by Belva Plain
I want a fabric to be woven between us, a strong, unbroken tissue, unblemished from beginning to end, not like Martin or Jessie or Alex and Mary.
Ned moved, making a sound like a mutter or a sigh. His dream was troubling him. What was his dream? She reached out her hand to wake him, to say, “Oh Ned, my dear and darling, what shall we do? Don’t leave me!” But thinking then it would be cruel to wake him from merciful sleep, she drew her hand away.
“What does he think?” Martin cried. “That medical training is something you put down and take up like a piece of knitting, as simply as that?” And she knew he was thinking: My girl, my brilliant girl, after your grades, your record, your potential, and you’re to give it all up so he can go off to an advertising job? An advertising job, compared with medicine?
“He could get a job elsewhere, after all,” Martin said more calmly. “Inconvenient, perhaps, but not impossible.”
“That’s exactly what Ned said about me.”
“Well, it’s entirely different, and I’m astonished that he doesn’t see it.”
“Dad, don’t turn your anger against Ned. Help us. Advise us. We’ve spent three days talking, and I don’t know how to solve it.” She wiped her eyes roughly. “I don’t want to cry. You know I hate crying.”
“Yes. Yes, you’re between a rock and a hard place, as my father used to say.” Martin sighed. “Sometimes I think we doctors ought to be like priests: don’t marry and don’t have children. When there’s no one you love and have to care about, then you can do what you want. Nothing can hurt you.”
“Well, we’re not priests, are we?” And she thought as she pressed him, of all the secret things written inside us, as on a scroll, unrolling back and back.
“Ah, you know in what direction my hopes lie! You’re my own and I want so much for you. How can I think clearly, fairly? For you I want the world and all that’s in it’ ”
“Then you don’t know how to solve this,” she murmured.
“You will have regrets either way—how I wish I could spare you!” he said gently. “Only remember that you’re not alone. I’m here, for what I’m worth.”
She thought: All of a sudden he looks the way he will look twenty years from now. He raised his eyes to hers. She thought she had never seen eyes of such soft, penetrating sadness.
The argument had gone into the second hour of the fourth day. “Machismo, Ned,” Claire cried. “That’s what it is! You have to play the dominant male to show you’re not like your father.”
“That’s a Goddamned rotten thing to say!” Ned cried.
She was instantly contrite. “I know it. I apologize. I didn’t mean it that way. But you are being a heavy male, you really are.”
“When you break free of your father and his ambitions for you, maybe you’ll grow up and be a woman,” he said coldly.
She was furious. “Maybe one day you’ll learn there’s more to being a woman than just taking care of a man.”
Don’t dodge the issue. Ever since I came to New York I’ve seen and thought—I haven’t spoken out but I’m going to now—you’re letting your father plan your life! How do you even know you wanted to be a neurosurgeon? He decided it for you when you were some sort of a child prodigy and now you—”
“You’re crazy! Nobody ever said I was a prodigy. Don’t make a fool out of me! Putting words in my mouth, or my father’s!”
The air quivered between them with the intensity of a summer storm.
“I’m going for a walk,” Ned said. “I need to get out Maybe it will clear out thoughts, being quiet for a while.”
She heard the elevator door clash open, followed by the whir of its descent. “Whither thou goest,” and so forth. Ought she not go to the ends of the earth with him? Had she not come from a long line of women who had done just that, following their men across oceans, bravely leaving home and parents, all the dear, familiar places? “Whither thou goest …” Yes, but women were different then, and I am different; certainly not better, only different I am a doctor first. Secondarily, I happen to have female organs. Why should I be controlled by a uterus and a pair of ovaries? Why should these make all the difference?
Maybe, maybe, he will come back from the walk with another point of view. Maybe he will come to an understanding of what I mean. You love a man, and suddenly you’re fighting. He turns into a stranger.
She got up and put a record on the player. This need for music, this, too, was a legacy from her father. Laying her head back, she willed herself into another place and time, while Respighi’s “Birds” rustled in Rome’s cypresses. Thousands of birds fluttered and wheeled against a background of triumpant Sunday bells. The birds filled her head. Most living of all living things, so free, whirling and beating through the windy sky! So free!
The door opened and Ned came back. He turned the record off.
“We’ve talked it all out,” he said, not looking at her. “We’ve gone as far, I think, as words can take us. So for the last time I ask you. Have you changed your mind? Will you come with me?”
She took a deep breath. “No, Ned. I can’t.”
His face was closed up tight, like faces at funerals. Who knows what regrets and terrors lie behind the faces you see at funerals?
“You see,” she said, “I have to do what I have to do.”
He looked at her. “Well, that’s it, then isn’t it? I suppose it has to be. I’ll take my things in the morning when you’re out. It will be easier that way.”
“Yes,” she said.
Once she had been standing on a sidewalk where a dreadful accident had happened in the street. Someone had been run over. She’d had the same sense of unreality then, queer and remote as voices heard across water or snow.
“Well,” he said and stopped. He opened his mouth again to speak and closed it without another word and went out. Again she heard the clash of the door and the whir of the elevator as he went down. But this time was the last. And silence fell.
The apartment looked abandoned although, two months after Ned’s departure, Claire was still living there. The cleaning woman had been in, leaving fresh towels in the bathroom and the morning paper on the coffee table. It was cold in the room, even though on the street below heat blasted yellow-hot as if from an untended furnace. She turned down the air conditioner and sat huddled, shivering and swaying. I must look old, she thought. Bitter old, and as desolate as I feel.
For almost a month now, she had known she was pregnant. And she sat with her secret knowledge, looking around the room as though in some corner of a cabinet or shelf lay an answer to her questions.
A closet door had been left ajar, and on the top shelf she saw a forgotten hat, that crushable Irish country hat which he had worn in England and brought with him when he came here. He had come here to be with her. That hat looked sad. In Hong Kong now he would be wearing a panama hat, wouldn’t he? Or maybe one of those tropical topees? Or did they only wear those in India? He would be wearing a white suit and drinking a gin sling in a garden, or else in some cool room where a ceiling fan turned slowly. No, that was Somerset Maugham in Singapore, half a century ago. In Hong Kong he would be in an air-conditioned room like this one, fourteen floors above the street. Would he be working late and thinking of Claire?
My nerves, she thought. Good God, my nerves! I’m a moth beating and bumping on a windowpane, trying to get out. Get out where?
Feeling ice-cold, she ran a tubful of hot water. But her shoulders and knees, protruding from the water, were still cold. And she wondered whether the creature inside her, the tiny, fishlike thing, could feel the cold. Some said it wasn’t really alive yet, but of course it was. There might even be a way in which it could sense the misery in its mother. Who really knew? It sleeps. It rocks in the warm pool and already contains within itself all that it will ever be: a cherub with curled lashes and a cleft in its chin like its father’s; a fleet running boy; a timid, good girl with large feet. To destroy these possibilities? Yet, to be a child wit
hout a father?
She got out of the tub and dressed herself, then began to cry. A tabloid writer would describe “heart-rending cries,” she thought disgustedly. I’m sick of tears. But the truth was that they were heart-rending. My heart is rent. I hope they can’t hear in the apartment below because I can’t stop. She slid to the floor and knelt with her face on the seat of the chair. I’m crying for everything. Why have I spoiled everything? Why has he spoiled everything? Damn him! Still, there’s nothing else I could have done. And now, this baby—
Think! Don’t let tears and fears carry you downhill! Fear rides a toboggan over the ice; once it slips past the brim of the hill, it can’t stop. So hold on, Claire, hold on.
Across the park in the heart of the city there waits a man with an expert knife, a skilled and sterile knife that can solve the problem, that can destroy or save, whichever way you care to regard it. Sub rosa he works, but he is well recommended. Doctors send their wives and their mistresses to him. Medical students send their friends.
Nevertheless, fear followed at her back. It pursued her into a waiting room which was no different from a dentist’s, with an etching of the Cologne Cathedral and a neglected sansevieria in green pot. It reminded her of those places where you take a crucial examination, where a pencil sharpener grinds, a proctor assembles a pile of blue books, and their crisp rustle tells you it is too late to run away and claim to be sick. Too late.
“Mrs. Blake,” the nurse called. For a moment she forgot that was the name she had given, so that the nurse had to repeat it. All heads in the room turned to Claire as she rose. They were all scared. And they all knew that was not her name.
It was done with extraordinay speed.
“Well, that wasn’t too bad, now, was it?” the doctor said.
He was three-quarters of the way out of the door. He hadn’t spoken a word up till then.
“No, it wasn’t,” Claire said, unclenching her teeth. Actually, the pain had been quite bearable. She remembered the sound of scraping and willed herself not to think of it.
“You can go home now,” the nurse told her.
“Can I do anything?”
“Well, I wouldn’t suggest a ten-mile hike. Rest today and take it easy for the next few days, that’s all.”
Heads went up again when she came out into the waiting room. She felt so sorry for them all. She wanted to say: Don’t be afraid, it’s not so bad. A young girl sat there, a child no more than fourteen. A couple sat there; they were no longer young. He was shabby in a crumpled summer suit. Probably they already had more children than they could afford. She felt so sorry for them all.
Out on the sidewalk she stood hesitating. Suddenly she didn’t want to go back to her apartment alone, which surprised her, for she had imagined herself, when this was over, going back to her own place and quietly resting, pulling herself together, not so much in body as in mind.
Mother was still in Vermont. She decided to go to her father’s. Having overcome his dread of water, he had rented a summer house again near a beach. She hailed a taxi and drove to Grand Central.
There was no one but Esther in her father’s house when she arrived. Claire sat down in the kitchen.
“You want something to eat, Miss Claire?”
“No thanks.” I only want not to be alone. “You just came back from visiting your folks in Florida, my father says.”
“Yes. Tarpon Springs. My kids live there with my mother.”
“It’s beautiful there, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but you can’t earn enough to support the kids.”
“How many do you have, Esther?”
“Me? I only have two. But my sister, she’s got eight here in New York. Six born since her man left her.”
“How do they live?”
“Oh, she on the Welfare. Gotta be.”
“Tell me, Esther. Why does a girl have all those children? I mean, because she’s all alone and—”
Esther raised her eyes. The lashes rolled slowly scornfully up from her cheekbones as if she were reluctant to reveal a deep, old enmity. “That’s just the reason. A girl gets lonely.”
Lonely, Claire thought, wondering. I’ll need to learn so much about people that I don’t know at all.
She got up and walked to the kitchen-door, looking out at the lawn where stood the picnic table, the string hammock and the barbecue, the apparatus of American suburbia. At the bird-feeder a cardinal feasted on sunflower seeds, while his partner picked up the overflow on the grass. Suddenly into the silence came a running flash and a flurry of desperate shrills.
“Oh, Esther, come!” Claire screamed. “The cat’s got the cardinal! Come! Run!”
Esther ran outside and came back. “It’s too late. Don’t look,” she said with surprising gentleness. “There’s nothing you can do.” And she turned Claire away from the pathetic heap of scarlet feathers. “Don’t you feel well, Miss Claire? My, you feel very hot. I’ll make you a cold drink.”
Without curiosity and disbelief, the girl looked into the face of this strange woman who could cry so over the death of a bird.
Toward dawn, Claire woke. A shaft of light fell into her eyes, making her head ache. Then she became aware of another ache, deep in some pit between her spine and her stomach. Something was knotted, tight and hard and sore. She felt her forehead. It was hot. Then she remembered yesterday, and alarm struck. Could there be anything wrong? No, no, surely there was nothing. It was only the natural effect of an unnatural procedure. It would certainly take a few days to feel normal again.
She drifted back into sleep, turning her head away from the irritating light. When she woke again, the soreness inside had turned to pain. She was shivering and her head was hot; it felt hollow. No, this surely wasn’t right.
She sat up in bed just as Marjorie came through the door. The girl’s long hair fell like a curtain over her shoulders.
“You said you’d do my braids for me.”
“Of course. Sit on the bed.” Claire raised her arms. They were weighted at the shoulders. She raised herself in the bed, forcing her strength, forcing cheerfulness. “Got plans for today?”
“Lisa’s mother’s taking Peter and me to the beach.” “Oh fine!”
People were thoughtful of these two who had no mother. Children without mothers. Mothers without children. Would hers have been a sturdy peaceable child like this one? An affable boy like Peter? No. These were predominantly Hazel’s children. Hers would have been someone different. But who? Her arms fell.
“I seem to be tired this morning,” she said. “Maybe you’d better ask Esther to finish.”
She lay back and dozed again. Whe she woke, the house was quiet and she had a sense of morning lateness. And she stumbled out of bed, calling, “Dad! Dad!”
Esther appeared at the foot of the stairs. “It’s ten o’clock. Your father left on the seven-forty-five,” she said in some surprise.
“And the children? Where’s everyone?”
“Enoch’s gone to his job and Miz Baily took the kids to the beach.”
“Oh yes. Marjorie told me.”
“You’re sick,” Esther said accusingly.
“I know. I’m sick.”
“I told you yesterday I thought you was.”
“I know. I need to see a doctor. I’ll get dressed.”
“You came all the way to Jersey in a taxi?” Tom Horvath repeated.
“Yes.” A surge of pain shook Claire, cold sweat dampened her hands. “First I thought of Dad. Then I thought better of it. Maybe we needn’t upset him with this.”
Tom Horvath looked at her seriously. “He will have to know,” he said.
“I’m very sick, aren’t I, Uncle Tom?”
“I’m afraid you are, Claire.” There was no reassurance in his homely face. “I’ll have to take you to the hospital.”
“Oh, can’t I go home? Tell me what medicine to take and—”
“Come, you know better than that You’ve an infection, dear girl. You
’ve got a hundred and four fever.”
“Peritonitis?” Her voice trembled and chirped. Suddenly the room went dizzy with stripes and blocks of brilliant color. The chairs bent in the legs. The floor tilted, and Uncle Tom swam slowly toward her, curving his way through heavy water.
“Yes, Claire. Peritonitis.”
* * *
“Who did this, Claire?” “I can’t tell you.”
Her body twisted in the bed. Her stomach twisted. Was something holding her head in a vise? Was she vomiting or only feeling the need to?
Dad’s face came close. The eyes pinched up and there were knobs on the forehead. Then the face vanished. Hands did things. Nurses’ hands, delicate and chilly. Voices and echoes sounded at the end of a long corridor or somewhere in an empty auditorium. The ceiling spun like a top slowly wobbling before it falls.
She ripped, she tore and split. Cloth tore. Trees cracked open and animals shrieked. I can’t stand all the noise in this place, all this noise and all these bright lights in my eyes, she said. Ah, bloody froth and bubble of pain, rising and cresting! Hold on, hold on until it passes. Will it pass? Slide now as it ebbs, down and down, into a dark, burning trough. So hot, the glowing fire! Now rise again, splinter and crack. Rise up and up. Ah! Hold on! Hold on and twist. Oh God! How much? How long?
She opened her eyes in a later time. An hour? A year?
Lightly, quietly, she lay on clouds, on seafoam, in a white bed in a vast landscape where there was no sound: land of the dead?
Her father’s face leaned over her again. Blinking, she looked and looked again to make sure it was he.
“What day is it?” she whispered then.
“Tuesday.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“It’s the fourth day and the drugs have taken hold. Your fever’s down.”
“I’m going to be all right?” “Yes, thank God, you are.” “I almost died, didn’t I?” “Yes, Claire.”
“I’ve made so much trouble for you,” she said as reality rolled back.
