Cost

Julia imagined prizing up the soft wood with a crowbar, ripping up everything, revealing the damp splinters, the damp scuttling creatures. Banishing them, sweeping everything out, setting out the heavy new boards. Lining them up, measuring, sawing—though this was real, serious carpentry, electric saws, unwieldly lumber. It was beyond her. She'd take it up in some other life. The one in which she got along with her father.

She set down the tray and went back inside. In the front hall she called to her parents, still in the guest room: “Lunch is ready.”

“All right.” Her mother's voice was high and sweet and frail, like an old woman's. “I'm just putting on my scarf.”

Her father did not answer. He would be standing beside her mother, his awful windbreaker zipped up to his chin, waiting, proud of his patience.

Julia waited, too. For this moment—the lunch tray out on the porch, the water pitcher coated with fine cold droplets, the sandwiches neatly cut—she was idle.

On the hall floor lay an ancient, threadbare Persian rug, its fringe ragged and meager. On the wall an old etching hung over a small, ponderous mahogany table. Beside it was a black Windsor chair. Sunlight irradiated the plaster walls, slanting past the etching. It was a picture of Paris at twilight, black roofs and chimneypots against a crepuscular sky. Julia liked the idea of Paris—its narrow streets and gilded salons, its worldliness and complexity—set here in the bare old house with its painted wooden floors, in the empty windswept countryside. She liked the sense it gave of the great reach and swing of the world. She liked the house itself, its simplicity, its worn surfaces, its offer of comfort and shelter. Its dry cedary smells, and its deep, deep silences.

The Windsor chair's narrow spindles fanned gracefully out, the lines set in rhythmic intervals, like a dark chord against the pale wall. The chair, the table, the picture of Paris, the wash of sunlight all seemed to form some mysterious balance. The house was soundless. Shafts of sunlight struck through the rooms, across the walls, the old rugs, the rickety furniture. The day was suspended, the earth paused. In this moment it seemed that a celestial order ruled. The sun flooded through her, she felt herself dissolving into luminous silence. She was here, in this moment, in the old house. Nothing was more luxurious than this deep soundlessness and light. Her parents, whom she loved, and who loved her—who were the great high cliffs of her world, still towering over her, though beginning to dissolve into the radiant dusk—were nearby. They were alive, they were here, and about to emerge into the sunlit hall.

Suspended, invisible, Julia waited for her parents to appear. She wondered what their life was like, their private life, when they were alone together in a room. Their shared silences. Who were you when you were unobserved? What were the things they kept from her? What were the things you kept from your children?

What did she keep from her own children? Very little now. When your children were small you tried to conceal your doubts and fears, your pettiness and failures. You tried to be what they needed—strong and certain, pure and loving. Of course they learned quite soon who you were—weak, uncertain, impatient, ungenerous. There was nothing of your character they did not know.

Though there were parts of your life you kept to yourself. There were things Julia would never tell them, things that should stay unshared, unconfessed. There were secrets that should die with people.

When Julia was alone, her personality unbound, drifting, she had no idea what she was like. Would her children recognize her? Didn't she twist herself, quickly, instinctively, into the shape she always wore for her children? Was it different from the shapes she wore for other people? For her parents?

The guest-room door opened, and Katharine stood in the doorway, leaning on her cane. Over her hair was a blue paisley scarf, tied dashingly at the nape of her neck, like a Gypsy's. She smiled at her daughter.

As a young woman, Katharine had been beautiful, with high cheekbones, liquid brown eyes, a square Gallic face and aquiline nose. She was still a beauty; the soft skin was weathered, but the cheekbones and profile were still firm. Her loveliness lay now in her warm luminous eyes, her inclusive smile: Katharine had always enjoyed her days.

Julia saw her mother's younger face beneath this one, as though a steadily thickening net, a veil of age, were being set over it. The earlier face was still present, but dissolving into this one, soft, lined, mottled.

Katharine made her way slowly down the hall. She wore baggy blue pants, a loose flowered shirt. Her small body was now shapeless— thick and bulky at its middle, slack and gaunt elsewhere. The womanly landmarks—waist, breasts, hips—had slid into insignificance.

Katharine walked unevenly, her torso dipping with each step. Her hip had been injured long ago, before she'd been married. It was part of the family history. An accident: icy roads, a skidding milk truck. Before it, Katharine had swum, skied, danced, played tennis. She'd famously climbed to the top of Mount Washington with her older brothers. Afterward, for a while she'd seemed to recover, but over the years everything had steadily worsened. Her spine had shifted, compensating for the damaged hip. An ankle had given way and had been fused. The other ankle weakened, a shoulder froze. In spite of operations and therapy, her body had become increasingly twisted. Now she leaned heavily on a cane, her movements slow and awkward.

What was her mother like, alone in a room?

Alone with her pain. Pain was the thing that was never mentioned. Katharine never spoke of it, nor did Edward, though they all knew it was present. There was nothing to be done; it was to be endured. To talk about it, even to admit it existed, was somehow shameful.

Her mother's life swam around Julia, a dense transparent layer of existence, like the veil of atmosphere surrounding her planet. Julia held in herself the sunny stretch of her mother's childhood as the darling of the family, the youngest child, the only girl. The Depression, when she'd nearly had to drop out of college. The accident, then the dark stretch of the war. Her domestic world, her husband, her three children. The ebbs and flows of Katharine's marriage—would Julia ever know about these things? Did she want to? Could she bear knowing them? She did not want to know her mother's pain, it was unbearable to consider. The intimate knowledge of her mother's life was charged, dangerous, too powerful and frightening to approach. Though in some way she did know these things, she knew them by breathing in her mother's life with her own. Julia was encased by her mother's life; she saw her own life through it, it was her air. We think back through our mothers, if we are women, Virginia Woolf had said. But it was alarming to think back, to venture into the closed and secret chambers of the mother's life.

Now Katharine smiled up at her. “I love those yellow walls in the guest room,” she said. “It's such a pretty color. And thank you for the flowers. You know rugosas are my favorites.”

“Oh, you're very welcome,” Julia said lightly.

Her tone—airy, noncommittal—implied that the walls just happened to be that shade, that the flowers had somehow gotten into the room by themselves, that she didn't know her mother loved rugosas. Julia would not admit to trying to please her mother, though she did. She would not accept her mother's gratitude or praise. She resisted her mother, held her at a tiny stubborn distance. Some subterranean line had been drawn between them, sealing Julia off.

Edward appeared now, behind Katharine. “I wanted to look up where we are,” he complained, “but Julia doesn't have an atlas.”

“I do have an atlas,” Julia corrected him. “I just can't find it right now.”

“Well, I don't know how you can say you have it if you can't find it,” said Edward to himself.

“Edward,” Katharine said humorously. She caught Julia's eye and shook her head. She was used to this, distracting attention from Edward's bad manners, making him seem charming and funny. Julia saw her father smile to himself, pleased, like a naughty boy.

Julia turned away from them both, from their collusion, her father's irritating manner. “I thought we'd eat out on the porch.”

They sat in a row in the bright shade. The air was hot and dry, with a whiff of cinnamon from the ferns. Before them the long pink grass rippled down to the cove.

Katharine sighed. “This is awfully nice. You have such a lovely place.”

“It's a pretty nice view,” Julia said.

“But the house,” Katharine insisted, “the house is lovely.”

“Falling to bits,” Julia said cheerfully.

“But in such a charming way,” Katharine said, smiling.

“I wish I'd found that leak in the bathroom,” Edward mused. “I'd have fixed it for you.”

Julia said nothing. Having her parents here roused something in her. She felt she was holding something at bay. She was patrolling the border. She was never not patrolling the border. It was a peacekeeping mission, she would not provoke an incident, but she would patrol, with armed guards. She picked up her sandwich and squinted into the bright light. For the meadow, for that smoky pink grass, first an undercoat of dead green, for depth. Or maybe yellow, deep yellow, for vitality.

The sky was brilliantly clear and blue, but the sun had moved around behind the house, and the shadows—still short and black— were beginning to lean toward sunset.

TWO

Edward followed his wife as she made her way to the back door and carefully onto the porch. As Edward stepped down, he felt the floorboards yield springily beneath him.

Rotten, Edward thought, pleased. He liked discovering flaws, it made him feel successful. Through some arcane law of psychophysics, every flaw that Edward discovered elsewhere increased his own sense of well-being.

He knew what should be done to this, the rotten boards ripped out, the punky orange shards piled on the lawn. New dry wood, the snapping of the chalked string against it, the blurred shadow flawlessly straight. The boxy, blunt-tipped pencil, the dull iron shine of the nails. Everything set in place.

Edward once would have done it himself, though now it was beyond him. Still, he'd have liked to watch it. He enjoyed watching construction—carpentry, wiring, plumbing—anything with mechanical complexity. He liked this larger, inanimate counterpart to his own world of cutting and clamping and reconnecting. He liked knowing how systems worked, all of them; he used to read instruction books on wiring and plumbing. He'd once done those things. He liked having the tools laid out on his bench, clean and ready. He liked making things function properly, correcting flaws. And there was a dark, subversive thrill about using hammers, awls, saws. Power tools: the spinning disk of silver teeth turned smooth by speed. The high whine of danger as his hands approached it, feeding the wood steadily into the lethal cut. Putting at risk his own irreplaceable tools, his hands.

He'd always been proud of his hands. They were small, with strong, supple fingers; he'd kept them clean and well-tended, the nails short, the skin pink. The harsh surgical scrub soap was abrasive, you used lotion to keep the skin from drying and cracking. They all did. At first it seemed girlish and sissy, but later it seemed normal.

All that was over. Edward could risk his hands however he liked, though he could now only do minor handiwork, nothing difficult. He had become clumsy, his agile hands were paws, the fingers thickened, joints stiff. One hand would not entirely open, because of Dupuytren's contracture, a spontaneous scarring of the fascia. The other hand opened and closed, but with difficulty: Edward was being slowly hobbled by his own body.

Worse than clumsiness, though, was the ebbing of his energy. Things he'd once have done in a moment, before breakfast, without thinking, now took him all morning. Everything was slow and hard to manage, even talking. There were moments when he could not produce a simple, common word, one he'd known his whole life. It frustrated him. He'd always been in control of things; his limbs, his mind, his life. How had he been so quietly, so irrevocably, deposed from power? He was helpless before this. All he could do was keep his secret from the world.

Part of the pleasure Edward took in discovering flaws had always lain in his ability to correct them. He'd have liked to fix the leak beneath the sink, the rotting floor. He'd have liked to fix all these things, he liked to make contributions, but offering anything to Julia was risky. He hadn't dared suggest help when Wendell left her. She'd always been touchy, and whenever he made suggestions she turned antagonistic. She was like that, his older daughter, challenging, argumentative. Something in her was abrasive. There was a gritty vein that would not rub smooth, that ran all the way through her.

Her younger sister, Harriet, was easier in that way; Harriet didn't argue. She didn't get angry with him; she said what she meant. But she was cold, somehow. Both his daughters were difficult. For some reason, he'd gotten stiff-necked, cantankerous ones. It was too bad; he'd have liked soft, winsome daughters, that kissed and petted him.

Julia helped Katharine into a chair, and Edward lowered himself beside her. The springy metal chair sank disconcertingly.

“Oh,” said Katharine, as the chair dropped beneath her. “What a nice surprise!” She bounced gently. “I think this is lovely.” She crossed her wrists primly in her lap. “How do you do, Mrs. Astor?” She nodded to them as though she were at a tea party, rising and falling decorously.

Julia laughed. They had the same sense of humor; Edward did not. He gave a bemused smile and looked into the distance. He didn't share Katharine's penchant for the absurd. He tolerated it, but did not approve.

Katharine looked out over the meadow, still smiling.

She took pleasure in the world, it was her great gift, though Edward would admit this only to himself. It was his policy not to admit anything publicly: neither flaws in himself nor strengths in other people. He gave compliments sparingly. Praise made people soft, he'd never looked for it himself. Success at the task was its own reward. Successful surgery was a serious achievement.

To himself, he admitted to admiring this about Katharine—the way she took pleasure in the world. Now that his days were quieter, now that they were alone together so much, he was more aware of what she did. He could see that it had given him—all of them in the family—pleasure. He was beginning to admire other things about her, too. She'd stood up to him. He could not now remember why, but there had been times when he'd nearly crushed her. She wouldn't let him do it, she'd resisted him. He admired that, though it wasn't something you talked about. Paying compliments made him uncomfortable, so did talking about emotions.

What you felt you should keep to yourself. The current rage for telling everyone how you felt, talking about your parents to a stranger, was ill-advised. You could talk to a therapist for the rest of your life and all that would change was your bank balance. It was self-indulgence. People should take responsibility for their own lives, get on with things.

Julia offered him a plate. “This is yours, Daddy. No mustard.”

Edward looked at the sandwich. “Thank you.”

He was looked after now. Other people chose what he would eat. It was a strange way of living. He looked out across the meadow and took a bite.

Take responsibility for your own life, your own actions: it was a favorite theme of Edward's. He was now alone, much of the time; in his mind, and he'd begun thinking more and more about these things. How his life had gone, how he felt about it.

Therapy was pointless, he agreed with himself once more. Subjective, irrational, unquantifiable, it was directly opposed to the fundamental premise of science. Therapy was for whiners, neurosis was self-indulgence, though it was unfashionable to say so. Serious mental disorders were different: psychosis, schizophrenia, severe dementia, those were all organic. They were caused by physical pathology and should be treated physically. At one time Edward had been involved in that kind of treatment. It was called somatic. Then those disorders had been treated surgically, though now the treatments were mostly chemical.

When Edward had done his training, the treatment of mental illness was almost entirely physical. Little had changed since the Middle Ages, though during the twentieth century there were experiments with insulin, horse serum, electric shock. One surgeon took out women's reproductive organs, claiming he'd eliminate madness in the next generation. Nothing had really been successful, and by the late forties the public hospitals were still using isolation and restraint. Locked wards and straitjackets were pretty much all they'd had.

After the war, thousands of soldiers came home traumatized by battle, psychologically incapacitated. The country was unprepared and the health-care system swamped. Mental patients occupied one out of two hospital beds in the country. Hospitals were overwhelmed, understaffed, and underfunded. In the V.A.s, the ration was one staff member for every two hundred patients. Mental health was a national crisis.

It was a crisis and became a scandal. There were exposés, grim photographs in Life magazine. Images of hell: crowds of naked patients in straitjackets sitting on the floor in bare rooms. These were our brave boys come home, and this was how we treated them. The government called for investigations, medical science called for a cure. Edward's field was galvanized with urgency.

Psychosurgery was the answer. Edward remembered the first time he'd heard the term “leucotomy”—at a staff meeting, everyone's face solemn. It was a new procedure, the severing of connections between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain. A Portuguese doctor, Moniz, had invented it, and an American, Walter Freeman, brought it here. It seemed to be the answer to mental illness.

Freeman's operation was simple and swift, and the VA. embraced it. This was the answer to those hordes of desperate, hopeless patients. This was the silver bullet, modern, scientific, and humane. There were federal grants and public funding, a health initiative. Forty or fifty thousand operations were performed across the country. The symptoms were gone, and the brave boys went home to their families. It wasn't just soldiers: the procedure seemed to work on all mental patients. It was a miracle. The national emergency had been resolved. It was a triumph for his field. Edward had been right in the middle of it.

A few years later, when psychotropic drugs emerged, treatment shifted toward medication, psychopharmacology Edward shifted, too, away from mental illness, toward other pathologies. He wanted to perform surgery, not write prescriptions. For the next forty years he addressed neurological disorders, physical malfunctions within the nervous system. He became an expert on certain procedures.

The sunlight here was dazzlingly bright, and the long grass hissed mildly in the wind. It reminded Edward of Cape Cod, his parents' house, the old saltbox on a low rise among the cranberry bogs. Those runty scrub pines, stunted by the wind. The air there smelled of the pines, and of the sweet, tangy bayberry; even, faintly, of salt, though the house was several miles from the beach.

Here, salt was heavy in the air, drifting up from the shore. The tides were high—he liked that about Maine, the great sweeping shifts of its waters, the brimming heights, the draining lows. The brutal iciness of the sea, closing like a fist around your heart. You couldn't swim here, there was no thought of it.

He'd never see the Cape house again. When Katharine could no longer manage the steep slope of the lawn, they'd stopped going there. Rather than leave it in his estate to be taxed, he'd asked Harriet if she'd like it, she'd always used it the most. He'd never thought to ask her to keep it, and two years after he gave it to her, she sold it to a developer.

It still made him angry, he felt it now in his throat. When he found out about it, Harriet told him coldly that she'd had no choice. She couldn't afford the taxes and the maintenance. She wasn't using it much, and she needed the money to start her practice. But if she'd only told him, of course he'd have paid the taxes.

Edward didn't want to see it now, crowded by other buildings, the bogs drained. He wanted to hold it in his mind as he'd known it, on its small hill, the old silvery-barked cedar trees on the front lawn, the high thick tangle of wild sweet pea and honeysuckle cascading down the hill behind it.

In the pond were snapping turtles. Once, when he was rowing across it, a turtle had clamped itself invisibly onto the oar, hanging on. He'd been small, only eight or nine. He remembered the sudden inexplicable weight, like a spell cast on the left oar. The smell of the flat green water, the stand of pines on the far hillside: mornings in that house had been pure and blue, silent and untouched. His father, in white duck trousers and faded blue sneakers, walking back and forth on the wiry grass, spreading the sails out to dry. Edward helped, tugging the heavy canvas from its damp folds.

No, he didn't want to see the place again. It was safe in his memory. Did it matter if it existed nowhere but in his mind? His memory seemed a better and better place to live. As he grew older, what was stored there grew more and more different from the world around him. The worlds diverged—did it matter? He wondered how Julia's sons were doing.

“Now, tell us, how are the children?” Katharine asked.

Edward thought, confused, that she'd just asked that question. Or had he just asked it? He looked sideways at Julia, to see if Katharine had repeated herself. Julia wouldn't say so, but her voice would be slow and patient. Edward hated people being patient with him, it was so patronizing.

“The boys are both fine,” Julia said, frowning, looking out over the pink grass.

Julia wouldn't say if they weren't. She never did, though Edward knew things had been pretty bad at times. Both with the children and her divorce: she led a chaotic life, as far as he could tell. She never talked about it. I'm fine, she always said forbiddingly. She wanted privacy, he understood that. He didn't want to know everything, either. Hearing about other people's lives was either tedious or frustrating, they made so many mistakes. Katharine, of course, heard all those things; she was interested.

Edward had disapproved of Julia's divorce. He didn't know why Wendell had left Julia, and he supposed no one would ever tell him. Wendell was married now to someone else, so it had probably been woman trouble. Of course you had these urges, everyone did, but you didn't leave your wife. People were so ready now to give up, throw everything away, but divorce was the solution to nothing. It made everything worse, usually. Look at Wendell, off with some inferior woman, Julia on her own now. For good, probably, her face turning lined and leathery.

He'd never wanted to divorce Katharine, though he'd been interested in other women. He'd had flings. But he'd never have left her. His marriage was part of himself, like being a surgeon. Each day he had waked up married to Katharine, and a surgeon.

Surgery had been the thing, the center of everything. The operations he'd performed were still part of his consciousness. He could go through each step of each one. They were like the house on the Cape— still there, still real, ready for him to inhabit.

Surgery had been his life. He'd done thousands of operations, over nearly four decades. It had engaged him utterly, it had given him his greatest pleasure. There was nothing more serious, more crucial, more delicate. He'd welcomed the challenges. He'd welcomed risk—he liked it—and often taking a risk was the right thing to do. He'd been good and he'd been lucky, and he'd been rewarded for both. Young doctors came to train with him, he'd been twice head of the National Association of Neurosurgeons, which he'd helped found. Surgery had been his life, a continuing challenge, one he always rose to. It had been intoxicating: the excitement, the urgency, the thrill of commencement.