Katherine Anne Porter (46 page)

She knew she had been asleep for a long time when all at once without even a warning footstep or creak of the door hinge, Adam was in the room turning on the light, and she knew it was he, though at first she was blinded and turned her head away. He came over at once and sat on the side of the bed and
began to talk as if he were going on with something they had been talking about before. He crumpled a square of paper and tossed it in the fireplace.

“You didn’t get my note,” he said. “I left it under the door. I was called back suddenly to camp for a lot of inoculations. They kept me longer than I expected, I was late. I called the office and they told me you were not coming in today. I called Miss Hobbe here and she said you were in bed and couldn’t come to the telephone. Did she give you my message?”

“No,” said Miranda drowsily, “but I think I have been asleep all day. Oh, I do remember. There was a doctor here. Bill sent him. I was at the telephone once, for Bill told me he would send an ambulance and have me taken to the hospital. The doctor tapped my chest and left a prescription and said he would be back, but he hasn’t come.”

“Where is it, the prescription?” asked Adam.

“I don’t know. He left it, though, I saw him.”

Adam moved about searching the tables and the mantelpiece. “Here it is,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I must look for an all-night drug store. It’s after one o’clock. Good-by.”

Good-by, good-by. Miranda watched the door where he had disappeared for quite a while, then closed her eyes, and thought, When I am not here I cannot remember anything about this room where I have lived for nearly a year, except that the curtains are too thin and there was never any way of shutting out the morning light. Miss Hobbe had promised heavier curtains, but they had never appeared. When Miranda in her dressing gown had been at the telephone that morning, Miss Hobbe had passed through, carrying a tray. She was a little red-haired nervously friendly creature, and her manner said all too plainly that the place was not paying and she was on the ragged edge.

“My dear
child,”
she said sharply, with a glance at Miranda’s attire, “what is the matter?”

Miranda, with the receiver to her ear, said, “Influenza, I think.”

“Horrors,”
said Miss Hobbe, in a whisper, and the tray wavered in her hands. “Go back to bed at once. . . go at
once!”

“I must talk to Bill first,” Miranda had told her, and Miss
Hobbe had hurried on and had not returned. Bill had shouted directions at her, promising everything, doctor, nurse, ambulance, hospital, her check every week as usual, everything, but she was to get back to bed and stay there. She dropped into bed, thinking that Bill was the only person she had ever seen who actually tore his own hair when he was excited enough. . . I suppose I should ask to be sent home, she thought, it’s a respectable old custom to inflict your death on the family if you can manage it. No, I’ll stay here, this is my business, but not in this room, I hope. . . l wish I were in the cold mountains in the snow, that’s what I should like best; and all about her rose the measured ranges of the Rockies wearing their perpetual snow, their majestic blue laurels of cloud, chilling her to the bone with their sharp breath. Oh, no, I must have warmth—and her memory turned and roved after another place she had known first and loved best, that now she could see only in drifting fragments of palm and cedar, dark shadows and a sky that warmed without dazzling, as this strange sky had dazzled without warming her; there was the long slow wavering of gray moss in the drowsy oak shade, the spacious hovering of buzzards overhead, the smell of crushed water herbs along a bank, and without warning a broad tranquil river into which flowed all the rivers she had known. The walls shelved away in one deliberate silent movement on either side, and a tall sailing ship was moored near by, with a gangplank weathered to blackness touching the foot of her bed. Back of the ship was jungle, and even as it appeared before her, she knew it was all she had ever read or had been told or felt or thought about jungles; a writhing terribly alive and secret place of death, creeping with tangles of spotted serpents, rainbow-colored birds with malign eyes, leopards with humanly wise faces and extravagantly crested lions; screaming long-armed monkeys tumbling among broad fleshy leaves that glowed with sulphur-colored light and exuded the ichor of death, and rotting trunks of unfamiliar trees sprawled in crawling slime. Without surprise, watching from her pillow, she saw herself run swiftly down this gangplank to the slanting deck, and standing there, she leaned on the rail and waved gaily to herself in bed, and the slender ship spread its wings and sailed away into the jungle. The air trembled with the shattering scream and the hoarse
bellow of voices all crying together, rolling and colliding above her like ragged storm-clouds, and the words became two words only rising and falling and clamoring about her head. Danger, danger, danger, the voices said, and War, war, war. There was her door half open, Adam standing with his hand on the knob, and Miss Hobbe with her face all out of shape with terror was crying shrilly, “I tell you, they must come for her
now
, or I’ll put her on the sidewalk. . . I tell you, this is a plague, a plague, my God, and I’ve got a houseful of people to think about!”

Adam said, “I know that. They’ll come for her tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning, my God, they’d better come now!”

“They can’t get an ambulance,” said Adam, “and there aren’t any beds. And we can’t find a doctor or a nurse. They’re all busy. That’s all there is to it. You stay out of the room, and I’ll look after her.”

“Yes, you’ll look after her, I can see that,” said Miss Hobbe, in a particularly unpleasant tone.

“Yes, that’s what I said,” answered Adam, drily, “and you keep out.”

He closed the door carefully. He was carrying an assortment of misshapen packages, and his face was astonishingly impassive.

“Did you hear that?” be asked, leaning over and speaking very quietly.

“Most of it,” said Miranda, “it’s a nice prospect, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got your medicine,” said Adam, “and you’re to begin with it this minute. She can’t put you out.”

“So it’s really as bad as that,” said Miranda.

“It’s as bad as anything can be,” said Adam, “all the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night—”

“But not one for me,” said Miranda, feeling hilarious and lightheaded. She sat up and beat her pillow into shape and reached for her robe. “I’m glad you’re here, I’ve been having a nightmare. Give me a cigarette, will you, and light one for yourself and open all the windows and sit near one of them. You’re running a risk,” she told him, “don’t you know that? Why do you do it?”

“Never mind,” said Adam, “take your medicine,” and offered her two large cherry-colored pills. She swallowed them promptly and instantly vomited them up.
“Do
excuse me,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I’m so sorry.” Adam without a word and with a very concerned expression washed her face with a wet towel, gave her some cracked ice from one of the packages, and firmly offered her two more pills. “That’s what they always did at home,” she explained to him, “and it worked.” Crushed with humiliation, she put her hands over her face and laughed again, painfully.

“There are two more kinds yet,” said Adam, pulling her hands from her face and lifting her chin. “You’ve hardly begun. And I’ve got other things, like orange juice and ice cream—they told me to feed you ice cream—and coffee in a thermos bottle, and a thermometer. You have to work through the whole lot so you’d better take it easy.”

“This time last night we were dancing,” said Miranda, and drank something from a spoon. Her eyes followed him about the room, as he did things for her with an absent-minded face, like a man alone; now and again he would come back, and slipping his hand under her head, would hold a cup or a tumbler to her mouth, and she drank, and followed him with her eyes again, without a clear notion of what was happening.

“Adam,” she said, “I’ve just thought of something. Maybe they forgot St. Luke’s Hospital. Call the sisters there and ask them not to be so selfish with their silly old rooms. Tell them I only want a very small dark ugly one for three days, or less. Do try them, Adam.”

He believed, apparently, that she was still more or less in her right mind, for she heard him at the telephone explaining in his deliberate voice. He was back again almost at once, saying, “This seems to be my day for getting mixed up with peevish old maids. The sister said that even if they had a room you couldn’t have it without doctor’s orders. But they didn’t have one, anyway. She was pretty sour about it.”

“Well,” said Miranda in a thick voice, “I think that’s abominably rude and mean, don’t you?” She sat up with a wild gesture of both arms, and began to retch again, violently.

“Hold it, as you were,” called Adam, fetching the basin. He held her head, washed her face and hands with ice water, put
her head straight on the pillow, and went over and looked out of the window. “Well,” he said at last, sitting beside her again, “they haven’t got a room. They haven’t got a bed. They haven’t even got a baby crib, the way she talked. So I think that’s straight enough, and we may as well dig in.”

“Isn’t the ambulance coming?”

“Tomorrow, maybe.”

He took off his tunic and hung it on the back of a chair. Kneeling before the fireplace, he began carefully to set kindling sticks in the shape of an Indian tepee, with a little paper in the center for them to lean upon. He lighted this and placed other sticks upon them, and larger bits of wood. When they were going nicely he added still heavier wood, and coal a few lumps at a time, until there was a good blaze, and a fire that would not need rekindling. He rose and dusted his hands together, the fire illuminated him from the back and his hair shone.

“Adam,” said Miranda, “I think you’re very beautiful.” He laughed out at this, and shook his head at her. “What a hell of a word,” he said, “for me.” “It was the first that occurred to me,” she said, drawing up on her elbow to catch the warmth of the blaze. “That’s a good job, that fire.”

He sat on the bed again, dragging up a chair and putting his feet on the rungs. They smiled at each other for the first time since he had come in that night. “How do you feel now?” he asked.

“Better, much better,” she told him. “Let’s talk. Let’s tell each other what we meant to do.”

“You tell me first,” said Adam. “I want to know about you.”

“You’d get the notion I had a very sad life,” she said, “and perhaps it was, but I’d be glad enough to have it now. If I could have it back, it would be easy to be happy about almost anything at all. That’s not true, but that’s the way I feel now.” After a pause, she said, “There’s nothing to tell, after all, if it ends now, for all this time I was getting ready for something that was going to happen later, when the time came. So now it’s nothing much.”

“But it must have been worth having until now, wasn’t it?” he asked seriously as if it were something important to know.

“Not if this is all,” she repeated obstinately.

“Weren’t you ever—happy?” asked Adam, and he was plainly
afraid of the word; he was shy of it as he was of the word
love
, he seemed never to have spoken it before, and was uncertain of its sound or meaning.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I just lived and never thought about it. I remember things I liked, though, and things I hoped for.”

“I was going to be an electrical engineer,” said Adam. He stopped short. “And I shall finish up when I get back,” he added, after a moment.

“Don’t you love being alive?” asked Miranda. “Don’t you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?”

“I love to swim, too,” said Adam.

“So do I,” said Miranda; “we never did swim together.”

“Do you remember any prayers?” she asked him suddenly. “Did you ever learn anything at Sunday School?”

“Not much,” confessed Adam without contrition. “Well, the Lord’s Prayer.”

“Yes, and there’s Hail Mary,” she said, “and the really useful one beginning, I confess to Almighty God and to blessed Mary ever virgin and to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul—”

“Catholic,” he commented.

“Prayers just the same, you big Methodist. I’ll bet you
are
a Methodist.”

“No, Presbyterian.”

“Well, what others do you remember?”

“Now I lay me down to sleep—” said Adam.

“Yes, that one, and Blessed Jesus meek and mild—you see that my religious education wasn’t neglected either. I even know a prayer beginning O Apollo. Want to hear it?”

“No,” said Adam, “you’re making fun.”

“I’m not,” said Miranda, “I’m trying to keep from going to sleep. I’m afraid to go to sleep, I may not wake up. Don’t let me go to sleep, Adam. Do you know Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Bless the bed I lie upon?”

“If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Is that it?” asked Adam. “It doesn’t sound right, somehow.”

“Light me a cigarette, please, and move over and sit near the window. We keep forgetting about fresh air. You must have it.” He lighted the cigarette and held it to her lips. She took it between her fingers and dropped it under the edge of her pillow. He found it and crushed it out in the saucer under the water tumbler. Her head swam in darkness for an instant, cleared, and she sat up in panic, throwing off the covers and breaking into a sweat. Adam leaped up with an alarmed face, and almost at once was holding a cup of hot coffee to her mouth.

“You must have some too,” she told him, quiet again, and they sat huddled together on the edge of the bed, drinking coffee in silence.

Adam said, “You must lie down again. You’re awake now.”

“Let’s sing,” said Miranda. “I know an old spiritual, I can remember some of the words.” She spoke in a natural voice. “I’m fine now.” She began in a hoarse whisper, “‘Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away. . .’ Do you know that song?”