Flat on her back, Emma began to cry. When the night nurse looked in on her an hour later there were puddles on the pillow, on both sides of her head.
The next morning, the memory of it still in her eyes, she asked Dr. Fleming to allow her extra pills in case she spilled some again.
“I can’t cope with that much pain,” she said honestly.
Dr. Fleming was studying her chart. He looked up and took her wrist efficiently. “Mrs. Horton, pain is nothing,” he said. “It’s just an indicator.”
Emma could not believe she had heard him right. “What did you say?” she asked.
Dr. Fleming repeated it. Emma turned away. She told her mother, who made life harder for Dr. Fleming whenever she could; but Emma knew that even her mother didn’t really know what she was talking about. She had never been painfully ill in her life.
By the time she had dealt with pain for a month she had already lost what everyone healthy would have called life—i.e., health. The night of helplessness had turned her away from more than Dr. Fleming. From then on her energies went into an effort to balance herself somehow between drugs, pain, and weakness. The thought of going home no longer appealed to her at all. She would have been terrified at home, and she knew it was foolish to pretend that she could function there. She couldn’t deal with children, husband, or lover; an hour’s conversation a day with her mother and weekend visits from the kids soon became her limit. One day her hair began to fall out—an aftereffect of the radium—and as she was holding a mirror and weakly brushing it she began to laugh.
“I’ve finally found the answer to this hair nobody ever liked,” she said. “Radium is the answer.”
Aurora was stricken speechless.
“I was joking,” Emma said hastily.
“Oh, Emma,” Aurora said.
THERE WAS another problem; sometimes when she was alone the thought of all the things in life that were not like one imagined they would be amused her. In her case, the old childish fantasy of dying and having everyone suddenly sorry for their mistreatment began to come true. For a time Melanie was the only one who wasn’t awed by her decline. Suddenly everyone was sorry for her except Melanie. Tommy wouldn’t allow himself to show that he was sorry, but he still was. Melanie chose to treat her mother’s move to the hospital as a kind of caprice, and Emma was glad. She was weary of being offered pity and would have preferred it if everyone had criticized her as they always had.
But she rapidly became very weak, and being weak made it easier to attend to her turning away. Aurora, after her first horror, began to try to fight her daughter’s increasing passivity. For a few days she tried to goad Emma into living, but it didn’t work.
“This room is too bleak,” Aurora said bitterly. Indeed, it was quite bleak. That night she called the General, who was ailing himself.
“Hector, I want you to bring the Renoir,” she said. “Don’t argue, and don’t let anything happen to it. Vernon’s going to send a plane.”
Vernon came occasionally to the hospital, though usually he stayed in Kearney and helped Rosie with the children. His sandy hair was sprinkled more with gray, but he was as scrubbed and as energetic as ever and, as ever, totally deferential to Aurora.
Emma was more comfortable with him than she was with her mother, for Vernon seemed to accept her weariness and weakness. He didn’t demand that she live. Then one day all three came: Aurora, Vernon, and the General—who seemed older but no less straight. When he talked it was like someone was cracking walnuts. Vernon carried the Renoir, wrapped in many papers. At Aurora’s instructions he unwrapped it and hung it on the white wall, right in front of Emma. Seeing it again, particularly in Nebraska, caused Aurora to weep. The two brilliant young women smiled into the sad room.
“I’m giving it to you,” Aurora said, deeply upset. “It’s your Renoir.”
She felt it was the last and best thing she had to offer.
TOO MANY people came, it seemed to Emma. Melba came one day, driving all the way from Kearney in a snowstorm. It took her two days. She had bought Emma a paperback copy of the Iliad. It was said to be important, and she knew Emma read such books. Also, it was poetry. She crinkled her brow at the sight of her wasted friend, left the Iliad, and drove back to Kearney.
Also, Richard came. Emma had so hoped he woudn’t. They had not been great talkers anyway, and she didn’t know what to say to him. Fortunately, all he wanted to do was hold her hand for a while. He held her hand and pretended she was going to get well. Emma rubbed his neck and asked him about his grades. When he was gone she had troubled dreams about him; it had been bad of her to let him get so in love, but it was one among a great many mistakes.
Then one day she awoke and Patsy was there, fighting with her mother. They were fighting about Melanie. Patsy had offered to take her, to raise her with her two girls, but Aurora bitterly opposed it. Flap was there too. Emma heard him say, “But they’re my kids.” Patsy and Aurora completely ignored him. He was not relevant.
Watching them, Emma’s head really cleared, for a while. “Stop it!” she said. They stopped with difficulty, two extremely angry women. To her puzzlement, she smiled; they didn’t realize she was smiling at them.
“They’re my blood,” Aurora said. “They’re certainly not going to be raised in California.”
“That’s very biased,” Patsy said. “I’m the right age, and I like raising children.”
“They’re our children,” Flap said, and was again ignored.
Emma realized that that was what she had been forgetting in her grogginess: the children. “I want to talk to Flap,” she said. “You two take a walk.”
When they were gone she looked at her husband. Since her illness he had almost become her friend again, but there was still an essential silence between them.
“Listen,” Emma said. “I tire easily. Just tell me this: Do you really want to raise them?”
Flap sighed. “I’ve never thought I was the sort of man who’d give up his kids,” he said.
“We’re thinking of them,” she said. “We’re not thinking of how we’d like to think of ourselves. Don’t be romantic. I don’t think you want that much work. Patsy and Momma can afford help, and you can’t. It makes a difference.”
“I’m not romantic,” Flap said.
“Well, I don’t want them living with Janice,” Emma said.
“She’s not so bad, Emma,” Flap said.
“I know that,” Emma said. “I still don’t want her exercising her neurosis on our children.”
“I don’t think she’d marry me anyway,” Flap said.
They looked at one another, trying to know what to do. Flap’s cheeks had thinned, but he still had something of his old look, part arrogant, part self-deprecating—though the arrogance had worn thin after sixteen years. Somehow that look had won her, though she couldn’t remember, looking at him, what the terms of endearment had been, or how they had been lost for so long. He was a thoughtful but no longer an energetic man, and he had never been really hopeful.
“I think they better not stay with you,” Emma said, watching him, willing to be dissuaded. “I just don’t think you have the energy, honey.”
“I’ll really miss Melanie,” he said.
“Yes, you will,’” Emma said.
She reached out and picked at a spot on his coat. “I’d like her better if she kept your clothes clean,” she said. “I’m just that bourgeois. At least I kept your goddamn clothes clean.”
Flap didn’t counter. He was thinking about his children—about the life he would have without them.
“Maybe we should let Patsy take them,” he said. “I could spend my summers at the Huntington.”
Emma gave him a long look. It was the last time Flap really looked her in the eye. Ten years later, rising from the bed of a dull woman in Pasadena, he remembered his wife’s green eyes, and he felt all afternoon as he worked at the Huntington that he had done something wrong, wrong, wrong, long ago.
??
?No,” Emma said. “I want them with Mother. She has enough gentlemen around to control them, and anyway Patsy’s just being loyal. She might want Melanie, but she doesn’t really want two boys.”
The next day, alone with Emma, Patsy sighed and agreed. “I just hate to see your mother get her hands on that little girl,” she said. “I’d love to raise your little girl.”
“I’d let you, but Teddy can’t spare her,” Emma said.
That was the big ache, the only emotional pain that compared with the pain in her vitals: the thought of Teddy. Tommy was fighting; he had already girded himself into a tense, half-desperate self-sufficiency; but that was all right. He was half convinced that he hated his mother anyway, and maybe that was all right too, although it was painful. They had not given in to one another in a long time, she and Tommy, and maybe the fact that he kept himself braced against her was good; maybe it was even some kind of anticipation.
As for Melanie, her golden-haired daughter, Emma scarcely worried at all. Melanie was a little winner; she would make her way anywhere, with or without a mother.
But what would ever, ever become of Teddy? Who could he find to love him as much as she did? His eyes were the only eyes that haunted her. If she could have lived for anyone it would have been for Teddy; the thought of how he could take her death filled her with fear. He was always prone to assume all blame; probably he would feel that if only he had been a better boy his mother would have lived. She spoke of it to Patsy, who didn’t disagree.
“Yes, he’s like you,” she said. “Innocent and guilt-ridden.”
“I wasn’t so innocent.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use the past tense,” Patsy said. “Anyway, I’m having those kids out to visit a lot. She can’t object to that.”
“I’ll make her agree,” Emma said. She was thinking that her friend looked wonderful; only she seemed sad. It was hard to believe it, but Patsy too was thirty-seven.
“What’s wrong?” Emma asked.
Patsy shook the question off. Emma persisted.
“I don’t think you realize how I’ve depended on you,” Patsy said finally. “You and Joe. Sometimes I think I’m in love with Joe instead of with Tony. He’s drinking himself to death, despite me, and now you’ve got cancer, despite me. I don’t know what good I am.”
There was no answer to such a remark, and the two of them sat silently, as they had often sat when they were younger.
Then Patsy went off to Kearney to bring Rosie and the kids for a visit. “Bring my Wuthering Heights,” Emma said. “I always ask for it and they always forget it. And bring me Danny’s book if you can find it.”
“YOU’RE TO let her have those children now and then,” Emma said. “She’s my closest friend and she can take them to Disneyland and show them a great time.”
“I was thinking of taking them to Europe this summer,” Aurora said.
“Take your boy friends to Europe,” Emma said. “The kids will have more fun in California. Send them to Europe when they’re in college.”
It was inconsiderate, she thought, how blandly people mentioned the future in sick rooms. Phrases like next summer were always popping out; people made such assumptions about their own continuity. She pointed that out to her mother.
“Yes, I’m sorry,” Aurora said. “I’m sure I’m the worst offender.”
ALONE, EMMA didn’t think about much. She didn’t like pain and asked for drugs, and they were given her. Most of the time she floated; the effort of allowing tests, complying with shots was all she could manage usually. She sometimes watched scenes occurring around her, almost without emotion. Once her mother drove out an old religious fanatic who had tried to come in and leave a Bible. Emma watched, detached. Even when her head was clear she didn’t really think. In two months she found that she had almost forgotten ordinary non-hospital life; perhaps the drugs had affected her memory, because she couldn’t remember it clearly enough to yearn for it. Sometimes it occurred to her that she was through with most things—sex, for instance—yet the thought didn’t hurt much. It bothered her worse that she couldn’t go Christmas shopping, for she was a person who loved Christmas, and she sometimes dreamed of department stores and Santa Clauses on street corners.
Once, picking up the copy of the Iliad that Melba had given her, she chanced upon the phrase “among the dead,” and found it comforting. Even counting people she knew, there were a lot of dead to be among: her father, for one, and a school chum who had been killed in a car wreck, and Sam Burns, and, she guessed, Danny Deck, the friend of her youth. She supposed him dead, though no one really knew.
Mostly, though, she didn’t think. She floated; and when she roused herself at all it was to cope with doctors or visitors. She noticed that everyone in the hospital assumed that she was finished. They were polite; they were not really perfunctory, but essentially they let her be. It was her own people, not the doctors, who kept pressuring her to get well enough to go home for a while. They all seemed to think it must be what she wanted, but Emma resisted. If she had had a chance she might have gone home and dug in, but she knew she had no chance—knew it from what she felt, not from what she had been told. Once she accepted that, then she accepted the hospital. For those who could be cured, it was a hospital, but for her it was a depot, a kind of bus station; she was there to be transported out of life, and because it was ugly and bare and smelled bad and was run impersonally by hired functionaries, that which was never easy—a departure—could at least be handled efficiently. She didn’t want to go home, because at home the warmth and good smells of her life would be overpowering. Her children would drag at her, with their love, their brilliance, and their need. She would become vulnerable to her little joys: her soap operas, washing Melanie’s fantastic hair, Tommy’s newest book and Teddy’s hug, a nice dawdle with Richard, some Hollywood gossip from Patsy. If she went home it would hurt too much to die; also it would hurt those who were losing her. She wanted to slip away from her children as she had when they were tots, while they were somewhere else in the house happily playing with their babysitters. Then perhaps, before they really missed her, they would already have partly learned to do without her.
Still, as had been true so many times in her life, she was not as strong as her principles, nor up to executing any of her best theories. When faced after a few weeks with what she knew would be last visits, she could only get through them by pretending they weren’t last visits.
Most heart-rending of all, more terrible even than her youngest son, was Rosie. She had not come to the hospital much; she hated them. “They spook me,” she said nervously when she did come. “I was never in one myself in my life, except to have babies.”
“Momma should have left you in Houston,” Emma said. Rosie had brought her a box of chocolate-covered cherries. The sight of Emma, the real darling of her life, shook her so badly that she couldn’t speak. She had accepted stoically the eventual death of Royce—from pneumonia—and of her oldest girl’s baby, but the sight of Emma’s bloodless face was too much. She couldn’t talk and was too strung out to cry. The best she could manage was a few observations about the children, and a hug. For the rest of her life she was to regret, often to Aurora, that she had not managed to put her feelings into words that day.
The boys Emma saw together, after Rosie left. Melanie was in the hall playing with Vernon. The General had caught a cold, and Aurora was seeing that he got a proper shot.
Teddy had meant to be reserved, but he couldn’t manage. His feelings rushed up, became words. “Oh, I really don’t want you to die,” he said. He had a husky little voice. “I want you to come home.”
Tommy said nothing.
“First of all, troops, you both need a haircut,” Emma said. “Don’t let your bangs get so long. You have beautiful eyes and very nice faces and I want people to see them. I don’t care how long it gets in back, just keep it out of your eyes, please.”
“That’s not important, that’s just a matter of opinion,”
Tommy said. “Are you getting well?”
“No,” Emma said. “I have a million cancers. I can’t get well.”
“Oh, I don’t know what to do,” Teddy said.
“Well, both of you better make some friends,” Emma said. “I’m sorry about this, but I can’t help it. I can’t talk to you too much longer either, or I’ll get too upset. Fortunately we had ten or twelve years and we did a lot of talking, and that’s more than a lot of people get. Make some friends and be good to them. Don’t be afraid of girls, either.”
“We’re not afraid of girls,” Tommy said. “What makes you think that?”
“You might get to be later,” Emma said.
“I doubt it,” Tommy said, very tense.
When they came to hug her Teddy fell apart and Tommy remained stiff.
“Tommy, be sweet,” Emma said. “Be sweet, please. Don’t keep pretending you dislike me. That’s silly.”
“I like you,” Tommy said, shrugging tightly.
“I know that, but for the last year or two you’ve been pretending you hate me,” Emma said. “I know I love you more than anybody in the world except your brother and sister, and I’m not going to be around long enough to change my mind about you. But you’re going to live a long time, and in a year or two when I’m not around to irritate you you’re going to change your mind and remember that I read you a lot of stories and made you a lot of milkshakes and allowed you to goof off a lot when I could have been forcing you to mow the lawn.”
Both boys looked away, shocked that their mother’s voice was so weak.
“In other words, you’re going to remember that you love me,” Emma said. “I imagine you’ll wish you could tell me that you’ve changed your mind, but you won’t be able to, so I’m telling you now I already know you love me, just so you won’t be in doubt about that later. Okay?”