Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  She was operated on in the morning and a full-term, nine-and-a-half-pound girl was removed from her womb, dead. When a doctor brought him the news, Martin remembered her saying "You'll think of us together" and sat in a chair he felt he'd never rise from.

  Then the doctor said, "I'm afraid I also have to tell you that your wife has uremia."

  "Uremia?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Is that serious?"

  "Very. I'm afraid the child has overtaxed her system."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Her condition is critical."

  For the next five days Martin hardly slept. Since he'd known her, he'd begged her to see a doctor, any doctor, about the way she could go for days without peeing, usually during a deep despondency, but she never would. Uremia. The word lay like a mold in his mind and mingled with the name Alpha had picked for the baby: Dacey. It seemed a pitiable name to him. Was he in mourning? He could feel globular cells like the saclike bubbles attached to water weeds multiplying over the base of his brain. Soon his mind would go. He woke one night from sleep and felt that a growth of pimples as long as his hair, and filled with clear fluid, was swaying from his forehead.

  Alpha's condition grew worse, and he decided that the oldest, Jerome and Charles, should be allowed to see her, at least once, for a while, in case the worst should happen and started out for the hospital one night with them beside him in the car. The radiator hose broke along the way and he had to pull into a farmyard The farmer who came out had boils over his face and the back of his neck. He and Martin worked on the car under a yard light, while a collie dashed around their legs, and threw itself on them, keeping up such an endless yapping they could hardly talk. But together they got the hose patched, finally, with friction tape and wire. Martin slammed down the hood and saw Jerome and Charles staring out at him from behind the windshield, and wondered if maybe it wouldn't be better if they didn't see her in her present condition. He got into the car and drove home.

  The next day Alpha was transferred to a hospital in Peoria, which had an intensive-care unit and more specialists on call.

  All along, the doctors had assumed that she'd soon be improving, that there were more positive signs of recovery on the way, but Martin no longer trusted them. There was a detachment in her he'd never felt before, and she'd ask him not to look at her, or to leave the hospital before he was ready to go. One night she took his hand and said, "I'm going to show you how I pray the Hail Mary." She said this in a fury, and began the prayer with an emotion close to fury, but then she looked away, her expression cleared, and it seemed she was staring at a face in front of her, and he felt through her hand the current and aura that aroused him, but instead of resting inside and spreading in him in its usual way, it passed through him with pulsing surges that grew in strength, and then a radiance appeared around her lips. Or was it his mind again?

  "Amen,” she said, and turned to him with eyes so distant she didn't appear to recognize him.

  As he was leaving, a young, unfamiliar doctor came up and introduced himself, and said he'd started a different regimen of treatment that Alpha seemed to be responding to; there were a few signs of improvement. Martin stared into his eyes, for any trace of ambitiousness or self-deception, and saw only that the doctor believed m himself. He drove home forty miles an hour, hoping the children would be in bed by the time he got there, and when he walked into the house heard the phone start its ringing again. He picked it up.

  "Mr. Neumiller, this is Dr. Morrow, the physician who spoke to you this evening?"

  "Yes?"

  "I'm afraid I have some very bad news for you. We're not sure of the reasons yet, but your wife's gone into a coma. Can you come right in?"

  Martin nodded his head and hung up.

  *

  He was working with Jay in a subdivision in Delavan, trying his hand at troweling rough-coat in a closet, when he heard a car come racing toward the house, and went to a window and saw it squall outside, its hood nodding toward asphalt, and then the silvery-haired subdivision developer, the man Jay was contracting under, came toward the house in a middle-aged man's run. Martin put aside his hawk and trowel and sat on the scaffold, seeing himself do this a multitude of times, as the man came trotting into the room, out of breath, and said, "A doctor just got in touch with me through your dad! You're supposed to get to the hospital right away! It's about your wife, he said."

  Martin nodded to the man and bowed his head. He wouldn't want to be the one to tell Ed Jones that Alpha had died, and yet he sensed the old man was the only one of the Joneses who wouldn't hold him responsible for her death. He shifted his weight and shook his head once, as Jones might, and found he could stand.

  The developer was still in the room staring at him.

  He went down a hall and through rooms damp and brown-gray from rough-coat, and felt that brown-gray rooms led off them into infinity, and half fell into the room where Jay was skimming on finish.

  "The doctor called," he said. "Alpha. It's an emergency."

  Jay jumped from the scaffold and took him outside by an arm, and Martin blinked at the bright air, and then drew back and gestured toward his Chevrolet, parked under a tree on a mound of plaster-splashed clay, a perforated fringe of rust around his frame. "We better take—" he said. "I can handle—”

  The car looked changed, stranded on its tires, a part of the past that wouldn't carry him through time or over the broad swath of the world any more.

  "The hell," Jay said. "You aren't even going to drive."

  Jay got him into his station wagon and within a while they were doing a hundred. Martin was sorry the working of circumstance had put Jay at the wheel; he was a perfectionist, high-keyed and self-critical, and if anything went wrong, a flat tire or any other minor mishap, anything more, then Jay might blame himself for it with his flaying conscience. There was a sound of a siren and a reflected red light appeared in flashing sweeps across the windshield. Jay pulled onto the shoulder, ran back to the police and reappeared in a moment, and then the squad car swayed out around them, leaving rubber, red light pulsing, siren on high, and Jay, close behind, was soon doing a hundred again.

  Martin covered his face, and then removed his glasses and pulled his cap over his eyes; he didn't want to see any more of the outside world, not in its least manifestation, and with his eyes covered he was back inside the morning he'd lain under the quilt on the horsehair sofa, waiting for Alpha to wake, so he could find out if she'd said yes to his proposal, and how for a moment he'd mistrusted the Joneses' motives (did that have any effect on this, now? the book closing with its declamatory thump?), and then outside the house how the white world left by the blizzard lay spread out around him as limitlessly as his hope, a hope that grew as Jones talked, the horses plumed and stomping; and then five weeks ago, on their twelfth anniversary, he brought home a dozen long-stemmed roses, red roses, one for each year, and she'd said, "Just as sentimental as ever, aren't you?" And then studied the roses and smelled and arranged them, and said, "I love them. Thank you, Martin. These are exactly what I needed."

  He'd wept so much in the past few weeks he felt emptied of tears, but the cap kept dripping them on him.

  "Martin?"

  The emergency entrance of a hospital materialized around them. Jay got him inside and there was a note for them to wait at a downstairs desk. They went into a glass-walled waiting room and took off their caps and sat on a couch and stared at 'separate corners. Martin's hands were chapped and ivory-colored from lime, and as he clenched and unclenched his fist, his knuckle lines opened on flesh; the wrist above read 4:43. It grew darker outside and then through the glass he saw snow start to come down.

  The internist started up a corridor in their direction and Martin stood as the corridor blurred and tilted to one side, while his ears echoed with a sound like the sea, and the doctor, who looked an infinity away, kept marking time or walking backward down the corridor away from him, and then everything straightened and moved
true to life and the doctor stepped up in front of him.

  "Mr. Neumiller—" His eyes went to Jay and then he tugged at the gauze mask around his throat. "We've used all of our medical knowledge, the new drugs, and the most sophisticated equipment that's available to us, and it's just not enough. Your wife died about an hour ago. We tried to get in touch with you earlier, but couldn't. I'm terribly sorry, sir."

  Streamers of light, comets or falling stars he'd read about or seen, sped down the hall and entered his shoulders from the front and behind and held him on his feet. The doctor took his hand, then wavered and bent as though underwater, and said, "Would you like to see her?"

  He nodded and his upper lip started fluttering toward his eyes. The doctor led them down a different hall and around a corner, and set a door ajar. "We've brought her down here," he said. "You can go in alone, sir."

  Martin closed the door behind him. She lay on a high, wheeled stretcher beyond an empty bed, her face uncovered in the dim light, free of the tubes and masks that had sustained her, her hair, curled since she'd gone into the coma, the massy tangle it was when she was a girl. Her hands arranging the roses in a vase. Her critical and artistic eye.

  A glass shattered down the hall.

  "Oh, God," he said, meaning she was only thirty-four.

  Dark-brown bruises around her eyes and in her cheeks and along her throat. Her skin dry and chafed and a darker color from the disease. Stiff lips that tasted of crystalline gall. He knew it was wrong to keep kissing her as he was, but couldn't stop—intolerable that she was lying" dead to his touch and that he still loved her with a love as undiminished as on the day they'd first mingled their flesh and half become one another and he'd felt their soft parting as a seizure of loss he might not be able to live with again without her. Her face, a mask of flesh, was turned to one side and rocked with the arm he rubbed. Her hairline was wet. Loose eyelashes lay on her cheek and her lids were parted and would soon tremble with a tentative stir and open on him.

  "Alpha," he began, and his being closed around the name, the last of her he could physically hold. "Alpha, if you're anywhere close, if you can hear me, forgive me. Forgive, for—"

  He turned invisible below his eyes and struck across his back on the bed behind him. He rolled and tore at the covers to find the entry or exit to this, and then felt hands at his shoulders, drawing him away from his voice, and then was in a corridor with Jay's and the doctor's arms around him.

  "Will you see about any arrangements?" he said to Jay.

  Jay said he would.

  "Make sure they call Mom and Dad right away?”

  "Yes."

  "I have to be alone awhile."

  "Where?"

  "Outside here."

  The doctor and Jay were whispering as he went out the emergency entrance, drawn tight against the top of his spine, his only unerring support, his limbs swinging loose in another realm. He got into Jay's station wagon and drove off. Outside Peoria, beyond Bartonville, the snow started coming down in broken sheets, and he realized he was on a road at night, in a strange car, his heart sending out powerful shocks against his ribs, and then the headlights blossomed and widened until he was covering the entire road. He pulled onto the shoulder. Large lacelike flakes were floating down in the darkness and disappearing over the hood as if passing through it. Where was the wind of the world if there was one? The snow suddenly stopped.

  He drove through Pekin, past Powerton, the bad railroad crossing there, over the roads he'd driven past weeks to visit Alpha, and on out into the countryside, until he came to the big steel bridge spanning the Mackinaw. He got out and stood at the guardrail. The river was frozen along its edges and a channel of lime-colored moonlight lay in corrugations over the open water. To the west he knew was the dark-blue shape of the levee, and beyond the levee the broad expanse of blue-black where the Mackinaw emptied into the Illinois— A glimpse of himself striking the lime-colored channel with a surge of exhilaration, and every detail of his life, every shade of gesture and speech and emotion, every nuance of time, a preparation for it, and was this why he'd never in his life learned to swim?

  There was a full moon in the bright and rolling-clouded silver sky. Escape trails. A streak of her? Answer, oh, answer, oh, he'd given as much as he could to her and still survive and now there was no more. Nor her. How, when he'd lived his life as he had so he could live it the way he wanted when they were out of their thirties? Eeeeuunnnnoe! Blark hallers, holy tree of her, dying furnacework, down m Midvale, a tonic of yellowish sun on the street, the way the simplest skills or a prayer to some people seem magical, the board of no return, laughter and the horse laugh, too, in life; and now night.

  He turned and a dim ghost of a man once himself stared at him from a car window. There was something hard and icy at his back and he slid down it to this pile of stones. Or was it beaded water? Was this his afterlife as well? There was a stern and dark-browed teacher who didn't belong in Christendom. The snow, each flake flying out of the straight sky down the air at him, descended past the base of the cone he was rising through, and then the flakes began to whorl and sway with him, incorporeal and air-dependent, rocking and shifting and tilting in sudden side sweeps with the movement of a new wind in the night. He was aware of a cold crown over his forehead, a numbness in his fingertips, and then ice melting through his clothes.

  Headlights were approaching from the direction of Pekin. He got to his feet; it was Jay, of course. Jay and the police, and the police were after him for everything he'd done or hadn't done in his life, or for having such unreasonable thoughts as he'd had. He took off in the car and watched the lights diminish to silver dots in his mirror, and then saw that he was doing ninety, heard the rush of speed, and thought. Now all I have to do is jerk the door handle; tumble hard down toward it on dark asphalt, fractured and crumbling from severe freezes in a mound as high as a haystack, boy, before I take you and your car apart! And Dinah in her nitrous and banjo tomb he'd heard of only out of That cold storage box way up at the top! The attic of —

  The space, the space, the space!

  A block and a half ahead was the triangular park, the house. He shut off the headlights and then the ignition, and coasted onto the concrete drive behind his father's car. He got out and started toward the house and heard the faint and musically pitched voices of Susan and Marie mingled in crying, and knew they already knew. He got back in the station wagon and rested his head on the steering wheel. What about Jay? The phone, of course.

  Headlight beams swung over his shoulders and he looked up and watched the car go slishing past. A curtain in the living room parted and the face of his father, pale and stricken, appeared behind the glass, and across the room he could see his mother on the couch with the baby in her arms and the other children lined up beside her, their shoulders crushed together, trying to comfort one another. The curtain fell.

  He got out of the station wagon and slammed the door.

  There was one task that remained for him and it was a task he couldn't fail at; he had to keep himself and the children together as a family with all that was left of him and his life. Less than one half, he thought, as he wiped the melting snow from his face and then walked through the end of January toward the front door of the house.

  23

  MERCY

  Telegrams and long-distance calls to relatives and friends; trying to comfort the children and give reasonable explanations for the death, a lifetime of this. Walking down a corridor to the rear of a funeral home, where caskets stand open on display along the walls; the price of the funeral based on a casket's cost. Clothes hangers shrieking across a closet rod of pipe. His hard breathing, the heavy blows of his heart as if it demanded release. The children away at his mother's for the night, tonight only, so he can remove the traces of her that remain here in her clothes. Her pajamas and underthings and shoes already in the incinerator, and now her dresses, all of these dresses that once held her, many still dense with her smell.


  He threw an armload into a cardboard box and hangers clashed and dress materials slid over one another like many-colored liquids pooling. Two more armloads, emptying her half of the closet, and then he picked up the box to go to the incinerator, but it was waste of a sort that Alpha would fly out at; he'd give these to his sister Rose Marie; she and Alpha were of a size and exchanged clothes. He tried to straighten the dresses but they slipped through his fingers with a fountaining of memories of her in him. He stood and swayed off-balance from the weight of images displacing one another.

  This dress, the one she wore when she received First Communion, he couldn't give away—dark blue with large white polka dots, which echoed now with eloquence. He tossed it onto her vanity. And this, the navy suit she wore the day they were married, he couldn't allow anybody to have, or bear to see again; nor this, the cotton maternity dress she had on during the long drive from North Dakota when they moved. Oh, Lord, have mercy on me.

  He jerked open vanity drawers. Hats and nylons and handkerchiefs and scarves and more blossoming undergarments; the middle drawer filled with makeup containers, hair combs, barrettes, perfume, a crucifix, and a rubber-band-bound stack of birthday and anniversary cards he'd given her; the card he'd enclosed with the roses on top. Into another box, the two dresses and the suit, a knitted tam she'd worn only once because he laughed when he saw her in it, a hat she was trying to decide on in McCallister while he waited outside with the boys so she wouldn't be bothered, and then she came out to the street and called him in and pointed to two choices on a dressing table, and said, "Which do you like?" Both looked equally attractive, but he said, "The brown."

  "Then I'll take the green," she said.