The Summer Without Men

developments in No. 2706, and the medical staff had been summoned, including the diabolical Westerberg, and the door had been unlocked, and the furniture had been removed from the doorway, and after that Regina herself had been removed to a hospital in Minneapolis for “testing.”
    When she finished this story, my mother appeared to gaze straight through me. She looked sad. Sadness was chasing us all, it seemed. I was sitting beside her and took her hand but said nothing.
    “I don’t think she will come back,” my mother said. “She won’t come back here, anyway.”
    I squeezed my mother’s thin fingers and she squeezed mine in return. Through the window I saw a robin alight on the bench in the courtyard.
    “She had spunk,” my mother said. I noted her use of the past tense.
    Another robin. A pair.
    My mother began to talk about Harry. All losses led back to Harry. She had often spoken of him, but this time she said, “I wonder what would have happened to me if Harry hadn’t died. I wonder how I would have been different.” She told me what I already knew, that after her brother’s death, she had decided to be perfect for her parents, never to give them any grief, ever again, that she had tried so hard, but it had not worked. And then she said what she had never said before, in a barely audible voice: “Sometimes I wondered if they wished it had been me.”
    “Mama,” I said sharply.
    She paid no attention and continued talking. She still dreamed of Harry, she said, and they weren’t always good dreams. She would find his body lying somewhere in the apartment behind a bookshelf or chair, and she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in his grave in Boston. Once in a dream, her father had appeared and demanded to know what she had done with Harry. When Bea and I were children, she said, she had had periods of terror that something would take us from her, an illness or accident. “I wanted to protect you from every kind of hurt. I still do, but it doesn’t work, does it?”
    “No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
    My mother’s melancholy didn’t last, however. I told her Boris had been in touch, which both cheered and worried her, and we weighed several possible outcomes and discussed what I wanted from my husband, and I discovered I didn’t exactly know, and we went over Daisy’s acting life and how precarious it all was, but how damned good the kid was, after all, and then Bea called while I was still there, and I listened to my mother laugh at some witticism of my sister’s, and over dinner she laughed again, hard, at one of my own. She embraced me tightly when we parted, and I sensed that her earlier gloom had been dispelled, not forever, of course, but for the evening. Twelve-year-old Harry would always be there, the ghost of Mama’s childhood, the empty figure of her parents’ hopes and of her guilt for having lived. I imagined my six-year-old mother as I had seen her in an old photograph. She has red hair. Although it is impossible to see the color in black and white, I add the redness in my mind. Little Laura stands beside Harry, a head shorter than he is. They are both wearing white sailor suits with navy trim. Neither child is smiling, but it is my mother’s face that interests me. By chance, she is the one looking ahead, into the future.
    *   *   *
     
    Below, without commentary, an epistolary dialogue made possible by racing twenty-first-century technology that took place the following day between B.I. and M.F. on the scenarios A, B, or D, and so on.
     
B.I.:  Mia, does it really matter what happened? Isn’t it enough that it is over between us, and I want to see you?
M.F.: If the story were reversed, and I were you, and you I, wouldn’t it matter to you? It is a question of the state of your heart, old friend of mine. Heart dented by rejection à la française, unhappy and surprisingly helpless alone, Husband decides it may be better o begin reconciliation proceedings with Old Faithful; or, Seeing the error of his ways, Spouse penetrates his Folly (ha, ha, ha) and has revelation: Worn Old Wife looks better from Uptown.
B.I.:  Can we dispense with the bitter irony?
M.F.: How on earth do you think I would have made it through this without it? I would have stayed mad.
B.I.:  She broke it off. But the thing was already broken.
M.F.: I was broken, and you came to the hospital once.
B.I.:  They wouldn’t let me come. I tried to come, but they refused me.
M.F.: What do