The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  “It sounds quite English,” Miss Paine said. She spoke it again, as if testing it. “‘John Laskell,’” she said. “It sounds like a Lancashire name. Are you English?”

  Laskell thought that it was by choice that he answered her with only the merest shadow of a smile. It was to be his belief through the next few days that he did everything at a minimum for reasons of his own, because he chose to do just that much and no more. Miss Paine seemed to understand that the smile meant, No, he was not English. There was a modification he might make—his mother had been born in the first year of his grandparents’ long English visit. But that did not make her English, or him. He added nothing to his dim negative smile.

  “I thought you might be. You talk as if you might, not like most Americans.”

  He could just about gather that it was meant as a compliment. But it seemed to Laskell that he had not yet said a word. Miss Paine said, “And you’ve been talking a great deal, my dear man.” And she explained with a precise little nod, “Delirious.”

  Laskell understood then that the ultimate confrontations which had been forced upon him for so long were the fantasies of delirium. He had been undergoing something that had the character of a perpetual examination in mathematics, on the result of which much more than life itself depended. Those infinite abstractions were in some way connected with the terrible pain in his throat. They were not real. He felt grateful to Miss Paine for having explained everything so precisely.

  Miss Paine put a thermometer under his tongue and took his wrist between firm fingers and thumb. She consulted her watch, which was a rather large one pinned to her blouse; Laskell looked at her, not turning his head but only his eyes. His eyes hurt as they moved. As she looked at her watch her face was abstracted, but she noticed his glance and smiled down to him, still counting. She had a chart on a clipboard and on it she wrote what his pulse was and then stood waiting for the thermometer.

  Laskell saw that the bulb of his lamp had been covered with a piece of the blue paper that is wrapped about absorbent cotton. He understood this device at once. It was what had been done when he had been ill as a child. And then it had been done again by the nurse when his mother was very ill. The cone of light and the great shadows on the wall were just as he remembered them all those years ago. The blue paper around the bulb meant that things were at rock-bottom where there was nothing you could do.

  The single window of the bedroom was open—it was a hot night. It was very late. There were no intimate noises coming up from the street. But Laskell could hear the whistles on the river, the chuffing of locomotives and their bells, the clop-clop of the hoofs of horses coming down from the north of the city. These sounds had for him the very meaning they had in sleepless nights of his childhood when his mother had sat up with him. It was an illimitable unknowableness, space dissolved into time, huge areas and vistas never to be inhabited by his consciousness, although when he had learned about the constellations and the signs of the Zodiac, he had dimly understood those spaces to be inhabited by the brooding minds of the Water-Carrier, the Archer, the Fishes, the Maiden, the Crab, the Twins, and the Bull. From all this he was precariously fenced, but fenced nevertheless, lying in a delicate balance between danger and safety. He dozed as Miss Paine sponged him, but he could smell the alcohol and feel that tepid washcloth on his face, the returning identity as his face was cleaned.

  Miss Paine said, “Just stay awake long enough to drink this juice.” She was lifting up his pillow, with an arm beneath it, and holding to his lips a glass with a bent glass tube in it. He fretfully turned away his head as the diluted orange juice burned his throat. “You must try to drink quantities,” she said. “With scarlet fever we flush the kidneys.”

  The naming of the disease set a good many things to rights. He sank back to sleep with the comfortable assurance that soon his universe would have its familiar order, that all he had to do was endure.

  When Laskell woke again at daybreak, it was with a clear sense of the difference between the world of his bedroom and the unencompassable world of the delirium he had just passed through. He noted the familiarity of the big mahogany dresser, the bookcases, the photographs on the dresser. He saw the nurse in his armchair, asleep. He remembered her name and what she had first said to him. “I am pain. Isn’t that a dreadful name for a nurse?”

  He was a man of rather humorous habit, which now asserted itself. He thought of Paine with amusement, of her life spent entering one sickroom after another, her opening words always known to her and never varied. She presented this poor little product of her wit to the old and the young, to the despairing and the hopeful, to the clever and the dull, certain that it would succeed equally with them all in their common need of her. “I am Paine. Isn’t that a dreadful name for a nurse?”

  She was craggy, this Miss Paine, thin and angular and vaguely middle-aged, and her meager dull hair was a little disordered and her tiny cap was awry. Laskell lay there and looked at her in the gray, growing light. And then she awoke and saw him watching her. She smiled to him, not immediately moving from her huddled position of sleep. Then she rose and set her cap and her hair straight before the mirror and was neat again, or at least as neat as she ever would be, for she could never rise above a respectable dowdiness, no matter how newly laundered her uniform was.

  She stood beside the bed and looked down at her patient. “You’re better,” she said quietly, stating a fact and not congratulating him on it. Laskell became aware of his ability to swallow with much less effort.

  Miss Paine looked at the watch on her chest and said, “It’s too early to get you ready for Miss Debry, but you’d like a little sponge.”

  “Who?” Laskell said with some intensity. It was his first word spoken in consciousness. It came out hoarse and rusty and far-off.

  “That’s the day-nurse.”

  Miss Paine answered Laskell’s look of perplexity and unhappiness by laying a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not deserting you. I’ll be back tonight,” she said. She spoke with a touch of coy professional reassurance, but she seemed to mean what she said.

  Laskell hoped she knew that it was not merely that he wanted her to be loyal to him. He wanted to be loyal to her. He felt a very direct, simple, and complete connection with her and he did not want it disturbed by the introduction of anyone else.

  She went for the basin and the cloth. As she sponged his face and neck she said, “Just you wait until you peel. Now that’s a real cleaning up, skin as soft and clean as a baby’s.”

  At seven o’clock she woke him from a light doze and began to “get him ready for Miss Debry.” She used these words again and Laskell found them quite natural. He even found them rather pleasant. He understood that he must have been got ready and handed around a good deal in the last few days.

  “You haven’t many suits of pajamas,” Miss Paine said. “But Mr. Croom is attending to that. And you haven’t nearly enough sheets, but Mrs. Croom is attending to that. Lovely people the Crooms are, I do think. Both of them.” Laskell found it a little surprising, this relationship between Miss Paine and the Crooms, developed, as it were, over his insensate body.

  And then, as if reminding him of his duty of gratitude, Miss Paine said with great severity, “Your friends Mr. and Mrs. Croom have been wonderful to you. They have taken care of everything.”

  She might well have spoken with severity, for there was no gratitude in Laskell. At this time of his life no one in the world meant more to him than young Arthur and Nancy Croom. No one meant as much. Ordinarily he would have liked nothing better than to hold affectionately in his mind another proof of the Crooms’ goodness. He smiled to Miss Paine, but it was not in recognition of what his friends the Crooms had done but simply out of his vast contentment that whatever needed to be done had been done. Someone, after his thick-voiced, incoherent telephone call, had “taken care of everything.”

  “How long will this last?” Laskell asked.

  Miss Paine was gathering the
discarded sheets and pajamas from the floor and she answered over her shoulder and still stooping. “Scarlet fever? Oh, if you’re good,” she said, “three weeks, perhaps four. If you’re good.”

  Her tone was notably indifferent. It was clear that she did not want to give weight to his question, would not consent to his believing that he was very ill.

  Laskell understood that it would be a good six weeks and that he was very ill. And when Miss Paine turned to look at her completed work, at the neat bed, at Laskell’s precisely parted hair—as he now knew from her telling him, it was parted on the right side, the same side as the Prince of Wales parted his hair—at Laskell’s arms in the fresh blue pajamas nice and quiet and symmetrical by his sides, Laskell met her professional pride with a motionless answering pride at his beautiful readiness for Miss Debry.

  He was quarantined. Miss Debry told him with a kind of religious awe that the Board of Health had pasted a sign on the door of the apartment. No one could come in to see him. He lay secure in the strength of the taboo.

  One day was like another. This made time go fast and not, as Laskell would have thought, slow. Each day was like a fresh sheet on his bed, spotless and exactly like every other sheet. And just as the thing he lay on was not a sheet but the sheet, no matter how often it was changed, so the thing he lay through was the day. Whatever time might be, it was not what so many people said it was, a stream. Questions like that of what time was presented themselves to Laskell and he did not so much think about them as regard them with pleasure.

  There was one part of the day that was perhaps less pleasant than the rest. This was the few hours after lunch, when the city, already baking in the June heat, seemed to have lost its energy. Then Laskell remembered himself as a boy in the great empty afternoons of summer in a seaside resort, moving alone with the sense that in all the world everyone but himself had a happy occupation; one day, he recalled, he had come on a dead dog, blackly festering in the sun, and suddenly felt he knew what it had been like to be the Greeks in their camp on the beach before Troy when the pestilence had stricken them because they had offended Apollo. Had he really thought that? He was not sure. But he was sure that he had seen the dog with a kind of terror and he was sure that he had read the Iliad when very young, beginning with excerpts from a set of books called The Children’s Hour, and had been frightened in his dreams by the fierceness of Achilles. But he was not sure that he had as a child brought the two things together.

  Laskell learned to take his longest nap in that empty time after lunch. He slept in the morning too, after the routine of breakfast, bath, and change of bed linen, and then would lie content until noon. In the late afternoon, after the long nap, he would lie quiet, aware of the city moving toward the mystery and eroticism of the evening.

  He kept books by his bed, those he asked for from his shelves and those his friends sent him as gifts. But he did little more than sift through the pages. He was rather amused by the ignorance of friends whose health hid from them the knowledge of what a sick man would want. He was even annoyed by his friend Kermit Simpson who sent him Dostoevsky’s The Possessed because, as Kermit’s card said, Laskell had never read it and now had the leisure to do so. Nothing could have been kinder than Kermit’s gift, for Kermit had had the big book cut up and stitched into four separate volumes to make it easier for a sick man to hold. But Laskell could not keep the characters in their places and the intensity of the emotions alienated him not only from the book but also, most irrationally, from the giver. On the other hand, he experienced great pleasure from gifts of flowers and fruit. His annoyance with Kermit Simpson passed as irrationally as it had come when Kermit sent him a large basket of figs and pomegranates.

  What John Laskell chiefly felt as he lay there in his wide bed was awareness. He did not know, really, what he was aware of. He did not even know what awareness was, except that it was different from consciousness or thought. He had no real thoughts and no wishes. He did not think about his work nor did he think about himself at all. Yet his awareness was an awareness of himself. He lay through the day, drinking in the light that filled the room, and experienced something just short of an emotion. It had great delicacy and simplicity, as if the circulation of his blood had approached the threshold of his consciousness and was just about to become an idea. It was as if being had become a sensation.

  Laskell did not try to understand this. But he remembered a moment when one of his professors of philosophy at Columbia had leaned half his short body across the table in the passion of his question and had asked, “Gentlemen, who does it mean to be? Not to be a man. Not to be a bird. Not to be a stone. Or a tree. Or a house. But gentlemen: What does it mean—just—to—BE?”

  Woodbridge, of course, had been talking about a technical problem in metaphysics, yet this question and its intensity were now, suddenly, memorable to Laskell.

  If there was one thing that marred his existence in these days of illness, it was Miss Debry.

  Miss Debry, as Laskell began to understand, was beautiful. The understanding was late in coming. Much before it came had come the understanding that Miss Debry was unendurable. But late one afternoon Laskell saw her standing in profile before the window, writing her last entry of the day on the chart. She held the clipboard against her, just under her breast, and her head was bent over it. If Miss Paine’s uniform could never look fresh, Miss Debry’s always gleamed with whiteness. Some process of starch that Miss Paine perhaps forbade at the laundry and Miss Debry insisted on made Miss Debry’s skirt stand out. Miss Paine’s cap was tiny and it perched on the top of her scant hair and it could not look really white because it was of such thin material that the hair showed through it. But Miss Debry’s cap was large and winged and made of a heavy material, and across it was fixed a band of dark blue ribbon, so that she was very nearly wearing a hat, a small white hat of considerable elegance, chosen to set off her dark hair.

  It was in their appearance as nurses that Laskell first compared the two women. Having begun so, he then observed the quality of Miss Debry’s more personal appearance, somewhat as if it were the inescapable next step in logic which he had to take. She was neither short nor tall. She was not slim but certainly not to be described by a word so heavy as plump. Outside of paintings, Laskell had never seen a woman contrived in these proportions. Her skin was superbly white, her hair superbly dark, and she had fishpool eyes. The late light poured in at the window and Miss Debry was willing to stand full in it. It made her very beautiful, very much to be observed. Laskell was glad that it was the late light. Soon after the sun set Miss Debry would be gone, giving place to Miss Paine. He lay there watching her. He hated her.

  She put down the chart and stood at the foot of his bed. “Now then,” she said, “we’ll get you ready for Miss Paine. All right?”

  Laskell, now that his mind had turned to the matter of her beauty, remotely observed her fine, heavy neck and the pretty way her hair grew at the nape.

  “All right?” Miss Debry insisted. She always wanted Laskell to declare his assent to every detail of the routine. He had no wish to assent, but he knew that she would insist. He nodded.

  “Don’t you want to talk? Are you tired? I suppose all that fever could make you tired. Well, I’ll get the basin.”

  She washed his face and neck and then unbuttoned his pajamas. “You haven’t begun to peel yet, have you? You will soon though. You have a lot of hair on your chest, haven’t you? Do you know what they say about hair on the chest? Do you know what they say?”

  She expected an answer. Laskell gave it and hoped that he would be rewarded with a Canadian version of the meaning of hair on the chest. “No,” he said.

  “They say it shows you’re strong.”

  “Oh, do they?”

  “Yes, that’s what they say.”

  She washed his back and dried it and rubbed it with alcohol and then with talcum. “You have a nice little apartment here. It’s very tasty and cozy. Will your wife be back soon?” />
  Into the pillow Laskell said, “Not married.”

  “Oh! I thought you were!” she said insincerely. “Because it is fixed up so nice. Are you an artist? You have so many pictures.”

  “No.”

  “What are you then, a writer? Is that why you have so many books? Are you a writer?”

  “Yes, a writer.” Laskell thought it was simpler that way.

  “Oh, a writer. And living here alone in Greenwich Village. My, you must have times!” Her voice became naughty. “This is Greenwich Village, isn’t it? I used to know a painter in Montreal who lived alone in a studio and my, what times we used to have there, a whole bunch of us.” She held the fresh pajama coat for Laskell to put his arms in.

  “Wild,” she said. “He’s famous, do you know him—Walter Capper?” Now she was at the foot of the bed. She reached under the covers and drew down the trousers of his pajamas.

  “Did you ever hear of him? He’s famous.”

  “No.”

  “He paints nature,” she explained.

  She washed each of his legs and thighs, using the elaborate technique that preserved modesty by exposing only part of the body at a time. Then she handed him the washcloth with the phrase she had been taught. “Now will you bathe yourself?”

  Laskell obediently washed between his thighs. Miss Debry said, “My, the old priests in the Montreal hospital, they could never get over the idea of a woman’s giving them a bath. Goodness, how embarrassed they’d be. It was all you could do—are you finished? Give me the cloth. Now I’ll make your bed. All right?”

  Laskell saw the old priests in their Montreal beds and he felt very sorry for them.

  But at least, every day, she would be gone. She was the one thing in the world that troubled his peace. The late June days were glaring and bright and in the brightness stood Miss Debry in her white uniform with her white skin. Laskell loved to sleep and he loved to lie motionless in the bright room when she was not there. He looked forward to her leaving the room to make his lunch or to eat her own.