[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  This registered with him, too, just like the fact that she knew the number of days since the accident, and he seemed to be trying to decide whether to speak further or not. “There’s one more thing,” he said finally. He twisted toward the nightstand and felt for a book inside the drawer. From the book he retrieved a folded sheet of paper, which he handed to her.

  At the top, it said, Rules to Be Observed for the Prevention of the Spread of Tuberculosis.

  “I don’t understand,” Lavinia said slowly as she read the rules. “Who’s this for?”

  “It was in my father’s account book. Folded like this with a bill from Dr. Quigley. I remember that he went to the doctor before he went away because my mom thought he had bronchitis.”

  “Did you show this to your mom?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “I already did it.”

  Lavinia waited.

  “When Dr. Quigley was here, before my mom came up, I asked him. He didn’t want to tell me at first, but then he said he gave the paper to my dad. There have been cases of TB in people who’d lived in the Midwest on farms, so he gave my father the test. My father was supposed to wait for the results, but he left.”

  Lavinia looked down at her fingers. She didn’t know whether to prompt him or to wait.

  “The test was positive,” Clare said.

  “That means he has it, right?”

  Clare nodded.

  They both sat still, as if hiding from a large predatory animal that was sniffing for them in the woods.

  “What about you?” Lavinia could barely croak out.

  Clare shook his head. “He gave Neva the test when we first got here, and it was negative. He said that he took a sample of my spit when he operated on me that night after the accident. He said it was a public health issue. I don’t have it.”

  Lavinia felt herself breathing again.

  After a time, she said, “Maybe that’s why your father isn’t coming back or answering the door. So he won’t infect anybody.”

  Clare pressed one side of his thigh. “I thought of that, but I don’t see how he could even know.”

  “Did Dr. Quigley tell your mom?” Lavinia asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Lavinia looked at the solid white plaster around Clare’s leg, and then at his fine-boned, unbroken fingers, precise and honey colored against the sheet. “I’ll bet that’s why he left,” she said softly. “He sensed it, and he went away so you’d all be safe.”

  Clare looked at her with what she took for doubt, and then he closed his eyes. “I don’t think I can talk anymore, Vinnie,” he said.

  The nickname, used for the first time, found the nerves in her face and hands and made them feel more alive.

  “Do you want me to go now?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Come closer, would you?”

  She couldn’t move the steamer trunk, so she went around to the other side and moved some clothes off a little wooden stool. Then she pulled the stool up to the side of the bed, and he opened his eyes to see where she was.

  “Now give me your hand,” he said.

  She put her hand in his, and even after he fell asleep, she stayed there like that, letting go only when she realized that the Rules to Be Observed were still lying open on the trunk, so she refolded the paper and hid it in the account book, which she slid into the drawer, and then she sat down beside the bed and took his hand again.

  95

  Aldine was standing in the kitchen when the pain seized her, obliterated normal thought, and then let her go. It was like Krazy Kat taking a mouse in its teeth and then, at the height of terror, pretending to let it go. Aldine looked at the calendar. It was December 4. Since the Josephsons had come, she’d stopped crossing off the days and instead put next to each passing day a pencil mark so faint it could not be seen beyond close inspection. The pain again came and went. She walked upstairs to the bedroom, certain she would lie down and have a baby in a few minutes, but the awful clenching didn’t return and she grew bored. The third time, she staggered to the barn to tell Ansel, but before she could open the heavy door, the tightness that made her stagger released her once again. She told him, “I thought it was coming,” stood and watched him for a moment as he did something inside the tractor’s unfathomable parts, trying not to look at the doctor’s car. The barn was even colder than the house so she kissed him on the cheek and went back inside.

  All morning, the gripping started hard and sharp, then tossed her aside to wait some more. It was exhausting, but she tried to keep herself busy. She washed a pan so she could bake a flat cornbread that needed no eggs, a recipe she’d found written on a yellowed piece of paper in the same drawer that held the vegetable seeds. She heated a jar of Sonia’s stewed tomatoes. It looked as if it might snow, and by the time Ansel sat with her at the table, white bits had begun to swirl outside the window.

  He asked if she’d had more pains.

  “Six times,” she said, and he neither nodded nor shook his head, but put his hand to her sleeved arm and said she should lie down after dinner.

  Afternoon was silence, snowflakes that dissolved upon touching the ground, and increasingly frequent episodes of pain, which she waited for on the bed. Ansel had decided to work downstairs on some part of the tractor she could not identify. Seeing the greasy parts spread out on old newspaper on the dinner table made it almost seem as if the barn had come into the house, but she didn’t mind. She liked the oily smell, in fact, and sometimes she had to laugh, thinking what Ellie or Charlotte would do if they saw tractor parts in the front room. Each time the hurting started she counted to keep from crying out, telling herself that she could get to a larger number than she had reached last time, and only if the pain was still fierce when she reached that number would she call him upstairs. What time it was when that happened, she didn’t know because they never knew what time it was. The night had begun, and from then on he was either beside her in the bedroom, solid and still in the chair he had brought from downstairs, or he was preparing what he said he would need when the baby came; she looked up once to see him carrying a knife, another time, a stack of towels. He passed before her like a figure in a pantomime, the props suggestive of acts she could not foresee. She was mauled by the pain and abandoned, mauled and abandoned. Many hours passed in this way, the frequency of pains accelerating until there was hardly a break between them, and he looked at her and said he was going to see if he could feel the baby’s head now. He said, yes, he could, but Aldine could only feel the hugeness around which everything strained, an immensity that couldn’t pass, despite the force of what felt like a river pushing it down. “Yes, now,” he said, “it’s coming now,” and finally all the water in the river seemed to bear down at once and she felt the most wonderful shattering. “Look now,” he said, and he held up a baby girl.

  96

  The day was cool but the sun was bright, a good day to see the Sleeping Indian and even the purplish gauze that was the ocean if you were on a hill, but Neva wasn’t on a hill. She was in the alley behind the café. The trunk of the queen palm was rippled and hairy. Blond paint was peeling off the side of the café, where it said, The Sleeping Indian Café—100% Clean. Neva found a sunny place and sat down cross-legged. She fiddled with the black and yellow Bakelite bangles, rolling them around her wrist before using them to make a pedestal for the apple she was eating, one that would, for a while, anyway, keep the bitten part out of the dirt. Charlotte had said, “Why do you even want those ugly things?” but Charlotte probably just wanted them herself.

  It was a green apple, her favorite, and she took another bite. She closed her eyes and willed her father to appear with Aldine. It was Friday, only one day more to Charlotte’s wedding day, and Neva had asked Santa if he could grant an early request this year. She kept her eyes closed for an extra count to ten because she heard someone walking in the alley, a shuffling, heavy sort of walk, a man’s walk, and her he
artbeat quickened. But when she opened her eyes, it wasn’t her handsome, handsome father. It was Uncle Hurd. “Morning, Miss Geneva,” he said. “The big day approaches.”

  She looked down at her apple. Maybe what her mother had said at dinner was true. Her father was going to live in their old house in Kansas, and they couldn’t join him because of her. Because of her lungs. “When will he come back?” Neva had asked, and her mother wouldn’t answer. She didn’t like California if it was going to be like this. She slid her bracelets up and down on her wrist. They were sticky now from the apple.

  When she looked up, Uncle Hurd was watching her so sadly that she put down the apple, stood up, and held out her arms. He lifted her up and she laid her head on his shoulder. He didn’t say anything except, “That’s better.”

  He held her and stared off toward the packing plant.

  “You miss your dad, don’t you?”

  Neva pushed her head up and down.

  “Well, we all do, don’t we?” her uncle said and then she closed her eyes while he carried her around the café. She felt the warm cotton of his shirt against her face and legs, and then, when he pulled up a little and said, “Well, hello there, Boss,” she opened her eyes and saw Mr. McNamara’s big brown head and big white smile. Uncle Hurd’s hand slipped a little when he set her down, and she felt the jolt of the pavement through her skin.

  Mr. McNamara made a big show of holding open the door for Uncle Hurd and then he looked down at her. “What about you, girly? Would you like to come in?”

  With the door open, the hot egg-and-sugar smell of custard seemed to brush up against her skin, and inside, behind the counter, her mother was talking to a customer and holding a spoon that shone in the long sideways sunlight.

  “How about it?” Mr. McNamara said. “Could I buy you a root beer float?”

  Neva turned away without a word. She didn’t feel like having a root beer float that Mr. McNamara paid for and she didn’t feel like watching men eat big mouthfuls of food and laugh big laughs. She didn’t feel like playing jacks with Marchie and she never ever wanted to put on the flower-girl dress Aunt Ida had made for her, not if her father and Aldine weren’t there. Maybe she would just stay home with Clare on Saturday. That was another reason there shouldn’t be a wedding. Clare couldn’t go, either. Charlotte should just wait some more until they were all back together again, was her opinion.

  97

  At dusk on December 8, Dr. Myron Stober was walking home through the streets of Emporia. It was cold. At first there were people here and there, but as he passed out of the commercial district, he became one of just two people on the street, himself and, ten yards or so before him, a small brown-haired woman in a green scarf. The woman kept glancing back with a worried look. He nodded and tried to smile, and he slowed down, but it aggrieved him that she kept throwing nervous looks over her shoulder. It was cold and he was losing light. He decided to cross the street, speed up, and get home.

  But when he reached his own door and set the key to the lock, he heard footsteps, and there she was, standing on the sidewalk behind him: the woman in the green scarf.

  “Good evening,” the woman said, a little abashed. “I see we were going the same place after all!”

  “My office is closed for the day,” he said.

  “It’s okay. I was headed back there,” she explained, pointing to where Sonia Odekirk lived.

  He nodded without interest, but, instead of proceeding to Sonia Odekirk’s, the girl lingered.

  “You must be Dr. Stober,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I’m Glynis Walsh.”

  Again he nodded, then, pushing open his door, felt the first wave of warmth from within.

  “I think my friend Aldine was working for you,” the woman added. “I was just going to tell her good-bye.”

  Dr. Stober abruptly turned around. “Friend of hers, are you?” He stood facing her, and fingered the soft folds of the handkerchief that lay unused in his coat pocket. In the left pocket he kept the last handkerchief his wife, Lucy, had washed and ironed. In his right he kept the ones he actually used.

  “Yes,” she said, but she looked a little strange when she said it, as if he might try to disprove it. She stood still in the gray evening air, rubbing the dead grass with one shoe, each breath a small, shapeless cloud. “Do you know if she had her baby?”

  “No,” Dr. Stober said, and heard the coldness in his voice, so he added, “I’m afraid I don’t.” They were perhaps ten feet apart, and he wanted to learn whatever it was this girl could tell him about Aldine. In the days following the theft, the doctor had begun to feel that the arrangement he’d made with Mrs. Odekirk would never satisfy him. He could never enjoy the car that she’d promised to buy him (if in fact she could afford a Phaeton) and could never stop wondering what had happened to his own. He’d begun to think of himself as one of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Ops—Dick Foley, maybe, or Mickey Linehan. He gathered information. He waited. He trusted in the general weakness and corruption of others.

  Dr. Stober took a step closer to the girl. He did his best to smile. “I’ve been worried about her, in fact. She was due a few days back, and I was supposed to deliver the baby, but she’s run off.”

  Glynis looked genuinely surprised. “Run off?”

  “I have a feeling the father showed up.”

  Glynis tugged at her scarf like it scratched her chin. He wished he could see her face better. It had grown darker and she stood beyond the illumination of the streetlamp. “I wanted to tell her I finally got transferred to La Castañeda,” the girl said.

  “I’ve been there,” Dr. Stober said. In one of the Hammett books, The Glass Key or The Dain Curse, the Continental Op was talking gently to someone he wanted information from and the author used the word crooned to describe his way of speaking. Stober had liked that. It made him understand that the op’s coaxing way of talking was like serenading. “La Castañeda,” he said, doing his best, “it’s quite grand, magnificent really, an absolute jewel.”

  “That’s what I hear, too,” the girl said. “And outdoor tubs with natural hot springs right next door.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said with luxurious emphasis, though he didn’t remember any hot springs. He hadn’t stepped foot in the hotel. Lucy had wanted to go in, but he’d been in no mood for it. “A tub of piping hot mineral water,” he said to the girl, “now that would be the place to soak one’s feet after a long day.”

  The girl laughed out loud. It was so easy, being pleasant; he wondered at the general veneration of it. “We’ll tell Aldine of your good fortune when we see her,” he said.

  “Will you? Well, thank you very much.”

  “It might help . . .” He acted as if this was just occurring to him. “You wouldn’t know who the father is, do you?”

  “The baby’s, you mean?”

  “Yes, the baby’s.”

  It was impossible to see Glynis’s eyes clearly. Her face was so pale it seemed in the darkness almost white. He kept his hands in his pockets, rubbing his thumb back and forth on the soft, clean handkerchief, balling the dirty one with his other hand. “I’d like to know that she’s safe,” he said. “Mrs. Odekirk and I have been worried like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Glynis, who had pressed the back of one hand to her lips for a long moment, took the hand away. “I think he did show up,” she said. “He came into the restaurant looking for her.”

  He waited. Sometimes the Continental Op stopped asking and just waited.

  “It was a name I’d never heard before. The man’s name was Ansel.”

  Dr. Stober raised his chin slightly to show he was expecting a bit more.

  “Price,” she said. “Ansel Price.”

  He spelled it aloud and she said, “Yes, that’s right. I saw it on his letters to her.”

  In Aldine’s note she had said she was taking the car to help a friend. “This Ansel Price,” he said, “did he come from around here?”
r />   “Yes. Aldine lived with him and his family when she was a teacher in Dorland.”

  That was enough, Stober thought. More than enough. “Thank you, my girl,” Stober said, his voice suddenly brusque. He stepped past the girl and strode toward the rear cottage.

  “You’ll tell Aldine, though, when you see her, where I’ll be?” the girl called after him, but he didn’t answer. He was already pounding on Sonia Odekirk’s door.

  98

  Ellie had not expected her father to come to Charlotte’s wedding. She’d even bet Ida five cents that he wouldn’t. But here he was on the eve of the day, walking in while she and Ida put the finishing touches to the kitchen after a long day of baking. Herr Hoffman looked prosperous as ever, but smaller, his back no longer straight, his neck more deeply descended into the cavern of his chest. His blue eyes were as aloof as she remembered, though, when he presented himself in the door of the café, looked from Ellie to Ida, and said, “So this is California.”

  They both had their hair in rollers and scarves, which made hugging awkward. Tears ran down Ida’s cheeks, as if she had missed him, but Ellie’s eyes were dry as stones. For a fleeting moment she braced herself for the cold formality between her father and Ansel, but that dread was at once displaced with another: the fact that Ansel wasn’t here for his daughter’s wedding.

  Her father was looking approvingly here and there in the kitchen. The pies stood in a neat row alongside the canisters of cookies, and everything gleamed in the kitchen. It was her mother who had taught her that, never to leave a kitchen with anything unclean or undone, but perhaps it had been her father who had demanded it. “Everything sparkling,” he said, nodding to himself, and she was surprised how a compliment as mild as this could suffuse her with prideful pleasure.

  And then in the next moment, her father said, “And where are your husbands?”

  Ida cast a quick glance at Ellie, then told their father that Hurd was up at the house and why didn’t she just go fetch him?