by Lisa Alther
‘Let’s go on a trip to Ireland when I get out of here,’ Mrs. Babcock suggested.
Ginny glanced at her doubtfully — doubtful about her mother’s getting out in the first place, doubtful about her stamina for a trip if she did, doubtful about the two of them even going to downtown Hullsport in a friendly fashion, and especially doubtful about the strained cheerfulness of her mother’s voice.
‘Sure. That would be fun,’ Ginny said brightly. The thing was, she’d love to go to Ireland, all those places. From her mother’s stories, she felt a definite bond with her ancestors. They had been German Lutherans from the Catholic part of Germany, Puritans and Pilgrims from Anglican England, Anglicans in the Catholic south of Ireland, Scotch Irish Presbyterians in the Catholic sector of Scotland after the ‘45. Misfits, all of them, with loyalties every bit as confused and fragmented as Ginny’s had always been. Was this proclivity for propelling oneself into circumstances in which one was bound to feel set apart from the surrounding community hereditary, a result of those minute flecks of nucleic acid in each cell? Or was the proclivity absorbed from one’s parents, in the same way that kittens learned to drink milk by watching their mother?
‘…and I consider it a privilege to be deemed worthy of suffering like this,’ Sister Theresa was saying fervently, when Ginny and Mrs. Babcock arrived at the sun porch for lunch.
‘A privilege!’ Mr. Solomon snorted, his thick lenses magnifying his eyes to the size of platters. ‘A privilege! You think you’ve been singled out for special favors, eh, Sister? I like that vun. God says, “There’s Sister Theresa. I think so highly of her that I’d like to give her cancer.”’
Sister Theresa crossed herself. ‘A privilege,’ she confirmed, fingering the medal around her neck with the praying hands and the slogan ‘Not My Will But Thine.’ ‘The Lord gives no one more than he can endure. The cross and the strength to bear it.’
‘Big of Him. So the number of misfortunes you experience is a token of the cosmic judgment on the well-being of your soul?’
“When I was a little girl at school, Mr. Solomon,’ Sister Theresa explained earnestly, ‘sometimes I would come home crying because the bigger boys had teased me. And my mother would say, “But they wouldn’t tease you if they didn’t like you, child.” That’s how I see my present situation, Mr. Solomon.’
“Vell! At last ve have something to agree on, Sister. God -your God and my God — God is a bully!’
Sister Theresa crossed herself again. ‘I didn’t say that, Mr. Solomon,’ she said, her eyes lowered and her beefy face turning red. ‘I said that it is a pleasure for me to bear whatever burden the Lord chooses to place on me. I am strong and the burdens make me stronger.’
“Vell, if that vere how it vorked, Sister, I vould now be a Charles Atlas of the soul!’
Sister Theresa looked at him questioningly.
‘My vife and my three children vere herded into box cars, Sister. I suppose they died. I hope they died. It vould have been a blessing compared to life in the camps.’
That’s not fair, Ginny thought. Jewish people always won out in the one-upmanship of suffering.
T’m sorry, Mr. Solomon.’ After a delicate pause, Sister added, ‘There has always been evil in the world, since the Fall. Evil will flourish until all men in their hearts and minds accept Christ our Lord as their savior. God does not perform or condone evil. However, He can turn it to His own ends sometimes. Look what a bright and sensitive race yours is for its suffering, Mr. Solomon.’
Mr. Solomon cleared his throat, aware that he was being drowned in honey. ‘Thank you, Sister. But I still say it’s vun hell of a lousy vay to run a vorld. If I had run my jewelry department the vay your God runs this vorld, do you think I’d have lasted a veek? No, I’d have been out valking the streets looking for vork.’
The electric chimes on the Southern Baptist church were now playing ‘Call Me Unreliable.’ Mrs. Babcock was struggling with an overcooked piece of meat that might have been beef or veal or pork or lamb.
‘How can you call it “lousy,” Mr. Solomon, when you can look out the window on a beautiful sunny day and see a bird singing?’ Sister Theresa pointed to the bird feeder in the pine tree on which sat a mockingbird.
Mr. Solomon’s fist hit the table hard. The dishes jumped, and the silverware clattered. Mrs. Cabel looked up from her meal in alarm for the first time during the entire discussion; she had food smeared across her face.
‘I call it lousy for that very reason! God put me on this earth and made me love vat I found here. Little by little, He’s taken it all avay from me. First my parents, then my vife and babies, then my house and country, and now my occupation and means of livelihood.’ He pointed at his cloudy eyes. ‘I can’t fix clocks anymore. I can hardly even see the bird you’re talking about, Sister. And soon He vill take avay my breath, and vith it my life.’ He was very upset and was breathing with difficulty. ‘You know vat I call your God, Sister? I call Him a sadist.’
‘No, Mr. Solomon, no. This life is only a pale hint of the next. Death is the beginning, not the end. You lose nothing, you gain everything. Everything precious that’s been taken from you here, you retrieve with interest on the other side. I’m sure of it, Mr. Solomon. Your wife, your children, everything.’
‘Yes, I know vat your people say, Sister Theresa. And so you must. You have a product to sell, like the rest of us. But it vas your man Pascal, Sister, who said, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” But tell me, Sister, ven did you go into the convent?’
This question seemed beside the point to Ginny. She glanced at her mother, who had been watching the exchange intently, like a tennis match. ‘I was sixteen, Mr. Solomon. Why do you ask?’
‘Forgive me for saying this, Sister. I’m obviously upset and out of control. But vat do you know of losing a mate and three children to psychopathic maniacs?’
Sister Theresa flushed and said nothing. The conversation appeared to be at an end. The four ate in silence, Ginny looking on from the sofa.
That afternoon Ginny lay on the spare bed in her mother’s room, a needle in her right arm. Her blood was spurting down a tube and into a plastic bag that was strapped to the side of the bed.
She and her mother had just watched ‘Hidden Heartbeats.’ Sheila’s bridge party had gone poorly. Ella, the wife of Mark’s boss, had not appeared, leaving Sheila one player short. As they limped along with their game, the other women kept whispering behind their cards, as Sheila struggled to maintain a stiff upper lip, about why Ella had snubbed Sheila and wrecked her card party. At the end of the half-hour show, the phone rang. Was it Ella calling to explain her absence? They wouldn’t know until the next day. The tallies, however, which Sheila had spent yesterday’s program picking out in the five-and-ten, had been a great success. All the ladies at the party asked how in the world she’d managed to find such clever ones. ‘And on Mark’s salary, too,’ a lady added behind her cards to the others.
‘Do you think it’s Ella on the phone?’ Mrs. Babcock asked Ginny.
‘I doubt it. Really I think it’s Mark. He’s probably had a run-in at work with Ted, and Ted told Ella not to go to the party.’
‘Oh, Ella’s not that spineless.’
‘Don’t you think so?’
‘Heavens no. She’d have called at least, if she weren’t going. Something must have happened to her.’
‘Well, maybe you’re right.’
Now “Westview General’ was on, which Ginny also remembered from her breast-feeding days.
Dr Marsh was talking to Sam, whose wife had been his patient. ‘Sam, we’ve been friends for a long time, Sam.’
‘Yes, Doc, and that’s the truth, too.’
‘So, Sam, when I say I hate to…’
‘Doc, you don’t mean…?’
‘Sam, buddy, you know I wouldn’t want to lead a friend on…’
‘Doc, you’re not sayin’…?’
‘Sam, you have to be strong…’
‘You mean…?’
‘I’ve always leveled with you, haven’t I, Sam?’
‘Is it…?’
‘I’ve done the very best I can for you, Sam fella.’
Sam finally broke down in manly sobs.
Dr Marsh put his arm around Sam’s heaving shoulders and handed him a bill. ‘Now, Sam, Blue Cross will pay most of it. And you do have your dear wife well and back home again, don’t you now?’
Ginny lay watching her blood flow out of her arm and down the tube. Her blood. She knew a great many things about it from physiology at Worthley. For instance, she knew that only 1.5 percent of Americans had her mother’s and her blood type, B negative. Type B was much more common in Central Asia. How it had found its way to southwest Virginia was a mystery. She also knew that platelets died in three to four days. And she knew that her own healthy bone marrow was turning out five hundred billion of them each day. In other words, Ginny was not returning to Vermont, or to anywhere else, for the present. Her mother needed her. The shoe was on the other foot for a change. It was a novel sensation.
She lay still listening to the ticking of the Hull clock, “Westview General’ providing the background. She concentrated on her heart, zeroing in on a single red cell. She traced its pathway out of her heart and through her lungs and down her arteries and capillaries to her big toe, where it released its oxygen. Then it raced back up the capillaries to her veins, and from there back to her heart. If she had been timing this circuit correctly, it should have taken about twenty-five seconds. She looked at the filigreed second hand on the steepled clock and confirmed with satisfaction that it had.
Never mind why people died. Why was anyone alive. How could any one body possibly coordinate all that it had to coordinate? It was mind-boggling. Red cells, white cells, platelets, antibodies, the twelve clotting factors. The surprising thing was not that the production and delivery systems sometimes broke down. The surprise was that it ever functioned flawlessly at all, much less in most of the people one met.
When her bag was full of dark red blood, Dr. Vogel removed the needle and told her to hold her arm over her head for a while. Then he put a tourniquet on Mrs. Babcock’s upper arm and began prodding with a sterile needle for a vein. He appeared to be having difficulty. He made several trial punctures and had to withdraw the needle each time.
‘Young man, must you do your internship on me?’ Mrs. Babcock meant it as a joke, but it came out peevish.
Ginny laughed heartily, trying to carry it off. Finally Dr. Vogel found a cooperative vein and settled the needle in it. Ginny’s blood flowed down the tube from the plastic bag and into Mrs. Babcock’s body.
Ginny, as she rested, considered the justice of this arrangement: Her mother shared her blood with Ginny via the placenta when Ginny had needed it. Now Ginny was simply returning the favor via rubber tubing. There was undeniable satisfaction in the concept that her mother’s blood might learn about platelet management from Ginny’s blood. After all, the flow of instruction between them had generally run in the opposite direction. Ginny savored the idea of a reciprocal arrangement. However, if they shared blood type and had shared actual blood at some remote point, did that mean that, genes being what they were, Ginny’s own healthy blood was programmed to break down at some point? And Wendy’s?
At least this had gotten her out of the craft program, Mrs. Babcock reflected as she watched Ginny’s blood flow into her arm. She remembered from the encyclopedia how the audience at Roman gladiator fights would leap from the stands and vie to drink the blood of especially skilled and courageous gladiators as they died in the dirt, the idea being to imbibe via their blood their nerve and vigor.
‘He took the cup; and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink ye all of this; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you, and for many, for the remission of sins.” — Mrs. Babcock suspected that the wine/blood ritual in Holy Communion had its origin in fact as much as in symbolism. Scientists could take a worm trained to perform some simple activity, chop it in bits and feed it to an untrained worm; the untrained worm would suddenly be found to possess the skill of the worm that had made up its meal. Genes, RNA, DNA, chromosomes…the accumulated experience of the species, passed on in encoded form down through the ages. Just so this transfusion. Her own defective blood could ‘learn’ about platelet husbandry from Ginny’s healthy blood.
There was something altogether alarming about this. About her being ill enough to need a transfusion, certainly. But more than that. She didn’t like having Ginny as her donor. In the first place, it meant that she couldn’t suggest that Ginny go back to Vermont. Surely the tension between them couldn’t be good for either of them, particularly for Mrs. Babcock herself when she needed thorough rest to aid in her recovery.
But there was another factor in all this that she was persistently refusing to face, she knew. A subtle shift in the balance of power between Ginny and herself had occurred, and she didn’t like it at all. The pattern had always been Mrs. Babcock’s bleeding herself dry, as it were, for the children. Nothing had ever been too much for them to demand of her. ‘I live but to serve,’ she had quipped gaily when they had come bursting in demanding three dozen chocolate chip cookies for a class Christmas party, or tuna sandwiches for eighteen for a club picnic. But there had been truth in this quip, she now knew. Ceasing to serve, she had collapsed, mentally and physically. And now here Ginny was, serving her, and lying on the spare bed with an expression of smug satisfaction at doing so. Mrs. Babcock was profoundly uncomfortable with this reversal of roles.
That she should feel so uneasy about this suggested to her an unflattering possibility — that she had dominated the children through weakness; she had smothered them with her martyrdom. By always doing everything for them, usually in advance of their requesting it, had she undermined their drive and self-confidence? That was perhaps why Jim and Ginny had such difficulty ever sticking with anything, why Karl clung so fanatically to his routines? But here she was lapsing into self-reproach. Perhaps if she had turned some of this reproach on them in their early years, rather than always in on herself, she wouldn’t be here in this hospital bed today. The truth was that she had done the best she knew how, being an amateur at parenting. Now that she was a professional, having turned out three finished products, her skills were no longer in demand, and it was too late to rectify mistakes committed during her apprenticeship.
When Ginny got back to the cabin, the sun was about to plunge behind the kudzu-faced bowl. She went out to the pine tree. Two baby birds hung from twigs, their heads back, their eyes closed, and their yellow beaks open to reveal their delicate pink throats. Suffering, Wilbur J. Birdsall said they were; and she was allowing them to, requiring them to. She glanced around for the third baby, searching the dish and all the nearby branches. She found it on the ground — a stiff corpse, wings outstretched and rigid and mouth gaping for food. Feeling nauseated, Ginny heaved the graceful little body into the kudzu.
Then she sat on the stone steps. Her options were clear. She could flush them down the toilet. They would go down with the same ease as a Tampax. She could smash their skulls on the stone steps. She could guillotine them with the machete. If she chose not to sully herself by performing their execution in person, she could move them to the ground, so that the wild cats could find them more easily. Or she could leave them to starve.
No, damn it! She wouldn’t buckle under to the verdict of Wilbur J. Birdsall, world renowned authority or not. These baby birds normally fed on their parents’ vomit. But at some point their tiny gastrointestinal systems had to make the conversion to self-digestion. It seemed distinctly possible to Ginny that under extremely stressful conditions such as these, the babies’ systems could develop and convert more rapidly than usual. It was worth a try anyway.
She got a glass of water and fed a drop to each bird. At first she wasn’t sure they were still alive. They didn’t move at all. But they were warm, a
nd there were faint hints on their fluff-covered breasts of beating hearts. After a minute or so, each bird swallowed his droplet. And then one drop after another.
Ginny mixed raw hamburger and tuna and whole wheat flour into a disgusting paste. Taking a minute bit, she formed a tiny ball. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, she carefully dropped it into the mouth of one of the babies. She waited. Nothing happened. But then, slowly, the bird’s beak began to twitch. And then the membrane in its pink throat began to expand and contract convulsively, and the tiny ball disappeared, like an insect enfolded by a Venus’s-flytrap.
Cheered, Ginny fed each bird several balls. In the cabin, she found a small deep basket with a lid. They could cling to its sides, and it would be dark and cool like their lost chimney. She put them in, no longer worrying about sullying them with her odor, since the parents had copped out anyway. Wouldn’t Wendy love to be helping her with this project? Ginny could see her mushing her chubby little fingers in the meat paste, trying with an intense frown to form a tiny ball like Mommy’s. She would clutch a bird in a sticky hand and giggle gleefully as it screeched in her face. If only there were some way to prevent her from ripping the birds to pieces in her enthusiasm. She’d pry their beaks open and poke at their eyes with sticks and dismember their wings in her exuberant curiosity. An idea popped into Ginny’s head with the force and clarity of true inspiration: There was no need to sell the big house! She and Wendy would live there together; her mother could live in the cabin. Three generations of Hull women, all in a row!
Cheered by this thought, she went to the phone and got Dr. Tyler’s number in Spruce Pine.
‘Why, Ginny, what a pleasure,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you in years.’
‘I haven’t been home much lately.’
‘What a shame. You know, I feel a special attachment to the people I’ve delivered.’
‘It’s mutual. In fact, I’m sitting on the bed you delivered me in.’