All the Little Live Things (35 page)

Crisis turned out to be like the smell of tarweed. By the time you realized you were smelling it, you had been smelling it a long time.

That realization came to us only a few days after the Peck blowup, when we stopped in and found Marian not outside, not reading, not tidying up the details of her life, but flat in her bed, and nauseated.

It was shocking to see her down: I had the instant conviction that I would never see her up again. The thinness that had always roused protective feelings in us had taken a sudden change and become emaciation. The face that tried to smile and reassure us through spasms of nausea was for the first time weary and pathetic. None of it was new. We had simply not noted the stages of her deterioration, despite our watchfulness. It dawned on us that for days, a week, maybe two weeks, Ruth had had trouble making anything that would tempt her appetite. She found her invalid delicacies untouched on the tray or in the refrigerator. Appetite, attentiveness, the performance of little duties, had all been growing more forced. Now suddenly she was a woman sick to death.

John was not at home-he had taken Debby to school and gone on to a meeting at the university. The place was ours, dismay and all. Ruth sent me out while she got Marian comfortable and tidied the bedroom. Outside, I stacked a lot of the wood that John and Debby had been so assiduously making, and I raked up the front yard and burned a pile of leaves.

Later I went inside, out of the nostalgic sad autumnal smell of leaf smoke, and talked a few minutes to the girl propped in bed with her hair in pigtails. Despite the nausea, her eyes were extraordinarily bright. I thought she looked at me with the soft intensity, the tenderness, that I had seen in the eyes of too many people dying of cancer-the look that says how lovely are the shapes and colors of life and how dear the faces of friends, how desirable it all is, how soon to be lost.

Because she had watched her downward progress more knowingly than we had, she knew what the nausea meant. She had discussed it all with her doctor in advance, and as usual had made preparations. Though she insisted she would not take drugs if pain came upon her, she had no objection to intravenous feeding, for that would keep her stronger for the baby. John, she said, would take her to the clinic that afternoon, and they would see if they couldn’t find a practical nurse, someone who could give her the feeding at home. She would not go to the hospital, not so long before the baby was due. It would, she implied but did not say, be a fatal omen. When you went to the hospital in cases like hers, you were already dead, you lost your identity as a person, you became a case, a sickness, an obligation or an anxiety only. She knew very well she would not survive three or four weeks of the hospital. To go there this early would be to go defeated.

Nevertheless, they took her there that evening. John joined with the doctor to overrule her. But at the end of three days they brought her back again, shakily triumphant, and looking better for the three days of care. A nurse was with her, a large white-nylon person with upper arms as big around as Marian’s waist. I heard her name a hundred times while she was there; I can’t remember it now to save my life.

But coming home did not restore Marian to what she had been before. There was now no pretense that she was simply resting and would soon be up and around. The needle taped into her thin captive arm, the bulky figure in white nylon, were temporary, yes, but not in that way. What is more, the nurse’s coming shut us out of most of the comforting chores we had formerly done, and gave us in exchange only sickroom visits, stiff and awkward and tainted with false cheerfulness.

Ours, not Marian’s. She had no need of false cheerfulness. She simply opposed her will to the sickness and deflected it. Now that she had made it home, she had not a doubt that she would live to bear the child. Strengthened by the drip of maltose into her blood stream, she might even manage a normal birth. With laughter in her throat and tears in her eyes she told about meeting, on a visit to the clinic a couple of weeks before, the wife of one of John’s colleagues who, seeing her obviously pregnant, had wanted to give her a baby shower. “She was kind,” Marian said. “She meant only the friendliest. But it made me laugh, it was so sort of ... orthodox.”

Never with the lamp turned down, never with her mind or her resolution clouded. Whatever darkness she looked into when she was alone, or alone with John, never left the slightest shadow on her face. Yet we became gradually aware of some change of expression, a change that we might have thought the flicker of response to some thought until one afternoon, sitting with her while the nurse took a walk, I realized that Marian had stopped what she was saying. Her legs stirred under the spread. The grimace, the sickroom tic, the shadow of a thought, whatever it was, passed plainly across her face.

Across the bed, stiff and sudden, Ruth leaned forward in her chair. “Pain?”

Marian’s half-closed eyes cleared, the grimace became a smile. She nodded.

“Which?”

“Which?”

“Labor, or ... the other?”

“Ah,” said Marian disgustedly, “I wish it was labor!”

“How long?”

“The last few days. It’s not too bad, just twinges.” .

“Marian, you’ve got to let them give you something for it!”

But she shook her head, stubborn and intractable. She set her will against the pain as she had set it against time and malignancy. She did her best to ignore it. She held on. She held out.

But it must have made her desperate, as it made us grim, for it told her how little time she had. Death and life grew in her at an equal pace, the race would be down to the wire. And of all the things she might have ,feared, she feared pain worst, because it might obliterate in animal agony the last great experience.

John and her doctor both told her-and John told us -that they would not let her endure too much pain, they would give her drugs whether she agreed or not. She hadn’t much choice: either pain or drugs would blur the climax she had set her whole strength toward. So she willed her pain small, she denied its capacity to hurt her. And who of us could tell whether she managed to make it small, or whether she only forced herself to bear more than she could?

A bleating nuisance, unable to bear her bearing of her pain, I called her doctor and asked if she could not have a Caesarean immediately. Why shouldn’t she have the satisfaction of bringing forth that hard-won baby, seeing it, handling it, assuring herself that it was normal and warm? Then she could let go.

He told me she couldn’t possibly stand an operation. She wouldn’t live to know whether she had borne the child or not. No doctor, certainly not himself, would perform any such operation except as a last-ditch measure to save the child. The baby, he told me, was safe as long as Marian was.

“Which is not long,” I said.

“No,” said his dry controlled voice (Why does one so hate those who must keep their heads in human and feeling situations?), “no, it’s a great pity.”

A pity.

That was the afternoon when Tom Weld drove his caterpillar across the tottering bridge and began tearing great wounds in the hill. We saw him as we walked slowly home from our afternoon visit, and full of the bitterness of being able to do not one thing for Marian, we took refuge in fury at that barebacked Neanderthal and his brutish machine. I associated his mutilation of the hill with the mutilations that Marian had suffered and was still to suffer, and I hated Weld so passionately that I shook. He was a born ugliness-maker, and he was irresistible and inescapable. We couldn’t move our hill or turn our house the other way; and we could no more resist the laws of property, the permit of the planning commission, and the Weldian notion that mutilation was progress, than we could stop the malignant cells from metastasizing through Marian’s blood stream.

For a long time that evening we sat on the terrace, while the swallows and later the bats sewed the darkening air together over the oaks, and the crude gouge that would become a road faded into dusk, then dark. The white surveyors’ stakes swam and were lost in granular obscurity. The night air was strong with the scent of tarweed, mixed now with the half-sour smell of broken adobe.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I don’t mind getting old. I wish it would hurry up. The other day I read something in Crèvecoeur’s
Letters from an American Farmer
that said it all: ‘Sometimes my heart grows tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids.”

“Marian would read you a lecture if you said that to her,” Ruth said. “Though you couldn’t blame her if she felt that way herself, poor child. I suppose we ought to wish it would come soon.”

“What I wish is that she’d give up that baby and start taking some sort of treatment and give herself a chance.”

“It’s much too late. You mustn’t kid yourself.”

“I guess not,” I said.
“She
never has.”

We sat on in silence, and as we sat a soft darkness moved against the sky’s darkness, and soundlessly an owl had settled in the oak almost level with our eyes. I could just see his outline, a Halloween cutout, on the branch. For several minutes he sat there, utterly noiseless, and then he was gone.

“What was that, a bloody omen?” I said.

“Oh, Joe, stop it! You’re only making it worse.”

“It couldn’t be worse.”

She stood up with a rustle of impatience. Then after a few seconds her hand came under my arm, and I put my own arm around her. “We’ll have to do our outside living in the patio now,” she said. “I don’t think I could bear to watch what he’ll be doing over there.”

“What?”

“That’s the way the military reports defeats. ‘Our troops have taken up new positions.’ Life is one new position after another.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“Like what? Intelligence doesn’t help, foresight doesn’t help, determination doesn’t help, courage doesn’t help, grace doesn’t help. If any of them did, Marian wouldn’t be where she is.”

It was too dark for me to see Ruth’s face, but I could tell from the outline of her head that she was looking at me directly and hard. “But she hasn’t given up,” she said.

Ruth has her own variety of toughness. She is rawhide where Marian was some kind of light, strong metal. “All right,” I said at last. “Tomorrow we’ll take up our new positions.”

We went around to the patio side and stood. It was so still that I heard the hollow rush and murmur of traffic from the choked highways of the valley. Over that way the sky was reddened, but in the other direction the hills were dark and whole. A star looked up at us from the bottomless black pool.

“It isn’t as if he could ruin everything,” Ruth said. “This side is getting lovely as the planting grows up. Lots of people don’t have a tenth as much.”

“No.”

“And we won’t get any dust over here.”

“No.”

I breathed in deeply, wanting as much as she did to take pleasure in the calm night and the peaceful patio and the oil-black pool with the splintered star in it. But aromatic tarweed flooded my nose, mouth, head, and heart, and away off in the hills, miles away it seemed, but clear as a bugle, we heard the frenzied, cracking voices of hunting hounds.

Our visit to Marian next day was brief, no more than ten minutes. The nurse did not want us there at all. Every move she made as she checked the jar on its stand, or the taped arm, or as she stood, a thick white disapproval, in the doorway, told us that. Marian tried. She asked about Catarrh, who had got clawed up in a fight with a wild tom. But her attempt at a smile would hold no more firmly than her attempt at interest; her eyes full of affectionate tenderness would cloud, her body would stir with insistent pain, her whole presence would retreat across an uncrossable gap. It seemed that she had shrunk in the bed, all but her mounded abdomen. Her skin was yellow, and when we kissed her she was clammy to our lips.

Our cheerful noises died in our mouths. Twice we watched her attention twist inward in spite of her attempt to hold it on us. But at the end, when we took her hands and kissed them and tiptoed to the door with a furtive sickroom guiltiness, she summoned her full smile. It blazed at us, burning through pain and everything else. “Bless you,” she said. “Bless you both. I like to think you’re my father and mother sent back to me.” The nurse closed the door.

In the living room John had just hung up the telephone. Weakly we said, “Isn’t it time? Shouldn’t she be taken in? If the doctor was here, wouldn’t he insist on a hypo?”

“We’re waiting for Debby to get home,” John said. “She won’t go while Debby’s away.”

“Couldn’t I go and get her out early?”

The look he gave me was almost ugly. A man so robust as John has really no way of showing anxiety. Where another man might sag or stumble, grow haggard under the eyes, appear with mussed hair or wrinkled clothes, he simply couldn’t help his coordination and his muscular health. His tan was intact, his virile crewcut bristled. But still his look had an ugly, fleering quality, and he said, “That would make it special. It mustn’t be special. It’s got to be as casual as Tuesday afternoon.”

It was I who stumbled and stammered, overcome by the fear that neither he nor anyone else had made any preparations. “But she is going in today? What about a room—is there a chance she couldn’t get one? Shouldn’t we ... ?”

“The doctor’s holding a room,” John said. “The nurse has orders to give her a hypo if it gets too bad. We’re only waiting for Debby.”

“John,” I said, “we don’t want to be in the road, God knows. But you know how we feel about her. Can we do anything? Drive you in?”

With his arms around us both he moved us to the door. “Of course,” he said. “Yes, that would be a help. I’ll call you.”

A smile, a pressure on the shoulders, and we were outside, simultaneously accepted for service and shut away from the intimate trouble that had room only for the family and the nurse.