I was naïve enough, drunk enough, to be surprised to find that a body could become a new thing altogether, shed of its clothes. Just as I was surprised to discover, not then, of course, but over time, that in the dark it would all remain unchanged—skin, hair, and limb, bone and blubber, scent and heartbeat and rhythm of breath. Unchanged as far as mouth was concerned, lips were concerned. A mystery revealed only to the long married.
In the morning, in the pale hotel room, what a lot of strangeness. I reached for my glasses to see the time. Just after 7:00 a.m. There was a brown-edged cigarette burn in the wood of the nightstand that I associated somehow with the narrow headache that was searing the center of my brain. My mouth was as dry as ash. Experience told me I would not go back to sleep. Whatever charm the room had had last night, with its low light and drawn shades and elegant silver bucket of champagne, hadn’t exactly fled—I had never before, after all, spent a night in a place anything like the St. George Hotel—but there was a weirdness about it all at this hour of the morning—the light behind the pale green curtains and the rattling of the dark radiator, a door slamming somewhere, the revving of motors in the street, a disappointing sense of an ordinary day, even here in the lovely hotel, an ordinary day simply going on. Tom, this stranger, with his thin hair curled like a Coney Island Kewpie doll’s above his pink face, was serenely asleep beside me.
I found my nightgown on the floor, slipped into it—hardly a wrinkle, I was happy to discover, good fabric, as my mother had said. The robe was on a chair in the corner. In the bathroom, I threw cold water on my face to relieve the headache. I brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth, combed my hair, and put on a little lipstick. In the movies, there would be room service, a bellhop pushing a cloth-draped table into the room, ostrich feathers on my sleeves, but it was Sunday morning and we had to fast, since we were meeting my mother and Gabe for ten o’clock Mass. My mother would give us breakfast back home, with all the wedding party invited. There would be some quiet kidding, no doubt, Tom’s friends from the brewery especially. At the reception one of them had crooned, “Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed, we danced and we danced cause the room had no bed.” One had left a jar of Vaseline on the seat of the hired car when we left the reception—which Tom knocked to the floor and I pretended I didn’t see.
We were taking a train to a resort outside of Albany, a place Gerty had recommended that would prove to be less elegant than we had hoped.
With my head aching, I recalled something my father had once said, about someone not being the first groom to feel under the weather the morning after the big day. I figured I wasn’t the first bride to feel this way, either. And then I remembered it was Dora Ryan’s husband he had referred to. The woman pretending to be a man. I was grateful that I hadn’t thought of her before this, especially last night, as we slipped out of our clothes.
When I went back to the room, Tom was awake and looking at me with some concern. His hair still stood up above his bald scalp like a pale flame. “Are you all right?” he whispered as if I were some delicate thing, and although I was a little sore—I’ll admit I had wondered at one point if the Vaseline would have helped—I said, blasé, “Oh, I’m fine, thank you. And yourself?”
He said he suspected a glass of tomato juice with a shot of Worcestershire would help, after Mass. And I quoted my father to him, Not the first groom, after the big night.
He moved aside a bit, as if he needed to make room for me to get back into bed, and I climbed in beside him.
Strangely—here I was in my satin and lace nightgown and him in his undershirt, in bed together for the first time in our lives and talking as if we were fully clothed and sitting at my mother’s table drinking tea—we went over our plans for the day, Mass, breakfast, the subway to Grand Central, or should we splurge and take a cab? Why not? Our packed suitcases were at my mother’s—I said “my mother’s” purposefully, self-consciously, not “my house,” or even “home,” as if to remind myself of where I now belonged—even if it was only a small apartment in Rego Park that I had barely seen, that Tom had secured only two weeks earlier. I said “the old neighborhood,” although it had been my neighborhood just the day before.
Because she was on my mind, or perhaps because we were a married couple now and such subjects were no longer impolite, I told him the story of Dora Ryan’s travail, back in the old neighborhood: a woman pretending to be a man.
“More to be pitied,” Tom said. He in turn told me about a fellow he worked with, Darcy Furlong, from the South. “A nice guy,” he said, “but a window dresser, if you know what I mean.” Some of the other fellows had given him a hard time until the boss put a stop to it—the guy’s tormented enough, was the way the boss, Mr. Heep, had put it to Tom.
(At our reception, Mr. Fagin and Mr. Heep had stood before me, arm in arm, laughing and pointing at each other, shouting about what they called the “irony of it,” that they both had names out of Charles Dickens. I thought it only a meaningless happenstance, but Tom, who had learned his catechism from former chorus girls, saw every such coincidence as God’s winking reminder that He was a regular Ziegfeld, orchestrating everything. Tom raised his glass to the two men and said, “Beers and biers,” which got everybody roaring.)
“You’ve got to have some pity for them,” Tom said. “People like that. It’s got to be a lonely life.”
And we drew closer together, in our new and unaccustomed intimacy, under the hotel sheets that smelled faintly of bleach and now of our own sleep-warmed bodies.
For one of us at least, we knew, we were certain—this is how we saw the world—there would never again be loneliness in life. For Tom, as it turned out.
He shifted in the bed and put his arm around my waist, put his face to the satin and lace of my lap. There was the sound of water running in another room, another door closing somewhere nearby, and short voices in the hall. The ordinary, rushing world going on, closing up over happiness as readily as it moved to heal sorrow.
I reminded him that we didn’t have much time, we had to get going if we were going to make it to Mass. His cheek against my bare arm was rough with the night’s stubble. The taste of champagne lingered on his breath. To hell with time, he said, and I marveled to discover that this was something we might also do in daylight.
The figure in the doorway was squarely built, broad-shouldered in his long white T-shirt and with a wide dark head, but not tall, and decidedly pitched to the right.
“Can’t you sleep, Marie?” he said.
“No,” I told him.
“Would you like some hot milk?” A smiling lilt to the words.
“No,” I said, resisting the charm of it.
I heard him sigh. Saw him tilt a little farther to his right, leaning, I supposed, against the door frame.
“Is there anything at all I can do for you?” he said. There was some golden light, hallway light, behind him. There was the lamplight from behind my chair that touched his white T-shirt. He had told me at some point that he’d found a cardboard box of them, size XXL, on the side of the Grand Central Parkway, and now he wore them every day to work, fresh and clean, a little too long, perhaps. He was not a tall man, but broad and strong, although somewhat misshapen. He had had scoliosis as a child. He had told me this, too. Like most of the workers here, caregivers they called themselves, he was from one of the Islands and spoke with a lilt that was often both beautiful and incomprehensible.
“I’m fine,” I said.
If you’re the caregiver, I sometimes said, am I the caretaker? But they didn’t understand the joke.
“Would you like to get back into bed?” he asked, and I lifted my hand. Sleep eluded me in the way so many things had begun to do: recollections, sounds, vision. I had grown weary of waiting for it. “No,” I said, “I’m better off in the chair.”
“I think you would be better off in the bed,” he said.
And I told him I had four children, six grandchildren, and each one of them did an excell
ent imitation of my mother. He should try another tactic.
I heard him laugh. He said, “But your mother couldn’t teach you to bake the bread.”
I said, “That’s true.” It surprised me to recall that I had told him the story. “I thought if I learned to cook, my mother would die. The way it happened to my friend. I was a stubborn child,” I added. “ ‘A bold piece’ is what my mother called me.”
With the way my eyes were, and the way the hallway light shone behind him, it was impossible to see his face, but I heard his laughter, which was meant to tell me I hadn’t changed. Two small children, who were not real, stood beside him, leaning against the hem of his oversized shirt. It was a trick my eyes had begun to play on me: figures appearing here and there, mostly in my peripheral vision: strangers, children in old-fashioned clothes, sometimes nuns in long habits or women with babies in their arms. A clean and lacy light all about them.
When I told my own children about this, they either nodded impatiently—well, if you’d had that transplant—or commiserated with false enthusiasm: maybe it means you’re regaining some vision. Even with my diminished eyesight, I knew they were exchanging “Let’s be tolerant” looks. Once, I asked them, impatiently—an impatient patient—“Why do you think every mystery is just a trick of the light?”
But my caregiver here in the doorway, in his oversized T-shirt, found in a cardboard box on an access road off the Grand Central Parkway—I knew all his stories just as he knew mine—called these illusions angels, the consoling angels that appeared to only the few, in their old age. He said I saw them because I had once saved someone’s life. Some Island superstition, I thought, or a tactic from the caregivers’ manual. But closer to what I wanted to believe, to tell the truth.
Still, I told him he was very much mistaken. I said I’d worked at Fagin’s funeral parlor until my first child came along. I was the consoling angel in those days, I said. I helped bury the dead. I didn’t save a one of them.
Now he asked me, his hands held to his sides as if to place them on the illusory children’s heads, “Will you call me when you’re ready to get into the bed? Will you do that at least, so I can help you?”
I said, “I will,” and the silence that followed told me he knew I lied. I saw the children move into the room.
“If you ask,” he said softly, “you know I will do it for you. You only have to ask.” And then he disappeared from what was left of my vision, because my eyes suddenly brimmed with foolish tears.
I suppose I stood then, because he caught me as I fell.
The doctor was red-faced. His hands were abrupt. “Mrs. Commeford,” he said, “you are not cooperating.”
Although I could not see it, I knew there must have been perspiration beaded on his forehead, because as he leaned to shout at me, a drop of it hit the sheet beneath my chin. I didn’t see it fall, but somehow I heard the sound it made, and in my pain I imagined that out of that sound, the sound of a raindrop on a dry roof, there rose more profoundly the scent of the hospital laundry, the scent of bleach on the sheet that nearly reminded me, too, of some experience in this life that I might have liked, might have loved, even—my first night with Tom, under sheets that had not been dried in the sun or on a line in my mother’s kitchen—but the pain was a swelling black tide that engulfed the brief, bright recollection in the same way it began to absorb the doctor’s red face and the hovering nurses in white and the light in the room—daylight or electric, who could say. I had been in labor for hours and hours by then, days perhaps.
I had not understood, I had not been told, the extent of the suffering involved, from the cramps of the enema to the scrape of the razor to the endless searing rise and the long aching fall of each contraction.
I had sent so many entreaties to heaven by then—first, that my baby would be healthy; then, that I would please not die; now, only that the pain might end—that I had begun to see myself as some kind of Fuller Brush salesman knocking on a solid door, a door without hinges, without knobs. Hours, days, could it be weeks, into this ordeal, I’d given up the hope of getting an answer, and so turned my pleas instead to my own father, who had loved me and would have wept to see me here, trussed up like a beast in a slaughterhouse, trapped under the weight of my belly, racked with pain, and now, among so many indignities, this man, this doctor, shouting angrily into my face.
“I am cooperating,” I managed to say, and wanted to add something shocking and bitter and profane. But the black tide was surging across memory, too. I couldn’t reach the words I wanted: bastard, son of a bitch, amadan, damn fool.
There was, somewhere beside my ear, a hiss of air. The white nurse leaned in. She held in her hand the rubber mask, offering the ether, but the doctor brushed her away with a wave of his hand. She seemed to disappear into the light. “Oh, please,” I heard my own voice, not roaring out those curse words as I had imagined, but pleading, whimpering and thin.
The man leaned down again. This was not my own doctor but one, I recalled, brought in sometime in the last few hours or days, red-faced, imperious, with abrupt, impatient hands. “A little pain now,” he said, “for a good outcome later. For your baby.” A good outcome.
A bitter drop of his perspiration fell on my lip, and then he leaned across me and his white chest absorbed like cotton the black wash of my pain. He was going to smother me, the only antidote, of course, for my suffering. Fool that I had been to think otherwise. No other relief but dying, letting go of this poor body at last, sloughing it off, a shell, a doll. They could stuff it with horsehair. I would make no more entreaties: I would fall effortlessly against the solid and unyielding door.
They tore me in two. Later, making a joke of it, I said I was run over by the Coney Island Express, the parameters of the pain, from breast to thigh, just about the distance between the black steel of the subway tracks. The odor of blood that filled the crowded room like the underground scent of hollowed rock and cold steel. I heard, in fact, the walloping, beating rhythm of passing subway cars just as the red-faced doctor sliced me apart without sufficient anesthesia, without any at all, I was certain. And pulled the baby out. And sewed me up again so that I felt every stitch. Pain like the walloping beat, light and dark and pounding air, of a passing train, steel against bitter steel, a train passing over me, cracking my hip bones and rattling the teeth in my china skull.
“Unnecessarily withheld,” two of the nurses said later as they bathed me and changed my dressing and returned my limp body, still mine, it seemed, to a bed on the ward. They spoke softly, looking over their shoulders to the door and the hallway outside. “He had his training in the army,” they told me. “He had a bad war.” “Cruel,” they said of him. “Brutal.” They said, “He thinks women need to be more stoic about these things.”
But when the doctor came into the room again, they only smiled and bowed and then scattered like pigeons when he shouted his demands.
I saw my mother in a chair by the window when I opened my eyes again. My mother wore her hat and her pale broadcloth summer suit, and she held her purse on her lap. The slatted sunlight had washed her of all color. I thought for a moment that we might both have died during the long days and nights of my ordeal, not because of the pale light in the blank room, but because of the sweet assurance I felt, waking and seeing my mother there, that I was loved, cherished beyond all reason. The peace of this, the stillness of the room, the temporary suspension of pain, seemed evidence enough that I had come to the end of time. I felt a strange elation. And then I closed my eyes and slept again.
It was evening and the light was low and Tom was in the chair when I next opened them. And then a parched morning, the sound of trays and rolling bassinets and babies crying here and there, the sound of the nurse’s voice as she leaned over me, all of it furred and fiery. I had an unshakable image of red-flocked wallpaper growing like fungus over my tongue and down my throat. They threw whatever covered me aside, but there was no relief in the chill I now felt on my damp skin.
The wide bandages were ripped from what was left of the poor pale flesh suspended between the thin bones of my hips. There was the sweet, pungent odor of pus. There were barked orders from the military doctor, or perhaps this was another one. More indifferent hands running over my flesh; no indignity in it anymore, I had grown so accustomed to it now. A broad nurse with gold curls beneath her cap washed my naked body with a large sponge, running the thing up and down over my extended arm—extended because the nurse had lifted my hand and clamped it under her own armpit, in the casually efficient way a busy woman hanging clothes holds a clothespin in her mouth. She ran the sponge up over my shoulders and between my breasts. The nurse wore a damp apron over her uniform, and her fat arms were as cool and solid as gray marble. There was the faint smell of vinegar in the air.
Later I heard my mother’s voice raised in anger, but had no strength to assure her that there was no need to object: a body, after all, was a paltry thing, and really, Momma, all modesty had long ago gone out the window.
And then there were murmured prayers. A bald priest in a black cassock with a green-and-gold stole, with a missal in one hand and the other reaching for the small container Gabe held out to him in his cupped palm. Gabe, too, in a pale suit, standing at the dark priest’s elbow, but presiding somehow, elegant and assured, nonetheless. I focused on Gabe’s hands. His beautiful hands. And then I felt the flesh of the priest’s thumb against my forehead and my palms. And then someone fumbled with the blanket at my feet and I whispered, or so I was later told, “Oh, honestly.” It was Tom who laughed then. I knew him by his laughter.
Later, he put his dry lips to my cheek and held them there.
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