Published in River Styx 48 (1996), pp. 16-30
Edward L. Schwarzschild, Assistant Professor of English

I.
The Bubba of this story, Mrs. Mildred Maisel, had only one working eye, and she had an artificial hip that made her 'oof' out loud and sway with each step, but she could still look around for herself, and she knew that the place where the stern surgeon's assistant had told her to wait was no sun room, and it would never be one, not in her lifetime. "We call this place 'The Sun Room,'" the assistant had proudly said, and it was all Milly could do to stop herself from saying, "Well, you can call it whatever you like, dear, but that doesn't change what it is."

In fact, it was not a room at all -- it was a sixth floor hallway that connected surgery and intensive care, bridging two hospital buildings. In this space, Milly sat and waited between visits to her husband, Mr. Charles Maisel, the Zayda of this story. At age seventy-four, he was about to undergo open heart surgery for the second time. To remember him at sixty-four-his age when they first cut into his chest -- was to recall his endurance, strength, and kindness. He had the bulky, knotted forearms of a carpenter, he sported a silver goatee, and he wore wideframed bifocals that doubled as safety glasses when he patrolled the construction sites he was paid to supervise. When he went in for that first open heart surgery, everyone knew he would recover. Some joked that anesthesia would be unnecessary. Those who worked under him came to visiting hours at the hospital, and they pictured Charlie awaking while the doctor was sewing up his chest. Their boss would reach out, wrap his hand around the bicep of the young doctor, and say, "That last stitch was a tad off-line, son. Would you like this old man to show you how it's done?"

No one seemed surprised when he became, after surgery, both stronger and wiser; not only had he faced down death, but he had emerged with more artery space and a brand new heart valve -- he wasn't dead, he was a significantly more efficient breather! The telltale scar ran like a train track down the middle of his rib cage, and with the slightest provocation, he would unbutton or pull off his shirt, revealing for anyone not too squeamish the culminant, chillingly stitched evidence of his ability to survive. Back on the job in less than two weeks, he moved slowly at first, he felt a certain caution, but he was there.

Though the doctors spoke as if Charlie was the same man at seventy-four that he had been at sixty-four, the situation surrounding his second open heart surgery was utterly different. Again the doctors talked in cheering voices of increased blood flow, stronger lungs, and they quoted statistics about a new kind of artificial valve made from the heart of a pig. Only a few people heard Charlie's laughter anymore, and they did not hear it often, but Milly remembered him chuckling as he wondered aloud what his father would have thought of such an implant. "What's wrong with the heart of a cow?" he asked the doctors. "Pig valves, you know, they're tref. Aren't there valves on the hearts of kosher animals?"

During the decade that passed between open hearts, Charlie lost his job; he was forced to retire at sixty-five. He tried to establish himself as a fix-it-up man for hire, a local, reliable, friendly doer of odd jobs. He ordered several hundred business cards and he painted his name, phone number, and "Fix-It-Up Man" on the doors of his pick-up truck, but work was hard to come by. Then, while he sat in the house, unemployed, hoping for the phone to ring, pestering Milly with his inactivity, something happened. The hand of an enormous clock clicked into place, or the stars in the sky of their small universe fell into a new alignment, or the air all around them grew denser and more scarce, and, suddenly, everyone started dying. Milly and Charlie found themselves spending much of their sixties and seventies moving from bedside to bedside, trying to cheer their friends and families through long and short final moments. They would look at each other, they would hold each other's hand, and they would think and not say: if the Gurbargs, the Diamonds, the Marins, the Goodmans, and the Maurers can die, how are we to believe that we can keep going much longer?

Before entering the hospital, Charlie began speaking frequently in terms of closure. At temple, he could be overheard saying such things as "I've had seventy-five good years," or "I've had the pleasure of celebrating my fiftieth wedding anniversary." And he'd go on: "The time has come for me to be a little flat on my back. What can you expect? I can't Complain. I haven't had a life you can complain about."

Millie was not waiting long in "The Sun Room" before she saw a friend. Harold Packel, the rabbi of Philadelphia's Congregation Beth Am, was a tall, wide, well-fed man, but what she spotted first was his colorfully embroidered kepah as it bobbed brightly above a sea of uncovered heads. Five days a week, he drove to several hospitals, took the elevator to the top floor of each one, and worked his way slowly down to the lobby, visiting his ailing congregants. He pulled up a chair, sat down beside Milly, took and held one of her hands. "You know, you're not alone here," he said. "Already I've seen Joe Loninger in intensive care, and Alfred Mut is getting ready for eye surgery. Max Homig's right arm is being put in a cast. Also I ran into Ethel Frank."

"What's Ethel here for?" Milly asked. "Is she visiting too?"

"No, they were taking her into X-ray, but I don't think she'll be staying overnight."

"Is there anyone else?"

Rabbi Packel pulled a small blue memo pad from his shirt pocket, flicked some pages, and said, "Well, I have written down that I should look for Milt Singer around the delivery room because his granddaughter's due for twins. And then there's Meyer Levin, you know, he's a regular volunteer here. You'll see him come strolling by in his uniform." He closed the pad, placed it back in his pocket, and then he leaned forward in his seat. "When I stopped by Charlie's room," he said, "the nurse wouldn't let me in. Tell me, Milly, how is he?"

"Surgery first thing in the morning," she said. "And the doctor told us it might take a long time because he's not exactly sure what he'll find-six, maybe eight hours. He says there will be scar tissue from the first surgery and that makes it especially difficult."

The rabbi stood up slowly, Milly stood up with him, and they hugged. "I should continue on my rounds before it gets too late," he eventually said. "I'll come by tomorrow, but is there anything I can do for you, anything I can get for you while I'm gone?"

"With all these people in the hospital," Milly said, "we should play poker. Just tell people where I am when you see them. Ask them to come by and play a few hands with me before they leave. Just pennyante."

"OK. I'll spread the word," he said, leaving her, stepping back towards the bustling crowd of patients and staff and passersby.

These days, in the Northeast, the elderly travel by the busload to Atlantic City casinos and younger people tend to think they go in search of a jackpot, a tumble of coins, a stack of chips, enough to remove all worries from their retirement. Milly knew of many who boarded the busses with just such hopes and dreams. But she also knew that most of her friends went to the glitzy buildings for a different reason. They went to Atlantic City because at the slot machines, or the blackjack table, or at craps or roulette, they could experience the workings of chance and suffer only financial loss. They could step into a world of possibility, play for normal stakes, and it was not impossible to win. Even more, regardless of whether they won or lost, at the end of the day, everyone ate dinner together, and the bus waited to take them all peacefully home.

Sitting in the hallway, Milly saw the hospital as a casino of health, and she wondered how many times you could walk out feeling better, or even feeling the same? How many times could you put your open heart on the table and get it back? Like casinos, hospitals stay well lit around the clock, confusing one's sense of time, making it difficult to keep track of the outside world, making it difficult to know when the day is over and the night has begun. But, eventually, the crowd lessens, the hallways clear, and you find yourself in a vast quiet space named after an emperor, or a queen, or the moon, or even the Sun; you find windows there, they may be in shadow, they may be heavily tinted, but it's very late, and the darkness comes through.

II.
Because Meyer Levin wisely filched a dozen five hundred count boxes of toothpicks from cafeteria supply, he was given the dual honor of calling and dealing the first game. He began by explaining how the toothpicks would serve as poker chips -- "a penny a stick" was the rule and, acting as the bank, he gave each player a box in exchange for five dollars. Then he said, slowly, looking around the table as he spoke, "Ladies and gentleman, we shall open the evening with a game of Meshugennah Hurdy Gurdy." Including Milly, there were seven people ready to ante up. Max and Ethel had made it, Max with his forearm in a cast and a blue sling, Ethel with complaints about the personally degrading nature of X-ray procedure. Milton came up from delivery, and he sat on the edge of his seat, waiting to be paged so he could rush off to hear the first cries of his great-grandchildren. The arrival of Linda Wells and her sister Charnelle completely surprised Milly. They were Charlie's teammates in the Thursday night Center Lanes Bowling League. Morton Decker, Charnelle's husband, was in overnight after minor foot surgery, so they had to come visit him, but they also wanted to find out how long it would take Charlie to get "back out striking." Milly had known them for close to fifteen years; everyone else playing she had known since high school.

The glasses Meyer wore had the thickest tenses anyone had ever seen, and they seemed to rest right up against his eyelashes, the top of the heavy black frames pushing into his eyebrows. Bald and pale-skinned, with large jowls and a thick neck, Meyer in his glasses inevitably looked something like an insect, but he had the smooth voice of a gentle, understanding angel. "Yes," he said, "it shall be Meshugennah Hurdy Gurdy," and he began dealing as he described the game: "This is seven card poker, dealt two down, four up, one down. When a queen hits the table, you know that the next up card will be wild. If more than one queen comes up, the wild card follows the final queen. Queens in the hole are also wild. And, most importantly, if at any time I turn up the queen of spades, the game is dead, and everyone antes again, I re-shuffle and re-deal."

Milly instinctively disliked the idea of a game-killing card, of a game that went back and forth between being alive and being dead. To relax, she tried to focus only on the lilt of Meyer's voice and the movement of the cards. When he dealt an up card, he would hold it right in front of his glasses, then he would call it out. A two was a 'deuce,'a three was a'trey,' and he pronounced 'nine' as if it had two long syllables: "nigh-in," he would say. He couldn't see the cards on the table, but he had a strong memory, and he would offer assessments of the hands along the way, saying such things as: "the deuce is no use," "he'll make space for an ace," "what's she trying with the nigh-in."

Again and again, Meyer turned up the queen of spades; he would toss it in to the middle of the table and say, "It is the spadey lady, the game is dead, and that's the beauty of Meshugennah Hurdy Gurdy." Five, ten, fifteen times in a row, and the pile of toothpicks that was the pot grew larger and larger. Milly did not know what the odds were of such a long game, but she had played Meshugennah Hurdy Gurdy on many occasions, and she had never before seen the queen of spades so many times in a row.

The rest of the players seemed both excited and puzzled, and Milly thought they were making small jokes to avoid thinking about the meaning of their odd circumstance. They talked about the winning straight flushes, the winning five-of-a-kinds that the queen of spades kept killing. Milly felt disbelief and shock. She saw the persistence of the queen as the persistence of death. It would keep coming and she could hardly bear it. The game continued, she grew more and more tired, and she considered closing her eyes, but instead she tried to distance herself in silence, only rarely glancing at her cards. She settled into a rhythm: tossing in toothpicks, listening to Meyer's voice....

What had stayed with her over the past two days was one of the surgeon's answers. Dr. Irving Kravkow had appeared during the earliest visiting hours of Charlie's first day in the hospital and, standing by the foot of the bed, holding the chart in his hand, he said he needed everyone to understand that the surgery would take a long time. He offered a brief step-by-step plan: "Two days from today, we'll open him up, stop the heart, put him on a heart and lung machine, and get down to work." Milly didn't want to quarrel with the plan, but she did have a question. "How is it that you stop the heart?" she asked.

"It's surprisingly easy. To stop a heart, all you do is touch it. You touch it and it stops."

"You just touch it and it stops?"

"Essentially."

Charlie, who had been quietly listening in bed, asked, "Well, how do you start it going again?"

"A shock, a small electric shock. It's the most unpredictable part of the operation because there is never any guarantee the heart will start back up."

Whenever Milly had tried to sleep after that, she was startled awake by the thought of her own heart stopping. As she imagined it, she would wake up, turn to the people around her, and say, "I think my heart's stopped. I could use some help getting it started again." The other people in this vision were threatening and cold. "How can you speak if your heart had stopped," they wanted to know. A man menacingly opened and closed the sharp metallic connectors of the large set of jumper cables he carried. "Should I hook these on?" he asked. "You think maybe these might help?" Occasionally, a young nurse would appear, but she had very little comfort or advice to offer. Though she was sympathetic, she didn't think anything needed to be done. She just wanted Milly to calm down. "Oh, your heart has stopped," the nurse would say, as if she were talking to a child. "That's no good. Here. Now sit down for a minute. Just take it easy." The only people who seemed to understand were Charlie and her friends. When they approached her, she would say to them, "I'm so glad you're here. I need some help. You see, my heart stopped." They would each say, "I know how it is. Mine stopped too."

In the recent past, Milly had seen a car accident where a bloodied body on a stretcher was lifted into an ambulance. She and Charlie were driving home from an evening movie-Charlie was behind the wheel-when they came upon the flares and flashing red lights of an accident. Car accidents scared her. Neither she nor Charlie seemed able to drive the right speed anymore; they'd go the wrong way on a one way street, they'd occasionally miss their exit. "Don't slow down," Milly said as they approached the scene of the crash. "Just drive right past. I don't want to see a thing," but she saw and she felt sure the person on the stretcher was dead.

There was the time she saw Bob Lasky suffer a stroke. She and Charlie had gone out bowling with Bob and his wife Naomi. Naomi walked off to the bathroom, it was Charlie's turn to bowl, so she and Bob sat at the scorer's table, watching and chatting. They were trying to figure out whose grandchildren were more spoiled when Bob suddenly became quiet, turned in his chair, and stared off towards the front door. Then he said, "Butterfly, butterfly, butterfly," and he began to scratch nervously at his chest. Milly rushed to a phone, the ambulance came quickly, and Bob did not die. He developed a stutter.

Only once had Milly seen someone die. When she was still a child, seven years old, her mother took her to visit her great aunt Annie in a downtown hospital, and there she was in a wheelchair by a window, gazing out, slouched down, her big-knuckled, arthritic hands folded in her lap, and Milly looked at those hands, wondering who this woman was, wondering why one of those hands was moving towards her, so she stepped back, not wanting to be touched by such pale, bony fingers, and she turned her head, because she didn't even want to see them, and instead she saw an old man roll out of his bed and thump to the hard floor and stay absolutely still as people ran over and touched him and prodded him and lifted him up and covered him with a white sheet. She didn't turn back to her great aunt Annie, she stared at the shape of the old man and tried to see where his life had gone because she didn't think it could have left the room so quickly.

Calls came in for the spadey lady and Milly pictured her out at the edge of her consciousness. This popular queen carried the shovel for which she had been named and she worked at the cemetery, surrounded by green, digging a large, wide, circular grave at the center of a field that stretched out towards the sky. She needed toothpicks for her work, for support. They could stop the earth from caving in. Toss the spadey lady the toothpicks....

Someone had a hand on her shoulder and was gently shaking her awake. Her eyes shot open, her body tensed, and she said, "What? What? What is it?" The uniformed man who stood before her with his cart full of janitor's equipment was very apologetic. "I'm sorry, ma'am," he whispered. "I saw you here and I thought you were just sleeping, but I wanted to check and make sure. I was a little worried, you see, because I looked closely and I couldn't tell if you were breathing. I'm sorry. It's very early. You go on back to sleep now." Before she could respond, his back was turned and he was walking away.

Meyer Levin was sound asleep in the next chair. The rest of her friends were gone. The cards and toothpicks were on the white table. Milly watched the janitor walk into the next building and then, aside from a few slow-moving, steepy,eyed young doctors, aside from herself and Meyer, the hallway of glass was empty. She stretched out her arms, she rubbed the back of her neck with her right hand. It was almost three-thirty in the morning. She thought she might be able to fall back asleep and she hoped she would stop thinking when she did. She closed her eyes, rested her open hands on her chest for a moment, and said, aloud, to no one but herself, "I am still breathing. My heart beats and beats."

III.
When Charlie got home, four days after the surgery, he had a terrible case of the hiccups. Dr. Kravkow had kept him open on the table for close to nine hours, he installed the new valve, he performed a quadruple bypass, and since he didn't feel comfortable with the way the scar tissue from the earlier operation had come to hold the heart, he slowly cut the heart free and repositioned it. Then they stitched Charlie up. But over the course of the next two days, they had to go back in twice more to clean up internal bleeding. After all this, Milly thought, after once again dodging death, after slowly struggling back to her, he was being driven crazy by hiccups. When she asked the doctor for reasons, he spoke of cilia on the diaphragm that had been disturbed during surgery., It would take them several additional days to heal. But she wanted a more expansive explanation. She wanted to know how something so absurd could happen. Hiccups and open heart. She wanted to know if there was anyone at all who could see fairness and sense in such an arrangement.

The strangeness of the card game seemed to set the tone for the recovery. When Meyer woke her up that morning in the hallway, he had told her about how the game had never really ended. Thirty-four times in a row, the queen of spades appeared. After Milly dropped offand no one, he said, could bear to wake her up-they kept playing, hoping to finish the one game and see who would win the huge pile of toothpicks. Since everyone knew it would be the only game of the evening, the bets grew larger until, eventually, everyone had placed all five hundred of their toothpicks in the center of the table. Even then, the game was killed by the card. Everyone simply reclaimed their five dollars. Rabbi Packel stopped by after the surgery and told Milly the game sounded like a theme for a sermon: people kept calling the game dead, and yet it never ended. It was possible to wager everything and lose nothing. The game, in his eyes, could be used to illustrate the power of tradition: tradition always seemed endangered, yet it continued, preserving the shape of time, binding people together. Yes, Milly silently allowed, one could see it that way, but she found herself thinking that Meyer's Meshugennah Hurdy Gurdy showed how the sign of death was everywhere, how it couldn't be concealed, how it couldn't be avoided; you could shuffle and shuffle, deal and deal, but the sign of death would keep coming. You could call it whatever you liked, you could call it tradition, but that didn't change what it was.

Charlie was home, but he couldn't relax, couldn't sleep. He had medication that was supposed to make him drowsy, but that was all it did. He nodded off for fifteen or twenty minutes, then he stood up and shuffled around their small, two-story house. Milly followed him from room to room, watching how his body twitched -- each hiccup raising him up, tilting him forward; he lifted his shoulders every time, as if he were trying somehow to shrug off the unending reflex. These were not the sort of hiccups that a sudden scare could chase away. A look of fear already filled Charlie's eyes, a look that said: When will it stop? She spoke quietly to him, told him he would be alright, trying to give comfort, asking him to be still, and she thought of death's many masks, its infinite appearances, how it could show itself on the highway, in a bowling alley, in hospitals, as another car, a flash of light, a tug at the throat.

Charlie had other problems. His stomach was upset, the stitches hurt, his entire body felt weak, fragile, and he couldn't remember the last time he experienced real, deep, undrugged sleep. He described thick waves of nausea and dizziness that he could see coming; they rose out of the walls, he said, and they towered above him, curling over just beneath the ceiling, silent and majestic until they crashed down upon his body. But these waves came only every now and then, while the hiccups were continuous, one each minute, sometimes more. Time passed. Hours. He ate nothing for lunch. For dinner he worked down a few bites of a potato knish. It was an effort to drink a full glass of water.

"This is torture," he told Milly, and she could see how it was; like a constant reminder of captivity, the hiccups proved a powerlessness, a vulnerability, and he would have done anything for them to stop. The sun began to set and it had been an entire week since Charlie had entered the hospital. He said, "I should have said no. This isn't right. I shouldn't be here like this."

He wore baggy light blue boxers and a white tank top undershirt around the house. By late in the evening the combination of his medication, his frustration, his almost empty stomach, and his lack of sleep made him slightly delusional. Milly was also tired. To herself she said, I am not well-rested by any means. She wanted him to get into bed and lie still so she could lie beside him, hold onto him, calm him down, give him warmth, carry him to sleep with her. But he kept getting up. And when he spoke, he ceased to make clear sense. She worried he might have a stroke. She considered returning to the hospital in the morning.

He wandered down from the bedroom to the kitchen where he found the newspaper, and he ripped it up, in long slow tears, shreds of paper falling to the floor, and he was saying, "It's not today's, it's not today's," even though it was. He turned on the TV, he turned on the stereo, he opened the microwave oven, he opened the windows, and Milly thought he was getting reacquainted with the house. Then he went back upstairs, into the bedroom, into their walk-in clothes closet, and he said, as if he had come to the end of a long difficult search, "Here they are. They're right here. This is where they are."

"What?" Milly said, "What is here?"

"These," he said, "these are what's doing it to me. These are at the heart of my problems." He stepped into the closet and began tossing out ties and belts, throwing them onto the dark brown hardwood floor, repeating out loud, calmly, in a voice of determination and anger, "These are what's doing it to me, these are what's doing it to me." His movement was not frantic, but rhythmic, systematic. Over the years, he had accumulated ties wide and narrow, ties of all colors, neck ties, bow ties, bolo ties. He threw them over his head, using both hands, right, left, right, left, without looking back. Milly leaned against the bed, out of range, and looked on. There were thin dress belts, shiny black and brown, and there were wider belts, large-buckled, banging loudly against the floor. She watched as they whipped back through the air, lines of motion moving out from the closet, and then they slid across the bedroom floor. Like snakes, they coiled and uncoiled, wriggled and snapped.

And she could see that, weakened as he had become, he etained a certain power. She could see the movement of the muscles of his arms and shoulders, she could see the strength of his legs. She remembered that when the two of them had gone visiting friends and relatives in hospitals all across the tri-state area, they would walk into rooms hand in hand, trying to exude happiness and motivation; their fingers tightened as they tried to hold themselves, their family, and their friends together. They smiled, joked, gossiped, thinking all the while that sickness was something everyone had to get through, even those who weren't sick. Charlie could not sit still in those sterile, drab rooms. She would take a seat by the bed, but he would pace, offering to open a window, to adjust the blinds. He'd arrange the flowers as he spoke. He picked up scraps of paper, threw them towards the trashcan, and if he missed, he picked them up and shot again. She knew he missed on purpose.

When all the ties and belts of his life were on the floor, Milly stepped into the closet and stood beside him. He was sweating. A hiccup moved up his back; it shrugged his shoulders. She took his hand and she could feel that he would follow her. She led him to the bathroom, gave him his pills, took him to bed and had him lie down. "Be still," she said, "I'll be back in a minute," but his eyes were already closed, he probably couldn't hear, and so she breathed a sigh of relief, hoping he would sleep at least until sunrise. It was already after midnight. As bad as he looked, as lost, as down, she knew there was a chance that, if he would sleep, he could wake up, refreshed, free of the hiccups, beginning to feel better. The very last thing Milly wanted was time to herself. Every day her fear of being alone increased. She had spent one night in the glass hallway, but every other evening of the past week, she had refused the offers of friends and driven herself slowly home after the final visiting hour. When she walked by herself into the house, it wrapped her in a cold, dark solitude. The steps to the second floor seemed unusually steep and she leaned on the banister, pulling herself up, one step at a time. Then she would check the alarm clock -- she needed to wake up at six to be at the hospital by seven -- and she would stretch out on the bed where she waited and waited for sleep. After a few minutes, her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could see the emptiness of her room, but she found herself thinking about the bed beneath her. The frame was of dark polished teak, like the bed of her parents: a wedding present, their first luxury, handmade by some immigrant friends of her father.

During one of those nights alone, almost dreaming, Milly remembered a time when she was seventeen. Her mother was fifty-two then, her father had been dead for five years, and she was the only child still living at home. At seventeen, she thought a lot about boys. She had only recently experienced her first substantial kiss and she looked forward to more, but she didn't think her mother would understand her excitement. Her mother was old, alone, with a body that was sinking in obedience to gravity and too little movement. But then it was late one night, it was after a date, after a few more kisses had left her longing, confused, bewildered. She walked softly by the master bedroom and found her mother there, wearing only a nightgown, stretched out above the covers, face down, one hand reaching towards each side of the wide mattress, as if she were trying to wrap her arms around it, as if she were trying to embrace it. She heard Milly's footsteps and turned towards the door. Her face was red with tears and crying. "I miss him," she said to her daughter, "I really miss him," and Milly knew then that longing filled the night air, that the need for a touch, a kiss, a close body would not disappear with age.

This memory had drawn her out of bed and she had searched the house that night for the three old penmanship notebooks in which her mother had kept her diary. They had plain brown and black covers, wide-lined white pages. She found them in the den, stacked them on her night table, and read them when she couldn't sleep. The first entry was from 1940 and it consisted of the pledge of allegiance before there was anything about God in it, and a list of seemingly random words: "Sympathy weather delicious stomach perhaps crowd knife knock trade charge learning service original special urge whole crisis delay fatal exempt immediately." In the diary she practiced her English; she tried to improve her vocabulary and her spelling as she recorded parts of her life. She wrote about trips to New York City or to the Jersey Beach. She wrote about her permanent wave, about the city during a blackout, about her wartime ladies' club. She wrote that she wanted to "tell about each day like Mrs. Roosevelt." Late at night, alone, Milly folded down the corners of certain pages.

She didn't want any more time to herself, but she liked this moment long after midnight in the bedroom, with Charlie back home, breathing in the easy rhythm of sleep as she watched over him. She quietly cleaned up the closet, hanging up the ties and belts amidst the smell of his sweat. She put on her nightgown, brushed her teeth, washed her face, took the pills she had to take. When she stretched out on the bed beside her husband, she listened to his steady breathing and opened one of her mother's notebooks to a passage she had read many times:

December 27 1941: My daughter Milly married on the day after Christmas halfpast eleven. I got up rather early. I could not sleep. During the night I had lots of dreams. I was afraid to go to the wedding for fear I might break down. It was ten o'clock when Milly came. Good morning mother how do you feel I am all right. She looked at me and I looked at her with out saying a word to each other. I went upstairs and had a good cry. Eleven o'clock all of us were dressed for the wedding. Every one of my children looked nice to me. I was proud of them. At the ceremony I closed my eyes and made believe that my husband was near me. He was there -- I meant to say his spirit was with every one of us. My new son-in-law looked sweet, one of his cousins gave a luncheon for us. The luncheon was beautiful. Then we went to the reception in another cousin's home. When I came into the house everything looked so beautiful. I didn't think it could be real. I thought maybe I am dreaming. People started to come and every time people came in my thoughts were about my husband. Everybody looked happy. Who knows what goes on in your heart. Didn't I look happy and everybody told me that I looked nice. I tried very hard to keep up a lot of times. I wanted to have a good cry. But I smiled. People don't like to see you cry. It was a hard day for me. My husband used to laugh and say You have such big troubles. My heart aches for you.

Milly read her mother's shaky, pencilled handwriting, and, suddenly, she was sure he could get better, the hiccups would go away, she could feel it in the air. He had stronger arteries, a shiny new valve, and years to live. But the loneliness that would come was already there, it had sunk in, deep, in anticipation, and it would dwell beside them. A time had come, and now, even during their happiest moments, even amidst celebration, reunion, recovery, their hearts would ache and ache for each other.

Milly got out of bed for a moment and walked to one of the bedroom windows that looked out over the neighborhood. She put her face up to the glass. It was cool to the touch and it fogged with her breath. She could see houses in the quiet darkness, a blinking yellow traffic light, parked cars along the street, and, up at the corner, a red brick doctor's office.

Charlie moved in the bed. He heard her sigh, and he might have thought she was crying. "What is it?" he asked. "What is it?"

She climbed back into bed and put her tired arm over him.

He felt warm, calm. "Nothing," she said. "Go back to sleep. I'm here. I'm right here next to you. I'm holding your hand."