by Bellow, Saul
“I can’t have the pad,” Hattie complained. “The switch goes on and off, and every time it does it starts my generator and uses up the gas.”
“Ah, now, Hattie,” Rolfe said, “this is not the time to be stingy. We’ll take you to town in the morning and have you looked over. Helen will phone Dr. Stroud.”
Hattie wanted to say, “Stingy! Why you’re the stingy ones. I just haven’t got anything. You and Helen are ready to hit each other over two bits in canasta.” But the Rolfes were good to her; they were her only real friends here. Darly would have let her lie in the yard all night, and Pace would have sold her to the bone man. He’d give her to the knacker for a buck.
So she didn’t talk back to the Rolfes, but as soon as they left the yellow house and walked through the superclear moonlight under the great skirt of box-elder shadows to their new station wagon, Hattie turned off the switch, and the heavy swirling and battering of the generator stopped. Presently she became aware of real pain, deeper pain, in her arm, and she sat rigid, warming the injured place with her hand. It seemed to her that she could feel the bone sticking out. Before leaving, Helen Rolfe had thrown over her a comforter that had belonged to Hattie’s dead friend India, from whom she had inherited the small house and everything in it. Had the comforter lain on India’s bed the night she died? Hattie tried to remember, but her thoughts were mixed up. She was fairly sure the deathbed pillow was in the loft, and she believed she had put the death bedding in a trunk. Then how had this comforter got out? She couldn’t do anything about it now but draw it away from contact with her skin. It kept her legs warm. This she accepted, but she didn’t want it any nearer.
More and more Hattie saw her own life as though, from birth to the present, every moment had been filmed. Her fancy was that when she died she would see the film in the next world. Then she would know how she had appeared from the back, watering the plants, in the bathroom, asleep, playing the organ, embracing—everything, even tonight, in pain, almost the last pain, perhaps, for she couldn’t take much more. How many twists and angles had life to show her yet? There couldn’t be much film left. To lie awake and think such thoughts was the worst thing in the world. Better death than insomnia. Hattie not only loved sleep, she believed in it.
The first attempt to set the bone was not successful. “Look what they’ve done to me,” said Hattie and showed visitors the discolored breast. After the second operation her mind wandered. The sides of her bed had to be raised, for in her delirium she roamed the wards. She cursed at the nurses when they shut her in. “You can’t make people prisoners in a democracy without a trial, you bitches.” She had learned from Wicks how to swear. “He_ was profane,” she used to say. “I picked it up unconsciously.”
For several weeks her mind was not clear. Asleep, her face was lifeless; her cheeks were puffed out and her mouth, no longer wide and grinning, was drawn round and small. Helen sighed when she saw her.
“Shall we get in touch with her family?” Helen asked the doctor. His skin was white and thick. He had chestnut hair, abundant but very dry. He sometimes explained to his patients, “I had a tropical disease during the war.”
He asked, “Is there a family?”
“Old brothers. Cousins’ children,” said Helen. She tried to think who would be called to her own bedside (she was old enough for that). Rolfe would see that she was cared for. He would hire private nurses. Hattie could not afford that. She had already gone beyond her means. A trust company in Philadelphia paid her eighty dollars a month. She had a small savings account.
“I suppose it’ll be up to us to get her out of hock,” said Rolfe. “Unless the brother down in Mexico comes across. We may have to phone one of those old guys.”
In the end, no relations had to be called. Hattie began to recover. At last she could recognize visitors, though her mind was still in disorder. Much that had happened she couldn’t recall.
“How many quarts of blood did they have to give me?” she kept asking.
I seem to remember five, six, eight different transfusions. Daylight, electric light…” She tried to smile, but she couldn’t make a pleasant face as yet. “How am I going to pay?” she said. “At twenty-five bucks a quart. My little bit of money is just about wiped out.”
Blood became her constant topic, her preoccupation. She told everyone who came to see her, “—have to replace all that blood. They poured gallons into me. Gallons. I hope it was all good.” And, though very weak, she began to grin and laugh again. There was more hissing in her laughter than formerly; the illness had affected her chest.
“No cigarettes, no booze,” the doctor told Helen. “Doctor,” Helen asked him, “do you expect her to change?”
“All the same, I am obliged to say it.”
“Life sober may not be much of a temptation to her,” said Helen. Her husband laughed. When Rolfe’s laughter was intense it blinded one of his eyes. His short Irish face turned red; on the bridge of his small, sharp nose the skin whitened. “Hattie’s like me,” he said. “She’ll be in business till she’s cleaned out. And if Sego Lake turned to whisky she’d use her last strength to knock her old yellow house down to build a raft of it. She’d float away on whisky. So why talk temperance?”
Hattie recognized the similarity between them. When he came to see her she said, “Jerry, you’re the only one I can really talk to about my troubles. What am I going to do for money? I have Hotchkiss Insurance. I paid eight dollars a month.”
“That won’t do you much good, Hat. No Blue Cross?”
“I let it drop ten years ago. Maybe I could sell some of my valuables.”
“What valuables have you got?” he said. His eye began to droop with laughter. “Why,” she said defiantly, “there’s plenty. First there’s the beautiful, precious Persian rug that India left me.”
“Coals from the fireplace have been burning it for years, Hat!”
“The rug is in perfect_ condition,” she said with an angry sway of the shoulders. “A beautiful object like that never loses its value. And the oak table from the Spanish monastery is three hundred years old.”
“With luck you could get twenty bucks for it. It would cost fifty to haul it out of here. It’s the house you ought to sell.”
“The house?” she said. Yes, that had been in her mind. “I’d have to get twenty thousand for it.”
“Eight is a fair price.”
“Fifteen….” She was offended, and her voice recovered its strength. “India put eight into it in two years. And don’t forget that Sego Lake is one of the most beautiful places in the world.”
“But where is it? Five hundred and some miles to San Francisco and two hundred to Salt Lake City. Who wants to live way out here but a few eccentrics like you and India? And me?”
“There are things you can’t put a price tag on. Beautiful things.”
“Oh, bull, Hattie! You don’t know squat about beautiful things. Any more than I do. I live here because it figures for me, and you because India left you the house. And just in the nick of time, too. Without it you wouldn’t have had a pot of your own.”
His words offended Hattie; more than that, they frightened her. She was silent and then grew thoughtful, for she was fond of Jerry Rolfe and he of her. He had good sense and, moreover, he only expressed her own thoughts. He spoke no more than the truth about India’s death and the house. But she told herself, He doesn’t know everything. You’d have to pay a San Francisco architect ten thousand just to think_ of such a house. Before he drew a line.
“Jerry,” the old woman said, “what am I going to do about replacing the blood in the blood bank?”
“Do you want a quart from me, Hat?” His eye began to fall shut.
“You won’t do. You had that tumor, two years ago. I think Darly ought to give some.”
“The old man?” Rolfe laughed at her. “You want to kill him?”
“Why!” said Hattie with anger, lifting up her massive face. Fever and perspiration had frayed the fringe of curls; at
the back of the head the hair had knotted and matted so that it had to be shaved. “Darly almost killed me. It’s his fault that I’m in this condition. He must have some_ blood in him. He runs after all the chicks—all of them—young and old.”
“Come, you were drunk, too,” said Rolfe.
“I’ve driven drunk for forty years. It was the sneeze. Oh, Jerry, I feel wrung out,” said Hattie, haggard, sitting forward in bed. But her face was cleft by her nonsensically happy grin. She was not one to be miserable for long; she had the expression of a perennial survivor.
Every other day she went to the therapist. The young woman worked her arm for her; it was a pleasure and a comfort to Hattie, who would have been glad to leave the whole cure to her. However, she was given other exercises to do, and these were not so easy. They rigged a pulley for her and Hattie had to hold both ends of a rope and saw it back and forth through the scraping little wheel. She bent heavily from the hips and coughed over her cigarette. But the most important exercise of all she shirked. This required her to put the flat of her hand to the wall at the level of her hips and, by working her finger tips slowly, to make the hand ascend to the height of her shoulder. That was painful; she often forgot to do it, although the doctor warned her, “Hattie, you don’t want adhesions, do you?”
A light of despair crossed Hattie’s eyes. Then she said, “Oh, Dr. Stroud, buy my house from me.”
“I’m a bachelor. What would I do with a house?”
“I know just the girl for you—my cousin’s daughter. Perfectly charming and very brainy. Just about got her Ph. D.”
“You must get quite a few proposals yourself,” said the doctor. “From crazy desert rats. They chase me. But,” she said, “after I pay my bills I’ll be in pretty punk shape. If at least I could replace that blood in the blood bank I’d feel easier.”
“If you don’t do as the therapist tells you, Hattie, you’ll need another operation. Do you know what adhesions are?”
She knew. But Hattie thought, How long must I go on taking care of myself?_ It made her angry to hear him speak of another operation. She had a moment of panic, but she covered it up. With him, this young man whose skin was already as thick as buttermilk and whose chestnut hair was as dry as death, she always assumed the part of a child. In a small voice she said, “Yes, doctor.” But her heart was in a fury.
Night and day, however, she repeated, “I was in the Valley of the Shadow. But I’m alive.” She was weak, she was old, she couldn’t follow a train of thought very easily, she felt faint in the head. But she was still here; here was her body, it filled space, a great body. And though she had worries and perplexities, and once in a while her arm felt as though it was about to give her the last stab of all; and though her hair was scrappy and old, like onion roots, and scattered like nothing under the comb, yet she sat and amused herself with visitors; her great grin split her face; her heart warmed with every kind word.
And she thought, People will help me out. It never did me any good to worry. At the last minute something turned up, when I wasn’t looking for it. Marian loves me. Helen and Jerry love me. Half Pint loves me. They would never let me go to the ground. And I love them. If it were the other way around, I’d never let them go down.
Above the horizon, in a baggy vastness which Hattie by herself occasionally visited, the features of India, her shade,_ sometimes rose. India was indignant and scolding. Not mean. Not really mean. Few people had ever been really mean to Hattie. But India was annoyed with her. “The garden is going to hell, Hattie,” she said. “Those lilac bushes are all shriveled.”
“But what can I do? The hose is rotten. It broke. It won’t reach.”
“Then dig a trench,” said the phantom of India. “Have old Sam dig a trench. But save the bushes.”
Am I thy servant still?_ said Hattie to herself. No,_ she thought, let the dead bury their dead._
But she didn’t defy India now any more than she had done when they lived together. Hattie was supposed to keep India off the bottle, but often both of them began to get drunk after breakfast. They forgot to dress, and in their slips the two of them wandered drunkenly around the house and blundered into each other, and they were in despair at having been so weak. Late in the afternoon they would be sitting in the living room, waiting for the sun to set. It shrank, burning itself out on the crumbling edges of the mountains. When the sun passed, the fury of the daylight ended and the mountain surfaces were more blue, broken, like cliffs of coal. They no longer suggested faces. The east began to look simple, and the lake less inhuman and haughty. At last India would say, “Hattie—it’s time for the lights.” And Hattie would pull the switch chains of the lamps, several of them, to give the generator a good shove. She would turn on some of the wobbling eighteenth-century-style lamps whose shades stood out from their slender bodies like dragonflies’ wings. The little engine in the shed would shuffle, then spit, then charge and bang, and the first weak light would rise unevenly in the bulbs.
“Hettie!”_ cried India. After she drank she was penitent, but her penitence too was a hardship to Hattie, and the worse her temper the more British her accent became. “Where the hell ah you Het-tie!”_ After India’s death Hattie found some poems she had written in which she, Hattie, was affectionately and even touchingly mentioned. That was a good thing—Literature. Education. Breeding. But Hattie’s interest in ideas was very small, whereas India had been all over the world. India was used to brilliant society. India wanted her to discuss Eastern religion, Bergson and Proust, and Hattie had no head for this, and so India blamed her drinking on Hattie. “I can’t talk to you,” she would say. “You don’t understand religion or culture. And I’m here because I’m not fit to be anywhere else. I can’t live in New York anymore. It’s too dangerous for a woman my age to be drunk in the street at night.”
And Hattie, talking to her Western friends about India, would say, “She is a lady” (implying that they made a pair). “She is a creative person” (this was why they found each other so congenial). “But helpless? Completely. Why she can’t even get her own girdle on.”
“Hettie! Come here. Het-tie! Do you know what sloth is?”_
Undressed, India sat on her bed and with the cigarette in her drunken, wrinkled, ringed hand she burned holes in the blankets. On Hattie’s pride she left many small scars, too. She treated her like a servant.
Weeping, India begged Hattie afterward to forgive her. “Hettie, please don’t condemn me in your heart. Forgive me, dear, I know I am bad. But I hurt myself more in my evil than I hurt you. “_
Hattie would keep a stiff bearing. She would lift up her face with its incurved nose and puffy eyes and say, “I am a Christian person. I never bear a grudge.” And by repeating this she actually brought herself to forgive India.
But of course Hattie had no husband, no child, no skill, no savings. And what she would have done if India had not died and left her the yellow house nobody knows.
Jerry Rolfe said privately to Hattie’s friend Marian, a businesswoman in town, “Hattie can’t do anything for herself. If I hadn’t been around during the forty-four blizzard she and India both would have starved. She’s always been careless and lazy and now she can’t even chase a cow out of the yard. She’s too feeble. The thing for her to do is to go east to her damn brother. Hattie would have ended at the poor farm if it hadn’t been for India. But besides the damn house India should have left her some dough. She didn’t use her goddamn head.”
When Hattie returned to the lake she stayed with the Rolfes. “Well, old shellback,” said Jerry, “there’s a little more life in you now.”
Indeed, with joyous eyes, the cigarette in her mouth and her hair newly frizzed and overhanging her forehead, she seemed to have triumphed again. She was pale, but she grinned, she chuckled, and she held a bourbon old-fashioned with a cherry and a slice of orange in it. She was on rations; the Rolfes allowed her two a day. Her back, Helen noted, was more bent than before. Her knees went outward a little
weakly; her feet, however, came close together at the ankles.
“Oh, Helen dear and Jerry dear, I am so thankful, so glad to be back at the lake. I can look after my place again, and I’m here to see the spring. It’s more gorgeous than ever.”
Heavy rains had fallen while Hattie was away. The sego lilies, which bloomed only after a wet winter, came up from the loose dust, especially around the marl pit; but even on the burnt granite they seemed to grow. Desert peach was beginning to appear, and in Hattie’s yard the rosebushes were filling out. The roses were yellow and abundant, and the odor they gave off was like that of damp tea leaves.
“Before it gets hot enough for the rattlesnakes,” said Hattie to Helen, “we ought to drive up to Marky’s ranch and gather watercress.”
Hattie was going to attend to lots of things, but the heat came early that year and, as there was no television to keep her awake, she slept most of the day. She was now able to dress herself, though there was little more that she could do. Sam Jervis rigged the pulley for her on the porch and she remembered once in a while to use it. Mornings when she had her strength she rambled over to her own house, examining things, being important and giving orders to Sam Jervis and Wanda Gingham. At ninety, Wanda, a Shoshone, was still an excellent seamstress and housecleaner.
Hattie looked over the car, which was parked under a cottonwood tree. She tested the engine. Yes, the old pot would still go. Proudly, happily, she listened to the noise of tappets; the dry old pipe shook as the smoke went out at the rear.
She tried to work the shift, turn the wheel. That, as yet, she couldn’t do. But it would come soon, she was confident.
At the back of the house the soil had caved in a little over the cesspool and a few of the old railroad ties over the top had rotted. Otherwise things were in good shape. Sam had looked after the garden. He had fixed a new catch for the gate after Pace’s horses—maybe because he could never afford to keep them in hay—had broken in and Sam found them grazing and drove them out. Luckily, they hadn’t damaged many of her plants. Hattie felt a moment of wild rage against Pace. He had brought the horses into her garden for a free feed, she was sure. But her anger didn’t last long. It was reabsorbed into the feeling of golden pleasure that enveloped her. She had little strength, but all that she had was a pleasure to her. So she forgave even Pace, who would have liked to do her out of the house, who had always used her, embarrassed her, cheated her at cards, swindled her. All that he did he did for the sake of his quarter horses. He was a fool about horses. They were ruining him. Racing horses was a millionaire’s amusement.