One Fifth Avenue

“You’re going to have to move back to Streatham and take care of her,” his sister said warningly. “She was grocery shopping for you. She normally only shops on Thursday mornings,” she added accusingly, as if the accident had been his fault. “She made a special trip for you.”

“Thanks, dear,” Billy said.

He hung up and looked out the window. The train was pulling in to New Haven, where the landscape was depressing and familiarly bleak. Going home made him sad and uncomfortable; he’d had neither a happy childhood nor a happy home. His father, an orthodontist who believed homosexuality was a disease and that women were second-class citizens, was despised by both Billy and his sister. When his father passed away fifteen years ago, they said it was a blessing. Nevertheless, Laura had always resented Billy, his mother’s favorite. Billy knew Laura thought him frivolous and couldn’t forgive their mother for allowing Billy to study useless pursuits in college, like art and music and philosophy. Billy, on the other hand, thought his sister a dreary bore. She was absolutely ordinary; he couldn’t comprehend how nature could have supplied him with such a dull sibling. She was a drone—the very epitome of everything Billy feared a human life could become. She had no passions, either in her life or for her life, and therefore tended to exaggerate every tiny event out of proportion. Billy guessed his sister was making a bigger deal out of his mother’s fall than was necessary.

But when he got to the hospital on the outskirts of Springfield, he found his mother was worse than he’d hoped. She was always robust, but the accident had turned her into a colorless old lady under white hospital bedding, although she’d colored and permed her hair in preparation for his Christmas visit. “Ah, Billy.” She sighed. “You came.”

“Of course I came, Mother. What made you think I wouldn’t?”

“She’s on morphine,” the nurse said. “She’s going to be confused for a few days, aren’t you, dear?”

His mother began to cry. “I don’t want to be a burden to you and your sister. Maybe they should put me to sleep.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” Billy said. “You’re going to be fine.”

When visiting hours were over, the doctor pulled him aside. The operation had gone fine, but they wouldn’t know when or if his mother would be able to walk. In the meantime, she’d have to be in the wheelchair. Billy nodded and picked up his Gaultier bag, thinking how incongruous the expensive French luggage looked in this sad local hospital, then waited outside in the cold for thirty minutes for a taxi that took him the twenty miles to his mother’s house. The taxi cost a hundred and thirty dollars, and Billy winced at the price. With his mother injured, he would need to start saving money. In the snow next to the driveway, he saw the imprint of his mother’s body where she had fallen.

The back door was unlocked, and entering the kitchen, Billy found two bags of groceries on the counter, obviously placed there by a kind paramedic. Although he’d always considered himself a cynic, recently Billy had noticed that random acts of human kindness now caused him to become sentimental. Feeling heavy of heart, he began unpacking the groceries. In one bag was a warm container of light cream. This was what would have caused his mother’s unfortunate trip to the store. Billy still insisted on using light cream in his coffee.

He arrived at the hospital the next morning at nine. His sister came shortly thereafter, accompanied by her younger child, Dominique, a scrawny girl with thin blond hair and a nose like a beak; she looked just like her father, a local carpenter who had grown marijuana in the summers and eventually gotten arrested.

Billy tried to talk to the girl, but she was either not interested or not educated. She admitted that she hated reading books and hadn’t read Harry Potter. What did she do, then? Billy asked. She talked to her friends on the Internet. Billy raised his eyebrows at his sister, but she shrugged. “I can’t keep her off it. No one can keep their kids off it, and frankly, no one has time to monitor their kids every minute. Especially me.”

Billy had some feeling for the girl—after all, she was a blood relative—but was saddened by her as well. The little girl was on the border of becoming white trash, he decided, and he was struck by the irony of how hard his own parents had worked to be upper-middle-class, to make sure their children were educated, to expose them to culture (his father had played Beethoven in his office), only to produce a granddaughter who would not even read. The Dark Ages, Billy thought, were just around the corner.

He spent a long day with his mother. She was in a cast from her knee to her waist. He held her hand. “Billy,” she said. “What’s going to happen to me?” “You’re going to be fine, Ma, you’ll see.” “What if I can’t drive?” “We’ll figure it out.” “What if I have to go into a nursing home? I don’t want to go to a nursing home. I’ll die there.” “I won’t let it happen, Ma.” His stomach churned with fear. If it came to that, how could he prevent it? He had no means to do otherwise.

His sister asked him to dinner at her house—nothing fancy, macaroni and cheese. Laura lived a short distance away from their mother in a large ranch house that their father had bought her after her first divorce. It was a mystery to the family why Laura, who was a lawyer, could never manage to make ends meet, but since she was a writer of legal briefs, Billy suspected she didn’t make as much money as her law degree would imply. And she was a spender. Her house had wall-to-wall carpeting, a dinette set, display cases of porcelain figurines, a collection of teddy bears, four TVs, and in the living room, a modular sofa in which each piece had cupholders and retractable footrests. The thought of spending the evening in such an environment filled Billy with dread—he knew it would leave him unbearably depressed—and so he invited Laura and her daughter to their mother’s house instead.

He made an herb-roasted chicken, roasted potatoes with rosemary, haricots verts, and an arugula salad. He had learned to cook from the private chefs of his wealthy friends, for he always made it a point to mix with the staff in the kitchen. His niece, Dominique, was fascinated—apparently, she’d never seen anyone cook before. Studying the girl, Billy decided she might have potential. Her eyes were wide-set, and she had a pretty smile, although her incisors were as pointy as a dog’s. “What will Dominique do when she grows up?” he asked his sister when they were in the kitchen, cleaning up after the meal.

“How should I know? She’s twelve,” Laura said.

“Does she have any interests? Special talents?”

“Besides pissing me off? She says she wants to be a vet when she grows up. I said the same thing when I was twelve. It’s something all little girls say.”

“Do you wish you were a vet now?” Billy asked.

“I wish I was married to Donald Trump and lived in Palm Beach,” Laura said. She smacked herself on the forehead. “I knew I forgot something. I should have married a rich guy.”

“You might think about sending Dominique to Miss Porter’s in Connecticut.”

“Right,” Laura said. “So she can marry a rich guy. Of course. There’s only one problem. It takes money to get money, remember? Unless one of your rich-lady friends wants to give her a scholarship.”

“I have connections,” Billy said. “I might be able to make it happen.”

His sister turned on him. “Connections?” she said. “What planet do you live on, Billy? Mom is in the hospital, and all you can think about is sending my daughter to a private school to learn how to sip tea?”

“You might find life more tolerable if you learned to speak to people in a civilized manner,” Billy responded.

“Are you saying I’m not civilized?” Laura threw a dish towel on the counter. “I’m sick of it. All you do is come back here with your snotty New York attitude and act like everyone is below you. Like you’re something special. And what have you done with your life? You don’t even have a job. Unless you call escorting old ladies a job.” She was standing in the middle of the kitchen, straddling the slate-tiled floor like a prize-fighter. “And don’t you even think about going back to New York,” she hissed. “You’re not going to leave me here to clean up the mess. I’ve been taking care of Ma for the last fifteen years. I’m done. It’s your turn.”

They stared at each other with hatred.

“Excuse me, Laura,” Billy said, pushing past her. “I’m going to retire for the evening.” And he went up to his room.

It was his old room, unchanged, although their mother had turned Laura’s room into a guest bedroom. He lay on the bed, a four-poster with Ralph Lauren bedding from the early eighties, when Ralph had just ventured into home furnishings. The bedding was vintage, as, Billy realized, was he. He took a Xanax to soothe his anxiety and, at random, picked out a book from the shelves encasing one window. He turned it over and looked at the title: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann.