Lina just then noticed a mural on the long wall—a line of women moving forward, with angular faces. She asked Shirley who’d painted it. The figures had a grim consistency.

  “A former patient. We had a good art teacher here for a while.”

  Their mother walked slowly to the sitting room, with Shirley’s hand on her back. Donnie and Lina pushed next to her. They wanted her to remember they were here.

  “It’s the Elavil,” Shirley said.

  So that was why. A drug had slowed her and made her vacant-seeming, with a scratchy fear in her eyes.

  “See the head, the way it goes down. She’s tired now. Time for her nap.”

  They followed Shirley through the empty dormitory, a TV down the hall emitting the hollow sounds of a laugh track. Their mother nodded on her bed. She ran her hand through Donnie’s hair. She didn’t want to return with them, as Lina had feared. It was startling how quickly they’d waned for her. Their mother was still beautiful, in a way not obvious; it opened to you.

  Leaving, they passed a young nurse lining up paper cups of medicine.

  “Excuse me. Are you giving my mother anything besides Elavil?” Lina asked.

  The young nurse was dressed in a white uniform. “Lithium, it looks like. But it’s mostly Elavil.”

  “She seems kind of out of it.”

  “Really? It’s a good drug. It usually helps. But I’ll make a note for the doctor.”

  The woman was still standing, playing her hand game against the wall.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m glad it’s all women,” Donnie said, kicking gravel.

  “That Shirley grew up in Norwalk,” Julie said. “Her mother was a nurse here, too. The head doctor lives on the grounds. I’ll show you the house when we drive out.”

  As they rode in the cola-colored Chevrolet (did Julie seek out shades of mud?), she asked, “Hey, Lina, do you have your license yet?”

  Their mother hadn’t let Lina practice. “We need me to work,” she’d said, and Lina had never asked again. “We had only the one car,” Lina said now.

  “This wouldn’t be the worst place to teach you,” Julie said. Then, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t taken Diane’s car out for a week. I hope it’ll start.” Car would become another item on her list.

  Julie asked about the landlord. Once, a long time ago, Lina told her, when her mother needed an extension on the rent, she’d driven to the landlord’s house and sent Lina in. She thought they’d hesitate before evicting a polite high school girl.

  “That’s Diane, all right.” Julie laughed.

  Mrs. Haley had opened the door wearing a white floor-length quilted housecoat with an ostrich-feather neckline.

  “You know who they are, right?” Lina asked. She explained, Jack Haley had been the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. The day Lina went inside their house, he was slumped in an old blue bathrobe at the kitchen counter. Mrs. Haley offered Lina a glass of orange juice. Lina said yes, please, and Mrs. Haley took a carton of Minute Maid from the refrigerator. Lina’s mother always bought fresh-squeezed. Mrs. Haley asked her how she was doing in school.

  Lina said good. “School’s easy.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful. Just wonderful,” Mrs. Haley said.

  Finally, Lina blurted, “My mom’s hoping we can pay late.”

  “Oh, sure. Tell her the end of the month is fine.”

  The whole time, a rerun of Gunsmoke was playing on a portable TV.

  Tonight, in the car, Julie asked, “Do you think she’s up to date now with the rent?”

  Lina and Donnie looked at each other. “No,” Donnie said, and they all three laughed.

  * * *

  —

  At home, they searched for financial records. Every drawer they opened was stuffed with stationery. Ferns pressed into handmade paper. Pretty, unmarked envelopes. They found a savings account in an accordion file, but it was depleted; they could see the stamped withdrawals. Lina found the statements from her mother’s nurses’ retirement fund. “Here’s some money!”

  But Julie said they couldn’t touch that without a penalty. “She’s still young. We’d best leave that be. Diane may need that someday.”

  Lina felt slapped; Julie had seen her thinking of herself. But she also felt relieved to hear the word someday in the same sentence with her mother.

  In the leather checkbook, Lina and Julie found that the last rent check had been entered five months ago.

  “We’d better pay,” Julie said. “We don’t want the landlord sniffing around.”

  “Are you sure?” Lina asked. The back rent would empty her mother’s account.

  Julie said she’d put in another thousand. She looked serious, filling out the deposit slip. Julie drove them in their mother’s car up to the landlord’s ranch house.

  When Mrs. Haley opened the door, she lifted a hand to wave at the car and asked, as she had the last time, “Does your ma want to come in?” In the dark, she couldn’t tell the difference between Lina’s mother and Julie.

  This time, Lina handed her a check. Mrs. Haley pulled the paper tight between her hands. She didn’t look particularly happy. “Can she manage? We don’t need it all today.”

  “It’s okay,” Lina said.

  “Well, good. She must be doing well, then.”

  This time, Mrs. Haley didn’t offer Lina juice or ask how school was. Running back to the car, Lina remembered something her mother had once told her that she’d never believed: people liked to help you.

  24.

  Walter drew 3-D letters on the back of a spiral notebook during class.

  LA.

  MOM IN HOSPITAL

  He was copying signs he’d seen hitchhikers hold on the side of the road. VIETNAM VET, one had Magic Markered. Most named destinations. FRESNO. TIJUANA. ANYWHERE BUT HERE. He remembered the guy from Bakersfield and hoped his mother had recovered from her operation.

  But Julie still told him to wait. Every time he hung up, after hearing the equivocation in her voice, he sat still, furious and relieved. The feelings didn’t cancel each other out but left him exhausted. Did she think he’d be in the way? His mom had gone into the hospital at the end of October. Now Julie was talking about him coming home at Christmas. He should stay there at school and do his studies. That’s what she would want was her refrain.

  * * *

  —

  Walter only talked to people who already knew. Ken, who’d told Melinda. Susan suspected something, he thought. Probably Carrie had heard, too; he trusted she’d understand. His other friendships went dry. Cathy blamed his mom for their breakup and he avoided her. He spent hours in the co-op’s garage working on bikes. He spun the wheels just to listen to them whirr.

  He studied the way he always had, but facts fell through him. The TA handed back his chemistry midterm with a D.

  Walter carried the graded test up to the sorority. He still hadn’t told Susan or Carrie about his mom. His own failure felt easier to explain. For the first time, he was more eager to find Susan than Carrie, and there she was, reading with her legs up on the porch railing. She didn’t say the usual things. Cub had said, You can still pass. Walter kind of wished she’d say that, too. But she asked, “Do you really want to be a doctor?”

  “It’s not a question of do I want medicine, it’s more whether medicine wants me.”

  Susan left her book and pencil and jumped down from the porch. As they walked, she talked about doctors. She had the habit of saying things to keep your dignity intact. “All day, they’re touching bodies that aren’t always clean. Everything’s a matter of life and death.”

  “At least doctors make a difference.”

  “Lots of people make a difference. Teachers. Architects. Social workers. Florists. My parents would say real estate agents. Doctors keep people alive, but for what? There’s being alive and there’s meaning. My mom’s best friend married a surgeon. He missed all his kids’ birthday parties. The human body isn’t the same for him, after seeing illness all day long. She says he doesn’t touch her.” Did she mean sex? “What kind of doctor do you want to be?”

  “Maybe psychiatrist,” Walter said.

  “How’s the summer girl?” Susan had never once used Cathy’s name.

  “We broke up.”

  “You feel okay about that?”

  “What was it your roommate said, love is the business of the stupid?”

  “An occupation of the idle. But, seriously. You don’t miss her?”

  “Not now. My mom’s in the hospital.”

  She didn’t look away, so she must have known. “What’s going on with that?”

  He told her what he’d heard from Julie.

  “Do you feel like the doctor’s good?”

  “I think so. It’s something called moral treatment. Like a rest.” He’d been reading; those ideas Julie told him about started the asylum movement, here in the States. A schoolteacher named Dorothea Dix met the English Quakers. Susan kept asking questions. Lina had told him their mom seemed out of it; Julie had asked the doctor to cut back her dosages. Susan was so curious. Walter’s mind, at a certain point, turned off, like an overheated appliance.

  They circled back, and up on the sorority porch Carrie stood, a triangled scarf on her head, its back corners fluttering. A scarf! Pure ornament, Jan Tudor would say. He liked watching Carrie from a distance. He didn’t have the energy now for more. A convertible honked. The driver looked straight ahead and she ran down. She jumped with unbent legs like the girl in the movie and hopped in.

  * * *

  —

  Melinda brought home a cat with a metal electrode sticking out of its head. Graduate students had botched its surgery. The ragged edges of its furred skin had healed roughly, like a browned bite out of a peach. When Melinda set it down on the floor of the attic, it wobbled, walking unevenly underneath Ken’s bed.

  Susan handed Walter a box of stationery in class. To write to his mom every week, she said. She pulled a coil of stamps out of her pocket, pretty stamps, with pictures of trees.

  “I could just use notebook paper.” The stationery was nice. “I mean, I don’t know how much a letter will mean to her right now.”

  “At least you’ll be doing something. You should probably make a schedule for calling the doctor, too.”

  Maybe she was right. He had no idea. Nothing like this had happened to him before.

  Mr. Matthews, the director of financial aid, turned up in the Princeton Shop.

  “Did you know you have a future architect working for you?” he asked Mr. Barsani.

  He bought the first suit Walter showed him. Walter held the tomato pincushion as the older Mr. Barsani, working on his knees, adjusted the trousers. He hardly ever spoke, hunched over a black globular sewing machine in the back room.

  * * *

  —

  Dear Mom, Walter wrote, then stalled. It’s foggy today. He balled up the expensive sheet of paper. It was foggy every day in Berkeley.

  Berkeley’s the same. Foggy. Like when you drove me up. I hope you’re getting better.

  I love you.

  Walter

  “Pretty basic,” he told Susan.

  “You’ll get the hang of it. Have you called the doctor?”

  He hadn’t. Passing a pet store, Walter bought a toy mouse stuffed with catnip. When he set it under Ken’s bed, he could see the cat’s eyes gleam from its defended corner. It lived among the coils inside the box spring and came out only at night for food and water.

  * * *

  —

  Walter dreaded his conversations with Julie. You couldn’t end a call without cutting her off. Normal pauses never occurred. He made himself dial. She answered on the second ring. Julie was never not home.

  She had been getting to know Norwalk, she said, so the kids could have some time alone with their mom. Julie, who had no children, had a reverence for family, Walter noticed. One street in Norwalk was lined with antiques stores. “Your mother liked antiques,” she reminded Walter.

  Likes, he thought but didn’t say.

  She told him about seeing incarnations of remembered furnishings from her Michigan childhood, now placed in a white-walled store, with extravagant price tags. Where were those lamps from the living room on either side of the couch they used to call “the davenport”? Who knew they’d become antiques?

  They should have held on to them, she’d written to her brother in Michigan. Walter was beginning to understand that Julie considered the true part of her life incomprehensible to her brother. His mom had felt that way about her family in the Central Valley. They wanted to hear about the Rose Bowl parade, Julie said, and whether she’d seen any celebrities. Once she’d seen Anjelica Huston in Gelson’s, weighing a peach. For years, she’d reported her glimpses of Hollywood stars in her letters home.

  His mom herself probably seemed a celebrity in those letters.

  Doodling on his binder’s inside cover, Walter pictured Julie walking through antiques stores intimidated, never buying a thing. He wished he could buy her some small treasure. She told him she’d discovered an ice-cream store in Norwalk that made weekly flavors and brought two pints back to the hospital.

  “Your mother always loved ice cream,” Julie said.

  Loves, Walter thought.

  The years of their friendship, Julie went on, going out for dessert was the pretext for their conversations. Our excuse, she said. Julie missed those talks. She now realized they’d been the most important of her life.

  She’d once heard a young nurse complain about her fiancé: He’s dying to get off the phone with me, always interrupting me to conclude, when we should be starting an endless conversation. At the time, Julie felt sorry for that young husband-to-be. An endless conversation seemed a tall order, but now that she’d had her own—what had it been? Eight years? Nine! You were in fourth grade!—she was beginning to understand what it meant for something like that to end.

  Walter rubbed his neck. He had never once thought about his mom’s friendship with Julie.

  At the beginning, Julie said, she didn’t propose an outing too often, knowing Diane was busy with the kids. Eventually, though, they talked every day. During a dull afternoon Julie looked forward to the evening when she could call Diane and tell about her day, its net of insults and specks of pleasure. She bought a long cord so she could pull the phone around her kitchen, feeding the cats while they talked. She still sometimes felt that pleasurable feeling arise while she was driving home from work, Julie said, before she remembered—she couldn’t call Diane now. “Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Diane had once begun a conversation, “why don’t you like Goldie Hawn?” They’d decided together to throw over their family allegiances and vote McGovern. They’d each saved for silver plate and selected the same pattern, Autumn Rose, though Diane bought hers on layaway. Julie thought now that really she could’ve helped her friend. Maybe never again would someone care what she thought of Goldie Hawn. She laughed.

  That was probably true. Later, Walter realized he should have said: I care.

  When she returned to the ward, she said, after a few hours in Norwalk, Lucille Ball was jumping around on the TV, the kids patted a spot for her next to them on the slumping couch, and they all ate ice cream. Lina had professional opinions on the flavors. Her favorite was cactus. At five, they shuffled into the dining room with the mural Lina stared at from different angles. The ward no longer seemed so terrible. There was a bread pudding Donnie liked. Driving back, Julie let Lina get behind the wheel. There were only a few cars on the road. Lina was cautious; she didn’t want to take her foot off the brake. Last week, when she finally did press her sneaker on the gas pedal, the car jerked forward, shaking them up.

  “Do you think Mom’s getting better?” Walter asked.

  “It’s hard to tell,” Julie said. “I think so.”

  * * *

  —

  The person Walter told next, after Susan, was Em Ball, the librarian.

  “Moral treatment,” she repeated. “I like the sound of that.”

  Mrs. Ball took care with her outfits, the way his mom had, but his mom had dressed to look pretty. With Mrs. Ball it must have been for another reason; she was married and had a full head of white curls, a style she called a “permanent,” although, he later learned, it wasn’t.

  * * *

  —

  Walter delivered Mr. Matthews’s suit to a My Three Sons house. This was 1973 Berkeley, where people walked barefoot caped in serapes, yet a woman opened the door in a pleated white tennis skirt. The style of an epoch didn’t, apparently, reach everyone. She offered Walter a glass of water.

  That night, he checked under Ken’s bed, but the toy mouse remained where he’d left it. The cat, evidently, had no desire to play.

  25.

  Walter began to ask his mom questions in his letters. Was there anything I could have done to make you happier?

  He asked Lina if she could get her to talk to him on the phone and she said, “It’s not like that, Walter.”

  “Well, tell me what it is like, then.”

  “It’s just…it’s just really different than it was up in Berkeley.”

  “What can I do? Tell me and I’ll do it.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “Just live your life.”

  * * *