The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  On her most recent visit to Dr. Baker, she will remind him that she will still not have got the butterfly weed back. Then, after he will have spent long minutes listening to her chest with his stethoscope, she will ask, “Will I ever be able to say ‘Better, thank you,’ when somebody asks how I am?”

  His face will be full of sympathy. “I wish I could encourage you,” he will say. “I wish so much that I could give you some hope. I wish so much that I could make you into a chaser.” She will wait to hear him add, “But I cannot.” He will not. His face will seem to say it.

  She will write to Colvin, plaintively, “If I could only live long enough, I might learn how to live.” But she will not be learning anything about how to live in that sanatorium. Paradoxically, she will be a prisoner of the clock and the bell which rings to signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next, but at the same time she will have no sense of time at all, so that after two whole months she will think that she will have been there only a month, and she will have to depend upon her one close friend, Penny (who will rhyme with her and even agree with her in many ways, including the nature and extent of her condition), to remind her that it is Monday or Thursday, the day of a picture show.

  “I hate to ask you for anything, dear Colvin,” she will write to him. “But the sunlight on the veranda hurts my eyes so, and some of the other women have smoked glasses which they wear to shade their eyes. I could buy some in the canteen, for only 78 cents, but I don’t have a penny to my name.”

  In return Colvin will send her ten dollars, and a birthday card for her seventeenth birthday, on which he will write: “I wish this was more. But I am trying to save up my money so I can come and visit you, which would cost me hotels and food and all. Do you want me to come and see you?”

  Tenny will be very happy that Colvin wants to come and visit her. Most of the other patients will have visitors from time to time, but she will not have. She will be worried that the very sight of Colvin will make her want to violate all sorts of rules with him. She will have heard the rumor that there is a certain place, in the basement of the main building, where patients who are married may take their visiting spouses for brief sessions of supposedly conjugal recreation, but Tenny, not married, or at least not to the man who will be visiting her, will not be able to apply for the use of that facility.

  On a lovely day in March, with signs of spring in full flourish, Colvin will arrive during morning Rest and will wait patiently for morning Our Own Hour, when Tenny will come downstairs and into his arms. After they will have kissed, Tenny will tell him that one of the rules forbids all kissing. “I’ll probably be arrested,” she will declare. “Every week, a passel of folks gits arrested, for all kinds of things.”

  “I wish you could be,” he will say, chuckling, and when she will look peeved he will take the trouble to explain to her something that nobody else has troubled to explain. “Arrested” in sanatorium parlance has nothing to do with the detainment of violators but refers to the checking of the disease. If your tuberculosis is arrested, you are well enough to go home, hence the Sanatorium Outlook’s regular list of those arrested is a list of those released from the sanatorium. “It would be so wonderful if your disease could be arrested,” he will say to her. “But I reckon you know the chances are pretty slim for that.”

  She will have to wait, nervously, while Colvin will go off to confer with the sanatorium doctors, with Dr. Stewart and Dr. Baker. Our Own Hour will be expired before he returns, but he will have received permission to remain with her the rest of the day. “I aint too darn certain your doctors and me saw eye to eye on a lot of things,” he will declare. “Leastways, they let me look at your X rays, and I managed to reclaim your butterfly weed. Also, I got permission to examine you myself. Come on.”

  Colvin will take Tenny out to his buggy, still drawn by good old Nessus, and will drive her the four miles into the town of Booneville, where he has a room at Herod’s Hotel, not fancy but comfortable. Along the way, Tenny will want to know all of the news he knows from home. He will tell her that he will not be teaching at the Academy this term, although he will still be visiting once a week as the physician. Tenny’s husband, Russ, and his girlfriend, Oona Owens, will be inseparable, and it will be assumed that since Tenny will never return that Russ and Oona will become permanently connected. Venda and Nick Rainbird will be talking of getting hitched. Jossie Conklin and Tim James will be doing likewise, and Tim will have been hired by the Mission Board to replace Jossie as principal. The basketball teams will be dissolved, but Russ himself will be teaching archery, and quite a lot of the student body will be taking lessons in the sport. Tenny will not ask Colvin if by any chance Piney has returned home; she will assume that Colvin will have told her if Piney had.

  Finding herself alone with Colvin in his hotel room will be almost too much for Tenny. She will beg him to take her to bed. She will complain that it has been so long, months now, since she will have had him inside her—not even informing him of that last time, which he probably didn’t know about—and she will miss it so, will dream of it so, will want it so.

  “Dr. Baker told me you had morning sickness for two or three weeks,” Colvin will say to her.

  “Hell’s bells, Colvin, I’ve had morning sickness, afternoon sickness, evening and night sickness too, day in and day out, but all I’ve got right now is heartsickness and lust. Take off your doctor’s face if not your clothes and come to bed with me.”

  But he will keep his doctor’s face, frowning, and will say, “Throwing up in the mornings is not a symptom of tuberculosis. It’s usually a symptom of pregnancy.”

  She will think about that, and will declare, “It’s true I aint flown the red flag the last few times I was supposed to.”

  “So,” he will say. “It sure didn’t take you very long to find yourself a boyfriend.” His voice will express anger, so unlike him, and he will add with bitterness, “You know, I’ve been persuading myself it’s just a superstition, or leastways just a faulty observation, that folks with TB are prone to get horny. But you seem to be a living example!”

  She will laugh. “I never heard that. But I can tell you there are some gals in Hemingway Hall who don’t never talk about nothing else! I can also tell you, though, that it’s practically impossible for any couples in that sanatorium to find any way to get together for that purpose.”

  “So how did you manage to do it?”

  “Colvin, even if I had a boyfriend, which I don’t, the only way he could’ve knocked me up, with all the rules they’ve got in that place, would’ve been to slip me his sputum cup—we’ve all got these sputum cups we have to turn in twice a day—he could’ve slipped me his cup filled with his jism instead. Yeah. That must’ve been what happened.” Saying this wryly, mockingly, she will have hoped to bring a grin to Colvin’s face, but he will still look as all-fired solemn as ever.

  “Then who was it?” Colvin will want to know. “When and where?”

  She will take his hand. “Dear Colvin, I have never had any man inside me but you.”

  He will withdraw his hand. “The last time we did it was that Eureka hotel in November! That wouldn’t give you morning sickness in February!”

  “No, the last time we did it, or maybe I ort to jist say the last time I did it to you, was on the kitchen floor of my house on Brushy Mountain, in the middle of a night before Christmas.”

  He will stare at her, and will abruptly sit on the bed. She will sit beside him. “That’s pretty hard to believe,” he will say.

  “I reckon there’s a lot about me and you that’s pretty hard to believe,” she will observe, smiling. “But I did it to you without ever waking you up, and got your jism inside me at just the best time of the month, so now me and you are going to become Mommy and Daddy.”

  He will shake his head. “Having a baby will kill you.”

  “If it does, then the baby—and maybe it will be a girl—will keep you company in your loneliness, and maybe sometim
es remind you of me.”

  Colvin’s eyes will fill with tears. “Tenny, I won’t never need nothing to remind me of you. I will remember you every day of my life, all the days of my life. But listen to me, sweetheart. It takes nine months to make a baby, and even if you could hold out that long, and the baby could be born, the baby would be infected with tuberculosis too. Even if you could do it, would you want to bring into this world a baby as sick as yourself?”

  Tenny will think about that. Instead of answering his question, she will ask, “You don’t think I can last nine months?”

  “I brought you here to look at you,” he will say. “Now we’d best get on with it.”

  He will have her undress. He will spend a long time with his stethoscope pressed to her chest, her back, her sides, even her shoulders, having her take deep breaths, shallow breaths, and coughs. He will look into every one of the openings of her body, including the one through which she will have hoped to pass the baby. “Hmmm” is all he will say, then or throughout his hour-long examination.

  At length, he will ask, “Did Dr. Baker ever tell you how long he thought you might last?”

  “No, only that I don’t have much of a chance.”

  “There’s something you’ve got to think about, Tenny, and I won’t beat around the bush. Trying to carry that baby in your womb is going to shorten your life, which, Lord knows, aint going to be very long anyhow. My advice is: terminate the pregnancy. Now,”

  “You mean take it out of me? Aint that illegal?”

  “Yeah, abortion is illegal, not only according to the laws of the state of Arkansas, which strictly forbid it, but also the policy of the sanatorium, which will not allow it.”

  Tenny will burst into tears, letting out a lot that she’s been holding back. “I wanted so much to have your baby,” she will say between her sobs. Colvin will keep his arm around her for a long time, until she will be able to stop crying. At length, when she will be in control again, she will ask, “So how can I git it taken outen me if nobody will allow it?”

  He will tell her about Doc Kie Raney, and the oath that Kie had made him swear as a young doctor just starting out. “I’ve been practicing medicine now for many a year, but I’ve never performed an abortion. That don’t necessarily mean that I don’t know how to do it, though. I think I can do it. Would you trust yourself to me, knowing that all I want to do, all I could possibly do, is make you live just a little bit longer?” At these words, Colvin will burst into tears again himself, which will prompt Tenny to begin crying all over again, and they will just hold each other and have a good long cry for a good long time.

  The rest of Colvin’s visit will be a blur in her mind. Much of the rest of her short life will be a blur in her mind. She will recall asking Colvin if the abortion will hurt and he will assure her that it will not hurt nearly as much as the artificial pneumothorax, but it will hurt none the less, and produce blood. He will refuse her request to have a glimpse of the fetus. Will Colvin stay two more nights at Herod’s? Or only one? She will not be able to tell. She will know that they will never be able to sleep together, and he will take her back to Hemingway each night, and then eventually he will be gone. She will not even be able to recall the details of their parting. There will not have been anything dramatic or sentimental about it that will furnish her memory something to dwell upon. Her memory, like her vision, will withdraw into blur.

  When Dr. Baker will find out that she has had an abortion (which his very next examination will uncover), he will pretend at first to be sternly disapproving, because of sanatorium policy, but then he will say, “You know, if it weren’t for the damned policy, I would have done it for you myself. Your Colvin Swain is a very wise man, and an incredible physician, with a vast knowledge of tuberculosis. Did he tell you that Dr. Stewart offered him Dr. Schroeder’s job? Schroeder is leaving, and we need a men’s physician, and Dr. Stewart made your Colvin a very good offer, with the added inducement that he’d be able to keep a close watch on you, who are apparently his all-time favorite patient. But apparently that wasn’t enough to persuade him to give up his practice in Stay More. Tell me about this Stay More. What’s it like?”

  So Tenny, growing increasingly nostalgic herself, will attempt to give Dr. Baker a picture of Stay More, what little she knows of it. She will be haunted by the “what-if” of the possibility that Colvin could have become a permanent fixture around the sanatorium, and she will wonder why Colvin will have never mentioned the offer to her, but she will understand something she will not say to Dr. Baker: Colvin will have turned down the offer not because of his love for Stay More (although certainly that will be a strong consideration) but because he will have known that if he took the sanatorium job he might not hold it very long before his “all-time favorite patient” will no longer be there, because she will have gone to that Other Place where people no longer have to breathe or try to breathe or eat or try to eat or shit or try to shit.

  She will be moved, eventually, from Hemingway to Hospital. The latter will not require long stretches of sitting on the porch in Rest. In fact, the schedule in Hospital will not even be the same as elsewhere in the sanatorium. No one in Hospital will be allowed out of bed.

  One day Dr. Baker will announce to her, “We would like to try a thoracoplasty on you.” The very name, which rhymes with nasty, will terrify her, and none of Dr. Baker’s efforts to explain the need for the operation or what it involves will do anything to lessen her horror. She will realize why so often the rest of her short life will be becoming a blur: because a clear view of it will be too much to take, and she will not be able to accept the idea of a thoracoplasty, which will involve the removal of all of the ribs on one side of her chest, leaving her deformed and with long hideous scars. All she will be able to see in the blur is her body as a misshapen blob.

  “If I’ve got just a short time on this earth anyhow,” she will say, “I’d much rather that Colvin laid my pore body to rest with it still looking mostly like it ought to,”

  “But possibly the thoracoplasty will buy you some time to enjoy life a little longer,” Dr. Baker will argue.

  “‘Enjoy’ aint the word,” she will say.

  “Wouldn’t you rather get out of Hospital and go back to Hemingway?” he will attempt to tempt her.

  She will realize that she misses the long Rests on the veranda, especially now that spring is here and everything is blooming and the air is so fine. But to pay eleven of her ribs for it? “Could I write to Colvin and ask him what he thinks of the thoracoplasty?” she will request

  Dr. Baker will look annoyed. “The operation ought to be done at once. I’ve scheduled it for tomorrow morning. By the time your letter got to Stay More and you received a reply, it would be too late.”

  She will attempt to write Colvin anyway, that last evening before the operation, but will discover that she cannot properly apply a pencil, let alone a fountain pen, to a sheet a paper. The effort will resemble a first-grader’s letters, and, dismayed at her handiwork, she will allow all the letters to become a blur. She will ask the nurse to write a letter for her, but dictating a letter, something she will have never done before, will deprive it of its privacy and she will not be able to tell Colvin that she thinks Dr. Baker is some kind of mean rascal. “I guess by the time you get this, I won’t be your Tenny anymore,” she will say.

  She will have hoped that the operation will be one of those where they put you to sleep and when you wake up it’s all over and you don’t feel a lot of pain. But she will discover that the operation will be performed under local anesthesia. She will be made to lie on her good side, with sandbags holding her flexed body in place, and most of what happens will happen behind her, on her back. If it will not have been for the newly acquired power of her mind to make a dull blur out of everything, she will have been able, if she desired, to count the removal of the ribs, one by one, with a big pair of shears that makes one cut on one end and another cut on the other end, and then she will have
been able to hear the sound of each cast-off rib clattering into a bucket But she will blur all this out and will think instead of Colvin’s Hygiene class, that first day when they studied bones and she had made her comparison between the skeleton and the timbers holding up a building. What now will hold her up? Will she be able to stand? To walk?

  Dr. Baker will assure her that with the help of a chest support she will be able to stand and to walk but that she ought to spend as much time as possible at Rest, on the Hemingway veranda. He will tell her that all the bandages will have to remain in place for a week, and that she will have to resist the temptation to look beneath the bandages to see if her body is still there.

  After several days, she will ask him, “Was that operation supposed to make me feel any better?”

  Maybe it will be a question that he will have never given any thought, because he will not be able to answer it. “Thoracoplasty has often been thought of as a lifesaving last resort,” he will tell her. “We didn’t do it to make you feel better.”

  By cruel coincidence, the day that the bandages will be removed will also be the day that Colvin will return.

  “I wouldn’t advise you to look in a mirror,” Dr. Baker will caution her. But of course that will not stop her, although her mind will shift automatically into blur as she approaches the mirror, and she will not be able to notice the length or the shape or the configuration of the scar, nor even how it has made her lopsided. Being in blur, her mind will not even be able to notice that her face will still be Tenny, her hair will still be Tenny, her breasts—albeit one of them will be droopy on one side—will still be Tenny.

  Being in blur, her mind will not even recognize Colvin when he will appear. “Tenny, sweetheart, it’s me, Colvin,” he will attempt to get her to see him. “I’ve come to take you home.”

  “Colvin?” she will say, trying to see him through the blur. “Why are you here? Have you come to take that job?”