by Alice Duncan
“I’ll cut up your ham for you. Want butter on your potatoes, carrots, cabbage and rutabagas? Vi left a bowlful of butter on the tray.”
“Speaking of trays…” I squinted for about a third of a second before I decided squinting was too painful an expression with which to deal, so I stopped. “If you’ll go to the closet, you’ll find on the top shelf the tray we used for you when you were confined to bed. It’s got those little fold-up legs, so it’ll be easier to eat from than if I try to balance a tray on my lap.”
“What lap?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.”
Almost as obedient as Spike, Sam went to the closet and fetched the tray. Sam would never be as obedient to my orders as Spike, because I’d taken Spike to the Pasanita Dog Obedience Club’s doggy-training classes two years prior, and he’d placed first in his class. Spike always did what I told him to do. Sam, not so much.
Oh, and I had that leggy tray in my bedroom closet because that’s where I stored it after I finished nursing Sam when he’d been released from the Castleton Hospital where he was taken after he was shot. It had been touch and go for a while, and we were all worried, but he survived. Thank God. He’d been about the most appalling patient any person who’s ever nursed anyone could have wished for. Not that a nurse would ever wish for that kind of patient, but…Oh, never mind.
Sam carefully poured out a spoonful of morphine syrup. I eyed it malevolently. I wasn’t joking when I said my darling Billy had killed himself with the stuff. He had. But what Sam had said was also true: Billy’s problems and mine were totally dissimilar, except that we were both in great pain. According to the doctor, my pain would go away soon. Billy’s never would have left him, and he’d finally ended his life after he’d endured what he’d decided was enough pain and misery. The year after his death was probably the worst of my life, but I don’t like to think about it.
“Here,” said Sam, guiding the spoon to my lips. “Be careful. Don’t want a spill.”
I opened my mouth, shut my eyes, and Sam shoved the spoon into my mouth. I swallowed. The stuff was vile!
After I’d gulped down the morphine syrup and grabbed the glass of water Sam had thoughtfully provided for me—I guess he’d tasted morphine syrup himself a time or two—I drank deeply. I was so greedy to get the sweet-bitter taste out of my mouth, I dribbled.
“Careful,” said Sam, using one of the napkins Vi had provided to mop up my chin and the bed covers. Then he opened the tray’s legs and set the tray over my blanketed limbs. It really was a clever little thing, that tray.
“S-sorry,” I gurgled. “I don’t know how Billy could stand that stuff.”
“Wait and see if it doesn’t help you feel better.”
“Guess I’ll have to, won’t I?” I said testily.
“Guess so.” Sam grinned at me. “As I asked before, would you like butter on your vegetables? And your dinner roll?”
“Oh, yum. I love Vi’s dinner rolls.”
“Indeed. Your aunt makes the world’s best dinner rolls. I’ll butter one of them for you, too. I’ll cut your ham, but you’ll probably be able to handle the soft vegetables and the roll—as long as I split it and butter it—by yourself.”
“Yes, please. Thank you, Sam. You’re being very nice to me.”
“Yeah. I know.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. Childish, I know, but he only laughed. Really, though, this being-waited-on nonsense was for the birds. Sometimes I’d have fantasies about being wildly wealthy, like some of my clients, but I honestly don’t think I’d enjoy having servants following me around all the time. I’d make a stinky queen, wouldn’t I?
“Want a little mustard on your ham?”
“If you’ll put a dab on my plate, I’ll swipe my bites of ham through it.”
“If you say so.”
“I don’t like lots of mustard, but I like a little bit.”
Sam nodded as if he were actually pleased to be taking orders from me. Ha. That’d be the day.
“And after you butter my rutabagas and dinner roll, will you please tell me how I happened to get hit by that car? It seems to me that if someone was driving poorly, he or she would have hit more than a single person, especially in that huge crowd milling around after the parade was over.”
Frowning as he cut ham, Sam said, “That’s another reason I find the accident—if that’s what it was—troubling. We were all standing in a group, waiting for Pudge to fold up his camp stool so we could walk home, when you suddenly went reeling into the street.”
“I did what?”
“You went reeling into the street,” Sam repeated, carefully setting my plate of food on the tray he’d erected over my legs.
“Why did I do that?” I glanced from my plate of food, which looked delicious, although I honestly wasn’t very hungry, to Sam’s concerned face.
“I don’t know, but I suspect, given the suddenness of your departure from our group and the fact that you were instantly hit by a car, someone pushed you.”
“Oh.” My gaze remained fixed upon Sam, and I suspect I looked as befuddled as I felt. “I don’t remember being shoved.”
“You don’t remember being hit by the car, either,” he reminded me.
“True.” I forked a piece of ham, dipped an end into the little squirt of mustard Sam had plopped on my plate, and stuck it in my mouth. I started with the ham because it had the strongest flavor, and I hoped it would help drown out the evil taste of the morphine syrup. “I wonder if I’ll ever remember.”
With a shrug, Sam, too, ate a piece of ham. After he swallowed, he said with a deep, satisfied sigh, “Delicious.”
“That’s the only reason you want to marry me, isn’t it? Because then you can continue to eat Vi’s meals.”
With a grin, Sam said, “That’s not the only reason, although it’s a mighty good one. I also like you pretty well.”
“I like you pretty well, too, Sam. Except when you’re mean to me.”
“I’m never mean to you.”
“Yes you are.”
“Nertz.”
The telephone rang. On New Year’s Day. Talk about nertz!
Sam and I exchanged frowns. Sam rose from his chair and carefully set his plate of food on my night stand, although I’m not sure why. I don’t think he aimed to answer the ’phone, but he stood there, on guard, looking as if he aimed to protect me from whoever was on the other end of the wire.
It is true that telephone calls in our house were almost always for me, due to the nature of my business, and they generally came from women wanting me to conduct séances and so forth. However, even I hadn’t expected a telephone call that day. Maybe it was my brother or sister, both of whom lived somewhere other than Pasadena. If one of them were calling, he or she probably only wanted to wish everyone a happy new year.
Wrong.
Pa appeared in my doorway. “It’s Doctor Greenlaw. He saw the accident and wants to know if you’re all right. Want me to tell him you’re recovering?”
“If he saw the accident, why the devil didn’t he come over and help?” demanded Sam, who didn’t care for Dr. Fred Greenlaw. There’s a reason for his dislike—a very poor one, if you ask me—but I won’t go in to that now.
“He said he tried to get to us, but the crowd was massive, as you know, and people kept blocking him. By the time he got to where he thought we’d been, we were gone.”
Before Sam could say anything else of a corrosive nature, I said to Pa, “Please thank him for telephoning. You can tell him about my left arm being dislocated. It’s very nice of him to call.”
“I’ll let him know,” said Pa, and he vanished. I heard him speaking into the telephone receiver. The telephone itself hung on the kitchen wall to the right of my bedroom, which led directly off the kitchen.
“That was nice of Fred,” I said to Sam.
“Yeah,” said Sam.
“You’re a crosspatch and an old grouch, Sam Rotondo.”<
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“Huh.”
Then I heard a knock on the front door. And the telephone rang again. Good heavens.
The person at the front door turned out to be Mrs. Killebrew, who lived across the street from us. She didn’t stay, but she told my parents Pudge Wilson had advertised my accident up and down the street on both sides, and she just wanted to inquire as to the state of my health and to bring the family a fruitcake. She made fruitcakes every Christmas, although she’d complained in recent years that they weren’t as good as they used to be because she couldn’t get dark rum in which to soak the cakes. I’d never have told Mrs. Killebrew this, but I didn’t like fruitcakes, rum or no rum. Vi made the occasional fruitcake for Mrs. Pinkerton, but she didn’t force the family to eat them.
Don’t get me wrong. I adored Mrs. Killebrew, who was a very nice lady, and for whom I felt sorry because she’d lost her elderly husband a month or so earlier. So I could sympathize with her on that account, but at least her husband had been old and not young, like my Billy. Not that it matters.
I also love fruit. If I were given an orange to eat, I’d devour it. In fact, I devoured at least one orange almost every day, since we had two orange trees in our yard: a navel and a Valencia. They produced fruit pretty much all year long. But I think retaining the skin of an orange, lemon and/or grapefruit and candying it—or whatever the process is called—is a lousy idea. I love dehydrated apricots, peaches, apples and stuff like that. And prunes. But fruitcakes? Not to my taste.
Not that it wasn’t sweet of Mrs. Killebrew to bring us a fruitcake, even if nobody in the household would eat it.
Oh, never mind.
As for the telephone call, the caller turned out to be Harold Kincaid, probably my best friend. Harold was another person Sam didn’t care for very much. The reason he disliked Harold was the same reason he disliked Dr. Fred Greenlaw, even though both men are lovely individuals. The one little thing—Sam claims it’s not a little thing, but I think it is—that annoys Sam is that they both prefer men to women when it comes to romance. When I first learned about this particular…What would you call it? This peculiarity? I guess that’s as good a word as any, I was surprised, but I didn’t care much.
For some reason, men seemed to care a whole lot about stuff like that. I don’t understand it. I mean, who cares whom anyone else loves? It’s nobody else’s business as far as I’m concerned.
Anyway, that’s not the point. The point was that Harold called. Pa said Harold said Dr. Greenlaw had called him, and he (Harold) wanted to offer his best wishes and find out how I was doing. So Pa told him. He (Pa) also told him (Harold) I’d be laid up for at least a couple of weeks and that I couldn’t get out of bed at the moment. The English language is pronominally deficient, if you ask me. Not that you did.
At any rate, Harold said that was all he wanted to know, and I should expect to get a gift from his mother, who had become hysterical when Harold told her about my accident—which, apparently, wasn’t an accident. Mrs. Pinkerton’s hysteria was nothing out of the ordinary, so I didn’t fret much about her condition.
“So you can expect something, probably large and expensive, from Mrs. Pinkerton,” said Pa.
“Oh,” I said, looking at my father, who grinned at me from my bedroom door. “Isn’t that nice?”
“I’m sure it will be,” said Pa. He turned and went back to the dining room, when the stupid ’phone rang again. So—although I didn’t see him do it, I know he did—Pa detoured to the telephone on the kitchen wall and answered it for the third—or was it the fourth? I can’t even remember—time that day. My poor father was going to have to eat a cold dinner if he kept answering the blasted telephone.
As soon as I heard the click as he hung up, I hollered, “Just leave the receiver off the hook, Pa!”
“That would be rude, Daisy,” came my mother’s voice from the dining room.
“But Pa’s dinner’s getting cold!” I retorted.
“I don’t mind, sweetie,” said Pa.
“I’ll answer the telephone, Joe,” Sam offered. That was nice of him. Of course, he’d already eaten more of his own dinner by then than my poor father had been able to get down, thanks to the ’phone and the door.
“Thanks, Sam,” said Pa. “I’ll take you up on that offer.”
Our doorbell scritched. We have one of those old bells that twist. People like Harold and his mother have chimes. La-di-dah.
“What the heck?” I said. “Is the entire world going to come calling or telephone? Darn Pudge Wilson anyway!”
“The kid was scared to death for you, Daisy. I think he’s sweet on you,” said Sam.
I sighed again. “Yes, I know he is.” Something then occurred to me kind of slowly, like maybe a centipede that had lost a few legs. Only that sounds disgusting. “You know what, Sam?”
“Probably not. What?”
“I think that syrup is working. I’m about to drop my fork because I’m suddenly so exhausted.”
“Whoops!” Sam rushed over, took my fork from me, removed my tray, and I sank down onto the bed pillows, which he’d thoughtfully fluffed for me. For so grumpy and grouchy a man, Sam could be a sweetheart when he wanted to be.
Four
And that’s all I remember of New Year’s Day, 1925.
As reported by Sam, who remained with my family (according to all reports) for the rest of the day and into the evening, the telephone continued to ring and folks continued knocking on the door.
When I woke up the next morning, my bladder was screaming. When I tried to get out of bed in order to walk to the bathroom, the rest of my body joined in. Poor Spike, startled by my loud cry of agony, walked up from the foot of the bed and licked my face.
“Thanks, Spike,” I moaned to my faithful hound. “I hurt everywhere.”
Spike was all sympathy. His eyes told me so.
I don’t know how long it took me to get out of bed that morning, but during every second of it, my entire body throbbed to beat the band. I hobbled to the bathroom and more or less fell onto the toilet. You probably didn’t need to know that part, did you? I’m sorry. But really, it was the most painful day of my life. Physically, I mean.
As I sat on the pot, I cursed my idiocy for not taking a swig of morphine syrup before I attempted this journey to the bathroom. Then I remembered my Billy and how horrified I’d been whenever I saw him drinking the stuff, and I burst into tears.
In other words, I was a complete mess. The fact that I couldn’t use my left arm in the attempt to balance myself didn’t help matters any. As tears streamed down my face, a knock came at the bathroom door.
“Daisy?” My father said. “Sweetheart, are you all right? You should have hollered. I’d have helped you.”
Feeling miserable and extremely sorry for myself, I said in piteous accents, “Thanks, Pa. I’m all right.”
As awful as it sounds, I’m accustomed to lying. Heck, I lied for a living. But I seldom told whoppers like the one I’d just told my father.
“You are not,” he said, sounding faintly critical. “You were hit by a car yesterday, your body is torn up, your left arm is useless, and you shouldn’t try to do things by yourself when you have a family to help you.”
His words made me feel worse, although I hadn’t thought such a thing was possible until it happened. Miserable, I sniffled and said, “Th-thanks, Pa. I didn’t know it would hurt this much.”
“Nonsense. I could have helped you get out of bed.”
“I’m sorry.” Being scolded on top of being in hideous pain only made me feel more injured, but I didn’t tell my wonderful father that. He worried about me, and that was sweet of him.
He was also right. I’d been an idiot not to realize that, even if Ma and Aunt Vi had already left for work, Pa would be there in the house and would have assisted me in any way he could. I guess my brain, along with the rest of me, had become rattled when that cursed car hit me.
I hobbled to the bathroom door, opened it, and Pa
instantly put an arm around my right shoulder. I shrieked, “Ow!”
Grimacing, Pa said, “Sorry, sweetheart. There’s not a single inch of you that isn’t wounded, is there?”
Snuffling like a blubbering baby, I said, “No. Everything hurts. All my muscles ache, all my scratches and scrapes sting, and my left arm and the left side of my body are howling in agony.”
“Better take a spoonful of that medicine Doc Benjamin left for you.”
And that comment, of course, reminded me not merely of how stupid I’d been not to have thought of it myself, but also of my dead Billy, and I cried some more. As Pa gently walked me down the hall and into the kitchen, I stopped dead in my tracks, momentarily diverted from my suffering. The kitchen was full of flowers! And cakes. And cookies. And unopened packages. And a whole lot of other stuff. Blinking, thinking my eyes had deceived me, I just stood there, staring.
Pa understood. “You have no idea.”
“I don’t?”
“Nope. The whole house is full of flowers and candy and cookies and cakes, and just about everything else you can think of. Mrs. Pinkerton sent you a huge box. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up so you can open it and see what’s inside.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to do. The notion of looking at everything and writing thank-you notes to people daunted me even more than the things themselves pleased me, which tells you what kind of shape I was in.
“And Harold’s bringing you lunch.”
Turning my head slightly—even doing that hurt—I stared at Pa. “He’s what?”
“He’s bringing you lunch. From the Castleton. He said you like their Lobster Newburg.”
“Lunch? Castleton? Lobster? But…but what about Vi?”
Pa chuckled. The vibration shot through my battered body and made it twang like a banjo string.
My head hurt. My brain hurt. My entire body hurt. And the house was full of stuff people had given us. What was going on?
“Um…Maybe I ought to take a teaspoonful of that hateful syrup. I can’t quite seem to figure out what’s been happening here while I was asleep.”
