A Reckoning (22 page)

“Oh, dear, Mary.”

“Here, hold this against your forehead,” Mary was saying as Laura retched over the basin in her bathroom. “You’re all upset over going away,” she murmured. “Don’t worry. The spring will be waiting when you come back.”

At last, after retching, the sheer relief of being back in bed was such that Laura fell asleep, and when she woke there was just time for Mary to help her into a clean nightgown and a light wool dressing gown and slippers. She had meant to be downstairs when the ambulance came, but Mary was adamant.

Brooks and Ann were at the door.

“Hi,” Brooks said. He gave her a quick, hunted look. Ann came right in and kissed her and then the men were there with the stretcher, and she was being lifted into it like a baby and strapped down.

“Is that comfortable, ma’am, not too tight?” Laura looked up at a very young, serious face, dark eyes.

“Thank you, yes, I’m fine.” Then she added, teasing, “I guess I won’t be able to escape, will I?”

“I guess not,” he said solemnly. The joke, if it had been a joke, fell flat.

“All right, let’s go,” the older man said. Laura couldn’t see him very well as he had his back to her, lifting the other end. And it was really amazing how cleverly they maneuvered her round the banister and down the stairs, the descent just slightly vertiginous for a few seconds, then straight out the open door into delicious spring air.

“Oh, please wait a second,” Laura said impulsively, “The apple tree’s in flower!”

She saw it fleetingly, a rosy mass, a bower of pink and white, and then she was being gently slid into the ambulance.

“Shall I come with you, and Brooks follow us in the car?”

“All right.”

Mary was standing in the doorway and gave a brief wave. And there Laura was with Ann on a low chair at her feet, and the shades left up so she could see out of this curious conveyance, gliding along like a flying gondola.

“Everything’s so beautiful,” she said as they passed an apple orchard, then flowering cherry, then woods, the greens still so fresh and brilliant; it all seemed like a stained-glass world. “This is fun,” she murmured.

“Look, the crews are out!” Ann said, as they swung out along the river, and sure enough, there were two shells, their long oars sweeping them up the river.

“Why does it always seem so Greek?” Laura asked. “I don’t suppose the Greeks had shells?”

“‘The young men, all so beautiful,’ is that it?”

“If only we could turn back now and go home,” Laura said with a smile. “This has been quite a treat so far.”

Then they were silent as the ambulance turned off the drive, proceeded through dirty city streets, and drew up at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital. Laura closed her eyes. The very look of it was appalling, cold, a jail for the sick. “Ann, stay with me,” she said.

“Of course. That’s why we’re here. We’re not going to abandon you, dear Laura.”

With the knife thrust of fear Laura realized that she wanted their help. She had to admit that. In this dreadful impersonal place. She hated the thought that the young man would leave her now. Already she was being lifted from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital one on wheels. “Good-by,” she called, and the young man turned and waved. “Good luck,” he said with a smile. As he went through the door Brooks came in.

“Take it easy, Mother. You know what hospitals are like. It may be a while before we know where you’re going.” Ann was standing by the stretcher holding Laura’s hand.

“It’s good of you to do this,” Laura said. Then she closed her eyes. A voice came over the public address system, “Dr. Warner. Dr. Warner.” Feet shuffled past, subdued voices, the sound of a typewriter. Laura felt she was in the middle of a huge, empty world, a center of loneliness among strange, busy sounds. And she was terribly tired.

“Ann, is my suitcase there?”

“Right here, Laura.”

“Mother, we’ll need your Blue Cross number.” Brooks had returned from somewhere, very businesslike and calm.

“Look in my purse, Ann. I think it must be there, somewhere among the credit cards.”

Laura had broken out into a sweat—papers, things one had to have! She had not put her mind on all this. She had let herself be bundled away to a hospital without even thinking of these necessary preparations.

“Here, I’ve got it,” Ann said in triumph.

“Thanks. I’ll be right back.”

“And indeed in a very short time Brooks was there with an orderly to wheel the stretcher to room 103 on the fifth floor. She was wheeled into a huge elevator, Brooks and Ann on either side of her. Brooks had the suitcase now.

There were two nurses and an intern in the elevator. They talked in loud voices and laughed about the food in the cafeteria. It was as though Laura on her stretcher simply did not exist. The voices hurt her ears. “After all,” she thought, “I might be dying.”

“Can’t you be quiet,” Brooks whispered furiously. “My mother is very ill.”

“Oh, sorry,” said the intern. Laura opened her eyes and caught his lifted eyebrow and a muffled giggle from one of the nurses, and she hated them.

The elevator crept from floor to floor, an interminable progress, now made in complete silence, a self-conscious silence, exposing Laura, she felt, to incurious resentment. What do they care? She thought. I’m just another body to be carted around and done things to. Why did I ever allow Jim to persuade me? To be trapped like this. Very far away down an interminable tunnel she evoked the apple tree in flower in her garden, Mary waving at the door. Would she ever see them again?

“There, at last!” Ann breathed, as Laura was wheeled out on the floor and into her room. “And it’s a single room, thank God.”

“And you can look out on some pretty dreary roofs,” Brooks added. “But at least there’s some sky.”

Ann meanwhile was unpacking the suitcase. She took the transistor out, set it at the station with classical music, and laid it beside Laura under her pillow.

“Now I have some hiding place down here I’ll be all right,” Laura said. “It was just that awful feeling when we were dumped in the hall!”

“Of course,” Ann said.

“Wouldn’t you like us to stay until they have been in to check on you?” Brooks asked. He managed, Laura noticed, never to look at her and was now staring out of the window at the pigeons wheeling over the roofs. “Carrier pigeons, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said.

“What about your supper? Do you suppose Dr. Goodwin will have seen to that?” Ann asked. Under the spell of the hospital they all felt stiff and ill at ease.

“I doubt it. But I can’t eat anything much anyway. It doesn’t matter.”

A young nurse in starched white bustled in with a thermometer and took Laura’s pulse while she waited. Laura was grateful that this one didn’t chatter. “Someone will be in in a little while to ask you a few questions. Can I do anything to make you more comfortable, Laura?”

Laura winced at the first name when she did not even know who this person was but caught Ann’s eye, and they smiled, for Ann, she suspected, knew exactly what she was thinking. When the nurse had left, Ann said, “This first-name business! I suppose they want to make patients feel they are all one big family.”

“Well,” Laura thought it over. “I noticed that Jim Goodwin began to call me Laura when I became rather ill—people in hospitals return to infancy, I suppose.” Laura closed her eyes, afraid a coughing fit was about to seize her. “Maybe you’d better go now,” she managed to say.

“Will you be all right?” Ann asked at the door. “Try to rest.”

“I’ll be all right. Jim promised to look in at seven.”

“Well then, I guess we’d better be getting home,” Brooks said.

“Just one thing,” Laura suddenly remembered. “If Ben comes, I want to see him.”

“Jim Goodwin told us no visitors,” Brooks said firmly.

“I told him—Ben.”

“It’s all right,” Ann intervened. “Don’t worry.”

“Why hasn’t Ben come? We called him weeks ago.” Brooks sounded cross.

“He’s finishing a painting. I asked him to finish it first,” Laura explained.

“Oh, my God,” Brooks said between clenched teeth.

“Come on, Brooks.” Ann took his arm.

“All
right,”
he said crossly.

“You rest now, dear Laura.” And then at last they were gone.

One way of handling what Brooks was finding it hard to handle was anger, of course. But Laura knew more than ever that her instinct to keep the family at a distance had some reason in it. Their anguish could only ricochet against her, and she had no wall to protect her from it now.

She was exhausted and tense. No possibility of dozing off. There was too much noise, and the transistor when she tried it for a moment only provided some soupy music, so she lay wide-awake, waiting, and was quite glad to see the intern come in with his pad and pen and sit down in the armchair across the room.

“How old are you, Laura?”

“Sixty.”

While he asked the routine questions, and she answered, Laura took him in: a thin, self-conscious young man with a quaintly long neck and protruding Adam’s apple. There was something seedy about him that Laura found attractive—his tufted eyebrows and small gray eyes behind huge, round glasses made him look a little like a ruffled owl.

Of course the questions had to do only with illness. By the time he was through this young man would know all about her years in the sanatorium, about her hysterectomy, and about her damaged lungs—and that is all he would know. Laura was amazed to discover that she was struggling to make a connection on another level. In a hospital one is reduced to being a body, one’s history is the body’s history, and perhaps that is why something deep inside a person reaches out, a little like a spider trying desperately to find a corner on which to begin to hang a web, the web of personal relations. Yet she had imagined she was through with that, that personal relations had become irrelevant.

“You look as though you could do with a good night’s sleep, doctor.”

“Do I?” He shot her a shy smile. “The thing is, I’m on duty for thirty-six hours, and this is the last hour. It’s been rather busy here.” Then she caught his glance, a personal glance for the first time.

“You’re Dr. Goodwin’s patient.”

“He’s an old family friend. His father was my mother’s doctor.”

“That’s great,” said the young man. “You’re in good hands.”

“I didn’t want to come in here at all, but he persuaded me. I’m dying, of course.” And then as Laura saw the man wince, she asked quickly, “What’s your name?”

“Dr. Edwards. John Edwards.”

“Don’t people often say they’re dying, Dr. Edwards?”

Now a faint smile appeared. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean they are, you know. I’ve seen patients pull through when there didn’t appear to be the slightest hope.”

“The will to live.” Laura gave a deep sigh. “It’s so strange.”

“Built in,” John Edwards said. He got up. “I’m sorry but I must go. I have three more patients to interview.”

Of course to do their work they couldn’t afford to come in contact with a patient’s soul. There was always that out. Laura looked at her watch. Only four, and Jim wouldn’t be here for hours. Better try to settle down. But that was just what she was not going to be permitted to do. A different nurse came in to take a blood sample, and Laura reacted violently to the puncture. She felt outraged that her body, weak as it was, should be attacked in this brutal way.

“Come on, Laura, it’s not that bad,” the nurse said crisply.

“I’m so tired,” Laura said, ashamed of behaving like a child. Tears started in her eyes.

“There—see, it’s all over.”

Laura tried to turn away onto her side and had a violent fit of coughing, the first since she had entered the hospital. In a second the nurse was holding her with evident expertise. Sweat poured down Laura’s cheeks. And then finally it was over.

“I’ve rung for another nurse,” the nurse said as she left.

But no nurse came, and Laura was just as glad. She lay still, feeling her heart thud on inside her. I’m really so ill, she thought, why did Jim have to do this to me?

Then in a few minutes a contraption with two bottles suspended from it was wheeled in.

“What’s that thing?” Laura whispered.

“I.V.”

“Oh.” Laura withdrew deep inside herself while the tube was inserted and the tape taped. This she would have to have out with Jim when he came. But for now, she was not about to watch life seeped into her drop by drop. she turned her head away.

“Perhaps you’d like to be a little lower? Shall I try rolling the bed down?”

“No, thanks. I’m afraid of coughing.”

“Anything else I can do?”

“Move the orange juice so I can reach it.”

It was this lack of imagination that made hospitals such engines of torture, she was thinking. You have orange juice all right, but it is set just out of reach by someone in a hurry who never really puts herself in a patient’s place. A patient is simply a small cog in the machine. Laura had dreaded coming here, but she was amazed at how quickly all the horrors began. Someone across the hall had a soap opera going on TV. She couldn’t catch words, but the continuous intense murmurs prevented rest. Then there were voices, too, people visiting patients in nearby rooms. Why did people always appear to raise their voices when saying good-bys?

Laura turned her head from side to side trying to find a comfortable position. She took a sip of orange juice, and it stayed down.

After that she must have dozed off, for, sensing that someone was looking down at her, she opened her eyes and there was Jim Goodwin.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Jim.”

“You’ve had a little sleep,” he smiled. “That’s quite a feat in this noisy place.”

He pulled up a chair and sat close to the bed. Laura was so glad to see him that she almost forgot about the I.V., but then she saw the transparent tube and the bottles.

“It took some doing to get a private room,” he went on. “You know you can close the door. There’s no law against that.”

“Good,” she murmured. “Close it when you go.”

“Tomorrow you are set for X-rays at nine. We’ll know a little better what is going on when that has been done. And while you’re here we’ll get the lungs drained—that should ease things. I can see you’re having rather a time breathing.”