49
After they’d finally told Connell, she could talk openly with her girlfriends about Ed’s condition. She called them every night—Ruth, Cindy, Marie, Kelly, Kathy, her aunt Margie—going through the lineup, dialing a new number the instant she’d hung up with the first. She didn’t want to be interrupted once she’d started, so she waited to make the calls until after dinner, when Ed was in his study grading lab reports and writing out lectures. Her friends invariably ended whatever calls they were on when she rang through. She didn’t always know what she was going to talk about when she picked up the phone, but the conversations followed their own rhythms, and they always had to do with Ed. She didn’t even try to talk about other things. She thought if she talked it out enough, she could make it more familiar, less overwhelming, less frightening.
Whenever she called the McGuires and Frank answered, he handed it right to Ruth. Once, about a month after the dinner at which they’d told Ruth and Frank and the others about Ed, Frank annoyed her with the way he rushed off, and she asked Ruth to hand the phone back to him.
“Where the hell did you go?” she asked. “Why haven’t you called? Why hasn’t he seen you? Why haven’t you taken him out for a beer? Why haven’t any of you goddamned guys taken him out? He’s in that study night after night.”
“I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”
“He knows that. Just call him and say hello.”
“I will,” Frank said.
Frank didn’t call, though, and a week later she got Ruth to put him on. She pretended Frank had called and handed the phone to Ed. She was afraid Ed would notice that the phone hadn’t rung, but he just took the phone and started talking to Frank like a teenager, his excitement palpable. She listened to Ed’s end of the conversation, which lasted an hour. Nothing about the disease came up. That was one difference between men and women. Men got along fine without revealing anything. She almost admired them for it. The downside was that they retreated to their islands.
When she took the phone back from Ed, she made Frank promise to call Ed again soon, but Frank didn’t call, and the next time they went to the McGuires’, Frank hardly spoke at dinner, and they left right after dessert.
? ? ?
Eileen had been telling Ruth about the anxiety dreams she was having about all her teeth falling out and her skin peeling off her body, when Ruth surprised her by suggesting she see a psychologist. She was amazed to hear Ruth speak of the positive experience she’d had in therapy. She didn’t even know Ruth had ever been in therapy. It was nearly impossible to imagine. It wasn’t that Ruth was a stone; she was in fact tirelessly empathetic when listening to the troubles and pains of others, and she always made time for her friends. It was just that she herself never gave anything away. You wouldn’t catch her crying if you tied her up and strangled her cats before her eyes one at a time. For years, Eileen had taken at face value Ruth’s assertion that, having more or less raised her younger siblings, she’d decided she was done bringing children up. Then, late one night when the men were asleep, Ruth admitted she’d been terrified to wreck a kid’s life with drink the way her mother had done. Ever since, when Eileen saw Ruth looking at Connell with affection, she knew there was more in Ruth’s heart than she’d admit to anyone, including Frank.
Eileen had dismissed therapy as an indulgence for those with too much time and money and too few friends. Besides, Catholics didn’t go to shrinks; that was what the confessional booth was for. What were you supposed to do, though, when you hadn’t been to confession since your early twenties? She pictured herself enumerating her sins for an hour and a half, being handed an inexhaustible list of prayers to recite, and leaving with no more clarity than she’d had going in.
Ruth’s therapist was named Dr. Jeremy Brill, and his office was near Ruth’s, a block from the Flatiron Building. He greeted Eileen at the door and directed her to an armchair. Eileen looked around for the couch she’d been expecting, but there was only a mahogany desk, two armchairs, and a trio of reassuring diplomas—Harvard, Cornell, Yale—on the wall above a little bookcase. The room was dark except for a floor lamp and the little light that came through the slatted blinds.
Dr. Brill sat in an armchair and asked her to speak. She found it easier to begin than she had expected. She was talking about her mother and father, her youth in Woodside, her life in Jackson Heights, her career, even Mr. Kehoe, and after she’d been speaking for a while, she felt the first sprigs of unburdening bloom in her chest. After she’d subsided into silence, it gratified her to hear Dr. Brill—he insisted that she call him Jeremy, but that wasn’t going to happen, even though he was at least ten years younger than her—say that Ed must possess superior intelligence to preserve outward normalcy for as long as he had.
“A less intelligent man might have given himself up long ago,” Dr. Brill said. “Who knows how long he’s been keeping this hidden?”
He prodded her to speak about the way Ed’s illness made her feel, and though she’d vaguely decided beforehand to parry such questions, she began to speak with a pointedness and clarity that surprised her, until, many minutes later—it amazed her how silent Dr. Brill remained, how he seemed to draw the words out of her as though hypnotizing her with his eyes, which narrowed and widened to some hidden rhythm—she felt the engine of her thoughts wind down, midsentence. He told her their time for that session was up.
The next time, she didn’t feel comfortable talking. After an initial greeting, Dr. Brill didn’t say anything either. A long silence settled into the Oriental rug. It put her in mind of the silent treatment Ed sometimes gave her, or the standoffs Connell would enact as a little boy, when he stubbornly refused to speak.
“What’s your biggest fear?” Dr. Brill asked after a while.
“I’m not quite sure,” she said. “Probably being alone.”
Another silence.
“And why is that?”
“Who wants to be alone?”
“Some people might.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“Do you feel that your husband is leaving you alone?”
“Sometimes I do, I suppose. Yes. I guess I do.”
“I understand,” he said. “This is a disease where you never win. It doesn’t just take down the sufferer. It takes down the spouse, the children, the friends. It can feel tremendously isolating.”
It was feast or famine with him; either he didn’t say a word or else he said more than she wanted to hear.
She understood that she wasn’t going to win, that she couldn’t beat Ed’s illness, and yet she wasn’t about to sit there and let someone tell her she was going to lose. She decided right then that she was never coming back. That made it easier to speak, and she spent the next half hour holding forth on all sorts of things she had no idea she was thinking about. In the end she felt relieved for having had a chance to get them out. It was almost a shame to have to cut this experiment short, because she was beginning to see value in it, though only in small doses, and for someone very different from herself.
? ? ?
She could see the day coming when Ed would have to stop working, and she wanted to be smart. She went to the Alzheimer’s Association to find out what kind of resources might be available. The social worker told her to wait until she was impoverished and they’d be able to help her get assistance.
“Impoverished?”
“Medicaid only kicks in once you’ve spent down to the threshold. You can keep your salary, up to a certain dollar amount. Not your husband’s. That goes straight to Medicaid. You’ll have to liquidate investments. You can put your money into home improvements, even update your wardrobe. Buy medicines in advance, staples for the house. Set aside burial expense money for both of you. Necessary things. Not jewelry. Definitely not jewelry. Except for your wedding ring and your engagement ring, and his wedding ring. You can keep those. If you spend the money down quickly, the government can come in and ask where it went, and you might not get Medicaid. You can keep the house no matter what. And the car. The upside is, when you’re nearly broke, there will be assistance available.”
“You’re telling me that short of—going broke, as you put it—there’s nothing I can do to defray the cost of a nurse—or a home, if it comes to that?”
“At this point, no.”
“Everything in my savings account goes?”
“Yes.”
“All the stocks?”
“Indeed.”
“The retirement accounts?”
“Them too.”
“Let me tell you something,” she said gruffly, feeling pride rise in her like a fever. “I worked hard my entire life.”
“I’m sorry.”
The costs would be enormous; their savings would dwindle quickly. The cost of at-home nursing care (she refused to consider a nursing home until she absolutely had to) would be the equivalent of taking out a second mortgage, which would be expensive enough on two incomes, but when Ed’s pension kicked in at about 40 percent of his salary, it would be virtually impossible for her to pay it without dipping into their retirement money, which would shrink quickly.
“I should have done the cabinets in cherry,” she said.
“Come again?”
“I was too prudent. I should have had the bricks ripped up and marble tiles put down. I should have bought three mink coats instead of one on sale. I should have gone to Europe every year. I should have spent my money like a drunken sailor in my twenties and thirties when everyone around me was doing it. This all would have been a lot easier to swallow if I were poor.”