in her hand. She laid it on the rail. She said, I can’t explain it, Em. It’s like being loved by the weather.

He had said, Okay.

He had wanted to say, what does that mean? He’d wanted, quite badly, to ask. But he had made a rule, long ago, about asking, and he stood on the porch with his hands at his sides and watched her taillights go down the long gray lane to the gate, and thought that she was not wrong.

He read, at night.

It was a thing he allowed himself. It was not hunting. He was very clear on that. Hunting is for people who are afraid of losing the animal, the notebook said, and he was not afraid; he was waiting; and a man may surely read. He began in the first winter, in the oil room, with the Lund-Berg dictionary and a stack of grammars from the Rockland library, and a paperback Anders Skau that he had bought in a shop in Oslo by mail. Den druknede timen. He had read the pages of her draft so often that he could have said them with his eyes closed; it was a different thing to read the Norwegian. It came slowly, at first, a word at a time, like feeling for steps in the dark. And then, in the second spring, without warning, it opened. He turned a page at two in the morning, under the green lamp, with a pencil in his teeth, and found that he was not translating. He was simply reading. The sentences ran under him like a floor.

He read all of Skau. He read the Swedes. He read twelve Norwegian thrillers a year, in a row on the plank shelf, in their original paper covers, and with each of them he thought of a woman at a desk with her feet drawn up under her, saying you can’t help it, everyone leaves fingerprints. He did not read the translations. He had made that rule too. He did not walk into a bookshop and look at the new fiction table. He did not type her name. For four years, with a cold exact discipline that cost him a great deal, he did not once lift a finger to find her. He read in the language of the place she had gone, and kept the door shut, and waited for it to open of its own accord.

Arrange for it to arrive.

On the first of April, every year, his mother drove off alone for the day.

She said that it was a ritual. She said it lightly, over breakfast, in her apron, with her hand on the teapot. My spring ritual. I go and look at the water. She would be gone from nine until dusk. And he would see her, when she came in, with her cheeks stung pink by the wind, and a small closed look in her face, like a woman who has been to a funeral and a wedding in the same day.

He never followed her.

He knew perfectly well that he could have. It would have taken him no more than a minute. He sat in the kitchen on the first of April, year after year, with a mug of tea going cold and a Norwegian crime novel open on the table, and the clock on the wall ticking toward dusk, and did not follow her. It was his great work. It was the single most difficult thing he had ever done. He was proud of it with a ferocity that surprised him. Look, he told the notebook, in capitals. I kept my word.

* * *

She was well for three years and a half.

They were the best of his life, he sometimes thought. She went back to the clinic. She walked in the Eastern Cemetery with a dog from the shelter, a three-legged mongrel she named Hester, to the amusement of nobody. She took up the cello at forty-nine and was dreadful. In the evenings she sat at the kitchen table with her feet in his lap and a glass of the Scotch she never drank, and told him stories of Desmond: the time he rowed to Monhegan on a bet, the time he rewired the church. And Emory sat with his hands on her ankles, in the lamplight, and listened, and thought, she’s here. She’s still here.

It came back in the March of the fourth year, in the liver, with the daffodils.

She told him herself. She stood at the sink with her back to him and said it in the voice she used for the dying, and he put down the pan and went across the kitchen and put his arms round her from behind. She was so thin. He could feel the whole architecture of her through the cardigan, the ladder of the ribs, the small hard knobs of the spine. She said, “It isn’t going to be quick, I’m afraid. But it won’t be very long.” He said, “Okay.” She said, “Don’t.” He said, “I’m sorry.” She turned in his arms. “Say it again. The other way.”

“I love you.”

“Yes,” said Pip. “That’s the one.”

She stopped treatment on the first of June. She sat him down at the table and explained it to him as to a student, drawing a little graph on the back of an envelope, with a pencil, in her upright hand: the likelihood, the burden, the months. He listened. He did not argue. She said, “I’d like to be at home,” and he said, “Of course,” and she said, “And I’d like it to be you,” and he said, “Of course.” They moved her bed down into the front room, where the light came in all day through the marigolds, and he cleared his schedule at the yard, and the squad took his duty without a murmur. Mrs. Dunphy sent a casserole. Ned Pratt drove in from Port Ellis every Sunday with a card and a bag of apples, and sat beside the bed in his Sunday suit with his cap on his knee, saying nothing, with his eyes full.

She was dying by August.

She did it as she did everything. She was dry about it, and orderly, and bright. She made a list of the people to be informed. She made a list of the hymns, which were to be sung badly and few. She corrected his handling of the morphine pump with an air of frank professional despair. And on the last Sunday in August, at four in the afternoon, with the sun lying in a long gold slab across the quilt, she asked him to bring her the book that he’d been reading.

“Which?”

“The one you read in the chair. The Norwegian one. You think I don’t see.”

He gave it to her. It was the Skau. Den druknede timen, in its battered paper cover, with a pencil mark in the margin of page ninety-one. She held it in both hands, in her thin yellow fingers, and looked at the cover for some time.

“Is it good?”

“It’s about a mother.”

“I know what it’s about.” She turned it over. “Read me a bit.”

He looked at her. She lay on the pillow, small, shrunken, her cheekbones like a bird’s, the bright hazel eyes still fixed on his face with a clear unwavering attention that made him want to look away. He didn’t. He opened it at random. He read a paragraph, in Norwegian, in a low even voice, about a woman at a window in the rain who has not slept, and when he had done she closed her eyes.

“Your accent is excellent,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“I mean that it’s very good. It’s as though you’d been born there.”

“I like the sound.”

“Yes. I imagine you do.” She was silent for a minute. The clock ticked. A fly went up and down the window. “Em. I need to ask you for something. I want you to understand that I’m asking as your mother, and as the only person who ever told you no, and I’d like you to hear every word before you answer.”

“Mom —”

“Let them go.”

The room went entirely still.

He heard it. He did not move. He sat on the edge of the bed with the book in his lap and his hands round the paper cover, and he heard it as one hears the one wrong note in a long piece of music, so clearly that he could have drawn it. Them.

She heard it herself. He saw her hear it. Her eyes came open, and in the thin yellow face something moved, like a shadow across a field. “Her,” she said. “I mean — let her go. Cor. I meant —”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t. I’m a little muddled, I’ve had —”

“Mom. It’s all right.”

“No.” She put out a hand, groping, and he took it. It was dry and light as a leaf. “No, I did it. You heard. You heard me say it. I’m not going to take it back, I haven’t the strength, and anyway you’d know.” She smiled, faintly, with a kind of exhausted wonder. “Twenty-eight years of lying to you, and I can’t do it for five minutes at the end. It’s very funny, really.”

“What are you asking me?”

“That you let them be. Em. Please. There’s nothing for you to find. I want you to know that. There isn’t a single thing at the end of it that you’d want.” Her fingers tightened. “It would cost them everything. Everything they’ve made. And you would stand in the middle of it, in the wreck, with your hands full of it, and be so sorry. I know you. You’d be so sorry. You’d say it to them for the rest of your life, and it wouldn’t help.”

“What have they made?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“You’ve told me there’s a they.”

“Yes. I’ve done that. I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes again. “I’ve done that, and it’s the last thing I’m going to do, and I’m not going to say another word. I’m going to lie here and ask you for a promise, and then I’m going to die.”

He looked at her.

He looked at her for a long time, in the long gold light, with the dust turning in it and the fly on the glass, and the sound of the sea coming faintly through the open window from a mile away. He thought of a kitchen floor. He thought of a needle, and a voice saying come here, my darling, and a lamp going round and round and round through the whole of a long night. He thought of a check on a kitchen table in Portland, and a girl behind a shut door.

He thought of the first sentence in the first notebook, which he’d written at fifteen, the night after the funeral, in a hand that was still a child’s: I WILL NEVER AGAIN BE THE ONE WHO WAS NOT THERE.

“I promise,” said Emory.

It was out before he had decided. And it went through the room like a dropped plate.

There was a gap in it. He felt it. A hair’s breadth. A pause before promise, the old one, the small dark door in the middle of the sentence, the hitch of a mouth checking its papers. He had spent four years and nine months closing it; he’d closed it for Fenn, for Ned, for the Coast Guard, for the woman with the freckles; and when he reached for it now, in the sun, with her hand in his, he found that his fingers would not close.

He did not try again. He let it stand.

His mother opened her eyes.

She was looking at him with such a tenderness that he could not bear it. She did not look angry. She didn’t look afraid. She looked as one looks at a thing one has made, a long time ago, in a cold room, out of the best that one had, and found, on the last evening, to be exactly what it was.

“There it is,” said Pip softly. “Thank you for not hiding it.”

“Mom —”

“No, that’s right. That’s better. I’d sooner go knowing.” She smiled. “I’d sooner have the truth, with the hole in it, than a lie I couldn’t see. It’s what I’d have done. I spent my life wanting you to be honest, and the very last thing you do is tell me you’re not going to keep your word, and you don’t hide it from me.” Her breath caught. “It’s the best thing you’ve ever done. It’s a terrible thing and it’s the best. I’m so proud of you, Em. I’m so ashamed. You’re the best thing I ever made, and the worst, and I loved you every minute. Both.”

She was crying. So was he. They sat in the evening light on a narrow hospital bed in the front room of a house in Portland, in a smell of marigolds and morphine and the sea, with a Norwegian paperback face down on the quilt between them, and wept, and held on.

* * *

She died at ten past four on the morning of the thirty-first.

He was with her. He had not slept for three days. He sat on the edge of the bed in the gray before dawn with the window open and the lamp turned low and her hand in both of his, and he watched her breathe. She was past speaking. She’d been past it since Thursday. She lay with her eyes half closed and her mouth a little open, and her breath came and went, shallow, slow, with the long dreadful pauses of the dying.

He counted. He couldn’t help it. He had counted her pulse on a gurney and her steps on a stair and her breaths in the dark. He counted them as he’d counted everything in his life, to hold it, to keep it, to know that it was still there.

One. Two. Three. Four.

She had said it to him as a child. In the attic in Allston, with the rain on the skylight and a dark thing at the foot of the bed, she had sat down on the edge of the quilt in her nightshirt and taken his hand, and said, Em. Look at me. We’re going to breathe. Four, and then a big one. And they had. And the thing at the foot of the bed had gone.

Four, he thought. And then —

The big one did not come.

He sat and waited. He sat with her cooling hand in his, and the gray light coming up the wall, and a bird beginning in the garden, and he waited for it with his whole body, for ten minutes, for twenty, as he had waited at the end of a lane. It did not come. It did not come, and there was a silence in the room that had not been there before, enormous, level, like the surface of a sea after a storm.

He put his face down on her hand.

And he wept for his mother, who was dead, and who had known what he was, and had loved him anyway, and had put her hands round him on a kitchen floor in a gale and done the one thing she could. He wept as a boy weeps, without sound, with his whole back. And at the bottom of it, like a stone in a well, quite cold, quite clear, in a voice that was nobody’s, he heard himself say:

Now.

He sat up.

He didn’t want to. He was ashamed of it. He wiped his face with his sleeve, and laid his mother’s hand on the quilt, and sat looking at it in the dawn with an expression that nobody saw. Then, very slowly, as a man lifts something heavy that he has put down a long time ago and thought he would never again be asked to carry, he turned and picked up the Norwegian book from the foot of the bed.

I promise, he’d said.

It had a hole in it. She had seen the hole. She had been, in her last act on earth, scrupulously fair, and had not asked him to fill it.

He opened the book to page ninety-one.