The Deceivers (3 page)

“I would be completely terrified. So go ahead. Be scared a little.”

She smiled at him. “I’m okay now.” And they left. As he followed her out, he thought, You look at your woman from the time she is twenty-three until she is forty, and somewhere along the line you stop being able to see her. You see a face that is dear to you, and a body you love, and you have no idea how she looks to anyone else. I like her tidiness and her gift of laughter. Her face is round and her eyes are gray and her hair is brown and silky. Her waist is slim and her legs are good, and her body is firm and solid. I feel good when I see her across a room. In the beginning it was magical, full of electric excitements, quivering emotional scenes. Now it is all warmth and custom and habit and content. But in the beginning she was a stranger. And now, when I think
of the scalpels and the wound they will make, I feel a horror and a sickness as though it were my own belly they will cut.

She stood by the car while he unlocked the door for her, and then they drove to the hospital and parked in the big lot as the afternoon visitors were leaving at the end of the two-thirty to four visiting hours. He carried her small bag and they went to the admissions office. They gave the information required and he turned over the hospitalization policy. Bernie had reserved a bed in a semi-private room on the third floor, Room 314.

The visitors had left by the time he took her up to her room. The bed was freshly made and turned down. A floor nurse came in and explained the call system. The other bed was rumpled but empty. Just as he was about to leave, a small sallow brunette on aluminum crutches came hobbling in and went over to the bed by the windows. “Welcome to good old 314,” she said. “I’m Rosa Myers and a jerk kid ran a stop sign and busted my hip and cracked my pelvis and I’ve been here nine and a half weeks and you’re my sixth room buddy.”

“I’m Joan Garrett and this is my husband.”

The girl worked herself onto the bed. “Honey, I’m pleased to meet you because I’m happy to have a change. The little old lady who was in that bed was released at noon. She snored ten hours a day and groaned the other ten. By the way, the room service stinks and the food is inedible. Otherwise, you’ll have a ball. What are you in for?”

Carl said, “I better go before I get thrown out. See you at seven, honey.” He kissed her. She seemed distracted, as though already she had gone a little bit apart from him.

He went down the corridor to the self-service elevators. When the elevator door opened, two nurses rolled a bed off the elevator. It contained an unconscious girl of about ten or eleven. There was a flask fastened to a post and a tube taped to her arm. The child’s face was gray and sweaty, and there was a lingering sick-sweet smell of anesthetic.

He rode down on the elevator and when he got off he was facing a panel board of the names of doctors, and a light was blinking beside two of the names. The hospital seemed full of a silent bustling impersonal efficiency. He felt as if there were more things he should have done. Just as he was about to leave, he saw Bernie Madden hurrying down the first floor corridor.

“Bernie!”

“Oh, hi, Carl. Just bring her in?”

“A few minutes ago. She’s a little scared.”

Bernie took him into a small waiting room near the front desk. He was a small man with wide shoulders, cropped black hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a pale face with dark shadow of beard, a look of vitality and controlled energy. “They’re all scared. Perfectly natural. And so are you. And right now you’re hoping I know my business as well as you think I do. Relax, boy. I don’t tell this to my associates, but I’m a pretty sharp operator. And that’s a sort of a pun. We’ll fool around with some tests and I’ve got her scheduled for ten o’clock Tuesday morning. I’ll give her a spinal.”

Carl frowned. “You mean she’ll be conscious?”

“Listen, she’ll be so full of joy juice, she won’t mind a thing. I wish they were all as easy as this one is going to be. Joanie is as healthy as a horse.” Bernie punched him lightly on the shoulder. “You run along and leave everything to Uncle Bernie Madden.”

He went out and got into the car and drove back to the house, pulling into the car port to park beside Joan’s elderly and moody Hillman. It was five o’clock when he let himself into the house. He stood in the kitchen and listened to the silence. The refrigerator made a subdued whirring. The electric clock on the kitchen wall had started the habit of whining a few months back. When you rapped it briskly, the whining stopped. He rapped it.

And he said aloud, “Welcome home, ole Carl.”

His voice had a hollow sound in the house, and his footsteps seemed loud, and he heard creaks in the hardwood boards of the floor that he had not noticed before.

In less than two hours he could head back to the hospital, and he would see her again tomorrow evening, and when there would be the longest wait of all, until he could talk to Bernie after the operation.

He left the hospital for the second time that Sunday at eight-thirty when the visiting hours ended. When he had arrived at a few minutes after seven, the Gray Lady at the temporary desk in the lobby had told him Mrs. Garrett already had two visitors, and patients were only allowed two at a time. He told her that he was Mr. Garrett and she told him somewhat dubiously that he could go up provided he sent one of the other visitors out into the hall.

He heard and recognized Al Washburn’s hearty and appalling laugh the moment he stepped off the elevator. Joan’s room was only a few doors from the elevator foyer. Al and Jen Washburn were there, and Jen had brought a vase of cut flowers from their garden. Al was the general agent for a large insurance company and the Washburns had moved onto Barrow Lane at Crescent Ridge just a few weeks after the Garretts. The two couples had been reasonably friendly during the five years, drawn together by the bond of being “early settlers.” And Carl had served with Al on the board of the Crescent Ridge Association when it was first formed.

The bed of Rosa Myers was crumpled and empty. Jen sat on the foot of Joan’s bed. Jen was an arid looking, withered blonde with a great deal of spurious animation in her face, a shrill voice, a great many large dead-white teeth. Carl had never before realized quite how much noise the Washburns created. He hoped they’d have the sense to stay away when Joan was feeling wretched.

Joan’s bed was cranked up at the head and she was wearing a bed jacket with small blue flowers embroidered on it. She was smiling, but she looked pale under her summer tan, and rather worn. He greeted the Washburns and bent over and kissed Joan, and admired the flowers. After some of the casual and pointless conversation that occurs in all hospital rooms, Al Washburn tugged Carl out into the hall and said, “Fella, we’re going to run into some trouble with the town supervisors again. Now I know you’re not on the board any longer, but we’re going to need the benefit of your advice.”

“What now?” Carl asked, feeling curiously weary. “The school thing again?”

The year after they had moved to Crescent Ridge, Carl had put in a great deal of discouraging time as chairman of the committee empowered to work out some sort of agreement with the near-by village of Scottsville. He had shown, through projected tax tables, that it would be of benefit to both Scottsville and Crescent Ridge to enlarge the town boundaries to include the entire development. But the village residents were afraid of being gobbled up by the large housing development, and the people of Crescent Ridge were afraid of town taxes. So he had worked out a compromise scheme whereby the children of Crescent Ridge could attend the town school a mile away by paying fifty dollars a school year, or, if the parents preferred, the kids could attend, free of charge, the large County Central School, ten miles away.

“The school thing again,” Al said dolefully. “Now the fifty bucks isn’t enough. It should be a hundred, they say. They got to enlarge the town schools. They want to pay the teachers more. By count, two hundred and twenty-one of our kids went to the town schools last year.”

“Including yours and mine.”

“Will you do some thinking on it and come and talk to the board a week from tomorrow night?”

“You already know what I’ll come up with.”

“Do I?”

“Yes you do, Al, and you know it’s an unpopular point of view so you’d rather have Carl Garrett do it than Al Washburn, everybody’s buddy.” He had spoken more sharply than he intended.

Washburn’s large red face turned slightly darker. “Don’t get so hot, boy.”

“We’ve got over fifteen hundred population. We’ve got the land set aside for our own school. We get inadequate police protection from the state and the county. Running the water and sewer system on an assessment basis is clumsy. Snow removal on a volunteer basis just doesn’t work. And it’s damn well time we petitioned the state legislature and became an incorporated municipality, Al, and you know it.”

“But Jesus, Carl, the people came out here to avoid city taxes.”

“And they want just as many services as they got in the city, and nothing comes for free. Scottsville won’t play, and
that’s a stupid reaction on their part. If you want me to come and be unpopular, okay. I’ll do it.”

Al beamed at him. “Wonderful! And look, put it in writing so you can read it and then leave a copy with the secretary.”

“When we become an incorporated municipality, you’ll be mayor, Al.”

“If elected, I will serve. Say, Joanie seems in pretty good spirits. Jen says this is a female type operation. Bernie Madden is tops. You haven’t got a thing to worry about.”

After the Washburns left, Carl had a few minutes with Joan alone. “What are they doing to you, honey?”

“Castor oil is what they’re doing to me, dammit. Hand me my robe, please, dear. I’ll be right back.”

While he sat in the chair by the bed, waiting, Rosa Myers came back in on her crutches and gave him a wry grin and hitched herself into bed. “You got a good gal there, Mr. Garrett.”

“Thanks.”

“In between her little jaunts down the hall, we’ve been trading life histories. I’ve seen her in the store a couple of times. I’m an assistant buyer at Gliddens. Sportswear. At least I was before that yuk bounced me into the air.”

Joan came back and got into bed and Carl hung up her robe. She looked slightly wan. “Rosa calls this the Memorial two-step,” she said, and she looked beyond him toward the door and smiled widely and he turned and saw Cindy Cable come in.

Bucky and Cindy Cable were the younger couple who lived next door to them on Barrow Lane. Bucky, christened Gilbert, was an energetic and successful salesman of industrial abrasives and solvents, covering five states with the aid of a private Beechcraft he kept at the Hillton Airport. Cindy, christened Cynthia, was a tall girl of about twenty-six with dark blond hair, long hair that she wore alternately in a pony tail, or a bun at the nape of her neck, or piled high. Her cheekbones were high, cheeks delicately hollow, gray-blue eyes set wide, mouth wide and soft, with a not unattractive hint of petulance. She moved slowly, and held herself well. They had two small children, Bobby who was four and Bitsy who was two.

When the Garretts had first moved to Crescent Ridge, they had been most unhappy about the neighbors who moved into the new house next door. They were a couple in their middle years named Riker. He was a C.P.A. in Hillton. They had no
children. In the beginning there was a period of superficial friendliness between the two families. But it ended with a bitter boundary dispute over the location of a small red maple Carl had brought home from Hillton and planted on the western border of his lot line. When it was proven, by a surveyor, that one half the slender trunk was on the Rikers’ land, Mr. Riker said that unless it was transplanted, he would cut it down. The tree did not survive the second transplanting. Then the Garrett children were caught racing across the Riker lawn, and there was a full-scale scene about that.

They were still nodding coldly at each other when they met, but it ended with great finality on a Halloween night when Riker, ashen and trembling with an almost ungovernable rage, hammered on the Garrett front door at ten o’clock, demanding that “your brat kids be thrashed in my presence, or I will go to the law.”

Someone had soundly plastered the Riker front door and picture window with elderly eggs. Carl had tried to retain some semblance of amicable relations up to that point. But both Kip and Nancy were at a party at the school and had been there the entire evening, and Joan had driven out a few minutes before to go pick them up.

Carl had rarely been as angry. He put his hand against Riker’s gaunt chest and walked him backward out into the darkness and chill of the front yard. As Riker gasped in outrage, Carl said, “My kids have been away all evening at school. You can consider the rotten eggs as a gesture of opinion of the entire community here. You are ridiculous, petty, half-crazed people who don’t belong here, and never will. I don’t want any further contact with you in any way. Now get off my property.” He walked trembling into the house and slammed the door.

A year later Riker was hospitalized for a serious ulcer condition and failed to survive the operation. The house went on the market. The Cables bought it. The Riker episode had made the Garretts gun shy, and so it was several months before they went beyond normal politeness. Cindy, to Carl, was the tall young woman next door who was as thoroughly pregnant as anyone he had ever seen. After the baby was born, the Garretts began to run into the Cables at neighborhood parties when Bucky was in town.

The new couple was measured in the eyes of the community. Bucky was a nice guy. His wife was a character. The reason for the designations was most simple. Bucky was intent,
uncomplicated, friendly as any pup. But Cindy was quiet and watchful, and when she expressed an opinion, it was uniquely her own. She had an offbeat mind, a great deal of skepticism, and she could be appallingly frank.

Soon the four of them were warm friends, in spite of the difference in ages. It was one of those rare and pleasant situations where everybody in the foursome liked everybody else and enjoyed being with them. Cindy and Joan were forever wandering into each other’s houses during the day. Bucky and Carl assisted each other on their do-it-yourself projects, trading monstrous insults.