The Last Romantics(101)
Renee will see this same tenderness in her own son, first with his friends when he is young, then with his wife and his own children, Renee’s grandchildren. Sometimes she will see it, too, in her colleagues and in the families of her patients. A care, a watchfulness, a willingness to accept the burden of another’s fear. As a surgeon she will attempt this same degree of humanity with her patients, but to do it absolutely, as Joe did that day, will prove impossible, and she will feel herself over the course of her career falling short. Even as her professional accolades accumulate around her, she will lament her emotional failures.
At age sixty-one—still young in body and mind, still able to perform a nineteen-hour surgery without complaint—Renee will retire from full-time medicine to teach and spend time with her son. Jonah will be nine years old then, and, Renee will say, she’s missed enough. Jonah is curious and kind, a violin player, a rugby devotee (though too skinny to play), a lover of the sea and the animals found there, who leaves for his marine-biology program at the University of Washington with a suitcase full of seashells and a framed photo he’s kept on his dresser since childhood of his Uncle Joe, his namesake, a man Jonah never met but feels he knows due to the stories his mother tells of baseball and pond swimming and New York and a cake made with almonds and cinnamon.
Jonathan’s reentry into Renee’s life proceeds slowly after that first day in the hospital. For months Renee will refuse him, not trusting this change of heart or his promises to cut down on travel, to parent alongside her. But then, after nearly a year, she relents. Jonathan returns to their home in New York. He has always loved Renee, Jonathan will tell us that Christmas, all of us gathered around Noni’s dining-room table, giddy on champagne and pecan pie. Baby Jonah is asleep in Renee’s lap, sucking a pink thumb. “I’ve loved only her since that day in the ER,” Jonathan says, and he holds up his hand, the scar having faded years ago to a thin white line cross-hatched with the ghost of stitches that Renee herself had sewn. Twenty-six years after that Christmas, on the day Jonathan Frank dies of a quick, painless stroke, his eyes will rest on the scar and it will appear suddenly to glow and pulse, a wavering, white-hot mark across his palm that opens again to reveal an image of Renee in her white doctor’s coat, Renee gently, seriously holding his hand and healing this small, wounded part of himself.
Renee will outlive Jonathan by twenty years, and her dying image, the last picture she will hold in her head, is an improbable one. It is not of Jonathan, or Jonah, or one of us, her sisters, or Noni or Joe. It is of our father, the long-gone Ellis Avery, and the day he took her fishing on Long Island Sound, just the two of them on a boat long enough for twenty, and how the late-afternoon sun made the water glimmer and glint like a thousand tiny diamonds.
Caroline will always believe that Luna has something to tell us. She will always look for Luna, and it is with Caroline that I will feel the greatest guilt and regret. She is a mother; she would know better than I what it meant for me to walk away from our brother’s child.
There are moments, weeks, years when I forget about the boy Rory, but then, after a dinner that Caroline has cooked for us, we sit in her garden with its view of Joe’s tree, and she will say the name: Luna. She will ask me, “Why did we never find her? Should we try again?”
“No,” I say. Year after year. Decade after decade. “No, we should give it up. Luna is gone.”
And so over the course of our life together, I dissuade Caroline from looking for Luna Hernandez. On this question at last I side with Renee. And finally Caroline surrenders.
“What good would’ve come of it?” she will say one afternoon when we are in our eighties, vacationing in cool, blustery Maine. She grasps my hand. “I’m so glad we never found her. We didn’t need another sister.”
Caroline and Nathan will not live together again, though they will remain friends, wonderful friends, speaking nearly every night on the phone in the years before Nathan’s death. His is a slow-moving cancer, so slow that at first the doctors advise him against treatment—old age will get him first—but then suddenly the disease accelerates as though it has awakened from a long sleep, as though it is reminded of its reason for being. When he dies, Nathan will be single, a beloved father and grandfather, known in perpetuity for a subspecies of the Panamanian golden frog that he discovers while on a research trip in the Cordilleran cloud forest. The Atelopus duffyi. This small, glistening amphibian—really more yellow than gold, he’s noted in several books, and smaller than its cousin Atelopus zeteki—is the last thing Nathan will see when, alone in a hospital room at 1:00 a.m. in the year 2049, he finds himself miraculously walking along a twisting stream on the eastern side of the Tabasará mountain range. The small, brilliant body of the frog hops before him, and he follows it farther and farther into the wet, hot trees.
Caroline will continue with her acting, gaining local acclaim, appearing in all the best regional theaters, Williamstown and Amherst, and then, the year after she marries Raffi, she appears in an Off-Broadway production of A Doll’s House, a run that lasts ten years and brings her the kind of independent satisfaction and artistic fulfillment that sewing Halloween costumes and directing school productions never could. After Raffi’s death she will meet Leo, fifteen years her junior, an esteemed set decorator, and will believe that at last she has found her soul mate, the love of her life.
Caroline and Leo have six years together. It is a simple picture that comes to her one morning in the shower: an image of Joe on the baseball field, a high-school game she had attended only reluctantly and then watched from way up in the bleachers, far from Noni, Renee, and me. She remembers clear as a bell Joe at the plate in his purple-and-green uniform, and he is like that lilac tree she planted so long ago in her backyard: strong, tall, branching limbs, and beautiful, so beautiful, with the perfect arc of his swing. As ball meets bat, the crack of it explodes into light, and Caroline closes her eyes as she, too, falls into light.