Talking about Greta in this fashion was simply out of the question, but feeling I owed Hoos some return for the tales with which he had regaled me—my own share in the game we were after all playing—I rhapsodized in terms applicable to womanly beauty in general, those visions and fantasies by which, indeed, we were scarcely for a day untormented. “Think of lilies,” I said, “of lilies in mounds of drifted snow …” Hoos flung an arm over his eyes, as though shielding them from some blinding light or intolerable pain. At the same time Horswissel’s bed creaked sharply and was still, as the man no doubt got on all fours with his ear to the partition.
I broke off, ashamed of myself. But I had already begun to see myself as Hoos saw himself, a prisoner of inflammations that time and improving health could only intensify. Perhaps T.B. had been a mistake. There must be a better way of evading reality. It was with matters at such a pass that I made the third connection of what I recall as a sort of triangular life during those fall and winter months at the sanitarium.
In the dining room, which was common but segregated, I saw one evening a new face on the women’s side. A slender girl with blonde hair gathered into a ponytail sat gazing downward as she waited for the bowls of food to reach her. She listened to the chatter of the women among whose hands they passed down the table, smiling when appropriate, but keeping her eyes fixed on her blank plate. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she had a habit of chewing the insides of her cheeks. I inquired about her from Horswissel, who was on my right. He said she must be the girl just moved over to ambulo from the infirmary, where she had been for a year or more. She had had a pneumothorax, the operation by which gas is pumped into the pleural cavity in order to collapse the lung on one side. She was said to be shy and rather religious. In her pale face were the roses obligingly supplied by the disease to either cheek. Her fair hair prepared me for blue eyes when she turned once toward the men’s tables—perhaps sensing she was being watched—but what met mine was a soft fawn’s gaze of the most melting brown. Something shot along the surface of my heart like ice cracking on a pond. Her head bowed momentarily lower, lifting the gold tassel of hair off her neck.
I scarcely knew what I ate. I hurried to the main lounge after dinner, arriving just in time to see her walk up the corridor to the women’s wing with a rather formidable maiden lady of middle age who was notorious, even with the chaplain, for the hymn sings she organized in her room when other people wanted to read or rest. I loitered on the gravel path outside the women’s porches, hearing there presently a swell of feminine voices coming clear and wonderfully sweet through an open window:
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
I returned to my room feeling melancholy and vaguely troubled. The mood continued all through the following morning, Sunday. I failed to see the girl at breakfast, and made no more progress except to learn that her name was Rena Baker. She turned up at midday dinner, after which she was again swept from my view in a tide of companions making for the women’s ward. I did not mind this frustration too much, having by now devised a plan. I went to chapel that afternoon with a will.
The sanitarium chaplain was a charming codger of great sensitivity and learning whose pithy sermons were anything but a bore. Today, however, we drew a substitute, a visiting parson so long-winded that his mid-service invocation carried us well past the point at which old Wenzel would have released us into the summer sunshine. Early in its course I stole a glance over my shoulder at Dr. Simpson. He had the look of a man dozing rather than praying; the familiar smile curled his lips, as though some irony too fine for consciousness were turning on the lathe of slumber. Knowing Rena to be sitting directly behind him, I gave my neck another quarter turn. Her head, under a solemn bonnet, was bowed. It lifted just then, and the eyes opened—and banged shut again.
After the benediction I hurried out as fast as the lagging congregation would permit. From the chapel steps I saw her walking toward the main building, alone. I overtook her on the gravel path.
“How did you like the sermon?”
She brought black-gloved palms together in surprise and laughed—a whispered little laugh that conveyed a feeling of the most intense reserve yet the most curious intimacy. “Well, anybody who talks for forty-five minutes on the value of silent meditation …”
I fell in beside her as we discussed the minister’s text, which had been the words from First Kings in which Elijah finds God not in the wind nor the earthquake nor the fire, but in the still voice. We agreed we had heard too many sermons on this verse, which was supposedly calculated to disarm prolonged and complex exposition. By now we had reached the sanitarium. Sounds of tea being poured in the main lounge reached us on the doorstep where we lingered.
“Will you have some with me?”
She again joined her palms, stiffening her fingers as though to tighten the fit of her gloves. “Oh,” she cried in that rippling whisper of a laugh, “I’m supposed to chase till supper.” This was institutional slang for resting—chasing the germs. “I’m here on trial, you know, and I don’t want to go back there.” She pointed in a loop over my head to the infirmary. “Some other time though, maybe.”
“My name is Don Wanderhope. I already know yours.”
It was three days later that I found her alone again. She was sitting in the lounge reading some mail, including a religious periodical of which she clutched the crumpled wrapper in one hand. “Oh, it’s you again.”
“Perseverance of the saints. How about a walk? It’s nice and bright.”
“Well, a short one. I’ll get my coat.”
Thus began a relationship which I pursued with a kindled heart and what are known as honorable intentions, but one subject to a tarnish for which I had only myself to blame. I mean its natural misinterpretation by the one-dimensional Hoos.
This lout’s gossip of our observed ambles about the grounds and into the surrounding fields at first annoyed, then infuriated me. I entered the men’s lounge one evening after seeing Rena home, as it were, to hear the conversation come to a stop so sudden there could be no mistaking its theme. A patient changed the subject with a gusto obvious enough to banish any remaining doubt. This was a recent arrival named Niebuhr, a professor of economics from a Midwestern college, here for his second stay. Niebuhr could rarely be got off his professional ground once he had secured the floor, and would discourse on real wages and gold reserves with a heat that was needless since no one there understood what he was saying enough to take issue with it even were he so minded. But he would harangue away till some impassioned declaration would explode in a fit of coughing, the results of which he would commit to a small crachoir carried on the person for that purpose. An economist with conspicuous consumption was all Bontekoe needed to make his day, as he soon let us know, ducking behind an arm to fend off the expected cuffs.
I sensed a certain constraint in Hoos’s manner when we went to our room after the bell and set about preparing for bed. He retired without a word. The next evening I hurried out after dinner to keep a tryst with Rena behind the garage, into which we sometimes slipped to sit in the pickup truck and talk in peace, I behind the wheel, she with her head on my shoulder. We must have resembled a pair of young lovers going for a drive, or rather rehearsing for the glad day when they might do so, in a vehicle of a more romantic sort, of course. As I went down the corridor I caught faint footsteps behind me and turned in time to see Hoos dart into the lounge, with a last-second effort at nonchalance that was something to behold. The next time it was he who went out first, to stalk me from God knew what cover, for I was now certain that he was spying on me—or on us. The mystery deepened when he vanished on an evening when I stayed in, and stole back into the room in stocking feet long after Lights Out. Asked where he had been, he was at first evasive, then blurted out, “I’m stir-crazy. I warn you.” He flung the wor
ds at me accusingly, as though I were in some way responsible for his plight.
The huggermugger reached its climax one night when I had no date but slipped out for the purpose of decoying Hoos into the open in hopes of getting to the bottom of this thing. This much accomplished, as was discernible from the stealthy padding in my wake, I strolled past a clump of firs where, screened from his view, I suddenly doubled back and raced around the sanitarium water tower in a wide arc that fetched me up in arrears of my pursuer. He presented rightly the appearance of a dog who has lost the scent, but my relish of his bafflement was short-lived. No doubt assuming I had vanished for my rendezvous in the garage, he stood looking through its soiled windowpanes, shading his eyes, then went around to the back and listened at the closed door, again resembling a snuffling hound. So he had indeed been spying there. And not alone there, I presently learned.
I went for a tramp about the grounds, to cool down and calm my nerves. As time for the Lights Out bell drew near, I made a last swing around the women’s wing, in hopes of catching a glimpse of Rena for a moment out-doors—or even a snatch of evensong—but was arrested instead by a figure of another sort. It was Hoos again, peering surreptitiously over the porch rail into Rena’s room.
I slipped into the shadows when he turned his head, instinctively avoiding embarrassment. I was squatting in cover when the bell sounded and, presently, the rooms darkened one by one, suggesting well enough what had rewarded his gaze. I floundered in doubt as to what course to take. I was seething, yet loath to make matters any more deplorable by creating a scene, certainly then and there. Watching a voyeur would appear a specialty admitting of only one refinement, and our little nocturne had that. Hearing a rustle behind me, I turned and saw a pair of bespectacled eyes peering at me through the bushes. It would have been futile for Horswissel and me to pretend we had not recognized one another, and so, parting the breast-high foliage, I swam through greenery to his side. “Shh,” I said, leading him away by the arm. “Were you observed?”
“So dot’s it. You got a good ting of it, watching de girls,” he said, as he permitted himself to be drawn onto the gravel path.
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” I said. “For heaven’s sake, man, let me handle this. Is that clear? Not a word of it must be breathed.”
“No!”
It turned out to be impossible in the confusion to avoid Hoos, who, frightened off by noises, possibly our own, turned and bolted through the landscaping into our arms. The three of us now engaged in furious whispers, rendered more chaotic by Horswissel’s lewd misconstruction of my plea for secrecy—his thought being to keep “a good thing of it” among ourselves—as well as by our being illegally abroad, so that we stole to the darkened men’s quarters like a trio of desperadoes. Once alone with Hoos in our room, however, I lost no time in expressing my disgust with his conduct.
“Look, I’m no prig, but if you’re going to do that sort of thing, I’ll thank you to do it at somebody else’s window. And keep away from the garage.”
“It’s all well and good for you to talk,” he retorted, “but how do you think I feel, thinking of you doing pushups in the back of that pickup truck?”
“Now look, you bastard. If you’ve managed to see anything at all, which I doubt, you must know we just sit in the cabin.”
“Don’t give me that. And why apologize? Who wouldn’t want to get out of this clink once in a while and cut himself a piece of cake?”
“If you don’t shut your foul mouth, I’ll shut it for you!”
“You mean this is the real thing?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”
“So you’re smitten. Damned if he isn’t smitten.”
After this wretched colloquy, conducted while stumbling about in the dark undressing, I lay seething in bed for an hour or more. Could I gracefully request a change of roommate? The only double room currently half vacant that I knew of was Horswissel’s, transfer to whose company could scarcely be considered an improvement. Despite his former money and pretense at reading the books that had gotten him by the skin of his teeth into the Elect, Horswissel remained for me a Dumb Dutchman whom I wanted to kick in the pork. And on sober reflection the next morning the whole idea of a move seemed ill-advised. Natures as coarse as Hoos’s are often equivalently sensitive, and a slight could transform him from a nuisance into an enemy, possibly a very nasty one. It was all very well for Foyle to keep him at a distance by deliberate rudeness, as he said he did, on the ground that vinegar repelled more flies than honey, but his problem was not my problem. There was one ray of hope. Hoos had lately expressed confidence of being “sprung” after his next quarterly examination, a mere month off. Better to rub along till then.
Thoughts of Hoos’s welfare, however, even for that matter my own, were banished from my mind by a turn in Rena’s.
Her health had been precarious for some time. Now after an encouraging spell of normal temperatures she suddenly shot a fever of a hundred and one. She was seized by coughing fits that left her weak and dizzy, and were marked by increasingly ominous flecks of red. The doctor confined her to bed, which was a woe for me as well as for her. Men were barred from the women’s dormitory except for the regular visiting hours, and my calls on her then were almost unfailingly ruined by the presence of other visitors or, what was worse, that of her roommate, Cora Nyhoff.
This woman loved God and hated men in nearly equal measure. She would stick around whenever I came, allegedly to help “cheer Rena up” but in effect to queer my progress with Rena, sensed as a threat to her own domination of the girl, of which I glimpsed an unhealthy side. The two had been paired off as being both “religious,” stupidly, since there was no resemblance between Cora’s bigotry and Rena’s piety. Though Rena never admitted it, I suspected that the older woman had begun to pall. Indeed, I wondered if her continuous abrasive presence wasn’t responsible for Rena’s reversal. I was about to suggest as much to Dr. Simpson when I learned that she had gone back to the infirmary.
Here I could visit her freely with at least an even chance of not running into Cora when I walked in. Though confined to bed, Rena would sit on it tailorwise, drinking the tea I brought in or fingering the letters, papers, and books with which the counterpane was everlastingly strewn. She never held her teacup by the ear, preferring to warm her hands around the china, always watching me as she sipped, as though I bore constant reappraisal. We talked of poets, composers, the West, last Sunday’s sermon—always last Sunday’s sermon, of which a vital interest in human faith prompted her to be critical, as distinguished from Cora’s dull evangelical chatter about “blessings.” Divine worship was piped in for infirmary patients to hear from earphones plugged into bedside sockets.
“He seemed to think,” said Rena one Sunday evening of a seminary student who had preached at vespers on the injunction not to cast one’s pearls before swine, “that Jesus meant the pearls would only be ignored, but the text says clearly enough lest they turn again and rend you.’ It’s a popular mistake, but imagine a divinity student making it!”
“You could remove your earphones. I had to sit there and take it.”
“Are you an atheist?”
“Not a very devout one,” I reassured her, smiling from my chair. “I’m backsliding fast.”
“Do you believe in a God?”
“With nothing certain, anything is possible.”
“You’re slippery as an eel, aren’t you? Do you believe you have a soul?”
“No, but I believe you do.”
With a terrier-like interest in everything that caught her eye or took her fancy, she would change the subject without a moment’s notice. She now glimpsed, through the window, the figure of a middle-aged patient named Swigart, the sole Methodist among us, walking along with a cigar in his mouth. His affliction lay elsewhere than in his lungs. Rena reported that Swigart, a tobacco addict fated to have been born into a denomination where nicotine was proscribed, was happy for the first time in his life
among the Dutch, who of course smoke like chimneys. “He’s been declared arrested but won’t go home,” she laughed. “There’s a story that he used to smoke behind the barn after he was forty, but it’s probably too good to be true.” We watched the object of this gossip, puffing contentedly, disappear in a blue cloud among the frozen lilacs.
“Do you pray for me?”
“Well, that would mean the one I was addressing had done this to you to begin with, which I find hard to believe anybody would.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“I simply mean that asking Him to cure you—or me, or anybody—implies a personal being who arbitrarily does us this dirt. The prayer then is a plea to have a heart. To knock it off. I find the thought repulsive. I prefer thinking we’re the victims of chance to dignifying any such force with the name of Providence.”
“We’re supposed to deserve it,” she said, poking about in a box of cookies which my mother had baked and sent me, and which I had passed along to Rena.
“Not you.”
“I’m a sinner.”
“Stop giving yourself airs. You’re beginning to sound like Cora.”
“What would you do if you were God?”
“Put a stop to all this theology.”
I came over to the bed and rummaged among the cookies too. Touching her hand, I took it and raised it to my lips.
“If we could only kiss,” she said, pressing my fingers to her cheek. Under her silk pajamas I saw a neat, tilted breast, which I longed to touch. I started to sit on the bed, but footsteps in the corridor sent me ignominously back to my chair. Munching a star-shaped cookie, I sat listening to Cora’s voice greeting a nurse outside the door. Dull rage riled my emotion as I watched Rena, averting her eyes, tidy herself and the bed. I not only rose when the smiling visitor entered, but gave her my seat. I left instantly, as always seemed best under these circumstances.
But we had a beautiful afternoon the next week.
The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 9