But now, instead of ending, it continued; now not a year went by when he wasn't hospitalized. The son of long-lived parents, the brother of a man six years his senior who was seemingly as fit as he'd been when he'd carried the ball for Thomas Jefferson High, he was still only in his sixties when his health began giving way and his body seemed threatened all the time. He'd married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he'd been a success, but now eluding1 death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.
The year after he had carotid artery2 surgery he had an angiogram in which the doctor discovered that he'd had a silent heart attack on the posterior wall because of an obstructed3 graft4. The news stunned5 him, though fortunately Nancy had come down by train to accompany him to the hospital and her reassurance6 helped restore his equanimity7. The doctor then went on to perform an angioplasty, and inserted a stent in his left anterior8 descending9 artery, after ballooning the artery open where new deposits of plaque10 had formed. From the table he could watch the catheter being wiggled up into the coronary artery — he was under the lightest sedation and able to follow the whole procedure on the monitor as though his body were somebody else's. A year later he had another angioplasty and another stent installed in one of the grafts11, which had begun to narrow. The following year he had to have three stents installed at one go — to repair arterial obstructions12 whose location, as the doctor told him afterward13, made the procedure no picnic to perform.
As always, to keep his mind elsewhere he summoned up his father's store and the names of the nine brands of watches and seven brands of clocks for which his father was an authorized14 distributor; his father didn't make much money selling watches and clocks, but he loaded up on them because they were a steady item and brought window-shoppers in from the street. What he did with these seed memories during each of his angioplasties was this: he would tune15 out the badinage16 the doctors and nurses invariably exchanged while setting up, tune out the rock music pumped into the chilly17, sterile18 room where he lay strapped19 to the operating table amid all the intimidating20 machinery21 designed to keep cardiac patients alive, and from the moment they got to work anesthetizing his groin and puncturing22 the skin for the insertion of the arterial catheter, he would distract himself by reciting under his breath the lists he'd first alphabetized as a small boy helping23 at the store after school — "Benrus, Bulova, Croton, Elgin, Hamilton, Helbros, Ovistone, Waltham, Wittnauer" — focusing all the while on the distinctive24 look of the numerals on the dial of the watch as he intoned its brand name, sweeping25 from one through twelve and back again. Then he'd start on the clocks — "General Electric, Ingersoll, McClintock, New Haven26, Seth Thomas, Telechron, Westclox" — remembering how the wind clocks ticked and the electric clocks hummed until finally he heard the doctor announce that the procedure was over and that everything had gone well. The doctor's assistant, after applying pressure to the wound, placed a sandbag on the groin to prevent bleeding, and with the weight resting there, he had to lie motionless in his hospital bed for the next six hours. His not being able to move was the worst of it, strangely — because of the thousands of involuntary thoughts that suffused27 the slow-moving time — but the following morning, if all had gone well overnight, he was brought a tray of inedible28 breakfast to look at and a sheaf of post-angioplasty instructions to follow and by eleven A.M. he would have been discharged. On three separate occasions he'd arrived at home and was hurriedly undressing for a much-needed shower when he'd found a couple of the EKG electrode pads still stuck to him, because the nurse helping to discharge him had forgotten to peel them from his chest and throw them in the garbage. One morning he looked down in the shower to find that no one had bothered to remove the IV feeding needle, a gadget29 they called a heplock, from his black-and-blue forearm, and so he had to dress and drive over to his internist's office in Spring Lake to have the heplock taken out before it became a source of infection.
The year after the three stents he was briefly30 knocked out on an operating table while a defibrillator was permanently31 inserted as a safeguard against the new development that endangered his life and that along with the scarring at the posterior wall of his heart and his borderline ejection fraction made him a candidate for a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. The defibrillator was a thin metal box about the size of a cigarette lighter32; it was lodged33 beneath the skin of his upper chest, a few inches from his left shoulder, with its wire leads attached to his vulnerable heart, ready to administer a shock to correct his heartbeat — and confuse death — if it became perilously34 irregular.
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 bulge35 that was the embedded36 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 running down her face: she wanted her father to be the way he was when she was ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen, without impediment or incapacity — and so did he. She couldn't possibly have wanted it as much as he did, but for that moment he found his own sorrow easier to accept than hers. The desire was strong to say something tender to alleviate37 her fears, as though, all over again, she were the more vulnerable of the two.
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 waning38 hours. They'd go to the park and it would be just the two of them and the shadows and the light. She was running for the school team by then, and during a meet she was rounding a bend when her leg gave way and she fell to the track in agony. What had happened was something that can happen to a girl in early puberty — because the bones don't fully39 harden by that age, what would have been in a mature woman merely a strained tendon was more dramatic for Nancy: the tendon held but a piece of bone in the hip40 pulled away. Along with the track coach, he rushed Nancy to the hospital emergency room, where she was in great pain and very fearful, especially when she heard there was nothing to be done, though at the same time she was told, correctly enough, that the injury would heal by itself over a period of time. But that was the end of her track career, not just because recovery would take the rest of the season but because puberty was upon her, and soon her breasts enlarged and her hips41 widened and the speed that was hers when she had her childish body disappeared. And then, as if the end of her championship running and the alteration42 of her physique weren't enough to leave her reeling, that very year delivered the misery43 of her parents' divorce.
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 parental44 reconciliation45 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 sobs46 because of the inexplicable47 turn of events.
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eluding
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| v.（尤指机敏地）避开( elude的现在分词 )；逃避；躲避；使达不到 | |
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artery
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| n.干线，要道；动脉 | |
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obstructed
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| 阻塞( obstruct的过去式和过去分词 )； 堵塞； 阻碍； 阻止 | |
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graft
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| n.移植，嫁接，艰苦工作，贪污；v.移植，嫁接 | |
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stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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reassurance
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| n.使放心，使消除疑虑 | |
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equanimity
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| n.沉着，镇定 | |
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anterior
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| adj.较早的；在前的 | |
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descending
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| n. 下行 adj. 下降的 | |
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plaque
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| n.饰板，匾，(医)血小板 | |
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grafts
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| 移植( graft的名词复数 )； 行贿； 接穗； 行贿得到的利益 | |
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obstructions
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| n.障碍物( obstruction的名词复数 )；阻碍物；阻碍；阻挠 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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authorized
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| a.委任的，许可的 | |
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tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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badinage
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| n.开玩笑，打趣 | |
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chilly
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| adj.凉快的，寒冷的 | |
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sterile
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| adj.不毛的，不孕的，无菌的，枯燥的，贫瘠的 | |
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strapped
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| adj.用皮带捆住的，用皮带装饰的；身无分文的；缺钱；手头紧v.用皮带捆扎(strap的过去式和过去分词)；用皮带抽打；包扎；给…打绷带 | |
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intimidating
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| vt.恐吓，威胁( intimidate的现在分词) | |
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machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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puncturing
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| v.在（某物）上穿孔( puncture的现在分词 )；刺穿（某物）；削弱（某人的傲气、信心等）；泄某人的气 | |
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helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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distinctive
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| adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的 | |
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sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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haven
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| n.安全的地方，避难所，庇护所 | |
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suffused
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| v.（指颜色、水气等）弥漫于，布满( suffuse的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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inedible
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| adj.不能吃的，不宜食用的 | |
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gadget
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| n.小巧的机械，精巧的装置，小玩意儿 | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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lighter
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| n.打火机，点火器；驳船；v.用驳船运送；light的比较级 | |
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lodged
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| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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perilously
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| adv.充满危险地，危机四伏地 | |
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bulge
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| n.突出，膨胀，激增；vt.突出，膨胀 | |
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embedded
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| a.扎牢的 | |
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alleviate
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| v.减轻，缓和，缓解(痛苦等) | |
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waning
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| adj.（月亮）渐亏的，逐渐减弱或变小的n.月亏v.衰落( wane的现在分词 )；（月）亏；变小；变暗淡 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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hip
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| n.臀部，髋；屋脊 | |
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hips
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| abbr.high impact polystyrene 高冲击强度聚苯乙烯，耐冲性聚苯乙烯n.臀部( hip的名词复数 )；[建筑学]屋脊；臀围（尺寸）；臀部…的 | |
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alteration
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| n.变更，改变；蚀变 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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parental
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| adj.父母的；父的；母的 | |
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reconciliation
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| n.和解，和谐，一致 | |
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sobs
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| 啜泣（声），呜咽（声）( sob的名词复数 ) | |
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inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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