by Carol
“Are we all here now?” asked Nurse Hoskins. She was a large woman with the body of a professional wrestler—and a face that would have been considered ugly even on a wrestler.
“There was a theft here last night,” announced Hoskins, looking around the room severely. “Someone took something from my desk and left a mangy dollar bill to pay for it. Well, let me tell you that the thief wont go unpunished. I have taken that dollar bill to the FBI and they are sprinkling it with fingerprint powder right now and they'll tell me whose fingerprints are on it—''
She wouldn't have talked in that fashion to men of her own age; but her presumption seemed to be, always, that anyone who had to be taken care of was childish and of limited understanding. She looked around, perhaps to see if any eye was guiltily averted from hers. Morty, the timid old man who occupied the third bed down on the other side of the room from George, quailed under her glance, his hands fluttering vaguely at his mouth.
“So!” she said, bearing down on him. “I might have known it was you!”
“Just a minute!” called George. He hopped out of bed and strode towards her. “You leave Morty alone. He didn't take your goddam roll and coffee. I did.”
Hoskins stared at him with a dropped jaw. Probably what surprised her most was the mere fact of his defiance: compounded by that other fact that recently, up until yesterday, he had been one of the feeblest of the feeble old men here. She recovered, seized his right arm just above and below the elbow, turned him around and walked him back to his own bed, with a threat that turned him pale:
“Just for that, you don’t get any breakfast. We’re not going to have any overfeeding here.”
And so, when the trays were brought in, there wasn’t one for him, although he was again terribly hungry. He was ashamed of being so ravenous; and yet, under his shame, was a small trembling pulse of delight. Hunger was so lively. It gave him something to look forward to, and he hadn’t had that in ... oh, ages!
To his additional delight, when Mildred came on duty at eight, she brought him some orange juice, toast, eggs and cornflakes. It seemed to him the most delicious breakfast he had ever eaten in his life.
4
Looking out the window the next morning, he saw Hugh ana Edith coming up the walk. He hopped back into bed, feeling less at a disadvantage there than in his shabby bathrobe.
“This is a pleasure!” he said. “I had hardly expected to see you again so soon.”
“You’re looking great, Dad,” said Hugh. “We phoned and Nurse Hoskins said you were better. She certainly knew what she was talking about.”
Edith took her customary place in the chair and Hugh sauntered over to the other side of the bed. There seemed to be something on his mind. George looked at him questioningly.
“Dad, there’s something I want to ask you ...”
“Oh? You have something for me to sign?”
“Let’s not be childish,” advised Edith.
“It’s about some money,” went on Hugh, faltering a 95
little. “Is it possible that you, just before the bankruptcy twenty years ago, put aside some money?” George stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I have an idea that when you saw the bankruptcy business looming, you put some money aside where the creditors wouldn’t get it.”
George continued to stare. A chill, almost physical, sank into his heart. “You have an idea... ?”
“That’s right.”
George found words again. “Why, you snivelling ingrate—you mean-spirited worm! Do you think I’d resort to something like that? When I turned over my books and accounts to the bankruptcy court, I accounted for every penny I had. I laid everything right on the table. If you think I’m the kind of man who’d cheat his creditors, you still know nothing of me after all these years.”
But what was curious was that Hugh, instead of flinching under this scorn as he ordinarily would have done, stood steadfast. “Now take it easy, Dad. No one would blame you if you did keep something aside. It’s just what I’d do, myself.”
“I’m sure you would!”
“Nevertheless,” went on Hugh, determined, “I have it on good authority that you did keep some money aside.”
That chilling sensation sank deeper into George’s chest as he racked his memory to discover who that authority might be.
“Something,” said Hugh carefully, “in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars.”
Ah! So he was talking about Janie’s Fund.
Janie Whitmer had been his sister’s little girl. When she was a blond and plump two-year-old, he had set up an educational fund for her, amounting to $10,000. He had supposed, quite rightly, that her parents would never be able to afford to send her to college. That had been twenty-two years ago. Two years later Tommy disappeared with the firm’s assets and
George was in bankruptcy, but his private misfortunes did not affect Janie's Fund in any way. That money was hers, not his. There was no legal way in which he could have gotten access to it, even if he had wanted to, except if Janie died before she reached college age. That had been a mere formality: he had never expected to see the money again. But six years ago, the gift had returned to the giver. The radiant Janie, on her way home from a high school dance, was killed when the antique automobile in which she and her escort were riding was struck by a train.
He had been in no hurry to touch the money. It held for him too much unhappy feeling. But, gradually, during that last year with Hugh and Edith, he had begun to see that perhaps he had something in reserve worth keeping there. He had never mentioned the fund to Hugh.
Who could have put Hugh and Edith on the track of the money? Surely not the Trust Officer or his old friend Charlie Kincaid, the General Manager, of the Bureford Bank. It was a mystery. But of one thing he was certain: They would never get their hands on that money.
He said, “You’re wasting your time, Hugh.”
“Dad, this is the way I look at it. That money is never going to do you any good. How can it? So we might as well have it. If you die we would be able to obtain it, I think, but only if we knew where it was. And we need the money now. I’ve gotten into rather a hole with certain land deals I went into. I fell in with some guys who said they could show me how to make a killing. And they did—only the killing was me. Boy, they really buried me! And Nurse Hoskins says you’ve been doing better lately and ... well, you know... may be around for some time, and ...”
“I must remember, Hugh, to tell my butler not to admit you again.”
"I know I’m not your flesh and blood, but Edith is, and—”
"Goodbye, Hugh.”
"Okay, old man,” said Hugh, picking up his coat, which he had dropped across George’s feet. "You’re just being spiteful and you know it! That money can never do you a bit of good. I think you’re simply determined that we will never get hold of it. Look, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Tell us how to get the money and we’ll let you have some of it for your personal needs. You can’t spend much here, I know, and a few hundred dollars might last you quite a while. You could buy little things, like cigarettes—”
"I don’t smoke.”
"—and magazines. You like to read.”
Hugh fell silent, as if waiting for a reply. Which didn’t come. Watching his face, George had the curious impression that he was working himself up to some resolve or sacrifice.
Hugh swallowed, as if forcing down something distasteful. "Look: What with compound interest, over a period of twenty years, that money will be much nearer twenty thousand than ten. And that much money would be more than we’d actually need to make good our losses. What was left over would pay for a personal nurse for you for some time. Nurse Hoskins! We could hire her! That means we could take you home. You could live at home, with us! Wouldn’t that be great? Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”
"Hugh, you not only shove the knife in, you twist it. But I know you. After you got that money, I wouldn’t be with you three months
before I was right back here again.”
Hugh and Edith exchanged a glance over his bed—and he saw what he had done. He had admitted that the money existed.
"So,” said Hugh.
"So,” repeated George, laughing in agreement.
‘'Yes, you’re right. The money does exist And you were right about that other matter, too. You will never get your hands on it.”
The younger man allowed himself a sneer. "What happened to those high moral principles you were bragging about a moment ago? So you wouldn’t cheat your creditors, would you?”
"I'll explain nothing to you, Hugh. All you need to know is this: You’ve squeezed everything else out of me, by one means or another, but you won’t get that money. You have my job and my company-all right. I gave you those. But you also took away my income from the company and my home and even the spot of ground I was to be buried in, and I didn’t give you those. I still have a small shred of self-respect left, but I wouldn’t keep even that long if I let you sweet-talk, wheedle, nag, trick, or bully the secret of that money out of me. You will never see it. Goodbye.” "Dad,” said Hugh bitterly, “you’re senile. I’ll have you examined and declared non compos mentis. You’ll be forced to tell what you’ve done with that money.”
George laughed again. “How? By physical torture? Or by withholding my cigarettes? Goodbye.”
Hugh made an inarticulate sound of disgust and stalked out the door. Edith rose. “Well, Father, I’m sorry to see you like this. I’ll give you some time to think things over and maybe you’ll arrive at a better state of mind. I’ll come again in a few days ... and I think I’ll bring a visitor. A surprise visitor.” And she followed her husband ... leaving her father with a good deal to think about.
5
He definitely had his legs.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, he looked down at them. His feet didn’t seem so white as they had, and—he lifted his pajama bottoms a little—the skin of his legs had lost that glassy, or porcelain, look. What did it mean? Could it be that his circulation had improved? Well, whatever it meant, he could walk about the ward with a good deal of assurance now and without getting tired. On the contrary, he often felt restless when he lay down and wanted to get up again and be moving about.
As he did now, for instance. He hopped down onto the floor and walked the length of the ward, nodding absently to Morty, Zorbedian, Dumbarton and the other old fellows as he passed them. Odd. Something odd ... What was it? He looked back. Old heads turned suddenly away from him, or looked down at newspapers or at empty hands. They had been watching him. But why? He glanced down at himself. There was nothing odd in his appearance. He was no shabbier than usual. Oh, well, what did it matter? He went to the window at the end of the ward and looked out.
Looked out at the green lawn and the street beyond. On the other side of the street he could see the trees and, here and there, poking their roofs through the greenery, houses. The World Out There. How beautiful! He couldn’t seem to see enough of it. His eyes lapped it up, greedily. His gaze soared on over the housetops and trees to some twin towers in the distance—how long had those been there? he’d never noticed them before—and, further, to some blue-gray mountains in the very far distance. How long had those been there? Forever, he supposed. And yet, having looked out this window hundreds of times, he had never seen them before. Lord, how clear the air must be today!
After several minutes, he turned away from the window with a wistful sigh. The bed nearest him, Borgmans, was vacant. Someone had dropped a weekly newsmagazine there, open to the medicine section, and the headline of a column caught his eye, partly because someone—the same someone, probably—had drawn a border of black crayon around one of the paragraphs below it. He idly picked up the magazine and read:
OLD USED AS GUINEA PIGS
NYC (Apr. 28) Dr. Bosley Turping charged today, in a speech before the American Medical Ass’n, that aged persons are sometimes used as guinea pigs in this country.
“It is no secret,” said Dr. Turping, “that seriously ill persons and terminal patients are sometimes experimentally given drugs whose properties and effects are inadequately understood . . . There is nothing shocking about that; in many cases it is undoubtedly the right thing to do. But it is shocking that elderly men and women in nursing homes without any specific or serious ailments but simply suffering from a general debilitation, from ‘old age.' are also sometimes experimentally given substances the effects of which are unknown.”
Turping went on to give instances. The paragraph starkly edged in black was one of these:
“The resident physician of a small midwestem nursing home administered various drugs to patients under his care in the hopes of finding a cancer-retarding or regressing drug. As he seldom had a cancer patient (those being taken to the nearby County Hospital and elsewhere), he gave his home-brewed concoctions to inmates who had no sign of cancer. This man, himself very advanced in years and in the opinion of some of his colleagues no longer competent to practice medicine, made the mistake of bragging about his ‘researches’ to a nurse who informed the local AMA chapter. He is now on leave of absence’ from the nursing home, while the local board of supervisors, reluctant to undertake any action that might blacken the reputation of a man with decades of public service behind him, is quietly seeking to retire him.”
George smiled. Zorbedian. Probably, it was Zorbedian who had marked the paragraph, no doubt thinking that the midwestem nursing home was the Owl Creek Rest Home and that its culpable resident physician was none other than Doctor Ives, who had so unexpectedly taken his sabbatical. And the description did fit rather patly ... but, after all, there were hundreds of such institutions in the midwest, so what were the chances that the item had anything to do with Owl Creek? The pathologically suspicious Zorbedian was always accusing the nurses and staff of putting strange substances in his food and drink, but apparently they didn’t think him crazy enough to transfer him to the psychopathic ward at the General.
With the thought, he naturally glanced at Zorbedian, on the other side of the room, and found that the old guy, sitting bolt upright in bed, was glowering at him, his lower lip thrust out as if in a surly accusation. George winked at him. He dropped the
magazine back onto Borgman’s bed and paced the ward hack to his own. Again, he was conscious that his fellow inmates were regarding him rather curiously, hut when he stopped to look about at them questioningly all dropped their eyes or turned away—except for Zorbedian, who continued to glower at him, as with some undefined suspicion. George shrugged his shoulders and went on. He couldn’t let things like that concern him.
But when he was about six feet from his bed, some-tiling else made him stop and stare. His hands flew to his eyes.
His spectacles lay on his pillow.
He didn’t have his glasses on! He hadn’t had them on! But ... but then, how had he been able to read that magazine? He hadn’t been able to read a page in years without his glasses. And how had he been able to experience that wonderful horizon-scanning vision? Ordinarily, the trees on the other side of the road were to him, without his glasses, a green cloud or haze lying on the ground. My God, his vision had somehow cleared! But how?
He looked about, at his rumpled bed, and at the bare floor. He could see the grain in the wood! It reminded him of his last flight in a plane, years ago: Looking out the window, in the clear sunlight above the clouds, he could see every pinscratch on the metal wing. He shyly, almost surreptitiously, glanced about at the faces of the other old men, his so-diffi-dent companions. How ugly they were I He had never noticed before how very blemished and wrinkled their faces were. He wasn’t likely to be any handsomer, though, was he? He looked down at his hands. He could see every fine hair on their backs . . . but the age spots, those dark liver spots—he couldn’t see those any better than he had been able to before! That was an anomaly. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear the spots were fading. And where were the warts on the little finger of his right
hand?
One part of his mind was blank, another part buzzed with incoherent speculations, nothing arguable taking shape. He went into the toilet and took a look at himself in the mirror over the washbasin. His eyes looked all right; clear, without redness or film. He was badly in need of a shave, but his face wasn’t as blemished as he had anticipated. And it was filling out. If he weren’t careful, he’d soon be a fat old man like Hendershot. Was it his imagination, or was his hair fatter, too? He ran his hand through it and it seemed to him more full-bodied than it had been, not quite so wispy.
He went back to his bed. If he continued to wander about restlessly, he’d fret the other old guys. It didn’t take much to do that. By way of occupying his mind, and without any more definite purpose, he propped himself up on his pillows and wrote a letter to the Trust Officer at the Bureton Bank, asking for a statement of the exact amount in the Janie Whitmer Trust Fund, and advising that officer that no information concerning the fund was to be released to anyone without his written consent. His hand moved swiftly, legibly, without the slightest tremor, and he gave his signature the old flourish of years past. He had a stamped envelope on hand and, still humoring himself, although it was a pity to waste the stamp, he put the letter into it and addressed the envelope. Which he then posted behind his pillows, as if it were a personal missive to the Sandman.