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Max Sheffield lowered himself gingerly onto one of the chairs on the patio of his Hollywood Villa and struggled to stop shaking.
Above and around him were the ambient sounds of a California night: passing cars; rustling palm trees; the occasional police siren.
It had taken him years to get used to California, he thought, as he attempted to divert his mind, to stop gasping for air.
New York had been like London, and he’d had Sara, and Niles, his sardonic and indefatigable family retainer, when he’d first come to America. The first few years they’d lived there—until Sara died, really—it was as if he’d lived in a bubble. When Americans engaged in weird behaviors, he’d bring them home to Sara as amusing anecdotes—grazing habits of the local fauna—and they’d laugh together at their idiosyncrasies.
For Sara, descended from generations of Boston Brahmans, New Yorkers seemed loud and pushy, far beyond her capacity to explain to her British husband. Max, meanwhile, had gradually become accustomed to their extravagant dramatics, which he continued to regard with a condescending bemusement.
And each night, he had returned, happily, to the world he’d built with Sara: an empire of two, and then five, as the children had been born.
It was all he’d ever known, or wanted—until suddenly, tragedy had struck.
In the beginning, it hadn’t seemed like much. Sara was tired—a woman who’d usually bounded out of bed by 5.30 to help Niles make breakfast and get the children ready for school was suddenly oversleeping until 7, or 9, or even 10 A.M.
At first, workaholic that he was, he’d merely been irritated by the way Sara’s fatigue had created an imposition on his work schedule. Later, he’d been vaguely worried by Sara’s flagging appetite, her complaints of abdominal pain. But he’d been buried in the production of a new show, and nothing had really registered.
Until the night of the premiere.
Sara had dragged herself out of bed to accompany him. Elegantly dressed and coiffed, she’d never looked more beautiful. He was the luckiest man in the world, he’d thought, and his life was perfect.
And then she’d collapsed at the theatre and they’d rushed her to the hospital.
That’s when they’d told him that Sara had waited too long to see a doctor. The cancer had metastasized and spread. There wasn’t really anything they’d be able to do, the doctors had explained. The best they could promise is that they’d try to keep her comfortable.
Sara was dead less than six months later, leaving him and the children blindsided, damaged, and numb with misery.
Max had buried himself in his work, and tried, desperately, to parent as Sara had. But it was next to impossible—he was used to keeping his feelings inside, leaving it to Sara to clean the wounds, dry the tears, and handle all the bedtime cuddles. For the next year, it had seemed as if all the air had been sucked out of their lives with Sara’s death. Maggie had wandered around lost; Gracie had babbled about an imaginary friend in a manner that worried Max when he allowed himself to think about it; and Brighton, simmering with the blind, impotent rage that Max wasn’t allowing himself to express, kept using some peculiar American toys to fake gory deaths about the house that Niles patiently wiped away.
And then Fran had blasted into their lives, and he’d taken a head-long plunge into another world.
From the first hours he’d known her, he’d watched her turn his house, his family—even his business—upside down. He’d watched her heal his children, reeling from Sara’s loss, before his eyes.
He’d been more of a challenge for her, he thought wryly, and she’d lost her temper with him more than once, even after they were married.
After twenty-five years together—thirty, if one counted the time she’d lived with him as his nanny before they married--he was still learning from her.
Fran had been an invaluable partner when they’d transplanted themselves to the alien territory of California, even more foreign to him than Queens had been on his first visit. But over the years he’d found that being married to Fran was an even greater professional asset in California than it had sometimes been in New York—an unexpected dividend of their marriage that had come as a complete, if welcome, surprise. There were other Jews in the Broadway theatre world, of course, and some of them had used colloquialisms he’d learned to recognize, after Fran had come to work for him. But the Jews he met in Hollywood were tougher, more aggressive, and took no prisoners. Here, Fran’s rough-and-tumble approach to the world had fashioned her (exactly the right word for his wife, Max thought to himself) into an invaluable role model. The first time a highly distinguished Hollywood executive—who would remain nameless-- muttered something feral about him in Yiddish, Max had merely arched an eyebrow and flashed back entirely in kind.
The man, Max remembered, had looked so startled that Max had wondered if he was about to have a heart attack.
“Where’d a Goy like you learn Yiddish?” the executive had demanded.
“My wife,” Max had sniffed, “is Jewish. And she’s from Queens.”
He’d had no more trouble from the Distinguished Executive—nor any of the dozens of Hollywood flunkies the man had mentored, to populate any number of small production companies dotting the new business landscape of Hollywood’s television world—after this incident.
Indeed, over time, many of them had come to regard Max with a kind of awe.
And Fran and the children—and her mother, of course--- had laughed over the story for weeks.
Fran.
Max took another deep breath and tried to swallow down the rising panic that seemed to be strangling his throat, his heart.
How could this be happening to him—again?
What kind of a sick joke was God making now?
Fran had cancer. Just like Sara.
Max was dragged away from his thoughts by the nasal sound of his wife’s voice.
“Maaaaaax?”
He looked up and saw Fran padding toward him in fuzzy slippers and one of her outrageously colorful bathrobes.
“Max, what are you doing out here? It’s four o’clock in the morning!”
He took a deep breath and tried to calm down before Fran’s eagle eye discerned his panic.
She had enough to worry about, he thought. She didn’t need his anxiety on top of hers.
“I was just enjoying the night sky,” he said brightly.
“Maxwell Sheffield, you are a terrible liar.”
Fran pulled up a lawn chair, settled next to her husband on the patio, and took his hand. “Max, you’re shaking all over! What’s wrong?”
Max’s fragile self-control shattered immediately, and he rounded on her, snatching his hand away. “What the bloody hell do you think is wrong? “
The rage he hadn’t allowed himself to feel when a doctor, thirty-five years ago, had solemnly announced that Sara and her family were best off considering palliative care, exploded inside him.
He jumped out of his chair and began to pace, something he hadn’t done in years.
“I come home from a long day at the studio, and I find you sobbing on the sofa!”
Oblivious to the night quiet, Max started to shout.
“You tell me they found a lump! You tell me you’re going to need surgery! A bi—biopsy!”
Max sputtered amidst his tirade. “A ma-mastectomy!”
“You forget I’ve been through all this before!” Max continued to rant. “You’re ill! I’m…..” he stumbled for breath, his chest heaving. “I’m….”
Fran had been silent through his outburst, although her eyes, filling with tears, followed his frantic figure back and forth.
Max stopped and turned to stare at her, deflated.
What on earth was he doing? How could he yell at her?
He sank back into his lawn chair and lowered his head into his hands.
“I’m such a bloody idiot,” he announced.
Fran looked at him tenderly. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Bubula, but that’s not news.”
She stroked his back. “I’ve known you were an idiot for quite some time now.”
He raised his head and looked up at Fran. She was older now, with a fuller figure than she’d had back in the days when she’d fanned about their New York home in miniskirts—but she was still beautiful, still his goddess of wisdom and joy. Couldn’t she understand that he was terrified, not just at the prospect of losing her, but at the thought of saying, doing, the wrong thing—again?
He had failed Sara miserably, he thought. He didn’t want to fail Fran the same way.
He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” Fran looked at him, amused. “For what?”
She brought her hand back to adjust her bathrobe around her. It actually got a little chilly at night in L.A., although she was used to colder in New York. “It’s not like you got me sick.”
Max turned to look his beloved wife straight in the eye. “I’m terrified of losing you,” Max confessed. “I already lost one woman I loved to cancer.”
He tried for humor. “I’m reluctant to lose another.”
Fran looked at him wryly. “As I recall, you’ve tried to “lose” me on a number of occasions over the years.”
She smirked. “Somehow you always ‘found’ me afterwards.”
He thought of the night he’d proposed, when he’d been flat on his back in a New York alley, rolled by three men half his age and twice his size. “Or you found me…”
They smiled at one another, and Fran took up his hand again.
Max settled himself in his chair. “At least you’ve caught it early. Sara had been feeling poorly, but she didn’t look into it, didn’t say a word for months. We didn’t know she was ill until it was nearly over.”
Fran turned to him, her dark eyes filled with ironic amusement.
“Max,” she reassured him, “you know I’m the last person in the world to keep quiet about anything.”
“Fine women do not suffer in silence,” Fran added, with a definitive shake of her head.
“I never thought I’d find your gift for complaint a positive, but I guess I do now,” Max teased.
“Oooh you better watch it, Wisenheimer,” Fran replied with a smile.
“Perhaps, if they catch it early, they can cure you,” Max voiced his fiercest hope aloud.
Fran sighed heavily and studied her husband. If he really wanted to help, he needed to be more realistic about what the future held. She was willing to babysit him tonight, but it might not be so easy going forward.
It was best to be honest, and prepare him, so that his disappointment didn’t drag them both down.
“Max,” she began. “I’m not going to be cured. This isn’t ever going to be over.”
“What’s likelier to happen,” she continued, a new expert after a long conversation with her oncologist, a gentle, precise young woman who vaguely reminded her of Gracie, “is that I’ll go into remission.”
“But that’s not so bad, Max,” she squeezed his hand. “Remission can last a long time.”
“Remission?” Max queried.
“It’s sort of like when they cancel your television series, but the show is still going strong in syndication,” Fran explained.
She grinned at her husband. “You can still collect plenty of residuals.”
Max was silent for a moment, and Fran wondered if he’d heard her.
Max let go of her hand, got up from his chair, and began to pace again.
“Well, at any rate,” he began. “You aren’t going to face this alone. I’ll organize a ZOOM call tomorrow. We’ll tell the children. You won’t go to any more doctor’s appointments by yourself. We’ll all be waiting for you when you have the biopsy next week.”
How could one not love such a man? Fran thought to herself.
Practical as always, however, Fran needed to pull her husband back down to earth.
“The twins are about to take midterms,” she reminded him. “Eve will ace everything,” Fran referred here, to their youngest daughter, who’d excelled in Mathematics from her earliest years, to Fran’s utter astonishment— “but Jonah only studies when you threaten him.”
“If we tell Jonah I’m sick, he’ll use it as an excuse to drop out of college, and we’ll never get him to finish,” she fretted.
Max’s expression hardened into the grim lines that had first appeared during the years their elder son, Brighton, had been the same age as their youngest son was now, and engaged in similar behavior. “He’ll finish,” Max assured his wife. “He wants to stay on the swim team.”
“He also wants to stay alive,” Max added.
“Maggie’s got her hands full with the boys,” Fran went on.
“David and Matthew are nearly as old as Eve and Jonah,” Max countered.
Maggie’s sons, both in high school, were paradoxically just a year and two years younger than their Uncle Jonah, with whom they’d spent a young lifetime of summers and after-school afternoons. As children, they’d been his adoring sidekicks—and, frequently, his partners in crime.
“I meant the boys that she and Michael manage,” Fran replied, referring to the young men who worked for the Modeling Agency that Max’s eldest daughter, Margaret, ran with her husband Michael, a former underwear model. “Keeping those kids away from drugs, sex, and rock-‘n-roll is like herding squirrels.”
“Brighton and Ndoumbe are stuck in Paris,” Fran continued. Brighton had met Ndoumbe, a second-generation Senegalese immigrant to France, during his gap year in Europe, and finally learned French to attend college with her at the Sorbonne. The two had married and founded an international non-profit for refugees, jetting about the world, bringing food and supplies to people living in tents, until COVID had marooned them in their Paris apartment. Now, it had been nearly two years since Max and Fran had seen them, and their ten-year old daughter, Fatoumé, in person.
“And Gracie’s teaching,” Fran finished her protest. “Between her classes, and the baby, she and Meadow barely have time to breathe.”
Gracie, the brainiac of the family, had gone on to take a PhD in Psychology and Philosophy at Harvard and was now a professor at UCLA, where Jonah and Eve were freshmen. She and her non-binary partner, Meadow, had recently had a baby, little Sydney.
Having four children--and three of their grandchildren--within driving distance was one of Fran’s greatest joys. She especially loved being a Bubbe. But she well remembered how much work it all had been, and two of her daughters had careers, to boot.
“You can’t just announce to the kids that they should assemble in formation as if you were Captain von Trapp blowing a whistle!”
Max flounced impatiently. “It wouldn’t be like that, Fran,” he pleaded, his voice echoing a faint trace of petulance. “They’ll want to help!”
“I’m sure they will,” Fran soothed. “But we can’t ask them to do more than they can fit in.”
Fran rose from her chair and moved to her husband’s pacing figure.
Reaching out her hand to slow him, she turned Max around so that he could look at her.
“Thanks to you, I have more love in my life than I ever would have expected. The joy that you, and the children bring me is my strength.”
“You mustn’t worry,” Fran continued.
Bravado only took Fran so far, though, and she turned away, then---overwhelmed, once again, by the despair that had engulfed her the previous afternoon.
“I just have to figure out what the hell I can still wear if half my chest is missing,” she muttered, fixing her gaze on the dull patio stones.
Max turned his head to look at his wife’s slumped back.
It came to him with stunning clarity that supporting Fran was the way to save himself.
The key, he realized, was to learn from the mistakes he’d made in ignoring Sara’s illness—to speak his heart, his truth, as Fran had taught him to do—without banking his emotions with the restraint that had driven Fran crazy the first years they’d known one another.
He thought of the day they’d married, when Fran’s misgivings had paralyzed her, and he’d finally had to reassure her by sharing the depth of his feelings.
If he could do the same thing for Fran every day—if he could encourage the children to do so, too—--then they could all face whatever challenges her illness might throw before them without fear—and without regret.
Of course, Max knew in his heart that he’d only need to follow the children’s lead to say the right thing. His children, after all, had been properly schooled by Fran at a younger age.
It was his own blind stupidity he was going to need to keep an eye on, not theirs.
Max walked over and turned Fran around to take her in his arms and tilt up her chin.
“You will always be beautiful to me,” Max assured her. “I’ve been dazzled by you from the first time I saw you come down the stairs in that gaudy red dress.”
Fran slugged her husband’s arm in mock reproach. “That dress was not gaudy!” She protested. “And you made scads of money for your production that night.”
Max brought his face closer to Fran’s and lowered his voice to a rough whisper in the last dark hour of an early morning.
“And I want you,” he vowed, “for every damned episode, and every bloody residual.”
Dawn broke across the skies of Hollywood, California as Max Sheffield kissed his wife, and, together, they faced a new day.