Ten North Frederick

by John O'Hara

  They were to leave Gibbsville two days after Country Day closed for the school year, sailing two days later. On the night that school closed Joe broke his right leg.

  Edith and Joby had gone to bed early, having finished all but the final packing, and Ann was at a bon voyage party at the Laubachs’. Arthur and Rose had given Edith and Joe a party the night before Country Day closed, so that that ceremonial of the trip was out of the way. (“A good idea to get that out of the way so you won’t be exhausted boarding your ship.”) The trunks had gone to New York, and Marian had even put the slip covers over some of the downstairs furniture. The house was not quite abandoned, not quite occupied, and Joe was busying himself with last-minute chores, mostly of a paper-work nature. Although Edith had retired, he had gone twice to their bedroom to ask her questions. On his third visit to the bedroom he found her deep asleep and he closed the door gently and walked softly to the top of the stairs.

  In later months he tried to recall exactly what occurred—whether his loose-fitting house slipper caught on the carpet-covering, or he misjudged the turn that he had made literally many thousands of times. In any event, he started falling at the top of the stairs, which were quite steep and had sixteen risers.

  He fell all the way to the first floor and lay there. He was unconscious, his fall unheard by his wife or their son or any of the three servants. He was later able to estimate how long he lay there: from about ten minutes past eleven until Ann’s return at twenty-five minutes to one.

  Ann quickly recovered from her first horror and determined that he was alive. She called her mother, who did not answer, and she went upstairs and shook Edith out of her sleep. Together they went downstairs again, and they noticed what Ann had not noticed earlier: the blood on his trouser-leg. Edith telephoned Billy English, who, as Ann said, took forever to get there. He announced that Joe had a broken leg, compound fracture, and a concussion of the brain. He sent for the ambulance. Nobody remembered to wake Joby.

  Ann in her party dress went to the hospital with her mother and Dr. English, who was an extremely careful and slow driver. The Chapin women waited in the superintendent’s office for Billy English’s first report, which was an hour in coming.

  “He has a bad fracture of the leg, that we know, and he must have done a complete somersault falling down the stairs, to account for the concussion. We’re lucky, very lucky, he didn’t break his neck. That sometimes happens in falls of that kind. I won’t try to underestimate his condition. He’s badly hurt. However, he’s alive and right now he’s sleeping. Our danger now is from the concussion and of course shock. I’ve arranged for a room for you, Edith, and you, Ann, if you’d care to stay. It’ll be down the hall from Joe’s room. I know you’re not going to feel much like sleeping, but the floor nurse will get nightgowns for both of you. Regular hospital nightgowns, but it might be a good idea for you to try to get some rest tonight so that you won’t be exhausted tomorrow.”

  “Has he recovered consciousness?”

  “Not completely, Edith, and he won’t for several hours, how many I don’t know. That depends on several factors. We don’t know how long he was lying there, and of course we don’t even know what happened, do we? You can have some coffee, if you like, or tea, but I’d suggest you both have a cup of bouillon. I have a room here myself, so I’ll be here through the night, and I’ll see that you’re notified the minute there’s any change either way. I don’t want to alarm you, but at the same time our dear Joe has had a very close call and I can’t honestly tell you ladies that he’s entirely out of danger. Joe’s more than a patient to me, too, you know.”

  “Thank you, Billy, we realize that,” said Edith. “I’ve had some sleep and I’m quite awake now, but I think we’ll follow your suggestion.”

  “Mother, I’m wide awake,” said Ann.

  “But let’s do what Dr. English says. We have to think of tomorrow, and we’re not going to be much help if we haven’t had any sleep. Will you show us our room, Billy?”

  “Come with me,” said Dr. English. “Your mother’s right, Ann. Tomorrow’s when you’re going to need your strength.”

  “I know that, Dr. English. It’s just that I know I won’t sleep.”

  “Well, try,” said the doctor. “I can give you a tablet that will put you to sleep . . .”

  “No, and don’t put anything in my bouillon,” said the girl.

  “That never crossed my mind,” said the doctor.

  “And you’ll apologize to Dr. English for your rudeness.”

  “I didn’t mean it rudely. I’m sorry, Dr. English,” said the girl.

  “We’re all under a strain,” said the doctor.

  The Chapin women got little sleep. They were kept awake by their concern for Joe, but that was not the only tension that made sleep come hard. They were extra-conscious of each other; it had been a long time since they had slept in the same room. What it came down to was that it had been a long time since they really had been together. Edith was proud of her daughter’s exquisite form, and Ann was pleased that her mother had not gone to fat as so many mothers had. But Edith had preached modesty all through Ann’s childhood and girlhood, and now the act of undressing in the same room was an intimacy that neither Edith nor Ann was prepared for. They did not appear wholly nude in front of each other; the putting-on of the hospital nightgown was accomplished in the bathroom. But they could not help looking down at each other’s gown, where the bosom extended, and lower down where the pubic shadow could be seen under the summer-weight cotton. The intimacy made them strangers, and since neither wanted to talk about what was worrying both of them, they told each other good night, try to get some sleep, and lay listening to each other’s breathing and turning in the beds. They were placed in each other’s company, but it could not be said that Joe’s accident had thrown them together.

  However, they had been apart for years. A teacher at Miss Holton’s had had to instruct Ann in the frightening mysteries of menstruation, and with that opportunity gone, Edith neither was given nor had contrived a second chance to get on close terms with the matured and maturing girl. And Ann, therefore, was independent of her mother, but with no one of her sex to take her place. The whole world of sex was between Ann on the one side, and, on the other, what she did and did not know. This very night, before her discovery of her father at the foot of the stairs, she had touched a boy, a boy had touched her, with such exciting effect that her capacity to feel put her, in her own mind, a million miles away from a candid relationship with her mother. She was in the stage where what she was discovering and experiencing was unique, notwithstanding her complete knowledge of the act which, performed by her parents, had caused her existence. She thought about it little enough, but when she did she thought of her father visiting her mother in total darkness, without visual or tactile enjoyment or prolonged excitement such as she herself had enjoyed, and achieving the ultimate embrace (which she had not yet achieved) in the fashion of all married couples. So far she had not been able, or permitted herself, to imagine her father in the positions of love-making. It was easier for her to imagine her mother making love with an anonymous, featureless figure that was her father, but not Father. She was convinced otherwise, but it was not impossible for her to imagine her mother as a partner in love-making with almost any man; and except for the dirty trick it would have been on her father, she would not have been irreparably shocked if her mother had used her body for pleasure with another man. To Ann a woman’s body was designed for two related purposes, pleasure and child-bearing, and her mother as a woman was no different from any other woman. As the wife of Father, however, she owed him complete fidelity, and there was nothing to indicate that she had betrayed that trust. She knew that when she got married she was not going to fool around.

  The mother and daughter were not visited until seven-thirty o’clock in the morning, when a nurse brought them coffee, toast, and soft-boiled eggs.
Edith telephoned Marian to have Harry bring some day clothes and she then spoke to Joby. To her annoyance and relief Marian had already told the boy the bare facts of Joe’s accident.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Father?”

  “Because you were asleep and there was nothing you could do, now don’t be upset, Joby, don’t be upset.”

  “Can I come over with Harry?”

  “Yes, of course, although you’ll only be able to see Father for a minute. He’s still asleep.”

  “Are we going to Europe?”

  “Oh, dear,” said Edith. “No, we’ll have to cancel all that. A broken leg takes months to heal.”

  “Will Father have to carry a cane?”

  “At least. In the beginning, crutches.”

  “Is he going to have to stay in the hospital?”

  “I imagine so, quite a while.”

  “All summer?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Then he won’t be able to play golf, either,” said the boy.

  “Oh, no. Now I must stop talking, unless there’s something important you want to ask me.”

  “Is Father going to die?”

  “No, no, no, Joby. You mustn’t think that,” said Edith.

  “Well, the paper called up and asked if it was true Father had concussion of the brain.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I answered, they thought I was you on the phone.”

  “Well if they call up again, don’t tell them anything. Tell them to get in touch with Uncle Arthur McHenry, if they want any information.”

  “A boy that was on Gibbsville High football team, he got concussion of the brain and he died. I remember.”

  “There are different kinds. Now I must hang up, and you get ready to come with Harry.”

  There was gloom on Main Street and in the Lantenengo Street homes with the report of Joe’s accident, and in the barber shops and the Gibbsville Club and the Elks Home and on the Market Street one-man trolleys and in cigar stores and soda fountains and at bus stops and in the forty-five speakeasies of Gibbsville, wherever men and women gathered by the half dozen. There was no one to say, “It served him right,” and there were many who said, “It’s a goddam shame.” Bob Hooker ran a daily bulletin, a one-column box on Page One, on Joe’s condition, and when it was announced, after the third day, that Joe was “off the critical list but unable to receive visitors” Gibbsville accepted Joe as among the ailing, who would be a long while “on the mend.”

  Joe was allowed to go home, to the farm, in the second week in August, almost exactly two months after entering the hospital. A bone man from Philadelphia was called in for an opinion when the leg was slow in healing, and in return for his $1,000 fee he provided the information that Joe was forty-seven years old and that he approved the treatment Joe was getting under Dr. English.

  “Otherwise, I don’t see what good he did,” said Arthur to Edith. “It’s nice to know that Billy’s a good doctor, but we knew that all along. Of course I’m not particularly enthusiastic over Philadelphia specialists.”

  “Forty-seven,” said Edith. “Your bones don’t knit as quickly. I just hope the right leg won’t be shorter than the other.”

  “Billy says it won’t be,” said Arthur. “What I don’t like—it seems to me Joe himself is still low in spirit.”

  “Billy says that’s the result of the shock and the concussion.”

  “And it may be, but I don’t like it. He’ll say to me, ‘I’ll be back in harness after Labor Day,’ and then he’ll wonder aloud whether he’ll be ready for the November term.”

  “Of court?”

  “Yes. November’s always very heavy because we lawyers ask for postponements in the September term. But one good thing, one consolation. He’s achieved one ambition.”

  “Which?”

  “Just sitting here and lying in the hospital, Joe’s made enough money in the stock market so he can give you and each of the children pretty close to a million dollars. Joe’s a very rich man. So am I, I might add. At least we don’t have to worry about money. Edith, I wonder if it might not be a good idea for you and Joe to go abroad this winter.”

  “Let’s not talk about that again till he’s all recovered.”

  “But think about it. Take some of that money and go to the Riviera and have a real rest. Joe’s been working hard and scooting about the countryside as though he were running for office. Why don’t you start inculcating the idea of a real vacation? The children will be going away to school in the fall.”

  “He likes scooting about the countryside.”

  “It’ll be quite some time before he’s able to do it again, and you might as well get him away from temptation. If not Europe, Florida. It doesn’t have to be Palm Beach. There are other places. Or California. Sit in the sun and see some new people and get his mind away from work. In less than three years we’ll be fifty, Joe and I.”

  Joe called to them. “Hey, you two.”

  He was in the living room, which had been converted into a downstairs bedroom. The main house on the farm was always cool, what with the shade of the walnut trees and the two brooks that passed in front of and at the side of the house. A hospital bed was set up in the living room and Joe was able to escape most of the August heat.

  They went inside and Edith washed Joe’s face.

  “What dire deeds of derring-do were you plotting?”

  “Arthur was doing all the plotting. He thinks we ought to go abroad next winter.”

  “That’s odd. I think Arthur ought to go abroad next winter.”

  “Well, then somebody in this firm is going abroad next winter,” said Arthur.

  “Not necessarily. Arthur could be just as stubborn about it as I plan to be. Result: neither goes.”

  “Result: we’ll both collapse. It was just an idea I had, and Edith doesn’t take kindly to it.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t. I don’t expect to win the Harvard game with a sixty-five-yard dropkick, but I’ll be well enough to let you have a vacation. You’re entitled to a good one, and I’m going to insist you get it.”

  “It isn’t only the office, Joe. You’re going around as though you were a traveling salesman.”

  “Oh, well, that’s fun, that comes under the heading of relaxation.”

  “Relaxation? Joe, I’ve seen you come home from one of those relaxations. Last winter. I remember one time you’d been to Erie, I think it was. Yes, Erie. I don’t remember what that trip was for. In fact, I seldom do know. You used to tell me, but in the past year or so you just announce that you’re off for Lancaster, or Altoona, and away you go. Sometimes it’s an overnight Pullman, other times a long drive, a long exhausting motor trip. Say, hadn’t you just come back from one when you tried to take the steps all at once?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Joe.

  “Yes, you had. We had our party for you, and the next day you went to Whitemarsh for the Lawyers Club tournament. And the next day was when you cracked your leg.”

  “It might have been, but don’t try to see cause and effect there, Arthur,” said Joe.

  “Why not? If I can show you that the relaxing trips, as you call them, are taking too much out of you, I’ll be doing you a favor. Joe, I was just telling Edith, we’re getting close to the fifty mark, and whether we like it or not, we’re slowing up. If Billy English were to tell you that the reason—”

  “I beg your pardon, Arthur. I know what you’re going to say. I don’t think Billy English is going to tell you that I broke my leg because I was tired. But even if he did, I’m doing something I like to do, and if I get tired while doing it—at least I’m getting tired at a pastime I enjoy. Fellows we know are out risking their necks fox-hunting, down around Philadelphia. And others are chasing women instead of foxes, and others are ruining their guts on bootleg
hootch.”

  “I know all that, but you seem to me to be tiring yourself out for thirty pieces of silver.”