Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  “About the Master,” she said. “You see, I loved him.”

  I nodded again. She began to sob, softly at first, and then with increasing volume. I stroked her hand, and nodded, although she couldn’t see me for the tears.

  The Master?

  The head nurse came bustling in, his round face rosy with irritation.

  “I told you not to upset her. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

  “But she wants to tell me something. I can’t go now.”

  “Look at the state you’ve got her in. You certainly aren’t doing her any good. Now, please go.”

  “Sophia, I’ll come back. You get some sleep, and then I’ll come back. Okay? I’ll stay right here at the hospital until you can see me again.”

  She nodded faintly, her eyes already closed.

  In the lounge I found Darien ready to depart and Earlene trying—fairly unsuccessfully—to talk to Mrs. Warzek. I leaned on Darien and persuaded him to tell the nurse to let Sophia talk to me. The best thing they could do for Sophia, I insisted, would be to let her unburden herself of whatever was causing her such distress that she wanted to end her life.

  “That’s what we have a social work staff for,” Nurse Martin said, tartly. “And the clergy.” Obviously life was slopping over into his routine again, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

  “Fine.” I was trying hard not to lose my temper. “I’ll talk to the social worker. I’ll talk to the priest. I’ll talk to anyone. But Sophia will only talk to me. If she’ll talk to me with the social worker there, that will be fine. Or the priest. But I really don’t think she will. Especially not the priest.”

  Not given the little she’d told me already.

  So I said good-bye to Earlene when she left and,along with the phantom mother, settled in for the long wait until Sophia woke again.

  After about two hours, during which I had thoroughly perused the Dan Quayle magazine and every other piece of printed material in the waiting room, Mrs. Warzek finally began to respond to my gentle advances.

  In a soft, hesitant voice she said, “I didn’t know anything was bothering Sophia. She seemed just the same as usual. She’s such a good girl. Never gave us any trouble before this. Always did what she was supposed to.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”

  “Of course, her father would never stand for any nonsense. Not even when she was real little. He’s real upset at Sophia. It’s not like her to do anything to get him so upset.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Now? Well, at work, of course.”

  “At work? But Sophia …”

  “He doesn’t want to lose his job. He just started as a custodian at the college. It’s not what he’s used to. But the cement plant …”

  Her faint, uncertain voice trailed off. Another tragedy of the failing northeast economy.

  Although I could see traces of Sophia’s delicate beauty in her mother’s face, Mrs. Warzek was a ruin of a woman. Her skin was pale and papery, her eyes a dead blue. It was difficult to tell how old she was, but her dull hair was still blond. I thought she probably wasn’t more than forty-five.

  Talking to her was like entering some alternative universe presided over by a deity referred to as “Sophia’s father” or “he.” As with most supreme beings, the penalties for transgressing divine rule seemed a little vague. But then, perhaps transgression had never been attempted. Until now.

  Poor Sophia.

  And now she was looking to me for help. She had tried to call me, she’d said. I remembered the telephone call in my office the night before, from which I’d been distracted by Lieutenant Piotrowski. I remembered the hang-up on my answering machine. I began to feel inadequate; people tried to talk to me, and I was never there for them.

  Then they died.

  I jumped up from the yellow vinyl chair. Oh, my God! Amanda!

  She was grouchy when I reached her in her Georgetown dorm room. “Where have you been, Mom? I’ve been worried sick.”

  “Isn’t that supposed to be my line, honey? Listen, let me tell you what’s been going on.” And I did.

  “Tell Sophia to—to chill out,” Amanda advised, as I was about to hang up from our half-hour conversation. “Everything will be okay. You’ll help her, won’t you, Mom?”

  Oh, yeah. That’d be real easy. But I was pleased by my daughter’s faith in me. Amanda’s the best thing in my life. I wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me that in my senior year at Lowell High, though, when I skipped a monthly period, ignored it, and then skipped two, then three. So, I did what I thought I had to do: got married the day after graduation and blew my full scholarship to Smith.

  Fred was a truck driver, and his job kept him on the road for long stretches of time, five or six days per trip. In a basement apartment in North Adams, without friends or family, I retched my way through a long, sick pregnancy, surviving largely on saltines and secondhand Regency romances, both of which I bought in bulk.

  If I’d retained a shred of self-respect in face of my mother’s shame, my father’s fury, Fred’s resentment,and the hypocritical sympathies of my high school classmates, Amanda’s birth rendered me totally docile. I was nineteen. I had no money, no skills, no confidence. If I displeased this volatile, moody man to whom I seemed to have bound myself forever, how could I care for the child I had been careless enough to bring into the world? It was my fault; I was the one with the uterus. I’d been told that often enough to remember it very, very well.

  For two or three years I merely functioned. I washed my face, combed my hair, went through the nightly obligations of the marriage bed. I took abuse passively. But when Fred started backhanding Amanda, I scooped up my daughter, walked out, got a job waitressing at a truck stop, started evening classes at the state college. Read better books.

  Grew up. Went to graduate school. Got the job at Enfield. Had a dead man fall into my arms.

  Sophia woke around eight P.M. A young Pakistani nurse explained in English so meticulous I knew it wasn’t native that she’d been directed to stand in the doorway while I talked to the patient. This, I thought, was Nurse Martin’s revenge, even though he was now off duty. Mrs. Warzek was asleep, slumped uncomfortably in a yellow vinyl armchair, covered with a hospital blanket. I whispered to the nurse not to disturb her.

  When I saw Sophia, propped up on pillows for my visit, even I wasn’t at all certain I should be talking to her. Her eyes, sunk deep in their discolored sockets, were lackluster. She looked as if she wouldn’t have energy enough to speak.

  But she managed a wan smile when she saw me and mustered sufficient strength to begin apologizing immediately for causing me any trouble. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it gently to silence her.

  “Sophia,” I said. I found myself tempted to call her “honey,” as if she were Amanda. If ever a young woman needed some mothering, it was this one. You are only her teacher, I reminded myself firmly. You are not her mother. You have enough on your hands. Do not get yourself too deeply involved here.

  “Sophia,” I began again, “I’m only sorry you’re hurting so badly. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I’m such a fool.” She began sobbing convulsively. I glanced over at the nurse in the doorway, but she smiled ruefully and turned her back on us.

  “We’re all fools, sweetie,” I told Sophia. “Honey, it’s part of the human condition.” Such wisdom. But she needed to hear it.

  She stopped sobbing.

  “Not you.” Her voice was weak.

  “Sophia, if I counted up the times I’ve made a complete, blithering idiot of myself, in a major way, I’d run out of fingers and toes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” I paused to think about it. “Well—maybe I’d run out of fingers.”

  I couldn’t quite believe it, but I think she smiled. At least, I took the weary upward curve of her lip on the right side and a momentary glint of life in her blue-gray eyes to be a smile.

  “Wo
uld it help you to talk a bit?”

  She sighed, a sigh that came from somewhere deeper than the lungs.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised at the story she told me. It was a very old story, perhaps the oldest: a story of seduction and betrayal. I shouldn’t have been surprised but, of course, I was.

  Over the course of the fall semester, very slowly and with cool calculation, Randy Astin-Berger had seduced her. After several weeks of intrigue, he had tired of her enthralled devotion and, somewhat abruptly, dumped her.

  Sophia, of course, had been brokenhearted. His attentions had been so unexpected, and he had seemed so godlike to her, that she had seen herself as being at fault, unworthy. His death had devastated her. It was as if the sun had set forever. Nothing remained for her but the murky emotional twilight of her family life.

  Of course, she couldn’t stand it.

  Her story, as she told it, had been more halting and fragmented—and confused—than that. When she finished, she looked enormously debilitated, but her face had relaxed somewhat, as if she had achieved a temporary peace.

  I talked with her for a while, trying, clumsily, to give her what little reassurance I could. What can you say to someone who feels so deeply betrayed that the foundations of life no longer seem to hold? I promised I’d come see her tomorrow and sat with her until she fell into what looked like a genuine sleep.

  As I walked to my car, I thought back to this fall’s fierce debates about sexual harassment, remembering that Randy Astin-Berger had taken a prominent part. The college was trying to define a consistent policy about sexual relationships between faculty and students. Those who opposed sex between professors and students felt such liaisons were irresponsible and exploitative, that they constituted a blatant abuse of power. The other side felt guidelines would be repressive and puritanical. Astin-Berger—the prick—had given an impassioned faculty-meeting speech against “incarcerating the body in a pernicious web of moralistic regulation.”

  Greg declared he’d never heard such frenzied polemic in all his years at the school. It was the most divisive college issue he could remember. The faculty was split right down the middle, and each side had defended its position with the high moral passion of the righteous. By the end of the semester, the issue hadn’t been resolved, other than for a fuzzy provisional statement that satisfied no one, infuriated almost everyone—and never once mentioned the word “sex.”

  All the way home from the hospital I fumed about that bastard, Astin-Berger. A sexual predator if there ever was one. Putting the make on a vulnerable child like Sophia. I wanted to kill him.

  But, then, someone had beaten me to it.

  Six

  AT LUNCHTIME on Sunday the Blue Dolphin diner was packed with Christmas shoppers and students letting off steam between exams. Although it was after noon, people were still ordering the enormous breakfasts for which the place is famed. A waitress went by, carrying a tray heaped with omelets, home fries, and sausage. The odor of potato, onion, and grease was irresistible. American ethnic food. I stood in the doorway of the battered chrome-and-steel diner—an original ‘40s eatery, not one of the trendy reproductions—and waited for Greg and for a booth. The intense cold had relented a bit, and the outside steps were covered with muddy slush. I stamped my feet to shake the melting mess from my boots.

  As a couple in matching purple hand-knitted mittens, hats, and scarves brushed by me, zipping up their identical navy blue down jackets, a fiftyish waitress with improbable blond hair offered to show me to my booth.

  “I’m waiting for a big man with a dark beard,” I told her.

  “Sounds good, honey,” she responded promptly. “So am I.”

  I had tried, with no luck, to reach Greg by phone three or four times after he’d failed to show up Friday night for our planned raid on Randy’s office. By Sunday morning, however, Sophia’s suicide attempt had driven my worries about our broken sleuthing date back into a very dim corner of my mind. I was grading papers, huddled in front of the wood stove in jeans and a ratty Boston University sweatshirt, rushing through the essays at warp speed so I could make time to get over to the hospital. When the phone rang, I grabbed it immediately.

  “Yeah?”

  “Karen? Karen, I want to apologize.”

  “Greg? For what?”

  “For not showing up the other night.” “Oh. Right. I’ve been worried about you. What happened?”

  There was a silence. Then, “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. Could we get together?”

  Shit, I thought. Irena.

  I glanced fatalistically at the scarcely diminished stack of papers, took a deep breath, and offered to meet him at the Blue Dolphin for lunch. That would give him time to pull himself together a bit, and I could get through another five papers. If I was ruthless. After lunch I could go on to the hospital.

  I followed the blond waitress to a table in the back of the diner. Avery Mitchell was sitting in the next booth. Well, it’s a small town. Sometimes much too small.

  He was with a couple of trustee-type middle-aged men—burly, balding WASPs in Sunday leisurewear of brightly colored Eddie Bauer sweaters. Most likely they were holding a damage control session. Funny, I would have expected him to host such important guests at the Enfield Arms or the new Biscotti Café. Someplace with original prints, overgrown orchid plants, and risotto. But he looked quite comfortable with the aqua vinyl of the Blue Dolphin decor and a half-eaten bagel.

  Avery nodded when he saw me and after a moment excused himself to come over to my table.

  “Karen, how are you?”

  My hands went cold. Tall, lean, suave, patrician: There was no denying it now, this man looked terrific to me. So much for my working-class erotics.

  “I’m fine, Avery.” I’m cool. I’m smooth. I’m totally unruffled. “And you?” Brilliant conversationalist, too. And still, oh God, wearing the B.U. sweatshirt. “How are you?”

  “Okay.” His right hand made a that’s-of-no-concern gesture. A slender, well-manicured hand. Beautiful. “But you? You’ve recovered from the shock?”

  Shock? Was he implying I had been in shock?

  “I’m fine,” I replied. With a little distance.

  The waitress returned, carrying my coffee and followed by Greg. She raised an eyebrow at me in approval. Avery seemed startled to see Greg; God knows what he thought. And Greg looked positively disconcerted to see Avery. Which I could understand. Here he is ready to spill his guts, and who’s standing in the aisle but the big boss. The one who had just granted him tenure.

  The waitress gave me a second knowing glance as she put down the coffee. Two good-looking men. Some girls have all the luck.

  I didn’t feel very lucky at the moment, however. Just damn awkward. What I really wanted was for everyone to vanish—Greg, the waitress, the trustees. No one would remain but Avery and me. Preferably in a dark, smoke-filled club with a moody piano in the deep background. I would reach up and with the tips of my fingers slowly stroke that elegant hand. Just once, beginning at the wrist and moving down to the tip of the little finger. Once would be enough….

  “Well, I’ll leave you folks to your breakfast, ah, lunch,” Avery said, after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, and returned to his trustees. I was left with Greg and a fairly grimy menu. I ordered a Wisconsin cheddar omelet with herb sausage, home fries, and buttered whole-grain toast.

  The omelet came. Involuntarily I gave the waitress a complicitous smile. Then I turned my attention to Greg, who was brooding over his coffee.

  “Here,” I said, cutting the cheddar concoction in two pieces, “take half of this. I’ll never eat it all, and you look as if you could use a little nutrition.” And truly, if anyone as hefty as Greg could looked malnourished, he did. I thought I detected a slight hollowness in his cheeks even under the beard. As I lifted the half omelet onto the plate with his abstemious order of toast, thick yellow cheese dripped onto the Formica tabletop. I dabbed at it absently with my napkin
.

  “So,” I said. “What’s up?”

  Greg stared at the table and mumbled.

  “What?”

  He looked up at me abruptly. “Irena never came home.” He spoke louder than he intended to, then winced. He looked over at Avery, and lowered his voice.

  “You remember Friday night, I was making bouillabaisse? To celebrate? Well, she doesn’t come home by six, when she’s supposed to.” Greg was slipping into the narrative style of his Brooklyn youth. “And by eight everything’s cold, the champagne’s flat. And then she calls.” Greg paused, overcome by indignation.

  I sipped my black coffee and waited for him to continue.

  “She’s been delayed, she says. Isn’t going to make it home tonight. Doesn’t even ask whether I got tenure. So …”

  “Yes?”

  “So, we had the mother of all arguments, Karen. And then I jumped in the car and went to Manhattan to talk some sense into her.” He stirred cream into his heavily sugared coffee.

  “Did it work?”

  “She’s not coming home.”

  Oh, God. “Ever?”

  “I don’t know.” I think it was only the presence of Avery Mitchell in the next booth that kept Greg from dissolving in tears. I’d never seen a man look so despondent.

  That was all Greg would say. I was quite certain he thought Irena was involved with another man. It wasn’t inconceivable. With her bouncy strawberry blond curls and eyes the color of sherry, she has just the kind of peachy beauty that would prove irresistible to any show-biz Lothario. A good ten years younger than Greg, she had married young, and life in a stuffy academic town might well have begun to chafe.

  Greg was by now completely lost in gloom. After a few minutes of one-sided conversation, I changed the subject. I told him about Lieutenant Piotrowski’s visit to my office, the poem on Randy’s computer, and Sophia’s suicide attempt. For some inexplicable reason all this misery seemed to perk Greg up.

  He knew Sophia, he said. She’d done an independent study with him the previous year on the anthropology of American ethnicity. “Her parents are from Poland,” Greg said. “And she was fascinated by ethnic novels, tales of assimilation. You know, where the protagonist struggles with personal identity? What does it mean to be an American when your parents live the old-world ways? She wrote a paper for me on Bread Givers—have you read that?”