“They don’t make them like they used to,” I overheard Omar say as he and Carol came in the front door after the early show. He was a knowledgeable critic, being by virtue of television reruns able to achieve that connoisseurship of silent masterpieces and vanished comedians usually reserved for adult intellect. I heard Mr. Howard drive on, leaving Omar to walk home after a Coke with Carol. I rose from my living-room chair and asked about the picture. It had been terrible, as measured against, sure enough, a short composite of excerpts from the old comedies run as an extra feature. We were soon on the sacred subject of the thrown pie.
“And have you ever noticed, Daddy—Omar and I were just talking about it—have you ever noticed this,” said Carol, shaking off her coat, “that after the one guy throws his pie and it’s the other guy’s turn, the first guy doesn’t resist or make any effort to defend himself? He just stands there and takes it. He even waits for it, his face sort of ready? Then when he gets it, he still waits a second before wiping it out of his eyes, doing it deliberately, kind of solemn, as though the whole thing is a—”
“Ritual,” said Omar. “You see it isn’t a fight in the sense of something in which you defend yourself, but basically like your bullfight in Spain, where it isn’t a sport either as we here think of it with our S.P.C.A. attitude—it’s a ceremony. Even the way the face is wiped off is stylized, as Carol says. First slowly the eyes are dug out with tips of the fingers, then the fingers freed with a flip, then the rest of the face is wiped down strictly according to established rules …”
I hovered anxiously about while Carol fixed their refreshments in the kitchen. She was now puffed up as a result of the Meticorten. Its side effects were a colossal appetite plus a danger of high blood pressure requiring salt-free foods. The larder was stacked with dietetic canned goods and soft drinks which the ravenous girl by now loathed. There were periodic fits of rage, during which she screamed that she would take no more Meticorten if it meant eating the disgusting foods for which I scoured New York. I knew she had gorged herself on popcorn at the movie, and from the living room I could hear the hiss of forbidden bottle caps and the sound of the icebox being raided, but I hadn’t the heart to make a scene in the presence of her friend. I retired, thankful this was the last week of the steroids.
It was a few days later that Mrs. Brodhag reported one of our best pieces of crystal missing. It was a Venetian goblet, of which I could hardly be expected not to make an issue. It had obviously been thrown out because it was broken. “I have a confession to make,” Carol said at last. “Omar did it.”
I laughed aloud, tucking this betrayal among my store of cute sayings with typical adult opacity. That evening Omar phoned, but Carol was “not at home” to him. I thought this standard feminine caprice till the sight of her in tears in her room told another story. She didn’t want him to see her in her present gross condition. “I’m as fat as—as he is!” she shouted, and picking up the box of Meticorten tablets hurled them against the wall.
Stooping to retrieve the scattered pearls, I remembered her and Omar a few years back in their more tender childhood, sitting on the doorstep making some serious effort to learn to snap their fingers; spelling words with their eyes closed, this obstacle being for some reason a special sporting condition; laughing over their first Saturday lunch in our kitchen as they sliced their bananas with scissors; gossiping about a local woman whose hair was “bleached black,” etc., etc.—all the rest of the carefully noted cunning turns. There was the story she had written for an earlier grade beginning: “The cocktail guests were an ill, assorted group.” The telegram she had sent me on my birthday, delivered over the same telephone from which it had been dispatched. Her habit of using “egghead” as an epithet for stupidity, synonymous with “knucklehead” or “pinhead,” being unable in the crystalline domain of innocence to imagine a scale of values in which intelligence was suspect. I remembered her once accusing Omar of something by screwing a stiff finger into his stomach and saying, “Yours truly did it and nobody else.”
Out of these disjointed reminders, like fire out of a jumble of brush, leaped the realization that she had not been betraying Omar at all by “confessing” that he had broken the Venetian glass. The gimmick word was indeed a measure of her loyalty: peaching on him was like peaching on herself.
As I gathered up the pearls I prayed, too, that the 6-MP, whose inauguration was scheduled for our next clinic visit, would be effective. But not too effective. It must destroy the villain without toxicity to the rest of the system. “Report any mouth sores, vomiting, or diarrhea immediately,” Dr. Scoville instructed me when the campaign was finally launched.
For three weeks I sweated out the possible tragedy of a drug that could not be tolerated. I watched with crossed fingers while she sipped her breakfast orange juice, the acid test for inflamed gums. I telephoned in her first complaint with a sick heart—which the doctor freed like a bird from a snare by saying, “Fine, if it’s no worse than that. That’s where we like to keep them, on the edge of toxicity.” Our luck held. When I took her back to the clinic, her weight was down, her blood normal. But a reviving villain reawakens in the marrow two weeks before there are any hematological signs that he is again stirring, so it was not until late that afternoon, when they telephoned the report on the sternal aspiration, that I knew we were in the clear.
“Can I take her on a vacation?” I asked, forcing my rapture from a throat still dry with fear.
“Anywhere. It’s a solid remission. We won’t need to see you for three weeks.”
We flew to California, stopping off to visit my father as Carol herself had insisted. She had seen her grandfather three or four times before, in his strange habitat, and was ready for the sights and sounds that composed it. Indeed, I read in her wide eyes something of the instinctive fascination of childhood with the phenomenon in question. She held my hand as the doors were unlocked and the first of the inhabitants shuffled by us along the corridor down which my father, rather histrionically, hobbled to greet us. A recent letter from the doctor in charge, which I had shown Carol, prepared us for the welcome.
“After he shakes my hand,” the doctor had written, “he always rubs his palm around the top of his head three times, counterclockwise, which is an unusual thing for a right-handed man. He ends up invariably by scratching the back of his head and his neck, and after completing this part of the procedure, he drums very rapidly on top of his head with the other hand. Pathetic as it is, it has its comical aspects, as I think you will agree, and it also gives me something to think about, though, I must admit, without much profit.”
After the anticipated ritual, my father embraced his granddaughter, whom he then swept into the lounge to meet some of his friends. He insisted on holding her on his knee for what, as he protested to me privately, might be the last time. The flow of complaints soon started up, threatening to bar the likelihood of poor Carol’s ever getting to meet his friends. But the friends, now semi-formally queuing up for introduction, had to be presented. One was a beanpole of a youth in a denim shirt who did nothing but grin. Another was a stocky, successful-business-man type who after the greeting excused himself on the ground that he was terribly busy. He moved from chair to chair with a telephone ending in a foot of frayed cord, for which he thanked an unseen waiter, and over which he closed deals and barked at subordinates in distant cities. The strangest of all was an old fellow who also did things on his bald dome with his hands. He would first place one hand flat on top of his head. Then he would smack the other on that, then withdraw the bottom one and place it on top, alternating this indefinitely for hours on end. The enthralled Carol finally asked him why he did that, and he answered, “If I don’t, who will?”
Taking my father out for a walk, we passed the spot where I had proposed to Carol’s mother long ago, as only I knew, who of course had never told her anything more than was necessary of her mother’s past. At last it came time to return Grandpa to the ward, but before continuing o
n our holiday, I stepped alone into the doctor’s office for a word with him. After a few comments about my father, chiefly the admission that there was nothing to be done for him, the doctor fidgeted in his swivel chair a bit and said abruptly, “How’s the little girl?”
“What do you mean?”
“I noticed the sternal puncture. And the marks on her legs speak of recent Meticorten fat.”
“She’s on 6-MP.”
“Working?”
“Great.”
“And next there’s Methotrexate, if you haven’t played that card, and a new drug coming in from Germany, as well as the FUDR they’re fiddling with clinically over here. Lots of things.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Your doctor will no doubt tell you all about them in good time. In New York you’re obviously at Westminster. Scoville, I suppose? World’s leading authority on the acute.”
“You know everything.”
“God bless you both.”
“You believe in Him?”
“And in man, which is a hell of a lot harder. Still there are times when we can, for which one is glad. Good-by.”
“Good-by.”
We flew to San Francisco, loved it, went by train to Los Angeles, and there our pleasure suddenly bogged down. We were sitting in our hotel bungalow across from the now démodé Brown Derby after a dreary day of sight-seeing, Carol brushing her hair in her bedroom and I sitting in mine hating myself for a father who knew nobody in Hollywood, but nobody, when I suddenly snapped my fingers and exclaimed, “Andy Biddle!” You remember the poor devil with the sense of humor that had made the Boss’s gripping tales excruciating and his jokes flat? He had been sacked soon after the Big Dinner and promptly gotten a job in the publicity department of a major film studio. I knew the name of the hotel where he lived and had him on the phone in two minutes. In another thirty we were tumbling out of a cab in front of his place just outside Beverly Hills.
It was a perfect night for all three of us. Andy is one of those people who converse almost solely in anecdote, and he was at the top of his form. His endless, giggling yarns about the movie capital and people he knew there kept Carol in stitches. He told us this Hollywood story:
A prominent writer got a job in a studio where his first assignment was a scenario of a best-selling novel about ancient Egypt, written by an inferior but far more popular author. He turned in his completed script and after five days or so was summoned into the producer’s office. “This dialogue,” said the livid producer. “It’s laid in ancient Egypt and you’ve got characters saying things like ‘Yes, siree.’ What kind of talk is that for ancient Egypt?” The writer, a little puzzled, asked to see the passage in question and had the script fairly flung at him. He read the dialogue that was disturbing his superior, and found he had on his hands the task of explaining that the letters in question spelled, “Yes, sire.”
Carol knew enough of costume pictures—princes throwing purses with exact amounts in them, glasses hurled into castle hearths—to get the point instantly. The curse of television! Laughter was merriest over the actor whose hand they made sure the dog would lick, as a sign of affection, by smearing beef gravy on his fingers before shooting the scene.
We came home by train, riding in a compartment but sleeping together in the lower, from which we peered out whispering and tittering at the midnight scenery. After the glimpse of Andy Biddle’s life she taunted me with “Daddy, why don’t you get a decent job?” How charming the way little girls hunch up their shoulders when they laugh, to which is often added the mannerism of inclining the head to one side, in shy apology for something brash just said or asked. Often as I lay with my grief in my arms, I thought of her mother, of whose body she had a more slender version, of whose face a purified form. With the effects of the Meticorten gone, the old poetic word “gracile” came once again to mind for the perfection, in motion or repose, of that compact roseflesh, firm in the bud. Enough has been said of the particular coloring, the honey and amber of hair and skin, to indicate that the yellow rose is meant rather than its pink sister.
She fell asleep, and as we pounded on through the continental night I tried to banish from my mind all thoughts but the single one: She will go back to school. She would push her bicycle up the long hill leading to it as usual, in order that she might coast down all the way home. Her hair would stream out behind her in a cloud of gold, and her legs would be outthrust above the whirling pedals, till the momentum had squandered itself against the upgrade leading into our drive, in which she would come to a perfectly timed stop just before the front door. I held this picture like a hoard of treasure as, breathing her fragrance about me, she turned over in my arm, jostling a few notes from a musical bear without which she would not think of going to bed. What had Cardinal Newman written in that loveliest of hymns? “I do not ask to see the distance scene; one step enough for me.”
fourteen
Soldiers going into battle or embarking on missions of peril often reckon up their chances of coming out alive on the basis of odds that there is always some mathematician around to supply. Say twenty to one. Of this game there is a further refinement. Does luck in having emerged whole from previous dangers proportionately reduce the chances of doing so again? No, say the computers, the chances are the same each time: twenty to one.
Similarly does sickness make statisticians of us all, invokers of the laws of probability. When a relapsing marrow indicated that resistance had arisen to the first drug, and the beast after six months in chains was again abroad, the successor known as Methotrexate was hurled into the breach. It too had a fifty-fifty chance of being both effective and tolerable. Did luck with the 6-MP halve our odds on being lucky again? No, the average was the same. Indeed, the fact that the one drug worked indicated the second might.
The rise of the morbid cells in the marrow, which had gone from twenty per cent to forty to fifty, was checked, slowly reversed—thirty per cent, fifteen, five, till at last a normal marrow was drawn from that breast bone to which the healers so remorselessly helped themselves. “We’re back in business again,” said Dr. Scoville, turning his old-boy smile on me like a revolving lighthouse beacon. Then he ran to catch a plane for London.
That spring my father died, and when I flew to Chicago I took Carol with me, not because I thought children should attend funerals, but in order not to spend a day away from her.
I loitered a moment among the nearby graves. Doc Berkenbosch was there now in that colony of the dead Dutch, as was old Reverend Van Scoyen, who had performed so well over Louie’s deathbed—and of course Louie. On my mother’s headstone were chiseled the words, “Awaiting the resurrection of Our Lord.” Your husband never saw your grave, Moeke; he was too steeped in melancholy to mourn you at the time, and we never brought him down for the funeral. Melancholie, as your ancestral tongue has it. Here is a branch of early lilac, and for you I always liked the old Dutch word for long-suffering: lankmoedig. I drop it on your grave like a sprig of fadeless syllables. That reminds me of a bright saying of your granddaughter’s. She once wrote a theme for school which had to be a character sketch of some member of the family, and hers began, “My long, suffering father …” Of course that was long ago and she laughs at it now, as she did at Andy Biddle’s story of the Hollywood secretary whose typescript of a dictated story synopsis began, “This is a swash, buckling story …”
Vaarwel, lankmoedig moeder, vaarwell. Melancholiek vader, vaarwel. I leave you to the first flowers, and the tender stars of May.
One evening from the television room to which Carol had wandered in her nightgown with an orange on a plate, I began to hear a voice in a documentary: “… all medical science can to conquer it. The most fruitful source of study, and the best variation of the disease in which to try out certain new remedies, is that form in which it cruises in the bloodstreams of children under the name …” My mind spun helplessly like a wheel in a rut. Sick with horror, I strolled in and stood over her, bending down to
help myself to an orange slice from the plate in her lap as on the TV screen a boy was put through familiar clinical tests for the instruction of the public. I should not have been surprised to see Dr. Scoville amble in. Were all my efforts to keep the truth from her, never to mention the name, the ceaseless censorship of word and tone, the hoarding of our secret from friends and neighbors, to collapse under this brutal mischance? “Lots of kids are worse off than you,” I observed, striking a negligent pose against the wall. I patted my coat pockets. “Keep that, I want to get my pipe.”
I shot on tiptoe to the kitchen, where I called Omar Howard. “Call Carol back. I’ll explain later. Don’t tell her I did this, but call her back instantly and keep her on the telephone as long as you can.”
“I understand, Mr. Wanderhope,” said the young scholar, who was probably watching the same program. I think Omar knew.
Keeping the pre-teen-ager on the phone for an hour was no trick at all in view of the recent birthday presents she had to report. She had gotten a new bicycle, half a dozen dresses, three pairs of shoes, two new leotards for ballet school, a crate of storybooks, assorted jewelry, a kitten, what would probably be her last doll, since she was now twelve, and a tape recorder costing two hundred dollars. It had been Mrs. Brodhag who had reined the madman in. “For God’s sake, Mr. Wanderhope, she’ll surely get suspicious. Now don’t buy her any more. In fact, take the tape recorder back, or say it’s for yourself, which it is anyway. And while I’m at it, don’t be so obvious about getting her piano pieces on it.”
The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 17