All the way home he thinks that he should have called the police first, or a neighbor, yet he doesn’t stop to do either now. A stubborn inner force insists that it isn’t just help that’s needed, but his help. Family business, private business. He changes lanes without caution, in and out, and the bleating horns of other, angry drivers disappear behind him in long, tapering streamers of sound.
Kenny is talking to himself, saying Joy’s name and the children’s again and again, a wishful, abracadabra of names. And once he says, “Oh, please,” and is horrified to remember his earlier, irreverent incantation of those words.
He’s coming to his own street, careening like a Keystone Kop, amazed, in this bad dream, that he has found the way, that his hands move on the wheel, that his legs obey him and run, supporting his weight, which is as heavy as granite with terror.
The door is bolted shut. All those locks meant to keep intruders out won’t let Kenny in either. His keys are lost, are in the car, or the street. He shouts instructions to Steven: “Push the button, damn it, turn the key, turn the knob! Open up! Open up!”
And then he’s inside, at the top of the stairs in a few springy, carpeted leaps.
She’s lying in the middle of the bed with her arms out. There would be no place for him if he had to lie down beside her. Her skin is like egg white, like ectoplasm. How can he tell if she’s breathing when the room is rocking like this? How can he hear her heart against the commotion of his own? He scrounges in his head for the proper bargain, and when he finds it, he falls on her, swearing his part.
35
NORA MCBRIDE HAS PULLED through, with the help of medicine, devoted attention, and her own passionate will. But when Daphne returns to work after her day off, she learns that Mrs. Bernstein is dead, having suffered a second stroke. It happened suddenly, while she and her sister were eating lunch and watching Days of Our Lives.
Mrs. Feldman, who has always been such a generous and reasonable woman, thinks an unfair exchange has been made. Pearl for Mrs. McBride. The next day, after the funeral, she pleads her case to anyone who will listen. “That one is much older,” she says. “Does she have a friend in the world, or a kind word for anybody? My sister had years left. Nobody can tell me she didn’t have years left. Do you know what she said just the other day? ‘This year I hope Betty takes us for the holidays.’ She was looking forward. She wasn’t planning on dying. She wasn’t even sick.”
Daphne, moving in her own fog of confusion and grief, murmurs words of condolence and urges Mrs. Feldman to eat something from the wretched supper tray. Mrs. Feldman is inconsolable. And she’s frightened that her sister will be replaced by someone she won’t be able to live with. What if they like different shows? What if she won’t talk, or talks too much?
“I don’t know,” Daphne says. “I don’t know. Maybe it will all work out.” As she speaks, she’s thinking of herself and Kenny. How can that ever work out?
Joy is in a hospital, and she will either live or die. Daphne was still sitting in her car on Shasta Drive when the police cars arrived, and the ambulance. She watched Kenny running alongside the stretcher, one child in his arms, the other circling his feet like a dog. She watched as if she were looking through a one-way mirror, observer without being observed. A woman rushed up and took the children from him, and he climbed into the ambulance with Joy and it drove away. Daphne sat there for several minutes afterward. She saw the excited cluster of neighbors who gathered near the scene of the crime. No one noticed her, or her conspicuous alien car. When she finally pulled away, it was like leaving a drive-in before the end of the show. Neither of the police cars chased her; none of the chattering women ran after her car, pointing an accusing finger.
She went home and waited there in a rigid misery of exile and suspense. There was a thick letter from her mother that she opened after an hour or so. Both of Daphne’s parents have been worried about her since her visit. She didn’t look quite right to them. Is it an affair of the heart, her mother discreetly asks. Margaret wants to come down and stay with Daphne for a while, for a little change of scenery. She is such a pretty and popular girl. There is always a new boy on the doorstep! Yet something—maybe the pressures of her upcoming senior year—is making her nervous and unhappy. What’s happening to everybody? Youth used to be such a gay and carefree time. Is it being wasted on the young (ha-ha)? Old Mrs. Jaffee says that Mount St. Helens is still taking its toll, that toxic particles are still in the atmosphere. She says the government should do something. If President Reagan had taken her advice, he would have bombed it right away and ended the whole thing.
Daphne laughs, and that releases the tension, permitting her to collapse and moan. Oh, what have I done? What have I done? Even children must know that you can’t wish for disaster and make it happen. But she had gone far beyond the harmless game of wishing. She had become as willful and dangerous as a volcano.
Kenny didn’t call her. She didn’t expect him to, yet she sat close to the telephone, jumpy with anticipation. Sometime in the early evening, she called a few hospitals, until she found the right one. “Are you a relative?” the clerk asked, and Daphne knew she wouldn’t be told anything unless she said she was. “I’m her sister,” she said. “I live out of town.” That entitled her to hear that Joy’s condition was critical. After she replaced the receiver, Daphne wished she had asked for specific details. She wanted some of Kenny’s precious numbers: a fifty-fifty chance? sixty-forty? She wondered what critical meant exactly, whether it was more hopeful than not. Her grandfather’s condition, right before he died, had been listed as poor. The poverty of dying, of relinquishing the world. What would become of all Joy’s things if she died? Blouses with price tags still hidden in their sleeves. Her Cuisinart, squat and silent on the kitchen counter. Kenny and his children standing among the valuable ruins.
She called several times that night, and Joy’s condition was unchanged. Unchanged and critical. Daphne couldn’t get a fix on the meaning of those words. She pictured Kenny at his bedside vigil, and remembered the way he’d sworn to leave his family and how, when he buckled his belt, she’d imagined a holster there.
She sat, holding herself, making an afghan of her hair, rocking back and forth on a rockerless chair. If only she were Joy’s sister, and was privileged to be there beside him in innocent, loving commiseration. And then, astounded, if only she were Joy.
Unchanged. She sat there such a long time. When she stood up at last, her bones creaked and her legs were stiff and bloodless. She didn’t even have the strength to open the foldout bed, but lay on its scratchy cover, under the blue sky of the starlit ceiling, trying to sleep. It was very difficult. She began thinking how older people say they don’t envy the young their sexual freedom, that they wouldn’t be young these days for anything. Daphne admitted that VD was scary; genital herpes was almost becoming a rite of passage, like acne. And no matter how careful you were, there was still a small risk of pregnancy. But what was that compared to the body’s tremendous capacity for delight? Those middle-aged protests were only sour grapes, she decided. Because their own golden youth had been sacrificed to morals and custom, they just couldn’t stand for anyone else to have fun. Then she remembered the dumb thing Jerry had said a few days ago, that the only difference between herpes and love is that herpes lasts. She’d laughed as much as everyone else.
Suddenly, in her awful wakefulness, Daphne knew what the older people meant. It was that the old-fashioned idea of abiding love—what her generation called commitment—was endangered by the ease of casual sex. The faithful mind and the wanton body were only mortal enemies confined to the same prison. Did one always have to perish for the other to survive?
The next morning, Daphne could not recall dreaming, but she must have slept. There was a blessed moment of blankness before the reality of what had happened the day before crept into her consciousness, like fresh bad news. She wasn’t able to go to school. Instead, she went back to sleep, still on the unopened bed, an
d dreamt a series of troubling episodes that had to do with school—the old examination dream in which she’s unprepared and her pencil breaks, or she can’t find the right room until it’s too late. On waking, she rushed to the telephone and called the hospital. Critical, unchanged.
When it was time to go to work, she put on her uniform, moving around the room like an automaton, and went out.
Poor Mrs. Feldman. The separation from her sister is almost surgical. Her great wound cannot be treated. “Pearl liked you. You were one of her favorites,” she tells Daphne, although Mrs. Bernstein often didn’t recognize her when she brought the trays in. “I want you to take something to remember her by. Go ahead, take anything you want.”
Daphne’s glance skims the room, which looks like one of those overstocked gift shops at the side of a country road. There isn’t anything here she wants, and her own anguish makes it difficult for her to concentrate. “Thank you,” she says, backing out. “There’s really nothing. And you should keep—”
“No, no!” Mrs. Feldman cries. “A souvenir! You were kind. You asked her how she was feeling. Do you want one of her needlepoint pillows? Or a plant?”
“A plant,” Daphne says, grateful for the option of a living thing. “A plant would be lovely.”
Mrs. Feldman selects an overgrown philodendron in a clay pot disguised by a ruffled crocheted cover. The leafy stems twist themselves around Daphne’s arm when she lifts the plant from the windowsill, and creep in trailing vines down her legs to the floor. She has an insane flash: Mrs. Bernstein, not in exchange for Mrs. McBride, but for Joy!
“Plenty of water,” Mrs. Feldman instructs her. “Give it plant food. And see that it gets enough light.” Then her face caves in.
Encumbered by the unwieldy plant, Daphne stoops to put one arm around the quaking shoulders, spilling some loose earth into Mrs. Feldman’s lap.
She delivers the other trays with more than her usual speed, and a false cheeriness that takes all her energy to fabricate. Rushing the cart down the corridor and dashing in and out of the rooms is a little like driving too fast. The slow reflexes of most of the patients save her from the agony of small talk. She is there and gone before they can gather their words.
“Lovers’ quarrel?” Monica inquires when Daphne appears in the doorway of the lounge. Everyone, it seems, turns to look at her as she enters.
“Why don’t you ever mind your own beeswax, Monica?” Evita asks, while Daphne attempts to rearrange her giveaway face. She goes to the refrigerator and takes her container of yogurt. “Illness,” she mumbles, still staring into the open refrigerator.
“What?” Mkabi asks.
“Illness in the family,” Daphne says with more clarity, turning to them. And when their complete attention remains on her, she adds, “Let’s talk about something else, okay?”
When she goes to collect the trays in 219, Mr. Brady is asleep, and Mr. Axel is sitting in his chair, only a few inches from the windowless wall he faces. As soon as he sees Daphne, his eyes resume life. “Ah!” he says, like a birdwatcher rewarded at last by the sight of a rare specimen.
She takes his tray, reserving comment on how little he’s eaten. Just minutes ago, her own yogurt could hardly be swallowed past the thicket of sorrow in her throat.
His scrutiny slows her movements, doesn’t allow her to go. So she attempts normal conversation. “Too bad about poor Mrs. Bernstein,” she says.
“Quickly,” he answers. “No pain.”
“Still, it’s sad,” Daphne says.
“You.” he says, eyeing her sharply.
“Fine,” she answers. Lately, when she speaks to him, she sometimes loses parts of sentences, too—articles, pronouns, adjectives—as if he’s taught her a new, economical language.
“Oh, no,” he says.
“Family illness,” Daphne begins, and then can’t continue the lie. His sympathy penetrates her very being. She puts his tray back on the table and sinks to her knees at the side of the wheelchair.
“Oh, Mr. Axel,” she cries. “I wish I could die!”
36
HER HEAD IN HIS lap gives Joe the strangest sensation. Although he has been bathed by nursing aides, and embraced and patted during visits from his family, this feels like the first time in an eternity, that he’s been touched. How lovely it is to be touched! He guides his undisciplined hand, with a major effort at control, and brings it to her head. His fingers catch on the hairnet and pull it off of their own free will. Her hair tumbles across his thighs and over his knees. It is silken and aromatic, like Deborah’s, like Sandra’s when she was a girl, like Adele’s in some remote planet of memory. He strokes Daphne’s head and croons a wordless, tuneless song of solace.
There’s no hurry for her to speak; he isn’t going anywhere. It is the one advantage of his circumstance. Although he thinks: “The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” he knows already that her despair is related in some way to love. What else? “Tell me,” he says, only when he’s certain that she’s ready to do so.
Her voice comes up in a holy whisper of confession. “I’m a murderer,” she says.
“Not.” She can only have broken some man’s heart, he’s sure. They’ll both survive.
“A married man,” she says. “And his wife tried to kill herself. Maybe she’ll die. I wanted her to.”
Her head is still in his lap; his hand still on its burning crown. “No,” he says, but it’s not a denial, only some avuncular soothing.
She knows that, too, somehow, and continues, her voice so low he must strain to hear her. “And even now I’m jealous of her. I’m the worst person I know. Evil.”
“Not evil.”
“There are children,” she says, as if that’s an unassailable argument.
“Everyone,” he says. “ … some bad thing.”
“Not everyone. Not you.” Her tone is faintly colored by hopefulness.
“Oh, yes.” In a rapid scan of his own history, he searches for evidence against himself to offer her. Two women, during his long marriage: one, a friend’s widow with whom he’d lain for the sake of comforting her, and he had; the other, a hot, deliberate girl so long ago he might be mistaken. He’d never intended anything more than the act, though. And he was careful that Adele never knew. It’s not the kind of thing to help Daphne with now. He can’t save her with false assurances, either: the wife will live—she is more scheming than you; the wife will die, which is for the best, and you can atone by raising her children. The children are surely as unreal to Daphne as death. He needs a darker private secret than the few gray ones he unearths. Those selfish deeds of childhood, the grownup acts of vanity and pride. Not enough.
And then he remembers Tepper, whose pharmacy was close enough to Joe’s for not-so-friendly rivalry. Also a married man, also a father, he’d fallen in love with a neighbor’s daughter, a girl still in high school. It was a madness that terrified Tepper because he’d never felt so much in his life: a lust that raised the hair on his body when he thought of her; a galvanic urge for danger. The girl became pregnant, and she was too innocent and scared to tell anyone for a long time. When she finally did tell Tepper, he went a little insane at first. He wanted to beat her, and to enter her again and again in the dark, cushioned backseat of his Packard. The responsibility was clearly his. He was so much older, more experienced, a pharmacist.
If he let her tell her parents, they would kill him. The father was a butcher, and Tepper envisioned cleavers severing his head, his hands, his genitals. His own wife was a frail woman and he loved her. Even if he survived the butcher’s wrath, he couldn’t marry the girl. She was stupid, a bovine beauty.
Finally, he took her to the store late one night. The girl was weeping, clutching at him, as afraid as a child at the dentist’s, but the slightest whiff of ether knocked her cold. She was too far gone, maybe five months, for what he attempted to do, and his fear made him inept. She bled like a slaughtered calf.
Daphne lifts her head from Joe’
s lap as he begins his halting narrative. Instead of referring to Tepper, he tells her that this is something he did himself many years ago. “See?” he says. “Love. Foolishness … nothing new.”
She listens the way his grandchildren used to listen to the stories of the robberies. Wide-eyed, bloodthirsty, pure. But there’s only one thing she really wants to know. “Did the girl die?”
Well, she didn’t, as it happened. Tepper, released from his blinding panic by the spring of blood, did the right thing. He put an ice pack on her belly and drove her quickly to the hospital. It was a close call, and the consequences were brutal and scandalous, but the girl lived.
Joe looks at Daphne and decides to give her more than he’d intended; and by doing so turn her crime into a misdemeanor. Why not? “Yes,” he tells her. “The girl died.”
She draws a shocked breath. But then she makes a face. “Oh, come on,” she says. “You’re making it up, aren’t you? You’d be in jail. You didn’t go to jail.”
There are bits and pieces of other stories he might use—newspaper items, rumors. Girls left to die elsewhere, far from the scene of amateur surgery. Parts of girls wrapped in rags and newspapers and not found for years. But does he want her to believe him capable of such horror? Besides, Joe is weary. He’s been clubbed into weariness. The whole business, with all its complications, his exertions of recall and invention, has taxed him badly. His speech is stuck. He can’t think so well anymore. And there go his hands in their harum-scarum flutter.
She takes his silence as an affirmation of her doubt. “I knew you didn’t do it,” she says, and she grabs his hands to still them. Her vitality sends a charge through him that is not exactly sexual.
He’s failed her, but it isn’t a fatal failure. There’s a little more energy to her motions as she stands and takes his tray again from the bed table. And he’s not done with what he can offer. Soon, he will let her start feeding him.
In the Palomar Arms Page 21