Meanwhile our long drought is officially declared ended in New Jersey on the strength of tropical depression Wayne, which never became a hurricane but brought a change for all. Some people associate the dry season’s ending with the election being settled and a hoped-for upturn in the economy. But these people are Republicans who’ll do fine no matter who’s elected. They are the ones who sell you water in a desert.
On a less optimistic note, Wade Arsenault has, unhappily, died. Of a stroke. A general system failure. “Eighty-four,” as Paul Harvey would say, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. No surprise to him and probably not disappointing, either, if he knew anything about it. I did not go to the funeral because I was in the hospital and didn’t hear until later. Though I wouldn’t have gone. Wade and I were not the kind of friends who need to attend each other’s funerals. In any case, his daughter, Ricki, and his thick-necked policeman son, Cade, were there to send him on to glory. Ricki called me in the hospital and sounded much the same as when I last saw her sixteen years ago, her voice a bit deepened and made less confident by time. I pictured her with a mall haircut, an extra thirty pounds strapped to her once-wonderful hips and a look of non-acceptance camouflaged behind a big Texas smile. “Deddy liked you s’much, Frank. Like me, I guess — hint, hint. It made a big difference to him havin’ you be his big buddy. Life’s peculiar, idn’t it?” “It is,” I said, staring apprehensively out my hospital window down onto Hooper Avenue choked with Christmas shoppers and misted with tiny snowflakes. I hoped she wasn’t calling from downstairs or out in her car, and wasn’t about to come check me out, being a nurse and all. But she didn’t. She was always a smarter cookie than I was a cookie. She told me that she’d discovered the Church of Scientology and was a better person for that, though at her age she doubted anybody would ever love her for what she was — which I said was dead wrong (I couldn’t remember what her exact age was). Our conversation did not range far after that. I think she would’ve liked to see me, and some parts of me would’ve liked to see her. But we were not moved enough to do that, and in a while we said good-bye and she was gone forever.
On the nearer-to-home front, Clarissa Bascombe’s scrape with local law in Absecon was indeed serious, but ended not nearly as badly as it might’ve. Her mother did bring down a lawyer from Haddam, a big, blond, handsome Nordic-looking palooka with eyes on both sides of his head — who I’d seen a hundred times and never paid any attention to, and who, I believe, is Ann’s new goodly swain — not the patch-pockets history teacher I previously imagined. She told me this lawyer, Otis — I don’t know if that’s his last name or his first — had “good connections,” which meant either the mob or the statehouse, whatever the difference might be. But by six p.m. Thanksgiving Day, this Otis had Clarissa sprung from the Absecon lockup and had made allegations that the police applied reckless and undue force by running her off the road and into the blinking lane-change arrow and on into the NJDOT employee, whose foot was only sprained and may have been sprained a week before. Otis also claimed Clarissa had possibly been the victim of date rape, or at the very least of a pretty scary dating experience that amounted to assault, leaving her traumatized — as good as innocent. She was actually fleeing for her safety, he said, when she made contact with the Absecon police. Thom may pay the freight for this or he may not, since he naturally turns out to have a past no one knew about but, also naturally, has mouthpieces of his own. It’s enough that Clarissa was unharmed and will eventually look less like a fool than she felt at the time. When she arrived at the hospital late on Thanksgiving night, when I’d been in surgery and was just waking up, feeling surprisingly not so bad but out of my head, she stood close by my bed, gave me her serious stare, put her two hands on my wrist below where they had me strung up to fluids and infusions and heartbeat monitors, then smiled gamely and said in what I remember as an extremely softened, chastened, worn-out, had-it-with-life voice, “I guess I’ve become number one in number two.” This was our joke of possibly longest standing and refers to a sign we once saw on a septic-service truck on the back roads of Connecticut, when she was just a girly girl and I was an insufficient father trying to find sufficiency. There were, or seemed to be, others in the room with her — Ann, possibly Paul, possibly Jill, possibly Detective Marinara. I may have dreamed this. Along the top of the green wall, where it corniced with the white ceiling, was a frieze bearing important phrases that the hospital authorities wanted us patients to see as soon as we opened our eyes (if we did). What I read said, “When patients feel better about their comfort level they heal faster and their length of stay is shortened.”
I looked at my sweet daughter, into her fatigue-lined, handsome face, at her thick honeyed hair, strong jaw, her mouth turned down at the corners when her smile was gone. I could see then, and for the first time, what she would look like when she was much older — the opposite of what a father usually sees. Fathers usually think they see the child in the adult’s face. But Clarissa would look, I thought, just like her mother. Not like me, which was acceptable along with the rest. I thought as I lay there, how few jokes we’d shared and how rarely I had seen her laugh since she’d become a grown-up. And while you could say the fault for that belonged to her mother and me, that fault in truth was mostly mine.
I said something then, in my daze. I believe I said, “I should’ve spent more time with you when you were young.”
She said, “That’s not true, Frank. I didn’t want to spend more time with you then. Now’s better.” That’s all I remember from those early hours in the hospital and from my daughter, who’s now back “camping out” with Cookie in Gotham, which pleases me, since she may have decided that “the big swim,” the “out in the all of it” were just mirages to keep her from accepting who she is, and that the smooth, gliding life of linked boxes may not be the avoidance of pain but just a way of accepting what you can’t really change. It’s possible she’s come to feel fortunate.
The passengers across the aisle from Sally have turned out to be Kansas Citians, a jolly, rotund couple named the Palfreymans. Burt Palfreyman is hairless as a cue ball, from chemo, and as blind as Milton from retinal cancer, but full of vim and vigor about a whole new round at “the clinic.” He’s had many others and tells Sally his hair’s getting tired of growing in and has just decided to stay gone. They don’t say what’s ailing Burt this time, though Natalie mentions something about “the whole lymph system,” which can’t be good. Sally remarks that my son lives in Kansas City, too, and works for Hallmark, news that turns them reverent, provoking approving nods, though Burt’s nod is more toward the seat-back in front of him. “First-class outfit,” Burt says soberly, and Natalie, who’s pleasingly rounded, with frizzed salmon-colored hair and puffy cheeks gone venous with worry and long life, stares over at me, around Sally, as if I might not know what a first-class outfit Hallmark really is and that that’s a serious lapse of info, needing correction. I smile back as if I cannot speak but can nod. “It’s all family-owned,” she says. “And they do absolutely everything for Kanzcity.” Burt grins at nothing. He’s wearing a blue velour lounging outfit with purple piping down the legs and looks as comfortable as a blind man can look in an airplane. “They’re right up there with UPS,” Burt says (which he calls “ups”), “or any of those big outfits when it comes to employee benefits, compassionate leave, that kind of thing. Oh yeah. You bet.” He might’ve worked for them in the Braille card department.