The Oriental Wife (23 page)

Here in New Haven he had many fewer visitors; it was too far for people to come. A Yale oncologist had dropped by once, to discuss Rolf’s plans for a liaison between Grace and the local hospital’s oncology unit, but it had been an especially bad day, a day when he could not finish his sentences or stop himself from grimacing. The man had not come again.

So there were only the two women. Connie came almost every day, keeping up a steady stream of jokes, mostly about his supposed malingering: how he was just trying to get out of work, or make people fuss over him. She liked to make this point in front of the nurses, who responded with varying degrees of warmth when she told them how he was really faking it, he just wanted all the pretty girls to pay attention to him. Once they had left the room, she would tell him triumphantly that she knew how to get around these people; what sourpusses the nurses in that place were, she said, but she lightened them up. Then she would report her comeback to the boy in the Pathmark that morning, when he told her they’d run out of the salami for which she had a coupon, or what she had said to the hairdresser, or the man at the gas station, all these remarks being of a jocular nature. It had been many, many years since she had shown him this convivial side of herself; it reminded him of those early mornings at the office off Union Square—the head-tossing, oddly childlike
woman who had so bewildered and moved him. But after a while, offended by his lack of response, she always reverted to the bitter, aggrieved wife, full of sarcasm and wounded feeling. If he didn’t appreciate her, at least other people did; if he didn’t want her around, she’d be happy to go elsewhere, thank you very much. “If you want the truth, the smell in here is enough to make me sick.”

Then there was Emma, who arrived, every time, like a messenger from the battlefield—charging in, shaking the snow from her boots, beginning at once to tell him about some encounter she’d had on the train, or some article she’d read in the
Times
during her journey—only to divest herself, seemingly, of her vehement energy along with her coat, until silence threatened. He could feel her waiting for something, some show of emotion, perhaps, that he could not make. And so he would summon out of his weariness carefully composed questions about the work she was doing, the situation in Cambodia, nodding gravely at her answers, feeling her watchfulness turn to resentment, the accusation always there just under the surface. At times he felt like a great white hunter, fending off an angry lion with only the power of his gaze.

He had told her she needn’t come so often, she mustn’t keep taking time off from her job, but she always protested, with a kind of strangled fierceness, that she wanted to be there, “unless you’d rather I didn’t come.” No, no, he said, as waves of fatigue washed over him, of course he was delighted to see her.

They exhausted him, both of them.

O
n the first Saturday in April, they made a full circuit of the park; spring had come early that year, the maple tree had already lost its first young green and was settling into its summer color. As they reached their bench, there were two boys standing in front of it, shouting in Spanish; one of them gave the other a push in the chest, flinging him backward, but he recovered quickly and went chasing the first one over a flowerbed and across the grass. “Don’t worry about them, they’re just kids,” Emma said. “Just young punks.” It was the first time she had spoken since they left the house.

A minute later she launched into a story about a Jehovah’s Witness who had knocked on her door and tried to give her some pamphlets about God’s kingdom; when Emma, trying to get rid of her, had told her she didn’t believe in heaven, the woman had said, “Face it, honey, if this is the only world we get, somebody has played a pretty mean trick on us.” “The thing is,” Emma said with a little laugh, “I sort of agreed with her.” Then she fell silent again. The two boys came running back into view, in high spirits now, breaking stride to jump up and snatch at leaves on low branches. Emma stared after them.

“The radiation didn’t work,” she said. “They want to cut off his leg, they say if they amputate they can get all the cancer.” The boys disappeared again, behind a clump of trees.
“Resorting to old-fashioned methods,” Emma went on, trying, Louisa knew, for the wryly mocking voice they always used in discussing Louisa’s own disasters. When she had fallen in the street that time, and the emergency room doctor had set her bad arm so that she could not lower it at all, Emma had said in just that voice that she certainly had a curious relationship with the medical profession. But now she could not bring it off.

Louisa stared blindly at the flowerbed, full of mangy daffodils, their leaves jagged where something had eaten away at them. She could feel the tears on her cheeks, and dreaded Emma demanding the Kleenex from her pocket and wiping them brusquely away. Instead, Emma took her good hand from her lap and held it. But she did not say he was going to be all right.

“So that one will be a rich widow,” Mrs. Rafferty said that night. Louisa had told her about Rolf’s illness as they were eating dinner. Once, Mrs. Rafferty had made stews and meatballs and apple brown Betty, but that was when the house was full. Now that it was only herself and Louisa, she prepared omelets for them, or they made do with Campbell’s soup and fruit-flavored yogurt out of tubs. Tonight it was franks and beans. Mrs. Rafferty, radiating discontent, had cut Louisa’s food into little pieces for her, and then urged her to eat up. Her niece had been expected to come the following day, but she had phoned earlier and claimed to have the flu—Mrs. Rafferty had known she was pretending, she said, from the phony way she coughed down the phone. “Your daughter had something private to discuss with you today, did she?” she asked, as she was sawing away at the hot dogs. It was then that Louisa told her about Rolf.

All those years ago, when Rolf had asked Louisa to go to Nevada and get a divorce (the only grounds acceptable in New York was adultery, and he did not want Emma to hear, some day, that he had been found in a hotel room with a prostitute), Mrs. Rafferty had told her she was a fool to go along with it. There must be another woman, she said, there was no other explanation for his wanting a divorce. Louisa had scorned this idea. “You don’t know him, you can’t understand what an honorable man he is.”

And she had believed that all through the six nightmarish weeks in Reno, when for hours at a time she could do nothing but lie on her back in the boxy hotel room, with its garish purple walls, like someone with a broken spine. There had been a woman in the next room, younger than herself, a pretty little brunette, whose sobs came through the wall night after night, but she, Louisa, had made not a sound. And then Otto had come, poor Otto, and shouted about Rolf, while she stared at him, bewildered, because it hardly seemed by then that her present paralysis, the state of dumb suffering she had been reduced to, could be related to anything as specific as what Rolf had done or not done. It was more as though some final, irrefutable knowledge had been visited on her, of the bleakness that lay at the bottom of everything. Rolf was as remote to her as the traffic noises outside her window, as the fat waitress in the hotel coffee shop.

But of course Mrs. Rafferty had been right. Even after all this time, if she was feeling more than ordinarily dissatisfied with life, she sometimes reverted to the subject of Rolf’s betrayal, while Louisa kept her eyes on her plate and chewed in silence.

Tonight, though, it was Connie Mrs. Rafferty wanted to talk about. She had met her when she accompanied Louisa to Sophie Joseftal’s funeral, twelve years before, and Connie had come up to them, sighing, and reminisced about a visit Sophie had paid to the house in Connecticut, how she had admired the view from the living room and the Royal Worcester coffee service and said that was really gracious living. Nothing but trash, was Mrs. Rafferty’s verdict, which she repeated now: never mind the airs Connie gave herself, and the fur coat and the diamonds. “I expect she’ll be well looked after when he goes,” she said darkly. “She’ll have made sure of that. And what about you? What kind of provisions has he made for you? You’d better find out soon.”

“I can’t ask him about money right now.”

“Suit yourself, then,” Mrs. Rafferty said disagreeably. “I was only thinking of you.”

In fact Louisa got a letter from him the following week, a typed one, as always, on office stationery, with his secretary’s initials next to his own beneath his signature. He wanted her to know, he said, that whatever happened to him in the coming months—and he had the utmost confidence in his doctors, they were fine men as well as very able practitioners—she would be provided for. There was not only a small life insurance policy in her name, but a pension the company would provide. He did not expect that any of these arrangements would need to come into effect just yet, but he thought she should know that, should they be necessary, she would be taken care of. He hoped she was well, he said, and that she would have a pleasant summer.

She wished, as she so often had lately, that she could talk to Sophie. It had been unthinkable that Gustav would outlive her, with his weak heart, his bad color, the tremor in his hands. But it was Sophie who died, very suddenly, of a stroke.

She used to visit once a week, always on a Wednesday—Sophie never changed to the point where she ceased adhering to a schedule, even if she had softened in other ways—bearing a plain yellow cake and a small bag of sugared almonds. She would glue together a cup that Louisa had broken, or sew a button on Louisa’s coat, biting off the thread with a satisfying snap when she was done. Nothing in Sophie’s manner, as she carried out these repairs, suggested that they were acts of charity. It seemed part of her pleasure in the visit to be stitching away while they chatted about the day’s news, or Emma, or what Sophie’s children were up to, with music playing on the radio. Only on those Wednesdays when Sophie was there had listening to music felt safe to Louisa back then. Then Sophie had died, and Gustav had gone to live with their son and his family in Ohio, where he survived for another ten years.

If Sophie had been there Louisa could tell her the things she was remembering now, about Rolf. But maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe they would only sit listening to Schubert or Brahms or Verdi’s Requiem on QXR, and talk about their children. After Sophie died she had gradually trained herself to listen to music on her own again. But nowadays even Hindemith could bring her to the verge of tears.

In his private room, back in the local hospital, the little candy stripers came with their carts laden with candy bars and
chewing gum and magazines, their shining hair tied in glossy ribbons for hygiene. The paintings on the wall were of sunsets over hayfields, or children building sand castles. But in the night, when he could not sleep, he seemed to smell the rot in his body; sometimes the stench made him drag himself out of bed to open a window. The night nurses came and scolded him for not having called them to do it.

There was one in particular he liked, a stocky diffident young woman with an air of gravity he found touching. Sharon was her name, and unlike the others she never joked with him or made perky small talk. She would listen to his breathing from the doorway, ready to move on if she judged him to be sleeping, but more often she found him wakeful, and entered to take his readings, with a surprising delicacy of touch. She was the one person whose presence he found soothing.

On the night before the operation, she came to his room at the start of her shift, to see if there was anything he wanted. He was fine, he told her; he had been very well looked after all day.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Then I’d better go check on the others. Mrs. Michaels, that’s the woman next door, she always wants to be turned over. And she weighs a lot.”

The third time she appeared, she opened the curtains—so he could look at the moon, she said. “See? It’s almost full.” She stood there watching it for a minute. Then she asked, “Are you scared?”

“I don’t think so. More squeamish than frightened.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“It’s just that I can’t imagine it. Knowing I’d wake up and there’d be part of me missing. I’d almost rather it just happened, and I didn’t have to know.”

“You’re a lot younger than I am. It would be different for you.”

“I guess so. But I think it’s because you’re from Europe too. You are, aren’t you?”

“Yes. From Germany.”

“So you might be more used to terrible things happening, you know?”

Just then the buzzer sounded at the nurses’ station. “I bet that’s Mrs. Michaels again,” she said. “I’ve already turned her over three times. She’s got lumps everywhere. Do you think you could sleep a little?”

“I’ll try.”

“You really should. But if you can’t, and you want anything, you’ll ring the bell, won’t you.”

Of course, he said.

“No you won’t. But I mean it. Even if you just felt like talking.”

He supposed there must be people who poured out their secrets to her at such times, with the room half dark, and the time drawing near for the surgery. What could he tell her? How, when he was lying in that other hospital, sick from the radiation, falling in and out of fevers, he had started remembering things, remembering being something he had not done for years? The arrangements for sending oncology residents from Yale to do a rotation in the local facility had been turned over to someone else; he was no longer part of anyone’s plans for the future, and though he still tried, as hard as he could, to
keep his mind busy with thoughts of the projects he had set in motion, the past kept breaking into his dreams.

Sometimes the memories that returned to him—snow on mountains, disturbances of light—were not even his own. Those vast receding vistas of high peaks must be out west, yet he had never, after all, gotten to the Rockies. Those scenes that came to him at night were from his childhood fantasies, or else the ones Louisa had described, on the day they’d gone to Bear Mountain.