I say nothing, just stare back at him. If “this President” fears death it’s because he knows the Fike Birdsongs of the world are gunning for him. I once saw Fike stepping out of the Vietnamese massage establishment out on Route 1—a flat-roofed, windowless, cinder-block bunker — formerly a Rusty Jones — with its lighted sign-on-wheels out front. KumWow. I could make a cheap reference to it now. Fike could work it into his Yuletide message. What Horace Mann would say about KumWow? A solace for our unexpressed griefs? Only, it’s Christmas Eve. And even for a non-believer, desist is easier than engage. Though I wonder what Fike’s father thinks of him, down in Fairhope. Fike’s about my son Ralph’s age — or would be.
Above his little purple priest’s collar, Fike stares at me hungrily. Silence is the best defense against non-entities — let them become insubstantial, like a retreating fog. I sniff the sharp-sulfurous sea tang blown inland from the shore. Hazards ride its whispering waves.
“Frank. Don’t act too shocked when you see poor ole Eddie. Okay? He’s looking rough. Underneath he’s still Eddie, though. He’ll really appreciate you coming.” Fike’s become confident again — all by himself. To prove it he sets his mouth into a downward-curving parabola, like a banker nullifying a loan extension. Bong, bong, bong. Let e-e-e-vry hear-ar-art, pre-pa-re hi-um roo-ooo-oom, and heavin ’n nachure sing.. .
“I’ll try to steel myself, Fike.”
“Maybe I’ll see you on the radio, Frank?” Fike hugs his briefcase tighter, backing away from me, as if we were in a narrow alley out here. “I like that Narpool you’ve been reading on the air. Though not that much happens there, wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s the point, Fike. You have to be available to what’s not evident.”
“Look out, now! That’s my line of work, Frank. Evidence of things unseen, etc. Hebrews Two.” This pleases him. He brightens supremely, backing away still. We’ve found our point of assent — in the unseen — a sacred accord that will let us go our separate ways to Sunday — which we do. Blessedly.
EDDIE’S FRONT DOOR IS ONCE AGAIN PULLED OPEN, this time by a big, pillowy black woman in tight red toreadors with little green Christmas trees printed all over them. She gives me an indifferent look and stands back for me to come in. She’s wearing a green scrub-in smock and cracked white nurse’s shoes her big feet have badly stressed. A stethoscope hangs off her neck. A yellow sponge is in one hand, as if she’s been doing dishes. She smells of peppermint.
“I’m Frank Bascombe,” I say, half whispering. “I think Eddie’s expecting me.”
“All right,” she says as I come in. “Finesse,” she says, which I take to be her name. “I’m his hospice nurse. He been kickin’ up dust, waitin’ for you.” She steps off, leading me to the right, out of the shadowy foyer and the main house’s front parlor — Greek Revival, pocket doors, bookcases, a sunny breakfast nook visible through doors to the back. Everything in the original part’s been done in ultramodern-’70s style — shiny tube-steel and leather chairs, the walls hand-painted in bold, jagged red-and-green striping and hung with large black-and-white photographs of the Serengeti, wattle huts, Mount K, an immense and motionless river with rhinos cavorting, and lots of artifacts around — a ceremonial zebra-skin drum-table, spears clustered in an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand, walls of hollow-eyed masks and shields and breastplates made of leopard fur — the dark continent’s designer side. Everything’s silent and pristine. No life’s transpired here, possibly, since the lady of the house flew back to square-head land, leaving it as her monument.
Finesse’s size and swaying stride create a peppermint airstream, where I’m following behind. “I thought that funny l’il preacher — whatever he was — wasn’t ever gonna leave,” she’s saying as if she and I know each other. “Fice. Idn’t that a dog’s name? I don’t b’lieve I met you. I did meet some of them.” She’s leading me through a dark screening theater and on into a paneled man-study with Vanity Fair prints, crossed wooden tennis rackets, the (apparently) complete Harvard Classics and a big Cape buffalo’s head staring somberly down off the wall. We pass then into a club room — snooker table, highboy chairs, Tiffany lamps, deep-cranberry walls, cue racks, chalks, a triangle of red balls on a perfect green nap. Again, nothing seems in use. Plans were made. Plans abandoned.
“I’m an old friend.” I’m barely keeping up. We pass through double doors to a small, expensively lit seafaring chamber — brass-framed charts, brass fixtures, brass telescopes, windlasses, monkeys’ fists, boat hooks, belaying pins, fife rails — everything but an oubliette. Plus walls of big blow-up glossies of Eddie on his beloved Tore Holm yawl, the Jalina, christened to honor the departed wife and long-ago lost to creditors. Eddie is distinctive (if miniaturized) as the doughty helmsman of the big seventy-footer, bowsprit (or whatever) to the bluster and spray, sails bellied, the commodore in white ducks and shades, deliriously happy, Jalina clutching his shoulders, her straight blondy tresses streaming behind (revealing a face a bit too small for her shoulders). I could never prize anything so much. A career selling houses lets you know you can live with a lot less than you think.
“Okay, lemme just say this,” Finesse says, coming about just as we’re about to pass through another double doors, possibly to Eddie’s dying room, where his dying days are upon him. Finesse would be my choice for nurse when the time arrives — big as a tractor, strong as a bison, bristling with authority and competence, yet also with outsized no-nonsense empathies acquired in a lifetime of shepherding rich white people out of this teary vale with a minimum of bother. Possibly she has a business card.
Finesse’s protruding jaundice-y eyes and expansive forehead lean forward at me now as important signifiers. “Mr. Medley is very ill. He’s ’bout dead.” She elevates her chin, her plush mouth in a tight, pious line to represent 1. Gravity; 2. Respect; 3. Solemnity; 4. Sorrow; 5. Consideration; 6. Submission; 7. Candor; 8. Lament. Plus a hundred inexpressibles that come into play (or might) when we elect to face the final hours of another.
“I know,” I say, meekly. Now that I’m in death’s maritime anteroom, I want to be a hundred miles away from it. “Eddie announced he was dying on the radio.”
“Okay. I know ’bout all that foolishness.” Finesse’s maximum breasts expand almost audibly against her nurse’s smock, advancing her stethoscope disk out toward me then back again. “But he’s happy. He don’t mind it. His brain’s goin’ and goin’. So you don’t have to be sorrowing. Because he’s not.”
“Okay,” I say. “I don’t expect to be here long.” I hope. Finesse, I see, wears a thin gold wedding band barely visible deep in her finger flesh. Somewhere there’s a Mr. Finesse. Trenton, no doubt. A tough, wiry, agreeable man she bosses around and reminds every day how things are going to be in this world and the next. I can only imagine how much he loves her — all there is to love.
“You stay just as long in there as you want to,” Finesse says. She still has the yellow sponge in hand. “It ain’t like you makin’ him tired. He’s already tired.”
“Okay.”
“Then, here we all go.” She reaches for the knob, pushes back the door to reveal… Eddie (I guess)… propped up in bed, looking not like Glenn Ford but like a little bespectacled monkey who’s reading The Economist.