Page 180

“That’s good, Sammy,” Sally Ann said. “I think you and the rest of the guys had better go home now.”

They went willingly enough, only pausing at the kitchen door to get a final look at their gore-spattered friend. When they were gone, Sally Ann leaned over their son and whispered to Phil. “I don’t think it’s stopping.”

“It will,” Phil said.

It didn’t. It slowed from the original shirt-soaking gusher, but continued to seep. The Parkers’ local doc was on vacation, so they took him to the hospital in North Conway, where Richmond, the on-call MD, peered up Jake’s nose with a little light and nodded. “We’ll fix that in a jiff, young man. Mother and Dad are going to wait outside while we do our biz.”

Sal wanted to stay, but Phil, having an idea of what the fix would entail, took her by the arm and escorted her firmly out into the waiting room and closed the door. Which did no good at all, because when his nose was cauterized, Jake’s howls filled the small hospital from end to end. Phil and Sally Ann clutched each other, both of them shedding tears, waiting for it to be over. Eventually it was… and wasn’t.

Dr. Richmond came out with one lapel of his white coat dotted with Jake’s blood. He smiled and said, “Brave kid. That’s no fun. Can I talk to your parents a minute, Jacob?”

He took them into the exam room. “Have you seen the bruising?”

“Sure, a couple on his arms,” Phil said. “He’s a boy, Dr. Richmond. He probably got them climbing trees or something.”

“On his chest, as well. Scrapper, is he?”

“No, not really,” Phil said. “He and his friends sometimes tussle, but it’s all in fun.”

“I want to do a blood test,” Dr. Richmond said. “Just crossing t’s, you know—”

“Oh my God,” Sally Ann said. Later she would tell Phil that she knew, right then she knew.

“Check his white count and his platelets. Rule out anything serious.”

“Doc, it was just a nosebleed,” Phil said.

“Bring him back in, Phil,” Sally Ann said. She had a white look around her eyes and mouth that Phil became very familiar with over the next year or so.

Phil brought Jake back into the exam room, and once he had been assured that a blood-draw would be a walk in the park compared to having his nose cauterized, Jake rolled up his sleeve and took the needle stoically.

A week later their family doctor called and told them he was sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looked like Jake had acute lymphocytic leukemia.

Their sturdy son went downhill fast. Eight months into what was then called “the wasting disease,” Jake had a remission that gave his parents several weeks of cruel hope. Then came the crash. Jacob Theodore Parker died in Portsmouth Regional Hospital on March 23rd, 1953, at the age of ten.

Sal laid her head on her husband’s shoulder during most of Jake’s closing ceremony. She cried. Phil did not. His tears had all been used up during Jake’s last hospital stay. Sal had hoped for another remission right to the end—prayed for it—but Phil knew Jake was going down. The Answer Man had as much as told him so.

Later that day he asked himself if he had smelled gin on her breath at the funeral. If he did, it would hardly have been worth noticing. The Parkers were part of the Booze and Cigarettes generation. Sally Ann had been enjoying light cocktails with her mother and father and their friends since she was sixteen, and there were always cocktails waiting when Phil came home. Two before dinner was the usual. Sometimes Phil would have a can or two of beer while they watched TV. Sal would have another gin and tonic. It was only later that Phil looked back and realized that one G&T in the evening had progressed to two and sometimes three. But she was always up at six, making Jake’s school lunch and breakfast for the three of them. It was also the generation of Females Cook, Males Eat.

He did notice at the reception after the graveside ceremony. There was no way not to. Sal was in the kitchen, telling Mrs. Keene a story about Jake losing his first tooth, how she had looped one end of a thread around that troublesome wiggler and tied the other to the knob of his bedroom door.

“When I slammed the door, that tooth flew right out!” Sal said, only tooth came out toof, and Phil saw Mrs. Keene—the pretty one, Harry had said on the day Phil met the Answer Man for the second time—easing back from her, a step at a time. Easing back from her breath. Sal matched her step for step, commencing a second story. She had a pony glass in one hand, tilting slowly so what was in it slopped on the floor.

Phil took her by the arm and told her his folks wanted to see her (they didn’t). Sal came willingly enough, but looked back over her shoulder to say, “That toof just flew! Gosh, what a sight!”

Mrs. Keene gave Phil a commiserating smile. It was the first of many.

He got Sal as far as the doorway to the living room before her knees buckled. The glass dropped from her hand. He caught it and had a memory, momentary but oh God so brilliant, of catching a return throw from Jake behind the garage. He got her through the groups of people in the living room, by then supporting almost all of her weight. His mother gave him a look and nodded: Get her out of here. Phil nodded back.

There was no point trying to take her upstairs, so he half-carried her into the guest room and laid her down among the coats of the mourners. She began to snore immediately. When Phil came back, he told folks that Sal was overcome with grief and felt she couldn’t see people, at least for awhile. There were sympathetic nods and more murmurs of condolence—God, so many condolences that Phil found himself wishing someone would crack a dirty joke about the farmer’s daughter—but he was pretty sure there were people (Mrs. Keene for one, his mom for another) who knew it wasn’t just grief that had overcome his wife.

It was the first lie he told about her drinking, but not the last.

Phil suggested they might try to have another baby. Sal agreed with a kind of listless, what-does-it-matter lack of interest. Sometimes he wanted to grasp her by the shoulders—hard enough to hurt, to leave bruises, to get through to her—and tell her that she wasn’t the only one who’d lost a child. He didn’t. He kept his anger to himself, knowing what she’d say: You have your work. I have nothing.

But she did. She had her Gilbey’s Gin and her Kool cigarettes. Two packs a day. She kept them in a little alligator case that looked like a change purse. She became pregnant in 1954. He suggested she quit smoking. She suggested he should keep his advice, however well-meant, to himself. She miscarried in her fourth month.

“No more of that,” she told him from her bed in North Conway Hospital. “I’m forty. Too old to have a baby.”