by Paula Fox
“Listen, you’ve seen the way these people stare at us? That man at the last gas station, he looked at you like you were trash.”
After three days and two nights of steady driving, despair caught up with her as though it had been traveling on the road behind them all the while, waiting for this moment a hundred miles or so out of Houston. She couldn’t believe she was going anywhere, or had come from anyplace. It was vital they go into this place together. She was suddenly enraged, deaf to White’s pleas of caution. He followed, reluctantly, a few steps behind her into the cool musty long room where a few old men perched along a narrow bar. The bartender himself was bent over arthritically, his turtle head thrusting forward out of his shoulders.
“Take your hat off, boy!”
Annie whirled and saw Mason White, his overseas cap still on his head, backing toward the door.
“He’s a soldier!” she cried. “He’s been in the war!”
“We got different ideas about that,” squeaked the bartender. The old men stared blankly at her. “If you want something, you can have it. But he gotta take his hat off. And we’re outa the meat loaf. I got some ham, that’s all.”
Mason White shook his head slightly. They went back to the car, hearing behind them the sibilance of ancient broken laughter.
She wept a few tears, noting that the chicken was now scratching futilely at the hard yellow earth near the car. “Look at that damned fool!” she said. Mason White’s hands were on the wheel. “All right,” she said, wiping her face with her hand. “We’ll go.”
It was early evening when they arrived in Houston. Throughout the colored section to the city, there seemed to be an extraordinary number of policemen.
“Somebody must have said something too loud,” said White. It was his first joke.
The Whites lived in a large ramshackle house, a small wilderness of tall grass around the porch steps. As he cut the motor, three women appeared in the doorway. Mason White bounded up the steps. The women clung to him, one of the younger ones looking over his shoulder at Annie with unconcealed amazement.
“Good-by, Sergeant,” she called from the window.
“No, no. You come in and eat with us,” Mason White cried. Then, turning to his family, “She drove me all the way.”
One of his sisters was touching the stripes on his jacket, and her small head with its marcelled black waves nodded in Annie’s direction as though she were in favor of this odd notion. White came back down the steps and took her arm firmly in his hand.
“After what you did for me—please stay. Mama?”
“Oh, yes!” Mrs. White said, smiling at her daughters. “She has to stay.”
At the dinner table, Mrs. White’s face was turned always toward her son. She passed plates of rice and meat to him, watching his mouth as he spoke, enthralled by the motion of his lips, in a dream of welcoming. The sisters talked about their work, the hospital, their neighbors, breaking into giggles when they looked at their brother. “You all grew up so,” he said, and they giggled at that too. They stared furtively at Annie; she tried to say something; they nodded in agreement before she’d finished, hurrying her words out of existence.
Would she stay on for the night? Mrs. White asked.
No, no, she had to push on, she said. Mrs. White began to thank her. There was an almost extravagant emphasis on Annie’s bountifulness which she experienced as some unconscious irony on the old woman’s part, a kind of pushing her away, back into her own place.
White walked out to the car with her, telling her how to get out of Houston.
“You going to drive all night now?”
“You let me sleep most of today. I think I can make it.”
“New York,” he said.
“New York,” she echoed. “Then, I’m going to Europe.”
“Everybody’s moving on now. Except me. I’ve been moving on for years, all my life it seems.”
She opened the door. A paper bag in which she’d brought him sandwiches lay on the floor near the brake pedal.
“Let me get that,” he said, leaning forward to pluck out the bag.
“We marched through Texas,” he said.
They shook hands. She waited a moment to watch Mason White run back up to the porch where his mother and sisters waited, their arms entwined, their brown faces so still against the gray shingle, like a photograph pasted in an album.
She drove most of that night, singing or talking to herself, until the morning sun’s first rays struck her across the eyes, and she pulled over to the side of the road and slept till midday. Later, at twilight, she just missed a dead cow, its head rising stiffly from the ditch along the highway, and an hour later, she followed a drunken driver in an old Ford, careening from one side of the road to the other, passing him at last in a desperate burst of speed. That night, utterly spent, she paid two dollars for a bed in a log cabin, too tired to care about the stained mattress ticking, the brutal bed springs, the dripping of a tap in a stained basin hanging from the wall.
She was wearing the sweater Theda had given her, and a raincoat on top of that, on the February morning she drove up the Pulaski skyway and saw, in the distance, the towers of New York City.
Chapter 19
Annie saw that winter had already played havoc with the driveway. Bumping up the hill toward the darkened house—could the old man have gone to sleep so early in the evening?—she recalled the ravages of those long-ago winters when ice and snow dislodged, then tumbled stones into the gutters, making the road nearly impassable; a car would lift and fall as the wheels gripped and lost traction, then slide and swing abruptly sideways, its front wheels spinning in mud, its back ones caught precariously on the uneven surfaces of rocks. Uncle Greg must have given up; the road had never been as bad as this. She opened her window the better to see, and poked out her head. For an instant, the air took her breath away, Hudson Valley winter air with its lung-drowning dampness, summer’s humidity gone dead and inhuman, and she felt on her forehead and nose stinging particles of hard snow as though the block of the invisible sky was being chipped away.
The frozen fields spread out on either side of the road, black where clumps of evergreens sat in their pools of darkness, faintly luminous with snow beneath the leafless branches of deciduous trees that her grandfather had planted in another century.
The car lifted its snout, wheels spun, the motor coughed, and she gained a level area where the road circled the house. A faint light flickered from an upstairs bedroom. He was not dead!
During her first three days in New York, she had phoned Uncle Greg several times, morning and evening, from the Murray Hill Hotel where she had taken a room.
When, at five this afternoon, there still had been no answer, she determined to do what she knew she must do, to drive up to Nyack, to discover the corpse.
She had listened too long to the ringing of the phone, gazing across the inner court of the hotel to a window facing her own. There, next to a half-emptied bottle of milk, she had seen a pair of long white feet resting on the sill. Was that person dead too? Lying on the floor of his room with his feet so neatly, so madly crossed, next to the remains of his last meal? The hotel was not as her father had once described it to her. The grandeur she had imagined, and which she had decided to enjoy for a few days no matter what the cost—at least if it was within reason—was gone, leaving only whispers of itself in the cavernous rooms, the marble bathrooms, the ragged faded carpeting along its dusty corridors. The lobby was full of old people staggering with age, dismayed by drunks, starting nervously at the clang of elevator doors. Here and there, vaguely criminal-looking men in tight blue or gray suits surreptitiously ground out their cigarettes on the floor.
She drew up before the familiar square porch. As she strode across the old boards, the bare limbs of a lilac bush next to the steps rattled noisily. The door was unlocked. She walked into the entrance hall, then stood in the dank silence for a moment. But there was no need for caution; she remembered where
everything was, and moved with sure steps toward the stairs, past the tables, the chairs, the coat rack, her hand brushing the back of the bronze lion as she began to climb upwards, feeling the thick dust on her fingers. A curious and irritating sound suddenly struck her ears, a series of steady pings. Then a heavier plunking, then a hollow thunk.
In the upstairs hall, she saw, straight ahead, the room from where the flickering light had emanated which she had glimpsed from the car. She walked quickly to it. Covering most of the floor was an assortment of receptacles, pots, pails, bowls, vases, pans of all shapes, and into them, with merciless regularity, dripped water from the ceiling. She stepped into the room. The flame of a candle swerved at the draft she caused, she swung to her left and collided against the mahogany sides of the sleigh bed. In it, asleep or unconscious, lay Uncle Greg, a faded green quilt drawn up over his chest. One hand gripped a corner of the quilt; there were spots of wax on the wrinkled fingers. She tried a light switch. The electricity was off.
She touched his face where the white stubble of beard grew up into his cheek. His eyelids fluttered, closed.
“Uncle Greg?”
Water dripped on her hair. She looked up at the ceiling where dark circles marked the holes in the plaster. The roof had triumphed over him at last.
In his face were the dark circles of his closed eyes. Only the wax-marked fingers of his hand seemed alive, although the hand too was unmoving, yet it had gathered the quilt and was holding it still, an echo of force in the knuckled fist. It was as though all the life in him had been carried away except there. But his eyes opened again—she had started away, to the phone. Someone had to be called, the hospital, the police. She paused, wished his eyes were still shut, not staring up at the ceiling with such puzzlement.
“Uncle Greg?” she whispered.
The head barely turned. The mouth, as though dried shut, opened unevenly, the flesh of his lips sticking here and there. For a moment, he looked at her with the same uncomprehendingness that he had looked at the leaking ceiling. Then his mouth stretched slightly; it was a try at a smile.
“You’re sick. I’m going to phone the hospital.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “I’m sick now.”
“There’s no heat.”
“Everything went,” he said, attaining his voice as though he’d climbed a mountain and found it at the top, a thin whistle of a voice.
“I’ll be right back.”
“No. Wait. I don’t know about the phone.”
“It’s working. I called you from the city.”
“Yes. That must be it. I thought I heard it ring. But I thought it was part of a dream. I’ve been dreaming.”
He released the quilt and hid his hand; he was trying to sit up.
“Don’t. Don’t move,” she said.
“Annie?”
Had he only now recognized her?
“Do you remember Helen Sears?”
She thought he was going to tell her of the old times, of the Sears family who had lived a few miles away, of the fire started by old Ephraim Sears fifteen years ago when he threw a kerosene lamp at his wife, a woman who had abjured speech in favor of her hands with which she pummeled her husband, her children, her sisters, her own father while he had been alive. The house had burned to the ground. Annie remembered Uncle Greg’s stunned horror as he told her that no one had survived except the old woman and her daughter, Helen, forgetting for once that Annie was only a child and should not hear of such things. Smelling of smoke, his hands covered with soot, he’d spewed out the story in the downstairs hall, then tried, later, to retell it and soften it. But it had been too late. She’d sneaked to the still-smoking ruin the next day, walking there directly from school, wondering if old Ephraim’s bones were still somewhere among the charred wet boards. And there had been Helen’s young brother, burned alive too.
“Uncle Greg—”
“No, no, no.” He was abruptly cranky, scowling. “It’s Helen I want you to call. Not the hospital. She’s got a nursing home. That’s where I’ll go. I have this hernia. That’s all. It’s why I haven’t been able to move.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Not hungry.” He sighed terribly. His eyes closed. She put her hand on his head. His hair was wet.
She made her way back down the stairs. He was so wasted! How long had he gone without food? She lit a match. Out of the dense dark, the bronze lion seemed to shake his bronze mane as he reached a paw toward the waiting mouse. She saw the lines where her fingers had touched the lion through the dust. The phone was there as it had always been.
It was easy. The place was simply called the Sears Nursing Home. Miss Sears herself came directly to the phone. Yes, of course, she remembered Annie.
“Uncle Greg is terribly sick. I think he’s not eaten for days. The ceiling is nothing but holes, and the snow is melting right over his bed.”
“Can you bring him here?”
“I’m pretty sure he can’t walk. He says it’s a hernia. But he looks almost dead.”
There was a pause. Then Helen said rapidly, “A hernia! These old maids! I told him a year ago he ought to be examined by a doctor. He promised…of course he didn’t go. Oh, these old men! They won’t get undressed, you know, not even in front of a man. That’s no hernia. I should have told him then what I thought it was. My fault…all my fault. I should have gone to see him. But this place wears me out, just wears me.down to the ground. I’ll send our ambulance there. It’ll be about an hour. The driver is having his dinner. Make him a cup of tea, if he’s got any.”
“There’s no electricity.”
“Oh, God! They’re all alike! No electricity! Do what you can then. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Annie sat on the bed and held his scaly old hand. He slept; he woke. Sometimes he spoke. She told him she was hoping to go to England soon. He simply looked at her. She saw it meant nothing to him.
“I have to buy new tools,” he said suddenly. “My hedge clippers couldn’t cut butter. If things aren’t scarce, they cost so much! Oh, I could fly to Jericho! The whole world makes me so riled! You see how the town looks? They spit on the sidewalks and don’t care about anything. When I think of how my dear father loved this place!” Abruptly his eyes closed. His breathing was so heavy, as though he were drawing the air up out of his lungs with a bucket, not enough air for one decent breath.
They came at last, and wrapped him in the quilt and lifted him to a stretcher, one holding a flashlight as they went down the stairs. Annie blew out the candle. In the darkness of the room, the water dripped ceaselessly into the pots. By morning, they would surely overflow.
The front door latch was broken. She brought the door to, watching the ambulance attendant cover the old man with a pink blanket. As she went to her car, she tripped over the quilt, already water-soaked where it had been tossed to the ground.
At the nursing home, Helen Sears was waiting. She nodded to Annie and gave directions to a nurse who was looking down at the old man as he lay on a table. A young doctor entered the room and peeled off the blanket. Uncle Greg was dressed in pants and shirt, but his feet were bare. The doctor pulled down the trousers, pushed up the shirt. He felt, he probed, he shook his head.
Later, Helen Sears said, “Well, it’s unmistakable and much too late to do anything. He’s riddled with cancer. We don’t need lab reports for that. Even that ignoramus of a doctor, so-called doctor …God knows what they’re teaching them in school these days, even he knows that. He won’t live long.”
“Long?”
“A day—a few days. Well, we’ll make him comfortable. That’s what I’m in business for—to make these old parties comfortable. No use taking him to the hospital. I’ve got a dozen of them here right now, dying. But they’re comfortable. Nobody can say they aren’t.”
Helen Sears looked broodingly at her large clean square hands. “Geraniums in the rooms,” she said.
“I’ll be back, then, tomorrow.”
But Helen
wasn’t listening. She was staring at Annie, looking through her. “Would you believe it?” she whispered. “My own mother is in this place! Ninety. Defecating and rubbing her feces in her hair, biting the nurses…” Her mouth widened; suddenly she shouted with laughter, then clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m not mad,” she said in a moment. “I suppose you know the story? About my father and brother and the house burning? Well, the old witch can’t hit anybody any more. Where are you living? I might have to call you.”
“I’m at the Murray Hill Hotel, but I’ve got to find a room to stay. I’m going to look tomorrow. You can leave a message. I’ll come up here anyhow sometime tomorrow, and maybe I’ll have a place by then.”
The older woman nodded. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked with surprising kindness.
“No, no thanks. I’d best be going.”
“Are you working, or anything? I always wondered what happened to you. Of course, I didn’t wonder all the time, had too much on my back to think about other people.”
“I’m going to England. I’ve saved a little money.”
“Does he have any money?”
“There used to be some kind of insurance from his father.” “Your grandfather,” Helen interrupted. “Yes. My grandfather. I don’t know exactly how it worked, but he got a check four times a year. I remember that because he was always planning to fix that roof, then when the money came he had to spend it on other things.”
“He must have made something in the way of income from his gardening work.”
“I just don’t know. I’ve been away five years.”
“Yes. And these old ones, they won’t talk about money, will they? Well, he was good to me, especially after my father tried to cremate us. We’ll work it out.” She rose to her feet. “England. I’ve never been anywhere,” she said. “Well, what are you going to do there?”
“I don’t know yet. Get a job.”
“Going to England to get a job…couldn’t you manage something nearer home?”