by Janet Frame
These two were the youngest in a room of older people — mostly composers, painters, writers, none greatly talented or successful, some rich with names to drop, for where a publication, exhibition or performance could not be dropped as often as the dropper desired it, a name could be substituted. ‘You know, he is . . . He’s one of the most . . . He was the one who . . . I know him quite well . . . Oh yes, oh yes, I did meet him . . .’
Inevitably, like two beads of mercury in a confined space, the two young people came together again, in the centre of the room, he talking, she listening and smiling. They shared a joke with the distinguished lawyer and his literary wife. (He was the lawyer, who, you know, the one who . . . He is the most . . . the only . . . over two thousand lawyers in New York City and only he . . .)
Names and deeds were being dropped regularly now. The room grew hot. Someone said, ‘Shall we turn down the thermostat or open a window? If we turn down the thermostat . . . if we open a window . . .’
They opened a window and the sudden breeze from the birch and maple woods caused the white paper skeleton hanging nearby to dance and rustle and grimace. It was taller than anyone in the room. The two had brought it when they came to the party, dangling it before them as they entered, capering about and shrieking with laughter. Ha ha, a skeleton. Groovy. Put it here. No put it here. No here will do. Yes, hang it there by the window. What a great idea!
The two remained in the centre of the room.
‘She looks radiant, doesn’t she, in that black velvet?’ one of the women said.
The sculptor turned to the writer beside her.
‘They tell me it’s your birthday today. How old?’
The writer made a giggling sound.
‘Thirty-nine. Every birthday’s been thirty-nine for years. I used to be quite happy to tell my age but now . . . ’
Each looked at the other, observing, not speaking. Their eyes kept a remnant of the brightness the young man had put there. Each was remembering his voice, his eyes, his smile; his chest broad as a young rooster’s, his stance as arrogant. Their thoughts led each to gaze at him again.
There was a shriek of laughter.
‘Oh, oh.’
He was kissing her. The celebration champagne was quite strong but they would have kissed anyway. It was a public kiss, a throwaway from immeasurable bounty.
A blush came on the sculptor’s cheek. She breathed quickly. She smiled.
‘Look at them,’ she said.
Everyone in the room was looking. Many were laughing and some of the laughter was mixed with memory and with nostalgia which is sometimes memory that, bypassing the preservative process, turns sour.
Once again the names began dropping.
And now the three older women were silent as they watched the young couple. Among the suddenly crowded gathering of their lost, discarded, outgrown, obliterated, murdered, mourned-for selves they began to drop, not names, but unvoiced memories — and if you had been there you would have known it was so. And though the white paper skeleton was in attendance even in their most private parties, though it grimaced, danced, rustled, taller than all their memories, in the sudden cold wind, the skeleton was not what they feared and longed most to be rid of or to become.
No, it was not the skeleton. It was the black velvet spider with the shimmering golden web.
A Night Visitor
Her name was Bernadine though everyone called her Mrs Winton. Mrs Winton in Bed Seventeen. Good morning, Mrs Winton. How are you today? I never heard her speak more than a few words, usually about the weather or the day or that she was feeling fine oh fine; in the bathroom in the morning with the test tubes of urine in their row on the shelf caught sparkling like wine by the morning sun. Such gold!
This is Bernadine in hospital, the colour of her sickness not known. She lay on the ‘heart’ side of the ward as opposed to the ‘lung’ side, and we on the ‘lung’ side had the macabre entertainment of watching the televised heartbeats of those with Pacemakers attached to their heart and of experiencing the shock and panic when the travelling graph suddenly faltered or stopped and the piping alarm signal sounded through the ward.
Visitors came on the morning of Bernadine’s operation — her husband, a short broad-backed man with heavy hands and a round worried face like a moon frowning on a suddenly uncontrollable and not understood ocean. There were sisters, too, and their husbands, and small children in warm coats and hats and long white socks. Bernadine always had many visitors who came directly to her — unlike those who showed panic on entering the ward as they searched for ‘their’ face, sometimes in their confusion and worry making astonishing mistakes: one would find oneself smiled at by a stranger, Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were . . . Mary, Harriet, Joan.
But not Bernadine. No one could have been mistaken for Bernadine. It was not only her dark skin but a kind of inward silence that distinguished her. She was isolated in her sickness and made a quiet contrast to her neighbour, a woman in her forties who had died and been revived by the machine and, as the current marvel, was allowed visitors at any time and was always surrounded by handsome men and brave clean beautiful well-behaved children, and flowers, flame-coloured and golden, in heart-shaped bouquets, delivered fresh each morning, and huge heart-shaped boxes of chocolates that tempted the passing doctors. One was not sure whether the flowers and chocolates were being laid on the altar of life or of death.
But this day was Bernadine’s day. Looking back I remember the bleak morning sunlight over the rows of chimneypots, the flash of colour as the test tubes of urine were touched with the rays, the coming and going of students with syringes and blood bottles; and Bernadine wandering up and down in a listless silence. Her operation was to be late in the day. I kept thinking, Everyone will be too tired, too tired.
At five o’clock the green-coated theatre porters came and Bernadine was wheeled away and her bed was made ready for her return. She would be awake by visiting time, the nurse said.
Visiting time came. Bernadine had returned and was lying unconscious with screens around her. Her husband and family came; the screens were partly removed and the visitors sat silently around the bed while Mr Winton held his wife’s hand. He spoke her name once or twice but she was still too deeply unconscious. He stared with a kind of fear that threatened to become panic at the tube and bottle attached to her ankle.
‘Perhaps,’ the nurse suggested, ‘you could go home and we’ll let you know when she wakes up.’
The friends and children went home but the husband said, ‘No, I’d rather stay’.
He found a chair and sat on it, still holding his wife’s hand.
Visiting hour finished. Formal hospital night came when all strangers were ejected.
‘We’ll let you know,’ they promised Mr Winton, ‘as soon as she wakes up. We’ll get in touch with you.’
They urged him to leave.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d rather stay. Bernadine has had an operation and I want to stay with her.’
The nurse went to speak to the sister at her desk. The sister came forward: tall, authorative; winged cap, frilled sleeves.
‘Won’t you please go?’ she said. ‘Everything will be all right.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d rather stay.’
They left him. The night staff came on duty. Mr Winton now sat in the centre of the ward drinking a cup of tea. The day sister, having made her report, spoke again to him, showing less sympathy than consciousness of his nuisance value.
‘You’re disrupting the smooth running of the ward.’
Now how could that be? Sickness is not smooth. Sickness and death are rough and crooked and can’t really, by routine and care, be made entirely smooth and plain.
Obstinately Mr Winton held his place.
‘I must stay. She’s my wife.’
‘But she’s only had an operation. She’ll be awake soon. We’ll let you know the moment she wakes. We’re not going to hurt her. Look, here’s the doctor. He’ll
explain to you.’
She spoke a few words aside to the doctor. His approach was bright, his voice low and calming as he promised faithfully that all was well, operations were being performed every day, as soon as Mrs Winton regained consciousness they would get in touch with him.
‘I want to stay,’ Mr Winton said simply. ‘You see?’
The doctor spoke sharply.
‘I told you we’ll let you know.’
Mr Winton could not be persuaded to leave. He had left his wife’s bedside and sat hunched in the chair by the ward fire, his face intent, listening, watching, waiting; as if he knew all events and waited only to receive them, to confirm them.
Ten minutes later when a nurse reported irregularities in Mrs Winton’s breathing and a doctor attending another case looked over the partly drawn screens and cried, My god, a haemorrhage, and a phone call brought the surgeon and his registrar and the screens were completely drawn around Mrs Winton, her husband pushed his way through the screen.
They led him back to his chair. Everything was going to be all right, they said. By staying he was interfering with the necessary treatment.
The sister suggested that perhaps he could go to have a meal at the hospital cafeteria and when he returned Mrs Winton might be ready to see him.
He stayed. Mistrust showed in his eyes. He held fast to his empty teacup and crouched in his chair and listened like a fox to the urgent whisperings and rustlings beyond the screen and one could almost see his heart pounce again and again to the rescue of its beloved possession. Though his face was grim and dark and he was silent, there was ravaging evidence of each thought as it passed and left its scar.
He became a central figure in the ward, as much a part of the night as the half-darkness, the traffic and the night-voices in the street outside. As the lights were dimmed and the tablets, for pain, were given out, and the ward sister and nurse took their places by the electric fire, switched to high, he stayed like a post, like an isolated pylon in a deserted valley and his black skin, in the sensitive time of conflict and confusion between skin and skin, black and white, yellow and brown, black and pink, began to speak for him in a ward where all others except his unconscious wife were pink-skinned. He was a captive and his captors were civilisation, advanced medicine and surgery where the body may be attacked and wounded and then, surprisingly, cared for and nursed: surely this was the behaviour of gods rather than men?
There were now three doctors attending Bernadine. They had entered, remote, best-dressed, laughing, like the ‘three young rats in black felt hats’ but their faces changed when they saw her and they stopped laughing. Their voices were low, in a working intonation, but when their pitch heightened and one darted from behind the screens to make a phone call and there was the sound of running footsteps in the corridor, we knew that Mrs Winton had died and they would try to revive her.
Floor space was needed. The screens were extended to cover a third of the ward, yet we witnessed it all, clearly reflected in the top panes of the tall windows, three images of three patients, innumerable deaths and dreams of revival.
Mr Winton paced the ward and when once again he invaded the screen and perhaps glimpsed or guessed the crisis, he let himself be taken out of the ward, the first time that he had surrendered: because he knew.
They would call him, they promised, as soon as Mrs Winton had passed the crisis and the apparatus was removed. They did not speak so confidently now. They did not reassure him that all would be well.
And now the ward was almost asleep except for those who could not help viewing the images in the window and could not turn away from them. I tried to close my eyes. I listened. I heard the ragged untidy urgent coordinated sounds of living and working; and breathing; and then, gradually, another sound — a neatly tailored silence that living and life have no place for. Then, like a sea entering the ward, the sound of washing, of water lapping against the world; a sound of peace and sleep; and death.
Then footsteps and Mr Winton sobbing, Bernadine, Bernadine.
He stayed now and no one asked him to go. He stood by his wife, claiming her, while her body was prepared and when they came to remove it wherever they remove the dead to, he went with them and they did not argue or try to persuade him not to. The three tired doctors washed their hands; what else could they do ? The nurse brewed tea and gave a cup to those who were still awake and who knew, and the neat silence stayed all night, and voices were low, telling about it and about other times when it happened, and when we woke in the morning, confusedly remembering, we found that the visitor who had desperately claimed Bernadine had gone, had taken her, and her bed was empty.
I Do Not Love the Crickets
When I’m writing I feel I must start with the idea that I love the people I’m writing about. I love them, I have deep compassion for them, it is not my place to try to change them. Unfortunately I have a problem: as I grow older I find it harder to love ‘people’, to look generously and compassionately at them. I disapprove, I pity them, I wonder what they ‘see’ in their lives, I suppose their way of life to be ‘poor’ while mine is ‘rich’; and at times, far from loving them, I hate them, not strongly enough to make the hate an effective other side of the coin of love, just a pity-hate which would rather that people were out of my sight.
Therefore, I said, before I write another novel or story I must try to find the way back to loving. When people in fiction weep, I weep, when they are in distress, I too am in distress. If my neighbour trips I think it serves him right, or, perhaps not as harshly as this, I merely give the matter no deep thought or feeling. One who dies in the mountains or bush or in the surf was ‘asking for it’ by behaving foolishly.
What a strange year it has been for me! I have tried so hard to find my way back to the loving which I find necessary for writing. I bought myself a white kitten for seventy-five cents, reduced from a dollar. It became my companion. I cared for it and respected it and now it has grown into a pleasant companion to whom my only responsibility is to leave it comfortable and cared for when I go to town for a few days. Sometimes it lies down as if dead and I see it dead, and I think calmly, perhaps then I will get another, perhaps not, I’ll see.
The man from whom I bought this house went blind. I never met him. Sometimes I think of him with fleeting sentiment, How sad, he was going blind, he had to sell the house. And then I can’t help feeling the tiny spark of love (this, you understand has nothing to do with personal sexual affairs which are private), the Shelleyan love, the ‘love one another or die’ kind of love and I am back in the country where writing begins; grateful, full of wonder; I might even cry real tears as I think, This is the only true place. You may be sure that the servant words whose survival depends on such places, agree with me as they try to amuse and calm me, but never, never try to stop the springs of love, and the tears. And I look about my house then for the evidence of the man who was going blind, and his family. They had seven beds, or ‘sleeps seven’ as the advertisements would say. They read the Reader’s Digest, the Woman’s Weekly (English), Woman’s Day, and the Boating World. On wet days they played cards. They surfed and swam. They spent the time like any other summer holiday family with a bach near the beach. Why did they come here? What was his work? Why was he going blind?
A neighbour talks to me, ‘He was having trouble with his eyes. Poor man. We saw them one weekend, the whole family, son and daughters and grandchildren, help to lay the concrete drive to the garage with their own hands. With their own hands.’
No one before or since has spoken to me of them. All I know is what I surmise, and that they laid the concrete drive with their own hands in one weekend. This was told to me in a tone of awe and admiration. I think I made the expected response, ‘Did they really?’ As if they had sailed round the world or gone to the moon.
My faint curiosity and pity do not develop into love. Instead, I feel the stupidity of a life that is remembered only by the family teamwork of laying concrete one weekend. My a
rrogance (a forbidden characteristic of a writer) refuses to let me enter the mind of the man himself and his family. I say, ‘O I would die of boredom.’ What did they think about, what did they dream about, if one of the memorable episodes of their life was the laying of concrete from the driveway to the garage door? Then I remember they would have made a noise, a Sunday noise most likely, and I am angry, for the country of writing is noiseless. How well I know the scraping and rattling of the do-it-yourself concrete mixers. It used to be said of encyclopedias, Every home should have one. Here, it can be said of concrete mixers, or motor mowers or circular saws or electric drills.
What is there in the habits of people around to make me love them as I know I must?
Therefore I leave my thoughts of the man who was going blind, and his family, and the linoleum he laid in the house, the plants they put in the garden (I thank them for the five feijoa bushes). I leave them because my arrogance is stronger than my compassion, and the solitude and quiet necessary for writing about the people who surround me are threatened by those same people. At the same time that I dislike them for their threats, I cannot love them enough to want to investigate their human essence: the ambrosial stink. I keep forgetting the need to accept as final the place of the ‘pitching of the mansion’.
Life interferes with art; life is the irritation. Always. And yet there are some who plead, innocently, for further life-involvement of the artist!