Free Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman Page A

at the ceiling, she remembered that he had had a heart attack in his fifties. His father had died young, and his uncles and his one brother, all of the same thing, he had told her. It ran in the family, sudden fatal infarctions. There were worse ways to go, he’d insisted. Those pills he sometimes took, waving away her concerned flutterings—they must be in his jacket. She leaped out of bed, found the vial, shook it at him. She could force the tablets into his mouth. She could force them into his rectum. What was the rhythm of CPR? She had taken a workshop in college, practicing on a puce dummy. She remembered almost nothing. Four minutes to midnight.
    She rolled him onto his back. Loosen clothing, she recalled: she unsnapped his pajama bottoms. His penis lolled. She pressed her fingers to the side of his neck. Nothing. She knocked on his chest. Nobody home. She placed her mouth on his and blew, and raised her head, and lowered it and blew again. His mouth was foul—hadn’t he brushed his teeth during that long stint in the bathroom? Still, there was something encouraging about the terrible smell and taste. His personal bacteria were still alive. She blew one more time, and then reached for the telephone and dialed 911. Three minutes to midnight.
    By the time the police and the ambulance came she was again wearing her red dress. She had broken one of the straps in her haste to put it on. He was wearing his trousers. Flat on the bed, his bare brown feet below the pinstripes, his rumpled pajama top above, he looked like a melancholy minstrel.
    The ambulance men were so deft, with their oxygen and their resuscitation attempts and their gurney. The police were so kind. One of them was female. What a fine career for a woman, Jamie thought. Yes, she told them, she was his assistant. Yes, he’d given a lecture. They had returned here to work on his next speech, it would be in Chicago…it would have been in Chicago. How had he seemed? Oh, preoccupied. “Infarctions run in his family,” she confided.
    They drove her home. Fern had been awake, she said, planning the next day’s lesson for her wretched students, when the police delivered Jamie to her. An unfortunate incident was what they said. They left. Jamie threw herself onto her bed, still wearing that red dress, and gagged her story into the pillow.
    “I turned her over,” Fern said, “and got the unbroken strap off her shoulder and rolled the dress down her body. I was sure that reporters would show up any minute and would seize on the dress, would call it scarlet. I slid an innocent nightgown over my cousin’s head. I threw the red heap onto the floor of my own closet.”
    But the reporters didn’t come. Except for one tabloid, the papers left Jamie out of the story. Lev’s biography filled their articles; the work he might yet have done interested the pundits.
    The staff went as a group to the calling hours at the funeral home. Jamie had planned to wear the red dress but Fern talked her out of it, she said. Jamie wore a black suit instead, with a very short skirt. In the coffin, she said later, he looked rested and handsome. Of course she could not give him a special good-bye, but her gaze traveled through the clothing and snuggled right next to his noble heart. And then she went into the next room to offer her condolences to the mourners.
    They were sitting in a semicircle. The mother: that severe chignon, pewter tinged with bronze. “She grayed in an eccentric manner,” Lev had told her. “She never did do things like other people.” The first wife, queenly despite an unflattering beige outfit, and her sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren, all solemn, sad—grief-stricken, you might say. One son looked just like him. Did he also have a heart that would fail too soon? Jamie wondered. The stunning second wife, wearing a silver pendant that resembled a stethoscope. Her teenage daughter, Thalia was her name, whose kneesocks and trashy novels Jamie had