by Carol
Staring out the window, he saw his daughter, just passing out of his line of sight and entering the building. There seemed to be someone with her, a figure in brown. Her Surprise Visitor? Something about the figure sent an uneasy thrill through him. A presentiment, but of what, he couldn’t have said.
Edith appeared at the narrow door of the ward, crowded by her mysterious companion. “Father,” she cried, “look who I’ve brought you!”
He was a man in his late forties, with a broad face and a wide mouth on which lurked a grin. His eyes were gray and, without being in the least shy or timid—they were very steady—had something vague about them. Perhaps the fact that he seldom blinked them made their steadiness seem unnatural. He looked, thought George, like a carnival barker.
“Hello, Pops,” he said, this apparition. “Long time no see.”
It had been twenty years, actually.
Tommy, the swindler, embezzler, ingrate, wife-deserter, etc., etc., displayed no sign of guilt in confronting the father he had ruined. He squeezed himself through the door and sauntered over to the one chair.
“As you see,” he remarked, “the prodigal son has returned. Please be advised that he expects a fatted calf. No? Well, no matter. He had a late breakfast. You’re looking okay, Pops—much better than advertised, which is rare. Only you’ve apparently lost the power of speech. Too bad. I’d looked forward to a little chat with you.
“One thing is certain,” he rattled on, as George, saying nothing, studied him curiously, “and that is that you'll know me if you ever see me again. You may wonder why I came back to these stamping grounds? I cant really say. It must be the Bad Penny principle at work. I hear about you now and then, because I often have dinner with Sis here and her spouse, and there have been times when I was glad to get a square meal, too. Not that I'm complaining. I've been doing all right lately. I'm associated in a very modest way with the Reverend Willie Hardrack. I write some of his radio patter and other advertising copy. ‘Keep those dimes and dollars coming in, folks!' Lucrative work it is too, though not for me. The Rev. Willy is a tightfisted old bastard."
“Father," said Edith, “I think you might forgive Brother Tommy. After all, he is your son.”
“He is,” agreed George.
“And you forgave him once for doing the same thing that you're mad at him for.”
“And he did it again," said George.
“Well, Pops," said Tommy, trying to put his hands back into his pockets while remaining seated, “that was all a long time ago. Also, you weren't really hurt. You made it all back. Personally, I'm willing to let bygones be bygones ...”
“Why not? You have nothing to lose by being magnanimous."
“And you, Pops," said Tommy, looking about at the old men and the beds, “what have you got to lose? Which brings me, naturally enough, to the subject of my visit. I have the vaguest memory of your telling me twenty years ago or more—you used to confide in me in those days, you know—that you had done something with ten thousand dollars. I can't quite remember what. And Hugh says that much money hasn't shown up since. I think he'd know. He has an eye for such things. He hinted to me that I might be doing everyone a service, not only you and him but me, if I came here and jogged your memory a bit. After all, I am your son—”
“Have you ever been vomited on, Tommy?”
“—and I thought that for old times' sake ..
George saw Trucky out on the lawn. He got suddenly out of bed, startling his two offspring by the agility with which he did so. He removed the envelope he had tucked away behind his pillows and, leaning out the window, called Trucky to him. ‘Would you please mail this letter for me? It's rather urgent.”
“I'd hand-deliver it, if you want me to, Mr. Clay,” said Trucky.
George got back into bed, hopping up onto it like a boy. He turned to Tommy. “Now, you were saying ... ?”
Tommy glanced speculatively out the window, as if with some idea of calling the man back and taking a look at the address on that envelope. But, although he dared a good deal, he didn't quite dare to do that: it might mean an unseemly physical struggle with this spry old man. The three of them saw Trucky drop the letter into the red, white and blue mailbox on the distant comer.
“Checkmate, huh, Pops?” asked Tommy. “You've stolen a march on us, Til bet. You always were a shrewd old buzzard. Well, I guess that's it. I will amble off now into the setting sun. Don't get up. I'm not likely to bother you again ... unless ... (I'm still racking my brains, you see) ... unless I think of something more in connection with that trifling sum: in which case I'll be back. But don't keep a candle burning in the window for me.”
He stepped past Edith, saying as he did so, “His eye is not quite so rheumy as you indicated,” and went out the door.
“I'm very cross with you,” said Edith. “We'd hoped, Husband and I, that Brother Tommy's return would soften you. Of course, Tommy was very flippant. But you know Tommy. You have to make allowances. I'm sure that inside he feels this whole thing very deeply, just as I do.”
He surprised himself by letting out a bark of delighted laughter. "Ha! That's beautiful!”
That silenced her for a moment. She glanced around, narrow-eyed, at the old heads turned their way. "You don't need that money,” she resumed, in a lower tone. "Brother Tommy and my husband and I do, but all your needs are taken care of here.”
"That's right,” said George, "you're still out buffeting against the waves of the wide world. You haven't reached this snug harbor.”
"I want none of your famous sarcasm, Father. I don't have to take that from you. You think we don't come to see you often enough and then you talk that way. Could you blame me if I don't come back for quite a while?”
He understood her. It was a threat. Well, he thought, it won't work. He took no pleasure in their company and they took none in his.
That night he dreamt he was again in his thirties and at home with his family. It was Christmas Eve. Still another version of A Christmas Carol was on the television, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come filling the screen at the moment. He and the two children, a blond boy and girl of about seven and eight, were decorating the tree. His pretty blond wife came out of the kitchen with a tray of fudge to which they all, laughing, helped themselves ...
He awoke, smiling. And yet it seemed to him that there was something slightly wrong with the dream. What was it? It took him a minute or two before he could place it exactly: Violet had had dark hair, as had had both his children from infancy. The laughing woman was not Violet and the children decorating the tree were not Tommy and Edith. The dream was not nostalgic: It took place in the future, not the past. When the woman had come out of the kitchen, he had glimpsed the date on the cloth calendar hanging on the inside of the swinging kitchen door:
1984.
1984? Not Violet...?
He tried to grieve, but couldn’t. Despite himself, he felt cheerful. His spirits kept springing up again. He was alert and full of energy. He got put of bed, peeped out into the hallway and saw that Hoskins was asleep at her post, her head slumped forward into her arms. Even the Wicked (as the Reverend Hardrack must have observed at one time or another) sometimes cease from chafing. He tiptoed past her and went down the hall into the recreation room at the rear of the building. A high wind was blowing, rattling the windows vigorously from outside. Guided by the moonlight streaming along the floor, he found his way to the exercycle—a machine not much used by the inmates, heart attack being feared more than flabby leg muscles—and, seating himself, began pedaling away. God, he felt good! He pedaled for what would have been miles, if he had been moving free out there in the wind and through the open world. He pedaled to Bureford. And beyond. And then, tired but happy, he dismounted and made his way back again past the dozing dragon to his bed, where he slept soundly, dreaming of breakfast.
6
George’s ... recovery ... after this was rapid. He could see well now without glasses and read for hours without
tiring his eyes. His hair was darker and fuller; his hairline was creeping forward, stealthily but not unobserved, day by day. His gait changed. His steps these last few years had been short, mincing and rapid, as if he were walking uncertainly down a steep incline. Now he walked easily, as if he were climbing a hill.
He ate voraciously. He consumed three meals a day, like the other inmates, and in addition cadged candy bars, apples, doughnuts and cups of coffee. He twice raided the kitchen at night, once eating an entire chicken and once a pound of ham. He was ashamed of his gluttony—and yet gluttony looked well on him. He filled out, but no matter how much he ate, his stomach remained flat, perhaps partly because he did stomach-muscle flexing exercises, exercycle pumping, and pushups. He did most of this in secret, one reason being that it alarmed the nurses so when they saw how vigorously he worked out. He exercycled at night, when he could slip past Hoskins. When he couldn’t, he would get out of bed to run-inplace or do pushups, hopping back into bed whenever he heard her stirring from her desk. He was up a great part of the night and yet he got plenty of rest. He could sleep as much as he wanted during the day, and this may have been why his steadily-improving appearance didn’t excite more comment than it did from habitual visitors to the ward: No one pays much attention to an old man sleeping with the covers pulled up about his ears. Hoskins never saw him during this period.
But of course the marked improvement in his appearance did not escape the notice of his fellows. Few things escaped the observation of those half-blind and half-deaf old men. His one sadness was, in fact, the attitude of the other patients. They were envious and jealous of him, almost as if they felt that he had usurped something rightly belonging to them. What most disappointed him was the attitude of Harry Dumbarton, three beds down on this side of the room. Harry was a taciturn old man with a craggy, weatherbeaten face and white hair like the bristles of a stiff brush. He had been a ship’s engineer in the merchant marine most of his life, and George had always found him intelligent and decent, although almost too reticent for conversation. And now Harry’s fine impassive face threatened to crumble whenever he looked George’s way. His rage—when it did burst out one day—was the more impressive for being so seldom displayed; it was as if he were speaking out at last under some intolerable and prolonged injustice.
He arose from his bed in his nightshirt. He turned, his legs trembling under him, and faced George, who had been restlessly pacing the ward and had stopped to speak to him. Harry must have been a fine man in his day.
"Why you?’ he cried, as George stared, blankly. “Why not me? Are you any better than I am? Where were you when the Grace de Dieu went down and everybody was drowning around me? Could you have held Collins afloat in the freezing water for eight hours until we were picked up? Where were you when the boiler exploded—?”
‘Harry,” said George, as calmly as he could, “Harry, you’re not well. I think you should lie down.” And, imitating Hoskins’s scientific grip above and below the elbow, he wheeled Dumbarton about and placed him back onto his bed. “Don’t excite yourself, old man; this is none of my doing.”
Harry sank back and lapsed into silence. George turned away, regretting the incident and wondering what in the world he could have meant when he had said, “This is none of my doing.”
But the incident wasn’t closed yet. The moment he stepped back into the aisle, the others rose against him. If he had been the hero of the encounter with Hoskins, he was the villain of this one. It may be that the taciturn Harry had spoken for them all.
“I know,” said Zorbedian, with a good old-fashioned melodramatic sneer, unconsciously imitated from some stage performance he had witnessed as a boy: “I know why you’re getting all this preferential treatment. You’re Nursie’s pet! You’re the sweetheart of that Nurse Paine-in-the-ass! You’re carrying on an affair with her! That’s why they’re giving you all the nutritious food and making us eat the wornout scraps with no food value in them!”
“Yes,” seconded Bob Bums, wincing as he raised himself on an arthritic elbow, “that’s why they’re giving you the modem miracle medicines and us aspirin.”
And to George’s further astonishment, there was a bleat from the prostrate bulk of the huge Hendershot in the bed next to his own: “And that’s why they’re letting you exercise all hours of the day and night while they make us lie here till our muscles atrophy.” “You fat old slob,” shouted George, blazing with anger, “you never exercised in your life! If you want to exercise, get out of bed and do it! Who’s stopping you? And you, Zorbedian, if I hear you speaking of Nurse Paine in that way again, I’ll wring your scrawny neck like I would a turkey’s!”
There was a clamor of voices. The others snapped and snarled at him; all except Dumbarton and the wide-eyed and trembling Morty. But the loudest voice was his own. He outshouted them all. He stalked about the room, roaring with outstretched finger, and sent each of them back to his pillow with a display of energy and resolution that none of them could match, like a trainer in a cage full of raging lions and tigers.
The whole hubbub lasted but a minute. He stood, quivering with anger in the center of the room, looking about him.
Mildred Paine stood just inside the door, looking at him with dismay and wonderment. She had probably heard the last part of the discussion.
She came forward, almost timidly. “I’ve never seen you like this before, George.” Her disapproval was tempered by a small smile. “You’re usually so patient and considerate. What’s making you so cranky?”
He turned his head away a bit peevishly. “I’m . . • I’m teething.”
And so he was: Mildred could see fragments of white thrusting themselves up through his sore and pink gums. The two looked at each other a long moment. Neither spoke, but each understood what the other was thinking. He saw her perplexed and anxious eyes examining his face and knew that she was seeing what she saw when he looked in the bathroom mirror. The wrinkles on his face were disappearing.
Mildred, her face frozen, drew back, as if shrinking from him. But she was a brave girl and she dispelled her feeling, whatever it was, and his answering chill, with a quick smile. “Well ... perhaps I should bring you a teething-ring? Maybe with that you wouldn’t be so crabby.” He declined that offer, but accepted some camphor to put on his tender gums.
His new teeth grew rapidly. In a short while he was eating with them—fortunately, for he went through a time when they weren’t much good as yet but he couldn’t use his store-boughten teeth. He had to gum his food, as did some of the other oldsters here. Mildred told various staff members about the new teeth, including the administrator, Pauline Lute; but Mrs. Lute somehow—perhaps because she was preparing for her annual vacation, although it was a curious lapse even so—completely forgot this startling bit of news immediately afterward. The dietician came to peer into George’s mouth, after which she sent him frequent glasses of milk, an attention which also aroused the malice of his fellow prisoners. Even those who weren’t thirsty resented Mildred and Buena bringing him the white glasses of bone-forming liquid: He was getting something they weren’t.
He itched and shed his skin again. And Mildred decided that it was time he had a real bath: it had been more than a year since he had had anything but a sponging. “I think you’re strong enough,” she told him, “to get in and out of a tub without falling and breaking a leg or drowning yourself. Of course, I’ll be there to help you.”
He studied her face as she soaped his shoulders, and found it pleasant. She was about fifty years old, but small, slim, trim, well-preserved. Her hair had been blond but was fading into grey. Her face, like her body, was narrow. She had probably been thought pretty as a teenager and—George added a codicil—he would have agreed with that judgment. She smiled under his scrutiny.
“All right, I can dry you now. Here, take my arm. Careful now..
It was while she was drying him with the heavy towel that something happened that hadn’t happened in years. He had been feeli
ng for some time a warming, erotic glow, rather pleasant in itself; an incipient stirring; but he hadn’t expected his appetite to take on a note of urgency or to manifest itself in any specific or tangible way. But it did.
“Oh, my?” said Mildred, incredulously, staring at it. “Now, don’t be childish, George!” He had taken her around the waist and, displaying an unexpected strength, bending his knees, forced her backward to the floor. “George—you’ll hurt yourself ”
But he felt quite capable and strong. He got his hand under her skirt and pulled off her panties—fortunately, she wasn’t wearing one of those damned body-stockings—and wedged himself into place.
In the tussle that followed she uttered not a sound until, finally, she gave vent to some involuntary ones. She struggled at first. Perhaps from surprise, but after a time ceased to do so, partly because she didn’t now want to bring anyone running and partly to lessen the chances of his hurting himself. She waited patiently until he had exhausted himself and then, released, got up; not helping him, for he rose to his feet quite easily.
“Pardon me a minute, George. There's a little thing I have to do. My!” she added, as she proceeded to do so. “What’s happening to you?” She looked him over seriously, as he—a bit awkwardly but not much—got into his pajamas and robe. “You haven’t eaten any monkey-glands, have you? Nothing like this has happened to me before.” She smiled. “I don’t mean ... well, I was married years ago, you know. I mean, some of the other fellows your age have had that same idea but they’ve never been able to back it up with anything solid. There’s no use denying it, George. You’re not just getting well or getting better, you’re getting ...” But her voice failed her: she couldn’t bring herself to utter that last word. “Anyway, I think that after this you can bathe yourself.”
They walked back in silence, arm in arm, to the men’s ward. She tucked him into bed and planted a kiss on his firm cheek—a kiss of forgiveness, perhaps, and he didn’t know what else. She straightened and stood in her white uniform, looking down at him, her face unreadable in the darkness. He looked back up at her for a long moment. She bent and whispered in his ear: