Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

by Highsmith, Patricia

  There’s a TV set in Naomi’s room, and she used to stare at its blank, oyster-colored screen for a few moments now and then, as if she were seeing something, would talk back to imagined personages in sitcoms, but no more. Stevey had bought the set for her when she was eighty (Naomi had been seventy-eight when she entered the Old Homestead), but as she grew more batty, the nurses had slipped the set out to other patients’ rooms (charging the inmates for its use, of course), and when the set went on the blink finally, nobody had bothered fixing it, and it had been put back, kaput, in Naomi’s room. In case any of her relatives turned up and remembered talk of a TV set and asked where it was, there it was. But Naomi’s relatives—living, walking, visiting ones—had always been conspicuous for their absence.

  The Old Homestead’s administrative staff and the nurses male and female sometimes chuckled over Naomi Barton Markham. Close to two hundred, they said, if she was a day! And still going! No reason for her to die!

  Nobody of Naomi’s family had visited in a century, the story went. The uncle of Stevey had died without issue and, remembering his brother Eugene with admiration, had left what he had to Eugene’s widow Naomi, whom he’d never met. Very kind of that uncle, as Naomi had married a second time to one Doug Villars, who had not been a great earner. Amazingly, Naomi’s legacy had held out for sixty years or so against the marauding of the Old Homestead administration, the adding of “special care” hours, and prescriptions for unnecessary items, the most absurd being Tums for the tummy, which Naomi did not at all need, but which the pharmacy was delighted to add to the list of items that she did need. It was a hell of a racket.

  Naomi Barton Markham’s room on the ground floor of the Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home in southern Oklahoma was a small room with one window and a private bath, which Naomi had not set foot in since she had been about a hundred and twenty. The room held, besides Naomi’s bed, a chair for visitors, a night-table with little bottles and a drinking glass with water in it, and on the floor near the bed a bedpan that the nurses were seldom in time to push under her, if the bedpan was needed during the times of diaper-changing.

  Someone of the staff had remarked, “Babies are a bore with wet diapers and all, and it doesn’t last long, maybe just two years. But Naomi—its been fifty years or so now.” Then later, “It’s been eighty—a hundred years now, hasn’t it?” And a circle of nurses and maybe even a staff doctor or two would join in the laughter in the Old Homestead’s round-the-clock cafeteria in the basement.

  Some stories got passed on like folklore.

  “When Naomi was eighty or ninety and quite lively, she used to creep at night from one room to the other, switching glasses of people’s false teeth—or she’d flush ’em down the toilet! That’s what I was told when I came to work here.”

  This story had inspired laughter and tears of mirth in dozens of young nurses and doctors. It was true! They felt it in their bones, it was true!

  And there were stories of Naomi going into the kitchen during that short period around 3 a.m., when the cooks weren’t busy with something, and Naomi would pour the salt into the sugar containers and vice versa, pull the plugs on the deep-freezers, anything to be mischievous. It was a fact that Naomi had had to be confined to a big armchair for a period of several weeks, given sedatives, shortly after she had entered the Old Homestead, and any nurse could verify this, as it was on record. Some nurses had looked it up, then asked for shorter hours or more pay for caring for Naomi, because the Old Homestead was not supposed to be a loony bin.

  The truth was, Naomi Barton Markham was insane, besides being senile, but insane in a way that no one could label, or define. Multiple infarcts of the brain? Why not? Good as anything, and it implied an insufficient supply of blood to the brain, a condition a couple of doctors had told Stevey that his mother had, as if that summed up and dismissed the variety of oddnesses that Naomi had displayed over the years. Whatever she had, it wasn’t Alzheimer’s.

  Further truth was, Naomi had cursed out, since the age of seventeen or so, nearly everyone around her, abused them in one way or another. First her boyfriends, who of course hadn’t been good enough for her; then her husband Eugene Markham, said to have had the patience of Job; then her second husband Doug Villars, who had had even more patience than Eugene (Naomi knew how to pick them), and finally Stevey, who had at first worshipped the ground his mother walked on, then turned against her in an emotional and Freudian sense (he hadn’t been in love with her any longer, after the age of fourteen, say), but not in a filial or legal sense, for he had always written to her if they were apart, and had continued to pay her bills as long as his rather lonely life lasted.

  And now—though the word now means nothing to Naomi—it’s the year 2071. Naomi’s TV set sits there, looking as antique as an Atwater Kent radio might have looked in 1980. The Old Homestead is still called that, though the building has been renovated a couple of times, and expanded too, because there are more and more old folks. Naomi is lucky in still another respect: she’s not in pain, doesn’t need morphine or even aspirin. Incredible. Doctors from far and wide have come to study her innards, thinking, wondering: “Can this fabulous Naomi Barton Markham have the low metabolism of the reptile?”

  No. Her metabolism is pretty low, to be sure, but she does not exactly hibernate. She just keeps cool, and needs thin blankets summer and winter. But there has been a slow change. Now she talks more, talks to non-existent figures in her room, as if she has visitors. She talks often in a baby voice, and with a somewhat southern accent. It has begun to disturb the staff.

  “Where y’all from?” Naomi will ask. Then she may identify an old boyfriend called Ned, whom she teases.

  Or she may address her own mother, whom she lies to, and with whom Naomi exhausts herself, or pretends to—gasping as if in exasperation at not making herself understood by her mother, whom she calls Mama.

  Then there is husband Eugene, whom Naomi clearly wishes to avoid, evade, banging her bony white fist down on the bedsheets, and yelling at him to get out of her room.

  All this sounds very funny, Naomi speaking without teeth. Or rather, it sounds funny for the first several weeks to the nurses, male and female, who come and go, bearing trays, taking away soiled diapers. Finally, nurses start maneuvering to get out of service in Naomi’s room.

  “I really can’t stand it, I just can’t,” said a 24-year-old female nurse from Wisconsin, plump and hardy and engaged to be married within a few weeks. “I don’t believe any of what she’s saying, but it gets under my skin.”

  That was it, it got under people’s skin. They couldn’t believe Naomi Barton Markham, yet there she was before their eyes, mumbling now and then by day and by night, talking to people of the past with such eloquence, they seemed to be standing in the room!

  “Ah didn’t say that an’ you know it,” Naomi would say softly and grimly between her toothless gums, and an incoming nurse might almost drop her tray.

  Despite the repetition of this and similar phrases, the nurses and doctors would glance into corners of the room to see if anyone was there, which made them feel silly and consequently a bit annoyed.

  So nurses pushed the room on to new staff coming in, or neglected Naomi slightly, the diaper situation became worse for the next nurse in charge, and inevitably there was a next nurse, because the Old Homestead wasn’t a charity or state institution, and they did try to keep up standards.

  Journalists from newspapers, accompanied by photographers, came sometimes to visit Naomi. The photographers could always get a ghostly shot of her pale, folded little face, propped up against white pillows. Most of the time, she refused even to mumble “Hello,” as if she sensed that by disappointing the journalists she could hurt them, show her power. Naomi was a nasty customer at heart.

  Naomi had no proper birth certificate. The story went that she’d had one when she entered the Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home, but had got hold of it somehow and destroyed it out of vanity. She had al
ways claimed to be younger than she really was. So was she even older than two hundred and ten?

  Oddly, the coming and going of journalists and photographers and curious doctors taking X-rays and metabolism tests made Naomi less rather than more real to the Old Homestead staff.

  “She’s sort of like a statue now. Do you know what I mean?” asked a nurse who was drinking coffee with a colleague. “It’s like taking pictures of a monument—somehow.”

  “Washington Monument lying down!” said a male nurse, smiling. “Very pale and glowing—ha-ha! But peeing and crapping all the same!”

  “She does seem to glow sometimes, when you walk into her room and it’s dark,” said a middle-aged nurse in a quiet voice.

  “I’ve noticed that too!” a younger nurse piped up. “Pale and sort of greenish, the glow—isn’t it?”

  Nobody liked Naomi. She didn’t show much of herself now to be liked or not, but what little she did show wasn’t liked. And so it had always been, for Naomi.

  ***

  In the beginning, she had been a small-town girl of slightly more than usual prettiness, with some talent for dancing. She had not lacked for boyfriends, and married at twenty-two. By that time, she was dancing with a vaudeville group which played Chicago, St Louis, New Orleans and Philadelphia.

  Naomi Barton was blonde, slender, pert, not much intellectually, because she hadn’t gone to school after her mediocre highschool in a Tennessee town. But the man Naomi married was an ambitious and promising engineer aged thirty, Eugene Markham, madly in love with her, indeed smitten. For a time, their careers merged nicely, he doing consultant jobs in towns where Naomi had an engagement for a week or so. Naomi’s career prospered. Eugene suggested to Naomi that she might aim for ballet, something more prestigious than what she was doing, which was chorus line with a few comedy acts.

  “I’ll get stage-fright,” said Naomi, wanting reassurance.

  “Course you won’t! We can afford ballet lessons! When do you want to start?”

  She started lessons in Philadelphia, but just at this time, Naomi discovered that she was pregnant, and she didn’t like that. It upset her.

  It upset Eugene slightly, too. “If it’s only one month, or six weeks as you said—maybe you can get rid of it? Hot bath or something? I dunno.” Eugene really didn’t know. It was early in the twentieth century and abortion by suction-pipe was not so well known as now, though very likely primitive peoples on faraway shores had been sucking out little unwanted embryos for hundreds if not thousands of years before the time of Naomi and Eugene.

  Naomi tried hot baths plus gin, resulting in a red face for herself, much sweating, but no ensuing period. She tried a long brisk walk in Philadelphia which got her into a wrong part of town, whence she actually had to run, but still she didn’t abort. At this point, Naomi became confused: she couldn’t sign a new contract with her manager for the following six months, because she’d be heavy with child by then. Oddly, neither she nor Eugene thought of looking for a doctor who would perform an abortion.

  “Well, let’s have the child,” said Eugene, smiling. “It’s not the end of the world, darling! It just means an interruption in your career. Not even a long one. Let’s cheer up. I love you, darling.” Eugene tried to kiss her, but she twisted away.

  “You don’t! You wanted me to get rid of our baby!” Naomi didn’t weep, she wasn’t loud or hysterical, she was simply determined.

  Eugene could not convince her that he was not only resigned to circumstances, but even happy with them.

  Naomi wanted a divorce.

  Eugene was thoroughly surprised. “Why on earth?”

  “Because you don’t want our child and you don’t love me!”

  Naomi packed, and took a train to Memphis, where her mother then lived.

  Eugene Markham followed his wife to Memphis on another train, managed to see her at her parents’ house, and tried to persuade her not to seek a divorce. He failed, and spoke with her parents on the matter. Eugene spoke well and eloquently, but Naomi’s parents (Eugene had been able to see them alone) took the stance that they considered “modern and correct:” parents should not interfere in the affairs of their offspring.

  Naomi got the divorce on grounds of “incompatibility,” since there was no adultery or absence without tidings. The child, a boy, was born in the home of Naomi’s parents, and Eugene’s offer to pay the doctor’s fee and other expenses relating to the birth was rejected by Naomi. Two or three weeks after the birth, Naomi resumed her vaudeville career (in Chicago now), and left the baby Stevey in the charge of her mother, Mrs. Sarah Barton.

  When Stevey was nearly four, Naomi married a man called Doug Villars, a year or so younger than herself, a simple but decent fellow with an accountant’s qualification that enabled him to get a job almost anywhere. Up to now, Naomi had been able to get a job almost anywhere too, whether she worked with a troupe or not, but the picture was changing. Vaudeville was dying out, Naomi was nearing thirty, and she did not adjust to the times. As she declined in ability and fame, and consequently got fewer engagements, she fancied her reputation growing.

  “It’s the ordinary public that doesn’t appreciate me,” she said to Doug. “I should’ve stuck with my ballet lessons—as Eugene used to tell me. Eugene had ideas! He wasn’t a bore like you!”

  Doug Viliars could be hurt to the quick by remarks like this. But Naomi made it up to him in bed. She knew on which side her bread was buttered, and where the butter came from, Doug’s modest but dependable salary. Besides, she enjoyed bed. But most of all, she enjoyed her power in bed, that was to say, her ability to say yes or no as to sex.

  The boy Stevey was emotionally close to his grandmother Sarah, since she had raised him from birth to the age of four, and Stevey and his grandmother corresponded faithfully after Naomi married Doug Villars and moved out of Sarah’s house. At nine and ten, Stevey was in love with his mother, as many boys are at that age, but Stevey was more in love than most boys, for the reason that his mother was seldom home. She traveled on dancing tours sometimes, while he and his stepfather stayed home, cooking and doing for themselves, and dreaming of the pretty woman who wasn’t there.

  Inevitably, Stevey had a difficult time adjusting to girls of an appropriate age for him, when he was fourteen and fifteen. He was supposed to be “interested” in girls of fourteen and then sixteen and so on, he realized, but they struck him as silly children. He liked “older women” of twenty and twenty-two, a few of whom he was able to meet, but who wouldn’t have given him the time of day, he knew, he being only sixteen or so. He had no strong desire to leap into bed with them, he simply adored them, worshipped them from afar, even women aged thirty. A great reader, he was acquainted with his own syndrome by the time he was fifteen: he liked older women, and needed a mother, or a motherly type, according to Freud.

  Stevey became an electrician, and did not waste much time pondering his personal hangups. He realized with faint horror that his mother was losing her mind—that was to say that by the time Stevey was twenty or so, he realized it. Stevey had left home after finishing technical school, and had lived in California, Florida and Alabama, but he kept in touch with his mother and stepfather, and visited them sometimes at Christmas. Stevey was also on good terms with his father Eugene Markham, kept in touch by an occasional letter, but Eugene had maintained a polite distance after Naomi’s second marriage, which Stevey thought only natural under the circumstances. Then Doug Villars developed leukemia. Doug had some insurance, but his lingering and fatal illness ate up a lot of the couple’s savings. After Doug died, Naomi “couldn’t cope,” as the textbooks put it. She’d leave something burning on the stove. She neglected her dog and cat till they were ill-nourished and flea-ridden, and her house was a mess. The neighbors complained (Naomi lived in a small bungalow in northern Oklahoma at that time), and the authorities stepped in.

  Stevey was informed of this, and at once went to Oklahoma, was appalled by the state of his mother’s ho
use, and by her mental deterioration too. She didn’t want to go to “a home,” she said, but Stevey knew that he couldn’t take his mother in under his own roof. She was apparently staying up half the night, prowling the house like a demented wolf, poring over old and disorderly papers which she didn’t want touched. A classic case. With some difficulty, Stevey got his mother into the Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home (she had to be confined in a padded cell for a few days there, and no other nursing home in the region had been willing even to try to take her on), paid for her house to be cleaned up, then sold it at the best price he could get. The resulting money he put on deposit to earn interest, as he foresaw a long stretch in the Old Homestead for his mother, and how right he was.

  Stevey Markham wrote to his mother a couple of times, but got only one letter from her in return. She had not liked him, she wrote, for putting her into a “silly nursing home for old people.” Why couldn’t he have let her stay at home, where she had been comfortable and independent? Stevey knew his mother well enough to realize that she wanted to start an epistolary argument, back and forth. So Stevey stopped writing to his mother, and within months, she stopped too. He visited her a few times, maybe five in all, starting with Christmases, of course. But Naomi usually chose to be huffy, to reproach him for not having visited her more often. And on the fourth or maybe fifth visit, she’d feigned indifference, looking at the ceiling, as if she couldn’t bear the sight of him or the presents he had brought her. She refused to speak to him, and in this Stevey recognized her old joy in hurting him, or trying to. So he gave up these visits.

  Naomi’s upkeep cost Stevey more than his own in the last decade of his life, as her money (really that of Doug plus the money from the sale of her house) had run out. Then as if to “save” Stevey, the remote uncle, his father’s brother, had died and bequeathed several thousand to Naomi, simply because she had been the wife of his brother Eugene. It was, Stevey thought, a minor miracle: his mother could keep going for at least another twenty years (he knew how to calculate Time Deposits and interest by now, even without a pencil), whereas Stevey couldn’t say the same about himself. Broke and seventy-four, Stevey was winding down like an old clock, and he died in his sleep of a heart attack, though he had not been overweight and had been a non-smoker. Stevey Markham had never had a proper vacation in his life. Shortly before his death, an odd thought had come to Stevey: his mother Naomi had managed to be a torture to others, a pain in the neck, even before he, Stevey, was born, by insisting on a divorce that his father had not wanted, but had agreed to, so that Stevey had been born into a fatherless home; and during his childhood his mother had picked quarrels with his stepfather Doug Villars, making their home life worse than rocky; and after Stevey’s death, Naomi would continue to be a pain and an expense—to somebody. The State, perhaps, Oklahoma? The state with a small s, meaning the government? The Old Homestead would shunt her into something cheaper, once his uncle’s money ran out. There were a lot of state-run institutions that were cheaper.