A Room of My Own

by Ann Tatlock

  "Ginny, time to wake up now."

  Time to wake up for what? For school? I had always awakened on my own. I didn't need Mother to wake me. Had I been sick? What day was this? What was going on?

  And then I remembered.

  "Mama!" I cried, fully awake. "What time is it?"

  "About eight o'clock."

  "Eight o'clock at night?"

  "That's right."

  "Have I slept all day? More than twelve hours?"

  "Yes, and no wonder--"

  I threw back the covers. "I have to get up and see Papa!" How, I wondered, could I have slept so deeply and for so long while Papa lay suspended somewhere between life and death in the hospital?

  Mother tightened her grasp on my arm. "I was just at the hospital," she said.

  "What?" I couldn't believe she would go without me. "Why didn't you come get me? Why didn't you let me go with you?"

  Her face was little more than a shadow in the dark room, and I couldn't see her expression. I reached over and turned on the lamp beside the bed. Mother's face appeared strained and wan, but otherwise she was calm. "Your father's still in the special care ward," she said quietly, "and you wouldn't have been allowed in with me."

  "You saw Papa?" I asked. Mother nodded. "How was he, Mama? How did he look?"

  "Well, not quite like himself." Mother tried to smile, but her effort didn't amount to much.

  "Did you talk with the doctor?" I was anxious to know everything, though Mother seemed reluctant to tell. "Did you talk with that neurologist they were going to call in?"

  "Yes, I saw him. His name is Dr. Murphy. He seems like a nice sort of fellow. More personable than Dr. Rawls, anyway."

  "But what did he say?"

  Mother lifted her shoulders and let them fall again. "That we can't know anything for certain yet."

  "But Dr. Rawls told us that much!" I sputtered. "I thought a specialist was supposed to know more than a regular doctor. What was the use of calling him in if he can't tell us more than that?" I was beginning to feel irritated by the entire medical profession.

  "Like Harold said, it takes time to assess the damage of head trauma."

  "Couldn't Dr. Murphy tell you anything?"

  "He said that your father has some reflex movement and that his pupils respond to light. Those are good things, he said."

  I was almost afraid to ask, but I forced myself to form the words. "What are the bad things, then?"

  Mother thought a moment, her mouth turned downward in a visible frown as if she were mentally sifting through the vast clutter of information the neurologist had dumped at her feet. "Your father's age, for one thing."

  "Papa's not old!" I cried.

  "Of course not. But I guess most people over forty-five don't recover as well from head injuries."

  More statistics. I clenched my teeth. "He doesn't know Papa," I said. "He doesn't know that Papa's different...."

  I let my words trail off as Mother patted my hand. All she said was, "Well," and I knew what she meant. I lowered my eyes to the quilt that covered my bed and tried to anchor myself by following the pattern in the stitches that connected the squares. After a moment, I asked, "What else did the doctor say?"

  "He said a lot of things, Virginia, most of which neither you nor I can fully understand. I'm finally learning that for a doctor's wife I'm woefully ignorant when it comes to medicine and the human body." She attempted to smile again. "I know about childhood diseases, but that's about it. Though that's debatable, too, since I didn't recognize chicken pox in the girls when all the symptoms were laid out right under my nose."

  Mother spoke wistfully. Personally, I didn't blame her for not knowing what she had never learned, but she seemed keenly disappointed in herself. Nevertheless, it wasn't Mother I was concerned about at the moment.

  "Mama," I ventured timidly, "did the doctor tell you whether or not Papa would be all right?"

  "No, Virginia," Mother replied quietly, "he didn't tell me that. He can't answer that question, I'm afraid."

  "No," I said, "I didn't think he could."

  Suddenly Mother stood. "Time for you to eat something," she said. "Everyone else has had supper already."

  "But when can I see Papa?"

  "Possibly tomorrow. I don't know for sure."

  "You won't go back to the hospital without me, will you?"

  "I don't like the thought of keeping you from school, but no, I won't go to the hospital without you. Your father needs you more than you need to be in school. We'll arrange for your lessons to be dropped off at the hospital for a couple of days. Come on, now, let's get you fed."

  I got up then and, sitting alone in my bathrobe and slippers at the kitchen table, tried to eat the scrambled eggs and toast Mother made for me before she disappeared to put the girls to bed. Though I hadn't eaten all day, I wasn't particularly hungry. I chewed slowly, thinking about what a strange place the kitchen was when there was nobody in it. Kind of like a church sanctuary without a congregation. The room was meant to be occupied, was built for bustle and activity, was where life was supposed to be going on. But now it was quiet and empty. Even the electric fan was still, turned off and unplugged after having worked so hard for so many months. The dishes had been washed and put into place behind the glass-door cabinets, the plates and bowls in stacks, the teacups dangling from little hooks, appearing unused. Even the refrigerator, tired of humming, was silent. Quiet as a tomb, I thought. The whole room was so quiet that even the scraping of my fork against the plate and the crunching of toast between my jaws was an annoying and grating noise. I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten in the kitchen alone. I couldn't remember ever eating in the kitchen alone. And the fact that I was there by myself, eating scrambled eggs in my pajamas at eight-thirty at night, meant that everything in my life had changed. I looked about the room nervously, fearing that at any moment the door to the pantry, or the door to the basement, or the door to the backyard would fly open and something evil would pounce in upon me.

  But what came into the kitchen a moment later was my brother, Simon, and when I saw him I sighed openly with relief. Simon was here, and a little bit of life was just the same as it had always been. Maybe he'd sit down and we could talk awhile, give each other a boost of encouragement. We'd experienced the riot together and had come away closer to each other for it. Now we could face together what had happened to Papa. Even though he was just a little boy, he had a certain strength about him, and heaven knew I needed that strength now.

  But my hopes quickly toppled into little crumbs of dread when Simon acknowledged me with one long stare of contempt and said nothing. I knew what he was thinking. Papa had gone to the camp and had the life nearly beaten out of him, and Simon blamed me. I watched him reach for a glass from the cupboard and fill it with milk from the bottle in the refrigerator. A pain hung in my chest as heavy as lead and pulled my shoulders down.

  "I didn't want Papa to go down there, Simon," I defended myself quietly.

  "You knew about the raid," he accused, turning from the refrigerator so quickly that some of the milk in his glass splashed out onto his hand. "You should have stopped him."

  "I wanted to stop him, but I couldn't. You don't understand--"

  "If Pa dies, it'll be your fault."

  His words hit me like a club across my sagging shoulders and knocked the breath out of me. He's not going to die! I wanted to yell, but the words caught in my throat. Simon's angry face became a blur as my eyes clouded with tears.

  I ran up to my room and cried myself to sleep, but even then I slept only fitfully between each fresh onslaught of tears.

  The next morning I awoke abruptly at dawn and realized that at just about that same time the day before, Dr. Rawls had come to meet us in the waiting room at the hospital. The first twenty-four hours will be critical, he had said, and this was it, the zero hour. The first twenty-four had passed and as far as I knew, Papa was still alive.

  Throwing back the covers, I climbed
out of bed and bundled up in my bathrobe and slippers against the morning chill. I might have enjoyed the cool weather after the unbearable heat of summer, but at the moment I gave it little more than a passing thought. I had to find out about Papa.

  As though in answer to my unspoken question, the telephone rang just as I entered the upstairs hall. I rushed down the stairs, hanging precariously on to the banister, while Mother, already up and dressed, moved quickly from the kitchen to pick up the extension on the table near the front door. I arrived breathless and anxious at her elbow. She only glanced at me, then turned away so I wouldn't distract her.

  "I see," she said. "All right.... Yes, I see. Yes ..."

  Light-headed with fear, I wanted to beat on Mother's broad back to get her attention, to get her to turn toward me so I could read her face. What was the person saying? Was Papa all right? Had he taken a turn for the worse? Mother's voice, calm and even, gave not a clue.

  "Yes, we'll be there as soon as we can," she concluded. "Thank you."

  She slowly returned the receiver to the cradle, seeming to barely possess the strength to carry out the task. She finally turned her eyes to me. I met her gaze.

  She didn't smile. "Eat some breakfast and dress quickly, Virginia," she instructed. "Your father's out of the special care ward and the doctor says we can see him."

  "Is he awake?"

  "No, not yet."

  "But is he better?"

  "Enough to be moved from special care."

  "When will he wake up?"

  "Don't ask me questions I can't answer, Virginia. Run upstairs and get yourself ready to go."

  A half hour later, while Mother put on her hat and Dr. Hal warmed up the car to drop us off at the hospital, I ran into Simon in the hall. He was just coming down to breakfast--Aunt Sally was frying eggs in the kitchen--and he was carrying a pile of school books under his arm. He walked by me without saying a word, as if I wasn't there. His accusations of the previous night came thumping down on me again, and I bit my lower lip to keep from crying. But to my surprise, Simon stopped short of the kitchen doorway and turned to look at me.

  "Ma tells me you're going to the hospital to see Pa," he said.

  "Yes, he's out of that special ward. The hospital called."

  He was trying to look angry but without much success. Simon was never able to be anything other than genuine. I knew from the look on his face he was sorry for what he'd said, though he'd never go so far as to admit it. Instead, he requested, "Tell Pa hello for me, will ya?"

  "Sure, Simon. I'll tell him."

  "Tell him I wish I could come myself."

  "All right."

  "But I can't, seeing as how the hospital rules says I'm not old enough."

  "I'm sure he knows about the rules."

  Hoisting the books up higher under his arm, he turned toward the kitchen again. But he paused and said over his shoulder, "Tell him I'm expecting him home by my birthday. That gives him a whole two weeks and three days to get better. I think that's enough time."

  I couldn't respond in words, my throat was so choked up. But I nodded and gave my brother a half smile, and he went off to get a plate of Aunt Sally's eggs.

  Papa had been moved into a private room on the wing of the hospital that was named after my grandfather. It was a first-floor room, overlooking the hospital grounds, where patients' families strolled to calm their nerves and patients themselves were wheeled to sit in the sun on warm days or in the shade of one of the maple trees.

  As we walked from the lobby to Papa's room, I noticed that Mother and I were the only civilians on the floor, that is, the only ones not dressed in the white uniform of the army of healers. We were the oddities because it was still only midmorning, and visiting hours--noon to two o'clock and six o'clock to eight o'clock--hadn't begun. The rules were being bent for us not only because we were the family of Dr. Eide, but because Mother was the daughter of Theodore Foster. Our double-edged status of privilege allowed us free access to Papa now that he was out of special care.

  Mother lectured me through the length of the corridor on how I ought to behave. "You must be brave, Virginia. There's to be no crying while we're with your father. I don't want to upset him."

  Because Papa hadn't yet awakened, I didn't think he'd know whether I cried or not. But Mother seemed convinced otherwise, and for that reason--just in case she was right--I promised myself I wouldn't cry.

  We finally reached the door of Papa's room, and while I paused on the threshold to gather my courage, Mother marched right in, leaned over the figure of Papa on the bed, and kissed the corner of his mouth. She didn't have to bend over very far because the head of the bed was elevated to a nearly forty-five-degree angle. A small ice pack crowned the top of Papa's head, and I thought he could have looked rather comic--like one of the Laurel and Hardy duo complaining of flu--if the situation hadn't been so grave.

  Mother pressed her fingers lightly to one of his cheeks and said, "We're here, William. Virginia and I have come to be with you." She went on talking to him softly while I made my way to the bed, the tapping of the heels of my shoes against the bare floor an annoying din in the quiet building. When I reached the bed, I followed Mother's lead and kissed Papa's cheek. The bristle of his whiskers against my lips startled me. I had never known Papa's face to be anything other than smooth and fragrant with aftershave. I drew back suddenly, thinking, This isn't Papa.

  And, indeed, the man in the bed bore little resemblance to the father I knew. Beneath the sandy whiskers, his usually ruddy cheeks were a pasty gray. His face looked small, his closed eyes naked and impish without his glasses. Both eyes were cradled by black-and-blue crescents, like two soft-boiled eggs served in eggcups. His nostrils and the inside of his ears were painted red with iodine. I didn't know why then, but I would shortly learn that meningitis poses a serious danger to head injury cases, and that this particular precaution was taken so that the germ-carrying microbes wouldn't enter Papa's head via these passages. A large bandage circled his head so that between the bandage and the ice pack only a tuft or two of hair stuck out on top of his scalp, like grass springing up between the cracks of a sidewalk. Even his ample body appeared smaller somehow, lying there beneath the crisp hospital linens. Since the sheet was pulled all the way up to his chin, his broken arm and shattered leg were tucked away, and I guess in a way I was rather glad that I couldn't see the whole mess at once.

  Aunt Sally had always said that things happened in threes, but this time she was wrong. Papa was the fourth in our family to receive a head wound in this war called the Depression, and his injury was the most serious of all.

  "Don't just stand there gaping, Virginia," Mother chided. "Say hello to your father."

  When I cast a dubious glance at Mother, she drew me aside. In a whisper she said, "We don't know how much he can hear, but maybe if we talk to him as though everything were normal, it'll help to bring him around."

  Everything was not normal--everything was very far from normal. I had promised not to cry, and that was hard enough, but to talk as though nothing were wrong--that was a whole different story. It seemed too much for Mother to ask of me, but wanting not to disappoint her, I said, "I'll try, Mama."

  When we returned to Papa's side, though, and I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out. I was paralyzed by the strangeness of talking to a sleeping figure. It seemed like talking to a photograph or to the tombstone of someone who obviously wasn't around to listen anymore. I glanced up again at Mother. She nodded at me to go on, like a mother bird nudging the baby out of the nest with her beak. Drawing in a deep breath, I told myself I couldn't exhale without including words with the air. I gathered together a few words in my chest, pushed them up to my tongue, and said, "Hello, Papa. It's me. It's--" I almost said Virginia. But somehow using my full given name didn't seem right. To Papa, I was Ginny. I had tried so hard to get him to call me Virginia, yet now I wondered why. What I wouldn't have given at that moment to hear him call me Ginny again. "P
apa, it's Ginny," I said finally. "Mama and I are here. We're fine. Everyone's fine. Simon says hello. He and Claudia and Molly miss you. They wanted to come, but you know they're not old enough. I'm glad I could come, Papa. The hospital is breaking the rules for us, you know, because you're special. Mama and I can come whenever we want and stay as long as we want, so we'll try to be here as much as we can, if Mama doesn't make me go back to school too soon...."

  The longer I spoke the more easily the words came, but just as I began to feel comfortable talking with someone who couldn't hear, Dr. Rawls arrived and interrupted us, lumbering into the room like a polar bear up on his hind legs. He tossed a greeting to Mother but seemed not to notice me. After studying Papa's chart and hanging it back up on the foot of the bed, he said, "Well, we performed the first lumbar puncture early this morning and discovered very little blood in the spinal fluid, which is a good sign. Of course, we'd like the fluid to be clear, but there wasn't enough blood to cause undue concern at this point. According to the manometer reading, there's a moderate increase in intracranial pressure, but again, there's no real cause for alarm as yet. We'll keep an eye out for increased pressure, of course, as there's a good chance of edema setting in, maybe even hemorrhage. In the event of either or both of these, we can begin a regiment of regular lumbar drainage and hypertonic solutions...."

  I stood there openmouthed, listening to this robotic recitation and understanding not a word of it. My eyes turned to Papa lying nearby on the elevated bed with iodine in his nose and an ice cap on his head, and I felt increasingly annoyed at Dr. Rawls and the highfalutin medical terms that dripped from his tongue like so much late-afternoon-staff-meeting dialogue. I didn't want to hear about lumbar punctures and spinal mercury manometers. I didn't want to hear about cranial trauma and meningitis and subdural hematomas, about concussion and contusion and compression, and about all the other disasters that Dr. Rawls was babbling on about. I didn't want to hear a series of meaningless statistics and speculations. What I wanted was to push aside this onslaught of medical rambling, to sweep it away like so much unnecessary clutter, and to get right down to the important question: Was my father going to be all right?