Could it be that he’s jealous? He was sounding jealous.
“Roger, I was only twelve years old!”
He bumped his fist against his lips. “Sorry. Continue, please.”
“Well, one really hot day, some of the prisoners began passing out in the cotton fields. You don’t know how hot it can get in Arkansas! Once I remember it was so hot that I turned on our garden hose and the water that came out gave me a first-degree burn. And another time—”
“Patty, tell me about Germany.”
“Ah, yes, well ... As I said, the prisoners began passing out in the cotton fields. So the guards took a bunch of them into town, into our store, for field hats. And that was how I happened to meet him. How I happened to meet Frederick Anton Reiker. From the first moment that I saw him, I knew ... knew that he wasn’t like them. Like the others.”
“Chose qui plaît est à demi vendu!”
“It wasn’t just his looks! Oh, I loved his looks, but more important, he was a wonderful man. And a pacifist, like you.”
“He convinced you of that? Every son-of-bitch Nazi soldier who got trapped in Paris after the occupation swore on God’s good name that he wasn’t like the others!”
“Roger, don’t you know that you never have to give a Jew lessons in German-hating?”
Roger made a few more bumping motions against his lips and I continued. “And anyway, jealousy is wasted on the dead.” I took his hand to kiss the inside of his palm. “It’s okay, I know you suffered a lot during the occupation. But Anton also suffered. I have always considered him as much a victim of the Nazis as Grandma’s family from Luxembourg. Well, after Anton escaped, I saw him just about dusk running along the railroad embankment and that’s when I took after him and hid him in some old abandoned rooms above our garage.”
“That was just after the war?”
“No, during. During the war.”
“Didn’t you realize that you could get into trouble with the authorities if you were caught?”
“Of course! Of course, I realized. I’m not dumb, you know! In my life, I’ve been confused, and I’ve vacillated a lot, but I’ve never NEVER been dumb!”
Roger’s shrug seemed to involve his whole body. “You know that isn’t what was implied.”
“I hope not, because I feel strongly about it. You see, some people—my lawyer, for instance, tried to build an entire defense on the proposition that I was dumb and simply couldn’t comprehend the consequences of my actions.”
“Your lawyer? You did get into trouble with the authorities?”
“Well, yes ... some. It wasn’t all that bad. I guess what I minded as much as anything else was the people on my side, like my grandparents, who were patronizing on the same basis as my lawyer. My father, now that I think of it, at least understood that I knew what I was doing. But for everybody else being twelve made me some kind of a dummy. Well, I wasn’t dumb and I did know!
“And even now I still feel a sense of pride, knowing that I did the best I could for him. Even after he died that helped. Oh, I cried about a beautiful person losing his life and I cried for myself ... for all I had lost.”
He gave short nods of his head. “Without an understanding of the inherent risks, your sacrifice would be without value.”
“Exactly!” I said, squeezing his hand. “Without an inherent value I—I ... say that again, please.”
“Certainly. If you did not understand the inherent risks that you took on behalf of this man, then your sacrifices would be diminished.”
“Oh, my God, Roger, you know so much!” I cried out, grabbing his hand. But it wasn’t until I saw him wince that I realized my nails were cutting hard into his palms.
“Well, I don’t understand everything. If Frederick Anton Reiker is dead, then why go to Göttingen?”
“That’s the most difficult part of all to explain.”
As he rested his chin against an open hand, I could tell that he was preparing himself for a period of intense concentration.
“I can tell you that it has something to do with what I don’t have. With what I’ve never had ... with ...”
“Is it so difficult,” asked Roger with the most annoying kind of serenity, “to confide in me?”
“Damn right! And it’s hard for you too, and don’t you forget it! Exposing oneself isn’t easy, not for anybody. Maybe it’s particularly difficult for me. I don’t know. But all my life, it’s been so very important to avoid showing any weakness. I felt as though I had to appear invincible just to survive. And breaking old habits is still difficult.”
“But you know you can trust me,” said Roger. “Whatever it is, I’ll understand.”
“Don’t think it’s bad! It’s really nothing that’s bad. It’s not as though I’ve killed or stolen. Why, I never even break in line, drop gum wrappers on the sidewalk, or renege on library fines.”
Roger nodded with what appeared to be a solemnity concocted to match the occasion.
“Then why—please tell me why I’m so ashamed of it, Roger?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
I heard myself sigh just as though I were experiencing a rapid and complete energy depletion. “For a while, all the time I was with you, I thought that I had given my old obsession the slip.”
I caught Roger smiling as though I were a frightened child needing only a few moments of his parental reassurance. “You’ve never experienced an obsession! Well, let me tell you, my friend, if you’re ever given the choice between an ulcer and an obsession, grab the ulcer. That only affects your body. While an obsession takes over your whole life.”
He wrinkled his forehead. “An obsession is affecting your life?”
“Not just affecting, Roger! Controlling. Controlling my life! Compelling me to do what is, at the same time, frightening and embarrassing.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe—”
“You can believe because I’m telling you! This is not the sort of thing that anybody would get pleasure from making up. But before I tell you what it is—what the obsession is—I want you to know that the only time I really had it under control was the time I spent with you. At least that’s what I believed until Olivia Marcou. But understand, she didn’t create my monster, she merely revived it. So, I think that I’ll never be fully comfortable until I ...”
“Yes?”
“Until I follow it—the experience—to its conclusion. Whatever that conclusion may be. Now, do you understand?”
“I’m not sure I understand anything.”
“Oh, my God, Roger, weren’t you listening? How could anyone be any clearer than that? What I’m trying to tell you is very simple. When Olivia Marcou comforted me on the way to the hospital, I knew that I had to be a part of a ... had to have a family!”
“Aha!” said Roger, tapping his own chest. “Allow me, madame, to show you exactly where a most exceptional husband can be found who with pleasure and pride will join with you in the creation of beautiful little children. Et violà! Ta famille.”
“Oh, no, Roger, no! Is that what you think I’m talking about—marriage?” I heard the word marriage spill from my tongue with a sharp, twisted kind of shrillness. “I’m not ready for that! I don’t know how to be what I’ve never had! I don’t want to be a mother. I want to have one. Don’t you understand I want Anton’s mother to be my mother too!”
I watched Roger carefully ease himself into the bedside chair as though he too had been recuperating from a very long and debilitating illness. Then he adjusted his polished metal watch strap. Releasing the catch and closing it. Releasing and closing. Closing and releasing. I felt the tension pull all of my own nerves into a thin, taut line. Releasing and closing ...
Then his hand moved away from the watchband to press for a few moments against the inner corners of his eyes. He looked directly at me. “Tomorrow morning,” he said in a voice heavy with leaden authority, “I will come to the hospital to take you home. You will recover
your strength and in the spring we will tour France and some of Italy from our Vespa.”
I had just enough courage to use his name, but not enough to look at him. It wasn’t his face anyway. I know because Roger’s face held such an enormous capacity for joy and what I was now hearing was infinities removed from joy. “The problem is, Roger,” I explained, “that if I leave for Göttingen tomorrow then I think I’ll have just enough money to cover the trip to Göttingen and then back to the States. But the catch is that I simply can’t afford to spend another franc in Paris.”
“I deserve better treatment than this!”
I heard the words all right, but they didn’t sound like his words, for they were too harsh and alien sounding to have emerged from his lips. “What?”
“Why do you stare at me as though you don’t understand? Do you wish me to repeat? Certainment. If that’s the way you felt, then why hold on to me? Unless you are an opportunist, why wait until the last possible moment to tell me of your plans?”
“Because I only found out myself this morning after Dr. Kopelman told me that I was being released.”
“You think I’m going to believe that? For twenty-two days you have nothing to do but rest and think and then today, at the very last moment, you make this incredible decision! Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes! Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. Why do you doubt me? What ulterior purpose could I have?”
“To hold on to me, dear lady, until I no longer had function for you. Lady, I admire you. You are shrewd!”
“Look, Roger, I know you’re disappointed, but I don’t think you know ... or even believe what you’re saying.”
“Oh, I know ... I know! But you don’t know what you’re doing! You’re leaving me. We love each other—I thought we loved each other, but you’re leaving. And for what? Answer me! For WHAT?”
“I tried to explain it. You told me to trust you, Roger. Told me that you’d understand.”
“Oh, I understand!” he shouted. “I understand!” But his face was so consumed by rage that I doubted that there was enough leftover space there to squeeze in a little understanding. “And I hate what I understand.”
“Oh, please don’t, Roger! And don’t hate me—I can’t stand the idea that we’ll part in anger.”
“Better try to get used to it because I feel more hate for you than I can tell you. You are cold ... money hungry ... and very, very calculating.”
“That’s not true!”
“It’s true,” he said in a voice that could be used for the most ordinary of business transactions. “Love isn’t nearly good enough for you. You want money too. A husband with very much money!”
“I never said that!”
“And there’s something else I could tell you,” said Roger, shifting back into a more comfortable stance. “I suspect that your poppa may be doing exactly the right thing as he chants those Hebrew prayers of the dead over you.”
25
CONSIDERING ALL THE trouble I had falling asleep, I didn’t expect to wake again either so soon or so abruptly, but an ongoing wave of nausea along with the distinct smell of blood rising from my breath encouraged me to snap on the light and move as rapidly as possible through the hospital room toward my connecting closet-sized bathroom. I reached it just in time to see a glob of blood falling from my mouth like a crimson waterfall.
At the first respite, I held tightly to a metal support bar and felt my temperature soar to heights that no thermometer could follow. I reread with sudden interest the sign posted conspicuously above the washbasin:
PRESS BUZZER
FOR ASSISTANCE
Roger. Somebody. Somebody please, please help me. I watched the large sign blur and then darken. The buzzer was within reach, but I couldn’t risk releasing even one hand from the support bar.
Another rush of nausea, and I tenuously held on while opening my mouth wide to make way for the painful passage of still another bloody geyser.
Then it came to me what was happening! The ulcer had perforated and I was hemorrhaging.
PRESS BUZZER
FOR ASSISTANCE
And there was a chance, I wondered if it was a likely chance, that I’d never see another day. It didn’t seem like such a big deal, and yet I was feeling sorry for myself. Nineteen is too young to die. I didn’t want to leave such an unfinished life. With more time, I might have been able to make a better job of it.
Mostly I wanted to leave somebody behind on this earth who would mourn me. Without that it would be as though all my years and all my pain had counted for nothing. As though I had never lived at all.
Would Roger find out? Who would there be to tell him? And if he did find out, would he mourn? Oh, how I’d want him to! Partly out of revenge. He would suffer as he has made me suffer.
My parents? I think they’d care, but I don’t think they’d care very much. Anyway how many times can you sit shiva for the same person?
My grandparents would care and Sharon might care a lot. And Ruth, oh God, how Ruth would care! I hurt at the sheer quantity of pain that I have already caused her. But I hope it’s like she says, that I’ve given her something too. Only I wish I could remember what it was.
More immediately I regretted the globs of blood that landed on the toilet seat and the even larger puddle at my feet. “Who was it that said boo to you, Patricia?” “Nobody said boo to me, Mother, honest!” Would the hospital staff consider that indicative of an uncaring (although now deceased) slob? And so good riddance to her! Please don’t. Don’t think that about me because, truth is, I haven’t strength anymore even for holding on.
Also I regretted the way my cotton nightgown was now plastered to me by heavy sweat. It seemed like a particularly unlovely, not to mention unfeminine, way in which to be found dead.
A sudden chill which raised all my goosepimples was now superimposing itself upon the sweat.
PRESS BUZZER
FOR ASSISTANCE
I am reaching beyond my capacity to endure pain. Somebody’s got to help me. I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of dying alone. Please come to me, Roger. Tell me that I will live. Tell me that everything will be all right. And don’t forget to tell me too that your words were only lies ... only jealous lover lies.
The walls whirled by in a blur as though I were observing them from the side window of a speeding Paris taxi. I saw the moving sign—the bold black letters smearing across the white background as it went rushing by. Even so I knew what it said:
PRESS BUZZER
ROGER’S
FOR ASSISTANCE
I saw my hand reach out to touch the buzzer, but nothing sounded. Sign swiftly speeding. Again my hand reached out to find the buzzer and then I heard it. Heard a very audible buzz.
Dr. Kopelman pulled back my eyelid and peered with a lighted instrument into my eye. “Don’t mind me, sweetheart; I’m just admiring your beautiful eye.”
“Ohh.” I had tried to smile, more for Dr. Kopelman’s benefit than from any overwhelming need of my own for comic relief, but I immediately regretted the effort, for I discovered that even a smile had the power to intensify the pain.
“How do you feel?”
“Sick.”
He patted my hand. “We gave you a shot and that will help ease the pain. And we’re setting up a blood transfusion. That will help too.”
As I slipped a sky blue sweater over my head two weeks later, Dr. Kopelman came into my room to give his “commencement address, part II.” Then the internist abruptly stopped his lecturing to make the observation that I looked “very pretty. Really nifty in street clothes.”
Dr. Kopelman brushed some invisible lint from his tweed jacket before saying that he didn’t want to frighten me, but that he would be “unforgivably remiss” if he failed to warn me that “a hemorrhaging ulcer constituted a life-threatening situation” and that I had to do everything possible to prevent a recurrence.
“I’ll cater to my ulcer exactly as you taught me, Dr.
Kopelman.”
He handed me some neatly stapled mimeographed sheets of paper. “Your diet and your instructions. Notice that rule number one concerns the duration of bedrest. For the first two weeks at home, I want you to stay pretty close to your bed. Total relaxation is what you must have. Physical and mental relaxation!”
I located a taxi at the hospital’s front door, but every time the meter clicked, I tried telling myself with monumental calm that money is only money. And I’m not worried. Anyway, taking the bus on this January day in my condition would be nothing less than an offbeat form of suicide. As it is, Kopelman would probably break our patient-doctor relationship if he knew that within less than two hours, I had every expectation of being on that train to Göttingen. I wondered if my doctor would be mollified a little bit if I bought a first class ticket.
At 39 Place St. Sulpice, I confided to the driver that I was “très fatiguée” and that, if he didn’t too much mind maybe he oughta see to it that I got up the three flights. I also explained that it would take me only a few minutes to pack and from here we’d go directly to the railroad station.
I knocked at the door to our place so tentatively that even the driver commented that only a trained bird dog could have heard it. Then he gave the door a single vigorous whack. When there was no response, I inserted my key into the lock, feeling inordinately relieved that I wouldn’t have to face Roger and profoundly saddened that I wouldn’t get to see him.
26
THE LOBBY of the Hotel Göttingen with its castle-style oak furniture, tapestries of hunting scenes, and leaded glass windows looked every bit as respectable (and infinitely more old world) than the sanctuary of the Jenkinsville First Baptist Church. Good. I was going to need every millimeter of respectability I could get.
The porter, a man too wizened and old to be carrying his own let alone other people’s bags, showed me into a large room with a massive bed embellished with elaborate carvings. In the bathroom, he curiously turned on both faucets and smiled idiotically when water gushed through the pipes. Actually, I don’t think he began smiling idiotically until I placed a bunch of strange-looking coins in his hand.