Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [35]
If he had married Mrs. Cohen he would not now be sitting in front of her with a crumb of fried chicken on his face, telling her to get ready to meet someone special.
“Sure,” Frances said.
“Maybe she’ll take me off your hands,” Mr. Cairn said.
S.S. ENDEAVOR
A short, wide woman with Mrs. Shenker’s sharp chin and thick eyebrows opened the door.
“I am—” Frances said, trying to hold on to her muffler and her purse and the bag of doughnuts and the jug of cider and the brochure about a camp for teenagers with physical limitations, and Mr. Shenker came into the front hall and opened the door wider.
“Hey. This is Miss … Frances,” he said. “Sylvia, this is Frances. Frances, my mother-in-law, Sylvia Winik. Frances spent time with Beth at the hospital. Jesus, Frances, you look like Shackleton on his way to the North Pole.”
“I doubt it,” Frances said. Frances was raised on Ernest Shackleton and brave Robert Edwin Peary and that moron Robert Scott and the tragedy of his ponies, eaten by the explorers, because Captain Scott was too stupid to use a dog team. (“Too much an admirer of dogs, the way Englishmen sometimes are,” her father had said, as if they both knew people like that, people who loved their dogs so much they would try to go to the South Pole with horses, to spare the dogs discomfort.) Frances knew the beginnings and ends of every polar expedition and nothing she ever did was going to be like Ernest Shackleton, who was a hero in her household, like Kennedy or King, and Mr. Shenker could just keep his big, fat, condescending, adulterous mouth closed.
“You might be thinking of Lawrence Oates,” Frances said, and Mr. Shenker looked at his mother-in-law and smiled. Lawrence Oates was one of the youngest men to accompany Scott and also the smartest, and when he understood he was dying of starvation and frostbite, he stopped eating entirely, gave away his compass, and lifted the flap of his tent to walk into the snow. “I am going outside now,” he said, “and I may be some time.” In their game of Great Expedition, this had been Frances’s favorite part, and she would say those lines and run onto the porch, in her pajamas, and her father would wait just the right amount of time and then carry her back in, as if there were icicles hanging all over her and she had just hours to live.
“Lorraine,” Mr. Shenker called out. “Frances is here. From the hospital.”
Mrs. Shenker came down the hall in sweatpants and a T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail.
“Frances, aren’t you sweet,” she said. “I didn’t know you were … Well, how nice. I was just doing some laundry. I thought it was going to rain, so we gave up on golf.” She put her hand on Mr. Shenker’s chest and he put an arm around her waist. “You were right, I was wrong,” she said.
“We’ll golf tomorrow,” he said. “Sylvia can spoil Beth and we’ll steal away.” The Shenkers and Mrs. Shenker’s mother all smiled at one another and finally Mrs. Shenker said, “Well, thank you for bringing a treat for Beth. Although, my God, we all ate enough doughnuts at that hospital …”
Mr. Shenker said, “Always room for a few more.”
Mrs. Shenker said, “Let’s just take a peek at Miss Beth and see how she’s doing.”
“Hey, Frances,” Beth said. Beth was smiling and she wore a silky green T-shirt over her bandages and a green headband. There was a pull-up bar above her head and her bedroom was decorated like a tropical paradise. She sat in the middle of her big green-and-blue bed, surrounded by her laptop, her iPhone, and her remote control. A flat-screen TV was mounted on the opposite wall, with white-capped waves painted to unfurl around it. The doorway was as wide as a hospital room’s. Pale-green mermaids raised their arms on either side of it, and there was an old-fashioned map of the world’s oceans painted on the wood floor, and a wheelchair was folded up in one corner.
Mrs. Shenker saw Frances looking. “I know—we went all out. We had an architect in here and Beth drove him crazy until everything was