Tornado Pratt (9 page)

She lost fifteen pounds in weight. She was like a little girl with big eyes. I got Ezra to find out who was the best surgeon in America and then I flew to New York and offered him a huge sum of money to operate on Nat. That doctor turned out to be a communist and would not put Nat forwards even for any amount of money. So then I came at him with:

“Okay, Doc, don’t do it for money. I won’t pay you a thing. But I’m still asking you to fly back with me to Chicago and operate. I tell you why. I’ll give away all my money to the poor. I’ll be a poor man myself for the rest of my life. I give you my word. What I’m asking you now, Doc, is to operate on my wife, not because I pay you more than others and not because I have any claim on a man with your beliefs but just because I love her so much. I promise you this, Doc, there is no one on your waiting list who loves anyone as much as I love my Nat. There just couldn’t be.”

And he came, Horace, and he operated on Nat. The operation was a success but he had to cut away half her stomach. And from then on Nat had great trouble with her digestion. She put on a little weight, not much. I took her travelling to find the best climate for her and we were happy in Australia for a while.

About two years later, she began to deteriorate and I took her back to Ezra in Chicago. This time he diagnosed cancer of the liver. And this time it was inoperable. There was only one place where there was any hope, a hospital in Milwaukee where some doctor had invented a method of treating cancer with a special drug and heat. Ezra said it was the best bet. I asked him:

“Will she be cured, Chuck?”

“It’s possible, Tornado. The body is a wondrous thing. But it would be safer for you to assume she won’t be.”

It took her nine months to die, Horace. At first she seemed to respond to the heat treatment and, after about three months, the doctor said we could go for a drive in the country. We had a terrific day, Horace. It was early spring and the woods were sprouting. After lunch, we decided to take a walk. The nurse had said we should take it very easy but Nat felt so well she persuaded me we should walk. It was one of those days which are still dank from winter but across which, every so often, waft intoxicating hints of
spring. These whisked us back to the cliffs of Devon and the pine trails of Carolina. Hand in hand, we cantered down a hill and ahead saw a longish trail winding up through maple woods. I said:

“We’ve got to reach the top, Nat.”

She looked sceptical.

“I’ll never make it, Titch.”

For answer, Horace, I whinnied and crouched down and when Nat had climbed aboard I went bounding up the trail with her on my back. It was a pretty big effort, even for me, but in the end I staggered out of the maple wood and there, Horace, the
countryside
fell away beneath us into a little gully with a stream and then into forest and meadow land which rolled away to the horizon. It was one of the finest views I ever saw, Horace, and Nat, still mounted on my back, gasped. I put her down, Horace, and we settled ourselves in a little hollow, half full of dry leaves, that commanded that amazing view and there we had our last true talk. I began:

“What do you say, honey, shall we build us a house here?”

“Titch, I think I’m going to die.”

When she said this, Horace, so calm and matter-of-fact, anguish welled up in me and I just gulped and moaned: “oh no—oh no”—shaking my head from side to side. She put out her arm, Horace, and pulled me down against her, my head against her breast, as if I was the afflicted one.

“Oh Titch, I am sorry. I don’t want to leave you. I’d like to be with you and look after you until you’re old—but we have to face facts, Titch.”

I could hardly speak but just gasped: “Why?”

“There isn’t much sense in this world, Titch. I realized that when I was quite young. The universe hasn’t got much concern for people, Titch.”

“It’ll kill me. I can’t stand it—I can’t go on.”

“I’ll be with you, Titch. My love will—because love is never destroyed in the world. We’ve had eight years, Titch, and that’s the same fraction of eternity as a lifetime.”

“Nat—this afternoon I had to carry you some, but you’re stronger than you have been. You could be getting better.”

She smiled and stroked my cheek.

“You never know, Titch.”

I had to ask her, Horace.

“Do you want to go home?”

“To England? Oddly enough, not in the least. I suppose it’s
because you’re my home now. Tornado. Mark you, I will want to see Daddy. You’ll send for him won’t you—in good time?”

She was serene, Horace, and she diffused that serenity through me. In the late afternoon, we walked slowly back through the maple wood to the car but when we reached it, Nat surprised me. I was about to help her in when she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me fiercely. I exclaimed:

“Nat. My love! My dear—what is it?”

And I felt the cool wet of her tears on my neck then, Horace, as she shook me slightly with her arms and begged:

“Don’t forget me, Titch—ever—ever—”

I think that’s how it was, Horace, but I’m not one hundred per cent sure. I know we had one day in the country before she began to deteriorate but it’s possible it wasn’t a fine day but a foggy day or a rainy day. There may even have been a blizzard gusting. I’m not even certain we entered a maple wood although I distinctly remember carrying Nat on my back. Trouble is there was this book I once read which had a girl in it who was dying and her guy carried her piggy-back through the woods and they had an
emotional
talk. But I’m pretty sure I’m not confusing that book with what really happened. I mean, sprawled here, Horace, with my body’s muscles dimmed, the muscles of my brain can still feel that weight of Nat near fifty years ago. So it must have happened the way I’ve told it, mustn’t it? The past
is
real, boy, isn’t it?

For the next couple of months I was with Nat all the time. I slept in the Ritz Hotel where I had my breakfast sent up to my suite. Then I would gulp it as I dressed and shaved and then dash about four blocks to the hospital. It was quicker than taking the car.

Nat had a private room which I hated. It was dead white in colour and its window looked out on to another wing of the hospital. At first I tried to get permission to decorate it more cheerfully but they wouldn’t let me. They said the smell of paint would distress Nat. I said: “Well, move her while it’s being done.” But they wouldn’t agree. Each time I entered that room it dazzled me by its coldness. Nat pretended she didn’t mind but I believed that she did mind.

I was going home one evening late when, to clear my buzzing head, I walked in the back streets awhile. In a basement I saw a guy painting at an easel and, just on impulse, I went down and knocked at his door. He was a guy of about forty-five and he told
me that he lived, or starved, on ten bucks a week. All around the room were these big canvasses bursting with life and colour. I offered him five hundred dollars in cash for three of them and Elmer Drake (now you know), at first pretty sceptical about the offer, watched me peel off the big bills and then flopped down on a chair and exclaimed:

“Mister, you’re jumping the gun. I’m not due to be posthumous for a couple of weeks yet!”

Later, I learned that Elmer really had been near starvation when I discovered him. Five years later the “Van Gogh of Milwaukee”, as the press began to call him, was the most successful American artist and I reckon he’s still one of the best—or at least that his pictures are amongst the best we’ve produced. Elmer himself was blown up in southern Italy where, a special operations’ colonel, he was trying to salvage a booby-trapped painting from a collapsing villa in the latter part of the second world war.

I hung the pictures in Nat’s room, overriding objections of the director, who claimed they’d trap dust, and that room was
transformed
. Drake’s crazy tumble of birds, fruit and faces licked the sterility. Nat loved the paintings. Often when I was reading to her, I’d see her studying one or other of them and smiling. After a few weeks, it became clear that Nat was not continuing to improve. Then she went through a bad patch. She became querulous. When Harvey visited her and asked how she was, she replied:

“Dying.”

And when poor Harvey tried to pass it off, she snapped:

“I am—of course, I am! Don’t bother to lie.”

She took to bossing me around. Get me some water! Stop that noise! Once she said to me:

“I want you to get me some pills.”

“Nat?”

“Oh, don’t pretend, Tornado. Sleeping pills or something. I want to get this over. I don’t honestly know why anyone bothers—to be born—”

Then she had the first haemorrhage. I was standing by the window talking to her and watching a couple of janitors shooting crap in the well below. I cracked a little joke. Nat didn’t respond and I was about to repeat it when I heard a kind of gulp. I turned with maybe a tremor of foreboding and saw Nat sitting up with her fingers pressed over her mouth. She looked just as if she was trying to suppress a laugh and I began to grin and say something else funny. But the next moment, with a thrill of horror, I saw fat red
worms crawling out between her fingers. I yelled: oh no! I jumped towards her and then, realizing I could do nothing, turned and galloped out into the passage, hollering for a nurse.

Nat went on bleeding for twelve hours. The next day the chief physician sent for me and told me that he felt the treatment was too arduous to continue. He could no longer hold out any hope. Nat was in the terminal phase of her disease. I walked out and cabled her father in England.

Over the next few days, I realized it had been the goddamm drugs which they’d been giving her which had made Nat so tetchy. The doctors had, in fact, been poisoning her with their medicine and torturing her with their hot room. Later, I checked up on that hospital and found it was a phoney. The noble and brilliant Doctor Ledski was just another gallant officer in the screw-the-rich brigade. He had no higher cure rate than any other cancer hospital. I swore I’d break him but I never did anything about it.

Nat recovered her serenity. In fact, she acquired a kind of radiance. I couldn’t match it. I felt cold and I’d shiver. Often I’d cry. My shoulders would shake and great sobs would wrench my body. Then Nat would comfort me. Once I said:

“For God’s sake, it’s
you
that’s dying!”

Then I cursed myself through all the alleys of hell and made God a bid of twice my fortune to unsay what I’d just said. Nat felt me go rigid with horror.

“Darling, don’t reproach yourself. You’re quite right. I am the one that’s dying—but you’re the one that’s suffering.”

“How do you do it? Aren’t you scared?”

“No.”

I couldn’t understand that, Horace. At least, I guess I could understand not being scared but I couldn’t understand being calm. If my own body had mutinied and was murdering me I’d have been in a rage. I’d have wanted to shoot it out with God, to trade punches with the Devil. It was Nat’s tranquillity that was creepy. I just had to watch her ebb away.

Then her pa arrived.

I took comfort from his presence. We didn’t talk much but we often had dinner together in the hotel dining-room and I felt a kind of reassurance just from being near him. People glanced at us. There weren’t many millionaires, and probably not another single marquis, in Milwaukee at that time. I heard a kid ask his mother:

“How can you tell he’s a lord?”

At first Nat was delighted to have her father with her, and I left
them alone for long periods but after about a week, she began to urge me:

“Don’t let him stay, Tornado.”

“How do you mean, honey?”

“Make him go home—to England. It may be a long time yet.”

“I think he aims to stay, Nat.”

It began to prey on her and that began to upset me. She asked:

“Did you talk to him again, Tornado?”

Fact is, Horace, I hadn’t talked to him at all. Leastwise not to suggest he go home. Didn’t seem to me I had any right. I asked Nat irritably:

“Why are you so keen on his going home, honey?”

“I don’t want him to suffer—watching me die.”

“He doesn’t seem to be suffering that much.”

Which was a bitchy thing to say, Horace, and I have to admit that I was feeling rivalry in suffering with the old nobleman. Nat said:

“You don’t know him the way I do.”

“Well how about me?”

It was amazing, Horace. My eyes filled with tears and my voice came out husky. Part of me gaped in astonishment at myself. I was supposed to be Nat’s tower of strength and I was sulking because I wanted her to say that I was suffering more than her dad.

“Oh, I wouldn’t compare him with you, Titch. You do
everything
best.”

I swallowed and gazed down at her modestly and I swear, Horace, it took me a couple of seconds to see the twinkle in her eye. Then we both howled with laughter and then, towards the end, my laughter turned into a scream and I threw my arms around Nat and hugged her so fiercely it’s a wonder I didn’t finish her there and then.

“No!” I cried. “You’re not to! You’re not to die! You hear me, Nat? Nowhere—anywhere is there another like you and I won’t be parted from you. I won’t! I won’t!”

And I wept for a long time, Horace, shaking Nat’s bed with the shuddering anguish of my grief.

Late that night, I went out on to the balcony of my hotel room. I had the best suite in that hotel and the balcony was really a terrace about fifty feet long with potted shrubs. It was on the twenty-fifth floor and I could look down at the streets flecked with crawling lights and out at the other sky-scrapers. I couldn’t see the hospital because it was too low. I gazed about morosely at the
city of Milwaukee. It was full of wraiths. The cubicles in the bright towers were the dens of cold wraiths and down at street level wraiths hovered behind the wheels of automobiles. There was no flesh in Milwaukee that night except for a forlorn shred of it in a hospital room. I stood powerless, Horace, my hands gripping the railings while the wind cut my neck. Every so often I moaned and the moan was not a response to anguish or pain but to the
intolerable
necessity to accept my own impotence. For thirty years I had been the storm and the whirlwind, harbinger of forces which, fully roused, could blow life into the shape I wanted. Limitations? None. What, the stars are far? I could hop to the furthest if there was something there I wanted. You say the world is thick? I could hammer it to a plate if my love needed one to eat from. Time is long and space is wide but with my thoughts and my endeavour I knit them into a cloak for Tornado Pratt!