Her heart ached for him, for she knew how confused his sudden acquisition of a father had left him. Completely the opposite of Elisabeth, he was so fierce and yet capable of being so tender. Elisabeth, on the other hand, was simply a casually happy, naturally good-natured child. Had she been anything else, her father’s fixation on Francis would have hurt her cruelly, but as it was she seldom protested over the special attention Francis received.
Surprisingly, Francis was very sweet with his sister. The two of them had been thrown so much together that often one knew what the other was thinking. Janice smiled, remembering seeing them in the garden together just yesterday, their heads almost touching as he tried patiently to teach her how to play tick-tack-toe on his school slate. It was hard to hurt Elisabeth, but Francis was so vulnerable that it almost seemed as if he had no defenses at all, and a careless word would send him wounded and sulking into solitude for the rest of the day.
The late afternoon sun was slanting in a sitting-room window when she rose restlessly and went to the front door to look out. The shadows of the oak and eucalyptus trees were long on the dirt road running by the house. She stood and stared as she saw the shadows slide over David, walking slowly up the road. Her mind refused to take in what she was seeing, and it seemed as if she watched him for hours as first the sun struck him and then the shadow. A numbness came over her as she could deny her eyes no longer, a short circuit of nerves and heart as much as of perception, for David and his clothing were soaking wet, and he was carrying Francis in his arms, the boy’s hair plastered to his head.
David came to the low gate in front of the house and automatically bumped it open with his knee as they all did. His face was a mask, absolutely without expression, and as he neared her she realized that Francis’s eyes were half open in a sightless stare.
“Oh no,” she moaned and clutched at the doorsill as David brushed by her still without speaking and put Francis gently down on the sofa.
“What happened?” she managed shakily, torn between going to the boy to see if he was really dead and standing rooted, afraid to know.
“He didn’t wait for me,” David said in a dead voice. “He went to the pond to sail his ship by himself. There was no one else there.” He paused, and his face slowly turned from stone into rage. “Goddammit,” he shouted suddenly, “haven’t I borne enough? What do You want of me?” He looked up and raised his fist. “I hate You, God. Do You hear me? I hate You!” He turned and swept some ornaments and a vase off the mantelpiece sending them smashing into shards on the floor. “I hate You, I hate You!” he yelled, and picking up a chair smashed it to pieces on the wall, bringing a framed painting crashing down. Wild-eyed, he ran then to the window and shockingly plunged his fist through it in a spray of shattered glass. He went about the room picking up and throwing whatever came to his hand, already bloodied by the broken glass of the window. Janice fled.
Not even thinking of the bicycle or of Nefertiti, she picked up her skirts and ran through the bars of sunlight and shadow until she could run no more and had to content herself with trotting awkwardly until she came to Rob’s house. She had no idea of where he might be; it was instinct alone that took her. Panic-stricken, she beat on the door for what seemed a long time. Miraculously she heard footsteps then and an impatient muttering, and in seconds she was in his arms, weeping and clutching at him.
“Jan! What’s the matter? For God’s sake, tell me!”
“He’s dead, Francis is dead,” she wept. “Oh Rob, tell me it isn’t true. When I thought he was dead in the pool below the waterfall, you brought him back to me, remember? Bring him back now, Rob, please, please bring him back.”
She wrung her hands and sobbed helplessly as he hitched up Hippocrates and lifted her in. On the way back, she gave him an incoherent account, only part of which he could even understand. He said afterward that when he saw the sitting room completely wrecked and smeared with blood, he thought at first that David had murdered the child that lay so pale and cold and still on the sofa, his familiar sailor suit clinging damply to the small body.
Rob touched the cold cheek briefly and threw one of the torn-down curtains over him. He grabbed Janice by the shoulders and shook her. “You’ve got to tell me what happened, Jan.”
Once again she blurted out the story, this time just clearly enough so that he realized that David had gone berserk after he had brought the dead child home. He reached in his bag.
“Here, take a good swallow.”
The medicine was bitter, and she made a face, but from then on she was able to control her tears and walk dry-eyed through the eons of hurting time that the afternoon and evening contained.
“I would give you more, but I’m going to need you,” Rob said. “Where do you think he is?”
“I don’t know,” she said hopelessly. “Maybe he ran out, maybe he’s upstairs.”
“Well, let’s look first.”
He wasn’t in the bedroom, which hadn’t been touched, and they went down the hall to his office. They found him lying face down on the floor, the empty brandy bottle by his hand.
“How full was the bottle?” Rob asked her. “Do you remember?” He pulled up David’s eyelid.
“Maybe three-quarters. We — we had a drink Christmas Eve, brandy flips Christmas morning, and another drink or so on New Year’s Eve. That’s all. Oh, and Double had one New Year’s Day, remember?”
“Sounds to me like nearer a half or even just a third, which is a blessing. If it had been full, he would have killed himself, gulping it down like that.”
The office too was a shambles, the chair tipped over, torn paper all over the room, the curtains yanked down and lying in an untidy bunched heap on the floor. She helped Rob lay him on the bed, and while he was examining the unconscious man, she absently began to pick up the papers. Something about them caught her attention, and she saw that they were drawings and plans of some kind. Of the ship he was to be in charge of at the yard? Instead of throwing the scraps away, she put them all on the desk.
Rob bandaged David’s injured hand and stood up. “That’s all I can do right now. Much as I hate to, I’m going to leave you. If he wakens, give him two tablespoons of this — it’s a sleeping medicine.” He peered at her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Can you hold together, love? I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Someone has to take care of things for you. Let’s see, I’ll tell Esperanza to keep Elisabeth overnight, send telegrams to your folks and his — I know where your address book is downstairs — and take Francis to be laid out. Is Weber’s all right with you?” When she nodded dully, he went on, “I think the sooner he’s buried, the better. How about late tomorrow morning?”
Again she nodded, not really comprehending what he was saying. Everything seemed to have happened so fast that the enormity of it hadn’t really hit her yet. With Rob gone and David unconscious, she would have to think about it all, wouldn’t she? No, she couldn’t. Somehow she would have to put it off until tomorrow. Tomorrow she would waken and find that nothing had happened after all. That was it, keep from thinking and then tomorrow it would be all right. Her mind clutched at this belief and clung to it limpetlike.
“You’re sure you’ll be all right?” Rob sounded anxious.
She nodded and tried a little smile, but it wouldn’t come. All she could do was to nod and nod.
He patted her shoulder helplessly. “The laudanum is in your bedroom, if you need any more, but don’t take more than you have to. Can I trust you?”
Again the mindless, wordless nod.
He patted her again and was gone. What would she do now to keep herself from thinking? There must be something. A book? She couldn’t comprehend it. Start another journal? That would force her to think. Her eyes fastened on the desk. Those papers, that was it. She would glue them all together and David would be so pleased he hadn’t lost them after all. Just then she heard the front door slam. She couldn’t help herself; she went to her bedroom and looked out the window in time
to see Rob put a bundle still wrapped in the curtain into the back of the buggy. No, she didn’t see that at all, she couldn’t have, because it didn’t happen. The glue, she thought desperately, where had she put the glue?
When Rob returned later, he found her meticulously gluing scraps of drawing onto a large sheet of heavy drafting paper. Though she hadn’t finished, it was easy to see that the drawing, finely executed, was of a steamship such as he had never seen before, a passenger liner with three rakish stacks and sleek lines. At the top of the legend in artful letters were the words THE PLEIADES OCEAN LINERS, and underneath, THE ALCYONE.
Chapter VIII
The following morning she woke, not to the discovery that it had all been a bad dream, but to the dreary reality of loss. Something strange had happened to time: each minute stretched out into an eternity of pain. David, deathly pale and obviously suffering physically as well as mentally, stood silently beside her as two laborers shoveled dirt onto the small coffin. It was another raw day, and the handful of mourners shivered inside their coats. Besides Rob and Double, Esperanza and her boys were there, Alex and Melanie Winters, and the Bartolis. Esperanza was weeping almost hysterically, but David and Janice stood side by side dry-eyed and stony-faced, both of them far beyond tears.
Afterward they all went to the house together, where Alex had had a funeral repast catered. Earlier that morning, Rob had managed to find two of Esperanza’s neighbors — Esperanza herself was prostrate with grief, as if Francis had been one of her own — to clean and straighten the sitting room, and a glazier to replace the window. He had even bought new curtains so that the old ones wouldn’t be a reminder of the one that had wrapped the child’s still form. Elisabeth was at the home of one of Esperanza’s married sons for the funeral, but she was brought back for the meal. Rob thought that it would help Janice to have the child to look after.
Partway through the meal, David excused himself and went upstairs. Janice decided not to follow him. That morning they had had so little communication that she knew her presence would mean nothing to him. When everyone but Rob and Double had left, however, she asked Rob to look at him and give him something if he needed it. She and Double sat downstairs for what seemed like a long time, staring at each other awkwardly. Elisabeth was out in back listlessly pushing herself on one of the swings. She didn’t really understand what had happened and querulously asked for Francis over and over.
“Jan, I think you’d better come up,” Rob called down the stairs.
What more could happen? she thought dully as she climbed up step by step. David was lying with a blanket over him on the bed in his office, his eyes closed. Then she realized that his teeth were chattering and he was shaking as if with a severe chill. She looked questioningly at Rob, unable to take in this new disaster.
“I think it’s malaria,” he said. “You remember that Burns said he had had it. I’ve only had one case before; we don’t get it much around here.”
“What does it mean?” she asked stonily.
He shrugged. “It probably means that he is having a recurrence that will happen once in a while and last for a day or so. During that time, of course, he’ll be miserable, burning up at one time and freezing the next. About all anyone can do is to sponge him down when he’s hot and cover him up when he’s cold. The hospital has some quinine. If you don’t think you can handle it, I’ll have him put in the hospital. One good thing — at least it’s not catching.”
“No,” she said wearily, “I’ll take care of him. But what will I do with Elisabeth? And my patients?”
“Inge can take care of your patients — the responsibility will do her good. What about boarding Elisabeth with Esperanza? She ought to be over her hysterics by this time. Or with Esperanza’s married son. Anyway, I’ll take care of it.”
“Rob, I don’t know what I would have done without you. I just can’t seem to visualize things, to make decisions.”
He touched her cheek gently. “Just try to outlive it, that’s all. If I can do anything else —”
She shook her head and tried again to smile.
“I’ll stop back by later with the quinine. Don’t be frightened, he won’t die.”
From then on she was too busy to think about anything. She couldn’t even have said when Rob came back briefly with the quinine. The chill that finally shook him until his bones rattled gave way to fever that made him burning hot to touch. He begged for water and more water, raving out of his head, most of it about when he was in the Philippines. It was like a great infected boil in his mind that burst in a gout of pus. She heard about Manuel of the bird songs bleeding to death in the dirt outside Manila; MacArthur’s young aide whose face became a mask of blood; a confusing story that she finally decided must be about two separate hospitals, one for insurrectionists in which he himself was doing the cutting and sewing and one in Manila where he saw Stephen dying; flushing guerrillas in the bamboo and cogon grass; Willie and the four black naked bodies hanging from a tree; the terrible journey to Palinan; shooting two drunken American soldiers; and of course over and over Valerie and more Valerie and even something about a woman named Ofelia. He shouted and swore and threw himself about, clean out of his head.
At last she saw the sweat come out first on his forehead in great round drops that stood out from his face, then on his chest and the rest of his body until it was running off him like bathwater. Rob came in with the quinine, and the next series of chill, fever, and sweat was much less severe. He went on talking, though, as if he mustn’t stop, and relived scenes from his childhood, including the episode with Christian and Kate, for which she pitied him, and then the war again, and finally he returned to begging God to stop punishing him.
“I killed him, you should have taken me,” he kept saying. “I was the one who abandoned him, I was the one who should have died.” He opened his eyes that looked into a place that no one but he could see. “He lay face down on the brown leaves at the bottom as if he were sleeping. I wouldn’t even have known he was there except for the ship, rocking and rocking all by itself on the far shore. Would God it had been me down there asleep, it should have been me …”
The next time he sweated and she changed the towels and bedding under him, she could stay awake no longer, and she sat in the chair by his bed and took his hand and slept. When she woke, the candle had burned out, but the room was light with morning. David was lying looking at her, his hand still in hers.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a weak voice. “Rob should have taken me to the hospital.”
She let go his hand. “You couldn’t help it. Actually, I’m almost glad it happened, because I know more about you than I ever did before.”
“You don’t mean —” He looked panicked.
“Yes, David, you did a lot of talking, talking you should have been doing to me all along.”
His eyes dropped. “I suppose I talked about Valerie, too.”
“You did, but —”
“Then you know I killed Francis.”
“I know nothing of the kind.”
“I wanted to stay with Valerie, did I tell you that? I wanted to leave you and the children and live with her, marry her, whatever way she would have me. Did I say that, too?”
“Yes, David, you did.”
“God or Fate or whatever you want to call it — my grandfather called it the Wendigo — has given me my wish. I’ve lost Francis and I’m going to lose you and Elisabeth. You can’t stay with me knowing all this.”
She took his hand again. “Oh, but I can and I will. That is, if with Francis gone you still want us.”
“Why, Janice? Once upon a time I would have said you’d stick by me no matter what I did, but I came back to someone else. When I saw how independent you’d become, it frightened me. I knew that somehow you would find out and then you and the children would be gone. Believe me, I would much rather it had been me who drowned.”
“Francis’s dying was an accident, David. You have to believe that. Abou
t a year before you came home, we went on a picnic in the hills and Francis was lost. I was sure he was dead, and I believed then that it was some terrible kind of retribution on the part of God. Later on I realized that I was being foolishly self-centered. When God allows the murder and mutilation of the innocent that go hand in hand with war, why should He care if you and I find solace outside our sterile marriage? What happens must happen without Him.”
His eyes widened. “You and I?”
“Don’t like it, do you? Women aren’t supposed to take lovers, only men. Well, let me tell you, I don’t look at it as a sin for either one of us, considering the arid relationship you and I had before you went away. I’m not going to let that happen again. Rather than allow myself to be destroyed like that another time, I’ll leave you. My lover is a fine, honorable man who wanted very much to marry me, and I’m not ashamed of any of it, just to get things straight between us.”
“I’ll give you your freedom if you wish it, Janice.”
“Before the death of Francis, I’d have said yes. Now we have just one thing in favor of our marriage, but it’s an important one. Not anyone else, not your Valerie or my lover or anyone, can share the grief you and I feel for our son. There is not one other human being in the whole world who can fully understand or know what we are experiencing. It is the first really mutual feeling we have ever had, David, and it could be a beginning. In that sense I would like his death not to have been in vain. Are you willing to try to build something worthwhile on this disaster? We are going to have to take one step at a time, you know, and come to like each other and respect each other before we can learn to love each other.”
He looked into her eyes. “I’ll try, Janice. At times I’ll be a brute to live with, you know that, but I’ll try.”
That night they received a telegram from Christian that he was arriving alone. When they met him at the station after his four-day journey across the country, he looked even more worn and tired than the year before, Janice thought. How he must dread these disasters that he kept encountering here. She remembered how close he and Francis had been, and how they had joked with nautical terms, and how Francis had been heartbroken when he left.
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