by Belva Plain
“No, sir, you express it very well.”
“You think so? Yes, well, devotion, then. Look. I move my finger. An electrical impulse in my brain provides the energy with which I move the finger. Simple, eh? You think so? Of course you don’t! What if the signal is given and the finger refuses to move? What if a finger moves when the brain doesn’t want it to? These are the tantalizing mysteries. We still know nothing. Nothing. Talk of exploring the poles! Here’s exploration for you!” He broke off abruptly. “You have a girl?”
Martin flushed. “Yes … No … I mean, there’s nothing official, but—”
But her face floats over the pages of my textbooks and no matter what else I’m thinking of, part of me is always thinking of her.
Albeniz smiled. “Well, you’ll work that out. There’s always a way.” He stood up. “You will get twenty dollars a month and your keep. You will live penuriously, unless, of course, your family has money.”
“Oh no!”
“Then you will live penuriously. There are worse things. In time, you’ll be rewarded for your work with some of life’s comforts, but you will deserve them then, which is more than can be said for a lot of people who live in comfort. Well, I’m going back to the lab for an hour and then home.” He shook Martin’s hand. “The next time we come you’ll try the spaghetti carbonara.”
Martin was halfway back to his room before he realized that Albeniz hadn’t even waited for his acceptance. He had simply taken for granted that no young man could do anything other than accept. And of course, he had been right!
There was such a beating and fluttering in his chest that he couldn’t shut himself indoors just yet; he had to move, to walk. He went rapidly across town. Past Fifth Avenue, where the great stores were shut for the night. Past Sixth Avenue, where the last late workers were leaving the office towers. Westward and southward through shoddy streets. Blowing papers wrapped themselves around his ankles. A luncheonette released the smell of frying grease. Near Times Square a Chinese restaurant wore a garish red-and-gold faked pagoda front The lights of a dance palace blinked in and out. “Fifty Gorgeous Girls. Fifty.” And it was beautiful. Everything was beautiful.
After a long time, he turned back. He felt like shouting out his glory. Remembering his father, he pushed the thought away, knowing that he would handle things somehow because, as Dr. Albeniz had said, there’s always a way.
Then he thought of Mary. She would be home soon and he would talk to her. How foolish of him not to have told her how he felt before she left! Not that she hadn’t known! He smiled to himself. Well, in another month he would put everything into words; he’d buy her a little ring; the three years wouldn’t be all that long to wait. Her father—there was another problem, of course, but not insurmountable, either. Donald Meig’s displeasure was hardly the end of the world!
He sat down at the desk and began a letter. He thought of asking her then and there to marry him, but the words looked either too stark or too florid and he decided he’d rather wait to speak them aloud and hear her answer. For the present he would only describe the marvel that had occurred tonight.
When he had finished he stood for a while looking out of the window. The soft, cold air of February, faintly damp with the nearness of spring, washed over him. A light went on in the wing of private rooms across the street. An ambulance, its tires making a small sigh on the pavement, rounded the corner. He took a long breath and spoke to his empty little room.
“I am going to be a great doctor.” It was half a declaration and half a wondering question. “I am going to be a great doctor.”
By two o’clock in the afternoon of the following day everybody knew about Martin. He was the only intern in the program who would be going on to specialize. It was something to talk about, to be envious of or impressed by. Tom puzzled over it.
“Oh, it’s a stupendous opportunity,” he admitted. “But I don’t know, Martin, it’s a depressing specialty. The patients are all strangers, people you’ll never see again. And most of them die, you know they do.”
“But if we take that attitude, they always will. The idea is to keep them from dying, isn’t it?”
“Well, I can’t wait to get out on my own. Beats me how you can even think of another three years.”
Tom and Florence were to be married in July and he was to set up practice in Teaneck, New Jersey, with three thousand dollars borrowed from their families. The early marriage Martin could understand and envy, but not the haste to leave the hospital.
I love it here, he thought. For me it’s the heart of the world.
Never before had he experienced such euphoria, such joy. Everything blossomed. He found himself singing as he moved around his room in the mornings. All the faces on the street were friendly. He wanted to walk up to people, grasp them by the buttonhole and shout at them: Isn’t it a wonderful life? There’s so much you can do with it! So much work, so much love—if only there were more time! Yes, it’s so wonderful and there’ll never be enough time for it all!
Then one day he decided to tell Tom and Perry about Mary. Their goodwill, their good wishes for him brought the usual tears to his eyes and their usual jokes about those foolish tears of his; they knew each other well!
Tom asked, “Have you told your father yet about Albeniz?”
“No, not yet.”
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
“I’m a coward, I guess. But I’ll do it when I go home next month. When Mary gets back.”
He’d had only a postcard since he had written his news. They had been moving about all over England; she would write a real letter soon. In the meantime she wanted him to know that his news was wonderful. She was happy for him and proud.
He stuck the card in the mirror above the dresser and read it over morning and night.
At last there came a thick envelope, postmarked “London.” Cutting the lunch hour short, Martin went to his room, locked the door and sat down, enjoying his anticipation. His eyes sped over the pages—
“… Alex’s mother has been a friend of Aunt Milly’s and Uncle Drew’s for years. He’s a wonderful person. You would really like him! His wife died when their baby was born, a beautiful little boy, Neddie.… The wedding will naturally be very small, but I don’t mind. Jessie and Father will come over for it, and we shall have the ceremony at Alex’s house—so old, deep country and yet not far from London. You can see sheep on the hills in back of the garden.… I know you will be surprised at the suddenness of all this. I am myself! But I am so very, very happy.”
He thought at first that she was talking about someone else who was going to be married, a friend or someone met on her travels. He read it again. Then he went to sit on the edge of the bed. He put his head in his hands and felt ill: giddy, as though he were going to vomit.
You would like him, she dared to write! like him!
Martin groaned. For an instant he had a crazy sensation: he was imagining this, it was a nightmare and in a minute he would wake up. But no, there it was, three compact pages in her own backhand script.
Why? How? Didn’t she know what he felt for her? Had she felt nothing, then, for him? Could he have been imagining that, also?
Or had she measured him against this—this Alex and found him the lesser of the two?
Oh, Tom was the lucky one! A solid woman like Florence was what a man wanted! A woman who knew her own mind, instead of—
He pounded his knees with his fists. Timid, short-sighted fool that I am! To assume that she would be there, waiting, ready whenever I was ready! Instead of making sure, instead of saying, that last night on the front steps—
He went into the bathroom and was violently sick. Then he came back and sat for a while, staring at the wall. After a time he picked the letter off the floor and ripped it across, ripped it over and over, and flung the shreds back on the floor. His arms felt heavy. A great weight descended and he threw himself down on the bed.
Someone pounded at the door. Martin o
pened his eyes into weak, departing sunlight.
“Are you in there? Open the door. Where’ve you been?” Tom cried. “Didn’t you hear the squawk-box? They’ve been calling you for an hour!”
“I didn’t hear. I don’t seem to be feeling well.”
“Sit down. I have to talk to you.” Tom’s long, ugly face was suddenly sad, like Lincoln’s face.
“What’s the matter?”
“First tell me what your trouble is. Are you really sick?”
“Yes. No. I’ve had a kind of blow, that’s all.”
Tom studied him. “Is it anything you want to tell me about?” he asked softly.
“Mary’s being married in England,” Martin said, looking at the floor.
“I’m sorry! Oh, Martin, I’m so sorry!”
“I know you are.”
“You don’t deserve it—”
A fire engine clanged in the street below. When it had passed, the silence was absolute.
After a minute Tom spoke. “I have to hit you again, Martin. Have to hit you when you’re down.”
Martin looked up. Distress furrowed Tom’s cheeks, furrowed and creased them.
“What do you mean?”
“Your sister telephoned. When you didn’t answer, they told me instead. Your father’s had a stroke.”
Chapter 6
He slid the flivver into the shed. Dean, their old, brown, calloused horse, thrust his head out of the stall. He’d outlived his usefulness and Pa was simply saving him from the glue factory. Hideous thought.
Martin entered the stall and laid his head against the hard, rippling shoulder. Its living warmth gave comfort He felt such loneliness! With Alice married and gone, with his mother herself in need of strengthening, there was no one to talk to. And after all, what was there to talk about?
Should he talk about Mary? No use in that. It was over and done with. Strange how chemistry worked, how the flow of man’s desiring could be extinguished by time and troubles as a fire is quenched.
Talk about his father, the withered flesh, the tottering walk? What is there to say about a life that’s running out? Just running out, like this horse’s life, old Dean’s.
Anybody coming in would think he’d lost his wits, standing here like this. And abruptly repelled by his own sadness, Martin straightened and went into the house.
“Pa gone up to bed this early?” he asked.
“No, he had his supper and went to his desk in the office.” Jean lowered her voice. “It seems to help him, sitting there looking at old records and things. I suppose he feels he’s busy. Martin?” Something in her tone made him look up. “Martin, I didn’t know he’d taken a new mortgage on the house, did you?”
“I? No. He’s never talked business affairs with me.”
“Well. The original mortgage had been paid off before you went to high school … I don’t understand.” His mother’s lips trembled. “How could he have worked so hard all these years and we still have nothing? It just seemed to go as fast as it came in. It’s not as if we’d had any luxuries. Well, yes, we did buy the new parlor suite last year; the old one was really a disgrace. And we put new linoleum down. But I wouldn’t even have done that if I had known.”
He didn’t answer, there being nothing to say. She set his plate on the table, poured coffee and, attempting cheer, sighed, “Well, what’s done is done I guess. No use bemoaning it.”
If there is anything pathetic, Martin thought, it is penury in old age, the specter of dependency. Old age must be hard enough without that.
From the kitchen table he could see into the parlor, where above the brown imitation Chippendale sofa hung the new photograph of his parents, taken fortuitously only a few months before Pa’s stroke. Alice had wanted it taken. Ma had resisted, but Alice had pressed. It was only because she was moving away, she had said. Privately she had told Martin of her feeling that something was going to happen.
“You couldn’t have known Pa was going to have a stroke,” he had argued.
And she had said no, she certainly hadn’t known that. She had simply felt that something might be going to happen and she wanted the photo before it was too late. So they stood for all time together in a gilded oval frame, the mother wearing a silk dress and a gold watch on a neck chain, the father in his dark good suit, looking, for him, unusually dapper and spruce. He would never look that way again.
“You saw Ken Thompldns today?” Ma inquired now.
“Yes. He won’t last the night. He’s been vomiting from a strangulated hernia since last Wednesday and they didn’t call till today. His wife thought it was colic.” Martin could hear the exasperation in his own voice. “My God, what pitiful ignorance! I thought as a last hope we could rush him to Baker for surgery. I would’ve driven him the seventy miles myself, but he wouldn’t go. Says if he’s going to die, he wants to die at home.” And Martin threw out his hand in a gesture of hopelessness, tipping the coffee cup.
His mother rose to wipe the spill and handed him two letters. “I forgot Here’s mail for you.”
Martin propped the letters against his water glass, reading over a lifted fork. Tom wrote that he had opened his office. He had got privileges at a good hospital. Florence was keeping her job, and they were gradually furnishing the house. Martin must somehow get down to see them.
The second letter was from Dr. Albeniz. He was holding Martin’s place open. He understood the circumstances, but hoped Martin would be able to set things in order at home within the next few weeks.
“Something wrong, Martin?”
“No. Tired, that’s all.”
“I don’t know what we’d do without you,” his mother said. “It would be disaster, plain and simple. Isn’t it the hand of Providence, though, that if this had to happen to your father, it waited until you were finished and ready to take his place?” She stood frowning a little, wiping and wiping the spot, now dry, where the spill had been. Then becoming aware of his gaze, she brightened. “Oh, I hear my raccoons at the trash! They’re almost tame, coming for their bread every night. I used to be annoyed with them, but your father taught me—You remember your pet raccoon, Martin? You were only about seven or eight when Pa found it along the road. Remember?”
He was not fooled by her brave prattle.
“Pa’s doing better, you know,” he said gently.
“Martin, you mean well, but I’d rather have the truth. I see him going downhill. Give me the truth: What’s going to happen?”
“Ma, I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did. I’d be surprised if he improved any, but he could go on no worse than this for years. Or he could have another stroke or a coronary tonight.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, it isn’t fair! He was so good to everyone!”
The night-bell rings. Sleet clatters on the windowpane. Pa creaks down the stairs and out the door; the motor coughs in the garage. The time is two-fifteen …
“No,” Martin said, “it isn’t fair.” (Not if you believed in just rewards, which he didn’t and his mother did.)
Presently the collies began barking in the yard, subsiding as they recognized a familiar voice.
“Sounds like Charlie Spears,” Jean said. She opened the door. “I thought it was you! Why, Charlie, what have you got there?”
Charlie Spears came in and set a carton of groceries on the floor. “Thought you might use some extras from the store outside of your regular order. A few delicacies for Doc. Doc Senior,” this with a nod to Martin. “He was always partial to bananas, and here’s Scotch marmalade, herb tea, water biscuits and some of that there smelly foreign cheese. I never liked it myself, but then, there’s no accounting for taste, as they say.”
Jean flushed. “Charlie, you’re too good to us. You shouldn’t, really you shouldn’t. We’re doing fine and—”
Charlie looked up sharply. “Twasn’t charity, Missus. ’Twas because Doc was always real good to me and he’s a friend.”
When he had gone, Jean said, “People have been so kind
. Sometimes it’s hard not to cry, they’ve been so kind. It’s one of the rewards of this kind of life. So you see, it isn’t all hardship, Martin.”
“I know that, Ma,” Martin said firmly.
There were shuffling steps in the hall, and his father appeared in the doorway. “Who was that?”
“Charlie Spears. He brought you a package of goodies.”
Enoch glanced at the carton without interest.
“I’m bored,” he said petulantly. “Nothing to do here all day.”
“You’ll just have to learn to kill time,” Jean told him, “until you get to be yourself again.”
Enoch stared at her. “Kill time! That’s the worst thing you could have said. It’s time that’s killing me. Well, I’m going up to bed. Good night, folks.”
He struggled slowly up the stairs. It was difficult because the bannister was on the right and it was his right arm which had been weakened. Once when he faltered, Martin rose to help, but his mother waved him back with a signal.
“He doesn’t want to be helped.”
And Martin knew that this understanding was born of thirty-four years of life together.
So they sat, the wife and the son, not speaking, stirring the coffee in their cups. Chink. The spoon struck the cup, then ground around the sides again. Chink. Once more the collies barked, this time at the front of the house. Martin got up and went to look. There was nothing to be seen in all that darkness except the band of light that slid from the open door. Then his nose led him to the basket of apples, to the sharp, fresh scent of Greenings.
“Martin, what is it?”
“Somebody’s left apples on the porch. There’s no name. That’s odd.”
“Not odd. People do that lots of times when they can’t pay and Pa’s written them off. They feel they want to give whatever they can. No, leave them there. You can carry them to the root cellar in the morning.” She went back to the kitchen.