The Immortalists(84)
‘Why the black clothing?’ Gertie asks. ‘Why the hair like Rosie’s Baby?’
‘Rosemary’s Baby?’ Varya frowns. ‘She was blond.’
A light knock on the door, and a nurse enters to bring Gertie dinner: chopped salad; a chicken breast in a gelatinous yellow membrane; a small roll of bread with a pat of butter, the latter wrapped in gold foil.
Gertie climbs in bed to eat, activating a robotic arm that unfolds to become a small table. In the beginning, she hated the facility. She called it that – ‘the facility,’ instead of Varya’s preferred term, ‘the home’ – and weekly she tried to escape from it. Eighteen months ago – after she called Don Dorfman’s Auto Emporium and set in motion plans to purchase a Volvo S40, giving Don Dorfman the number of a long-defunct credit card once owned by Saul – Gertie was prescribed an antidepressant, and her circumstances improved. Now she attends continuing education classes on subjects like Battles of the Second World War and the popular Presidential Affairs (Not of State). She plays mah-jongg with a group of boisterous widows. She makes use of the library and even the pool, where she bobs atop an inflatable lounger like a celebrity on a parade float, calling to whomever is in shouting distance.
‘I don’t know why you won’t come to the dining hall,’ she tells Varya when the nurse leaves. ‘We could sit at the table and socialize. Maybe you’d even eat something.’
But Gertie’s new friends make Varya uncomfortable. They gossip constantly about whose son is due to visit, whose granddaughter has just given birth. They responded with shock, then pity, after learning that Varya is both childless and unmarried. And they showed little interest in her longevity research, which aims, after all, to help people like them.
‘But no children?’ they persisted, as if Varya might have lied the first time. ‘No one to share your life with? What a shame.’
Now Varya pauses at Gertie’s bedside, standing. ‘I come here to see you. I don’t need to socialize with anyone else. And I’ve told you, Ma, that I never eat this early. Not before –’
‘– seven thirty. I know.’
Gertie’s face is both defiant and doleful. She knows Varya better than anyone else, knows her deepest secret and has probably guessed plenty of others, and lately Varya’s visits have provoked these power struggles – times when Gertie pushes against Varya’s carefully assembled exterior and Varya pushes the wooden thing back, insisting on its legitimacy.
‘I brought you something,’ Varya says.
She walks to a small, square table by the window and begins to unload a care package from a brown paper bag. There is a book of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, which she found at a library sale; a jar of Milwaukee’s dill pickles, in honor of Saul; and lilacs, which she brings into Gertie’s small bathroom. She cuts the stems over a trash can, fills a tall glass with tap water, and carries them back to the table by the window.
‘If you’d stop walking back and forth like that,’ Gertie says.
‘I brought you flowers.’
‘So stop and look at them.’
Varya does. The glass is too short. One flower keels dumbly over the side. They won’t be alive much longer.
‘Very pretty,’ says Gertie. ‘Thank you.’
And when Varya takes in the bland plastic table and the window felted with dust, the hospital-like bed across which Gertie has laid a faded afghan Saul’s mother crocheted, she can see why Gertie thinks so. In these surroundings, the flowers stand out, so colorful they almost look neon.
Varya pulls a metal folding chair from the card table at the window to Gertie’s bedside. The armchair is closer to the bed, but its fabric is nubby and stained and Varya has no way of knowing who’s sat on it.
Gertie peels back the foil around the butter and digs inside with a plastic knife. ‘Did you bring me a photo?’
Varya has, though every week she hopes Gertie will forget to ask. Ten years ago, she made the mistake of photographing Frida with the camera on her new cell phone. Frida had just arrived at the Drake after a three-day journey from a primate lab in Georgia. She was two weeks old: her pink face wrinkled and pear shaped, her thumbs in her mouth. That year, Gertie was still living alone, and the thought of her isolation compelled Varya to send a photo by e-mail. Immediately she realized her error. She had joined the Drake one month before, at which point she signed an uncompromising confidentiality policy. But Gertie responded to the photo with such glee that Varya soon found herself sending another – this one of Frida wrapped in a teal blanket while being fed by bottle.
Why didn’t she stop? For two reasons: because the photos were a way to share her research with Gertie, who had never fully understood it – previously, Varya had worked with yeast and drosophila, organisms so small and uncharismatic that Gertie could not fathom how Varya might discover anything of use to human beings – and because they brought Gertie delight; because Varya brought Gertie delight.
‘Better,’ says Varya now. ‘A video.’
Gertie’s face is a mask of anticipation. Her hands, thickened and gnarled by arthritis, reach for the cell phone, as if Varya has brought news of a grandchild. Varya helps Gertie hold the phone and press Play. In the video, Frida is grooming herself while looking into the mirror that hangs outside of her cage. The mirror is a source of enrichment, like the puzzle feeders and the classical music played in the vivarium each afternoon. By reaching their fingers through the bars, the monkeys can manipulate the mirrors, using them to look at themselves as well as the rest of the cages.