Swan Dive

wife, Eleni.
    ”Hello?” said a familiar accented woman’s voice.
    ”Eleni?”
    ”Yes? Who is this?”
    Her words were more slurred than I remembered, but only a little more. A good sign, I hoped.
    ”Eleni, it’s John Cuddy. Chris called me.”
    ”Oh, John! It is good to hear the voice. How are you?”
    ”I’m well, thanks.”
    ”John, I know Chris need to see you, but he is not here now. Can you come his office tomorrow, nine o’clock?”
    ”Do you have any idea what it’s about?”
    ”No. I know Chris is very worried on this case, and if he talk to you, he could tell why.”
    I thought of asking her to have Chris call me back, but then I pictured her, the way she looked the last time I’d seen her, and pushed away an image of what further progression of the multiple sclerosis had done to her by now. ”I’ll be there. He still in the building on Lowell Street near the courthouse?”
    ”No, no. He give that up, John. He have the office here in the house now. We fix up the garage.”
    I caught myself estimating mentally what Beth’s last few months with the cancer would have done to our finances without Empire’s hospital plan. I didn’t want to think how Eleni’s illness might have drained them. She gave me directions I half recognized, and we said good-bye.
    Talking with her on the phone had quashed most of the good spirits left over from dinner with Nancy . I read more bad news in the New York Times for another hour or so, then went to bed early.

I was up by 6:30, thumping over Storrow Drive on the Fairfield footbridge by 7:00. I headed downstream, favoring the waterside path over the roadside one.
    People who say they can’t stand running must never have jogged along the Charles River . I passed the giant layered bust of Arthur Fiedler, the late conductor of the Boston Pops. The mustached granite face eternally watches the Hatch Shell stage from across the field where thousands, over half a million at Fourth of July, would cheer for the orchestra and him. Near a scullers’ boathouse, I almost collided with Robert Urich, practicing a firing stance with his .45 while filming a ”Spenser for Hire” sequence on location. In the water, geese were landing, mallards were swimming, and cormorants were diving. What more can you ask from a sport?
    I forded the river courtesy of the Museum of Science and turned upstream on the Cambridge side, recrossing at the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. I went in the Bildner’s food emporium near Commonwealth for muffins and orange juice. Back on the street, I saw a throng of well-dressed office workers waiting outside a shuttered video store. The air was chilly, and they were stamping around, flapping their arms and checking their watches like a line of addicts outside a methadone clinic.
    At the condo, I showered, shaved, and debated what to wear. When I was an investigator at Empire, I talked with another classmate in Legal about throwing some simple cases Chris’s way. Unfortunately, Chris was the kind of lawyer that dressed in nubby polyester sports jackets and ill-matched slacks. His files were coffee-stained and never contained the right documents in the proper order. In the words of the guy in Legal, it was one thing to wish Chris well but quite another to refer him an insured as a client.
    I rummaged through the closet. While I didn’t want to outshine Chris by wearing a suit, I also figured there was at least a chance I’d have to be in court with him that morning. I pulled out gray slacks, a blue blazer, and a conservative striped tie.
    I drove to Route 1 and followed it north, mercifully opposite the choked, honking traffic crawling southbound into the city. Route 1 is a mixed bag of wholesome family restaurants, space-devouring businesses like fence companies and lumberyards, and pornographic adult entertainment centers. As I passed one, its marquee read: all new! ”a hard man is good to find ” and ”everybody comes between me and my calvins.”
    I turned northeast at the Route 128 interchange, and then shortly thereafter took the exit for Route 114. After a mile and a half of suburban forks, I found the Christideses’ house.
    It was a small ranch on a quarter of an acre. I remembered when they bought it, to be their ”starter” home. Back when her inability to conceive was thought to be a temporary aberration in an otherwise healthy woman. Then Eleni began to suspect that the infertility might be related to the occasional tremors she