He was a loving child, a very fine child. That afternoon she dropped housework and took him down the hill to the park, the rose garden full of the last roses, lemon-yellow, peach-yellow, gold, bronze, crimson, following him as he trotted and shouted along the paths between the thorny, fragrant bushes in the autumn sun.
Edward Meyer sat in his parked car looking across the lights of Berkeley and across the black, diamond-shackled bay to the Golden Gate, faint fragile center of the great sweep of lights and darknesses. Eucalyptus rustled over the car in a dry wind from the north, the winter wind. He stretched. “Damn,” he said.
“Why?” said the woman beside him.
“What’s in it for you?”
“All I want.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, and took her hands. When they touched they both quieted. Her grace was silence. He drank stillness from her as water from a spring. The dark dry wind of January blew, city after city flared below them round the bridge-strung bay.
He lit a cigarette; Elinor murmured, “Not fair.” She had recently given up smoking for the fifth or sixth time. She was a woman not very sure of things, biddable and quiet, taking what came. Edward handed her the lighted cigarette. She took it with a small sigh and smoked it.
“This is the right idea,” he said.
“For now.”
“But why stop halfway?”
“We’re not stopping. Only waiting.”
“Waiting for what? Till my psyche’s patched up, or you’re sure I’m not on the rebound, or something. Meanwhile we make love in my car because you’ve got a roommate and I’ve got a mother-in-law and we don’t go to motels because we’re supposed to be waiting—only we don’t. The whole thing’s illogical.”
At this she suddenly gave a hard, dry sob. His nervous anger turned to alarm, but she drew away from him, refusing comfort. She had never refused him anything before. He tried to apologise, to explain. She said, “Please take me home,” and all down the steep streets from Grizzly Peak to South Berkeley she sat silent, a silence turned against him, a defense. She was out of the car before he had it fully stopped in front of her rooming house; she whispered “Good night” and was gone. He sat in the car, blank, anxious, foolish. He started the engine, and with the noise of it his anger rose. When he got home ten minutes later he was very angry. Harriet, looking up from her book by the fireside, seemed startled. “Well!” she said. “Well,” he said.
“Excuse me,” said Harriet, “I’m finishing a chapter.”
He sat down, stretched out his legs, stared at the fire. He was bitterly angry at Elinor’s weak obstinacy, her irresolute, indecisive, temporising ways. There sat Harriet, thank God, like a rock, like an oak, finishing her chapter. If the house fell down in an earthquake around Harriet she would fix a bed for the baby, light a fire, and finish her chapter. No wonder Elinor hadn’t married before this, there was nothing to her, she had no character. He sat there full of self-vindicating anger and warm with the perfect sexual satisfaction she had given him, ready for more anger, more passion, more fulfilment, and for the first time in two years happy. Harriet finished her chapter. “Nightcap?” he said.
“No, I’m going to bed.” She stood up, erect, short, solid; he looked at her with admiration. “You look grand,” he said.
“Pooh,” she said, “whatever have you been up to? Good night, my dear.”
She had a cold. She usually got a cold in April. It went into her chest so that she rumbled like a truck and ached and coughed; at last she got on the phone and asked old Joan to come out and look after Andy. When Edward got home and looked surprised, she snapped, “I’m not up to running after the child today.” Then she went back to bed and lay cursing herself for having complained. One must never complain to men. Women at least knew complaint for what it was, part of coping, but he would interpret it, he would take it to mean that the full-time care of a child was too much to ask of a women of sixty-two; and then nothing she said or did would matter; he would have the idea in his head. And the child would be taken from her. Gradually or all at once she would lose him, the son she had always missed and to whom she was a wiser mother than she had been to her own two girls. The little monkey-face, the song at morning, the shirts to iron, the small automobiles and journals of chemistry left lying about, the presence by night and day of the son, of the man, of the man of the house gone, gone, all of it gone.
When he came in she did not turn her face to him. She lay grim, aching in the marrow of her bones.
“Well,” he said, “Andy’s spilled his milk and thrown his egg on the floor. Hear him yelling for Hat?” There were in fact loud, theatrical cries from below. “If you don’t recover in a day or two we’ll have to send him to reform school.”
“I intend to recover tomorrow,” she said, still grim, but lying easier. His kindness was exact: it hit the spot, carelessly it seemed, and healed.
“I detest being sick,” she said after a while.
“I know. You aren’t very good at it. Look here, I asked those people in Friday night, I’ll put them off a week.”
“Nonsense, I’ll be up day after tomorrow. Is your friend the checkers player coming?”
Edward laughed. “Yes. He wants to be pulverised again.” She had heard the young Philadelphian boast that he had never lost a game of checkers since he was fifteen, had taken him on and beat him six games running.
“I am a vengeful old woman, Edward,” she said, lying moveless, her short grey hair disordered.
“He doesn’t care—he’s trying to figure out your game.”
“I don’t like boasting.” That was Malheur County that spoke in her, the frontier without hope, the end of pushing on. “We’re all fools enough without adding that,” she said, unyielding, desolate.
“How about a drink before dinner?”
“Yes, I’d like a whiskey in hot water. But no dinner, I can’t eat with a cold. Bring me a hot toddy, and Dombey and Son, would you? I was just starting it.”
“How many times have you read it?”
“Why, I don’t know. Every few years since I was twenty. And put that poor baby to bed, Edward, he isn’t used to Joan.”
“She scares me too,” he said.
“Well she might; you won’t get round her with charm and persuasion. I have an understanding with her,” she went on, driven by a sudden will she did not stop to understand, “that when you and Andy move out she’ll move in with me, if it still suits her. She isn’t doing any regular cleaning any more, and her husband’s dead and her son’s in the Marines. And we’ve always got on.”
He stood silent, taken off guard. She looked up at him, the tall figure that dominated all the house, vulnerable and kingly, the young man.
“Don’t look so stricken,” she said with mild irony, “can’t I provide ahead for the winter? Now do go get my whiskey, Edward, my throat’s like sandpaper.”
To leave him free, that was her job. And she was good at her job. That had been her fault as a mother of daughters, she did not know if a girl should be left free or not, and so had vacillated; Rose had come out a bit weak, and Mary spoilt. But with a boy there was no question, he must have courage, and so needed freedom. Perhaps what a girl must have was patience, but she was not sure; in any case she was herself too impatient—not for pleasure and possession, like Mary, but for completion, for the end of things: unhopeful, and impatient.
She enjoyed her night and day in bed, entertained by Dickens, rain on the window, Joan in the kitchen singing long dreadful Methodist hymns. She rose much refreshed on Thursday, washed and ironed all the bedroom curtains, and weeded the iris beds in the fresh wind of April while the baby investigated all the possibilities of fresh wet dirt, and discovered the earthworm. On Friday night Edward’s friends came: two married couples, Tom the checkers expert, whom she beat twice and once inadvertently let win, and a little fair woman called Elinor. Elinor, what had she heard, a while ago, about an Elinor? She was pleasant to look at, anyhow, with thick fair hair and a
face as quiet as a pool of water. She was looking at Edward. Water in sunlight. O radiance, incredible brightness of the true sun, incredible heights.
“I’m never as good playing the red,” Harriet said, an ungraceful loser. “But I’ll leave you holding the field, Mr. Harris.” And young Tom Harris, appalled at having beaten her, apologised in his Eastern voice till she had to laugh. He so plainly thought her a wonderful old woman, a daughter of the pioneers, if she told him she learned checkers from Chief Joseph he would probably believe it. But all the time her heart’s eye was on Elinor.
No beauty. Timid, often defeated, getting on for thirty. Oh, yes, but patient; a patient woman: owning that passionate, intelligent patience that will wait, wait ten years, not for a lucky break but for the known, foreknown, fulfilment. One of the fortunate ones, who know that there is a point. It takes luck too, Harriet cried inwardly: you might have waited all your life, and let it all go by!—But this one was like Edward, one of the fortunate. They did not push on, they were not restless. They took what came, and when they spoke they were answered. They had seen the high peaks, and tragedy served them. Edward had met his match.
Harriet did not go upstairs before she had chatted a while with Elinor. Each felt the other’s earnest effort to show goodwill, to offer true friendliness; neither could quite accept; yet liking arose. Harriet went upstairs at ten feeling pleased with herself. In her dressing gown she crossed her room to look at the photograph of her husband, a vivid dark face, John Avanti at thirty, when she had first known him. Her heart rose as always to meet the challenge of him. He had changed her utterly, he lived therefore in her; she spoke to him. Well, John, I push on, she said, not aloud. She got into bed, finished Dombey, listened to the soft cheerful sound of voices downstairs, and fell asleep.
She woke in the grey light before sunrise and knew what she had lost. They would go now, within a year or so, the child and the man; all grace, all danger, all fulfilment, leaving her, as John dying had not left her, alone.She need not be impatient any longer. Even that wore out in the end. She had done right, she had done her job. But there was no point to it, for her. All she would need from now on was endurance. She was back down to bedrock, she had come in the end where all her people came. She sat up in bed, grey-haired in the grey light, and wept aloud.
The Water Is Wide
“You here?”
“To see you.”
After a while he said, “Where’s here?” He was lying flat, so could not have much in view but ceiling and the top third of Anna; in any case his eyes looked unfocussed.
“Hospital.”
Another pause. He said something like, “Is it me that’s here?” The words were slurred. He added clearly enough, “It’s not you. You look all right.”
“I am. You’re here. And I’m here. To see you.”
This made him smile. The smile of an adult lying flat on his back resembles the smile of an infant, in that gravity works with it, not against it.
“Can I be told,” he said, “or will the knowledge kill me?”
“If knowledge could kill you, you’d have been dead for years.”
“Am I sick?”
“Do you feel well?”
He turned his head away, the first bodily movement he had made. “I feel ill.” The words were slurred. “Full of drugs, some kind drugs.” The head moved again, restless. “Don’t like it,” he said. He looked straight at her now. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “Anna, I’m cold. I feel cold.” Tears filled the eyes and ran down from them into the greying hair. This happens in cases of human suffering, when the sufferer is lying face up and is middle-aged.
Anna said his name and took his hand. Her hand was somewhat smaller than his, several degrees warmer, and very similar in structure and texture; even the shape of the nails was similar. She held his hand. He held her hand. After some time his hand began to relax.
“Kind drugs,” he said. The eyes were shut now.
He spoke once more; he said either “Wait,” or “Weight.” Anna answered the first, saying, “I will.” Then she thought he had spoken of a weight that lay upon him. She could see the weight in the way he breathed, asleep.
“It’s the drugs,” she said, “he’s asked every time if you could stop giving him the drugs. Could you decrease the dose?”
The doctor said, “Chemotherapy,” and other words, some of which were the names of drugs, ending in zil and ine.
“He says that he can’t sleep, but he can’t wake up either. I think he needs to sleep. And to wake up.”
The doctor said many other words. He said them in so rapid, distinct, and fluent a manner, and with such assurance, that Anna believed them all for at least three hours.
“Is this a loony bin?” Gideon inquired with perfect clarity.
“Mhm.” Anna knitted.
“Thought wards.”
“Oh, it’s all private rooms here. It’s a nice private sort of place. Rest home. Polite. Expensive.”
“Senile, incont... incontinent. Can’t talk. Anna.”
“Mhm?”
“Stroke?”
“No, no.” She put her knitting down on her knee. “You got overtired.”
“Tumor?”
“No. You’re sound as a bell. Only a little cracked. You got tired. You acted funny.”
“What’d I do?” he asked, his eyes brightening.
“Made an awful fool of yourself.”
“Did?”
“Well, you washed all the blackboards. At the Institute. With soap and water.”
“That all?”
“You said it was time to start all over. You made the Dean fetch the soap and buckets.” They both jolted softly with laughter at the same time. “Never mind the rest. You had them all quite busy, believe me.”
They all understood now that his much publicised New Year’s Day letter to the Times, which he had defended with uncharacteristic vehemence, had been a symptom. This was a relief to many people, who had uncomfortably been thinking of the letter as a moral statement. Looking back, everyone at the Institute could now see that Gideon had not been himself for some months. Indeed the change could be traced back three years, to the death of his wife Dorothea of leukemia. He had borne his loss well, of course, but had he not remained somewhat withdrawn—increasingly withdrawn? Only no one had noticed it, because he had been so busy. He had ceased to take vacations at the family cabin up at the lake, and had done a good deal of public speaking in connection with the peace organisation of which he was co-chairman. He had been working much too hard. It was all clear now. Unfortunately it had not become clear until the evening in April when he began a public lecture on the Question of Ethics in Science by gazing at the audience in silence for 35 seconds (approx.: one of the mathematical philosophers present in the audience had begun to time the silence at the point when it became painful, though not yet unendurable), and then, in a slow, soft, rough voice which no one who heard it could forget, announced, “The quantification of Death is now the major problem facing theoretical physicists in the latter half of the Western Hemisphere.” He had then closed his mouth and stood gazing at them.
Hansen, who had introduced his talk and sat on the speakers’ platform, was a large man and a quick-witted one. He had without much trouble induced Gideon to come backstage with him, to one of the seminar rooms. It was there that Gideon had insisted that they wash all the blackboards perfectly clean. He had not become violent, though his behavior had been what Hansen termed “extraordinarily wilful.” Later on, in private, Hansen wondered whether Gideon’s behavior had not always been wilful, in that it had always been self-directed, and whether he should not have used, instead, the word “irrational.” That would have been the expectable word. But its expectability led him to wonder if Gideon’s behavior (as a theoretical physicist) had ever been rational; and, in fact, if his own behavior (as a theoretical physicist, or otherwise) had ever been adequately describable by the term “rational.” He said nothing, however, of t
hese speculations, and worked very hard for several weekends at building a rock garden at the side of his house.
Though he offered no violence to others or himself, Gideon had attempted escape. At a certain moment he appeared to understand suddenly that medical aid had been summoned. He acted with decision. He told the Dean, Dr. Hansen, Dr. Mehta, and the student Mr. Chew, all of whom were with him (several other members of the audience or of the Institute were busy keeping busybodies and reporters out), “You finish the blackboards in here, I’ll do Room 40,” and taking up a bucket and a sponge went rapidly across the hall into a vacant classroom, where Chew and Hansen, following him at once, prevented him from opening a window. The room was on the ground floor, and his intention was made clear by his saying, “Let me get out, please, help me get out.” Chew and Hansen were compelled to restrain his arms by force. He struggled briefly to free himself; failing, he became silent and apparently thoughtful. Shortly before the medical personnel arrived he suggested in a low voice to Chew, “If we sat down on the floor here they might not see us.” When the medical personnel entered the room and came close to him he said loudly, “All right, have it your way,” and at once began to yell wordlessly, or scream. Thegraduate student Chew, a brilliant young biophysicist who had not had much experience of human suffering, let go of his arm and broke into tears. The medical personnel, having had perhaps excessive experience of human suffering, promptly administered a quick-acting sedative or tranquilliser by hypodermic. Within 35 seconds (approx.) the patient fell silent and became tractable, accepting the straitjacket without resistance, and with only a slight expression (facial, not verbal) of bewilderment, or, possibly, curiosity.
“I have to get out of here.”
“Oh, Gid, not yet, you need to rest. It’s a decent place. They’ve eased up on the drugs. I can see the difference.”
The Compass Rose Page 22