Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

Dying wasn’t sad, she thought. Leaving people behind was sad.

There was something she wanted. It was exactly 3:44 in the morning. Dabney slept much of the day away, but in the very late hours, so late they were early, sleep often eluded her. Forbearance. Her great-grandmother, Winford Dabney Wright, had stood on the corner of Main and Federal Streets eight hours a day for six weeks petitioning for a woman’s right to vote, talking and arguing with anyone who would listen. Dabney’s beloved grandmother, Agnes Bernadette, had changed sheets and scrubbed toilets six and a half days a week her first five years on the island. She had taken off Sunday mornings to attend Mass.

Dabney poked Clen in the ribs until he stirred.

“What?” he said. He always snapped out of sleeping sounding cogent, but Dabney knew he might not remember this conversation in the morning. She had to make sure he was really awake. She sat up and turned on the light. This took effort. Her insides were now jelly.

Clen sat up beside her, blinking. He checked the clock, and drank from his glass of water. “Dabney?” he said. “Do you need a pill?”

“No,” she said.

“Do you want to talk?” he asked. “Are you afraid?”

She shook her head. They had had some frankly terrifying conversations about what came next. What would happen when Dabney died? What would it be like? Dabney appreciated Clen’s candidness-We don’t know, Cupe. Nobody knows. And so, Dabney had decided to focus only on her time alive for right now. The death door was closed.

Her time alive.

She said, “I want to see Box.”

Clen was silent, as she figured he might be. She reached out and touched the stump of his left arm.

“I want you to call him and tell him to come.”

“Me?” Clen said. “Why me? You should call him. Or Agnes.”

“No,” Dabney said. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. I want you to call.” Dabney reached for her ice water; her hand was barely strong enough to lift the glass. She took a pill. Clen would be the easiest person for Box to say no to, and so if he came, Dabney would know it was because he really wanted to. “I’d like you to call in the morning.”

Clen sighed, as she figured he might. But she had also thought he might refuse.

“All right,” he said.

There wasn’t a free minute in any of his days. The semester was in full swing and he was teaching three classes-two seminars and the Macro class. Normally he let Miranda or one of the department TAs handle the bulk of the Macro class, but this year he did it himself. Busy, busy, busy. The braver or more compassionate of his colleagues sometimes asked how he was “doing.” They knew Miranda had migrated, and they had heard Dabney was sick, perhaps, but they didn’t know the rest, or at least he hoped they didn’t.

He didn’t teach on Fridays, so that was the day he hopped the Delta shuttle to Washington.

He was in the West Wing when the phone call came. His cell phone was silenced, but he felt incessant vibrations and checked once discreetly-an unfamiliar number. He would deal with it later.

But less than an hour later, an aide entered the room with a message slip for Box.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s urgent, apparently.”

Box saw the name Clendenin Hughes and bile rose in his throat-not only because he despised the man but because he assumed the call could mean only one thing.

Dead? Box thought. The day before had been Dabney’s birthday, and he had sent a dozen long-stemmed roses to the house. Pink roses, whereas usually on her birthday and their anniversary and Valentine’s Day, he sent red. But he couldn’t do red roses, the I love you rose, although he did, of course, love her; he loved her enough to move mountains. He ordered pink to make a small point. Things had changed. Dabney would notice. She was all about details.

He had texted Agnes to see if the roses had arrived and she’d responded that yes, they had, and although Dabney wasn’t home just then, she would tell Dabney the roses had come.

Agnes’s final text on the topic said, You are such a good man, Daddy.

Box was stuck back on wasn’t home just then. Not home to receive the roses and notice the change in color, making him wish he hadn’t sent the roses at all!

He had assumed Dabney was spending her birthday with the philistine boor-but now, as he eyed the message, he worried that what Agnes wasn’t telling him was that Dabney was in the hospital.

He nearly knocked his chair over as he stood up, thinking, She’s dead. My wife is dead. The Treasury secretary and his deputies snapped to attention.

“Professor?” the secretary said. “Is something wrong?”

Box said, “Please excuse me.”

An aide found him a quiet, empty cube of an office from which to make the call. Hughes picked up on the first ring.

He said, “She’s still alive. She insisted I call you. She wants to see you.”

Box was consumed with something beyond anger, beyond fury. But, also, relief. She was alive. Breathe, breathe. She was alive.

“How is she?” Box said. “Tell me the truth. How much time does she have?”

“Nobody knows for sure,” Hughes said. “Weeks, maybe a month? Maybe longer, maybe not. Agnes called hospice. They’re coming on Monday. We want to make sure she’s comfortable.”

“We,” Box said, involuntarily.

Hughes cleared his throat. “She wants to see you. She’s asking for you.”

“Yes,” Box said. “I hear you saying that.”

“She insisted I call you,” Hughes said. “Believe me, I didn’t dream this up.”

“No,” Box said. “I imagine not.”

She wanted to see him. Fury trumped relief, and hurt appeared out of nowhere. She wanted to see him now, after she had lied to him, cheated on him, such an awful word, such an incomprehensible concept. Dabney Kimball, a liar and a cheat. What had he done to deserve such ruthless public humiliation? She had lied to him again and again and again and again! She wanted to see him now, but there had been any number of times when she had wanted to see only Hughes.

He knew she hadn’t been to the salon! And yet it had been beneath him to question her.

She had made a fool of him! She had made a laughingstock of John Boxmiller Beech.

And why did she have Hughes call? Why not call herself? Why make Hughes do it? Agnes could have called. Why Hughes?

Box wasn’t good with interpersonal drama or motivations of the heart; he despised murky emotion, most of all in himself. He preferred to keep above it. But even so, a part of him understood what Dabney was doing. She was trying to bring him and Hughes together. It was matchmaking of the most twisted kind. This time, she would not have her way.

Box decided: he would not go to her.

Hospice, weeks, months, a lifetime going forward without Dabney. The bite of strawberry pie, the icy cold root beer, she wanted to want him but her heart was elsewhere, he had seen it even at their wedding reception in the backyard of her grandmother’s house on North Liberty Street, but he had ignored the shadow in her eyes because he was just so happy that she was Mrs. Dabney Kimball Beech.

It would be better if she never saw him again. She could remember him as he had been: dignified to the end, at least he could say that. If there were to be another meeting of the two of them, who knew what he would say or do. How could he hide his pain, his sorrow, his incredulity, and this other emotion, the one beyond anger and fury. He would never be able to hide his broken heart from her, that was certain, and he didn’t want her to die holding herself responsible for it.

He would not go.

She told him she wanted to spend her final time at home, and by home she meant the house on Charter Street.

I love you, she had said. And I have valued and treasured the time I’ve had with you in this cottage, but this cottage isn’t my home. She swallowed. I want to go home and if you want to be with me, which I hope you do, then I’ll have to ask you, humbly, to come with me to Charter Street.

Clen bristled. Now, at the end, she was asking difficult things of him. She expected him to spend time in the house she had bought and lived in for twenty-four years with the economist. He would, what? Sleep there? In the guest quarters?

And yet he understood that this cottage wasn’t her home, it wasn’t even his home, and it was too small for nurses and hospice workers to move around in comfortably. She had to go back.

“I don’t want to let you go,” he said. He felt dangerously close to tears, but he had promised her he wouldn’t cry, and so he poured a bourbon instead, and then he called Agnes and told her they were coming.

So many people wanted to visit that Agnes had to draw up a schedule: two people a day for ten minutes apiece. Dabney was propped up in bed, pearls on, headband in place. She could sometimes hold together a conversation, sometimes not.

Morphine. She said it made her feel like a dragonfly on the surface of a pond.

“I took you to Jewel Pond a dozen times the summer you were three,” Dabney said. “It was hard to get to, and more than once I got the Nova stuck in the sand, but you liked to throw rocks there, and we used to look for turtles. In the sun, it did look like a jewel. Like an emerald some days, a sapphire others. Do you remember it?”

Agnes said that she did, but she didn’t. She liked the picture Dabney painted: Agnes and Dabney alone at a secluded pond, Agnes wading in to her ankles to throw rocks while Dabney watched from her towel under the red-and-white-striped umbrella. Agnes taking a nap facedown on the towel while Dabney rubbed her back and read a Jane Austen novel.

Agnes and her mother, suspended alone in a happy, peaceful bubble. If Agnes had been three, then Box had been in the picture. He had been her “father,” he had adopted her in the months after he and Dabney were married. But he had been working, traveling, speaking, teaching, writing.

Agnes had held only one grudge against her mother, a ten-year-old grudge that was really the grudge of a lifetime: Dabney had waited sixteen years to tell Agnes who her real father was. Sixteen years. It had always seemed an egregious misstep on Dabney’s part. Agnes should have known much earlier; she should have grown up knowing. She remembered a comment made by Mrs. Annapale, her Sunday-school teacher, who had owned the bed-and-breakfast where Box had stayed while he was courting Dabney. Mrs. Annapale had said of Box, “He stayed with me every weekend until your mother agreed to marry him. Your mother used to bring you sometimes, too. Such a sweet baby you were!”

And Agnes had thought, Huh?

When Agnes recounted this conversation to her mother, her mother had looked very worried for an instant, then she mentioned that Mrs. Annapale was getting older and might soon be mixing up Mary Magdalene with the Virgin Mary.

That had been a lie, or almost a lie. Not telling Agnes about Clendenin had been a lie of omission, a willful deception of the very worst kind.

Or so Agnes had believed until now-today, this past summer, since Agnes had met Clendenin. Now, her feelings had changed. She understood now, in a way she hadn’t before, just how gone Clendenin had been for Dabney. He had been on the other side of the world. The only way Dabney had survived was to pretend that he no longer existed. Agnes also understood how profoundly Dabney loved the man, and had continued to love him over all that time. The combination of the love and the hurt was powerful enough to keep Dabney from telling Agnes the truth. Plus, Box had been there to step in, a real father in every aspect but blood. What, Dabney had asked-calmly in the face of Agnes’s near hysteria at the age of sixteen-does it matter? Clendenin Hughes was just a name; his parentage was a matter solely of biology. He had never been Agnes’s father, Dabney had said ten years earlier, and he never would be.

But he was something now. Agnes wasn’t sure exactly what. At the very least he was someone else who loved her mother. In this he was a comrade, a teammate, possibly even a friend.

One evening as the light was fading-darkness came early in the fall-Agnes sat watching Dabney breathe as she slept and she said, “I forgive you, Mommy.”

Tammy Block came to visit, and Marguerite Levinson came with her golden retriever, Uncle Frank. Genevieve Lefebvre came, and Vaughan Oglethorpe came, smelling of embalming fluid. And every third or fourth day, Celerie came to discuss strategies for the future of the Chamber.