“Bah! Why would she open the envelope? And wouldn’t she destroy the damn thing instead of slipping it into a book? And why, if she returned to him, were her things auctioned off?”
“Oh, I don’t know!” Mr. Warbasse said testily. It was a disadvantage to argue in the recumbent position with someone who was upright and looking down with such cold triumph in her gaze. “I suppose you’re right,” he mumbled grudgingly and turned his back to his wife.
“Of course I am!” cried Mrs. Warbasse, who valued, above all, the final word. She returned to the living room and to the crate, now less than half-filled with books.
Walter and Elizabeth were married in June, at the end of his internship.
It was on one of the medical wards at Bellevue that he first noticed her, a pretty young thing who always looked trim in the freshly starched white and blue of the student nurse’s uniform. They began to go out, usually with other interns and nurses, and she always laughed at his stories—the humorous, sometimes poignant, never off-color incidents that he gleaned from the rich hospital supply.
“There was this enormous woman in the Outpatient Department” (this story was always a success and it kidded, in a disarming sort of way, the size of his nose), “a motherly type, you know. She was giving me her complaints and having a God-awful time with the language and all of a sudden she broke into Yiddish. ‘Madam,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand Yiddish.’ ‘Vot?’ she cried” (here, he threw up his arms), “‘A nice young Jewish doctuh like you not spikking Yiddish?’” (He ran the g and y together; his simulated accent was good.) “‘But Madam,’ I told her. ‘I’m not Jewish.’ Well, you should have seen her; you’d think her own son had disowned her. She slapped her forehead and turned up her eyes and she cried: ‘Voise! He denies it!’” Everyone always laughed.
“That one kills me,” one of the girls sometimes said, and often: “You haven’t heard the one about the woman in the O.P.D.? Walter, tell it to Martha...”
There were many parties, late and spontaneous things whenever an excuse could be found, and Walter always had a central audience. “Walter has such a warm feeling for people,” it was frequently said, usually in his hearing, although after a while most of them drifted away. Elizabeth remained at his side and met his glance with a smile, and later, often, they went to 11th Street for spaghetti or pizza. On the day she got her cap he proposed, and a week later she called him in his hospital room and accepted.
I love her, Walter told himself, and she loves me.
They took a two-week honeymoon on Cape Cod before leaving for his residency at the Boston City Hospital. A vacation counselor looked over their budget and into his files and came up with a cottage on the north shore, near Dennis. “A tiny thing,” the man said, smiling, “ideal for honeymooners,” and Walter found the remark faintly accusatory. “Very inexpensive,” the man went on. “Pre-season.”
It was indeed a small cottage, with two rooms and very little plumbing and an outhouse a few yards away. The beach was windy and the water cold—only once did Walter and Elizabeth test it. The two weeks passed in recurring daily patterns: their physical discoveries of each other, the periodic ceremonies of eating, the old radio from which nothing but a Rhode Island station could be heard, the magazines and newspapers they acquired, and strange little silences that even then began to form and congeal like something spilled and neglected. But with their new friends in Boston—the new doctors and nurses they later met and visited—Walter told of the honeymoon in droll and humorous terms, describing the shack as “two rooms and a path.” Everyone laughed, just as everyone had back in New York. Bermuda, everyone was convinced, could not have been more fun.
Although they couldn’t afford it, Walter insisted that he and Elizabeth go to Bachrach’s on Newberry Street and sit in the clothes in which they were married. “We can’t wait,” he argued, “until we’re wealthy to pose for a good wedding picture.” He was proud of her even and photogenic features smiling, beside the not-too-bad likeness of himself. Framing it in white gold, he set it on a bookcase opposite the sofa-bed.
They had a sublet on Beacon Street, and Elizabeth worked that year. She did private-duty nursing at the Massachusetts General (it paid better, although she enjoyed ward duty more) and frequently she and Walter met in the evening at some midpoint between their hospitals. They went to Scollay Square one night to see the celebrated tassel dancer, and although they sipped their drinks and watched the show almost without conversation, another one of his stories sprang from this evening.
“There was this blonde,” he explained, “pushing forty but quite attractive, and she came out between the acts and played the piano. Semi-classical stuff—you know, Clair de Lune and Lieberstraum and once in a while Tea for Two—but no style or talent at all, like a good child playing for company. Anyway, we weren’t paying much attention—” (We, he had begun to say, drawing Elizabeth into his stories and using the magnanimous We instead of the immodest I) “—until we noticed that she was crying while she played. Smiling, you know, at least with her lips, but crying too, and trying to blink the tears from her eyes. There were some drunks at the bar and they kept laughing and calling out remarks and between her numbers there was no applause at all. Well, we were in the balcony, above her head but quite near to her, and we decided to send some requests and applaud and, do you know? she turned her face up to us and played straight to the balcony and never looked again toward the bar. Poor kid, we learned later that she was an English war bride stranded in this country with a child and trying to earn her passage back to England. I suppose the management took her on for peanuts.”
“I’ve seen that girl, too,” someone said. “I wondered about her.”
Another girl turned to her neighbor and said, “Friend of the downtrodden, that’s Walter.”
It was then—not more than seven months since their marriage—that his glance met Elizabeth’s and he suddenly thought: Is that really the way it happened? He tried to remember, but could not decide whether he had exaggerated or supplemented or distorted in order to help the story along. He raised his drink, thinking: I talk too damn much at parties.
He began to take care with his stories—particularly those about incidents shared with Elizabeth—and he began to watch her. He discovered that she had stopped laughing, or smiling, or responding at all. Once in a while he found himself distressingly less fluent, even stumbling in his delivery. A pool of new questions formed in his mind: Had Elizabeth stopped loving him? Why did she never complain? Why did they never quarrel; why had he never seen her cry? And one day, causing him remarkably little astonishment, another question surfaced in his thoughts: Did he love her! He had no desire to be divorced; did that not indicate love?
Sometimes awakening first, Walter watched Elizabeth from the bedside and remembered the courtship at Bellevue. He thought of the many women who considered him attractive and clever, and he wondered why, with this shy and simple girl from Van Wert, Ohio, this girl who should have been dazzled and devoted and immensely grateful, marriage was becoming colorless. They had acquired so many habits and short-cuts, the skilled pretenses that gave the appearance of happiness, but in the private morning stillness he saw himself and Elizabeth as disenchanted, overly polite, mute of even the normal marital grumblings. He wondered, then, if he called her “Dear” too much and too carefully, if he swept ahead too briskly to open doors for her, if there was not some effort made to include her in his life when it should have been something effortless. But I do love her, he told himself, looking over the form of her body as outlined by the counterpane, and once, closing his eyes and considering his emotion, he was surprised to find that his mind turned from Elizabeth and from any woman at all (and he remembered, just then, his childhood—the becoming aware of his awkwardness, the plainness of his features and the length of his nose, the first frustrations of inattainment—and his younger brother, nimble and muscular and with black wavy hair that looked good disorderly or combed, and of people saying:
“He’ll be a lady killer, that one!”).
Once, as he watched, Elizabeth awoke and asked: “What’s the matter?”
Impulsively, desperately, he held her close to him and whispered, “I love you, Elizabeth. I love you very much.”
“And I love you too,” she said.
When his training had been completed, they returned to New York and Walter entered private practice. For a time, Elizabeth continued to work but as his income grew he urged her to give it up. But she enjoyed it, she said, and he smiled and asked: didn’t it look silly, her doing ward work at Bellevue with him in an air-conditioned Park Avenue office and paying a nurse more than Elizabeth earned herself? Besides, they liked to entertain, and both of them couldn’t be getting in late because of some emergency. And there were things that could occupy her at home: telephone messages, looking after his bag, the mail, his medical journals. Children, he might have added, but year followed year with no sign of pregnancy, and Walter preferred to leave this undiscussed. “Shouldn’t I be examined?” Elizabeth once asked, and he made some evasion. He found within him no great need for children, and was not anxious to learn which of them was sterile.
He tried to tell stories about Elizabeth that he thought would please her, stories that underscored her kindness and resourcefulness, but he came to realize that she felt no need for them. She seemed to take for granted that people liked her; she was content to sit silently among them, graciously seen but unheard. Not everyone is dynamic, Walter decided, and this is Elizabeth: gentle, bovine, utterly uncomplicated; and he drew no significance from the recent appearance of a snapshot of her father stuck into one edge of their wedding picture frame. Walter was particularly proud of her quiet dignity when his younger brother came east from California bringing that bleached frump of a wife of his, and Elizabeth sat beside the girl and smiled at her tales of Las Vegas and looked like a queen next to a harlot.
In time, Walter developed one of those fabulously lucrative Manhattan practices for which medical acumen is not essential and of which wealthy, not very ill ladies are a mainstay. His ability to listen with undiminishing sympathy was absolute. “Your husband’s the first doctor,” a woman told Elizabeth, “who really listened to me, and for years everyone had been cutting me off and calling me neurotic!”
“But she is,” Elizabeth later asked, “isn’t she?”
He shrugged. “There are somatic considerations,” he replied. Rarely did she inquire into his practice, and never did she persist.
In the ninth year of their marriage they moved into a cooperative apartment on East 54th Street. The rooms were many, and huge.
“What shall I do with this one?” Elizabeth asked. “Do you want a den?”
“It’s got a bath; isn’t it another bedroom? Why don’t you fix it up for yourself?” She turned to him, but he could read no expression from her face. “Now that we have the room,” he went on, “there’s no reason why you should suffer any longer from my irregular hours, the bedside phone…”
Elizabeth took over a year to completely furnish the room. She brought in brocaded drapes, a Chinese rug, mahogany polished to shine like tortoise shell. She canopied the bed and wrapped herself in matching cocoons of silk. She hid the lighting and silenced the switches and flanked herself with record albums, high fidelity, portable television. She subscribed to a book club and stacked her novels on shelves along the walls and, as they overflowed, into bookcases in every room.
“Elizabeth loves it,” Walter told everyone, “her private little world into which nothing enters except by personal choice.”
They came and looked into the room. “It’s perfectly lovely,” they said.
In the eleventh year of the marriage, Elizabeth’s father became ill and she flew to Ohio to nurse him. On the day she was to return Walter received, instead, a letter from her. Dear Walter, she wrote, ...I simply cannot bring myself to return...
At first, he felt nothing at all—or at least nothing he could identify. While he was still seated with the letter in his hand, the phone rang.
“Walter? Did Elizabeth get back?”
“No; don’t expect us tonight.” (Just a second’s hesitation.) “As a matter of fact, I have a letter from her. Her father’s no better, and she’s staying on.”
“Oh, what a shame! Why don’t you come along anyway?”
“Thank you, but—well, I’d feel awkward...”
“Nonsense, come on. It’ll do you good.”
Walter went. For the first time in many years, he told the story of the Jewish woman in the Bellevue Out Patient Department. It was new to this group, and they laughed loud and long. He told other stories; he had never been so inventive or told some of them so well. Before leaving, he consented to attend two other parties.
Returning to the apartment, he read Elizabeth’s letter once more. It was a first draft, he felt sure, impulsive, panicky. He would not write or call her, judging that with Elizabeth, his total silence would be more eloquent than any appeal he might make. For a time, he could let things rest, as long as he was not approached by an attorney or called into a court of law. Thinking of the cleaning lady, he put the letter into a book and returned the book to a shelf.
Thirty-four evenings later, he returned to the apartment after supper and found Elizabeth sitting on the sofa in the living room, her bags on the floor beside her. She had lost weight, and seemed anemic.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” he said.
For an instant she closed her eyes. “Walter, I don’t know if you’ll want me back—”
“My dear—”
“No, wait. I’m sick. I need an operation. That’s why I returned.”
She was badly frightened. He sat next to her. “Tell me about it,” he said. “We’ll get you the finest surgeon in New York.”
She survived only four days following the surgery. During most of that time he sat at the bedside while the three shifts of special nurses read their magazines in the linen room.
“Walter,” Elizabeth said hoarsely from time to time, “please give me something to drink...” Oxygen went by tube into one nostril and through the other another tube extended to her stomach.
“Darling, you know we have to keep your stomach empty.”
“Walter, please. You’ve no idea how horrible it is to be so thirsty. Just a sip of something, Seven-Up...”
“I’ll speed up the infusion.” He adjusted the clamp that controlled the drop-by-drop flow of glucose and saline into her vein.
Sometimes for hours they did not speak. Her eyes remained closed—although he did not think from her breathing and from little sounds that she made, that she was continually asleep. And then: “Walter...Seven-Up...”
“Poor Elizabeth—my poor, dear, sweetheart Elizabeth. I wish I could...”
When he said this, she turned and looked at him and at the crossword puzzle he was filling in. The special nurse returned from supper, and Walter left to eat.
Elizabeth was very quiet on the day she died. Coma occurred late, and during one of the last lucid moments she said, “Walter, what story will you make out of this?”
He had never guessed that he would miss her so dreadfully, or carry so many memories that caused him to feel pain. He avoided speaking of Elizabeth, and of many things, and frequently long conversations terminated with no contribution from him. When unpacking the things that the hospital had returned he found a crossword puzzle on which he had been working and discovered in the margin, in a handwriting he could not recognize, the word hypocrite. A marginal note, he told himself, anyone could have jotted it down while looking over the puzzle, and he searched the diagram itself for a possible application.
I don’t ever want to see my bedroom again, he remembered, the symbol of my total rejection, and he called an auction gallery and had them clear out Elizabeth’s room— clothes, draperies, books, everything.
The nights seemed to become longer, and were broken by restless, desultory dreams; he awoke each morning into the fresh ta
ste of panic, convinced that the day faced him with problems with which he simply could not cope. New York traffic began to upset him and very often, as he drove his car, he felt his heart skip and stop, and he developed sensations of choking and dizziness. He discovered the brief comforts of sedatives during the day, sleeping pills at night.
One of the Bellevue nurses called him. “Walter,” she said, “we heard about Elizabeth, we’re all very sorry. There’s a reunion, the old gang...we thought you might want to come, but if you don’t, we’ll understand...”
“Thank you for thinking of me. I’m not sure.”
At the last moment, he went. He had found, also, that he could use alcohol as a crutch. He drank three highballs quickly and sat with the fourth, glad that he had come. These were their old friends—although he had seen so little of them in recent years—the people who had known him and Elizabeth from the beginning. Sitting silently and still, he felt their affection and sympathy flooding over him like sunlight.
A nurse, a former roommate of Elizabeth’s, came and took Walter’s hand and glanced at his black tie (still, after eight months). “Poor Walter,” she said, “you miss Elizabeth terribly, don’t you?”
At once, the room was quiet. This was the first mention of Elizabeth that had been made this evening. His heart was suddenly beating comfortably; he felt warm and pleasantly at ease. Like in the old days.
He smiled, and blinked. “You know…” he said softly (it was so magnificently still; even on this carpeting a pin would have made a sound!). “You know, I keep thinking of those four days in the hospital. She was on nothing by mouth—peritonitis, you know—it was her only chance. But she was so thirsty, and kept begging for some Seven-Up...” Lowering his head even more, he blinked again. He whispered the rest of it. “The way it turned out anyway, I wish I’d sneaked one in and given it to her. I kept meaning to…”
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