by John Updike
The cast when completed went from the middle of Paula’s foot to the middle of her thigh. At some point in the process her eyes had come open again, in amazement. They scanned our faces and settled on the doctor’s. He held out one tobacco-colored forefinger, and her little plump square hand seized it. He told her, “Honey, I bet you were a really good walker. I bet you really stepped out.”
She smiled, in agreement or in simple pleasure at hearing him talk. The gap between her two round front teeth showed.
“You remember how to crawl?”
This struck her as so amusing her smile widened and she managed a laugh, a gurgle.
“ ’Cause you’re going to have to go back to crawling for a little while now.”
The intern removed his surgeon’s gloves of whitish transparent rubber, and Verna’s stubby and grubby-nailed fingers fiddled with a corkscrew curl at her temple. The clock on the wall said eleven-forty-two. It was utterly round and black-and-white and its clean numbers were swept every minute by a long red second hand. Its institutional perfection reminded me of Esther, her exactly one hundred pounds. I should call her. But such a call would plug up this vivid little pocket of freedom I had won, here in the middle of the night, where muddle seemed about to break into a whole new meaning.
Verna’s submissive daze was wearing off and in the role of mother she asked the doctor, “Are there any pills or medicine I should give her tonight?”
The answer came very soothingly, with a wry smile. “We’d like to keep little Paula with us overnight,” he said. “With her mother’s permission, of course.”
Verna blinked, not yet scenting danger. “Why is that? Isn’t she all fixed up?”
“Her leg you could say is fixed up, but there’s some few more medical attentions she might need. We would like to keep her under observation. I think she’ll have a good rest here, won’t you, honey?” His tone of voice as he shifted from Verna to Paula didn’t much change.
“You mean you think there still might be some internal injuries or something? But I’m sure she doesn’t have any of those. We’re all sure, aren’t we?” She looked from the doctor to the intern to the nurse—the nurse, I noticed for the first time, was an uncommonly tall gray-haired woman, as tall as Lillian, with that same tense, too-good, sterile air. Verna saw that she was trapped. “You’re not going to call DSS!” she blurted out.
I had to step in. I told the doctor, “I’m a professor of divinity at the university, and I’ll personally vouch for this little girl’s safety.”
The doctor wearily smiled and said, “I don’t doubt you will, Professor, but there wasn’t much vouching going on a few hours ago.” He added, more pleasantly, “We just want to hold onto her until we can check out a few things.”
“Don’t you dare call fucking dumb DSS!” Verna said. “They don’t know anything, they’re a bunch of non-persons freeloading on the taxpayers, they couldn’t get a real job if they tried!”
I said, “If the mother wants the patient released—”
“Then I think,” the doctor said, “we better get a policeman and a Department of Social Services representative over here for our own protection. In our judgment this injury may not have been inflicted as described.”
“It was!” Verna protested. “It was a total accident. I gave her a little tap and she threw herself against this idiotic bookcase they made me buy. It was her own stupid fault, practically.”
She had forgotten about our playground swing.
Now she remembered, and furiously pushed on. “You twerps can’t keep her here without my say-so. I know my rights. I want my baby, and my baby wants me.”
Edna, too, could do this pose, I remembered: the lady affronted, the grande suburban dame, the Chagrin Falls matron indignant over her servant problems. Edna had imitated it from her mother after Veronica, having stolen my father with Heaven knows what sluttish stunts, had put on weight and become involved in church and garden-club circles. In Edna’s eyes her mother had been to this manner born; but now the pose, passed down to yet another generation, had become quite bedraggled and hollow.
“Da bad?” an inquisitive voice said from the operating table. Little Paula was looking up at her mother. Her dark irises were dyed blue in the hospital light, her pupils no bigger in diameter than pencil leads. Her mouth was curling downward; she was beginning to whimper in fright. I held out a forefinger and she softly, stickily grabbed hold. My fingernail, I noticed, looked dirty, and a touch lopsided.
“Let’s let her stay, Verna,” I said. “She’ll be in good hands here.”
“Only if they promise not to call DSS. I have enough trouble with those creeps.” Perhaps “creeps” was meant to soften the earlier “twerps.”
No one spoke.
I sighed and offered, “I’m sure they’ll only do what’s best for Paula.”
“I’m not signing anything,” Verna said.
The doctor spoke, weary of being seductive. “You don’t have to, young lady. You just come to the front desk around nine-thirty tomorrow morning and if everything has checked out the little girl is welcome to go home with her mommy.”
Verna thought. “Actually,” she said, “I have an art class and there’s some things with the teacher I should get straightened out. Suppose I came by around noon?”
“That would be most gracious,” he said, without smiling. “I of course will be off duty at that hour, but the E.R. chief will be informed as to the case. The cast should be checked in two weeks and can come off in three or at the most four. Our bones heal fast at that age.” Our bones if not our souls, he seemed to be implying. To me he said, “A pleasure to meet you, Professor. I’m a great admirer of those that make it possible for the rest of us to keep the faith. My daddy was a preacher.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said.
The nurse and the intern had transferred Paula back to the gurney. Verna went over to it, to kiss her good night. As she bent her wide pale face down to the child’s smaller, darker one, her heavy bosom swayed in the low-cut cotton blouse. She adjusted Blanky under Paula’s chin, and bent low again to kiss lightly the toes that stuck out of the cast. From my angle, she was flashing both tits. I wondered if she knew it. “These nice people are going to put you to bed, Poopsie. Mommy will come for you in the morning. You be good.”
The child’s sharp little chin crinkled and she began to cry, with a panicked fury. The hospital staff crowded about the noise like a set of smothering white pillows. I pulled Verna from the room, and as I steered her back through the rooms and curving corridors to the entrance she too was crying. Her chin crinkled just as Paula’s had.
In the Audi, as we glided through the streets, her crying continued, now loudly, now inaudibly. Her words came out with difficulty. “When I bent over her, Nunc … I could feel all that hard plaster—in my stomach, like some kind of rock. You could see in her eyes she didn’t know what the fuck was up.”
“Well, few of us do, exactly.”
“They’re going to take her from me, aren’t they? That smooth old dude is going to call DSS even though he promised not to.”
I told her, “I didn’t hear him promise. What I heard was the silence of his not promising. As he explained, Verna, the hospital has to protect itself. Not just against being accused of breaking the law but of lawsuits.” Neon and sodium flickered in the windshield; we went around a traffic circle and up a looping ramp and then were on the bridge, with its Art Nouveau lamps and blocky old sandstone towers.
“And then the assholes are going to hassle me,” Verna was going on, “and ask me to crawl and eat fifty-seven varieties of shit, and if I don’t they’re going to … they’re going to take away my baby!” This last phrase emerged with a shriek; she lifted the serape from underneath and pressed it against her eyes, her mouth, as if to stifle another outcry. More role-playing, I said to myself. And not especially well played. Westerners have lost whole octaves of passion. Third-world women can still make an inhuman piercing grieving
noise right from the floor of the soul, as you can see and hear on television clips from Lebanon and Ethiopia.
Aloud I said, “I don’t think so. They may ask some questions, but remember it’s a hassle for them to take a child from its mother. What do they do with it then? The state isn’t that anxious to become a massive orphanage. If you listen to what Reagan and the others are saying they’re begging the family to resurrect itself, to take some of all this responsibility back out of their hands.”
She was indulging her hysterical vision: “First you all make me kill that one baby and now you’re going to take this one from me!”
It occurred to me that, like many visions, this was a wish fulfillment: she wanted little Paula to be taken from her.
I went on reasonably, “If you’d just stuck to our story—”
“It wasn’t our story, it was your story. It was a dumb story.”
“It was better than no story, and that’s what you seemed to be coming up with, in your fabulous brilliance.” Edna and I used to have quarrels that would go on and on, a whole stale hot Ohio afternoon, you did, I didn’t, I know you did, I know you know I didn’t; it was a kind of tussling, when we were too young and green to touch, and brother and sister besides.
Verna kept pressing the serape into her face, grinding its rough wool against her eyes. For the first time, by the light of loss, Paula seemed to have become real to her. “She was so … fucking brave, wasn’t she, Nunc? She hardly cried, once she saw we were doing something about her, and had produced these other people.”
“She was very impressive,” I swiftly agreed. We were not many blocks from Prospect Street. We were traversing that gorge of gaudy light Dale had seen, earlier this April, from his window on the seventh floor. I wanted to dump Verna and get swiftly home. Esther would be up, smoking and drinking and her mind browsing back and forth between anger and worry. I knew her mind, I could feel it nibbling on the possibilities. Long after love goes, there is still habit. Esther was my habit.
“She’s really so sweet,” Verna was saying, struggling for breath. “Wants to be so sweet. We have a lot of fun, sometimes, listening to music. You can see the poor little thing … watching me, trying to figure out … how to be a human being. I’m the only one she’s got. It’s not just that … I’m so alone I mind, it’s that she’s … so alone.”
I felt now that her sobs were being deliberately orchestrated and said irritably, “Don’t exaggerate. Paula’s no worse off than a lot of children in this city, and in many ways better.”
Her sobs haughtily dried up. “You mean because she’s connected, sort of, to swell people like you and that snooty wife of yours with your dumb kid. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that, he seemed nice, actually, that Thanksgiving; he was giving it a try, being nice to the stranger and all. He knows you both think he’s a dumbo, too.” I was hurt by this; if true, it was a distasteful truth. But it couldn’t be true. We loved Richie. Verna was burbling on, “But don’t you see, that makes it worse, for her and for me; until you showed up in all your snappy coats and gloves and your funny hat and everything, it didn’t occur to me there was something else, just my horrible parents I was so happy to get away from. God, I was happy. I used to wake up some days and start singing, me and my baby in those little rooms. The project isn’t much, I know to you it looks horrible, but it was a life, if you didn’t think there could be any other and if other people didn’t keep coming and telling you how crummy it is.”
I stopped the Audi right there, at the project, double-parking. It occurred to me that thus dropping her off at that hideous, childless apartment was somewhat heartless, even by my modest standards. “Or would you rather,” I asked, “come home and spend the night with us? We have a spare room. There’s a whole third floor. I know Esther will be still up.”
I prayed the girl wouldn’t accept; the sordidness of this evening was sinking in, and her noisy grief and confused self-defense reminded me of why I, too, had been glad to leave Cleveland: these heartland people have such an inexhaustible, tiresome gift for self—self-defense, -deception, -dramatization. Self-examination and moral acrobatics all day long; every bedroom, every breakfast nook an apologetical forum haunted by the hand-wringing ghosts of Biblical prototypes, hairy-nostrilled old Jews that would never be admitted to the country club but that enter into every event from mortgages to masturbation. Our Puritan heritage. How did those old Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and its imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L’Chaim! Compared with the Jews we Protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death.
Verna’s voice in the shadows of the Audi was so quiet I could hardly hear it above the muffled explosions of the idling engine. “No, I don’t want to do that, Nunc. But couldn’t you come up for a minute?”
Streetlight fell on the edge of her ragged cloud of hair, but her face was a featureless oval from which this husky small voice emerged as if from a gray hole. “Please. I can’t stand to be alone with myself just yet. I feel lousy and scared. I know I’ve been a pretty crummy human being.”
A musty warm attic smell had come into the car, from the heater. The clock on the dashboard said twelve-eighteen. Pretty late, to be out on a playground. The hospital visit had taken only two hours; it could just as well have taken three. The sly hand of Providence pulled a card from its sleeve: under the streetlight just ahead a car was pulling out, leaving a free space. I asked Verna, with an edge of scolding, “Why would my coming up make you feel less crummy?” I spoke as if to one more poor or failing student who has used up her hour yet still clings to the professor’s presence in the vain hope that this proximity may magically achieve what in fact can only be done alone, in work and study.
Her voice had shifted; hysteria had evaporated and a soft deadness, a knowing calm, had drifted in. She had become the teacher. As if we had entered some scalded and parched terrain where only she knew how to live. “I think you want to come up,” she said, almost singsong. “It might make you feel less crummy, too, and that might help me.”
“Who says I feel crummy?”
“Everybody can see it. Look at your frowny face sometimes, Nunc. Those eyebrows. The way you look at your own hands all the time. Come on up.” Her voice had gained authority. “Give something to somebody for a change.”
Her voice and not my hands and feet seemed to glide the automobile forward into the space of asphalt beneath the streetlight; the space was so long I did not even have to back in.
The project felt deserted; the human presence on Earth was reduced to vestiges: burning light bulbs, old graffiti, use-worn stair treads. In the apartment, Paula’s strange absence greeted us; that the child was not there, asleep behind the maroon curtain, could be tasted in the air of the place, its familiar peanut-husk scent as still as pondwater where the silt has settled.
Ignoring me, her shoulders hunched in elderly, plodding fashion, Verna punched through the curtain and disappeared. I could hear her open faucets, close a door, sniff, cough, begin again—a suppressed and furtive noise, like that of her retching earlier—to cry. I stood in her living room looking toward the tall crystalline center of the city, marvelling at how many of the skyscraper windows were lit. The waste. I felt numb, my body swollen by blows it had forgotten receiving.
“Nunc?” her snuffly voice called. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“I thought you might be coming out,” I said, and carefully sidestepped through the curtain.
This room had only one window, over in the kitchen area, beyond the black edges of a cabinet and small fridge, and my eyes took some seconds to adjust and find her. She was on the floor, in her bed, her futon. All but her wide pale face was beneath the covers: a child waiting to be tucked in with a kiss and prayers. I had to squat to her; both my knees loudly cracked.
“Aren’t you going to take off some cloth
es?”
“Oh, I don’t think so, surely,” I said. “I must be getting back almost immediately.” As my pupils expanded, I could make out a shine on her face, more tears or the dampness of a washcloth. The musty smell was strongest here, and comforting. Perhaps it was something the futon was stuffed with.
“I wish you’d just stretch out and hold me a minute,” she said.
“It would muss my shirt and trousers,” I said. The words as I pronounced them had the firmness of a slightly doubtful fact in a lecture (e.g., Pelagius was born in Scotland).
“That’s why you should take them off.”
What she said made sense. I obeyed, as far as my underclothes and socks, and lay down on top of the covers and put an arm around her blanketed, shapeless bulk. Like me, she felt swollen. Her breath, so close to my face, had the innocence of mint, a whiff of antiseptic mouthwash. I remembered hearing her spit catlike as in the other room I watched an airplane descend like a gently dislodged star. I could see the white of her eyes as she stared at the ceiling. After a minute of our lying still she asked, “How shitty a person do I seem to you?”
“Not at all,” I lied. “Just a little, ah, in over your head. I think the way people were designed originally the tribe used to raise the children, once the young mother had them. There was an overall program and everybody shared it. Now there is no tribe. There is no overall program. It’s hard.”
“Yeah, but other people don’t make a mess like I just did.”
“Who’s to say,” I asked her, “what’s a mess? When I left my first wife for Esther, it looked like a mess but it was really very clarifying. In God’s eyes”—I corrected myself—“according to the Bible, what looks like a mess may be just right, really, and people that look very fine and smooth and shiny from the outside are really the lost ones.” A stool may be high enough and the longest ladder too short.