“Any time we want to start living our lives all over again, everything we need is here—except courage.”
“Maybe some day we’ll have houses of our own,” Alice said, “and then whatever will we do with it all?”
“That’s done for, too,” Lucy said. “I’m forty-seven and you’re forty-three. People may call us the Beach girls but we’re no spring chickens, either of us. We’ve had our chance and missed it, and I’m so tired I don’t care any more. All I want to do is rest. I don’t know why people don’t tell you when you’re young that life is tiring. It probably wouldn’t have done any good, but then again it might have.”
“I don’t feel that way,” Alice said. She took a kindergarten chair and sat down, facing a bookcase crammed with glass and china. On a level with her eyes there was a milk pitcher which she remembered from her childhood. It was blue and white, and two young women (sisters, perhaps) walked in a garden, each with her hand through a young man’s arm. A duenna with a dog at her feet sat watching them, approvingly. And in the background there was a ruined temple, undoubtedly to the shaggy god who, from his place under the handle, kept an eye on both couples. Under the spout there was a motto which Alice Beach knew without having to read it:
For every evil
under the sun
there is a remedy
or there is none,
if there be one
try and find it,
if there be none
never mind it.
She turned her face away from this familiar message and looked out of the attic window at the bare branches of a big maple tree. After a while she said, “Sometimes I have to stop and remember how old I am.”
“You’ve got a few more years to go,” Lucy said. “Then you’ll be tired, too, like me. You won’t care any more what happens to you or what might have happened. Don’t look at me like that.”
“I can’t bear to have you say such things.”
“You don’t have to listen. And besides, I don’t have to say them. I can just think them instead, if that will make it any easier for you.”
“It won’t.”
“Well, then, you’d better go away. I’ll even help you.”
“Where would I go?”
“Anywhere. I can manage here without you, now. You can go anywhere in the world you please. There never was enough money for two but there’s enough for one, and you might as well take it and go abroad. You always liked the Dalmatian Coast. Go back to Ragusa and try there for a while.”
“What about Mama?”
“Well, what about her?”
“It might kill her if I left home now.”
“Nothing will kill her. She’ll outlive both of us. She’ll outlive everybody on Elm Street. She’s not ever going to die. It’s time you realized that. She’s going to live forever. And she can’t stop you from going because I won’t let her. I could have stayed in Europe if I’d really wanted to. I can manage her now and I could have managed her then. Deep down in my heart I didn’t want to. I wanted her to manage me. And she has, I’ll say that for her. She’s never been so sick or so tired and discouraged with Papa and us and herself that she didn’t manage things the way we wanted her to manage them. So pack your bag and put on your hat and go, and it’ll be all right. Go to Mississippi if you don’t want to go abroad. Go stay with the Potters on their plantation. Mrs. Potter asked us to last summer. All you have to do is tell her you’d like to go with them when they go. Maybe you’ll find someone down there. Sometimes a widower with children will——”
Lucy turned her head to listen. Both of them heard, faint and far away, the ting-a-ling of a bedside bell.
“I’d better go see what she wants,” Alice said.
“Let her wait,” Lucy said. “This is more important. And don’t look so frightened. Try and think calmly and clearly. Try to see what it is that you really want to do. And whatever it is—I don’t care if it’s to be a bareback rider in a circus—I’ll help you.”
These offers which come too late or at the wrong time, in words that are somehow unacceptable, are the saddest, the most haunting part of family life.
“Lucy, please stop!” Alice exclaimed as she started for the stairs. “I don’t pick at you. Why can’t you let me alone?”
14
“Mama?”
“She isn’t here,” Mr. Potter said. “You’ve got a new nurse.”
“Where is she?” Nora asked.
“She went back to the house to rest. She didn’t get much sleep last night, so I said I’d take over. Is there anything you’d like me to do for you?”
“What’s that awful shouting?”
“Some poor soul is having a hard time of it, I guess,” Mr. Potter said.
“It seems like it’s been going on for hours and hours. I don’t see why they don’t put her somewhere where nobody can hear her. It’s awful to have to listen to.… When’s Mama coming back?”
“Pretty soon. How do you feel?”
“All right. Only I’m so tired of lying here.”
“It won’t be much longer. The doctor says you’re coming along fine.”
“I want to go home,” Nora said.
“We’ll take you home,” Mr. Potter said, “just as soon as you’re able to be moved.”
“I want to be in my own room. I don’t ever want to see this place again.”
“Just be patient a little while longer,” Mr. Potter said. “It doesn’t do to try and rush things.”
“But I’ve been here so long and this bed’s so uncomfortable.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
The screaming was resumed.
“What time is it?” Nora asked.
“Half after two.”
“Did Mama say what time she was coming back?”
“She’ll be along directly. Now that you’re getting better, you mustn’t expect her to be at your beck and call all the time. You’ve put her through considerable strain, and she’s worn out. From now on, it’s up to us to spare her anything we can.… It’s a bad thing to grow old, Nora, and know that you’ve been a fool.”
After this abrupt revelation, the first that he had ever made to his daughter, Mr. Potter sat quietly and watched her eyes close and saw her breathing change gradually to the breathing of sleep.
Most maxims are lies, or at any rate misleading. A rolling stone gathers moss. A stitch in time doesn’t save nine. The knowledge that you have been a fool hurts just as much, is just as hard to admit to yourself if you are young as when you are old. Every error that people make is repeated over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, if they know what they are doing and cannot help themselves. The curtain goes up night after night on the same play, and if the audience weeps, it is because the hero always arrives at the abandoned sawmill in the nick of time, the heroine never gives in to the dictates of her heart and marries the man with the black moustache. There is not only a second chance, there are a thousand second chances to speak up, to act bravely for once, to face the fact that must sooner or later be faced. If there is really no more time, it can be faced hurriedly. Otherwise, it can be examined at leisure. The result is in either case the same. Windows that have been nailed shut for years are suddenly pried open, letting air in, letting love in, and hope. Cause is revealed to be, after all, nothing but effect. And the long, slow, dreadful working out of the consequences of any given mistake is arrested the very moment you accept the idea that for you (and for your most beautiful bride, who with garlands is crowned, whose lightness and brightness doth shine in such splendour) there is an end.
15
Part of the time Martha King was convinced that there was some dreadful mistake, that they were trying to bury her alive. At other times she was quite rational, knew why she was there, answered correctly when Dr. Seymour leaned over the bed and asked, “How many fingers have I?” and was able to distinguish between her own screaming and the chant that came from the next room: Oh doctor, doctor … oh my doc
tor … sometimes pleading, sometimes a shriek, sometimes a singsong, but in the next room. Not the same as Oh this is strong! The pain comes in waves! It’s all in my back! (she said that); or, It’s gone, isn’t it? (the nurse); or Are my eyes swollen? It feels as if I were peeking through them … Oh now it’s starting, it’s starting!
At three-thirty the nurse stopped referring to her watch, and time was measured by the slow progress of a patch of sunlight on the hospital floor.
“By rights,” George Diehl said, “she shouldn’t be having this child. She’s too old. She’s nearly fifty and worn out with bringing up kids, but she wanted one more, and I couldn’t refuse her. It’s not good, though—a woman of her age. She’s been in labour for fifteen hours and the doctor is worried about her heart. They let me in to see her for a couple of minutes, just before you came. We’ve been married for nearly thirty years, and yet whenever I try to tell her I love her, it sticks in my throat. I know she knows, but I thought she might like to hear me say it, so I did, and she said, ‘Who’s been getting you all upset?’ ‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘It’s just the sight of you lying there, looking like a young girl.’ Which was not the truth, you understand; she looked all worn out, but it pleased her, even though she didn’t want to let on. ‘You’ve been a good wife to me,’ I said, and afterwards I felt better, as if I’d got a weight off my chest.”
(The sunlight reached the foot of the hospital bed and began to climb.)
“But this waiting is hard on a man,” George Diehl said. “I’ve seen a whole year go by faster than these last two hours.”
To experience the emotion of waiting, in its purest form, you must pass through that stage when pacing the floor, or drumming with your fingers, or counting, or any of the mechanical aids gives release, and enter into the stage when the arrival of the minute hand of the clock at twelve is separated from the sound of striking by so long an interval that the whole nervous system cries out in vain for an end of waiting. Pain is movement, the waves of the sea rising, receding; waiting is the shore they break upon, the shore that changes, in-time, but never noticeably. The will that waits and endures is not the same will that makes it possible for people to get out of bed in the morning or to choose between this necktie, this silk scarf, and that. It is something you never asked for and that never asked for you. You have it and live. You lose it and give up the ghost.
During the course of that interminable day, Austin’s relation to the man with a mole on his left cheek kept changing. When the wall would no longer support the weight of his head, he got up and walked, his nerves on edge, his mind coming up against a high blank fear every six or seven paces. He felt his ribs encased in a delicate pressure that might, if he took too deep a breath, be shattered, and with it the last chance that things would turn out all right. A single nervous gesture, a word addressed to himself out loud and his life, like a round glass paperweight turned upside down, would be filled with revolving white particles of terror. At those moments when his natural patience seemed to have gained the upper hand and he was able to sit down and wait, the man with the mole would get up and walk, and it was impossible for Austin not to share in that walking, not to feel his own forehead contracting in the same furrows as that other forehead, and his eyes clouding over with the same suspicion that everything that could be done upstairs was not being done.
The first time that George Diehl, with his hands clasped behind his back, stopped in front of Austin as if there was something that he felt the need of saying, Austin turned his eyes away. He was sorry immediately. The mouth already open, about to speak, closed and the pacing was resumed. When George Diehl sat down and it was Austin’s turn to walk the floor, he hesitated and then said abruptly, “I guess we’re in this together. If you want to talk—if it will make it any easier for you to talk, go ahead.”
“No, thanks,” the man said, refusing this offer of sympathy as Austin had refused his cigar. Though neither offer was repeated, George Diehl did begin to talk eventually, about the lumber business, which was not too good, and then about how there wasn’t as much game as there used to be and how the creeks were beginning to be fished out or else ruined because the miners had been using dynamite in them; and Austin found himself with a lighted cigar in his right hand and a gradually unfolding history to contemplate that was quite different from his own, until this moment when the two had merged. The story of George Diehl (including the mistakes he had made—there were several that were serious—and the lucky breaks that had alternated with events not so lucky; the jobs he had lost through no fault of his own, the neglected opportunities, how George Diehl’s oldest girl wanted to be a teacher, how his son didn’t care about anything so long as he had a little spending money in his pocket and they didn’t ask him, when he went out in the evening, where he was going and what time he would be home) was a story full of interest and suspense, of strangeness and incident and even poetry.
Austin tried to limit himself to listening, but certain scenes and situations kept rising to the surface of his mind; words got as far as his lips and had to be pushed back. Finally, the fabric of reserve gave way under the weight of George Diehl’s confidences and Austin began to talk.
Martha King’s pains recurred at the same unchanging interval. A scrubwoman, in slavery to a bucket of soapy water and grey mop, reached the doorway and looked in.
“What’s the matter? Won’t the baby come out?”
It was not a question but merely comfort, freely given and gratefully received.
“Have you any children?” Martha King asked, turning her face to the door.
“Nine alive and one dead.”
“Was your second as hard as the first?”
“That’s right. And with the second one I suffered the same pain.”
The scrubwoman went on mopping the corridor. She did not know or ask who the patient in 204 was. There was no lace on the hospital gown, and pain had first disfigured and was now busy disposing of the beautiful woman. Pain did its work so well that old Mr. Porterfield would not have recognized Mrs. King. Neither would the Beach girls nor Mrs. Danforth nor anyone who ever saw her gathering flowers in her garden of a late summer afternoon. First the beauty went, then the smile, then the light in the brown eyes, then the perfume, then the softness, then the fiery temper and finally the deeper patience of love. All that was left was a creature writhing on a bed, trying to come to acceptable terms with agony.
George Diehl listened attentively, and now and then made some observation that indicated he had been turning over in his mind the events that Austin was describing. He had long ago come to the conclusion that there was so little difference in people or in how they met their problems that to criticize or take a high moral stand was more or less a waste of time. When Austin realized that no matter what he told George Diehl (he had already told him everything and nothing), George Diehl would not be surprised or shocked or blame him, a kind of exhilaration set in, which the older man understood but did not share—a state of excitement it was perfectly all right for Austin to feel, because he was younger than George Diehl and had more of his life before him.
The fading outside light was replaced by the glare of electric bulbs, and a black velvet cloth was hung outside the hospital windows.
“The only thing that frightens me is hearing that woman scream,” Martha King said.
It was her own screaming that she heard, this time. The next room was as quiet as doom.
Disfigure and dispose of Martha King as, say, Mrs. Beach or old Mr. Ellis knew her and you have a nameless animal creature, but the creature is not the end and certainly not the answer. There is finally the self, biting its hands and shouting It’s awful … Oh please … It’s so awful … Oh God I don’t like it.…
Out in the corridor there was the sound of dishes rattling, of talking and occasionally laughter. People who work in hospitals have their own sanity to think about and preserve.
At quarter to seven, Austin and George Diehl left the waiting room
and walked downtown to a restaurant that Austin had never been in before, and ordered steak sandwiches. Austin couldn’t eat his when it came. He pushed the plate away from him, on the verge of being sick. He watched George Diehl’s face while he ate, and thought how little of all that had happened to him showed in the very ordinary features, the eyes that were tired but friendly and had no comment to make beyond the fact that, if Austin wasn’t going to eat his sandwich, it oughtn’t to go begging. Austin passed the plate across the table and George Diehl transferred it to his own plate and went on talking and eating.
In silence, talked out at last, they walked back to the hospital, where, as soon as they opened the door, a nurse came toward them with a message for George Diehl, who seemed quite dazed by news that was good. He did not hear Austin’s congratulations or even seem to know who Austin was.
“Well, that’s that,” he said.
Austin found himself in full possession of the waiting room and, after nearly thirteen hours of George Diehl’s company and conversation, little or no interest in being alone. He began to walk the floor and the sixth or seventh step brought him face to face with the barrier that he couldn’t get past. He sat down and waited for the paperweight to be turned upside down, the miniature snow to begin falling.
16
When Ab had said her prayers, Mrs. Danforth lifted her into the big bed in the guest-room and drew the covers around her. “I’ll leave the light on in the hall,” she said, “and if you want anything in the night, call me and I’ll hear you.”
Ab looked up at her without answering, her eyelids weighted with sleep. Nobody but her mother had ever tucked her in bed before, and though Mrs. Danforth was kind and gentle with her, it wasn’t the same. She wanted her mother. The sound of Mrs. Danforth’s heels descending the stairs was not the sound her mother made.