Everyman

Nancy had been with him for this procedure too, and afterward, when he got back to his room and he lowered one side of his hospital gown to show her the visible bulge that was the embedded defibrillator, she had to turn away. "Darling," he said to her, "it's to protect me – there's nothing to be upset about." "I know that it's to protect you. I'm glad there is such a thing that's able to protect you. It's just a shock to see because," and finding herself too far along to come up with a comforting lie, she said, "because you've always been so youthful." "Well, I'm more youthful with it than I would be without it. I'll be able to do everything I like to do, only without having to worry about the arrhythmia putting me at serious risk." But she was pale with helplessness and couldn't stop the tears from ru

He never really stopped worrying about her, nor did he understand how it happened that such a child should be his. He hadn't necessarily done the right things to make it happen, even if Phoebe had. But there are such people, spectacularly good people – miracles, really – and it was his great fortune that one of these miracles was his own incorruptible daughter. He was amazed when he looked around himself and saw how bitterly disappointed parents could be – as he was with his own two sons, who continued to act as if what had happened to them had never happened before or since to anyone else – and then to have a child who was number one in every way. Sometimes it seemed that everything was a mistake except Nancy. So he worried about her, and he still never passed a women's clothing shop without thinking of her and going in to find something she'd like, and he thought, I'm very lucky, and he thought, Some good has to come out somewhere, and it has in her.

He was remembering now her brief period as a track star. When Nancy was thirteen she'd placed second in a race at her all-girls school, a run of about two miles, and she saw the possibility of something in which she could be exceptional. She was good in everything else, but this was another kind of stardom. For a while he gave up swimming at the club first thing so they could run together in the early morning and sometimes, too, in the day's waning hours. They'd go to the park and it would be just the two of them and the shadows and the light. She was ru

When she sat on his hospital bed and wept in his arms it was for many reasons, not least for his having left her when she was thirteen. She'd come to the shore to assist him and all his cool-headed and sensible daughter could do was relive the difficulties that had resulted from the divorce and confess to the undying fantasy of a parental reconciliation that she had spent more than half of her life hoping for. "But there's no remaking reality," he said softly, rubbing her back and stroking her hair and rocking her gently in his arms. "Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way."

That was the truth and the best he could do – and exactly what he'd told her many years earlier, when he held her in his arms in the taxi coming home from the emergency room while she shook with sobs because of the inexplicable turn of events.

All these procedures and hospitalizations had made him a decidedly lonelier, less confident man than he'd been during the first year of retirement. Even his cherished peace and quiet seemed to have been turned into a self-generated form of solitary confinement, and he was hounded by the sense that he was headed for the end. But instead of moving back to attackable Manhattan, he decided to oppose the sense of estrangement brought on by his bodily failings and to enter more vigorously into the world around him. He did this by organizing two weekly painting classes for the village residents, an afternoon class for begi

There were about ten students in each class, and they loved meeting in his bright studio room. By and large, learning to paint was a pretext for their being there, and most of them were taking the class for the same reason he was giving it: to find satisfying contact with other people. All but two were older than he, and though they assembled each week in a mood of comradely good cheer, the conversation invariably turned to matters of sickness and health, their personal biographies having by this time become identical with their medical biographies and the swapping of medical data crowding out nearly everything else. At his studio, they more readily identified one another by their ailments than by their painting. "How is your sugar?" "How is your pressure?" "What did the doctor say?" "Did you hear about my neighbor? It spread to the liver." One of the men came to class with his portable oxygen unit. Another had Parkinson's tremors but was eager to learn to paint anyway. All of them without exception complained – sometimes jokingly, sometimes not – about increasing memory loss, and they spoke of how rapidly the months and the seasons and the years went by, how life no longer moved at the same speed. A couple of the women were being treated for cancer. One had to leave halfway through the course to return to the hospital for treatment. Another woman had a bad back and occasionally had to lie on the floor at the edge of the room for ten or fifteen minutes before she could get up and resume working in front of her easel. After the first few times, he told her she should go into his bedroom instead and lie down for as long as she liked on his bed – it had a firm mattress and she would be more comfortable. Once when she did not come out of the bedroom for half an hour, he knocked and, when he heard her crying inside, opened the door and went in.

She was a lean, tall, gray-haired woman, within a year or two of his age, whose appearance and gentleness reminded him of Phoebe. Her name was Millicent Kramer, and she was the best of his students by far and, coincidentally, the least messy. She alone, in what he charitably called "Advanced Painting," managed to finish each class without having dripped paint all over her ru