“But his scourge,” Cook said. “Can you cure it so he’s fit?”
“Perhaps not cure it, but I can certainly manage it,” the doctor said. “Tomorrow I will begin treating him with mercury pills and we will watch for sores, tooth loss, and most importantly, obvious neurological damage, although that may not reveal itself so readily and may instead manifest over a matter of time. Unfortunately, we have no choice, so until I indicate otherwise, keep him from Margaret, feed him on separate dishes, and have him use the hired man’s facilities. Find him a decent set of clothing, as I’m sure he’ll want to attend his mother’s funeral. It will be a potter’s field affair, and I question my own wisdom in allowing him to attend, but he seemed quite attached to the poor wretch and feels guilty over her unhappy death. It was necessary, but I want no resentment at me spurring him through life.” And quietly, “He has much to overcome, Cook. God only knows what he’s already seen in his young life.”
“He is a handsome boy, now that he’s clean,” Cook said. “How old do you think he is?”
“He says he’s sixteen,” the doctor said. “A young man so nutritionally deprived that he has yet to enter puberty.”
“Oh my goodness,” Cook said.
“Exactly,” the doctor said. “You can understand now why freeing the mother to free the child was indeed an act of mercy.”
Silence.
“Do you think he knew—”
“No,” the doctor said abruptly, “and we will never speak of it again.”
“Of course, my father made her swear she’d never tell me, so I had to act curious in the beginning so I wouldn’t make her suspicious, but that all passed fairly quickly once Thaddeus settled into our house. So that’s how he came to be the son my father never had, his prize protégé, a fine doctor, and ultimately, my husband,” Mrs. Boehm said, giving me a level look. “Isn’t that remarkable?”
I gazed at her, stunned.
“So you see, Louise, people always act in their own best interest and are rarely what they seem,” she said, smoothing the covers over her lap. “Every person has a beginning, even those who would rather die than acknowledge it.” She grimaced as a spasm of pain passed through her. “My husband has never spoken openly to me about the years before he came to us, and I’m quite sure it would destroy him if he discovered I knew of his unfortunate origin, so I would appreciate your discretion in this matter.”
“Of course,” I stammered, as more alarming realizations came to mind.
“Yes, I see I have given you a lot to think about.” Her face was drawn, her smile tired, and her gaze bleak. “I’d like to rest now, so please pull the shades and wake me in an hour.” And then she closed her eyes and lay stiller than death while I did just that.
Reeling, I went into my room, but all of a sudden the smell of rot was too strong, was everywhere in the house, and I opened my window but I still couldn’t stand it, not along with what I’d just heard and still couldn’t believe, with knowing that Mrs. Boehm was dying, that she would die right there in that bed, and then what would happen to me? I wouldn’t be needed here anymore, would be sent back to the home to rejoin the sick and grief stricken, the crowded ward of teens that preyed on one another, would become one of the faceless, unwanted surplus who just kept coming…
The thought was unbearable.
I pulled on a sweater and went outside, standing by the back door a moment, hugging myself and gulping in the fresh air.
Peter came around the side of the house and stopped when he saw me. “Are you all right?”
I turned away, wiping my eyes, and nodded. “I’m fine.”
“Why do you say that when it isn’t true?” he asked, touching my arm.
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly.
“I’m leaving,” he said after a moment. “I haven’t told the boss yet, but I’m quitting on Friday.”
“You’re leaving?” I said, shocked. “Why?”
He shrugged and looked out toward the road. “This isn’t a good place for me. I don’t think it’s a good place for anybody.” He met my gaze. “I’ve already stayed longer than I meant to.”
And there was an unspoken question in his dark gaze that tilted something inside me and brought a strange weakness to my knees. “Do you know where you’re going?”
He shook his head. “I’ll find something. I always do.”
“But…to just go? To leave your home—”
“This isn’t my home,” he said with a grim laugh. “That was stolen years ago.” And then he stopped abruptly and shook his head.
“Well,” I said, feeling sadder than I should have, given that I hardly even knew him. “I guess we’ll miss you….” I backed up a step. “I should go back in now before anybody sees us talking. And besides, Mrs. Boehm needs me.” I reached for the door. “If I don’t see you again before you go, then…good luck.”
“Louise,” he said. “Have you ever thought about leaving here?”
“Leave? No,” I said. “They’re my foster family, and besides, where would I go?”
A door slammed at the back of the yard and I immediately opened the door to disappear inside before Dr. Boehm saw us.
“Wait,” Peter said urgently. “I…the workshop…have you ever been in there?”
“Only once, way back in the beginning,” I said, pausing. “Why, have you?”
“No, but he had me board the windows, and the smell around the place…” He gazed at me as if trying to gauge how much to say and, when I gave a nervous look toward the back of the yard, expecting to see Dr. Boehm striding toward me at any second, said hurriedly, “You don’t want to stay here, Louise. It’s not a good—”
“I have to go,” I said and quickly slipped inside. Ran to the kitchen window and watched as Peter turned and walked past Dr. Boehm, who was muttering and rubbing his gloved hands together and didn’t even seem to notice him.
Peter stopped and turned and met my gaze for a moment in the window, then walked back over, picked up his rake, and continued to work.
“Gran? One more?” I said, keeping my fingers crossed.
It took a moment, but she blinked once.
I woke up Mrs. Boehm and brought her a tea tray. We were sitting together in silence when a loud blast startled both of us. She dropped her spoon and struggled to the edge of the bed, motioning for me to help her to the window. I did and we looked out in time to see a scowling Peter striding over to where a deer, bony hips poking out through her sides and belly bulging, lay thrashing by the salt lick, and Dr. Boehm hurrying down out of his tree stand, rifle in hand.
“That’s a pregnant doe,” I cried, covering my mouth and looking away, sickened.
“He is consumed,” she murmured, swaying in my arms. “And still he denies himself.”
“The poor fawn…” I whispered, and then in a surge of fury, “It’s not hunting season. Oh, how could he?”
“Does are pregnant during hunting season, too, Louise,” she said quietly, without taking her gaze from her husband’s raggedy, tottering figure. “If they have mated in the fall, then they are pregnant when they’re shot….” She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the glass. “It is man’s right to destroy all he surveys.”
No, I wanted to say. No, it’s not, but instead I just looked back out the window, near tears, and saw Peter, grim and hands clenched in fists, watching as Dr. Boehm knelt by the deer’s body. The doctor said something, but Peter didn’t move. Dr. Boehm glanced up sharply and spoke again, and with an angry, jerky movement, Peter bent and helped the doctor lift the doe’s twitching body and place it on the cart Dr. Boehm commandeered alone and pushed doggedly toward the workshop.
I helped Mrs. Boehm back to bed and for the first time was unhappy at touching her, forcing myself not to shrink from the feel of her wasted muscles, hot under my hands, twitching and flexing like a pile of snakes. I wanted to leave the room, to leave the smell wafting from her whenever she moved, to wash my hands over and over again
, to plunge them into Nurse’s buckets of disinfectant—
“Come set my hair, Louise. Thaddeus will be proud of the kill and may decide to visit me tonight,” Mrs. Boehm said breathlessly, grimacing at her reflection in the hand mirror and missing my astonished gaze. “I would like to be beautiful for him when he does.”
So I sat for an hour winding her hair around rollers, and when we ran out of those, she showed me how to use strips of rags. While I was busy she told me about the intimate moment fifteen years ago that had changed their lives forever, the night of their fifth wedding anniversary when, desperate, she had ceased to be a lady and had become a woman.
I looked at Gran, and her eyes were open, but I wasn’t sure if she was actually seeing, so I got up and knelt in front of her, just far enough away to avoid her flailing feet. “Can I keep going?” I waited but she didn’t blink. “Gran? One more chapter, and then I swear I’ll go get the animal food ready? Please?”
It took a moment but finally her gaze found mine and she blinked.
How It Ends
It was, Mrs. Boehm said, the deck of racy playing cards she’d found in his bottom bureau drawer one day when, home alone, she’d decided to weed through their clothes for the annual charity drive. The deck had been hidden beneath a pile of old dress shirts and the cards were dog-eared and curved as if shuffled often. The photos of men and women together were shocking and, upon closer study, answered many of the questions she’d had since her uneventful wedding night five years before.
She went through them again and again, studied the women who were hard and cheap looking, wore far too much makeup and looked the way she’d always imagined prostitutes would.
Feeling just a little sick and guilty, as if she’d been snooping on purpose, as if, five years after the wedding and still a virgin, she wasn’t getting just a little anxious, just a little desperate to find the key that would unlock her husband’s stern, distant affection, so she had trumped up a reason and gone rummaging through his personal effects, she shuffled the cards one last time, studying the men, their naked backsides (they only showed the men from the back or the side, never the front like the women) and their expressions that seemed to alternate between fierce concentration and a kind of dazed ecstasy.
The more she looked, the stranger she began to feel, making her want not only to look at these couples but to be one of them, she and Thaddeus, naked as the days they were born, a husband and wife without secrets or separateness, wrapped in each other’s arms and marveling at what they’d been missing.
Yes, this was what she wanted now that she’d seen it, now that married love was more than twin beds, a movie screen kiss, and a fade to black.
She replaced the cards exactly as she’d found them, shut the drawer, rose, and left the room. She thought of the suggestive lingerie the women had been wearing, and without even pausing to run a brush through her hair or refresh her lipstick, she ran out and caught the bus down into the city, where she did her best to replicate the peekaboo bras (only pink or black, no red) and the lacy black garters and panties. She thought of the hair of the women on the cards and went to the wig department, leaving with a long, flowing Veronica Lake-style wig in a dazzling auburn, then headed straight for the shoe department for a wicked pair of black platform high heels with ankle straps.
From there, now slightly breathless, spurred by adrenaline and the images on the cards, she went to the liquor store, her first time ever inside of one, and bought their highest proof gin and several bottles of tonic, then on the advice of the clerk, stopped at the market for two fresh limes, two porterhouse steaks, two baking potatoes, and a fresh pouch of cherry pipe tobacco.
She caught a bus home and lugged her bags—so many!—up the block to their tidy little house. Tried to think of which should come first, the drinks and seduction or the meal, and decided first the fresh tobacco, then the meal, then when he was nice and relaxed, she would make them…no, first a predinner drink, a cocktail to relax him, and then the tobacco, the steak, the postdinner refill or two, and the seduction.
Yes.
She felt giddy with excitement because she had a plan now, she was doing something daring and unapproved, and later, when they were snuggled close and it was over, she would tell him how she’d planned this and he would lean back and smile and say, That’s my clever girl! And she would bask, oh yes, she would bask in the glow of his admiration because she’d been waiting far too long to earn it.
So when he came home, she did nothing to alert him, didn’t reveal even the tiniest glimmer of the excitement shimmering inside of her. She had taken a bath earlier and pinned her hair up (in secret preparation for the wig) but she was wearing a pair of slacks and a pullover, and she gave him her cheek to kiss like always, sent him in to sit in his chair and discover his surprise fresh tobacco, and said, while he sounded genuinely pleased at the gift, “Oh, and I read that all the up-and-coming young doctors are having cocktails before dinner, so I made us each a nice gin and tonic. Here.” And she carried his, which was twice as strong as hers, in, and he put down the newspaper and thanked her for that, too.
By the time the steaks were ready, he had finished the first drink and was absently sipping a second.
She kept the conversation general during dinner, spoke of his many surgical triumphs, and the gin made him expansive, loosened him up enough to laugh and actually tease her, saying she looked ten years younger with her hair up and dressed like that, and she laughed along with him and kept her distance and when dinner was over she casually poured them another round of drinks, his strong, hers mostly tonic because she felt looser, too, and had to go easy or she would scare him away.
“Madam,” he said, leaning back and giving her an owlish look, “are you trying to take advantage of me?” Luckily he missed her stricken look and, chuckling, hefted the glass and took a hearty swallow. “So tell me, my dear,” he said, leaning back in his chair and smiling, “what else do brilliant up-and-coming young physicians do? Vacation in Cuba? Learn how to ski? Put in swimming pools?” He drained the rest of the glass and, still smiling, surrendered it for another. “Let’s hear what the women’s magazines have declared de rigeur for the cream of the medical-community crop.”
“Better than that,” she said, trembling as she motioned for him to follow her into the living room and sat him in the center of the couch, taking careful note of his wobbly gait and flushed cheeks, “stay there for a second and I’ll show you.” She handed him the drink and hurried into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.
“Ah, let me guess,” he called. “You bought a new dress. No, a dress and shoes.”
“Wrong,” she called with frantic gaiety, shimmying out of her clothes and struggling into the cutout black bra, lace panties, and garter belt. The black stockings were the hardest, her hands were cold and clumsy, and it seemed to take forever to buckle the ankle straps on the shoes. “Keep guessing,” she called, bending and pulling on the wig.
“A dress, shoes, and a hat. I hope they’re green, Margaret. You always look lovely in green.”
“Thank you, dear, but that’s not it,” she called.
“I know!” he announced, his words distinctly slurred. “You bought a fur coat! What kind is it, Margaret?”
“Don’t be silly,” she called back, dabbing cheap perfume everywhere, rolling on bright red lipstick, rimming her eyes with black pencil, and smearing rouge on her cheeks. She gazed at herself, astonished, almost sick with anticipation because she looked like someone else, like a woman who knew things, knew how to excite a man, knew how to get everything she wanted, and so she turned on the phonograph and played the record album of boudoir music she’d bought, turned on the bed lamp she’d covered with a sheer black scarf, and—
“I know,” he said. “It’s a mink! You bought a mink, you little minx!”
She said a brief prayer, took a deep breath, and shaking, opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the living room.
“No,” she s
aid and didn’t know whether it was the shoes with their sassy high heels or the fact that she was nearly naked in the main room of their house or the gin or the deck of cards that had showed her what she was missing or the fact that he was sitting there, mouth open, eyes wide, staring at her with a look she had never seen before, a riveted look that made her sashay straight over to him, lift the glass from his slack hand, and straddle his lap. “The ladies magazines say that all you handsome, brilliant young physicians should always have your hands full after dinner.” And when his fingers, cold and damp from the glass, crept up and gripped her thigh, when his breathing came heavy, she took his face between her hands and kissed him hard.
He only said no once, tried to hold back once when he was propped above her on his knees and shook his head as if to clear it and said, Margaret, no, I shouldn’t, you don’t know—
Do it, she’d said, pulling him closer. Touching and stroking him, delirious, crazed by the powerful heat, yearning for this moment like none other, ever, loving him with every cell, wanting him, and so he did, and she locked herself around him and watched his face, saw the fierceness and discovered the second expression wasn’t concentration at all but need, yes, need because she needed him and he her and this, this was how they should be, laughing, tumbling, kissing, loving all the time…
When it was over and he had collapsed, hot, sweaty, smelling of gin and her new cheap perfume, gasping and mumbling and nuzzling her throat, her neck, she whispered, I love you, and he whispered it, too, and fell asleep with his arms tight around her.
Right before she fell asleep, when she was lying there drowsing in a beautiful, dreamy haze, wondering at the miracle, hoping they had made a baby, her arm draped across his stomach and her hand settled at his hip, her fingers found a small, scab-covered sore on his side, ran idly over it, and returned to nestle in his chest hair.