Judge Me Not
Page 18
“Tell her I’m coming to see her.”
“I told her that a week ago. She said for you to stay away from her.”
The doctor stood up. “Be good,” he said. He trudged out, a big weary man on an endless treadmill.
Teed was discharged at the end of the week. Five days later the doctor phoned him at City Hall. “Morrow? Come see the Heddon girl at two this afternoon.”
“Has she changed her mind about seeing me?”
“No. But now I want her stirred up. I want her to rant and rave and storm around, using all the facial expressions in the book. Got to start getting back muscle tone, or she’ll end up with a dead pan. All slack. She won’t tear now. Healing fine. But apathetic. Don’t like that. Go give her a hard time. Nurse expecting you.”
Teed put the transcript of his grand-jury testimony in the locked file. Miss Anderson gave him a sallow nod as he said he would be gone most of the afternoon.
He checked out with Powell Dennison. The heart was gone out of the man. Now he was merely an old man who worked mirthlessly, doggedly, and without satisfaction at the things he knew best.
Teed parked in the hospital lot at ten of two. The receptionist told him the room number, told him to go right up. A pretty nurse stood waiting in the hall. She held her finger to her lips, opened the door to let him in, closed it soundlessly behind him.
Barbara lay with the bed cranked up to bring her almost to an erect sitting position. Her knees were elevated and she was turning the pages of a magazine. A bandage covered the left side of her face, from hairline to chin. Her nose, right eye, and the right half of her mouth were uncovered. A smaller bandage was taped to her right cheek.
She gave him a startled look and reached for the signal button. He reached it before she did, took it to the length of the cord and put it on the window sill.
She had not spoken. He pulled a chair over, sat down, took her hand. She tried to pull it away, but he held it tightly. She let it go lax. Her hand had the damp coolness of nervousness.
“They’re going to make you beautiful again, Barbara.”
“Is that important?” Her voice was listless.
“It will be nice. I’m going to spend a long time looking at you. But even if they couldn’t, it wouldn’t matter too much.”
She looked at him gravely. “Don’t be a sentimental fool. Run while you can.”
“I’ve spent a lot of years running, Barbara. I’m tired of running. Now I’ve found something that helps me make sense out of living. A… sort of talisman.”
“A good-luck charm,” she said, her voice bitter, distorted by the constriction of the bandage across the left side of her mouth.
“Be rough. Be bitter and nasty and pretend you’re hard as brass hinges, baby. It won’t do you any good.”
“You want to look at a face like this?”
“When I get tired of looking, I’ll turn out the lights.”
A tear spilled over the lower lid of her eye, channeled down by her nose to her lip. She caught it with the tip of her tongue. “All cats are gray in the dark.”
“Suppose I love you, though. Suppose I spend more time thinking than ever before in my life, and I find out I love you. What then?”
“I chase you away, Teed. Because I don’t want you to keep remembering what I was, torturing yourself with it. And you’ll do that. After a while it would come between us and you’d look at me and think of it and hate me. I don’t want that.”
“I’ve given that considerable thought, Barbara. I’ve tried to be logical. It bothers me. It will always bother me. I admit that. I know why it will bother me. Because in the formative years they give you books about virgin princesses. Romantic books. They condition you to a double standard where a man is a man and a woman is not really human. So it is hard to remember, always, that a woman is human, not some kind of a damn sweet-smelling toy on a store shelf. I’ve done too much sleeping around. It isn’t good. It dulls your taste.”
“That isn’t the same.”
“I make a ledger in my mind. On one side I put this business of remembering what you were doing when I met you. On the other side I put all the things you have come to mean to me. And that leaves me right where I started. Needing you.”
She rolled her head restlessly from side to side, as though she were seeking escape. “Don’t, Teed. Please don’t talk like that to me. Please go away.”
“In eight months to a year this job will be over for me, and it will be turned over to local people. I know you’re going back to Baltimore. Here’s all I want. Go back. You’re mending on the outside. Mend on the inside, too. We’ll write letters to each other. When this job is over, I’ll come to you. We’ll talk. That’s all I want. A chance to show you that nothing will change in a year. Or twenty years.”
“Why tie yourself up to a tramp?” she pleaded.
“Tramp? A man is one thing one day and something happens and he is suddenly somebody else. Maybe you have to be honest with yourself. Too honest. You have to say to yourself, ‘I was a tramp.’ O.K. Say that. But don’t say, ‘I am a tramp,’ because you know that would be a lie, and I know it too.”
She looked up at the ceiling. “There is another way I would be unfair to you, Teed, if I didn’t send you away. I… can’t have children.”
“That was a nice try, Barbara, but you talked too much to Anna Fermi. I had dinner there with Armando and Anna last night. We talked about you. Anna happened to mention that you told her that you could have children.”
“Damn you, damn you, damn you!”
“They are my friends. I suddenly discover that maybe I never had better friends. We talked about you. I told them how I feel about you. We talked over whether or not I could forget that other business. Then Anna did a smart thing. She asked me if I would forgive you. I stared at her and I asked her what the hell for. Then she gave me that grin of hers and said that I had given the right answer and so she thought it would work out for us.”
“Leave me alone.”
“See? I’m pushing you out of a little death you’ve made for yourself back into life. You’re reluctant. I checked with another person too.”
“Maybe a letter to Emily Post would help.”
“I checked with Albert. Albert said that in his work he has to understand pigeons, but he’ll be damned if he can understand women. He told me to tell you that, such as it is, we have his blessing.”
And on her face was the twisted mixture of tears and laughter, bitterness and joy. “Albert was… always dopey.”
“He told me how stubborn you were when you were a little kid. He said I should use force if necessary. I said I didn’t want to use force. I said I would make a dramatic appeal. I told him that I would tell you that if you insisted on having nothing to do with me, life would cease to have any meaning at all to me.”
“Teed, don’t…”
“Albert said that sounded too corny and too dramatic. I told him it was the truth, and I couldn’t help it if it sounded that way. Albert said, O.K., then, for me to try it, but it certainly wasn’t going to work on the Barbara he remembered.”
She turned toward him. Her unbandaged eye was shining, bright, tear-filled. “That shows you how much Albert knows about women.”
His voice was husky. “Albert better stick to his pigeons.”
Her hand tightened in his. “I shouldn’t let you…”
“You’re not agreeing to a thing. Only to letting me come to see you when this job is done and we’re both a year older.”
“Don’t ever let me hate myself for wanting to say yes to you, Teed.”
“When we start tossing crockery, we’ll bring Albert in as referee. Darling, laugh again. I love your love.”
“I’ll laugh for you. I’ll laugh in the night. Not for funny. Joy laughter. Love laughter. Laughter for being alive.”
He kissed the right corner of her mouth. He tasted the salt on his lips as he straightened up.
“Tomorrow we’ll talk some more.�
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“Yes, Teed.”
“There’s a lot to say to you, Barbara.”
“I know.”
“Tomorrow we’ll talk about how in that other life, we were two different people, neither of them as sound as you and I. The old life didn’t happen to us.”
She frowned. “That’s odd! I can almost believe you.”
“One day you will.”
He walked down the soundproofed hall, and down the stairs, and out into the fat wet flakes of a late November snow. The flakes melted as they touched his face. He walked to his car, feeling that at last he had stepped from the sidelines into the midst of life. There could be no more detachment. Only involvement. You did the very best you could with everything you could reach. And never stopped reaching, or trying. And this, at last, made life a satisfying thing—a thing at which you were given one chance—and learned to enjoy the knowledge that one chance was all there was.