The Professor of Immortality Page 7

  His dream was that she would enroll at nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—he couldn’t bear to let his Maxie live where he couldn’t drop by to see her. Once she had acquired the education he hadn’t had the finances to attain, who knew what they might accomplish.

  She might have carried out this plan if her father hadn’t died of a faulty heart valve one rainy day in May when Maxine was twelve. She had stopped by after school. Spider asked her to mind the shop while he returned a damaged clock radio to the post office. She passed the time popping the bubble wrap from a shipment of cassette recorders. She had just popped a particularly satisfying bubble when she heard a thump from the back of the store. Somehow, she sensed what she might find if she went to investigate. As long as she stayed out front, her father would remain alive in back.

  A customer came in—Mr. West, whose son Bobby was a year ahead of Maxine at school. Had Bobby’s stereo been repaired? She sent Mr. West to ask her father, continuing to pop bubbles even as Mr. West hurried back out and slipped behind the register to use the phone. Spider hadn’t returned from the post office, so no one thought to keep Maxine from watching the volunteer firemen carry her father to the ambulance. According to the coroner’s report, he had been dead when he hit the ground. But something about popping that bubble at the exact moment her father’s heart burst led Maxine to think of a human life as nothing but a bubble of air kept intact by a fragile membrane.

  She cried. Of course she cried. But not nearly as much as her anguish warranted. Not until a few months later, as she sat watching Neil Armstrong bounce around on the moon, did she begin sobbing so violently she couldn’t breathe. “Oh, Mom. Can’t you almost see him?” And her mother agreed that she, too, had been thinking of Maxine’s father. Didn’t I predict this? Didn’t I tell you to mark my words?

  When the time came, Maxine applied to RPI. But SUNY Binghamton turned out to be less expensive. She considered premed. But the human heart seemed less an organ, a muscle, than a machine to be repaired or replaced by a more lasting and effective model. In the end she chose engineering, a field for which she seemed uniquely prepared by all the years she had spent acquiring skills even her male lab partners envied.

  The problem was, she had loved tinkering at her father’s bench because she had loved tinkering beside her father. The smell of soldered lead caused her eyes to tear up from a longing to feel her father’s arms around her as he guided her hands on the red-hot iron. Without him, she hadn’t a clue what gadget to invent. She considered changing majors. But what would she change her major to?

  And then, toward the end of her senior year in college, Maxine’s mother demanded Maxine come home to sort through her father’s possessions—her mother was moving to an apartment and couldn’t bear to throw out his things. With a heavy heart, Maxine climbed to her parents’ attic. Each cardboard box stood labeled with Magic Marker—“Leonard’s War Memorabilia,” “Taxes,” “Maxine’s Art Projects”—the flaps interlocking in the way Maxine remembered her mother teaching her. She opened the first box and found her father’s bulky Model B View-Master, which he brought back from the war. As she inserted the first disc, she heard him discourse on the importance of Navy gunners being able to distinguish our aircraft from the enemy’s. Imagine, Maxie, shooting down one of your own planes, then living with the knowledge you killed a pilot from your own side! She remembered him explaining how much easier it was to distinguish an airplane in three dimensions than in two, how many lives had been saved by the stereographic View-Master she was holding.

  As she lifted the Model B to the attic’s window, she could hear her father muse on the horrors he had witnessed in the Japanese theater of operations. Oh, Maxie, you have no idea what war really is. That burning ship! Those poor boys leaping overboard! And believe me, no matter what you might hear to the contrary, neither side has a monopoly on goodness. Hearing that phrase, “theater of operations,” she had pictured soldiers fighting on a stage while bystanders watched from bleachers like the ones the janitors set up in the auditorium at her elementary school. Or the bystanders looking on while the injured soldiers got operated on, the way Maxine and her friends huddled around the cardboard man whose organs they so carefully removed when playing Operation. How could a ship, which was surrounded by water, burn? If Monopoly was a game, what did it mean that neither player was any good? Only later did she realize those young men must have been leaping from their ships because they preferred a watery death to frying in the oily flames. How miraculous, that her father’s words could lie dormant in her brain, only to be released by the sight and feel of this heavy black View-Master, with the added gift that she could finally flesh out his words with the knowledge she had since acquired.

  She took so long in the attic her mother came up to see if anything was amiss. Maxine tried to explain the memories the View-Master had unleashed. And her mother, who so rarely took an interest in Maxine’s observations, surprised her by saying, “That’s why I couldn’t bring myself to throw any of this away.”

  A few days later, Maxine had given up on her idea of becoming an engineer and applied to MIT’s new Program in Science, Technology, and Society. For her doctorate, she designed and carried out a series of extensive interviews and psychological tests in which she attempted to quantify just how much of our emotional lives actually does reside in objects. In a way, she owes her career as much to her mother as to her father. The trouble is, she genuinely loved her father, while she often needs to convince herself that she loves her mother. She pays for her mother’s care in Ann Arbor’s best nursing home. But she often catches herself wishing her father might be the parent upon whom she is lavishing so much care in his twilight years.

  She stops at CVS to pick up the tweezers and tissues her mother requested, then crosses the Huron River and continues up the winding road to Sunrise Hills. (“Sunset Hills would be more like it,” her mother had remarked upon being driven there on her tour.) At the gated entrance, Maxine brakes for an elderly man bent at ninety degrees over the handles of his walker, moving as slowly as the Galapagos tortoise he so resembles. She parks in a spot for visitors. At the front desk, a security guard in a red blazer makes sure she signs the logbook. Maxine specifies she has arrived to visit Henrietta Sayers in Room 553 and is entering at 4:30 p.m. If she takes her mother from her room, she will need to sign another log at the nurses’ station. Then she will need to sign her mother back in when she returns her.

  “Ma’am! Ma’am!”

  Maxine looks back.

  “You made a mistake.” The guard points to the clock. “It’s 4:37.”

  Maxine studies the clock. “Yes,” she agrees. “It is.”

  The guard jabs her finger at the book. “Then why did you write 4:30?”

  She picks up the pen, which is attached to the desk by a chain of tiny silver spheres, each like a crystallized second, and changes the “0” to an “8.” As she heads to the elevator, she can feel the guard watching her, as if she might yet pocket a few loose minutes from a resident who can barely spare them.

  The elevator is located across from the gym. Seven women and two men lift weights no bigger than a turkey leg, curling them to their chests, raising them overhead, like an army training for an invasion by a superior force they are determined to withstand. The elevator takes forever to come. Maxine pictures residents wheeling themselves in and trying to remember which button to push. The doors open and a middle-aged man rushes out, so eager to regain his freedom the guard needs to shout after him, “Sir! Sir!” to remind him to sign the logbook.

  She pushes the button for the fifth floor. After an interminable series of comings and goings, the doors open on a cluster of withered residents. Rocking. Clawing at their faces. Moaning. Her childhood terror of death rises in her throat.

  “Help me!” a woman shrieks.

  She looks up so imploringly Maxine asks, “What is it? What do you need?”
But her question agitates the woman more. She snatches at Maxine’s purse.

  “Help me!”

  Maxine clings to her purse. The woman snatches the CVS bag. Maxine snatches it back. She hurries along the corridor.

  “Please!” the woman pleads. “Help me! Help me! Help me!” Maxine needs to summon her deepest powers of indifference to keep from turning.

  Beside the nurses’ station, a boiled old man sits cradling a stuffed lion. Did someone give him the toy to calm him? She read about a nursing home in Japan where each resident is provided with a robot baby seal. The old people can enjoy the companionship of a pet without needing to take it outside or clean a litter box. The same home is experimenting with robot caretakers that roll from bed to bed, making sure the patients take their medications. The robots bring the old people meals, sing songs, challenge their memories with riddles, and monitor the corridors to make sure no one gets lost.

  Here, in America, a few aides loiter behind their desk, chatting and filling out forms. Most genuinely care about their charges. But a few seem to resent ministering to residents who snarl at them, curse, and hurl racial invectives that make Maxine want to beg forgiveness for the entire white race. Forget robots. Wouldn’t it be easier to pay the human aides higher salaries?

  She finds her mother lying fully clothed on her bed—to lie beneath the covers during the day would be an admission of defeat. Maxine pulls up the one chair in the room and lifts her mother’s veiny hand—even in her sleep, the Parkinson’s causes it to twitch like a fish. Her mother wears a blouse printed with a Paris street scene and polyester pants with an elastic waistband her mother hates, but how could she manage zippers?

  Maxine shifts to the end of the mattress, takes one of her mother’s gnarled feet, and massages it. The toes straighten. The stiff sole relaxes. Her mother smiles in her sleep. Until recently, the two of them rarely touched. That they are touching now, with her mother so near death, brings tears to Maxine’s eyes. She remembers how Sam used to sit on the sofa massaging her own feet as they watched the evening news. He began with the soles. Then moved up to her ankles. Worked his way higher to her thighs.

  Her heart overflows with belated sympathy. If Maxine is so bereft here in Ann Arbor, where she has so many colleagues and friends, how much more isolated must her mother have been in their tiny upstate town? How furious she must have been at Spider Macalvoy, the army buddy her husband raised from nothing to become a partner in the company he built from the ground up. Or Dr. Vincent, who delivered Maxine and must have been aware his friend was working on a deal to sell their company. Not until Sam died did Maxine understand what it was like to lose the man you had slept with for so many years. The father of your only child. A child who would now be grieving in ways that made your own heart tear open even wider.

  Her mother had adored Sam, who reminded her of her own brilliant and inventive husband. And Sam had been wonderfully attentive to Maxine’s mother. Courtly. Demonstrating the manners he had been tutored in as a child. “He is such a gentleman,” her mother used to say, the highest praise she knew how to give. She had been devastated when Sam died. True, she couldn’t help but make her son-in-law’s death yet another of the tragedies she was fated to endure. But she idolized her only grandson. She lavished so much affection on Zach, he couldn’t help but lavish it back.

  “Why does Grandmom have to live in that awful retirement home?” Zach had asked. Maxine explained she had offered to sell their house and buy one that wouldn’t require his grandmother to climb stairs. But at the outset her mother had preferred to live among people her own age, with whom she might develop a regular bridge game or attend a concert. And then, as the Parkinson’s had progressed, she had grown too infirm to be cared for in Maxine’s home. The sight of all those elderly people rocking in their wheelchairs clearly bothered Zach. But he usually was the one to suggest they visit. During the week, he would ride there on his bike. Later, when he was visiting from MIT, he would borrow his father’s old VW bug and stop at Stucchi’s so he could bring his grandmother the Grasshopper Pie ice cream she adored.

  Now, sitting beside her mother, Maxine’s eyes wander to the photos crowding the nightstand: Zach toddling after a duck in Fenstead; Zach standing stiffly beside his prize-winning science-fair project on the workings of the photovoltaic cell; Zach in a thrift-store tuxedo, with his much shorter, frailer prom-date folded against his side. What was the prom date’s name? Angelica? Angelina?

  The autumn of Zach’s senior year in high school, Maxine had been working in her office when she was seized by a craving to be outdoors. She blew off a meeting and drove to the Arboretum. When she reached the rapids, where a local eccentric had arranged the rocks in the shape of a giant heart, she noticed a couple wading toward the opposite shore, hand in hand, the foliage orange and red behind them. Then the couple turned, and she realized the young man was her son.

  She managed to slip into the woods just before Zach and his girlfriend could see her. But as she bushwhacked to her car, it occurred to her there had been something wounded about the girl. The way one arm turned out from the wrist. The way she leaned against Zach, as if using him to steady her balance. She had been pretty enough, with hair so shiny, dark, and long it might have been its own tributary of the Huron River. But Maxine suspected the girl had some neurological disability. Which might have been why her kind-hearted son had fallen in love with her.

  That night, she had hinted to Zach that if he ever were to, well, like a girl, she hoped he would feel free to bring her home. Maxine would make a nice meal. She would try not to embarrass him.

  Zach said, “Okay, Mom. Someone tipped you off I’m seeing Angelina. If you promise not to cook anything Mexican, I’ll bring her to dinner this Friday night.”

  And Angelina had been a very sweet guest. She brought Maxine flowers in a milk-bottle vase she had painted herself. But Zach had been the one to carry the gift from the car—he had driven to Ypsilanti to pick her up—because Angelina would have had trouble carrying the vase while maneuvering up the walk with a brace on each arm. All of which gave Maxine the impression the girl was literally using her son to lean on.

  Up close, Angelina was even more attractive than Maxine thought. Her words seemed thick in her mouth, but she was a charming, loquacious talker. She and Zach had met in study hall, she said. She wasn’t that good at math, but Zach was wonderful at explaining algebra. Her father ran a landscaping business. She loved taking Zach to the Arboretum because she knew the names of all the bushes and trees and he didn’t know anything except maple and daisy. After they graduated, she was going to work for her father and save up enough money so she could open a nursery of her own.

  Maxine brought out the strawberry-rhubarb pie she had baked for the occasion. Angelina stood, put on her braces, and attempted to clear the plates. Unsettled by the sight of her son’s disabled Mexican-American girlfriend stacking the family’s dirty dishes, Maxine said: “Go, go. I’ll clean up. You two go out and have a good time.” Later, after Zach came home from the movie, Maxine managed to recite his girlfriend’s positive qualities. But then she found herself saying—as mothers often do—exactly what she knew she shouldn’t. “Zach, it’s fine if you fall in love with someone who has, well, limitations. But you need to make sure you aren’t falling in love because of those limitations. I mean, because you pity her.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she was horrified. “Oh, God, Zach. I am so, so sorry. Angelina is a lovely person. I don’t even know what I meant by that. I won’t say another word. I promise.”

  Zach lifted his hands. “Mom! You don’t get it! Angie is the one who’s taking pity on me!”

  Over and over, Maxine apologized. But Zach had never again brought Angelina home. Maxine hadn’t even realized he was taking her to the prom until he showed up in that tuxedo. The photo by his grandmother’s bed had been taken at Sunrise Hills, with the same Nikon that Maxi
ne’s father had used to take pictures of Maxine on her prom night. Not that she’d had a date. Her father had insisted she “gussy herself up” in one of her mother’s cocktail dresses and escorted her to a showing of That’s Entertainment in Saratoga.

  Her mother’s eyes flutter open. Her arm flies up and she fusses at her matted hair. “Tomorrow morning,” she reminds Maxine. “My appointment is for ten. But time is different in the basement.”

  “Sure,” Maxine says. “I’ll be here by nine.” She reaches into the CVS bag and pulls out the tissues.

  “Do those have the lotion already in them?”

  “Yes, Mom.” She puts the box on the bedside table.

  “These flat boxes take up too much space.”

  “Sorry. I’ll get the smaller box next time.” Maxine takes out the tweezers. The only thing she hates worse than plucking hairs from her mother’s chin is knowing Zach will one day need to do the same for her. “Hold still.” She leans so close she inhales her mother’s fusty scent, like an overripe peach. She grasps a spiky bristle.

  “Ow!” Her mother flinches. Maxine struggles to get a grip on a silky filament. After several aborted tries, she yanks. Three more hairs and Maxine is finished. “Yes,” her mother says. Not thanks.

  Maxine hopes this will be the end of ministering to her mother’s vanity. But her mother has requested Maxine buy the exact shade of mascara she has been using for forty years, and Maxine needs to explain—yet again—that the company discontinued making it. Instead, she shows her mother the slightly lighter shade she bought at CVS. With her mother’s hands jerking so violently, how is she going to apply mascara anyway? To divert her, Maxine suggests she allow her to wheel her to the dining room for dinner. But her mother protests that Maxine promised to look for the envelope from Cousin Joel. “I put it somewhere. Now I can’t find it. Maybe it’s in that drawer.”