“Is there something out there?” Larry said.
“Just the whole world,” said Gino.
“What does that mean?” said Frank.
“It means I’m going to leave this place,” he said. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m serious.”
Larry could see that he was, and Frank could too, and Larry blinked through falling hair, and Frank started to say something, but didn’t.
“But where would you go?” John said, finally. “Your daughter?”
Gino lowered his hands to his naked legs. His robe had parted and fallen to the side, and his fingers touched his knees, then floated down to his scarred shins. He looked very much like Harry Truman now, the same expressionless face and vacant brow, but he wore no glasses and his eyes were blue and large.
“I haven’t told you that story yet,” he said. “You’ll know when you hear it. And anyway, she’s probably dead by now. All the rest seem to be.”
“If we could buy this fucking place,” said Frank, glancing at Larry.
“But that’s the point,” Gino said. “I feel retired from life here, but we’re not dead yet, are we? All this fucking around and joking and argument. This business with Carolyn, like a bunch of kids. I’m a hundred years old now, man, but I ain’t dead yet. I’m getting out of here.”
“But where?” John said.
“Chicago. But not the suburbs or the country this time, the city. I’ve got the little pension and the social security, and I’ve checked the papers. I can get a room there. I can go out to museums and get a drink. I can take a walk along the lake.”
“But if you get sick,” Frank said.
“Oh, fuck that,” Gino said. “I’m sick already. I’m a very old man. I want some life now while I have it. Not this waiting around to die.”
Frank started to say something, to bicker, then he smiled faintly and said something else.
“Well, I must admit, I think of it too.”
“Have you?” Gino said.
“No. Not really. But I can understand the rest. This place I mean. It’s not exactly wholesome.”
“I have,” Larry said. “Especially since this chemo. I can go back to Philadelphia, actually do some work again.”
“The fucking chemo,” Gino said. “Just another instance. They’re not treating us here. This is a holding tank. They only do it because of the contract. Like that useless speech therapist. Legality, not medicine or ethics. Nothing like that.”
“That would close the place,” John said.
“But for the guy out there on the ward,” said Gino. “I hope he lives to be a hundred and ten. Fuck these doctors, these businessmen.”
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you,” Larry said.
“You bet your ass I am.”
He shuffled off to his locker to get the Chicago papers and his ledger book, and Frank set the chessboard and pieces to the side and got a yellow pad and a pencil and began making lists. Larry shuffled the cards absently, thinking about the uncertainty of endings and of beginnings, more difficult for Frank he thought than for himself. He wasn’t sure about Gino, even when he returned and showed them the ads he’d carefully marked, describing the various locations with a quiet enthusiasm.
“If only there were decent relatives,” Frank said.
“Why?” Gino said. “It could be the same as this, just different furniture.”
“I have a son,” said Frank. “That could be even worse.”
They heard the sound of sucking from the ward, and Gino looked at each of them, then turned back to the window.
“Maybe I could go to Tampico once again.”
It was John. He held his cigarette in the air, poised there, and there was something in his tone that got to each of them, both fantasy and possibility in the words. Then Gino coughed and lit his pipe again, and they could see the smoke rise, puffs disintegrating into a wispy haze above his shoulders at the window.
He turned then and began talking, picking the words carefully out of memory, telling the story in a formal way, as if he had no care or part in it, as if it were someone else’s life in the balance there, for he had come through it all and was here now for the telling and was only the messenger of his past. John adjusted his wheelchair and faced him and tapped a cigarette on his can, then lit it, the smoke flooding from his tracheotomy tube, and settled in with the two others to listen.
“… and Ramona was born in the tenth year of our marriage, my wife desperate for her in the lost romance of her own childhood, that she would join a company of virginal lovers and study her posture standing in the doorway, makeup and fine clothing, candlelight and flowers. But it was always Gino coming, the little guy in work clothes, and with the birth of a daughter the romance changed for her — image of the perfect mother, sister and confidant — so when Ramona pinned her tongue with the fake diamond she was accepting of it in bewilderment, and when she brought the tattooed boys around, ominous but manipulated, it was no last straw for her, though it was for me.”
High school, 1950, held back a year for truancy, his wife was giving her secret money, she was nineteen and hysterically theatrical, and he was already sixty, the ancient dull-witted father, but his wife was only a child for her, and Ramona was no fool about that until she was.
Sitting in the living room in the suburbs, wanting money, that dark boy in his mid-twenties on the couch beside her, carefully groomed, but dirt at the cuticles of his pared nails and in the wings of the hair he’d greased and combed, a thick hanging chain, and the black ironed shirt he wore, those stains at the pockets’ edges, and those tattoos.
When I get a proper life! When I get some decent clothes! Spark of the diamond on her tongue flicking in the red wound. When I get out of this shit hole!
Why not now? he’d said. And that stopped her, and the diamond disappeared behind her teeth, and she dragged the useful boy up out of the couch and slammed the door behind them as they left.
“We thought it was temporary of course. My wife died in 1962. She was just fifty-nine, my child bride. Have I mentioned her name yet? It was Mona. And in the days of the twelve years of her daughter’s absence she was getting ready to die, though I don’t think she knew that. It was a cervical malformation that caused the stroke, and I think it came from her hanging head, lifted only when she looked through the window, as if the physical gesture of anticipation could produce the desired object, Ramona on the sidewalk, coming home. I was retired then and seventy-one, and I thought I might be dying too, for I was some malignancy in the household, reminder in my presence of the cause of our daughter’s leaving, and it was true that I never loved Ramona, felt her absence only as relief, and I think my wife saw this, and I walked the suburban streets and read books in the evenings, and we both waited for something, but not the same thing. Ramona was a late child for us, and the only one. No excuse of course for her failed parents. But I think she held a pathology that we didn’t bring to her, though I accept responsibility for a certain coldness.
“But I didn’t die, and Mona did, and then I made my one pathetic move. I bought an isolated house near Cairo, on thirty acres, and set myself to gardening and fussing with repairs, and waited absently for death.
“I said I traveled to Tampico once, but that wasn’t true. It was only conversation in this place, part of our useless joking and badgering, and that’s why I’m leaving. I never traveled, or took pleasure in places or people, nor did I have the warmth of a woman in my bed beyond my early fifties. I worked and had a wife and daughter, and then the one left and I retired and the other died, and that was my life. I walked the streets like a man whose days were over, when they were only half over, and then I set myself to mindless tasks, and when I wasn’t mindlessly doing them I sat at a kitchen window smoking a special blend, gazing out vacantly at the possibilities of life there, with no heart for them at all.”