Ralph Memolo Stories

Ecuador

 

Only after Rebecca moved in with him did Jerome discover that one person by herself could create so much noise. Entering a room, Rebecca seemed always to have crashed through the door. Leaving, she never failed to slam the door behind her. She invariably signaled her return home by tossing a hefty ring of keys onto the kitchen counter, which keys, thus tossed, slid along the counter until they ran into the facing wall. Just as predictable was the sense of abandon—a wanton celebration of noises—with which Rebecca banged shut the doors of cabinets and closets.

 

There were also other Rebecca-generated noises that may not have been that loud, but rippled out to create other sounds. Her tread when she climbed the stairs in the front hallway was muted by carpeting, but her step was so heavy that she caused two small vases on a table in the hallway below to bounce.

 

More irksome to Jerome than the clanging and clatter that accompanied Rebecca’s every move was her blithe disregard of his requests, no matter how gently stated, to be more quiet. Her response to any such plea was to give him a look, a blank stare really, that indicated her lack of interest in this subject.

 

He once upped the ante by keeping track, over a two-day period, of the various noises Rebecca made. Then, the next night, at dinner, he read the list to her, trying as best he could to recreate the sounds he had so carefully catalogued. Rebecca’s reply—her voice purposefully flat, her manner bored—was that he was beginning to remind her of her father. Jerome had heard enough stories from Rebecca about her curmudgeonly father to know that wasn’t her idea of a compliment.

 

The next night, as if to mollify him, and also to show what she thought of his hectoring her about noise, Rebecca waited until they had finished dinner, and then, in a purposefully hushed voice, she presented him a gift—a neatly wrapped package containing a set of ear plugs.

 

There was another of Rebecca’s habits Jerome found even more annoying, and that was her tendency to drive too fast. She repeatedly ignored his pleas to slow down, whether she was zooming down a highway or speeding through quiet residential streets. He was particularly troubled by her proclivity, when entering the driveway of his house, to wait until the last second before aiming the gizmo at the electronic eye that opened the garage door. His cautionary warnings repeatedly ignored, he decided one day to have a speed bump installed in his driveway, but did so without warning Rebecca about it beforehand.

 

Rebecca spotted the speed bump in time to slam on her brakes just before she reached it. But rather than slow down and ease her car over the bump, she stopped, and backed up a short distance. She then drove at a diagonal across Jerome’s carefully tended lawn to the entrance of the garage. It was early spring, and since two days of intermittent rain had left the ground a bit soggy, Rebecca’s detour left deep tire tracks on an expanse of grass that had just begun to turn green.

 

When Rebecca entered the house, this time intentionally slamming the door so hard it seemed as if the entire house shook, she was already shouting about how she had come this close—holding her fingers an inch or so apart—from ripping the bottom off her car.

 

Jerome was as vehement as Rebecca in defending the speed bump. All he was trying to do, he told her, was to slow her down enough so that she wouldn’t crash through the garage door. Then, lowering his voice—and introducing a good bit of menace into it—he warned her never again to drive her car across the lawn.

 

He seemed to have prevailed for the moment since Rebecca, rather than answering him, went directly upstairs, leaving in her wake those two vases on the table in the hallway tingling. Moments later, having changed into a work shirt and jeans, she returned to launch a retaliatory strike. Her target? The assorted clumps of newspaper clippings, folded over magazines and books with post-it slips peeping out from their pages, which were scattered throughout the house. This was reading material Jerome set aside because of a habit he developed when he was still writing his twice-weekly column on the business page of The Boston Globe. These bits and scraps of highlighted information, he maintained, were all grist for his column.

 

He couldn’t tell when, or how, any of the material he set aside would be of use to him, but there was always a day when he would pluck one from one of his piles a news clip or three highlighted paragraphs from a government report that helped him demolish the extravagant claim of some bumptious politician or preening CEO. Therefore, a cardinal rule in Jerome Rowland’s household: None of his piles were ever to be trifled with in any way.

 

Rebecca occasionally complained about the clutter he created as did his wife, Marion, who had passed away three years before he met Rebecca. But Marion, in her distinctively quiet way, had allowed all of Jerome’s piles to remain inviolate until he himself decided to discard material that was no longer of any use to him.

 

Not so with Rebecca. The night she almost ran over the speed bump, she began marching around the house, gathering up all Jerome’s saved material. Then, each time she had an armful, she went out to the garage and dumped the material she was carrying into a plastic recycling bin.

 

The shouting match that ensued between Jerome and Rebecca while she continued to dispose of his piles only allowed them to restate their respective positions, pro and con, about the speed bump. That was followed by an awkward hour or so of silence, a cooling off period of sorts when Rebecca went to her office off the dining room and Jerome retreated likewise to his study upstairs.

 

Jerome was the one who finally made a conciliatory move, going downstairs and admitting to Rebecca that, yes, he should have warned her in advance about the speed bump. He even announced his intention to have the bump lowered a bit. Rebecca, in turn, relented enough to begin retrieving his reading materials from the recycling bin, but the whole time she did so, she continued her argument against the need for any speed bump at all.

 

In the week after the speed bump incident, Jerome also made amends by corralling most of his piles and moving them into his study. Rebecca may have had something similar in mind. Not that she drove more slowly or made less noise, but she agreed to accompany Jerome, one week later, on a trip to San Francisco to visit his daughter, Miss Susie, his five-year-old granddaughter, Tracy, and his son-in-law, Kevin.

 

Rebecca’s agreement to accompany Jerome to San Francisco was a notable concession on her part. As head of an organization that set up family planning clinics in the underdeveloped world, she traveled constantly and maintained a schedule that didn’t leave much time for trips of a personal nature. But her peace offering, if that’s what it was, came to naught because three days before they were supposed to leave for San Francisco, when she and Jerome had just sat down to dinner, she informed him that she wouldn’t be able to accompany him to San Francisco.

 

"Ecuador," she said, in giving the reason for her change in plans.

 

Jerome reacted to the brevity of Rebecca’s announcement with stone-faced silence, which caused her to begin explaining why there was a sudden need for her to travel to Ecuador. Quickly, almost too quickly in fact, she told him that a newly-appointed Catholic bishop was pressuring the ministry of health to close family planning clinics that her organization had recently opened in two of the country’s rural provinces. Her fear, she said, was that the health minister, who was politically ambitious, would try to gain favor with the Catholic hierarchy by curtailing the operation of those new facilities. Earlier that day she had learned that the minister was also working on a plan to eliminate even those clinics in the capital city.

 

Jerome’s response, delivered after a short pause, was in the form of a question, but one designed not so much to elicit information as to make a point. Wasn’t the situation in Ecuador, he asked, similar to that in several other countries where Rebecca’s organization had established their clinics?

 

"No, not at all," she said. "As of today, we’re in danger of losing Ecuador."

 

To Jerome, Rebecca’s reply sounded much like one that an American Secretary of State might have made, at the height of the Cold War, if a valued ally of the United States was about to join the Soviet bloc.

 

Once again, however, he greeted Rebecca’s remark with silence, mostly because he was trying to restrain himself. He was angry, first, at Rebecca’s last-minute change of plans, but far more troubling to him was the either/or situation she had put before him. How could he possibly argue that a visit to Miss Susie should take precedence over the life and death consequences of family planning in Ecuador?

 

"Didn’t I mention to you last week that we were having problems in Ecuador?" she said.

 

"No, not that I can recall. I’ll only say this—what is it, forty or so countries where you have programs? Now, since there’s bound to be an emergency in any one of these countries every few months, I imagine you won’t be available to visit little Tracy with me until she’s about to go off to college."

 

Rebecca, who had barely begun to eat, pushed her plate away.

 

"You’re free to think what you want," she said. "but I wasn’t aware that I had to check with you before deciding what trips I took and why. Or when either."

 

"That isn’t quite what I said."

 

"No, but you came close to calling me a liar. Perhaps you’d like to find out some day how much fun it is to spend a week in Ecuador. Let me remind you of something else. Never in my career have I spent a penny of my organization’s money on travel unless it was absolutely necessary. So don’t think I’d gin up a reason to fly off somewhere simply to avoid visiting with your Miss Susie."

 

Rebecca then left the table and went to her office where she began making her way through a pile of paperwork. A few minutes later, Jerome, having also lost his appetite, picked up both his plate and Rebecca’s and brought them into the kitchen. He had no intention of backing away from anything he had said, but at the same time, he knew it would be difficult to find out whether Rebecca’s trip was as necessary as she claimed it was. And even if he did find out that the situation in Ecuador wasn’t half as dire as she claimed, what could he do about it if Rebecca would rather travel there than visit Miss Susie?

 

When Jerome came out of the kitchen and was on his way upstairs, he stopped in the doorway of Rebecca’s office and told her that he still planned to make the trip to San Francisco.

 

"Please explain to Miss Susie why I had to cancel," Rebecca said, looking up from her work. "And when you do, refrain if you can, from any editorializing."

 

He wasn’t going to reply to that, but he couldn’t stop himself from making a parting comment as he turned to go upstairs.

 

"Don’t worry," he said, "this may be a case where any editorial comment I might offer, pro or con, would be superfluous."

 

Jerome’s riposte was a lie since he had every intention of explaining to Miss Susie that Rebecca would surely have accompanied him but for the crisis she needed to deal with in Ecuador. He fully expected that Miss Susie, likewise, would do her best to show that she understood very well why Rebecca had no choice but to fly off to Ecuador rather than visit with her and her family.

 

Jerome realized that he and Miss Susie would have thus maintained the delicate balance act demanded of both of them since the day he called his daughter two years before to tell her that he had fallen in love with Rebecca. He didn’t expect that Miss Susie would greet the news with a congratulatory whoop, but he was taken aback with how long it took her to respond to him. He was surprised enough by her reaction to shout into the phone, "Hello, hello," and even to shake the receiver to and fro, as if he could coax from it a reply.

 

Then, disregarding any phone problem, he asked Miss Susie if there was something wrong with what he had just said. Her reply—"Oh, no"—was not particularly convincing.

 

"Is it because I’ve sprung this on you without any warning? Or was it the word love? That isn’t a word I use lightly, you know."

 

Miss Susie then managed to extend her congratulations to him, but she did so with the feeling and conviction of someone who seemed, to Jerome at least, as if she could think of nothing else to say. He felt the need, then, to convey to Miss Susie what a fortunate man he was to have met Rebecca. "I’ll guarantee you one thing," he said. "you are going to change your mind about Rebecca once you’ve met her. And for the record, she’s a widow and she’s my age."

 

Jerome was surprised that Miss Susie hadn’t expressed some relief at learning her father had fallen in love with some flighty young thing thirty years younger than him. But why had she shown so little curiosity about who Rebecca was and how he had met her?

 

That led him, in one headlong rush, to explain all those things about Rebecca that attracted him to her. But overly anxious, he mixed together the grisly details of the freak skiing accident in which Rebecca’s husband was killed with a gushy report on how brilliantly Rebecca could deliver a speech. In the middle of his spiel, he circled back to tell more about Rebecca’s husband, who had been a young surgeon of exceptional promise. Her husband’s death, he said, was so devastating to Rebecca that she had stopped writing—literally in mid-sentence, he emphasized—her doctoral dissertation on early American landscape artists.

 

His delivery improved—he was more coherent at least—when he told of how Rebecca recovered from her husband’s death by taking an entry level job with the International Red Cross and her subsequent rise to a position where she directed teams that delivered aid to victims of natural disasters all over the world. He was in the middle of ticking off the commendations bestowed on Rebecca by three foreign governments when Miss Susie asked him if he intended to marry again.

 

"Of course," he replied, a bit perturbed at being interrupted just as he was boasting of the invaluable work Rebecca had done two years before as the head of a Presidential commission on homelessness.

 

Miss Susie’s response to that was to ask when the wedding was going to take place.

 

"I guess that depends on when Rebecca can fit it into her schedule," he said. "This week, however, she’s moving in with me."

 

That’s when Miss Susie seemed to have discovered rather suddenly that it was time for her to pick up Tracey from nursery school.

 

An hour later, when Jerome reached his son, Mitchell, it was obvious to him that Mitchell had already heard from Miss Susie. His son, the junior partner in a Silicon Valley startup, has been been more outgoing than his older sibling, but that day he could only say how surprised he was at Jerome’s announcement. Then, when it seemed as if he was about to repeat himself, Jerome interrupted him.

 

"Please," he said. "don’t pull a Miss Susie on me."

 

"It might have gone better if you had given her some warning," Mitchell said.

 

"No, it’s just Miss Susie once again acting as if she has veto power over other people’s lives. It’s that damned social worker mentality of hers. She’s dedicated herself to helping people—and she’s fantastic at what she does—but her help comes with one condition, you do as Miss Susie says or else."

 

"This will require an adjustment for us," Mitchell said. "I think you should grant us that much."

 

"Well, it’s an adjustment neither of you will have any trouble making once you get to know Rebecca. She can be charming and refined, but she’s a scrapper, too, a real dynamo. Other women her age might be letting up, but she’s out there, day after day, giving speeches, attending conferences, raising money. All the while, of course, she has to tiptoe through mine fields of religious prejudice and petty politics. But let someone cross her and she’ll engage in hand-to-hand combat if that’s what it takes to save poor women from having children they can’t afford to feed."

 

Mitchell’s answer to that—a simple "Wow!—left Jerome wondering what it was that so impressed his son. Was it Rebecca’s accomplishments, or was he surprised that his father, never known for his exuberance, was so freely expressing his passion for his new-found love?

 

Rebecca was as wary of Jerome’s children as they were of her. From the time she met him, she asked Jerome numerous questions about Miss Susie and Mitchell, but she did so in fits and starts, very much like someone who had to remind herself that it was a subject about which she should express some interest. The first time Rebecca met the two of them—it was a dinner at Miss Susie’s house, with Mitchell also in attendance—the conversation never rose above that of typical cocktail party chitchat. The only levity and spark that entire evening came from little Tracy first reciting, word for word, all the songs and rhymes she had learned in nursery school and then doing a run-through of the routines she was learning in her dance class.

 

Later, when they were driving back to their hotel, Rebecca asked Jerome why Miss Susie resented her.

 

"How can you say that?" he said. "I heard her tell you a number of times how much she admires the work you’re doing."

 

"Oh, she can be nice enough," Rebecca said, sounding as if she didn’t want to press the point. But a moment later, unwilling to drop the subject, she blurted out the word, "Intuition. Then, a moment later, she added, "It comes from being born female."

 

"Miss Susie is a very serious person, perhaps too serious," Jerome said. "But that’s what makes her so good at what she does."

 

"That may be so, but why did she ask me—twice, in almost the same way—whether I liked your house? And what was this, ‘Do you find it comfortable? Have you settled in?’ That was a dead giveaway. She obviously feels I’m an intruder—and in ways, I think, that go well beyond my physical presence in your house."

 

"I should have warned you," he said. "Both my kids have had a difficult time recovering from Marion’s death."

 

"If that’s so—and for now, I’ll take your word for it—I’ll try not to be bothered by their indifference towards me."

 

In practice, however, Rebecca met indifference with indifference. She was friendly enough towards Miss Susie and Mitchell, but Jerome never felt that she, or his children either, were eager to spend a great deal of time together.

 

He was aware that it wouldn’t take much to jar this uneasy truce between his daughter and Rebecca, but he was surprised that Miss Susie was so easily upset when he told her that, after Rebecca moved into his house, he had bought new furniture for the living room and dining room and was converting the den off the dining room into an office for Rebecca.

 

"Interesting," Miss Susie said on hearing that news, but then added, "I would have expected you to put up a better fight than that. All that furniture was so tasteful."

 

"Tasteful perhaps, but also faded and frayed if you looked closely."

 

"There’s something so primal about all this. The nest must be done over and all traces of the previous inhabitant expunged."

 

"Oh cut it out. Furniture is furniture. Don’t try to make it into anything more than that. Frankly, the whole place was in need of freshening up."

 

"The abruptness of it—and its finality. Don’t you think it might have been nice if you had first asked me or Mitchell whether we wanted any keepsakes that reminded us of the house we grew up in?"

 

"So now a faded living room sofa is a keepsake, something I should ship 3000 miles just to soothe your feelings?"

 

"Don’t put words in my mouth," she said.

 

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, I promise never again to make any interior decorating changes without first clearing them with you."

 

In the middle of the furniture dispute, Jerome came close to reminding Miss Susie that she was the one who had repeatedly urged him, for therapeutic reasons alone, to begin dating not long after Marion had died.

 

"You can’t let grief morph into guilt," she had once told him. "You must try, even if you don’t feel like it, to be future oriented. You’re a healthy guy, you look ten years younger than your age and you have a terrific house. Why, if they offered you as a prize in a raffle, half the women in Boston would line up to buy tickets."

 

Jerome usually responded to that kind of advice by doing his best to change the subject. He didn’t like the feeling that Miss Susie was treating him as if he were one of her clients, and he was particularly uneasy, after a lifetime of monogamy, of discussing with either of his children, even in a theoretical vein, the pros and cons of dating other women.

 

He had been as reluctant—self conscious really—about trying to explain to them the indescribable loneliness that afflicted him after Marion had died. Could either of them ever understand what it was like to pour yourself a cup of coffee and then discover a half hour later that you hadn’t drunk the coffee—and didn’t have any idea what you had done while the coffee grew cold?

 

He had been even more withholding about his visits to two different cardiologists, hoping to find out why at times he seemed short of breath while at other times he heart was racing even though he was sitting in a chair, reading a book. And he certainly never revealed to anyone, not even to the doctors who told him he was fit and quite healthy, that on certain days he still felt as though a tiny bird, its wings fluttering wildly, was trapped inside his chest cavity.

 

Oh, he could just imagine Miss Susie’s reaction to that and the dozens of questions she would then ask him. So instead of trying to convey to Miss Susie the true dimensions of his grief, he told her one day that he wasn’t, as he put it, fit company, for any woman.

 

"And what exactly do you mean by fit company?" Miss Susie asked.

 

"Let’s just say that being antisocial seems to suit me right now."

 

"Can we assume, then, that you might be more ‘social’ at some point in the future?"

 

"When and if, you’ll be the first to know."

 

He thought that settled the matter for the time being, but Miss Susie wasn’t about to give up that easily, not even when he changed the subject to the massive shake- up taking place in the managerial hierarchy of The Boston Globe. He wasn’t sure by the time it ended, he told her, that he would still have his column.

 

"My sin was being born when Dwight Eisenhower was still president," he said, "Around the Globe these days that’s like having a bull’s eye painted on your back. Oh, they call it a ‘buyout,’ and they give you some money as they ease you out the door, but what they’re saying, in effect, is that they can run the place just fine without you."

 

Ordinarily, Miss Susie liked to be kept up to date on "global politics," which was her term for infighting among Globe editors, but this time she simply asked if the possibility of cataclysmic changes at the Globe may have also caused him to adopt his antisocial policy. Specifically, she wanted to know if that accounted for his absence, the week before, at the annual Fourth of July cookout hosted by his neighbors, the McElroys? Seconds later, she asked him to explain why he hadn’t attended, the week before that, his sister Jennie’s seventieth birthday party.

 

"I was busy," he said, realizing that Miss Susie would then want to know what he was so busy at.

 

"Some people who know and care about you might begin to think you’re simply being boorish," she said.

 

"And other people—namely me—might say that I’m only trying to preserve my privacy."

 

"What a classic case you are. If only everyone left me alone, then I could really concentrate on how miserable I am. It’s all so infantile. Good God, I’d expect better than that from my little Tracy."

 

Jerome didn’t appreciate Miss Susie comparing his behavior to that of his granddaughter, but it bothered him even more to hear his grief likened to a simple case of self pity.

 

"I ran across something the other day that might be of interest to you," he told her. "It was in a book by C. S. Lewis—and before you ask, he was an Oxford don and literary critic. C. S. Lewis was surprised, he said, after his wife died, to discover something he called ‘the laziness of grief.’ Work, perhaps out of habit, he could do, he said. And so can I. But I know exactly what he meant when he said that his wife’s death left him without the desire to do anything that would take him out of himself."

 

"That takes us right back to where we started, doesn’t it," Miss Susie said, just before hanging up on him.

 

Miss Susie and Jerome might have remained forever fixed in their positions but for the outcome of that managerial scrum at the Globe. As Jerome expected, he lost his column, mostly because he became a bargaining chip in the wheeling and dealing that allowed Walter Simsbury to emerge as the paper’s new editor. But Simsbury, an old friend, offered Jerome a consolation prize by coming up with a new job for him. Officially he was now the paper’s senior national correspondent—but that made him, in Simsbury’s words, "our resident futurist."

 

"We spend too much time in this business telling people stuff that’s already happened," said Simsbury, who always sounded like a football coach giving a pep talk. "My point is this: Let’s try to detect the shifting of tectonic plates before, not after, the earthquake hits. I’m talking trends, the long view, looking over the horizon. Go where you have to. Talk to experts. Chat with the man in the street. Plumb the depths. Kick over rocks. Turn out stuff that’ll make my eyes pop."

 

Jerome sometimes recoiled at Simsbury’s backslapping exuberance, but it was obvious, once he began his new assignment, that Simsbury had come up with the curative Miss Susie had been trying to prescribe. For all the hard work he put into his columns, he now realized that they had become elaborate exercises in score settling, and the arguments he won often turned on something so petty (and so irrelevant) that it seemed as if he was writing primarily for his own amusement. But now, roaming the country, unfettered by subject matter and freed at last from the 850-word confines of his column, he turned out three-and four-part series that were a mélange of dire prophecy and hopeful prognostication that sought to bring some balance between these two extremes.

 

Reader response was generally positive, and he received little notes from Simsbury indicating his enthusiasm for Jerome’s work. But it was apparent that spending time away from home—and away, therefore from constant reminders of Marion—may have helped extricate him from "the laziness of grief." There was this bonus, too, that had come to him, courtesy of Simsbury: It was not as easy now, because he traveled so much, for Miss Susie to check up on him.

 

Now and then, his forays into the world of tomorrow failed to provide him with stories of any value. That was the case when he went off, at Simsbury’s suggestion, to Los Angeles for a conference of world health experts. While there, he searched diligently for Simsbury’s proverbial "big picture," but during his first two days in Los Angeles, he felt as though he had happened in on a gathering of experts who were interested only in speaking to each other—and in code at that.

 

An additional problem for him was the hotel itself. It was new, so new that not even the help knew how to negotiate its maze-like corridors. Since the hotel’s designer had also made lavish use of mirrored surfaces, Jerome seemed to spend much of his time wandering corridors that seemed to lead nowhere while seeing reflected images of himself coming and going as he searched in vain for a speech or panel discussion that might yield the germ of a story.

 

Late on the second day of the conference, finding himself in a mirrored cul-de-sac—and frustrated as to his whereabouts—he pushed opened a door that did not have a mirror on it and literally stumbled into a darkened room. He managed to keep his footing, but found himself staring into the beam of light from a slide projector. He immediately crouched down so that he would not obstruct the images being projected on the screen and then scurried, bent over at the waist, a la Groucho Marx, to a row of chairs some fifty feet away. Thus, his distinct, if not very graceful entrance into the room where he met Rebecca Casselman.

 

Rebecca was just then in the midst of excoriating the American government for its puny support of family planning in underdeveloped countries. Her presentation backed up her main point, which was the effectiveness of family planning in combating poverty and disease. In the course of her talk, she mentioned her recent move to Boston, where the organization she headed had set up a new office.

 

Jerome was instantly transfixed by Rebecca. He admired in particular the way she so effectively used her anger and indignation to underscore the arguments she made. Every sentence she uttered was built on the previous one, and the structure of her talk, overall, was so carefully organized that she was able to emphasize the points she wanted to make without having to raise her voice.

 

From his vantage point, Rebecca looked to be fifty or so, of average height and build and dressed in a no-nonsense business suit that was enlivened by a brightly colored scarf draped around her neck. The small light on the podium revealed a women with the presence—her shoulders squared and her jaw tilted up—of a soprano about to break into song. That wasn’t at all surprising to Jerome once he learned that Rebecca had been trained to stand erect and enunciate correctly by her mother, who had been a professional singer.

 

As soon as Rebecca finished her talk, and the lights went on, Jerome introduced himself to her. He saw then that her hair, cropped closely, had more gray in it than was evident when the room was darkened. Fine but discernible lines on her face and neck also indicated that she was probably closer to his age than he first thought. The downward cast of her mouth and her dark, deep set eyes, framed by coal-black eyebrows, gave her the look of a woman who had spent a good part of her life dealing close-up with death and disease. But seconds later, the frown lines would disappear and her eyes glistened when she let loose with the intermittent bursts of laughter that brightened her conversation.

 

At first, Rebecca was a bit curt with him because she felt that he hadn’t listened closely enough to what she had said during her presentation. But once she reiterated the major points she had tried to make, the two of them began swapping stories about the difficulties they had had in finding their way around the hotel. Soon, they were chatting and laughing as both of them—widow and widower, they discovered—entertained each other with accounts of less than desirable hotel accommodations they had encountered in their travels. It was Rebecca who suggested that they have a drink together.

 

Both Rebecca and Jerome were astonished at how quickly they went from being two people who were intrigued with each other to a couple who found it painful to be apart. One moment Jerome would scold himself for thinking he could fall in love so quickly with someone he hardly knew. Seconds later, he had convinced himself that there was no other way for anyone anywhere to fall in love.

 

Likewise, Rebecca couldn’t believe that she was the person (and not some stranger lacking in common sense), who pieced together the connecting flights that enabled her to get back to Boston (and dinner with Jerome) two hours earlier than if she had waited for a direct flight from Los Angeles. Once, only a month after they met, she called him from London, to say she was going to be there for three days due to a mix-up in the scheduling of a meeting she would be attending in Indonesia. Almost instantly, Jerome had booked a flight to London, and two hours later he was airborne.

 

Because both Rebecca and Jerome traveled so much, this was a courtship that was conducted long distance. He would nap early in the evening so that he was awake and alert when Rebecca called him after midnight from a time zone where it was already early morning. From hotel rooms that were thousands of miles apart, they would talk to each other for an hour or more, only hanging up because one of them needed to rest or had work to do. Fifteen minutes later, they would be back on the phone, continuing their conversation at the point where they had left off.

 

Both of them were that intent on sharing with each other everything that had ever happened to them, their early lives, their marriages, the progress of their careers, and most of all, their mutual experiences in grieving for their respective spouses. Nothing about these calls was as explicit or as tawdry as phone sex, but there was an unmistakable erotic charge as they cast aside any reservations and inhibitions in sharing with each other details and intimacies that, until that very moment, were known only to themselves.

 

In the first weeks after they met, when they were together in the flesh, Rebecca and Jerome would punctuate a bout of love making by laughingly giving thanks to the mirror-crazed hotel designer who had unwittingly brought them together.

 

 

 

 

It was a Thursday night when Rebecca told Jerome that she was unable to make the trip to San Francisco. They didn’t see each other on Friday because she was up and out early to get to a meeting at her office in Washington and he went off later that morning to a weekend retreat for Globe editors and its leading reporters at a hunting lodge in Maine. He called Rebecca on Sunday morning, just before he returned to Boston (and his flight, that afternoon, to San Francisco), but their conversation was quite brief since Rebecca’s cab was at the door, waiting to take her to the airport. Only when he hung up did he realize that Rebecca had neglected to tell him how he could reach her in Ecuador. He assumed, however, that she would be calling him at Miss Susie’s house.

 

It was odd, then, that Rebecca didn’t call him on Monday, and odder still when he didn’t hear from her on Tuesday. He was preoccupied, of course, with entertaining (and being entertained by) Tracy so he didn’t wonder that much about Rebecca’s failure to call him. But on Wednesday, he decided to call her Boston office, assuming someone there could give him Rebecca’s number in Ecuador. The only person in Rebecca’s office was a temp who sounded to Jerome as if she was reading from a cue card when she told him that the best way to contact Ms. Casselman was to call her office in Washington.

 

He tried to explain that he was a close friend of Ms. Casselman, but the temp only repeated what she had previously told him. Irritated by the woman’s robot-like response, he slammed the phone down when she was halfway through her scripted remarks. But, once he hung up, he was no longer certain about what the temp had said. Was it that only the Washington office knew how to contact Ms. Casselman, or did she really mean that he should call the Washington office if he wanted to talk to her? And what was all this business about calling Washington anyway? Why didn’t she just say that Ms. Casselman was out of the country this week, or more specifically, that she was on a mission to "save" Ecuador?

 

Angry with himself over this lapse in his memory—and bothered, too, that Rebecca hadn’t called him—Jerome put off calling Washington for the time being. By the next morning—having thought about it all night—he concluded that the little exchange he and Rebecca had had about her trip to Ecuador may have left her more upset than he realized. He had no direct evidence of that, except for Rebecca so abruptly ending their call on Sunday morning, supposedly because there was a cab waiting for her. He could not recall Rebecca ever caring whether a cab she had summoned was forced to wait for her. In fact, there were cab drivers, their engines idling, who were able to take a short nap while Rebecca finished last-minute phone calls or went back upstairs to change her clothes.

 

The phony cab excuse—and phony was how he thought of it—renewed his initial suspicions about Rebecca’s Ecuador ploy. For all he knew, she was probably spending the week in Washington. Yes, he could have called Rebecca’s Washington office and asked for her, but no doubt she had someone there who was screening her calls. He could even imagine Rebecca, once she knew he had tried to reach her, calling him back from Washington, with some kind of report of what she was up to in Ecuador. No, he was not going to be manipulated in that way. He would wait until he and Rebecca were back home to learn whether her trip to Ecuador was fact or fiction.

 

On Saturday afternoon, when Jerome returned home, he was so tired that he wanted to go straight to bed but hesitated at doing so because he expected that Rebecca might soon be returning home. In the meantime, he took a shower and freshened up and then unpacked and went through the mail that had been held for him by his neighbors, the McElroys.

 

Jerome had finished sorting through the mail and had begun reading that day’s New York Times when Rebecca arrived. As always, her entrance, was something akin to the racket that might have come from an Army brigade marching through the front door. Then the welcome home embrace between them was somewhat less fervent than usual because Rebecca suddenly realized that the cab driver, who had helped carry her bags into the house, was standing there waiting to be paid. Professing some embarrassment at her forgetfulness, she broke off from Jerome to settle with the cab driver, but as soon as he left, she began digging through a suitcase, all the while making pro forma remarks about how exhausted she was.

 

For a moment Jerome thought Rebecca was about to bring out some gift for him—something that made up for her failure to call perhaps?—but when she found what she had been looking for, it turned out to be a brightly colored woolen shawl she claimed to have bought while in Ecuador.

 

Then, unfolding the shawl and draping it around her shoulders, she said, "Isn’t this the most colorful thing you’ve ever seen?"

 

Jerome agreed that the shawl was indeed colorful, but was somewhat puzzled at Rebecca’s urgency in being so anxious to show it off. Nothing became any clearer to him when Rebecca stood in the middle of the room, with her arms outstretched and twirled around three times, in a halfway decent imitation of a ballerina.

 

"Impressive," he said, though that hardly conveyed how he really felt.

 

What he wanted to do just then, but put off for a moment, was to ask her why she hadn’t told him how to get in touch with her in Ecuador—or maybe taken a moment to give him a call while he was in San Francisco. Or was her sudden desire to show off her new scarf—and perform that silly little dance—her way of putting off any discussion of how they had gone an entire week without talking to each other? He also recalled that Rebecca rarely took time to shop when she was away on business. And that shawl she was so proud of? It wasn’t that different, he told himself, from one she could have purchased at a half-dozen stores on her way home from the airport.

 

Rebecca’s dance, which had been rather short-lived, brought her from the middle of living room to the sofa across from the chair in which Jerome was sitting. There, with a kind of sigh, she let herself fall into the sofa, and now, with her head thrown back and her arms spread out wide, she talked of how thoroughly exhausted she was. A moment later, as if a chill had come over her, she wrapped the shawl around her shoulders, and asked him if he had enjoyed his week in San Francisco.

 

Until that very moment, he had been prepared to recount for her every clever thing Tracy had said and done, but instead, in a quiet, somewhat offhand manner, he told her, "I never made it to San Francisco."

 

He had this sudden thought that his announcement might cause Rebecca to admit that she, too, had not stuck to her original plan, and then confess that Ecuador turned out to be a problem that could be dealt with from Washington. Or maybe she would forego any explanation of the circumstances that caused her to spend a week in Washington and simply apologize for having misled him. But Rebecca, letting the shawl fall away, and pulling herself up from her half sitting, half lying down position, said, "You’re kidding."

 

"No," he said, "why would I do that?"

 

It took him only a few sentences to explain that just as he was leaving the meeting in Maine, Simsbury had a story idea he wanted him to pursue, right then, without any delay.

 

"You know Simsbury, he thinks every idea he gets might spoil if we don’t act on it at that very moment," Jerome said. "In this case, it was all about how prisons are filled with convicts who are serving life sentences without parole. That means, in a few years, when all these lifers grow old and senile, prison guards are going to be doing double duty as nursing home attendants."

 

That idea, in fact, had come to Jerome, on the spot, thanks to a story he had been reading in The New York Times just before Rebecca arrived.

 

"Well, that’s better than telling Miss Susie I was the one who caused you to cancel your trip."

 

"You’re not the only one with a busy schedule you know."

 

"Oh my gosh. Something tells me that Miss Susie has heard a lot about how I crumped out on you."

 

"I’m not sure why you keep dragging Miss Susie into this. I had work to do, so I spent the week talking to penologists and prison guards and anyone else who knows something about this subject."

 

"Oh, forget about it then. I just figured you were so tied up out there that I didn’t even call."

 

"The same with me. Plus, I didn’t want to interfere with anyone who had the responsibility for saving Ecuador. Did you succeed by the way?"

 

"I did what had to be done," Rebecca said. "As for results, we’ll just have to wait and see.

 

"Damn. I figured your presence alone would have caused that bishop to wave a white flag."

 

"I don’t know what you’re driving at," Rebecca said, getting up from the sofa and tossing her shawl aside. "And I’m too tired to care—or to take your bait. I’m more interested in a hot bath and climbing into bed."

 

Rather than follow Rebecca upstairs, Jerome sat at the dining room table and finished reading that morning’s Times. He was only half concentrating on the paper, however, because he was trying to decide what to say if Rebecca learned that he had indeed gone to San Francisco. He could, of course, call Miss Susie and ask her to back up his story about having to delay his trip, but he cast that notion aside since he wasn’t sure that Miss Susie would agree to provide him with an alibi. He was hesitant, too, at having to answer the questions Miss Susie was bound to pose, questions that might not stop until she had explored every facet of his relationship with Rebecca and forced him to explain why he had uttered such an egregious lie about not visiting with her.

 

He chose, then, not to involve Miss Susie in his deception. He would deal with the matter himself but only if Rebecca discovered that he had lied to her. He had the sense, though, that Rebecca was too preoccupied with her own affairs to pursue the issue. Then again, that pathetic dance of hers indicated to him that she was uneasy about having deceived him. He expected that sooner or later Rebecca might admit to him that she had spent the week in Washington rather than travel to Ecuador.

 

When he finally did go upstairs, he found a note that Rebecca had propped up against the faucets of the bathroom sink. "I’m feeling a bit fluish so I’ve decided to sleep in the guest room," her note said.

 

But the next morning, Jerome was the one who awakened with the dull ache across his forehead that presaged sinus problems. He could hear Rebecca downstairs, but a sudden chill caused him to pull the blankets up around himself. It was almost noon when he tried once again to get out of bed, but he knew now that his sinuses were acting up because he felt as though a Sumo wrestler was sitting on his forehead. He finally did get up but only to go into his bathroom where he took the pills that would help unclog his sinuses.

 

He then went to the top of the stairs and called down to Rebecca. A moment later, when she arrived at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at him, he told her that he was going back to bed.

 

"It’s my sinuses," he said. "I’ve just taken my pills, which work like a charm, provided I don’t mind being knocked out for a day or two."

 

Rebecca asked if she could get something for him, some tea or juice perhaps.

 

"No thanks," he said. "The only thing I want right now is to get back under the covers."

 

"I wouldn’t do this if you were feeling better," she said. "but I’m going into my office for a bit so I can get caught up."

 

Halfway through the afternoon, Jerome awakened again. This time he went downstairs and forced himself to eat a soft boiled egg and a piece of toast. That left him so exhausted he returned to his bed and fell asleep again. Not too much later he was awakened by the sound of the garage door opening and then closing, and moments later, he heard Rebecca coming up the stairs, this time a bit more quietly than usual. She even showed great care in opening the bedroom door, and when she stood in the doorway, her body silhouetted by the light from the hallway, there was something soft, and tentative too, when she said, "Yes?"

 

"Yes, what?" he replied, regretting right off that his voice, quite raspy, made him sound as if he resented Rebecca’s intrusion.

 

"Yes, how are you feeling?"

 

"Slightly better, but not great," he said. Having cleared his throat by then, he didn’t sound quite so much like an old grouch.

 

"Do you need anything?"

 

"Not now, but thanks for asking."

 

"If you don’t mind," she said, "I think it’s better for me to stay in the guest room again tonight."

 

Jerome gave his assent with nothing more than a wave of his hand, which was filled just then with tissues because he had begun a sneezing fit.

 

In the morning, when he woke up and slowly got to his feet, he was still groggy from the aftereffects of his medicine, but his headache had dissipated somewhat. Leaving his bedroom and heading towards the bathroom, he noticed that the house was silent. That was a surprise because it was 7:30, just when Rebecca should have been finishing breakfast and getting ready to leave for her office. Perhaps, as a favor to him, she was trying to be more quiet than usual, but unsure about whether she had left, he leaned over the banister and yelled her name.

 

There was no answer, which caused him to call out again, this time louder. When that failed to elicit a response, he took a few steps in the other direction, checking to see if she was still in the guest room. All he found there, when he looked in, was a bed neatly made up. Only then did he realize that Rebecca, somewhat mysteriously, had got dressed and eaten breakfast and then left without waking him up. Any other time he would have welcomed the consideration she had shown, but now he was a bit perturbed to think she hadn’t cared enough to check on how he was feeling.

 

Fifteen minutes later, after a steaming hot shower eased slightly his clogged up sinuses, all that mattered to him was doing something about the hunger pangs in his stomach. But when he had prepared a bowl of cereal and sat down to eat, he found a note that Rebecca had left on the kitchen table.

 

Dear Jerome,

 

Yesterday afternoon I called Miss Susie, just to make clear that I would have indeed accompanied you to San Francisco, except for the situation in Ecuador. But before I ever got to that, she told me what a delightful time she and Tracy and Kevin had with you last week. That led both of us to discuss at length why you claimed not to have gone to San Francisco. Alas, we came to no firm conclusions about your need to fabricate a story about how you were so busy visiting prisons that you were unable to get to San Francisco. But in the course of my conversation with Miss Susie I came to regret that I never got to know her better. She turned out to be a far more charming and perceptive person than I had originally thought.

 

That last sentence should tell you what’s coming next. For a number of reasons, beginning and ending with the organization’s finances, I’ve decided that it doesn’t make sense to have offices in Boston and Washington, too. Therefore, we’ll soon be consolidating our operations in DC.

 

That brings me to my next point. I intend, while I’m in Washington this week, to find a place to live. Soon after that, I’ll arrange to move my belongings from your place. I’d prefer, if at all possible, to do this when you’re out of town, or at least out of the house. In my experience, these things work better that way.

 

By the way, I’m not a big believer in postmortems—you know, the dogs bark, the caravan moves on. So let’s leave it at that.

 

Best,
Rebecca

 

P. S. I owe you an apology. You did "editorialize" when you got to San Francisco, but on my behalf. Miss Susie couldn’t have been more sympathetic about the crisis I had to deal with in Ecuador.

 

It was too late, obviously, for Jerome to call Miss Susie. It might be wiser, too, he decided, to let some time past before he subjected himself to her questioning. Just then, in fact, he felt a greater urgency to call Simsbury and tell him of his plans to take an in-depth look at the "graying" of this country’s prison population. He could begin, right after that, to line up some interviews, and maybe by afternoon he would be at the airport and heading out of town.

 

Yes, Rebecca was entitled to her opinion about postmortems, but he was already planning later that night to call her at the hotel she usually stayed at when she was in Washington. Who knows, separated by a few hundred miles, he and Rebecca might end up having one of those lengthy phone calls they used to have when it was so painful for them to be apart. If that didn’t work, he was fully prepared to enlist Miss Susie in helping him repair the breach that had developed between him and her new-found friend, Rebecca.