Actually I couldn’t believe how good I felt, especially for someone who had only hours before been given bad news. “Your X-rays, Miss Bergen, indicate the presence of a four-millimeter lesion, a good-size ulcer in the lower duodenum.” Still I felt a whole lot more than merely comfortable. Sort of out there floating in phenobarbital-colored space.
And, my dear Dr. Kopelman, there’s something to be said for you. Relieving me like you did (under the most honorable of conditions) of all my responsibilities.
Maybe, though, the catalyst was God himself wearing the bold black stripes of a referee and signaling down to earth: “That girl looks weary. I’m calling time out!”
Here at the American Hospital, the days passed, and I liked the way they were passing in pleasant slow motion. Outside of having to drink my cream and eat my chalk, nobody demanded anything of me. And I was neither in pain nor lonely. Roger came every evening, and during the day there was that endless bridge game in the solarium which was usually seeking a fourth hand.
The hospital library had a lot of good old stuff, and occasionally some pretty good new stuff. My favorite was a brand new book by a first novelist called Other Voices, Other Rooms. That one I read twice.
The door opened and Diatra, a nurse’s aide from Sicily, walked through carrying my glass of cream, accompanied by two chalky pills. I made an involuntary face and Diatra responded with an if-you-only-knew-how-good-this-is-for-you face of her own. One reason, I suspect, that Diatra has such expressive looks is that she never much bothered to learn either French or English.
After she left with the drained glass, I pulled open the drawer of my bedside table to get a lemon drop which better than anything cuts the combination of chalk and cream. That’s when I saw the letter. I told myself that I had already read it, and one thing is sure, this letter doesn’t deserve an encore.
Before coming to the hospital last night, Roger stopped at the general delivery counter of American Express and, sure enough, they had handed him this. I slipped the letter from the envelope and despite my reluctance began reading:
January 1, 1951
Dear Patricia,
Well, I guess you sure can be real proud of yourself. You did just what you said you were going to do when you up and ran off like you did to Paris, France. Just the same, I sincerely hope that you can have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year so far away from your loved ones.
I’m going to tell you the truth (your daddy doesn’t think it’s going to do a speck of good) as only a mother can tell it, and I sure hope you have enough understanding to take it like a daughter should.
Patricia, I beg of you to please come home for everybody’s sake. We need you. I had to go to the doctor’s. He put me on nerve pills, but don’t worry any about me. Worry about your daddy!!! He’s too proud (you know how he is) to tell you himself, but he’s plenty hurt. Everybody in town knows where you are and they tease him and he tries to bear up, but it’s so hard.
Like last week, George Henkins was in the store and he made a point to tell your dad that he oughta be more like him. Mr. Henkins bragged that he’s the boss over his land, his niggers and his womenfolk.
Your daddy and I want you to know that we’re not going to bear grudges for what you did to us. If you’ll just come right on home as soon as possible, all will be forgiven. It’s not too late to build a new life for yourself. Please, Patricia, because we are your parents and we do love you.
Love and kisses,
Mother
PS. When you write, please don’t fill up your pages with any more long descriptions of churches and other buildings. You know we’re not interested in that sort of thing.
I put her letter back into the drawer, took out a pen, and addressed an aerogram:
Mr. & Mrs. Harry Bergen
c/o Bergen’s Dept. Store
Jenkinsville, Arkansas
U.S.A.
Dear Mother,
As you requested, this letter will be devoid of “any descriptions of churches and other buildings.” What this letter will be is another serious attempt to show you why I’m unable to grant you your request to return to Jenkinsville.
Just because a few people like Mr. George C. Henkins razzed my father because I have traveled to a foreign country shouldn’t make either of us uncomfortable. And, anyway, since when did Mr. Henkins (who Father himself has referred to as “a third generation high level crook”) become qualified to pass down moral judgments on others?
His statement to Father that he’s “boss over his land, his Negroes, and his womenfolk” says to me that he’s a more successful tyrant than Father. And I certainly wouldn’t challenge the accuracy of that statement. Because it’s quite true that Father is no longer boss over me.
Lately, I’ve had a lot of time to think about things and I have come up with at least one conclusion. And that is that I can never again live in Jenkinsville. Now that should, in no way, surprise you. You know that I want to explore something more of the world and you also know (for whatever reasons) we never did get along.
At home, I remember being too often emotionally upset and physically sick. One of the things you were fond of telling people was that I was “the biggest puker in town.” That used to get you a few laughs. Remember?
Well, what made me puke so much, I have recently discovered, is a peptic ulcer. At this moment, I’m writing you from my bed in the American Hospital, but by the time you receive this I will already be discharged.
My bills are being covered by a special fund of the American Student’s and Artist’s Center. I spoke with the Episcopal minister who administers the fund and every time I told him that I’d pay him back as soon as possible, he responded by telling me not to worry so much.
I’m feeling pretty good now thanks to the really excellent care that I’m receiving and my doctor says that he wouldn’t be surprised if my next X-ray showed complete healing.
Now healing is one thing and preventing another lesion from developing is quite another. Besides diet and medication which I’ll probably be on for the rest of my life, I have to avoid high tensions and prolonged aggravations. So you see, there’s absolutely no possibility that I could ever again live in Jenkinsville.
I sincerely wish that I was able to help you both with the problems that my being here has caused, but I can’t at this time help anybody else for I’m just now learning how to help myself.
Love,
Patty
I sealed the envelope and got to remembering how I grew up believing that I was really tough. Tough enough to tolerate anybody’s punishment. And tough enough that nobody in this world would ever be capable of destroying that which was indestructible.
Indestructible. I know more about that now. The ulcer taught me that there’s no such thing as indestructible. It’s just another one of my Webster’s International Dictionary words. Just another word located somewhere between inclement and ineligible.
The ulcer also taught me a little something about guilt. It showed me that I didn’t have to feel all that guilty anymore, for they weren’t the only ones paying a price.
The door opened and Roger came into the room, lighting it up. He came directly to my bed to give me a kiss which seemed to reach deep within my body. Then he nodded back toward the door.
“I know,” I told him. “You don’t have to say it.”
“But wouldn’t you think,” he said, insisting upon saying it, “that a truly civilized hospital would provide their patients with a little privacy?”
I laughed. “Only Kopelman knows for sure.”
“Oh, I have something for you,” he said, suddenly making me aware of the ubiquitous bag. Roosevelt had his black cape, Hitler his jodhpurs, and Roger his tote. Of all symbols, it struck me that his was the only one totally lacking in self-aggrandizement. For what is more open, more giving than a bag?
“Pears,” he said, bringing out two perfectly formed ones.
“My favorite.”
“I know.”<
br />
“You’re nice to remember that.”
He looked back into the bag. A troubled look moved across his face. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
“I’ve been too busy—I never did get around to returning them.” He deposited the pair of once-rejected fleece-lined black boots on my lap. “In case you haven’t looked out the window, let me tell you that the real world is cold and slushy.”
I felt a sudden on-rush of feeling for this man. I brought him to me, using his shoulder to rest against. “You’re easy to love.”
“I want to be ... for you.”
“I mean, I’ve only known you for a few months.”
“Almost four.”
“And I’ve known them all my life and yet you give me so much more. You’re a much finer person than they are! I know that now. Why, do you think my father would care if my feet were dry? I can’t imagine that he would. So, if you’re the better man, then why do I consistently use him for the standard? He’s a lousy standard!”
Roger shrugged. “He’s all you’ve known. We French have a saying, ‘Nous marions nos propres couchemars.’ ”
“We marry our own nightmares?”
“That you are destined to seek from a husband what you have already experienced from a father.”
I thought about that until I thought I heard a slight knocking sound. There it was again, shy and tentative. “Oui,” I called out, “entrez.”
The door opened a wedge and then a face, a woman’s face that I had seen before but couldn’t immediately identify, emerged. “Est-ce que je peux entrer?”
I did know her! That’s the same face. It was Madame, who kept me from collapsing at the church’s baptismal font and comforted me all the way to the hospital. Surprisingly, she was a good deal younger than I had remembered (or to be still more accurate, probably needed to believe). “Oh, my God, yes it’s really you! Of course, you may come in,” I said, waving her enthusiastically toward me.
Now her step quickened, losing all hesitancy. She was now approaching me as though we were very old friends, who had only inadvertently been separated by time or space. We embraced and then we laughed and embraced once again.
“Vous allez bien?” she asked. “N’est-ce pas?”
“Oh, absolument. Merci beaucoup pour votre assistance—oh,” I said, turning to look at Roger, who seemed a lot less surprised than I felt. “This is who I told you about. The lady that I thought I’d never get to thank because I never learned her name.”
Roger stood and, with a kind of easy dignity, introduced himself and then for the first time, I heard her say her name ... Olivia Marcou. It was Olivia Marcou.
She explained that she had been wanting to visit me for some time, to see how I was getting along, but her employer at the stationery store had been keeping her late.
I heard myself expressing genuine surprise that she worked. Oh, I knew even as I said it that it sounded dumb, but I never thought of her as actually working. Unless, of course, she was Mother Superior of an orphanage or something extraordinarily useful like that.
That’s when it struck me that surprisingly, since she was so important to me, I knew practically nothing about Olivia Marcou. I didn’t know if she was married or single. Did she have children? How many and how old? Did she love them? A lot?
And I wondered about Olivia Marcou as a little girl—the games she played and the toys she cherished.
No, I didn’t know the first thing about her. Or maybe I did know the first thing. And the first thing became everything: When I needed her, she was there.
24
BEFORE BREAKFAST on Friday, Dr. Kopelman strode into my room carrying an X-ray and two booklets which he deposited on my lap. Eat Well to Stay Well cautioned one, while another one, titled Taking Care of Your Ulcer, pictured a radiantly smiling man on the cover.
“Well, well, well,” he said, blowing cigar ashes off his red-and-green checked tie, as he seated himself in the cushioned chair next to my bed. “Tomorrow, you graduate.”
“Tomorrow?” I asked, already feeling the chilling winds of the January world. It wasn’t as though I was surprised. It was only that I hadn’t been expecting it. Well, exactly what did I expect? This is, after all, a hospital and not a home for little wanderers.
Ted Kopelman looked downright pleasant. “Yep, but I’m going to give the commencement address right now.” He went on to tell me what a grave mistake it would be to ever underestimate an ulcer’s potential for destruction. Particularly when it developed in one so young. How my life has to be so disciplined that I can never again put food in my mouth without first determining whether it’s on the approved list.
And when the doctor spoke of cigarettes and booze, he reminded me of the Reverend Mr. Burton Benn’s zeal while addressing himself to the subject of lust and greed.
After we wished each other “goodbye and good luck,” Dr. Kopelman left and I felt my empty gut begin to suffer abrasions from rubbing against the breastbone. I threw a couple of chalky pills into my mouth and tried, with my most reassuring voice, to calm myself down.
It’s all right to be a little upset. It’s never easy being forced from a safe harbor. A safe harbor, nothing! This place is more like an institutional mother to me.
That’s when I began to laugh out loud. God, if anybody here ever found out that I have a filial attachment to the American Hospital, then they’d ship me upstairs to the psychiatric ward for sure.
Boy, I’m really something! I mean if on my birthday I gave myself a tape recorder with a few prerecorded messages such as: “Everything’s gonna be all right” and maybe another message saying “Lay down your sweet head, honey babe, and rest a spell,” then by Mother’s Day, I’d be, sure enough, sending that machine a dozen long-stemmed American beauties.
By the time Roger arrived, I knew exactly what it was I had to do. I just didn’t know how. How to break it to him. But we didn’t get around to talking about it. At least not right away because he came in all consumed by his opportunity to buy a bargain motor scooter—a Vespa with barely three thousand miles on it.
“Not a lot of power,” he was saying, “but very reliable. It could take us to Normandy, the south of France, and across to the Italian Riviera.”
“I’d love it! The sun, the wind, even rain! I wouldn’t even mind a little rain—honest! And fog! Fog so deep and mysterious you could get lost in it. But sometimes you’d have to let me drive too. You would, wouldn’t you?”
“Any time,” said Roger, smiling so broadly that I didn’t know whether or not he was sincere. He spoke of a two-man tent he’d seen. (I didn’t bother correcting the error of his gender.) “Very lightweight and compact. Every night,” he concluded, “we will lie together under the birds.”
“Stars,” I quickly corrected.
“Stars,” agreed Roger, before breaking away from his vision. “Has Dr. Kopelman said anything specific about being released?”
My stomach lining felt as though it had just been attacked by a particularly ferocious square of very coarse-grained sandpaper. “He came by this morning—I’m not positive about the time.” That statement was hastily calculated to bore, or better still to mislead. At least until I can figure out how on this earth I’ll be able to tell him what it is that I know I have to tell him.
Roger, though, was not put off. He was directing all of his energies toward knowing. “Tell me what he said.”
I resisted the temptation to look away. “Said?”
“About your leaving here!”
“He—Dr. Kopelman—said that he was releasing me in the morning.”
“Magnifique!” he cried, wrapping his wiry arms around me like so much ribbon around a Christmas gift. “To be together again!” Then he suddenly pushed me an arm’s length away as though the wrappings had a need to examine the gift. “What else? What else did he tell you?”
“Nothing that I didn’t already know. That I would have to live a carefully regimented life.
”
He was looking me over very carefully. “I don’t believe you. He did tell you something else!”
“No. At least not what I think you’re implying. The ulcer has healed without complications. The great Kopelman himself referred to it as an unremarkable recovery. It’s only ...”
“Only what?”
“Only that I have to make you understand something, but I have no way—no words to make you understand.”
A vertical line as definitive as an exclamation mark sliced his forehead into almost equal sections. “Understand what?”
“What it is I have to do.”
“Which is?”
“I have to go to Göttingen—in Germany.”
“Göttingen,” Roger blinked. “In Germany.”
Progress was being made. “Yes! Yes!” I cried out, encouraged. “That’s where I have to go tomorrow as soon as I’m released. If I wait, I won’t have enough money for the trip. Now you may think that this is a rash and foolish thing to do, but all I can tell you is that it isn’t rash. I’ve thought about it for six years!”
Roger’s forehead crease deepened. “Why are you all of a sudden discussing Germany? You never before mentioned Germany. Are you feeling dizzy? Did the doctor give you an injection?”
“No, I’m not dizzy and no, there’s been no injection! I’ll start from the beginning. That way it will be easier for you to understand.”
But how can I make him understand? How can I possibly explain to Roger what I’ve never been able to explain to myself adequately? “It was the year that I was twelve. A German prisoner-of-war camp was set up near our town of Jenkinsville and then ... well, what happened was ...” I could still feel some of the same feelings that I felt then, only now I have lost all the words. Where did I put those words?
“Ah, yes,” said Roger, looking at me in a way that I didn’t understand because I had never seen that particular look on his face before. “And now you wish to visit some German soldier? Someone who was very special to you, n’est-ce pas?”