They followed Catherine into the dining room and settled themselves around the table. Catherine could not shake her resentment of Gina. The last thing Alex needed was a responsibility, a serious involvement with babies and a wife. He wasn’t even ready to take care of himself. If he had put himself in a position to have to take care of anyone else, he would never accomplish anything. At least there was hope as long as he was alone. The strain of the party, of smiling at guests and making arrangements, was making her edgy.
“What lovely friends you have,” Gina said clumsily to Catherine. “I enjoyed meeting them.”
“They are the few good friends who remain with us whatever happens,” Catherine answered coolly. She was troubled. Alex had walked away from her before she could ask him what she had wanted to know. And so she asked it now. “Is there any reason,” she said delicately, “why you both would be in a rush to do anything drastic?”
“Drastic?” Alex said. “Everything I do is drastic.”
“I mean,” Catherine continued, “is there any reason why you should rush into marriage?”
Victor looked surprised. Alex said nothing. Gina hated other people’s silences.
“What makes you think we’re in a rush to do anything?” she asked.
“I just had a sense,” Catherine answered.
“If you want to know whether I’m pregnant,” Gina said flatly, “the answer is no, I’m not.”
It was not the right thing to have said. It hung there in the silence. “But I am tired,” she continued. “It’s been such a long and full day, I would like to go to sleep.” She got up and walked to her room.
“Why did you have to say that?” demanded Alex, following her upstairs.
“It was what she wanted to know; it was what she meant,” Gina answered.
“You didn’t have to put it so bluntly. You embarrassed her for asking the question to begin with.”
“It was an embarrassing question to have asked. She shouldn’t have asked it in front of me.”
He let that pass. His hands were clenched into fists like tight little balls. “I won’t have you making her look like a vulgar inquisitor,” he said. “You realize you expose your own vulgarity by pointing, by making an issue of her curiosity.”
“It has nothing to do with vulgarity. You can tell from the way she looks at me that she can’t stand me,” Gina said. She kept talking despite Alex’s gestures of protest. “There isn’t even anything personal in it. She would probably hate anybody you brought here.”
Laura had been right. Alex was strange. She would never know what he thought. She could not have predicted how tense he had been since they had arrived. Still, he was right; her reply to Catherine had been crude. This place, she thought, looking at the tastefully furnished room, is a minefield. She had walked into it like a fool. Victor thinks a woman could be Alex’s salvation. Catherine doesn’t. She was trying to provoke me, Gina realized. Maybe she was trying to provoke Victor, too. Victor wants me as a caretaker for Alex; Catherine wants me out of his life. She realized, as she saw the hostility in Alex’s eyes, that in his distaste and his mother’s, and in Victor’s fondness for her, they had divided into factions. It came to her that his parents were probably always working at cross-purposes and shooting down each other’s hopes. Now she and Alex were caught in the cross fire. She reached for Alex’s hand, ready to apologize for what she had said. But he turned from her and walked out of the room.
Five
Nino’s fever was the steadiest thing around. It had come on slowly and settled in. Nothing huge about it, just a persistent heat that broke everything up a little faster. Since the day he had come home to find his right toes darkened to a blackish green, the only thing that seemed to be whole was his gloom. He had soaked his foot in iodine, taken penicillin for days; but the nails and then the flesh of his toes kept darkening, and the pain in his arch and ankles was beginning to move upward. His thirst never stopped now. He drank what seemed like gallons of water every day, but nothing he did washed away the pain.
When you have trouble with something, you keep having trouble with it, he said to himself. I was born crippled and I’ll die that way. He couldn’t remember his twisted legs or how they had looked. But he remembered his mother carrying him at four and five through clinic after clinic in Palermo, determined to drop his deformity in the lap of someone who could fix it. “It can be taken away,” she would tell him over and over. She had finally found a surgeon willing to try. He could almost summon the feel of the long cast that had immobilized him for what seemed like years. “You have to suffer to be well,” his mother would say. For years after he came out of the casts able to walk, every time he ran for a ball he seemed to run into the fact that he owed her everything. He had named Gina after her, hoping it would do some good. He had put so much into that child—his hope, his need for someone to talk to. He plunged his foot into a basin of soapy water, wincing at the heat. It was all for nothing. He poured iodine into the water. For nothing. She didn’t care for him, for any of them. He lifted his foot out of the basin, watching the brown water drip off onto the white towel. It all added up, all his effort, to this: the flaking, peeling, cracked skin, the progressive darkening he knew, no matter what he said, was gangrene.
One breakdown produces another. She could walk away from him just like that, cracking everything he had kept together with workdays that never ended before midnight, long years of listening to Laura, digging in in front of the ball game just to keep from screaming. Now she won’t even call me, he thought. She thinks I’ll come and get her again to drag her back. “Let her rot,” he said, pouring iodine directly into the cracking toe. At least the burning pain proved it was still alive. He refused to admit he carried around dead parts of himself, hauling them along the streets, hiding them in socks and shoes all stained with useless witches’ brew. “Next week,” Laura had yelled at him, “you’ll start burying potatoes under the drainpipes outside, like my Aunt Concetta did to get rid of her warts!”
If they cut away what’s dead, he thought, staring at his leg, there will be nothing left. He wouldn’t give in to this. If it was a question of will, he had it. Either you did, or you didn’t. He did. The trouble was so did she. His was greater. She had gotten away from it for the moment, but life would get her, even if he hadn’t. “Let her rot,” he repeated. “We’ll rot together.”
The fever was making him so weak, there were times he couldn’t separate his exhaustion from his anger. He stank of iodine, ammonia, soap. It was one of the neighborhood children who played outside who had made him dose himself sometimes just for the smell.
“You smell like snails,” the child had said in his six-year-old’s voice.
“What an imagination,” Nino had said to him. “Your imagination has a nose!”
Better to stink of iodine than to stink of the grave.
When Laura came in he was sleeping. He had dropped off, lying there, forgetting to put on his socks. She went to the kitchen carrying a huge bag of fruit. After she had washed the apples and peeled him an orange, she went in to see him. When she looked at his foot, she knew it was over. The idiot, she thought. He has diabetes and he thinks he can cure it with iodine and a Band-Aid. And him with a diploma. She was furious. The great thing about fury is that it keeps away everything else. When you aren’t angry, then you can think clearly. And if you can think clearly, you can see the future realistically. And her future with him was all there in his black foot, in its prediction that he would soon be legless. The prospect hung there, behind her anger, waiting.
Dr. Rizelli, when she called him, wouldn’t come. “You can’t afford a house call,” he said. “It’s thirty-five dollars.”
“Come,” she said evenly. “I’ll pay you in cash.”
He was there within the hour to pocket his money and shake his head. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “I told you that surgery two years ago wouldn’t work. What good is eight inches of clear artery when the rest is full of sludge?
He should be in the hospital. His diabetes looks out of control. No one can take off that foot unless it’s brought under control first. I can do it. I’ll arrange for a room.”
“No thanks,” said Laura. “I’ll make my own arrangements.”
Dr. Rizelli shrugged.
“Should I wake him up?” Laura asked. “Is there anything you can do for him now?”
“Let him sleep,” the doctor said. “What’s the point? Good luck.” He turned away and left.
He’d need more than luck if he let you put a knife to him, Laura thought. She called Dr. Ginori and waited for him to call back. By midnight there was still no call. Nino woke, freezing in the soaked sheets. Laura changed the sheets and covered him with blankets in which he began to steam. Discussing the symptoms with Laura the next morning, Dr. Ginori told her to bring Nino to the hospital right away. By the time they arrived, Nino was too weak to do more than acknowledge the good fortune Dr. Ginori said he had.
“You got two good years out of that plastic artery I put in,” he pointed out, “but the degeneration around it is just too severe. The other leg has no viable arteries to contribute. Neither, as I recall, do your arms. Sometimes,” he shrugged, “we just have to accept human limitations. We’ll get the diabetes under control, then we have no choice but to remove the gangrened part of the leg.” He shook his head. He looked at Nino and met his eyes. “I’m sorry. I wish there were more I could do, but there isn’t.”
Nino nodded. When Laura wheeled him out, he sank deeper into his chair and closed his eyes. She could see all hope falling apart. He’ll never walk again, she thought. His illness closed in on her; what he would have to go through hung there horribly before her. The vision of him, legless, began to fill her mind.
“You can learn to use crutches, or maybe an artificial leg. Jimmy walks everywhere with that artificial leg they gave him when he got out of the army,” she said to Nino.
“Jimmy is twenty-two,” Nino answered.
“So? You’re not so old. How old is sixty? Sixty is nothing these days. You have to try. You’re sick now, so you don’t think ahead. But you have to. And you have to realize that once the pain is over, you’ll want to try to walk.”
Nino turned his face toward the back of the chair.
He’ll never want to walk. He’ll make me run for him. She softened, thinking of how he had liked to dance. He was a really good dancer. He was always hard to get along with, but he really could dance, she thought approvingly. It had been a long time since there was a good wedding where they had danced together. Mostly, he danced with Maria. Or Gina. Now Maria was dead, and Gina had run away. He was angry all the time, over everything and nothing. Now, she thought dryly, he’s all mine! The bitterness, the anger, it’s all for me. She followed the orderly, who wheeled him into his room and began to unpack his things. Now that he was here, she would be here. That was the right thing to do.
Day after day she came to the light-green room to sit by him. When she tried to talk, he turned away. When she told him stories, he didn’t listen. When she came late, he was furious, and if she wanted to leave before eight at night, he grew enraged. So she sat without speaking, bringing him water, changing the TV channel, talking with the other patients, until the doctors brought his diabetes under control. But by the time they did, Dr. Ginori had gone to a convention in Texas and Dr. Timo, his young assistant, operated. Laura didn’t know exactly how it happened. Either Ginori had not told Timo what to do or Timo thought he knew better. These hotshot kids always think they know better! Timo had tried to transplant arteries, first from Nino’s other leg—the one they called the good one—and then from his arm. Nino’s heart began to fail, and it was so difficult just to keep him alive that all they could do was sew up what they had done. They didn’t get around to removing the gangrened foot. So now, Laura explained to anyone who would listen, the diabetes is haywire again, his heart is bad, his other leg and arm may go, and he still has gangrene.
“I would like to kill that doctor,” Laura cried. “If I had known that Dr. Timo was going to do that, I would never have made Nino sign the release.
“Look,” Dr. Timo had said, “I worked all night to keep him alive. I’m not in the business of hurting people. I just thought that so long as there was a chance of saving the leg, we should try it. He would be gone now if it weren’t for me.”
“Do you think he isn’t gone, the way you left him?” Laura demanded.
“The issue,” Dr. Timo insisted, “is what we will do now. We’re going to let him regain his strength, let his heart stabilize, and bring the diabetes under control.”
“You can’t remove the gangrene until his condition stabilizes, and it’s hard to control the condition while he has the gangrene,” Laura said. “You’re full of doubletalk. What you mean is, it’s a question whether his heart or the gangrene kills him first. You know what you did?” Laura said, poking him in the chest with her finger. “You put him in a contest!”
Dr. Timo gave up. “Don’t ask me to do anything again.”
“I didn’t ask you to do anything in the first place. Did I ask him?” Laura looked toward the sky. “No,” she said, “I didn’t. I asked Ginori. Why he has you for an assistant is beyond me.”
Dr. Timo walked away.
Laura sat down, still muttering. Even when you won, you lost. He was just a hotshot, a kid. He even looked about fourteen years old. Thinks he can fix anything. But she shouldn’t have talked to him that way. Why not? she demanded. He makes a mistake and I pay for it. Why did it always have to happen that way? Maybe it’s my fault, she thought. I came here so he could get better treatment. Things go better in a good hospital! No matter how hard she tried to learn the way things ran, the world always got the best of her. Rizelli would have cut off his foot without trying to do anything else. He wouldn’t have known how. She wondered if he were even licensed to do surgery. He wouldn’t have looked further than a small operation and a fee. When she thought she was being smart—protecting Nino from that dirty hospital—she had led him straight to this. They even had the papers against her. She had told him to sign the release after Ginori had explained the operation he would do—just the gangrene. But the papers didn’t say anything about that. When you say yes, she thought, you say yes to everything.
She shook her head and stared, not at him—he was too bruised and swollen even to look at—but at the monitors that blipped his heartbeat. It was hard being alone like this. The more she was with him, she knew, the more alone she felt. But now it was worse. She missed Gina. Not that she was any help, but at least you could talk to her. She could never talk to Nino about anything. Her friends were all right, but there were things you couldn’t tell a friend. Her neighbors? Agnes, the eyeball, the busybody? Every time someone gave a party she showed up for a cookie and a glass of something. This morning on my way to the hospital, she stopped me to ask where I’m going. What business is it of hers? Laura had sworn she wouldn’t call Gina, even though she had received Gina’s note with the two telephone numbers. She knew what the other number meant. But maybe now that he was dying it didn’t matter. The gravity of the situation hit. The bleeps kept up on the screen, but glancing at his swollen, feverish, bruised body, she couldn’t see how they could go on bleeping. She rummaged in her bag for change for the phone.
Alex hadn’t deserved the unkind things Molly had said about him. He was in love, and love was loosening him. Gina had changed a lot of things for him, he thought, looking at her. He couldn’t get over the idea of her giving up everyone for him. He had never felt so good about himself; never so much in tune with his friends or equal to his father. She didn’t have the corrosive kind of independence that made girls like Molly so hard. She didn’t seem to have any strong impulses apart from the one that had driven her toward him and away from her parents. She was lovely, he thought. And he would do right by her. Maybe he would go back to school. He would finish.
“It’s funny,” he said to Gina, “how loving yo
u changes things. I feel closer to everyone because I’m close to you and I don’t think the world is such an angry place.”
“What a wonderful thing to say,” she said, looking at him. He had a way of irritating her one minute and then coming out of nowhere with a warmth that always overpowered her.
She was so unformed, he thought. She drank up everything he showed her. She had her own ideas, but never said anything that contradicted his. What interested him interested her. She took up what he said and carried it further, coming up with angles he had never considered. He felt a rush of feeling for her.
“Don’t you feel the same way?” he said. “I think sometimes that I’ve just come out of solitary.”
“Not exactly,” she said. “I feel closer to you than ever, but . . .” she let her voice trail off. It was hard to say that she hadn’t thought she would feel so confined. Loving him had set her apart or against just about everyone she had ever known or cared for. She had begun to envy a little the other people at school who weren’t rushing for a job every day and had time to hang around and talk. It was definitely not like getting out of solitary, she thought. More like getting into it.
“You feel,” he said, finishing her sentence, “afraid of having thrown in with me.” He put his arms around her and began stroking her face. “You think I’ll go, but I won’t go,” he said in a soft voice. “You think I’ll never do anything, but I will do something. You think I’ll stop loving you, but I won’t stop loving you.”
He held her suspended under his sing-song voice, stopping the dry thoughts that flashed through her mind, even though her fears were not the ones he named. He began licking her eyelids. “Don’t,” she said. “It feels funny and anyway I want to see. I can’t see when you do that.”
“You don’t have to see anything,” he said. “I’ll . . .”
The Right Thing to Do Page 15