“You’re a doctor,” I said, “and you make a statement like that! What kind of a statement is that for a doctor to make?”
He smiled: “Go back and see her, George. Stay with her as long as you like. I’ll be here when you return.”
When I entered the room the nurse rose with a rustle of starched linen and I bent over the body alone. Her heart-shaped face was as white as paper, and moist; her body seemed to have shrunk until it was smaller than a child’s. If she was alive she was barely so, for she lay as though dead, as though dead for hours. Yet – I saw it – there was still life, a flicker of it in her throat. I touched her wrist as Jerome had touched it, and then – I was surprised because I was not surprised – her eyes opened and for an instant she recognized me. They closed at once and I thought I saw the ghost of a smile.
Behind me the nurse said quietly: “She’s not unconscious now, Mr. Stewart. She’s sleeping.”
So sleep had come, and with it, life.
I went to the window, saw Montreal as a sea of light, closed my eyes and remembered the many times I had looked down on the city from this same hospital. So many thousands had looked down from here and seen that sea of light.
Returning to Jerome I sat down and was silent for a long time before I spoke.
“How long were you with her?”
“Most of the afternoon.”
“And you say you did nothing?”
“There was nothing to be done. I was just there.”
“Did she know it?”
“I don’t see how that could have been possible.”
Through the windows I kept staring at that ocean of light that was Montreal. Then fear came back to me, and a sense of utter hopelessness all the harder to bear because, for an instant there had been hope.
“What’s the use of this?” I leaned forward to Jerome. “What’s the point of this? She’ll have to go through it all again. Don’t tell me there’s any hope of her heart getting better. Don’t lie to me, Jerome. Don’t pretend that to me.”
He said quietly: “No, her heart will be weaker after this. Weaker than it was before the operation. But strong enough to enable her to handle the next one.”
I groaned: “No! No, she can’t have another operation!”
“I’m afraid another will be necessary. But not before she’s picked up strength. This time she was too weak for Dr. Andrews to finish what he started. But the next one will be much easier.”
Again I groaned: “How long must this go on? What’s the sense of this? Why not let the poor woman go?”
He reached forward and his fingers closed on my wrist: “George, this isn’t cancer. She will recover.”
“For what purpose?”
“For a few more years of life.”
Again the darkness came down and roared about me and my identity as a human being almost disappeared. Out of the depths I heard my own voice say: “Do you hate her? Two more years of life! What kind of a life? Pain and fear and misery. Another embolism at any time. What kind of a life is that? Is that a life or is it a torture?”
He said nothing and neither did I for a long time. But I felt his presence, and again I felt strength come into me and I stopped being so dark.
“Everything you say is true, George,” he said finally. “It’s inherent in her condition. It always was, and she’s always known it.”
“You knew it, too,” I cried at him. “You always knew it.” Again I felt a spurt of hatred against him. “Is that why you ran away and left her?”
He shook his head: “I don’t really think I was running away from her when I went to Spain.”
“What else were you doing? Tell me that – what else?” Again that strange smile: “Actually, I think I was doing what you’re trying to do now. I was running away from myself, not from her.”
Then I became conscious of him coming very close to me even though he did not move. Suddenly he seemed to be inside me, to be me, and I became dizzy and weak.
“It will be like the world living under the bomb,” I heard my own voice say from a long distance.
“But it will be living.” Again he put out his hand and touched my wrist. “You must understand this, George, because I don’t believe you do. I don’t believe you really want to understand it. Look at her. Look at what lies ahead of her. As you are now, you couldn’t face that.” He paused. “But she can. You see, George, Kate wants to live.”
“I don’t believe she does.”
“Her organism certainly does.” He smiled again. “I’ve never seen an organism fight better. No, George, she wants to live and she must live. Her life isn’t completed yet. She knows it if you don’t. She wants to paint more pictures.” He paused again and said slowly, wonderingly: “If need be, she must be enabled to live her own death. She is one of the very, very few who can.”
Staring out at the perpetual spectacle of Montreal at night, at the curve of light along the southern shore of the St. Lawrence, at the dark curve without light that was the river itself, at the sea of light that was the city – staring out at that I felt the last of my strength go away and a cold moisture forming on my forehead.
“Is this room too hot or is something the matter with me? I’m going to faint.”
I felt his hands under my armpits and a moment later I was lying flat on a couch with him beside me.
Quietly, with almost a chuckle in his voice, Jerome said: “You must stop wanting her to die, George.”
I tried to sit up in denial, but could not. “No,” I whispered. “You must believe that. I never wanted her to die. Sometimes I think she thought I did, but no – I never, never wanted her to die.”
He said quietly: “You’re a human being, George. You must stop being so hard on yourself. You didn’t want her to die. But what is you? What is anyone? She must live a little longer in order for you to find out who you are.”
I turned away from him like a broken child and was helpless.
“You’ve been very good to her, George,” I heard him say. “No, not good enough.”
“Now you must learn to be good to yourself.”
“Oh, Jerome, I’m so tired, I’m so tired.”
After a while he said: “You’re too naked now. There’s a limit to what anyone can stand and at last you’ve found out what your limit is. Don’t worry about that. You’ll get over it. Kate is going to get better. She’ll help you.”
“I should be helping her.”
“You have helped her, and you will help her.” Then he said: “Listen carefully to this, George. You’re too unprotected. You must learn to build a shell around yourself like a snail and every now and then you must creep inside of it. Two days inside and you’ll come out able to face anything. Kate knows all about that. She’s known it since she was a little girl.”
Slowly I turned on the couch and his face swam into focus and again I had this feeling that he was within me, that he was actually myself.
“A shell around myself? What do you mean?”
“Think how Kate does it. You recognize the symptoms, don’t you? She’s always done it. She crawls away inside of herself for a few days and you feel as if you don’t exist. You’ve resented that, haven’t you? I know I did. You panic. You feel rejected. You resent her. And then you’re ashamed of resenting her.” A pause and another of those strange smiles: “Don’t you?”
Again I felt the sweat start and I said: “I’ve done all I could, all I could and I’m exhausted.” Then I whispered: “Yes, it’s true what you said. What do you mean – a shell?”
He looked at me and suddenly his face became absolutely clear, his eyes all-seeing like Rembrandt’s, and he said with an absolute simplicity: “Death. The shell is death. You must crawl inside of death and die yourself. You must lose your life. You must lose it to yourself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When things become intolerable – and for you they’ve become intolerable now – you must die within yourself. Your soul is making your
body revolt against what you think you have to bear. You can only live again by facing death. Then you outface it. You must say to yourself, and mean it when you say it: ‘What difference does it make if she dies? What difference does it make if I die? What difference does it make if I am disgraced? What difference does it make if everything we’ve done means nothing?’ You must say those things and believe them. Then you will live.”
I lay still, but my sweat had ceased to run; I lay still, but my nerves had ceased to scream; I lay still, but the room and Jerome remained in focus; I lay still, but I was no longer in a blackness shot through with fiery lights.
“You see, George, I’ve been through all this. Not once but many times. So have millions of people. Each one of us is everybody, really. What scares us is just that. We want so much to be ourselves, but the time comes when we find we’re everybody, and everybody is afraid. That’s when you must die within yourself. Think of your life as lived. Think of yourself as annihilated. Then death won’t matter. Then fear will go away because there will be nothing left to fear. I learned that in Auschwitz from a Jewish rabbi who also knew some medicine. I learned how to do it, too. A few gifted Jews seem to be the only people these days who know how to be Christians.”
Again I lay in stillness and for a long time nothing was said. He did not touch me, he was just there. And now I felt he had ceased being me. I felt as though in a few minutes I would be myself again.
“Then what I’m afraid of is death?” I paused and forced the words out: “Not her death, but mine? ”
He smiled at me: “No, I don’t think so. I think what you’re afraid of isn’t death at all. I think it’s life.”
When he said this I was astonished: not so much by the words but because of a mysterious force which made the words seem the most important I had ever heard. I had said to myself before that perhaps I was afraid of life. It was an old cliché – to be afraid of life. Now I looked at him and I knew it was more than a cliché.
“Not of life with her, George. Of life without her.”
I looked away: “Yes,” I whispered.
“You married her for safety against life. So did I. So do most people when they marry – they marry for safety against life. Now Kate is dying. Yes, I don’t deny that. Most of us die slowly for the last twenty-five years of our lives, but she’s dying rapidly. Let her live her death without being afraid for you, for how you’ll fare afterwards. You’ve been wonderful for her so far. I helped her when she was younger, and you’ve looked after her since. And she’s looked after us both. That’s all marriage is, I suppose. I went away. I ran away from myself. I destroyed what I used to be. I almost destroyed her. But you don’t have to do that. I’m too late, but you aren’t.”
He seemed to go away from me, to go out of me and away from me, and I was stronger and rose and with my back to him I stared at the city. That enormous panorama – she would live to see it and she would love it again.
Then I thought of so many things we had seen and done and loved together: our garden in the country, the first green shoots in the spring, the autumn stillness over the lake. I thought of the unborn pictures in her mind. I remembered her long, her almost endless struggle, and I remembered how thankful she had been, after every assault on her life, to be able to go on living. I thought of Sally and longed for her to be here. Sally must see Jerome again and he must see her. It would be all right, Sally and this new Jerome; it was necessary and absolutely right that she should meet him, and when she did meet him, she would know again that she was his daughter. I thought of Jerome as a boy, not even knowing his own name, coming down that river to the sea in the canoe at night. Who was he? I remembered how this thought had haunted him. I remembered that amazing afternoon in November when he had paddled me on the lake in the Laurentians and told me his story. ‘I don’t know who I am,’ he had said. Now I was none too sure who I was. What is a name after all? What is it to be the son of known parents? They seldom know you, or you them. All of us is Everyman and this is intolerable unless each of us can also be I. What is the struggle worth? How measure a thing like that in terms of ordinary value? Van Gogh painted alone and in despair and in madness and sold one picture in his entire life. Millions struggled alone, unrecognized, and struggled as heroically as any famous hero. Was it worthless? I knew it wasn’t.
Behind me I heard Jerome say: “Jesus said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He died in order to prove it and He rose in order to prove it. His spirit rose. He died in order to live. If He had not died, He would not have lived.” Silence for a long time. “Kate will live, and so will you.”
Another long silence and after a while I left him and went into Catherine’s room. The nurse met me with a smile.
“She’s sleeping peacefully,” she said.
“Has Dr. Christopher seen her?”
“He’ll be up any time now, but it’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about now, Mr. Stewart. Absolutely nothing. She’s going to get better. I promise you.”
I returned to the sunroom and found Jerome as I had left him. But almost immediately I knew he was not as I had left him. He had gone away from me, completely out of me, and the feeling I had was very mysterious. He had been me a moment before, but now he was himself, and I was myself, and we were like strangers. In response to this change we both became formal.
“Will you be staying in town for long?” I asked him.
He shook his head: “No, I’m leaving inside a few days. Do you remember Arthur Lazenby? Somehow he tracked me down and phoned me from Ottawa this morning. He’s finding me a job out west – or maybe it’s up north. There seems to be some new town they’re building out there and they want a doctor. My hands” – he held them out and for the first time I noticed those splayed fingers – “aren’t much good for difficult operations. But they can do routine ones, and I’m still able to work. No, I won’t come back here again, George.”
I felt alone when he said this, but not afraid of being alone.
I said to him: “You must meet Sally before you go. She’s a lovely girl. I think she’s going to get married this year.”
He smiled: “Yes, I’ll meet her if she wants to meet me. Kate told me I should.”
“You’re still her father, Jerome.”
“Yes, I’m still her father.” A smile and his hand went out:
“Good-bye, George.”
“Good-bye, Jerome.”
I left him and went down in the elevator. When I stepped out on the ground floor I met Jack Christopher, who had been talking on the house phone to the chief nurse on the floor where Catherine lay. The tight parentheses around his straight mouth yielded to a sheepish smile, and for the first time since I had known Jack, I thought of him as younger than myself.
“You’ve met him?” he asked me, and there was anxiety in his voice.
“Yes, I’ve met him. He’s still up there.”
Jack continued to look sheepish: “Listen, George, you don’t mind this, do you?”
“Not at all.”
“He’s still a wonderful doctor. He got in touch with me and – well, we consulted. There are dozens with more science than he has, and he’s out of touch with a lot – but he still has that mysterious thing, George. He has it more than he ever had it. Don’t ask me to explain.”
“I don’t ask you to explain. He’s got it. I know. He told me he didn’t do anything, though.”
“Of course he didn’t.” Jack became professional again. “There was nothing medical he could have done. But I’m glad he was with her this afternoon, just the same.”
“So am I.”
“It’s wonderful she’s going to recover. I didn’t –” Jack, embarrassed by such a show of feeling, half-guilty because this whole situation outraged his professional sense, turned and went into the elevator. I was glad to be quit of him.
For something new and strange had begun to happen to me. Light seemed to be shining inside of me when I stepped outside and walked down the dri
veway toward the city. The weather had turned still warmer, and on the precipices of the mountain tiny rivulets of icy water were making musical sounds. Romeo Pronovost had been right: winter was ending and this night was lovely with the first sounds of spring, and where is spring more gaily virginal, colder or more fresh than in this northern land where it comes when there still is snow? The soft air was as sweet as a healthy childhood, and the sky was not merely a night sky but a radiance illuminating my fatigue. Such a sky I had not recognized since I was ten years old, and I remembered its wonder and how I had almost wept on account of it. The chaos which had been dark within me for days had disappeared and my soul was like a landscape with water when the fog goes and the moon comes out and all the promontories are clear and still. The whole city shone and seemed to have a voice and I heard it, the voice of them all, the lights shaking and standing up, the sky opening to receive that volume of sound and color from underneath, all of it glad and good. As I walked along the familiar street chipped out of the rock of Mount Royal, with the city luminous below and the sky luminous above, there was music within me, so much that I myself was music and light, and I knew then that what she had upheld from childhood was not worthless, that she was more than a rat in a trap, that the loves she had known and inspired had not cancelled one another out, were not perishable absolutely, would not entirely end with her but would be translated into the mysterious directions of the spirit which breathed upon the void. I reached home, found Sally there, kissed her forehead and told her that all was well. Then with that music in my mind, Bach’s music, I fell asleep and lay motionless until eight in the morning when I woke to see Catherine’s painting on the wall, its colors singing, and the joy she had when she painted it was mine again.
EPILOGUE
I could end here because my story is told. But if this has been a story into which the reader was led gently, I think it may also be one out of which he should be led factually.
As Jerome predicted, Catherine underwent a second operation. It was performed in mid-March and again she rose to it like a champion. Dr. Andrews did a perfect job in record time, and when it was over her convalescence was so rapid it amazed us all. Once again Jerome had been right: she was bound to live because her life was not completed.
Watch that Ends the Night Page 43