by Irwin Shaw
God, Archer thought, standing there, not wanting to go back to Kitty’s room, how did we ever pick this one?
He walked slowly down the corridor, smelling the hospital odors, the flowers, the roses and carnations and medicines, mingling in the dimly lit, severe perspectives of the hall.
Kitty’s face above the blanket was flushed and feverish and her eyes were dilated and dark from the morphine and her hair was tangled and drenched with sweat. But she smiled when Archer came into the room, and her voice was clear and cheerful as she asked, “What did old Nature Boy have to say?”
“Everything’s fine,” Archer said, sitting down in the chair next to the bed. “The chances’re very good. You ought to sleep and try to keep quiet,” he said.
“I can’t sleep.” Kitty chuckled. “Isn’t it just like me?” she asked. “Allergic to morphine. The one lady in the whole world who can’t be doped. Are you ashamed of being married to a freak?”
“That’s all right,” Archer said, making himself match the mood she was desperately trying to maintain. “As long as we don’t tell our friends.”
“Friends …” Kitty moved her head drowsily from side to side on the creased pillow.
That’s one subject we won’t talk about, Archer thought grimly. “I’ve told the office,” he said hastily, “to keep trying to get a private night nurse, and they said there’s still a chance.”
“I don’t need a private nurse,” Kitty said. “I’m fine. And the floor nurses are awfully nice. Miss Kennedy told me all about the Army, in between throw-up periods. She was a lieutenant in the Army and she was in a hospital on the Riviera. She used to go swimming on the beach at Cannes. I’d love to see her in a French bathing suit.” Kitty chuckled again. “She has a face like the Palisades and she’s built like a restaurant icebox.”
Then the pains came. Kitty turned her face away, arching agonizedly in the bed, the muscles in her throat showing rigid and sharp. She moaned softly and Archer held her hand and she clutched it hard, her nails biting into his skin. Then it was over and she settled back, spent, into the pillow, her body slowly relaxing into the bed.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said, looking straight up at the ceiling. “I promise you. I solemnly promise you. I’m going to hold on. I only have one thing in the whole world that I have to do now and that’s hold on. All I have to do is concentrate and I’m going to do it. I promise.”
In a strange way, Archer realized, Kitty was welcoming the pain, welcoming the problem and the challenge, because, for the time being, at least, it blotted out the necessity of thinking about or resolving all the other things. With a shock he understood that he was welcoming it, immersing himself in it, for the same reasons.
Kitty moved in the bed, making herself more comfortable as her strength returned once more. “Clement,” she said, “did you call Jane? And tell her I was all right?”
“Yes,” said Archer.
“She’s really a very nice girl, isn’t she, Clement?” Kitty said, pleading.
“Yes,” Archer said.
Then Kitty screamed. She put her hands over her head and gripped the narrow pipes of the bedstead and screamed wildly and continuously and Archer knew that it had started and that there was no going back now.
He rang for the nurse and went to the door and threw it open. Kitty’s scream reverberated down the empty corridor. Archer expected to see people come running out of the doors at the noise, but nothing happened. No door opened. Patients and visitors remained privately enclosed, thinking, Of course. That is what you expect to hear in a hospital. Then Miss Kennedy turned a corner far down the hall and walked swiftly and bulkily on her silent white shoes toward the scream.
“It’s beginning,” Archer said, and Miss Kennedy nodded and went in, closing the door, leaving Archer outside. The scream died down. A moment later a large, pudgy intern came down the hall, almost trotting, his stethoscope swinging around his neck. Without speaking to Archer he went into the room. Five minutes later an attendant appeared, pushing a rolling stretcher, moving deliberately. Right behind him came Dr. Graves, with his coat off and his sleeves rolled back. They went in together with the stretcher, leaving the door open, and Archer watched Miss Kennedy and the intern pick up Kitty and place her on the stretcher. Archer went into the room as they were wrapping the blankets around Kitty.
“Doctor,” he said to Graves, who was standing to one side, looking down calmly at Kitty’s sweating red face. “Doctor, is there an incubator ready?”
“What?”
“I said is there an incubator ready?”
“Oh.” Graves turned to Archer. “I told you there wasn’t one chance in a thousand …”
The intern looked up sharply. Archer was surprised at the hatred that showed in his face. He ripped the telephone off its base. “Give me the premature nursery,” he said. He was from Georgia, and he said, “premachuah nursera.” “Hello,” he said, “this is Dr. Fredericks. We’re taking a patient up to the delivery room right now. I want a Davidson incubator up there immediately, all ready.” He put the phone down and stared with loathing at Graves for a moment. Graves seemed flustered and started out of the room. “I have to get prepared,” he said.
Graves led the procession down the hall, the stretcher rolling silently with Miss Kennedy and the intern pushing it and Archer walking by its side. Kitty turned her head to look at Archer. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I just can’t this time, darling. Forgive me. Please forgive me.”
“Sssh, Kitty. Don’t worry,” Archer said. For the first time it occurred to him that Kitty might die.
She only screamed once more, before they got into the elevator.
Upstairs, they rolled the stretcher swiftly to the delivery room door. They tried to get it through, but the stretcher was too wide. It bumped against the door frame and Kitty moaned.
“God damn it,” the intern said savagely to the attendant. “Where did you get this one?”
“I just picked the first one that was handy,” the attendant said aggrievedly. “How was I supposed to know it wouldn’t …”
“Jeepers,” Kitty said, and even her voice sounded childish and small. “Jeepers, this is awful.” Then her voice changed and was hoarse and angry. “Christ,” she said, “what’s taking so long?”
“We’ll have to wait, Mrs. Archer,” Dr. Graves, said, “until we get another stretcher downstairs and …”
“Christ,” Kitty said, trying to sit up, “the hell with a stretcher. I’ll walk in.”
“We’ll do better than that,” the intern said. “I’ll carry you in.”
“I think,” Dr. Graves said formally, “that it would be wiser to …”
“You,” the intern said to Graves. “You get in there and get ready.”
Graves looked as though he was going to protest. Then, with dignity, he went into the delivery room.
“Mrs. Archer …” The intern bent over Kitty, his voice very soft and Southern. “Do you trust me to pick you up and carry you in my arms?”
Kitty nodded. The intern threw back the blankets and put his arms under Kitty’s head and thighs. Watching him, Archer felt helpless and in the way. The intern straightened up easily, picking Kitty up as though she were weightless. Miss Kennedy held the door open and he started in. Archer started to follow him.
The intern stopped, holding Kitty high in his arms. “This is as far as you go,” he said harshly to Archer. “You stay out of here.”
He went through the doorway. There was a bright light beyond. Kitty’s eyes over his shoulder were frightened and pleading as she looked at Archer. Suddenly she smiled. She raised her hand and blew a kiss. Archer remembered to smile back. He felt proud of Kitty and he wanted to cry. Then Miss Kennedy let the door swing shut and Archer was alone in the hall with the attendant. The attendant piled the blankets on the stretcher and rolled it down the hall toward the elevator. After a moment, Archer followed him. His mind was blank. All he could think of was, That fat Georgia boy
is going to be a first-rate doctor some day.
Kitty didn’t come down for a long time and Archer sat in her room, trying to read a newspaper, listening to the dying sounds of the hospital as the visitors left and the patients settled down for the night. There was an account of a basketball game that had been played the night before and Archer read it four times. A man named Klipstein, who was six feet, eight inches tall had scored thirty-nine points. Everything is changing, Archer thought. When I went to school nobody was six feet eight inches tall and nobody ever scored thirty-nine points. There was an article about the H bomb, too, and Archer read that very carefully, too, although not as carefully as he had read about Mr. Klipstein. The author of the article disclosed that actually the H bomb would cause only ten times the destruction of the A bomb, and would be very expensive to produce and might turn out to be uneconomic, as there were very few targets big enough to make it worthwhile. The author sounded vaguely regretful about that and as though he blamed the Russians for not being enterprising enough to build adequate targets for the Air Force. He also said it was a triumph of American science.
American science wasn’t being so triumphant upstairs, though, Archer thought. They could extract explosives of godlike violence from the elements of the air, but they couldn’t manage to secure a child in its mother’s womb for just the twenty days more that would mean the difference between life and death. Archer went back and read about Mr. Klipstein again and wondered how tall Mr. Klipstein had been at birth.
The door opened and a little woman in a gray hospital uniform came in with a box of flowers.
“Mrs. Archer?” she asked uncertainly.
“She’s not here at the moment,” Archer said, conscious of the fact that it sounded foolishly ordinary and polite, as though Kitty had just stepped out to mail a letter or get her hair washed.
“These flowers just came,” the woman said. She had a piping, childlike voice and she was very frail in the bleak cotton smock, and she looked as though she had never been able to get past being sixteen years old, although her hair was graying and her hands were rough with work. “Do you want me to put them in a vase?”
“Thank you,” Archer said.
He watched her as she got a vase from the bathroom and started putting the flowers in. They were roses, intensely red, on long stems, not quite open. Archer looked at the card. “When you need me,” the card said. “O’Neill.”
Archer put the card in his pocket.
“Ah,” the little woman said, “aren’t they beautiful? They remind me of the day I got married.” She spread the flowers with fluttery little aimless movements of her small, worn hands. “I wore flowers that color.” She looked at Archer brightly and vacantly. “My parents didn’t want me to get married,” she said. “But I said, I will elope, and they had to give their permission. I wore a maroon taffeta dress, with flowers like that …” She waved toward the roses. “To my wedding. I did not wear a veil. It was a spring wedding. It was the most beautiful dress I ever had.”
“How long have you been married?” Archer asked.
“Twelve years,” the woman said dreamily, “but I remember every detail.”
“What does your husband do?”
The woman moved her head in a regretful little nod. “Nothing much,” she said. Her voice was flat now, without the color that it had when she spoke about her wedding. “He was wounded seven times and he just got out of the veterans’ hospital. He thinks he is going to get a job. Wounded seven times. If I was him, I’d just quit, but he thinks he’s going to get a job.” She stepped back and looked at the roses again. “Ah, what beautiful flowers,” she said, her voice sounding like the wedding again. She peered around the room. “Are there any dirty dishes?” she asked.
“No,” Archer said.
“Good night,” she said, and she shuffled out.
The fragrance of the roses was very heavy in the small room, oppressively sweet. Archer sat there staring at them, trying not to think of what was happening upstairs. Again he thought of the possibility that Kitty might die. How many women died in childbirth? You were always reading the statistics somewhere and you always forgot them. Was it one out of a hundred? Out of a thousand? Ten thousand? You knew other statistics. You knew that a certain basketball player was six feet, eight inches tall, you knew that the H bomb would devastate an area exactly ten times the diameter of the area that an A bomb would level, but vital information, like what chance your wife had to live or die, you forgot.
Without emotion, he thought of what it would be like to live without Kitty. Even if you could pay the rent, which was unlikely, you wouldn’t stay in the big house, rattling around in all those rooms, thinking of the woman who had belonged to you who had lived there and who had gone from you. You would take a room somewhere and you would eat in restaurants most of the time and you wouldn’t have that feeling of irritation at the beginning of each month when the bills came in and you saw how much your wife spent on clothes and furniture. You would probably have a certain small vogue as an available extra man at dinner parties, because you were acceptable-looking and didn’t talk badly, and some of the women you knew would try to get you married off to their friends, and you could sleep with anyone you wanted and were good enough to get. Examining himself, Archer realized that he had felt a little tingle of excitement at the thought. I should be disgusted with myself, he thought. At a time like this.
“She can’t die,” he said aloud. “She won’t die.”
You would look younger and feel older, as men without wives did, and you would invent reasons for not going home at night for just one more hour, and you would remember Kitty when she was nineteen and beautiful and you would keep remembering the day you got married and the night Jane was born, and all the bad times would be forgotten, and all the good times blurred and rolled together, so that Kitty would, always seem young and gay and full of laughter, and you would have a tendency to weep on holidays and wonder where your life had gone to.
He couldn’t sit in the small, over-fragrant room any more, staring at the neatly made bed that was waiting for his wife. He got up and went, out into the corridor. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t midnight yet, and it seemed to him that he had been in the hospital all his life…
He walked down the dark corridor toward the spot of light near the elevator where a nurse sat at a desk, making notations on charts. She looked up and smiled at him and he managed a smile in return. Above her head little green lights winked on and off mysteriously. The nurse paid no attention to the lights.
There was a little waiting room with, two stiff couches across from the elevator and Archer went in there and sat dawn. He put out the light and sat in the darkness, rubbing his eyes.
The telephone rang on the nurse’s desk, and he heard her say, “Yes, Doctor, he’s here. Yes, I’ll tell him.” Then the nurse came into the dark room and said, tentatively, “Mr. Archer …”
“Yes?” Archer reached over and switched on the light. The nurse was young and pretty, with a soft red mouth, and she had a vulnerable, gentle way of smiling that didn’t fit with her cap and uniform.
“That was Dr. Graves on the phone,” she said. “Mrs. Archer has just given birth. To a little boy. She’s fine, the doctor said.”
“How’s the child?” Archer said, thinking, A boy. Kitty kept saying it was going to be a boy.
“He didn’t say anything about the child,” the nurse said softly. “He’s coming right down. He said he’ll tell you himself.”
“Thanks,” Archer said. “Thanks very much.” He was conscious that he must look unkempt, in the same clothes that he’d been wearing for two days, and that he needed a shave and that his face must be sagging and old-looking after the long, hideous day. He wondered what this pretty young girl must think about men, after seeing them in this place in the hours of the night, torn and dishonored by pain or shabby with anxiety. Could she go out gaily with them, dance, laugh at their jokes, touch their bodies tenderly in lovemak
ing with the memories of all the nights in the dark, anguished corridor constantly with her? Some day, he thought, I must talk to a nurse.
“Can I get you anything?” she was saying. “A glass of milk? A cup of coffee?”
“Thank you,” Archer said, “Not at the moment.”
She went back to her desk and Archer stood brushing his clothes, arranging a stolid front to present to Graves.
Graves had his business suit on when he got off the elevator. He looked fresh and executive-like. First he shook Archer’s hand, looking at him soberly.
“Well?” Archer asked.
“Mrs. Archer is fine. She’ll be down in a half hour or so. We used a spinal and she’s conscious. She’s a little tired, of course, but she came through splendidly. Splendidly,” he repeated. “She had a very easy time,” he said. He sounded as if he were congratulating himself.
“And the child?” Archer asked.
Graves shook his head. Archer decided he didn’t like the way Graves shook his head. It was practiced, and denoted restrained, rehearsed, quiet, gentlemanly regret, like the performance of an actor who has been on the stage a long time and has studied his craft conscientiously but who is fundamentally without talent. You knew what he was driving at, but you didn’t believe him. “The child is very small,” Graves said. “As I predicted.”
“Is he alive?”
“As of this moment,” Graves said. “Yes. We didn’t weigh him. We put him into the incubator immediately, but I doubt if he weighs as much as two pounds. He’s breathing, but that’s about all just now. I wouldn’t raise our hopes too high.”
“Did Mrs. Archer see him?”
“I don’t think so,” Graves said. “At the moment of delivery we gave her some gas. Just enough to put her out for a minute or two. Do you want to see the child?”
“No.” It was spoken before he thought about it. He felt confused and hurt and he knew he didn’t want to expose himself to any more pain that night.
“I think you ought to go up and take a look,” Graves said, surprisingly insistent. “You’ll feel better about it later. No matter what happens. Take my word for it, Mr. Archer.”