In his many trips here, he’d had roommates of all classes; once, in a shortage of beds, even a woman, all Cockney scrawniness, anthracite hair and hemisphere earrings, who got herself up every morning to the bravos of the nurses, afternoons to the visit of a lover, evenings to the weak husband and harsh children who corroborated her tales of life over an Amsterdam Avenue bar. And under the night-light, lay back like a sharp-nosed girl, hugging to herself the short ward gown or her own blue nylon ruffles (neither of which hid the osteomyelitic erosions of her spine) while she set before Walter all the clandestine delights she still intended for that waiflike remainder of bone. Walter recalled these persons only when he himself came back here. Addresses were almost never exchanged between these confidants; indeed, their ill-matchedness was a part of these honesties of the crutch and the catheter—severable in an hour by a “getting out,” or a “going up” from which there was no return. What he was having was a “semi-private” experience.
This time he was in luck, with this literate, pleasant man, youngish at forty-odd, already head of an organization whose publishings included legal ones—Goodman had even heard of the Judge. His open blond looks, and the intelligence which came from them like a surprise, reminded Walter of Austin Fenno, though Austin’s accent and background, authentic as jewels, were more easily defined. Nothing was so diagnostic as this listening, in the haunts of the night and under battle conditions, to a voice without a face to confront you, the voice of the stranger on the adjacent bedpan, telling over its life for the privilege of listening—to its own life. This was the first time Walter could recall telling so much about himself. But then he had never before been the more “serious” of the two beds.
“So you’ve been in the Negev,” Goodman said. “Twice.” Below his tractioned leg, his arms were free, one hand holding the slender olive-gray book he’d been reading, Stern’s privately printed edition of his friend Mannix’s letters.
“Once with him,” said Walter. “Once—to search for him.”
“He didn’t go down in Germany?”
“Took off from there. Düsseldorf. He’d already left the Friends outfit. Came to say good-bye. To me. I saw the plane take off.”
“Oh?”
“Actually, that plane landed safely in Beirut. The plane was a commercial transport; they can be…pretty blithe…about passenger lists. And there’d been several stops in between. After Düsseldorf. No reason to suppose that David wasn’t still on it, though. The German reports, all very thorough, showed that he was, far as their borders. But the plane he was bound for, to pick up in Beirut, was the one that crashed. Inside the Israeli border, several hundred miles in.”
“Out there, they were—thorough?”
“They were very kind,” Walter said. He was leaning forward, sitting on the edge of his bed, in his dressing gown. All day he’d been hopping about; now that the place was oozing toward its evening quiet, he couldn’t quite forget that by tomorrow, in any case, he wouldn’t be able to move at all. “Though no bodies were recovered…May as well tell you. The Judge for a long time kept insisting to himself that David was still alive, somewhere. He couldn’t go see for himself. And maybe he felt…that he’d never…unbent enough, when his son was alive. You know how families are.”
“Any reason?”
“Not on David’s side.” Walter got up and peered out through the pane, cocking his head up, through the city’s angles, at the sky. “He was…a perfect son.”
“He comes out very clear here.” His semi-bedmate—what other word was there for a man subject to the same sheets and regimes?—laid the book down, closed. “Very plain and simple, and nice.”
“No more?” Walter turned from the sky. In pajamas, without the affectations of his dress, he looked scarcely deformed, merely a man excessively bent from stretching his small allotment of flesh over such a large solicitude. “Lots I couldn’t put in of course. About the work he was going to do out there. Or personal things. About them.” He hesitated. “So the letters don’t strike you as—anything extra?”
“They do. His family. They appear there, amazingly. And in what you’ve been saying—of them.” Goodman smiled. By day, his blue eyes had a clarity that didn’t seem to reflect, but at night, shadowed, he deepened, like a well giving back what was told him, in a profound listening. Or maybe that too was the hospital situation. “You know how families are.”
“Only one,” said Walter. “Only this one.”
“Any chance—he’s still alive?”
“None. Amnesiac?—He was somehow the last person in the world—No. If there were an ounce of him alive anywhere—I’d know.” Even when Walter looked unhappy, the rings around his eyes dissociated him from it, like spectacles. “The Judge didn’t feel I looked hard enough out there. At the time. But if David were alive—it would be like not having my hump—and not knowing it.” He raised his chin. “Glass of fresh water? Want anything?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
Walter came over and got the book, fussed with the other’s Kleenex box, put it nearer, hopped around his own bed to his own night table, ran a brisk hand through the pile of mail, his stamp catalogues in particular, gave them all a long look, and left them spread, like talismans. Then he got into bed, and lay back. In the semi-private experience, when the twin, turned-up toes of the inmates were quiet, a room looked into was a line drawing hopelessly unvaried—but Goodman’s traction pulley, Walter’s cricket motion, made this room livelier. Still, the pair were silent awhile, now that Walter too was in bed—for the night.
After a while, Goodman said, “What was it like? In the Negev?”
The other bed took a long time answering. The beauty of the semi-private experience was that it was as good for talk as a journey with whose mechanism one had nothing to do, though all the while one was going somewhere—in this case either “up” or “out.”
“Military,” said Walter. “And biblical. Like him.”
“He was—both?”
Again Walter took a while to answer. Back-rubs were over; they could hear the nurses trotting the halls with the evening pills. “He had armies in him.” The violence in his voice was unnatural to his own ears. It came from the brute heat of being alive. “Armies. He never knew.”
Nurse came in with the pills and laid one down for him, in its little frilled candypaper cup. “Tonight, you must take yours, you know,” she said softly. Sometimes he didn’t. Other nights he’d had that option. But she left it for him. He was to be trusted. “Goodnight, gentlemen.”
Goodman had the option. They both let the pills lie.
“Armies,” Goodman said slowly. “Doesn’t sound much like—him.” From which usage, Walter could see how well he listened.
“She said that. Mrs. Mannix. She and I talked once, about David. When I guess she knew she was going to die.”
“David got it from her, then,” said Goodman. “From what you say of her.”
“They’re a family of—both sides,” said Walter. “That’s what’s so wonderful.”
Goodman was moving in his limited orbit, and from the random sound, only for the sake of it, kicking out his free leg, opening and shutting a drawer. “Do they know, he and—Miss Ruth—that you’re here?”
“He does,” said Walter. “Not her.” Echoes came to him, from that dinner party the night of his uncle’s death. He and the Judge had never been closer than then. “She’s like the mother too—but different.”
There was the pause of men talking in hospital.
“How?” Goodman never lost sight of a question waiting to be asked.
“She can—do injury to no one.”
Again there was a restful pause.
“Damn,” said Goodman.
“Bedpan?” said Walter. They’d become as alert to each other’s bodies as the married.
“I—Yes,” said Goodman.
He got the pan, and stood at the bedside, his hair tufted, like a competent child. “My uncle left me a Cézanne,” he
said. “I’ve left it to her.”
“A Cézanne!” Goodman said. “Landscape?”
“Green and blue. I don’t know painting, but I was always fond of it.”
“‘Je continue donc mes études,’” said Goodman. “His last letter.”
“Cezanne? Ah, you know then. About painting.”
“Got a friend.”
“My uncle always said it diminished a man, not to care about the arts.”
“Some it might,” said Goodman. “Not you.”
Walter put the pan underneath the table, on the shelf. “Anything else? Can’t I—get you anything else?”
“Not just now.” Goodman watched him climb back in bed and sit there against the pillows. The hump was himself. Walter knew. “If I think of something, I’ll ask,” said Goodman.
After a while, the man in the next bed to Goodman said musingly, “You listen well.” In bed, with his malformation in back of him like an extra pillow, he looked more fully a man. “Never talked so much before. About myself.”
To this Goodman said nothing.
“If I—” said Walter. “I mean to make a friend of you.”
“You have me,” said Goodman.
This was the last quick response that either made. After that their remarks floated the room, not in strict sequence, like the breath of some apparatus that not even the hospital knew the name of, left for them to share.
“Consciousness. He made a remark about it once. I can’t remember it.”
Goodman took awhile, long enough not to make it seem a suggestion, before he carefully said, “London. Never really believe it’s on the other end of a phone. Even when it is. Guess I’m not modern enough.”
“The desert’s not timeless. One dies there just the same,” said Walter. “Leaving as much behind—as anyone…Oh, I’m modern enough…Used to get called out of class, in school…And my uncle’s voice would say—from his yacht on the other side of the world…‘Guess where we are now.’” For a while Walter could be heard padding among the papers on his night table without comment—Goodman wasn’t much interested in stamps. “No, we had words…I suppose,” he said then, a note of surprise in his voice, as if he’d found the stamp he’d been looking for and it after all wasn’t much. “The Judge and I. He wouldn’t accept a letter I’d been—entrusted with. Not for him, it’s true.”
In contrast to Walter, the other occupant of the room, his leg high in traction, looked like a man permanently frozen in the act of a huge running start. Sometimes he reached forward, as now, to touch the leg as if to press it forward, on. He saw that the rustle in Walter’s hand wasn’t a letter, but the paper cup with the pill in it, like his own. He lay back. “I’m not good with other people’s secrets,” Goodman said.
“Something that fails,” said Walter. “Wish I could remember.”
The wind blew in a swathe of night.
“Consciousness? You said.”
“Secrets…I suppose one doesn’t think of others as having them,” said Walter. “If one has none.”
Again there was a rustle of paper on Walter’s side, but Goodman couldn’t tell what it was.
“I suppose he meant me to keep the letter…forever.” The voice on that penultimate was stronger than Goodman had ever heard it—the voice of the hospital itself. Something fell into the basket at Walter’s side.
The man next to him raised up. “Walter—”
“Just the pill,” said Walter. His knees were drawn cozily to his chin. After days on a pulley a man couldn’t help but envy him. “I shan’t take it. Just for tonight.” He looked across at Goodman. “Don’t tell.”
“Walter,” said his roommate, “do something for me. Close that window.” He watched the other spring up at the word do—if Goodman willed it, he could keep that small figure all night in his service; would that be the kinder? Or to leave him. Goodman put his head in his hands.
The window was high; Walter, after a struggle to reach it, agilely climbed a chair, and brought it down smartly by a push from the top. Behind him, Goodman swiftly took his own pill. He had that option.
“Blowing cold,” said Walter, back in bed.
“October.” It was the last word Goodman said.
Walter sat, embracing his knees. “I’ve remembered.” He wasn’t surprised when there was no reply.
When the nurse came in for the ten-o’clock check, she said, “Shame on you. Look at him!”
Walter did so.
“Want another?” said the nurse. “I’ll leave it for you. Just in case.” She brought it, a smaller one. “There. You can take it in a half-hour or so. So you won’t bother us. Gotta real emergency down the floor, and we’re short-handed; Carter phoned in sick tonight, gotta cold. Gotta boyfriend from home, more like.” She smoothed his bed for him. “There. That’ll hold you. Sleep tight.” She hovered. To the initiate in their ways, they let drop what they knew, without knowing. “I’ll still be here to give you your injection at six.” She nodded brightly; it was her way of letting him hold her hand. “You won’t feel a thing.”
Walter nodded.
“Tell him good night for me, in the morning,” he said.
He sat bolt upright for a while. The time passed for when the extra pill was permitted, but he didn’t take it. “I must feel,” he said to himself. “I can feel. I—feel.”
“You’ve a lucky hump,” Mirriam Mannix had said to him, the day after his parents’ accident, when David brought him home to her, from school. She reached out and smoothed the hump almost avidly—not for a moment’s luck but for a lifetime. “Come to us. You’ll be lucky for us.” No one had ever wanted him for that before. That afternoon, it seemed to him that she scattered truth like beads; if the heavy amber necklace on her breast were to break and he to gather them, each long bead would contain a hard, flat truth. She’d seen at once what was bothering him. The tie between him and his parents had been so distant, for what he should be feeling in the hour of their death.
“You don’t need to dwell on it,” said Mirriam Mannix. “Let no one convince you. Of what you ought to feel. Like they convinced me.”
Much later, when just before her death she brought him the letter for David, he still remembered it. She knew how not to dwell—even though she herself couldn’t manage it.
“I ought to burn all my correspondence,” she said, in her high, handsome way, her dark cheeks kindled with the winter frost that set his marrow aching—and with the fire she had lit for him. “But some of the people who write me have nobody but me. You know how it is.”
He sat on the sofa beside her, enthralled under the wreath of her arm, her hand nursing their luck.
“It would be like burning them, poor things,” she said. How marvelous she was in her intensity—how she could feel! “I’ve burnt Simon’s,” she said of a sudden, and saw his face.
“Oh no, my dear.” Her laugh went link, link, link, in a chain that drew. “When you live with a person, it’s the other way. You don’t want bits of the progression that brought you together; you even hate seeing those. You want it all in the present, whole.”
Though he knew he would never live with a person, he was thrilled to his core. She made him a candidate for it, like any other.
“Besides—Simon doesn’t need them. He won’t need letters,” she said. At her age, so much nearer death than his eighteen, it hadn’t seemed to him strange of her to think of it.
How hotly she’d breathed of death, though—almost in love with it! Later of course, he knew why. “Except this one,” she said, handing him the letter.
“But—it’s for David, you said, isn’t it?” He only wanted to be sure, for the envelope was unmarked.
She nodded, narrowing her eyes at the photograph of herself on the piano. “I’m giving it to you because I can do you no injury by it,” she said. The crook of her mouth bewildered him, but that was his ignorance—of the charm of mothers, or their mystery.
He reached into a portfolio of the latest issues of comm
emorative stamps. The letter lay there, brought with him just in case—in spite of the silent phone—he should wake to find them standing here. If they should come—and for a while he imagined it in spite of all—it would be both.
“No, it’s David’s letter,” the Judge had said harshly, after the plane crash, when Walter first offered it. “It belongs to my son. Keep it for him.”
A month ago, Walter had tried again, on hearing that the Judge and Ruth were once again going to London. In spite of illness, the Judge took every chance to go there.
“I’m going in for that op,” said Walter. “I could have mailed it to you.” Somehow, remembering Mrs. Mannix, he hadn’t. It would have been—like a burning. “It oughtn’t to be found in my papers perhaps. Just in case.”
This time the Judge had said, “Come here, Walter. Closer to my chair. Walter—why do you think I go to London?”
He’d reflected, then said what honestly came to him, considering it all. “For Austin.”
The Judge’s eyes widened; since being chairbound, he was less impenetrable of face. “Walter, you’re a prize. Most people still help me to think I go there for a woman.” The Judge put out a small compact hand, and for a second Walter put in it his own long fingers. “The agencies are there. For lost people. I worked with them before.” The hand was the iron kind, musclebound with weight-lifting, which the chairbound often had. “Don’t think I accuse you, Walter. Not after my first—grief. We each believe as we have to believe. If he’s dead, then he has you to believe in him, of those who loved him. And Ruth, I think—too. But if he’s alive somewhere—he has only me.”
What the Judge had said was so like her! Walter almost spoke of it. But he was older now to the wonders here, and could let the house rest on this—that it was a house of both sides. So when he turned the study doorknob, to leave, he still had her letter.
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