Life Expectancy Read online

  “If you want Reuben sandwiches for dinner, we’ll have to go to the market for cheese.”

  Mom insists that she actually said, “After this, don’t think you’re ever going to touch me again, you son of a bitch.”

  Their love is deeper than desire, than affection, than respect, so deep that its wellspring is humor. Humor is a petal on the flower of hope, and hope blossoms on the vine of faith. They have faith in each other and faith that life has meaning, and from this faith comes their indefatigable good humor, which is their greatest gift to each other—and to me.

  I grew up in a home filled with laughter. Regardless of what happens to me in the days ahead, I will have had the laughter. And wonderful pastries.

  In this account of my life, I will resort at every turn to amusement, for laughter is the perfect medicine for the tortured heart, the balm for misery, but I will not beguile you. I will not use laughter as a curtain to spare you the sight of horror and despair. We will laugh together, but sometimes the laughter will hurt.

  So…

  Whether my mother was delirious or sound of mind, whether she blamed my father for the pain of labor or discussed the need for cheese, they are in relative agreement about what happened next. My father found a wall-mounted phone near the door and called for help.

  Because this device was more an intercom than a phone, it did not have a standard keypad, just four keys, each clearly labeled: STAFFING, PHARMACY, MAINTENANCE, SECURITY.

  Dad pressed SECURITY and informed the answering officer that people had been shot, that the assailant, costumed as a clown, was even then fleeing the building, and that Maddy needed immediate medical assistance.

  From the bed, clearheaded now if she had not been previously, my mother cried out, “Where’s my baby?”

  Phone still to his ear, my father turned to her, astounded, alarmed. “You don’t know where it is?”

  Striving unsuccessfully to sit up, grimacing with pain, Mom said, “How would I know? I passed out or something. What do you mean someone was shot? For God’s sake, who was shot? What’s happening? Where’s my baby?”

  Although the delivery room had no windows, although it was surrounded by hallways and by other rooms that further insulated it from the outside world, my folks heard faint sirens rising in the distance.

  Dad’s memory regurgitated the suddenly nauseating image of Beezo in the hallway, the pistol in his right hand, the baby cradled in his left arm. Bitter acid burned in my father’s throat, and his already harried heart raced faster.

  Perhaps Beezo’s wife and child had died at birth. Perhaps the infant in his arms hadn’t been his own but had been instead little James—or Jennifer—Tock.

  I thought “kidnapped,” Dad says when he recalls the moment. I thought about the Lindbergh baby and Frank Sinatra Junior being held for ransom and Rumpelstiltskin and Tarzan being raised by apes, and though none of that makes sense, I thought it all in an instant. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t, and I felt just like that red-faced baby with its mouth open but silent, and when I thought of the baby, oh, then I just knew it had been you, not his at all, but you, my Jimmy.

  Desperate now to find Beezo and stop him, Dad dropped the phone, bolted toward the open door to the hallway—and nearly collided with Charlene Coleman, a nurse who came bearing a baby in her arms.

  This infant had a broader face than the one Beezo had spirited into the stormy night. Its complexion was a healthy pink instead of mottled red. According to Dad, its eyes shone clear and blue, and its face glowed with wonder.

  “I hid with your baby,” Charlene Coleman said. “I hid from that awful man. I knew he would be trouble when he first showed up with his wife, him wearing that ugly hat indoors and making no apology for it.”

  I wish I could verify from personal experience that, indeed, what alarmed Charlene from the get-go was not Beezo’s clown makeup, not his poisonous ranting about his aerialist in-laws, not his eyes so crazy that they almost spun like pinwheels, but simply his hat. Unfortunately, less than one hour old, I had not yet learned English and had not even sorted out who all these people were.

  3

  * * *

  Trembling with relief, Dad took me from Charlene Coleman and carried me to my mother.

  After the nurse raised the head of the birthing bed and provided more pillows, Mom was able to take me in her arms.

  Dad swears that her first words to me were these: “You better have been worth all the pain, Little Blue Eyes, ’cause if you turn out to be an ungrateful child, I’ll make your life a living hell.”

  Tearful, shaken by all that had occurred, Charlene recounted recent events and explained how she’d been able to spirit me to safety when the shooting started.

  Unexpectedly required to attend two women simultaneously in urgent and difficult labor, Dr. MacDonald had been unable at that hour to locate a qualified physician to assist on a timely basis. He divided his attention between the two patients, hurrying from one delivery room to the other, relying on his nurses for backup, his work complicated by the periodically dimming lights and worry about whether the hospital generator would kick in reliably if the storm knocked out electric service.

  Natalie Beezo had received no prenatal care. She unknowingly suffered from preeclampsia. During labor she developed full-blown eclampsia and experienced violent convulsions that would not respond to treatment and that threatened not only her own life but the life of her unborn child.

  Meanwhile, my mother endured an excruciating labor resulting largely from the failure of her cervix to dilate. Intravenous injections of synthetic oxytocin initially did not induce sufficient contractions of the uterine muscles to allow her to squeeze me into the world.

  Natalie delivered first. Dr. MacDonald tried everything to save her—an endotracheal tube to assist her breathing, injections of anticonvulsants—but soaring blood pressure and convulsions led to a massive cerebral hemorrhage that killed her.

  Even as the umbilical cord was tied off and cut between the Beezo baby and his dead mother, my mother, exhausted but still struggling to expel me, suddenly and at last experienced cervical dilation.

  The Jimmy Tock show had begun.

  Before undertaking the depressing task of telling Konrad Beezo that he had gained a son and lost a wife, Dr. MacDonald delivered me and, according to Charlene Coleman, announced that this solid little package would surely grow up to be a football hero.

  Having successfully conveyed me from womb to wider world, my mother promptly passed out. She didn’t hear the doctor’s prediction and didn’t see my broad, pink, wonder-filled face until my protector, Charlene, returned and presented me to my father.

  After Dr. MacDonald had given me to Nurse Coleman to be swabbed and then wrapped in a white cotton receiving cloth, and when he had satisfied himself that my mother had merely fainted and that she would come to herself in moments, with or without smelling salts, he peeled off his latex gloves, pulled down his surgical mask, and went to the expectant-fathers’ lounge to console Konrad Beezo as best he could.

  Almost at once, the shouting started: bitter, accusatory words, paranoid accusations, the vilest language delivered in the most furious voice imaginable.

  Even in the usually serene, well-soundproofed delivery room, Nurse Coleman heard the uproar. She understood the tenor if not the specifics of Konrad Beezo’s reaction to the loss of his wife.

  When she left the delivery room and stepped into the hallway to hear Beezo more clearly, intuition told her to carry me with her, bundled in the thin blanket.

  In the hall, she encountered Lois Hanson, another nurse, who had in her arms the Beezo baby. Lois, too, had ventured forth to hear the clown’s intemperate outburst.

  Lois made a fatal mistake. Against Charlene’s advice, she moved toward the closed door to the waiting room, believing that the sight of his infant son would quench Beezo’s hot anger and ameliorate the intense grief from which his rage had flared.

  Herself a refugee from an
abusive husband, Charlene had little faith that the grace of fatherhood would temper the fury of any man who, even in a moment of profound loss, responded first and at once with rage and with threats of violence rather than with tears or shock, or denial. Besides, she remembered his hat, worn indoors with no regard for manners. Charlene sensed trouble coming, big trouble.

  She retreated with me along the maternity ward’s internal hall to the neonatal care unit. As that door was swinging shut behind us, she heard the gunshot that killed Dr. MacDonald.

  This room contained rows of bassinets in which newborns were nestled, most dreaming, a few cooing, none yet crying. An enormous view window occupied the better part of one long wall, but no proud fathers or grandparents were currently standing on the other side of it.

  With the infants were two crèche nurses. They had heard the shouting, then the shot, and they were more receptive to Charlene’s advice than Lois had been.

  Presciently, Nurse Coleman assured them the gunman wouldn’t hurt the babies but warned he would surely kill every member of the hospital staff that he could find.

  Nevertheless, before fleeing, each nurse scooped up an infant—and fretted about those they were forced to leave behind. Frightened by a second shot, they followed Charlene through a door beside the view window, out of the maternity ward into the main corridor.

  The three, with their charges, took refuge in a room where an elderly man slept on unaware.

  A low-wattage night-light did little to press back the gloom, and the flickering storm at the window only made the shadows jitter with insectile energy.

  Quiet, hardly daring to breathe, the three nurses huddled together until Charlene heard sirens in the distance. This welcome wail drew her to the window, which provided a view of the parking lot in front of the hospital; she hoped to see police cars.

  Instead, from that second-story room, she saw Beezo with his baby, crossing the rain-washed blacktop. He looked, she said, like a figure in a foul dream, scuttling and strange, like something you might see on the night that the world ended and cracks opened in the foundations of the earth to let loose the angry legions of the damned.

  Charlene is a transplanted Mississippian and a Baptist whose soul is filled with the poetry of the South.

  Beezo had parked at such a distance that through the screen of rain and under the yellow pall of the sodium-vapor lamps, the make, model, and true color of his car could not be discerned. Charlene watched him drive away, hoping the police would intercept him before he reached the nearby county road, but his taillights dwindled into the drizzling darkness.

  With the threat removed, she returned to the delivery room just as Dad’s thoughts were flashing from the Lindbergh baby tragedy to Rumpelstiltskin to Tarzan raised by apes, in time to assure him that I had not been kidnapped by a homicidal clown.

  Later my father would confirm that the minute of my birth, my length, and my weight precisely fulfilled the predictions made by my grandfather on his deathbed. His first proof, however, that the events in the intensive care unit were not just extraordinary but supernatural came when, as my mother held me, he folded back the receiving blanket, exposing my feet, and found that my toes were fused as Josef had predicted.

  “Syndactyly,” Dad said.

  “It can be fixed,” Charlene assured him. Then her eyes widened with surprise. “How do you know such a doctor-ish word?”

  My father only repeated, “Syndactyly,” as he gently, lovingly, and with amazement fingered my fused toes.

  4

  * * *

  Syndactyly is not merely the name of the affliction with which I was born but also the theme of my life for thirty years now. Things often prove to be fused in unanticipated ways. Moments separated by many years are unexpectedly joined, as if the space-time continuum has been folded by some power with either a peculiar sense of humor or an agenda arguably worthwhile but so complex as to be mystifying. People unknown to one another discover that they are bonded by fate as completely as two toes sharing a single sheath of skin.

  Surgeons repaired my feet so long ago that I have no slightest memory of the procedures. I walk, I run when I must, I dance but not well.

  With all due respect for the memory of Dr. Ferris MacDonald, I never became a football hero and never wished to be one. My family has never had an interest in sports.

  We are fans, instead, of puffs, éclairs, tarts, tortes, cakes, trifles, and fans as well of the infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies and the Reuben sandwiches and all the fabulous dishes of table-cracking weight that my mother produces. We will trade the thrills and glory of all the games and tournaments mankind has ever invented for a dinner together and for the conversation and the laughter that runs like a fast tide from the unfolding of our napkins to the final sip of coffee.

  Over the years, I have grown from twenty inches to six feet. My weight has increased from eight pounds ten ounces to one hundred eighty-eight pounds, which should prove my contention that I am at most husky, not as large as I appear to be to most people.

  The fifth of my grandfather’s ten predictions—that everyone would call me Jimmy—has also proved true.

  Even on first meeting me, people seem to think that James is too formal to fit and that Jim is too earnest or otherwise inappropriate. Even if I introduce myself as James, and with emphasis, they at once begin addressing me as Jimmy, with complete comfort and familiarity, as though they have known me since my face was postpartum pink and my toes were fused.

  As I make these tape recordings with the hope that I may survive to transcribe and edit them, I have lived through four of the five terrible days about which Grandpa Josef warned my father. They were terrible both in the same and in different ways, each day filled with the unexpected and with terror, some marked by tragedy, but they were days filled with much else, as well. Much else.

  And now…one more to go.

  My dad, my mom, and I spent twenty years pretending that the accuracy of Josef’s first five predictions did not necessarily mean that the next five would be fulfilled. My childhood and teenage years passed uneventfully, presenting no evidence whatsoever that my life was a yo-yo on the string of fate.

  Nevertheless, as the first of those five days relentlessly approached—Thursday, September 15, 1994—we worried.

  Mom’s coffee consumption went from ten cups a day to twenty.

  She has a curious relationship with caffeine. Instead of fraying her nerves, the brew soothes them.

  If she fails to drink her usual three cups during the morning, by noon she will be as fidgety as a frustrated fly buzzing against a windowpane. If she doesn’t pour down eight by bedtime, she lies awake, so mentally active that she not only counts sheep by the thousand but also names them and develops an elaborate life story for each.

  Dad believes that Maddy’s topsy-turvy metabolism is a direct result of the fact that her father was a long-haul trucker who ate N-o-D-oz caffeine tablets as if they were candy.

  Maybe so, Mom sometimes answers my father, but what are you complaining about? When we were dating all you had to do was get five or six cheap coffees into me, and I was as pliable as a rubber band.

  As September 15, 1994, drew near, my father’s worry expressed itself in fallen cakes, curdled custard, rubbery pie crusts, and crème brûlée that had a sandy texture. He could not concentrate on his recipes or his ovens.

  I believe that I handled the anticipation reasonably well. In the last two days leading up to the first of those five ominous dates, I might have walked into more closed doors than usual, might have tripped more often than is customary for me when climbing the stairs. And I do admit to dropping a hammer on Grandma Rowena’s foot while trying to hang a picture for her. But it was her foot, not her head, and the one instance when a trip led to a fall, I only tumbled down a single flight of steps and didn’t break anything.

  Our worry was kept somewhat in check by the fact that Grandpa Josef had given Dad five “terrible days” in my life, not just one. Ob
viously, regardless of how grim September 15 might be, I would not die on that day.

  “Yes, but there’s always the possibility of severed limbs and mutilation,” Grandma Rowena cautioned. “And paralysis and brain damage.”

  She is a sweet woman, my maternal grandmother, but one with too sharp a sense of the fragility of life.

  As a child, I had dreaded those occasions when she insisted on reading me to sleep. Even when she didn’t revise the classic stories, which she often did, even when the Big Bad Wolf was defeated, as he should have been, Grandma paused at key points in the narrative to muse aloud on the many gruesome things that might have happened to the three little pigs if their defenses had not held or if their strategies had proved faulty. Being ground up for sausages was the least of it.

  And so, less than six weeks after my twentieth birthday, came the first of my five ordeals….

  PART TWO

  * * *

  MIGHT AS WELL DIE IF I CAN’T FLY

  5

  * * *

  At nine o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, September 14, my parents and I met in their dining room to have as heavy a dinner as we might be able to stand up from without our knees buckling.

  We were also gathered to discuss once more the wisest strategies for getting through the fateful day that lay just three hours ahead of me. We hoped that in a prepared and cautious state of mind, I might reach September 16 as unscathed as the three little pigs after their encounter with the wolf.

  Grandma Rowena joined us to speak from the point of view of the wolf. That is, she would play the devil’s advocate and relate to us what flaws she saw in our precautions.

  As always, we took dinner on gold-rimmed Raynaud Limoges china, using sterling-silver flatware by Buccellati.

  In spite of what the table setting suggests, my parents are not wealthy, just securely middle class. Although my father makes a fine salary as a pastry chef, stock options and corporate jets don’t come with his position.

  My mother earns a modest income working part-time from home, painting pet portraits on commission: mostly cats and dogs, but also rabbits, parakeets, and once a milk snake that came to pose and didn’t want to leave.

  Their small Victorian house would be called humble if it weren’t so cozy that it feels sumptuous. The ceilings are not high and the proportions of the rooms are not grand, but they have been furnished with great care and with an eye to comfort.

  You can’t blame Earl for taking refuge behind the living-room sofa, under the claw-foot tub in the upstairs bath, in a clothes hamper, in the pantry potato basket, and elsewhere during the three interesting weeks that he adopted us. Earl was the milk snake, and the home from which he’d come was a sterile place with stainless-steel-and-black-leather furniture, abstract art, and cactuses for houseplants.

  Of all the charming corners in this small house where you might read a book, listen to music, or gaze out a many-paned window at a bejeweled winter day, none is as welcoming as the dining room. This is because to the Tock family, food—and the conviviality that marks our every meal—is the hub that turns the spokes that spin the wheel of life.

  Therefore, the luxury of Limoges and Buccellati.

  Considering that we are incapable of pulling up a chair to any dinner with less than five courses and that we regard the first four, in which we fully indulge, as mere preparation for the fifth, it is miraculous that none of us is overweight.

  Dad once discovered that his best wool suit had grown tight in the waist. He merely skipped lunch three days, and the pants were then loose on him.