“Why don’t you let that machine of yours pick up?” Poppy asked Rebecca.
A reasonable enough question. She didn’t tell him that she kept thinking each call might be Will Allenby.
The evening seemed to be the time for wrong numbers. Three different people phoned by mistake, one of them several times in succession — a Slavic-sounding woman who wanted to argue the issue. “Wrong number! No! This is not wrong number! I telephone my daughter! Bring her on!”
At nine o’clock, Rebecca went off to bed with one of her Robert E. Lee books. It began with Lee’s genealogy, which she found dull. She made herself continue, though. The thought came to her (on a whole separate track in her brain, while the first track continued cataloguing Lee’s great-grandparents) that over the years, she had gradually given up reading anything difficult. Even a newspaper article, the briefest little piece: if the first line didn’t grab her, she turned the page. It was something like her attitude toward exercise. Whenever she grew the least bit tired or out of breath, she quit. “I figure my body’s trying to tell me something,” she would say jokingly to Patch. (For invariably, it was Patch who urged her into these fitness efforts.) “If it’s sending me such a clear message, how can I ignore it?”
When Lee’s great-grandparents gave way to his grandparents, she put down her book and phoned Zeb. “What are you doing?” she asked when he answered.
“I’m reading about the harmful effects of night-lights.”
“Night-lights!”
“Evidently, children who’ve been raised with night-lights in their rooms end up having vision problems. Their eyes don’t get enough rest, is the hypothesis.”
“Or maybe,” Rebecca said, “the children didn’t see well to begin with, and there’s some biological connection between fear of the dark and bad eyesight; ever thought of that?”
“Hmm.”
“Maybe their bad eyesight caused their fear of the dark. The chair that looks like a monster, for instance.”
“This subject appears to have really gripped your imagination,” Zeb told her.
“Yes, well…”
She glanced at her clock radio. It was almost 10 p.m. Anybody phoning this late would think, Who can she be talking to?
She must be so popular! he would think.
“I’ve been making some resolutions,” she told Zeb. “From now on, I’m reading two books a week, serious books that I have to work at. Also, I’m joining a gym. I plan to get into shape, for once.”
“Now, what would you want to do that for? You’re fine the way you are.”
“No, I’m not! I’m a slug. You of all people, a doctor… Or maybe I should take up jogging. That would be less expensive. Except jogging’s affected by weather. Half the time the weather would be too hot, or it would be raining. I would feel so conspicuous, jogging with an umbrella.”
“Rebecca. Joggers don’t carry umbrellas.”
“How do they stay dry, then?” she asked him. But she was just being silly now, trying to get him to laugh.
After they said goodbye, she instantly sobered. The torn feeling seemed to have grown more pronounced, spreading its ragged edges deep inside her. She sat upright against her pillows and fixed her gaze on the phone. But no one else called.
* * *
The time that was finally settled on for the baby-welcoming was Labor Day. Another picnic lunch on the North Fork River, was the plan, except that Hurricane Dennis moved through the area over the weekend and they changed it to an indoor event.
The general theme turned out to be medical emergencies. First Joey was stung by a bee that had somehow found its way into the front parlor, and he had to be rushed off for a shot because he was allergic. Min Foo and Hakim, of course, were the ones who took him, along with the guest of honor since Min Foo was breast-feeding. This made the whole occasion sort of pointless. (Although still the Open Arms was a seething mass of Davitches, quarreling and laughing and shouting above the racket, children chasing each other around the dining-room table, Biddy pressing food on people, Troy and Jeep exchanging hair-raising childbirth stories.) Then Patch’s youngest two got into some kind of shoving match — not a very serious one, but Merrie bruised her crazy bone and had to be carried off, howling, to the kitchen for ice. “It wasn’t my fault,” Danny said. “She’s the one who was acting so damn piggish.”
Rebecca tried to grow taller. “I beg your pardon,” she said.
Danny, raising his voice, said, “It wasn’t my fault; she’s the one who was acting so damn piggish!”
Rebecca briefly closed her eyes. She opened them to find Poppy standing in front of her, swaying slightly. “Beck,” he said, “I don’t feel so good.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got this pain.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Here,” he said, and he clutched a handful of his shirtfront.
His face, she saw now, was a grayish white. All his features seemed to have sharpened. “Sit down,” she told him. “Zeb? Where’s Zeb? Somebody get Zeb! Hurry!”
She was leading Poppy toward the sofa as she spoke, half supporting him, noticing how alarmingly lightweight he was. She thought that he was trembling; then she thought it might be she who was trembling. He, in fact, seemed curiously calm, and made a point of positioning his cane just so along the inside edge of the sofa before he lay down. He laced his fingers across his diaphragm and closed his eyes. Rebecca said, “Zeb?”
“Zeb went with Joey and them,” a child offered.
“He did?”
“In case Joey needed first aid on the way.”
“Call an ambulance,” Rebecca ordered. “Poppy? Is the pain, let’s see, radiating down your left arm?”
He thought it over. “It could be,” he said.
“Somebody call an ambulance!”
Then there was the question of who would go along. Half a dozen people offered, including Danny, who wanted to see what an ambulance ride was like, and Alice Farmer, who felt that Poppy needed her prayers. “Beck would be enough,” Poppy said with his eyes still closed. “I don’t believe I care for a lot of clucking and wailing.” His lids were like bits of waxed paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out.
Rebecca rushed off for her purse and Poppy’s Medicare card. His room, with its smell of cough drops and stale clothing, the bedspread drawn clumsily over the pillow, seemed emptier than was natural. She snatched his billfold from the bureau and hurried downstairs.
Two ambulance men were already loading Poppy onto a stretcher. They had arrived without sirens, or maybe she just hadn’t heard them over the hubbub. (Everyone seemed to be issuing orders, and a couple of children were crying.) “What’s the matter with him?” she asked the men. “Is he going to be all right?” They brushed past her with the stretcher and she trotted close behind, clasping Poppy’s frail ankle beneath the blanket until they reached the front door and she had to let go. Luckily it wasn’t raining at the moment, although the sidewalks were wet and everyone had to step carefully.
Inside the ambulance, which was crammed with a reassuring array of dials and gauges and stainless steel machinery, Rebecca sat on a little seat beside the stretcher and took hold of Poppy’s ankle again — the only part of him not hooked up to wires in some way. This time they turned on the sirens. The driver spoke into a sort of intercom while he drove, relaying Poppy’s name, age, and Social Security number as Rebecca supplied them, and the other man monitored Poppy. “Is this a heart attack?” Rebecca asked, and the man said, “Too soon to tell.”
Poppy said, “But I haven’t had my hundredth-birthday party yet!”
“Oh, Poppy,” she said. “You’ll have your party! I promise.”