Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

  Since there was nothing wrong with their house – and since everything was airtight and shipshape – he didn’t want them to fix the pump. He had spent hundreds of dollars since he had come here and now was almost broke. The money that was supposed to last them two years had dwindled to almost nothing already – and, therefore, everything was fixed.

  The doctor sat in the chair beside Ralphie. Vera came out of the other room, closed the door quickly, and walked past them all into the far room, and shut the door again.

  But Joe insisted that the pump had to be fixed so they didn’t leave the house until late because of it. Joe took all the pipes off, and then, improvising, made one of his own out of some of the new copper pipe that was there, and out of a section of pipe he had in his truck. So it didn’t look nice at all – it was a rather cold, fashionless sort of pipe. Except it worked.

  Vera, with her nose running, and her head aching, and her stomach hurting, was now able to flush the toilet. As she came out of the bathroom, the winter’s twilight made a dull reflection against all her jars of spices, and whole-wheat flour, and packages of granola.

  Vera’s sickness persisted. Her temperature rose and she vomited.

  At first she thought she could doctor herself, and for a week she drank vegetable soup. Then she took a cold bath followed by a hot bath to change her temperature, and this gave her a case of pneumonia. Her temperature rose to 104°, and the doctor was called to the house.

  After seeing his patients that morning he got in his car and drove down to the lane, and leaving the car on the road, walked down to her place. The snow was up to his knees, and he seemed to enjoy the fact that he was out walking through the field, where at every step he had to break the crust and shield his eyes from the glare of the sun.

  She lay sweating in bed, naked under two huge quilts, while Nevin walked back and forth outside the door. The upstairs room was icy, and Vera had tried to get up that morning and then had fallen back down into bed.

  Vera’s hair was long and fine. Her face was large and her hands and feet were big. There was a cherry-coloured mole on her breast. Dr. Hennessey took her temperature and then moved back to the door. He looked about the room, and it saddened him to see the care with which she had tried to make the house exactly like it used to be.

  The doctor knew a lot of people like Nevin, or so he thought, and he was always angry with them.

  “Well, Nevin,” he said, “I suppose you’re taking good care of her, are you?”

  “Well, it’s mutual; she takes care of me too,” Nevin said, and smiled down at Vera – as if to please everyone there with the proper way of acting.

  “Mutual – I don’t like mutual. Never did. It’s all or nothing – always was. Pretty soon now, people when they start to live together will sign a contract or something – if you do a dish, I’ll do a pot. … Not that anyone in their right mind would ever stoop so low – but it might happen.”

  The doctor knew very well that Vera and Nevin had signed such a contract, but he pretended to be ignorant of it. And already he was grumbling and talking to a needle he was preparing to give.

  Little jars and vases, and a picture of a woman in a cornfield, the smell of wainscoting and closets, books on Margaret Sanger and George Sand, and Greer’s The Female Eunuch lay on her bedtable. The largeness of her face, and the bigness of her feet, and the self-important strides she made whenever she walked, filled the doctor, who wore his red bow-tie, with compassion. The doctor looked like an old farmer dressed up in the 1940s in one of those pictures beside the huge bumper of a Pontiac.

  Nevin stood inside the door. His hair was greying and his eyes were pale. His red suspenders looked very new and there was a sort of precision to the way his hair was unkempt – and a calculation to the way he looked concerned – which the doctor often noticed in people who kept vigil with the sick.

  The doctor said she would have to go to the hospital and that he would drive her.

  Then Vera got Nevin to help her dress, and she packed an overnight bag, one with an Expo 67 logo on it, and then collected some books. And, as Nevin helped her downstairs, the doctor stood in the kitchen looking at the various grains, rice, and herbs in her jars by the sink, and there was something frugal about the kitchen which made him feel sad.

  The doctor brought the car up to the house and he drove them thirty-five miles an hour to the hospital. The three of them sat in the front seat, because his back seat was taken up with garbage, which he often threatened to take to the dump, but never seemed to get around to doing it.

  The doctor admitted Vera, checked the glands in her neck, which were swollen, found there was fluid in one lung, put her on antibiotics, and had a nurse stay with her.

  The trouble was it was the start of the flu epidemic. The days were very cold, a haze rested over the river, the white houses took on an immaculate sheen, and inside those houses along the river, temperatures roared, and people sweated and vomited. There was such a low morale in the hospital at this time that the nurses were afraid to call in sick since demerits would be put on their record. Half the nurses came to work throwing up, and had to be sent home.

  The little Chinese nurse who followed the doctor about on his night tirades when he tipped over things and acted abominably, and disliked everyone, came into work in this way. Always frightened of her head nurse, she had a sort of dark fascination with her own ability to remain four foot eleven and keep going. She had restarted truckers’ hearts after they’d come in with heart attacks, she had helped in the burn unit. She had given injections of morphine to the dying, and she had dodged things Dr. Hennessey had knocked over. She was named Rose Wong, and the doctor once said to her: “Yes of course you Rose Wong – because if you ever Rose Right we might get something done around this goddamn hospital!”

  But even she could not keep going now. The outpatient ward was filled. People lay about in various attitudes, all seeming angry at their own impotence. When one man came in, he was escorted to a bed in the holding-unit. Lying down still in his clothes, and looking up at her, he asked what it was he had.

  “Asian flu,” she said, smiling down at him.

  The sound of wind hit the window at gale force, the top of the snow was washing back and forth.

  At the lowest point Vera was delirious and had to be bathed every few hours. They had to drain her left lung but unfortunately, after this procedure, her lung collapsed. Then there was worry about persistent infection – and, as Dr. Hennessey kept saying whenever he saw Thelma: “All the rest of it.”

  Every time Ralphie came in to see his sister he brought something for her. Her face looked, against her white hospital dressing gown, exceptionally long, and her large head, with blemishes on her forehead, and the way her bony hands, which were rough, lay outside the covers, impressed on Ralphie, who had to wear a mask when he went to see her, that everything they talked about before was nonsense, and if he ever spoke to her again he would be quite different. Then he would bend over and kiss her on the forehead.

  Joe would sometimes see Vye downtown during the day. He tried not to see him but it was inevitable that he would. Like most rumours, the one he’d heard about Rita was swallowed up in new rumours and things were forgotten. After a few weeks no one seemed to care about it at all.

  Vye and Myhrra started to come to the house. When they did, Myhrra would always act as if she had settled a dispute between Rita and Joe – and because of this they were now much closer together.

  “No no,” she would say, wagging her finger at Joe at the least little thing he said to Rita – as if it was understood how they, as two divorced or separated people, had brought Joe and Rita back together.

  But as Joe’s back persisted in annoying him on and off and as he felt that he could do nothing for his family unless he got steady work, he sometimes felt that he had nothing left to offer anyone. Since there was nothing much to do in the winter if you were not working and not drinking, Joe became, at the age of forty-three, the
same type of man he swore to himself he would never become. That is, he relied on his wife for money – spent his days playing the punch-board and buying lotto tickets, hoping that he would win the jackpot.

  The problem with his pain put a strain on everything. Though he was still very strong, he couldn’t go into the woods at certain times, because if he had an attack he wouldn’t be able to get out. And when the pain got too severe, he couldn’t travel in the truck. He would stay at home. If he sat at home and saw Rita doing the housework or lifting things by herself, he would fumble about after her, and she would tell him to go and sit down.

  The trouble with Joe was that he was jealous of Rita and always had been. He was eight years older than she was, and he wasn’t her first choice. Her first choice was the fellow who made her pregnant the summer she met Joe. She had been in love with him, there was no doubt about it, and he had moved away, and Rita suddenly began to hang about with a group that Joe knew. Besides this, there were others at college she had dated, who now were in business in town, and had done something more than swill wine for the last seventeen years.

  To Joe, who had grown up in poverty, who had left school, she was too good for him certainly, and he felt that she would think this as well. It made Joe feel foolish. Once he took to volunteering at the church. He would go up and do repair work, check the building, and sit there in the afternoons all alone playing solitaire. Then he would go home to supper and when Rita asked him where he’d been he would say he had to see people about his compensation, or his chances of getting hired on again. She believed this was a lie, and he knew it, and they never tried to hide that fact.

  The idea of drinking to ease the discomfort in his back usually came after supper when he went in to watch television and it would stay with him sometimes until he went to bed.

  I can’t drink, he would tell himself, when just a few years ago he would have been angry if anyone suggested that to him. What will happen if I drink, he would reflect. The pain might go for a bit and it might not – but even if it does – I’ll still be back drinking, and it would make everything worse than before.

  Anyway, he would say to himself, brightening up, if Tate Reed’s back is better, mine will be too, and there’s worse off than myself – I should be thinking of what I’ve got. Well, I can’t drink and I can’t walk, and I can’t work. Can’t weld, can’t sing – things could be a lot worse. …

  The one thing he did after the New Year was start an adult education course at the high school. What he was taking was basic math and English. Joe never had problems with math – he was always quite good at it. But it was spelling he could not get. He did not tell Rita he was taking this course.

  One night after a few weeks at the high school Joe sat down at the supper table. Only he and Rita were there. Joe had his sleeves rolled up, and his huge elbows placed upon the table. “Rita!” he said, too loudly, and stuttering suddenly. “Ask me how to spell something. Ask me how to spell Wednesday, for instance.”

  “Why in hell do you want me to ask you that?”

  He looked at her, became suddenly scared, and his face got red. “I don’t know.”

  “How do you spell Wednesday?” she said.

  “W-e-d-n-e-s-d-a-y.”

  Rita looked at him, and smiled.

  “Ain’t that right?”

  “Yes – it is.”

  “I knew it.” He smiled, spitting his snuff into a can.

  One night about six weeks later, when she was better, Vera and Nevin went up to see Clare and the doctor. Vera had made Clare some raisin bread, which she knew she liked. Vera was still coughing and still taking medication, which she kept in the pocket of her coat.

  The doctor was busy cleaning smelts at the sink. He was whistling to himself and talking to his budgie bird about letting him go outside if he didn’t stop his squawking.

  The night was cold and the doctor’s house was never warm. Nevin made the mistake of trying immediately to thank the doctor for coming to see Vera and getting her to the hospital.

  “And what does she look like now?” the doctor said. “A scarecrow. Look at her, big eyes – and skinny – she doesn’t take care of herself – CLARE!” he yelled.

  “I have my chores to do,” Vera said, looking at him proudly.

  He didn’t want to be unkind to her, and so he said nothing else. He batted the back of his head with his hand and lit his pipe, then he put his pipe down as if he had forgotten it completely and picked up a cigarette. He shoved the pipe into his back pocket and, with the cigarette in his mouth, he returned to cleaning the smelts.

  “You’ve just lit your pants on fire,” Vera said solemnly.

  “Oh have I – have I?” He grabbed the pipe and took it out and threw it down on the counter. Then, because the bird was squawking, he went in and shouted at it.

  “You could have had what you should have had, if you had only done what you were supposed to.”

  But both Nevin and Vera had the feeling that he wasn’t shouting at the bird but at them.

  “And how’s your mother?” Doctor Hennessey said.

  “I don’t know,” Vera answered, just as solemn. “I haven’t been up to town.”

  The doctor continued cleaning the smelts – all the time he spoke, his voice got deeper and hoarser, and the cigarette smoke circled above him. The wind blew through a pipe, and gave the whole house a mournful sound.

  “Chores,” he said. “Well, I don’t waste time with chores myself.”

  His whole house was a mess. Books and pamphlets lay on chairs, coats sat here and there. There was a smell of woollen socks and sweaters.

  The doctor was talking abruptly and trying to find things to say. He looked at Nevin with his cap with the earflaps still pulled down while he sat on the chair, and observed him with the politeness he always reserved for those he disliked.

  “How are things at the hospital?” Vera asked.

  “Nothing gets done up in that place,” the doctor said.

  Then he roared again, and his sister-in-law came downstairs. This was Clare, whom he’d lived with for five years, who cared for him and who listened to his complaining about “things out there.” “Things out there,” he’d said to her after he came home from town the week before, “are getting worse and worse – the worst of it is, now we have people who actually believe they believe in pacifism.”

  Clare – who handled the world much better than he did, and had her hair done every week at Myhrra’s (even though the doctor always said it smelled dumb) – smiled at Vera and Nevin, as if to indicate that she wanted them to forgive her brother-in-law, which both of them acknowledged, and immediately after this, it became understood by them that everyone thought about the doctor exactly the way they themselves did.

  “Who wants smelts?” he said.

  Obviously a fight of some kind had taken place between them – as it always did – and the doctor was making amends by cooking something.

  Clare tried to take over and he told her to go and sit down. She was a small woman of sixty, with dyed blue hair, and she wore a skirt and bobby socks.

  Whenever Clare said that young people were wonderful, the doctor would roar and say that young people weren’t wonderful at all, and in fact, there was nothing whatsoever worthwhile about them. And if she thought that people who did exactly what everyone else did, whatever the craze at the moment was, were wonderful – and took poetry classes (Clare had taken a poetry class), and formed encounter groups at the high school, and bragged about pottery cups, and tried to stop a few wars – then she could think what she wanted.

  Things the doctor did not like talking about included: aid for poverty-stricken countries, helping people in general, seeing to it that things changed, changing anything in general, relaxation (talking about ways to relax, such as yoga – yoga classes in general), anything that had to do with believing that you could change the system – systems in general.

  But it didn’t matter if Vera or Nevin ever mentioned any
of these subjects – though, in fact, they never did – the doctor would still complain about something to himself; the tone of their voice or something. And though he tried to be pleasant to them, he often found himself bursting out in irritation.

  As Clare and Vera and Nevin were talking, the aroma of smelts filled the room. Vera hadn’t eaten them since she was a little girl. In fact, she had started not to eat meat or fish since the first year of Greenpeace and the protest against the seal hunt. But now the smelts cooking in flour and butter made her want them. But she was afraid to ask. If she asked, the doctor might think the worst of her – this is what went through her mind – so she sat in the kitchen enduring the smell and looked at the clock over the sink, and the other clock over the fridge, and the clock on the timer on the stove – all telling a different time.

  Then Clare mentioned the new rule in church about having to stand at the altar to receive, and wondered if Vera liked that idea. Vera was aggravated that Clare did not know what was apparent. Vera was sure her atheism was the one thing that would be apparent. With her big mukluks on and her coat tied with string, she glanced at Nevin for support. Then she said that she did not think of church very often. Nevin shrugged and said: “And I’m Protestant.” And then he looked as if he’d just said something humorous. To Nevin, Catholicism was the one religion everyone was now allowed to dismiss.

  The doctor felt they were making light of Clare, and he did what he always did to protect her: he told her to shut up and stop bothering people – and eat her smelts and go to bed.

  Then he asked Vera and Nevin if they wanted smelts and set out two platesful on the table. He then moved some clothes off a chair and sat down himself.

  His clothes were strung all over the house. Clare had done his housework for years until he read an article that hinted that men would not be able to exist without women doing “everything domestic for them,” and last month he reacted to this by telling her that he didn’t want her to do anything for him. Now he left his clothes everywhere. He had lost airline tickets when he was supposed to fly to a medical convention (he didn’t want to go anyway), and had criticized her for not being “orderly.” And he cooked all his own meals. All of this was driving her crazy.