Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  The woman impatient to get Diddy’s attention again. “Heavens, that’s true enough. Why, sometimes the child hardly says a word to me for days. But she’s not sulking or cross then, believe me. Just quiet.”

  “Sugar, Jessie?”

  “Thank you, dear … Dalton, tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “Jessie, nobody could think better of Hester than I do. Don’t defend her—as if I were criticizing her, or about to. I’m not. I’m just trying to understand her.”

  What particularly preoccupied Diddy was Hester’s mistrust. Easy to understand, in the light of the hideous assault her aunt has just conjured up for him. A child is supposed to trust his parents, right? Suppose you’re a normal, trusting child. Then one parent abandons you, and the other flings acid in your eyes. Could anyone who endured such betrayal ever trust another person again? Remember, there are people who do put themselves entirely in other people’s hands without ever trusting them. Would Hester ever trust Diddy? Or was she merely consigning herself, fatalistically, to him? As she’d agreed to undergo the operation. Knowing it was the correct thing to do, but all the while without hope?

  Diddy knew he couldn’t talk further. His closeness with Mrs. Nayburn ebbing, wanting to salvage what remained. They’re both exhausted. Among the effects of this exhaustion: Mrs. Nayburn drifting back to her old coy, presumptuous manner; and Diddy becoming very stiff, upset. Diddy asks for the bill, pays; they leave. Hails a taxi and will take her home.

  “But it’s out of your way, dear. I can take the taxi myself.”

  “No, it’s not. I moved this afternoon to the Canada.”

  At this most reassuring news, Mrs. Nayburn took a deep, comfortable breath. “That big hotel on the other side of the park? Why, that’s wonderful, Dalton dear. Hester will be so pleased. Did you tell her yet?”

  Rather than say yes, Diddy nodded. Important to keep Mrs. Nayburn from talking too much, making him shrink further into himself and become incapable of seeing anything human in her.

  Diddy let the taxi go in front of Mrs. Nayburn’s rooming house. At their final good nights, the newfound tenderness for the woman flared up again. But quickly, quickly. “See you tomorrow, dear. And thanks for the lovely dinner.” Faster. Diddy walks past the Institute. Looks up at what he counts off to be Hester’s room; dark, naturally. Then across the park, and back to his hotel room.

  The gloomy mood settling in. Maybe he hadn’t let himself feel all the horror of Hester’s blinding. Feel it (now). Get in bed, under the covers; turn off the light. What’s the matter? Diddy can’t see Hester any more. She’s a story he heard, not a real woman whom he loves. Maybe that’s because until the present he’s never made a blunt, energetic effort to comprehend her. Diddy the Selfish has been busy thinking of himself.

  Think of Hester. With a catastrophe of such dimensions behind her, a wound of such depth incised upon her as she was just emerging from childhood. Enduring such a betrayal.

  Think of Hester, only setting aside what he can merely guess at, never estimate: how much she suffers from the usual pathology of survivors. Feeling always, somewhere, that they too should have perished. To survive is to be guilty. Because unpunished.

  Someone who survives his death sentence through accident, last-minute rescue, or mere luck rather than through his own strenuous efforts knows that, really, he should be dead. Knows that he has no true title to his life. He cannot be identical with his life when, after being on the threshold of death and even resigned to it, his life is incoherently and arbitrarily and at the last minute returned to him. However unjust the verdict which sought to deprive him of his life, it has in retrospect more meaning and coherence than his survival. To live, therefore, is to remain convicted and under sentence. But to have evaded, somehow, the execution of the sentence. To be alive, then, is chiefly a negative condition. Judged, one has escaped judgment. Sentenced, one remains mysteriously unpunished.

  Is Diddy thinking of Hester? Think of her, damn it. Neglecting only these most general feelings she might harbor for having survived her mother’s death sentence. Apart from this common pathology of the Survivor, what is Hester really like?

  It’s like having to conjure up a whole row of dolls on an imaginary shelf. They are all tall, full-bodied, fair-skinned, with long fine hair and sunglasses. But each has a different repertoire of actions. Diddy in bed; lying in near darkness, having turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, closes his eyes. The Hester-dolls begin to move, gesticulate. Even quarrel with each other.

  Which doll is the real Hester? And to whom does the real one belong?

  One doll is screaming and shaking her fist. Another doll, seated at the end of a long bench set against one wall of a large empty room, cringes. Another smiles ceaselessly, mechanically. Another, who wears a nasty expression on her tiny mouth, rushes to the doll on the bench and begins throttling her; then slaps the smiling doll across the face. She seems to have a gun in the pocket of her white linen dress. Or is it a bottle of acid?

  What could Hester really be like? She could be bitter. Or stupefied. Or defensively superficial and ingratiating. Or vicious, seeking to inflict upon someone else what was done to her.

  She was none of these, Diddy knew.

  Call it perversity or what you will, Hester’s character is not so ordinary. Sweep those dolls off the dream shelf; and consider the life-size mannequin that Diddy imagines sitting on the windowsill in his hotel room at this very moment. The figure looking at nothing in particular. Listening, perhaps. And gravely receiving Diddy’s vibrations. That’s the Hester who belongs to Diddy. At least, the Hester he has claimed. Diddy opens his eyes for a moment, looks toward the window. Shade up, curtain not drawn. Half looking for the creature spawned by his imagination; and, because he knows she isn’t there, half looking at the full moon through the leaf-stripped trees. Diddy sighs; leaves bed to get a drink of water from the bathroom. Yes, she could conceivably be bitter; or stupid; or superficially ingratiating; or vicious. But she wasn’t, wasn’t those dolls.

  Or, she could need to be a saint. Because her mother was wicked.

  These were Hester’s choices. For them Diddy has opened his heart. Loves her for what he (now) dares to describe as her sanctity; though it doesn’t manifest itself in the usual good deeds. And for her sanity, which shows itself, among other ways, in the girl’s strength and firmness of character.

  Diddy stares at his face, less haggard and bony than last week, in the mirror above the bathroom sink. Then turns off that light too, and finds his way back to bed by moonlight.

  This election of the right Hester from among the impostors and pretenders still gives Diddy no clue as to how Hester feels (now), as distinct from what she is. How happy or unhappy; how much and how actively she suffers. And if she suffers terribly, from what? Is it mainly grief? Despair? The impotence enforced by blindness? Unexpressed rage? Guilt? Sheer loneliness? Or longing for her mother? No way of questioning the apparition on the windowsill about that.

  Perhaps Hester is too intelligent to suffer a great deal. Doesn’t the capacity to suffer depend on a kind of superior stupidity? So thinks Diddy. With his eyes closed, becoming drowsier. A talent for suffering is to be found only among people of middling intelligence, those neither stupid nor wise, people with minds such as the one Diddy the Despairer has been endowed with or inherited or settled for. Especially during the last three years.

  Until the age of thirty, Diddy was even duller mentally. Hard to believe, but true. Before then, which was all his life, Diddy’s mind used to be even worse. Too stupid to suffer. Those were the years of sub-suffering, everyday misery, a complacent dull pain. And the belief that everything would turn out all right. When Joan left, Diddy became wiser. And so on. Wiser and wiser. He hadn’t been watching the wrong play for thirty years. But he’d been watching it without understanding the theory behind its staging—assuming naturalism of script and staging. In retrospect, a naïve error. The script is intricate, and charged
with obscure references; and the presentation concocted by the director, set designer, and lighting technicians is fanciful and stylized. Take, for instance, the lighting effects. It had occurred to Diddy, from his comfortable seat in the orchestra front center, that the lighting on the stage was rather dim. But after a moment, he banished any question about it; plainly, that was just the way this play was lit. Then, three years ago, he realized that the stage was and had always been much more brightly lit than his eye could see. And that he was (now) about to see it. Wiser and wiser. The scrim was raised. The gauzy light became, suddenly, knife-sharp. Almost gouged out his heart. Wiser. And suffering, for the first time. But not truly wise, wise enough to transcend suffering; and never likely to be.

  Except if Hester will teach him.

  Monday. Two days after the unsuccessful operation, Hester was moved to the fifth floor for the balance of her recuperation period. The new room looks out onto a courtyard, rather than onto Monroe Park. And, though barely twice the size of the one she had upstairs, contains three beds.

  In the bed nearest the window, a college girl who had smashed her ankle in a bicycle accident. After being set and put in a cast, the ankle had failed to mend. Had to be broken again, reset and pinned together by surgery, put in a new cast; it was (now) suspended in a traction sling.

  In the middle bed lies the wife of a state senator who, during the middle of one night last week, had almost hemorrhaged to death from a previously undiagnosed ulcer. She’d just had half her stomach removed.

  Since Hester is sharing this room with two other patients, even when Mrs. Nayburn is absent, they’re never alone. Still, all things taken into account, Diddy prefers her new accommodation to the private room on the seventh floor. Finds he’s able to spend much more time with Hester, during the next fifteen days, than he had before. On this floor, there’s less supervision of the comings and goings of visitors; their irregular presence in the patients’ rooms is treated casually. Diddy’s gotten away with an occasional morning visit, without trouble. The evening seven-to-nine sloppily enforced. And Diddy usually has at least three hours of the afternoon, sometimes more, before a nurse thinks to take the temperature of one of the three patients. Happens to come in. “My goodness, are you people still here? You have to go now.” A new nurse—Gertrude doesn’t work on this floor—obviously unused to giving orders and having them obeyed.

  Hester requires little medical attention (now). The girl is checked by Dr. Collins each morning; and slowly, systematically, the bandages over her eyes are thinned out. When Diddy arrives for the afternoon on the eighth day after the operation, he finds Hester down to disk-shaped bandages cupping each eye. Slim enough to put the dark glasses over them. Which she is wearing today. To Diddy another sign of recovery.

  Hester, who’s in the bed nearest the door, appears to enjoy the company of her roommates: Diddy often finds her in conversation when he arrives. But the state senator’s wife sleeps a lot. And the college student gets lengthy noisy visits from her parents on most days. For Hester’s additional diversion, Diddy has bought her a transistor radio with an earbug.

  Since visiting Hester has become an event absolutely relied on by both of them, Diddy wishes to give it more weight. But they have so little privacy. Diddy fearing the consequences of the kind of conversations to which they’re restricted. Only talk which could be overheard by the two other patients and their visitors, as well as by Mrs. Nayburn. Determined that nothing between him and Hester must be allowed to get mechanical and flat, Diddy seeks a means for reducing conversation without losing contact with the girl. Already lacking images, words cannot be sacrificed altogether. Only replaced. The habitual polite words. But what to put in their place? For Diddy is not willing to play Diddy the Docile, much less Diddy the Silent. Letting the garrulous Mrs. Nayburn chatter away without hindrance. Yet the only words Diddy wants to speak to Hester can’t be uttered here; must wait until they are finally alone.

  Other words must be found (now), which are not his words. Other words, which Diddy will deliver. Cutting off Mrs. Nayburn’s flow.

  Taking his cue from Hester’s remark that she liked her aunt reading to her, Diddy expresses his eagerness to perform the same service. Mrs. Nayburn had probably already thought of volunteering for that task herself; but, thinking over the meaning of Diddy’s presence, dismissed the idea. Diddy is bound by no such reciprocal scruples toward Hester’s aunt.

  “I’d love it,” Hester exclaims. “What will you read?”

  Diddy asks her to allow him to make his choice a surprise; promises to bring a book that evening.

  From the beginning, more of a success than Diddy had anticipated. His selfish goal instantly achieved. (Now) he need not bring out so many of those limp words, crafted for such a compromised function: to be acceptable to Hester, but also to be heard by ears other than hers. He reads an hour the first evening. Hester’s ordinarily pallid face gleams; undergoes a kind of fading when he stops. Begs him the next afternoon to read for a longer time, unless it tires his voice. Diddy is delighted to comply, and from then on reads for a substantial period of each day’s visits, so that he finished Pride and Prejudice in eleven days; and by the end of the post-operative period of seventeen days that Hester spends in the hospital is well into Emma.

  Unexpectedly, Hester’s aunt seems to derive nourishment from Diddy’s reading, too. More than anything else, this reading seems to certify Diddy’s competence as Hester’s future guardian; and to convey in the least painful way to Mrs. Nayburn that her attendance on the girl, gratefully acknowledged and, in this very act of Diddy’s, being paid token homage by imitation, is (now) superfluous. Mrs. Nayburn has been replaced, but Hester’s in good hands. Diddy’s expressive baritone voice and his educated pronunciation bespeak an authority and compel a respect that Diddy the Whole, speaking his own words, is not always able to command. As do the abstract certainties about pleasure and discord proposed in the novels Diddy has chosen to read. Chosen for no better reason than that he liked them—but Diddy, an enthusiastic devourer of printed words, likes many books—and that these were the only acceptable choices among the paperbacks available on the revolving rack in the drugstore near the Canada. An arbitrary choice, perhaps. But, whether Diddy knows it or not, a favorable one.

  Mrs. Nayburn, Diddy, and perhaps even Hester, calmed by Jane Austen’s authoritative prose well pronounced and energetically delivered in Diddy’s pleasant baritone. The trio inspired by that unflagging intelligence, neither modest nor self-deprecatory. Intelligence, good will, and reasonableness all seem possible. Indeed, inevitable. A few pages before the ball at Netherfield takes place, Hester and her two caretakers, the elder teetering on the verge of abdication and the younger barely more than an upstart pretender, unite in an unspoken alliance expressly designed to denigrate nobody. A treaty, out of tact never exactly spelled out but nonetheless binding, is concluded. Which regards everybody’s interests as having equal weight and dignity.

  First article of the treaty: the aunt will be present during the afternoon visit. Most of which is filled by a new installment of Jane Austen’s lucid narrative; the remainder, with watery old conversation led by the aunt and with Diddy’s vaporish musings.

  Second article: Diddy and Mrs. Nayburn will eat dinner together.

  Third article: the evening visiting hours are reserved for Diddy alone. With the aunt either returning to the rooming house to watch TV in the parlor or to chat in the kitchen with the friendly landlady, a widow about Mrs. Nayburn’s age; or going to a movie that Diddy usually selects and to which he escorts her after they leave the restaurant. When Diddy returns to the hospital, usually reads to Hester for a full two hours. Occasionally whispering an endearment. An expression of his solicitude and yearning.

  Diddy aware each evening, from the moment he enters the restaurant with Mrs. Nayburn and all the while he’s seated at a table with her, and also whenever he takes her up to the box office of a movie theatre, usually located downtown, tha
t he risks running into Watkins or the Reagers or one of his other colleagues at the plant. Slightly apprehensive. But doesn’t want to hide. Sooner or later, they’re bound to find out what he’s been doing these weeks anyway.

  Although Diddy awaits Hester’s release impatiently, he finds this period enjoyable. Time passes lightly. Something comforting in the regularity of his actions. A routine has been set. And things are in their places, where you’d expect them to be. His room at the Canada always looking the same. Maid service irreproachable: each day the bathroom is mopped down, the bed remade with fresh sheets, his shoes shined, the desk replenished with flowers. And Hester always where he thinks she is: in the hospital. Diddy’s fantasies that she’s having a romance with her doctor have subsided. And Mrs. Nayburn always on hand. Her unfailing presence also, in its way (now), part of the reassuring stability of things, ever since she’s come to annoy Diddy so much less. Ever since she divulged the truth about Hester’s blindness, on the day after her niece’s operation, Diddy has continued to feel warmly toward Mrs. Nayburn. The feeling of mild affectionate esteem doesn’t grow, but still holds its own. Not tolerance, exactly; Diddy is too divided in his real feelings. A kind of meta-tolerance.

  How absurd it seems (now) that Diddy once found Mrs. Nayburn not only an exasperating trial to his patience and good manners, but a menace, too. He scarcely minds the dinners they (now) take together each night. Even though the conversations conducted then are invariably shallow. One topic that recurs again and again: the hospital bills. But even Mrs. Nayburn seems shy about asking Diddy straight out how much he’s willing to contribute. Finally, one evening, he tells her. And makes out a check. Being not that intimate that either cares to talk about himself, they talk mostly about other people. Two other people. And about the past. Mrs. Nayburn tells stories about Hester as a child—all stories, it’s understood though never stated, taking place before the girl was fourteen. In exchange, Diddy talks about Paul’s childhood, about what it’s like to be a child prodigy so far as a mere brother can understand what Paul felt. And accounts of Paul’s later glory: the scholarship to Paris, the first appearance with the New York Philharmonic when he was fifteen, the international piano competition won at the age of nineteen which made him world-famous. Mrs. Nayburn’s pleasure in his stories is so artless, Diddy can hardly take offense. Nor be depressed, even though in all these conversations there’s no reversion to the intimate soundings of that first dinner. Diddy able to remember he’s not sitting across from a witch; or a reincarnation of Mary; or a faceless occupant of a train compartment with two bulging paper bags, like dead dogs, at her feet. Across from him in a booth or at a table in the Olympia Restaurant, the Greenleaf Diner, Cavanaugh’s Steak Joint, or any of the other restaurants they try, is Jessie Nayburn. A decent, well-meaning, lonely woman. After Diddy, the person most devoted to Hester in the whole world. Nurtured and cared for Diddy’s beloved all those years before Diddy found her. He calls her Jessie with pleasure, though still Mrs. Nayburn in his head. But in his head, he isn’t calculating exactly when Mrs. Nayburn will or must return to the empty house in Indiana. Since she appears to grasp the situation and to accept it, Diddy assumes she will leave shortly. As far as he’s concerned (now), she can stay until Hester leaves the hospital, since the two of them can’t be alone until after then.