The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  ‘Is that a fact? I declare. Law, I remember that night so well. Your mother was having really strong contractions, and what do you think happened? Half a dozen swifts flew down the chimney! Why, I never saw anything like it in my life! Those birds fluttered through that cabin in an absolute panic, getting soot all over everything, the ceiling, the walls, the upholstery. Your mother had just cleaned that day so’s everything would be nice and straight while she was laid up with you. Why, she hopped up out of that bed, and she grabbed a broom, and she chased those damn swifts all through the cabin, swatting at ‘em. And every now and then, she’d have a contraction and collapse on the floor. But after it was over, she’d hop right back up and chase after ‘em with tears just pouring down her face. And of course your daddy and I were chasing right behind her, trying to get her back to bed and she kept whacking us with her broom, too!’ They were both laughing. ‘Oh my, it was something to behold!’

  “What happened to them?’

  ‘I think your daddy finally managed to get them out the front door.’

  ‘Why did they fly down in the first place?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. They do that sometimes. Nothing but trouble, swifts. Rats with feathers, I call ‘em. But I don’t imagine you’re calling to discuss birds. What can I do for you, honey?’

  ‘Mother’s in the hospital.’

  ‘Is she? I hadn’t heard. What’s wrong?’

  Ginny had expected him to don his professional manner and take charge of everything at once. She was alarmed when he sounded merely interested, concerned but detached.

  ‘Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura.’

  ‘Hmmm. How’s she doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling you. To find out.’

  ‘Who’s her doctor?’

  ‘Vogel.’

  ‘Vogel. Fine young man. Excellent doctor. Just excellent. She couldn’t be in better hands.’

  ‘He’s been giving her steroids. And today she had a transfusion.’

  ‘Standard.’

  ‘Yes, but Mother felt the steroids weren’t helping.’

  ‘Ginny, honey, in the old days before steroids, do you know what we used to do when someone came in with undiagnosable bleeding? We’d transfuse, and maybe we’d excise the spleen. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. If it didn’t, we had to just sit there helplessly and watch more and more hemorrhages develop until the brain hemorrhaged and the patient blessedly died. They’re invaluable, steroids are. And antibiotics, used right. They’ve revolutionized the practice of medicine. Why, if you came down with pneumonia when I was first practicing in Hullsport, you spent all winter in bed. If you were lucky. Lots died. Now they’re up and around in days.’

  ‘Well, today, Dr. Tyler, with the steroids and stuff, is idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, you know, like, serious?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Ginny. Your mother’s not my patient. In general, it’s usually not that serious in children. It tends to clear right up. In adults, it can be more serious. As I said, there’s this danger of cerebral hemorrhage. But it happens rarely these days.’

  ‘She couldn’t, like, die or anything, could she?’

  ‘You know, Ginny, the trouble with patients is that they expect their doctors to be shamans or seers or something. I don’t know. I doubt if Vogel knows. Modern medicine has come a long way, but there are many, many things we still simply don’t know. Idiopathic. Cause unknown. There are hundreds of thousands of things that can go wrong with the human body. We’ve catalogued several thousand. One of my teachers in medical school in Richmond once told me, “As you practice medicine, you’ll find your hat will fit your head better. You will realize that there are many things you don’t know.” Has your mother been unhappy?’

  ‘Unhappy?’ It had never occurred to Ginny to consider the topic before. Except for the outburst the other day, her mother had invariably been briskly cheerful for as far back as Ginny could remember.

  ‘She has been the past few years, you know.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ Ginny insisted.

  ‘Well, then, I clearly shouldn’t be mentioning it. I’m an old man and my sense of professional ethics is slipping.’

  ‘Unhappy about what?’

  ‘Whatever people find to be unhappy about when they’re in a depressed state — everything, in short.’

  ‘But what was she depressed about?’

  ‘Well — maybe you should ask her that.’

  ‘Who, me?’

  ‘Well, child, you are her daughter.’

  ‘But what does depression have to do with her physical health?’

  ‘A great deal, I assure you.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t Vogel mentioned it?’

  ‘It’s a notion that is — out of favor among the medical profession at present. We have our fads and fashions like every other field, you know. Tonsillectomies are out now, phenobarbital for infants who convulse is in. And so on. But when you’ve been at it as long as I have, when you’ve treated people under all sorts of circumstances, when you’ve treated their parents and their children, you begin to see patterns. Illness doesn’t strike randomly, like a thief in the night. Certain types of people at certain points in their lives will come down with certain kinds of ailments. You can almost predict it after a while. A disease can serve the same function for an alert doctor as a Rorschach inkblot for a psychologist; it’s a form of existential self-expression for a patient, if you like. I know this may sound a little farfetched, my dear, but disease is not arbitrary, and it does not “attack.” But goodness, you’re not interested in an old man’s pet theories.’

  Ginny politely said nothing. Tyler was apparently freaking out in his retirement.

  ‘But I can assure you, Ginny,’ he added, ‘that you couldn’t do better than Vogel. I know that he’s doing everything that can be done.’

  Ginny had secretly been fantasizing that Dr. Tyler would come out of retirement and take over her mother’s case himself. ‘Do you think I should tell Mother that there’s this chance of cerebral hemorrhage?’

  There was a long pause. ‘Well, honey, that’s something you have to decide for yourself. You and your brothers. You see, my dear, I’m a very old man now, and I have to be thinking about my own death, not other people’s.’

  Unnerved, Ginny said, ‘Yes, well, it’s been nice talking with you, Dr. Tyler. Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Not at all, my dear. Any time. Give your mother my love, and tell her I’ll be over to see her when I’m back home at the end of the summer.’

  ‘Yes, I will. Good-by.’

  She hung up and sat motionless. The phrase ‘cerebral hemorrhage’ kept drifting through her brain. If she were in her mother’s place, she concluded that she’d want Wendy to tell her. On the other hand, could the specter of cerebral hemorrhage help to trigger one by placing the patient under tension? Once again she decided not to decide. She preferred being compelled into her decisions. She would see how her mother responded to the transfusion.

  She found a pen and some letter paper and began a letter. ‘Dear Miss Head: I am writing you from a need to acknowledge past debts. I know that when I was at Worthley you were trying to teach me to regard issues critically and with detachment, and to organize them into orderly patterns. To the extent that I absorbed these skills, they have proved invaluable. Your philosophy courses and the trips into Boston and the visits in your apartment were bright spots in what was otherwise a difficult and unhappy time for me, and I thank you for them from the bottom of my heart. I have thought about you with pleasure and affection ever since, and I only wish that the circumstances under which I left Worthley could have been more mature and more graceful. But you must know that they couldn’t have been, given what I was like at that time. I’m sorry I disappointed you so terribly. It’s one of those things in my life I’m least proud of. I hope you are well, and are busy on your book, or on another one. With warm regards, Ginny Babcock Bliss.’

  She to
ok it to the mailbox at the bottom of Cloyds’ hill before she could reconsider and tear it up. The kitchen lights were still on at Clem and Maxine’s. She decided to stop.

  “How’s your mother today?’ Clem asked, as Ginny sat down at their dinner table, which was strewn with dirty dishes. The three small dark children, replicas of Clem as a child, were coloring on the floor in a corner.

  ‘I don’t know really. She had a transfusion this afternoon. The doctor is very hopeful about the effect it will have.’

  ‘How about some soup beans and corn bread?’ Maxine asked. ‘There’s lots left.’

  Ginny hadn’t eaten all day and had given a pint of blood. ‘I’d love some if you’ve got it. I’m starved.’

  Maxine dished her up a plate. Ginny poured ketchup on the gooey brown beans and dug in greedily.

  ‘Doesn’t that man of yours feed you up at Vermont?’ Clem asked with a laugh.

  Ginny laughed, too, and decided not to mention that ‘her man’ had run her out. Why wreck a good plate of soup beans? ‘Clem, tell me to shut up if this is rude,’ Ginny said between bites, ‘but what’s happened to your leg?’

  Clem and Maxine smiled serenely. ‘Hit’s well,’ he said.

  ‘I noticed. But how come? Did you have an operation or something?’

  ‘No, the Lord has made me whole.’

  “Oh, brother,’ Ginny said with a grin.

  ‘But He has, Ginny. I pledged my life to Jesus after our wreck, and my leg growed out and straightened hitsef.’

  Ginny stared at him with disbelief. He pulled up his overall leg. Several appalling scars ran the length of his calf. The scars included puncture marks from the stitches, so that they looked like the seams on a football. He had had over a hundred stitches in his calf alone. But otherwise the leg looked sound and normal. The healing episode was apparently true.

  ‘Well, do you belong to one of the churches at the circle, or what?’ Ginny sputtered.

  ‘We got our own ministry, me and Maxine. We meet up at the springhouse, a couple dozen of us, ever Friday night.’

  ‘What? Right up here you meet?’

  ‘Yeah. We’d love to have you come Friday, wouldn’t we, Maxine?’

  Maxine nodded.

  Ginny sat silent, prodding her sticky beans with her fork.

  ‘How about it?’ Clem demanded. ‘You wouldn’t have to join in. You could just watch.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it bother the others?’ Ginny asked, trying to manufacture an excuse for not going.

  ‘Not once I told them you was an old friend of mine.’

  ‘I don’t know…’ She blotted up the juice from the beans with her corn bread and ate it.

  ‘Hit could change your life. Like hit done mine,’ Clem assured her. ‘But even if hit don’t, what have you lost? A couple of hours maybe.’

  ‘Do you preach, or what?’

  ‘We don’t have no set schedule. We do whatever the good Lord instructs us to.’

  Realizing how deeply offended Clem would be if she refused, Ginny accepted. ‘What time?’

  ‘Seven thirty, Friday.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be there.’

  ‘Good,’ Maxine and Clem said in unison.

  ‘Thanks for supper.’ She stood up.

  Mrs. Babcock woke up on her own the next morning, without having a thermometer crammed in her mouth. She lay still and listened with pleasure to the tick tock of the old clock on her bedside table. That sound had been her constant companion through life. It had filled the cabin when she was a little girl. And when her parents and she had moved to the big house, the clock had sat on the mantel in the living room. Sometimes she had perched on the Empire sofa and just listened for an hour or more to the steady ticking. And the most exciting time of the week had been Sunday morning after church when her mother would bring the clock down and allow her to wind it with its filigreed key — eight turns and no more.

  When she and Wesley had married and had begun living in the cabin, her mother had let her take the clock, like the ark in the Old Testament. When Wesley was overseas and Ginny would wake up screaming in the night, Mrs. Babcock would carry her into the living room and walk up and down the length of the room. Holding the tiny baby against her heart, which was beating in time to the clock, she would stroll and would pat Ginny’s shuddering back. She could understand the baby’s alarm — this understanding was the only thing that prevented her some nights from taking the baby by the feet and swinging her against the wall. Having been rocked in the amniotic fluid for nine months on its mother’s heartbeat, a baby was conditioned to that rhythm. Take it away and a baby was lost. It was a need one never got over, Mrs. Babcock had reflected on those dark cold lonely nights as she had strolled endlessly in obedience to the ticking. She had calmed her own self with the conviction that Wesley would be safely home again once the relentless pendulum had ticked off eight more months, or whatever the figure happened to be.

  And when Wesley did return — some twenty-one million ticks of the clock later, as she had calculated one night while hiking up and down with the howling baby — the passionate love they had made for many months afterwards was rendered that much more passionate for her because it was accompanied by the ticking of that clock, which served to remind her of the unutterable deprivation of Wesley’s absence and possible death.

  And when she and Wesley and the children had moved to the big house, the clock came along too, and sat on Mrs. Babcock’s desk in the hallway. The children tumbled around on the floor like puppies, fighting over whose turn it was to wind it. During the day, when she paused in the middle of the housework, she could hear the clock. If she woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, as she had often during her depressions in recent years, she could hear it. The clock had ticked just like this for her great-grandmother, for her grandmother, for her mother. Life went on, states of mind shifted with the ticking, her fears would pass. And they did. But only to return again, as the relentless ticking carried her ever closer to old age and death, ever farther away from the crammed years of young motherhood when she had been too busy or too exhausted to consider the inevitability of either.

  She opened one eye and glanced at the clock — the familiar yellowed face and script Roman numerals, the filigreed hands. Her friend, her enemy. Some days it was an enemy toward whom she felt a reluctant affection due simply to familiarity. Today, however, the clock was a friend — given how many ticks, would she be out of the hospital and back home? Already she was feeling better. She prodded the wads in her nose and the pad between her legs and found them unstained. The transfusion appeared to be working.

  Mrs. Babcock stretched all over luxuriously, like a cat in the sun. Someone who had never been seriously ill, who had never observed her bodily processes stalling and sputtering, couldn’t begin to appreciate the overwhelming sense of physical well-being engendered as those processes began righting themselves. Young Dr. Vogel knew what he was about. There was no longer any question in her mind. She felt sheepish about having challenged his judgment on the steroids.

  Sliding out of bed, Mrs. Babcock put on her green flannel robe. Her bruises weren’t aching, as they usually did when she first stood up in the morning. Looking out the window, she saw the sun coming up — a glowing red ball — over the hill behind the factory. At her eye level in the tree outside were the frantically busy squirrels that leapt from branch to branch in scurrying pursuit of each other.

  Mrs. Childress came in with her razor. Mrs. Babcock lay down and, with her eyes closed, felt her stabbed ear lobe throbbing to the ticking of the clock. Mrs. Childress was alternately dabbing the puncture and following the second hand of her watch. Much sooner than usual, she turned away.

  ‘Seven and a half minutes, Mrs. Babcock!’ she announced, as though Mrs. Babcock had just broken a track record of long standing.

  ‘Is that normal?’

  ‘Close to it.’

  ‘What’s normal?’

  ‘You have to ask Dr. Vogel. I�
�m not permitted to discuss it.’

  ‘Why in the world not?’

  ‘He’s the doctor.’

  ‘You’re the nurse.’

  ‘Four minutes is normal,’ she whispered, glancing around guiltily. ‘But you’re down from twelve, honey. That’s real fine!’

  9

  Divided Loyalties

  Eddie’s and my life after Worthley stood outside of time. Contrary to popular belief, there are really three kinds of people in the world: those who wear watches, those who don’t wear watches, and those who sometimes do and sometimes don’t. Eddie was firmly entrenched in the second category and was compulsively late in everything she did; I am in the third category, but that year I was decidedly watchless.

  Our apartment was on Broadway in Cambridge, on the third floor of a decaying tenement that was slated for urban renewal some time in the next decade. The pipe to the gas stove leaked, so that we had to leave the kitchen window cracked, even in the winter as snow drifted in. We were limited to sponge baths because the shower leaked into the apartment below, which was occupied by a frazzled welfare mother of five who had enough problems without her plaster ceiling’s collapsing as well. The narrow porch off the living room, which overlooked the busy trash-strewn street, was infested with squatters — pigeons who cooed and shat all day long. The entire place, advertised by its unscrupulous owner as furnished, was fitted out with the rejects from some furniture store’s Fire Damage Sale. The gas oven was so slow in lighting that it threatened to blow up the dreary linoleumed kitchen.

  In short, it was squalid. Eddie and I loved it. We were finally living arm in arm, cheek by jowl, with The People. Was it our fault if all The People in our neighborhood had applications in for the high rises in the redevelopment areas? Could we help it that they moved out as fast as they could, only to be replaced by people like ourselves? Were we to blame that the welfare mother below us scowled and guarded her small children behind her back when we passed on the stairs, muttering under her breath, ‘Filthy dykes’? I had to keep reminding myself that I was now officially a lesbian. I felt that, although I now wore wheat jeans and turtlenecks and sandals and a braid like Eddie’s, basically I hadn’t changed. Faces glared as Eddie and I strolled to the Stop & Shop with our arms around each other; necks craned with outrage in movie theaters when we held hands. Public indifference to me had shifted to disapproval since I had left Worthley; but I was still me, whoever that might be.