Passing by Michael Korda

Author:Michael Korda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

8.

THE LIBRARY—or, as we called it more realistically, the “TV room”—of our house must have been built during a brief period of prosperity on the part of the owners back in the mid–nineteenth century, when there were still people around locally who knew how to do such things. It has nicely carved wooden shelves and cupboard doors, and a very pretty fireplace—nobody could call it “elegant,” but it was at once handsome and cozy, unlike the larger, chilly living room, which we seldom entered. Margaret and I tended to gravitate to the TV room for a drink before dinner and a look at the news, and we often ate dinner there on folding TV tables and watched a movie or a miniseries, sprawled out on the big sofa with one or two of the cats beside us. Normally we would have gone out to dinner to celebrate our thirty-eighth wedding anniversary on June 30, but Margaret was still sensitive about the droop in the right side of her lips, so we stayed home quietly and celebrated in the TV room. By coincidence we had both written the same message on the card attached to each other’s gift: “38! May we have many more!”

Since Margaret could only drink through a straw, I had bought her an antique Tiffany sterling silver bamboo-pattern straw, which would save me from bringing a fistful of straws back from Dunkin’ Donuts every few days, and she had bought me a half bottle of champagne. We talked about taking a midwinter vacation, which we hadn’t done for years, but without conviction. We did not talk about the disease, or the MRIs, or the side effects of the medications, which was perhaps our best gift to each other over the past six months—cancer so easily becomes the only subject of conversation, the unwanted guest at every celebration.

As the summer wore on, Margaret’s strength returned. She was still too thin, the facial muscles on the right side of her face were still stiff, simple things like brushing her teeth were lengthy, infuriating tasks, but she was driving by herself now for short trips without me riding shotgun. Perhaps more important she graduated from riding Monty, the reliable old paint I had inherited from her once his competition days were over, to riding Logan go Bragh, her big black event horse—Logan was strong, “forward moving,” as horsemen like to say, with a mind of his own, and plenty of power under the hood. He was too much horse for me—I wouldn’t have ridden him on a bet—but it was interesting to see that when Margaret was mounted on him, she looked as if she had never been ill at all. She still needed a cane to walk, and needed help to eat or brush her teeth, but once she handed the cane to Miguel and mounted Logan she and the horse came together as one, it was a fine thing to see. It gave her more confidence too, and made the ordeal of waiting for her next MRI on September 22 a little easier to bear.

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