by Anita Shreve
“One good turn deserves another,” he says. “You followed my advice; I’ll follow yours.”
Dr. Lighthart moves toward the farm wife. “I think I’ll take it,” he says, “if we can work out terms.”
“It’s sixty-five dollars a month, with meals, heat, hot water, electric, and laundry included. Rent due the first of the month. We live our life the way we live our life. You’ll hear sounds from the kitchen, I don’t doubt, and the cars coming and going, but the walls are as solid as can be. The house was built in 1720, this ell in 1790. Built as a passageway from the barn to the house. Man was supposed to get hisself clean before he come into the kitchen. I don’t like a dirty kitchen, and my mother didn’t either.”
“Well, can we just assume this is the first of the month?” the doctor asks, counting out the bills for the farm woman.
“You moving in today?” she asks.
“I thought I might. I don’t have much.”
“What’s your livin’?”
“I’m a doctor. I work in a clinic in North Kennebunkport.”
She nods, taking this in. “You’ll be wanting supper tonight.”
“Yes, if you have enough. What time is dinner?”
“Five. On the dot.”
“Ah,” says the doctor, “the earliest I can get here during the week would be seven. Six-thirty on a slow day.”
“Well then, I’ll save your dinner for you. I can always whip up another batch of popovers if they go flat.”
“I’ll be here for dinner tonight at five. And tomorrow at five,” he says, shaking the farm wife’s hand.
Grace smiles at the woman as she follows John out to the driveway. They don’t speak right away, thinking it rude to do so in full view of the wife.
In the car, however, Grace says, “You just got yourself a good deal. She doesn’t seem like the type to want to pry into your life. I liked the place. It was charming, and in the spring it will be magnificent.”
“You paint a nice picture.”
—
When they reach Biddeford, Grace double-parks beside his Packard. He lingers in her car a second longer than he might. “Maybe we could go on another drive next weekend, take the kids sledding. I know a great hill.”
“That sounds like fun.”
“Great day, Grace,” he says as he leaves the Buick.
—
When Grace pulls up the driveway in the navy blue Buick, her mother pushes the back door open. “Oh my Jesus Christ Almighty!” she exclaims and holds her chest as if she thought her heart might explode.
“Are you angry?” Grace asks, sliding out of the car.
“Angry? Oh no.”
In the doorframe, her mother stands in awe, as if her chariot had come for her, as if all the dates of her youth had shown up at the right moment, just when her hair is perfect.
—
Grace’s responsibilities at the clinic expand. She is asked to see to the billing of patients and to keep the accounts at the bank. When the waiting room is overcrowded, she is charged with bringing patients to rooms in which she takes their temperature, weighs them, gives them a robe if necessary, and records physical complaints. In this way, the patients can wait in a private room for Dr. Lighthart.
By midweek, she asks the doctor if there’s enough money in the budget to buy side tables and lamps and to subscribe to Time and Life. She wants to make the waiting room more appealing.
“Sure,” Dr. Lighthart says. “Saturday afternoon all right with you? I could leave right after lunch, say one o’clock?”
Surprised that he has invited himself along, she tells him she’ll just check with her mother.
“Your car or mine?”
“I’ll collect you.” Grace can’t have Dr. Lighthart come calling for her at Merle’s house.
—
Grace invents an outing for her mother and the children for Sunday: a car trip with a picnic to a scenic vista. After explaining the trip (to her mother’s pleasure), she mentions that she’ll need a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon to buy furniture for the office.
“Not new furniture!” her mother exclaims.
“I’ll find a good secondhand store. It’s just side tables. They have to be respectable and more or less match the chairs there.”
“What’s that then?”
“Wood with a mahogany-like stain.”
“And to think I used to have side tables that would have been perfect,” muses her mother.
“I wouldn’t have taken your tables.”
“Maybe you should get a coffee table, too,” her mother suggests. “To put flowers on.”
“We’re getting subscriptions to Time and Life.”
“Well, you’d better get Good Housekeeping.”
—
On Friday night, wanting to confirm their expedition the next day, Grace leans against the doorframe of Dr. Lighthart’s office. He hands her a check. “So we’re all set for tomorrow?” he asks.
“Yes. How do you like your new place?”
“Meals are outstanding. There’s a widow living in one of the bedrooms upstairs in the main house, a shoe salesman in another. I gather he’s giving her samples.” He wiggles his eyebrows, and Grace laughs. “I’m not there much. Heat’s surprisingly good. Bed’s comfy.”
The bed must indeed be comfortable because the doctor appears, for the first time since she met him, rested. Maybe another weekend at his apartment will be even more beneficial. For her part, Grace can’t imagine living alone. Sometimes she wants to picture it, but to do so would mean obliterating Claire and Tom. “I’ve heard of two places we can try,” Grace suggests.
“And there’s always Salvation Army.”
“They must be cleaned out by now,” she says.
—
On Saturday morning, in Merle’s room, Grace hems a pale wool skirt she wants to wear on the shopping trip. Sunlight, bouncing off the snow, makes the windows shimmer, but the glare darkens objects in the room. She tries on the skirt and stands before the mirror. Because her hair hangs straight from the winter dry, she decides to put it up in a French twist. Maybe a little lipstick to punctuate her facial pallor. The skirt is part of a suit from Merle’s closet and still loose, though more tailoring would leave the garment misshapen. She puts her hands on her hips, turns, and notes that she’s gaining back some of the weight she lost when Aidan was in the house. Her hands move up her rib cage to the undersides of her breasts, but she can feel almost nothing through the thick brassiere and her white blouse. It’s the same with her girdle: running her hands down the front of her skirt, she would never know of the contours within.
The scream is so loud, so guttural, so not like a child’s, and yet a child’s, that Grace yells Claire’s name as she runs downstairs and into the kitchen. First she sees the terrible apparition and then, in the corner, her mother holding Tom with Claire’s face buried in her skirt. Claire has wet her overalls.
In a voice as calm as she can manage, Grace tells her mother to take the children upstairs. When she turns to her husband, it’s all she can do to stand straight and not cover her mouth.
He is hideous.
The left side of his face seems still to be on fire with its skin resembling a gruesome picture in a medical textbook. His ear is gone, his scalp raw, and his left eye appears to have melted. His right eye and his mouth are mostly normal, though the left corner of his lip is indistinct. He wears a silk scarf around his neck, and she realizes that the arm of his tattered coat is empty. She can’t imagine what the skin on his torso looks like.
“Are you in pain?” she asks, her first words to her husband.
“Yes.”
“What can I do for you?”
He tries to shake his good arm out of his coat, and she understands: he wants his coat off. Without looking at his face, she begins to lower the empty sleeve from his shoulder. He yelps—she must have touched him too hard. She lets the coat fall to the ground, then picks it up and drapes it over the back of a chair.
“Can’t sit.”
“Can you lie down?” she asks.
He nods. “I need water.”
She pours a glass of water at the sink and hands it to him. He raises it to his mouth and at least half of it dribbles down the left side of his face and falls onto his shirt, made of an unusually thin material.
“Come with me,” she says.
The irony of Grace leading her husband to another room in his boyhood house is not lost on her. And can’t be on him.
Her hands shaking, she checks her watch. An hour before she is to collect Dr. Lighthart, which will not happen now. She doesn’t know the telephone number at the farm, and she isn’t sure she ever gave him the number of Merle’s house. How long will he wait before he realizes she’s not coming? Would he then dare to drive to her house? She prays that he won’t.
She points to the sofa. In what looks to be a torturous set of moves, Gene manages to lie on his right side. She finds a pillow and puts it under his head. As she backs away from him, the entire construct of her life collapses. She will live in this house with this injured man on the couch until one of them dies. She will never again go to a job. She will never make love again. She will not have friends. Slowly, she sinks into the armchair under the tremendous weight of her future.
Gene
“I have to go to Claire and Tom,” Grace says to Gene. He barely moves his head. He has an inner look she’s familiar with from the clinic—the anticipation of pain.
She finds her family upstairs in her bedroom. Grace walks first to Claire and holds her in a tight embrace. “You were scared, weren’t you?” she asks her daughter, whose clothes have been changed.
Claire, sucking her thumb, nods.
“Do you remember Daddy?”
Claire gives a more exaggerated nod.
“Well, Daddy went to help others on the night of the fire, and he got burned. What you just saw was Daddy with some burns on him.”
Claire drops the thumb and opens her eyes as wide as they will go. She stares into the middle distance, caught halfway between fear and incomprehension.
“He was a hero, your daddy. And sometimes heroes come back with cuts and bumps on them. That’s what happened to him.” She sets Claire on her lap so that she can see her daughter more easily. “Would you like to go out and see him? He’s lying down.”
“Nooooo,” Claire keens as she whips her head from side to side.
Tom, crawling on the bedspread, stops to listen to his sister.
“That’s all right,” says Grace, holding her daughter close and rubbing her back. Grace catches her mother’s eye, in which she reads an agitated mix of fear, despair, and stoicism.
“We need to make some decisions,” Grace says.
“Is he staying?”
“We’ll have to put him in the library. I’m not sure he can make it upstairs.”
“The police said he’d been in a coma. Came to a week ago in a New Hampshire hospital, but couldn’t remember his name until yesterday.”
—
“How is Claire?” Gene asks from the couch as Grace sits across from him.
“She’s fine,” says Grace. “She just needs a little time is all.”
“My own children didn’t recognize me.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be. It’s reality.” He swivels his good eye, taking in the room. “I was never allowed in here. My bedroom and the kitchen were my playrooms. I was brought in here only to meet company and then disappear.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that. What are you doing here?”
Grace crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Here? In this house? Our own house burned down.”
“So I’m told. But my mother’s house?”
“Your children were homeless. My mother, too. I didn’t have a choice.” She pauses. “Were you in a coma?”
“I didn’t know who I was until a week after I woke up. For that week, I didn’t want to be alive.”
She waits.
“The arm, but mostly the pain.”
“Why did they take your arm?” she asks, unable to look away from the pinned sleeve.
“Gangrene.”
“Oh, Gene. Tell me what I need to know in order to take care of you.”
He closes his eye. “You won’t want to do it. I’m going to need some things.”
“Such as.”
“Gauze, Vaseline, iodine, a bedpan.” He studies her. “Lots of towels. The sheets will need to be cleaned every day. A rubber sheet.”
Grace takes in a sharp breath.
“I told you you wouldn’t like it.”
“We’ll do whatever has to be done.”
“And aspirins. I get terrible headaches. Where are you sleeping?”
“On the second floor.”
“In my mother’s bed?”
Grace nods.
He glances at Grace’s skirt. “And if I’m not mistaken, you’re wearing her clothes.”
“We had nothing when we got here.”
Fluid leaks from inside Gene’s shirt. She leaves the room, finds a clean towel, returns, and lays it with care over his left side. “I’m sorry if I’m hurting you,” she says.
“Please don’t pity me.”
“I don’t.” But she does.
“You lost the baby,” he says.
“I did.”
“Was it bad?”
“It happened the night of the fire.”
He rolls his head to the side. For a moment Grace wonders if he will cry. But, no, he’s angry. “If only they’d let us go home, I’d have got you out of there!”
“Can you lie here for half an hour?” she asks.
“You’re leaving me?”
“Just to get a doctor.”
“Old Man Franklin?”
“He’s gone. His house burned down, so he retired. We have a new one now. His name is Dr. Lighthart.”
For a few seconds Gene is silent. Then he snaps his fingers. “Injun!” he says.
“What?”
“Injun. You can always tell from the name. Two names put together. Whiteman. Yellowhair. Manygoats. Watchman. I knew some of them in the war and later working on the Pike.”
The prominent cheekbones. The high color of his skin. The straight black hair. Indian and something else. Maybe a lot of something else. What difference does it make?
“He’s a good doctor,” Grace says.
—
Grace’s hands shake so much she can barely shift the gears. Backing down the hill, she veers into snow-covered bushes at the end. I’ll kill myself this way, she thinks.
When she turns onto the rural street on which the farmhouse is located and pulls to the top of the drive, John Lighthart is pacing. She’s a half hour late for their appointment.
“Hello,” he says with a grin as he swings open the passenger door and gets in.
Grace turns to him and holds up a hand. “John.” She pauses, gathers herself. “My husband, Gene, came back this morning. He’s badly burned and not yet healed. He can’t sit. If you’re willing, I need you to come to the house and examine him and tell me what to do.”
The doctor searches her eyes. “Are you all right? Your face is white.”
“It’s just the shock.”
“You shouldn’t be driving, but I’d better take my car. You go on, and I’ll catch up. I have to put a few things in my bag.”
“Thank you,” says Grace. “Please don’t mention that I work for you. I haven’t told him yet, and…I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue at the clinic.”
“That would be a shame.”
“He’s crude. He’s not himself.”
“You go back to him. I’ll be right behind you.”
—
Grace parks the car and reluctantly walks into Merle’s house. Her mother, with a yellow apron on, stands in the center of the k
itchen. “I don’t know what to make for him to eat!” she sputters.
“The doctor is coming.”
“I nearly fainted when the police showed up. It’s dreadful, isn’t it.”
—
The sharp light from the window etches every defect in Gene’s face. Grace partially draws the maroon drapes.
“Where did you get that schmancy Buick?” he asks.
“A friend lent it to me.”
“Rosie?”
“Another friend. Rosie and Tim have moved to Nova Scotia. Can you walk with me to the library? There’s a bed in there.”
“Why?” he asks.
“We had a power outage that lasted four days. We all slept in there with the fire going.”
She watches as he reverses the agonizing process that enabled him to lie down. She moves toward him to help.
But he limps ahead of her, indicating that he’s master of the house now.
—
Grace greets Dr. Lighthart at the back door without a word. She remembers how Dr. Franklin used to walk in unannounced and take the stairs to the bedroom where the patient lay. Another world. Another country.
“Gene, this is Dr. Lighthart,” she says, introducing her husband.
“You can leave us alone, Mrs. Holland,” says the doctor.
Grace closes the door.
Mrs. Holland.
She sits on an upholstered chair in the hallway that may as well have been placed here for this very purpose: to wait to be summoned. In less than two hours, her life has been transformed. To think that at this very minute she might have been selecting side tables and lamps for the office with a nice man, a good man. She was planning on purchasing something quirky or useful for him as a house present.
She hears murmurs, a quick stab of a cry, and then silence behind the closed door. Dr. Lighthart signals to Grace to move with him toward the sitting room.
“The burns are bad,” he says as they walk. “He’ll need constant care. He has to wear loose silk pajamas and lie on silk sheets and silk pillowcases, all of which will have to be laundered every day. I’ve treated the burns, but I’ve not put on gauze. I want them to dry in the air under the pajamas I brought.” He pauses. “I’ll see what I can come up with and send along with Amy. I’ve left the supplies he’ll need for the next day or two on the dresser. Amy will bring more. The most important thing at the moment is to keep the wounds clean and to keep him hydrated. Whenever you’re with him, make him drink. Water, apple juice, and more water. I’d put a small table right next to the bed and set a plate of finger food on it. He can manage that better than, say, soup. He’ll pick at it when he wants to. Amy will try to get him to sit up tomorrow. She’ll be firm, and I expect your husband will holler like crazy. Then you’ll have to continue with that treatment yourself if you’re physically capable.” He sighs. “Grace, it’s unfair, I know. I’d like to see you hire a part-time nurse. Full-time would be better.”