We Are Not Ourselves(116)

She directed everyone to the dining room. She had decided to say that the occasion for their gathering was no occasion, that they simply wanted to see close friends and didn’t want to wait until Christmas to do so. It wasn’t a lie, exactly; she was very happy to have them there. For months now, she’d had to make excuses for not seeing them.

She used the proximity of Frank’s birthday as an excuse to stick him at the head, Ed’s regular seat. She sat Ed next to her. If Frank figured it out, she could count on him not to say anything. When the chatter was at its loudest, she filled Ed’s plate.

She was angry at Ed for putting off the telling of their friends. She didn’t care if he spilled food on himself or knocked his drink into his lap. He was on his own. She tried to absorb herself in conversations, but for the first time she derived little relief from the gathering of all these people. She ate distractedly enough to move even Jack to ask between courses if anything were the matter.

Deep into the main course, Ed tapped on his wineglass. She squeezed his knee instinctively. He struggled to his feet.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” he said as the voices lowered. She stood as well, to be beside him. “I wanted to have all of you here,” he said. “My good friends. It’s good to see you.”

He paused for long enough that it seemed he had stopped. She rubbed his back encouragingly. No one knew how to react. It was sort of funny, what he’d said; it was anticlimactic. She almost expected Frank or Jack to say, “Good to see you too. Now have a seat so we can eat.” They couldn’t, though, because Ed looked so deadly serious.

“I wanted to tell you that we’ve had some news,” he said. “It isn’t good news.”

Nobody moved; nobody said a word.

“We’ve had some tests done. And talked to some good doctors.”

It amazed her to hear him talk about Dr. Khalifa with such equanimity. Something deep in him was surfacing, some essential fiber in his character. Then he stopped again. His leg was shaking. He was steadying himself on the table. It struck her that he had tried his best. He had tried to spare her from having to tell them, but she would have to do it regardless. She put her hand on his shoulder to urge him into his seat.

“It looks like I have Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.

A second of stunned silence, then a round of gasps, hands held to mouths, looks of concern. Frank pounded the table and peppered Ed for details. Jack questioned the diagnosis. Evan and Kelly moved their seats closer together and pledged their support while holding hands. Cindy cried. Marie sat morose. Ruth made attempts at jokes. Tom drank whole glasses of wine in long quaffs and kept pulling his napkin through the circle formed by his thumb and forefinger. Nobody touched their food. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to serve dessert. She asked everyone if they’d like to move into the other room to sit with the news. They came up and hugged Ed one by one. He seemed more physically confident, quicker on the uptake, as if he had lanced a malignancy that had been draining his essence. She shuddered to imagine how much of his mental energy had gone into keeping everyone in the dark. In its own way, it had been a feat of fortitude.

Jack came up to her in the kitchen, chewing around his words as though they were a shell he was trying not to swallow.

“How could you do that? How could you embarrass that man like that?”

She had to hold her hand down to keep it from smacking his face. “This was Ed’s choice,” she said firmly.

“No man would choose that.” He turned and headed to the other room with the stiff uprightness of a former military man.

She had to remind herself that men took news like this differently than women did. She’d seen that for years working in hospitals. The bigger they were, the more uneasy they acted around revelations of disaster.

“It’s a matter of plaque deposits,” Ed was saying when she returned to the living room. Talking about the diagnosis had empowered him; he sounded professorial.

“Plaque deposits,” Frank repeated, a stunned vacancy in his voice. “I take care of plaque deposits.”

“Synapses get rerouted,” Ed said. “Brain mass decreases. Functionality suffers.”

Whatever had happened to his short-term memory, Ed’s long-term memory was, at least for now, an impregnable fortress. The clinical detachment with which he discussed what was happening neurophysiologically might have made you forget he was talking about himself. He seemed to welcome the chance to talk in this abstracted way. The faces of the people around him registered an appreciation of his aplomb, and a somber awareness settled into all of them of how terrible it was that such a fertile mind had been subject to this perverse accident of biology.

“Early-onset is the most virulent kind,” she said to Marie in the kitchen. “It dismantles motor functions and speech as it erases the memory.” She paused. “It’s the true Alzheimer’s,” she said, with something like pride at the thought that if her husband were to be destroyed by a degenerative neurological disorder, it would be the undiluted article, the aristocrat of brain diseases.

? ? ?

Everyone stayed later than usual. No one seemed to know when it would be okay to leave. Maybe they didn’t want to face the road yet, their dark thoughts, the reduced company of their spouses. Eventually Ed got cranky. “Is this thing ever going to end?” he asked, and went up to bed in a huff without pausing to say good night. Ruth raised her eyebrows, and Eileen raised hers back, and then Ruth started herding people toward the door.