by Belva Plain
“Thanks, yes. I’ll just sit here.”
“I’ll tell them where to find you.”
From a soft beige chair Iris looked at beige walls. These modern medical offices must come ready made, all of them the same, with the walnut-finished wood, the textbooks, the beige curtains, the diplomas, and the family photograph in color. This family had three children, all girls in pinafores, a chubby mother, and an Old English sheepdog. There was a world clock on the desk so you could know at a glance what hour it was in Singapore or Helsinki. Here in this town, it was half-past midnight.
A long time ago, or maybe only a short time ago, she had been sitting in a dining room at the Waldorf-Astoria. Diamonds, silk, and flowers.… Now here. The hospital smell, smell of sickness and disinfectant, seeped everywhere, even into this clean beige cubicle. Upstairs where Theo was, in a white place that gleamed with steel, the smell would be stronger. She felt like vomiting and, remembering what she had been taught, put her head down between her knees.
Long hours passed and she was still sitting so when the door opened and two men came in, doctors in white, looking official. The young man was Dr. Bauer, still as friendly and unassuming as, when an intern, he had tried to thank her for her kindness to him and his shy young wife. The older man, red and burly, must be the famous Dr. Bayley.
Jed Bauer introduced them. “This is Dr. Bayley, Mrs. Stern.”
The burly one held out his hand. “Dr. Bayley.” He sat down. He got to the point.
“We have a very unfortunate situation, Mrs. Stern. Your husband’s lost three fingers. That’s the worst news. The better news is that I’ve been able to reattach two of them. The index finger is lost up to the first joint.”
Iris did not speak. The clock said quarter to nine in Helsinki, where the sun was long up and people were going to work. In the beige cubicle, silence rang.
“A heavy door. It must have slammed full force,” Jed Bauer said into the silence.
Bayley ignored that to interrupt Iris, who had opened her mouth to ask a question. He had anticipated the question.
“The two I attached, if all goes well, will be minimally useful. That’s to say he’ll be able to hold a fork, drive a car, et cetera.”
The time in Singapore was—well, no matter, it was already the next day there, once you crossed the international date line. He’ll hold a fork, et cetera.
“And his work? I don’t suppose …” Her voice trailed off into a stillness that no one broke.
The men looked at her, pitying her brimming eyes, her leaking nose, and her desperate hands. Then she buried her face in a handkerchief. After a moment she asked whether she might see Theo.
“He’s not really awake, but you may go in.”
She looked down at the beloved sleeping face. It was white and clearly cut, perfect as white stone. His great swathed paw was white too, enormous in bandages, with his forearm resting on a pillow. She had a sense of unreality.
Jed Bauer was waiting when she left the room. “Come, I’ll drive you home.”
She answered mechanically, “I can drive.”
“No. Dr. Swensen will follow in his car and bring me back.”
When he stopped in front of the house, Bauer handed an envelope to Iris.
“There’s something here to help you through the night. Take one right away.”
“I never take things like that,” she told him.
His rebuke was kind. “Mrs. Stern, there are a few times when it doesn’t pay to be strong and proud. This is one of them.”
She went upstairs through the dead, silent house and obeyed the doctor. Then she pulled off her clothes and threw them on a chair. The shoes, the red dress, and even the sapphire ring were thrown. The last thing she saw before she dropped onto the bed and turned out the light was the glossy box with Léa’s filigreed purse, gift wrapped.
9
It was given out quite simply that a terrible accident had happened, which was of course the truth. Sympathy from every side was unending. A shock wave passed through the local medical community; far from being chief of surgery now, Theo Stern was finished with surgery forever. Worst of all for Iris was the unspoken commiseration, for naturally it was known that she had been the one to slam the door.
“I can imagine how you feel,” said a friend, embracing Iris with tears in her eyes.
The family, including Anna, who was still at the Berkshire inn, had been told something, about half of the truth, Theo having insisted on doing it that way. There was no sense spoiling their summer, he said, when there was nothing that they could do about it. And Iris understood that he was unready to face them and their sorrow for him.
While he was still in the hospital, she had knelt beside his bed so that her face was level with his.
“I beg you, I beg you, not to hate me too much.” She had barely been able to speak. “Yet, how can you not?”
Frowning, he had turned his head away. “Foolish, foolish talk. Hatred! All foolish.”
“I swear by my life that I wish it were my hand. Believe me. Do you believe me, Theo?”
“Yes. Yes.” He winced, and she knew he was trying to hide his pain—only, which pain was the greater, the physical or the mental anguish, she could not know.
Later, when she went home alone and lay all night without closing her eyes, she knew which must be the greater. For what was he to do? With all his bright future wiped away? Only blemished years could lie ahead. Blemished, aimless, and gray. She wept, and wept harder to think how insignificant had been last week’s tears, even her tears over Steve.
When she brought Theo home, they had still not spoken very much.
“Can’t you see I don’t want to talk?” he said.
“Only tell me one thing,” she implored. “Tell me you understand how sorry I am for this, for everything I said, for everything I did.”
“I understand,” he said wearily. “Now, for God’s sake, enough.”
He wanted to go to the office to “put things in order,” he told her, by which he meant to cancel appointments and transfer current patient records to someone else. When he came home, he sat on the terrace turning the pages of the newspaper with his left hand. After a while he dropped the paper and sat there staring out over the lawn toward the pool where nobody swam now. Between the oblong of still turquoise water and the pink brick pool-house stood lounge chairs and umbrella tables waiting for a gaiety that was not coming. These were the playthings and this the setting for success and confidence.
He looked too desolate sitting there alone, and Iris went out with a book to join him. After a while she ventured to pierce the heavy silence, saying, “Theo? Tell me what I can do for you.”
“Do?” he echoed.
“I thought,” she said timidly, “maybe you’d like to talk, to say what you’re thinking.”
“Thinking? How to stay sane,” he replied.
She did not answer. The lump in her throat lay like a tumor.
But she tried again with less personal subjects. In the dining room she read aloud a letter from Laura and one from her mother, who, having no idea of what really had happened, had now stopped offering to come home.
“Mama says Bernstein was marvelous as ever at Tanglewood,” she reported.
Theo only nodded. He scarcely ate. She was trying not to see the bandaged hand that rested on the table. And then she had to look back at it, couldn’t take her gaze away from it, and felt the agony in her own fingers.
Step by step, over and over, she retraced events. It was as if a machine inside her head had been programmed to perform a certain set of movements, complete them, and repeat them. It started with Steve’s arrest, and then the woman.… And all the red-hot rage in Iris settled on the woman; she could have killed her, it was the woman’s fault, the bitch, that this awful thing had happened to Theo, and her fault that Theo would never love Iris again. For how could he love her? She had crippled him.
She walked into rooms and forgot what she had gone for. A
ll night alone in the wide bed, for Theo slept in Jimmy’s room, she had miserable dreams of loss.
The dog runs out of the house and races down the street among speeding cars, my little children plead and call and I am helpless. Or: Theo and I are on a train that halts on the tracks for repairs; I get out to walk a little, when the train starts up again; it races past me and I run after it, but no matter how fast I run, I cannot advance and the train goes out of sight, with Theo on it.
She would wake in a sweat. In the mirror heavy eyes pouched within dark blue circles accused and stared. And always in the evening, confined to the dinner table, facing the food that neither of them wanted, there was the grim silence broken only by desultory, meaningless remarks that neither of them wanted to make. The gloom was palpable. They were in a drifting boat going nowhere. She became numb.
And one day there came a thought, stunning and chilling in its clarity: If I weren’t here, they would all be better off. Jimmy is on his way, Steve will sink or swim, Laura is one of the happy blessed, and Philip—well, somehow Theo will pull himself together and take care of him; one child isn’t much to care for.
Immediately came the reaction to the thought: It is bizarre, unclean, and you don’t mean it anyway, Iris. Stifle it. Get out of the house, into the light, and it will go away.
She found an errand to do in a department store, but forgot what it was. She stood at a counter behind a cluster of old ladies, trying to remember. The old ladies were animated, widows probably, out to lunch and window-shop; later they would go home to their tidy small apartments where old family photographs stand on top of television sets; they’d make tea in their kitchenettes and feed their cats, sufficient unto themselves.
When she still could not remember, she went to the car wash. They had a young girl there vacuuming the cars. She looked like a cheerleader, all-American, lean and competent and healthy. She was whistling. Uncomplicated, Iris thought, untroubled. My Laura is like that, thank God. And my mother is too. Lucky Laura, to be like Mama. Lucky Mama.
In the front hall when she got home there stood a pile of packages, dress boxes from Léa. The very number of them, piled to waist height against the wall, was obscene. What could she have been thinking of? Yes. The less said about that, the better. Yes. So then, what to do with them? They had all been altered, for her sleeves had always to be shortened, therefore they were unreturnable. There was nothing to do but take the boxes upstairs and unpack them.
Linen, silk, and cashmere rustled out of the tissue paper, mocking Iris with their creamy extravagance. Hanging them all out of sight at the back of the closet, she wondered how they were going to be paid for. Last came the black lace with its sprinkled bows and fairylike blue stole. For a few minutes she stood looking at it with hatred, as if it were a living enemy; then she removed the price tag and called downstairs to Pearl.
“Come up. I have a present for you.”
The woman was astonished. “You’re sure you want to give this away, Mrs. Stern? It’s brand new.”
“Yes. If it doesn’t fit you, give it to your niece. She goes to dances, doesn’t she? And here’s a bag to wear with it. It’s lizard, lined with satin. And the clasp is a swan, see? Beautiful, isn’t it? The best quality.”
Iris prattled as though she were persuading Pearl to buy the things, and she saw that Pearl, aware that something was very wrong, was covertly searching her face but did not dare the intimacy of a direct question.
“Maybe you’d like to take the afternoon off so you can show it to your niece. Do, go ahead. There’s nothing more to be done in the house today.”
When Pearl had left, the afternoon stretched ahead. There was nothing to fill it, or rather there were things, there always had been, but what was lacking now were the will and energy to do them. For a moment she thought of straightening her bureau drawers, for hers, unlike Theo’s, were never as neat as they should be; but then, how trivial a thing was a bureau drawer!
In the drowsy heat the house slept with window shades drawn down against the sun’s glare. From room to room Iris walked, through Laura’s pink nest where the bed was heaped with stuffed animals, to the full toy shelves in Philip’s room, to Jimmy’s neat space now marked by Theo’s occupancy—journals of medicine on the night table—and then to Steve’s, with whom it had all started. No! No, that was not fair, not honest, not true. Whatever it was, it must have started long before Steve.
Downstairs she wandered, inspecting idly, really just glancing and not caring. The Norfolk pine on the terrace was wilting for want of water; it didn’t matter. Someone had put a sweating glass on the piano and made a ring on the ebony finish; it didn’t matter. Pearl had left the kitchen in serene order; that didn’t matter either. This was how a home, how a family, fell apart, all the calm safety and solid comfort gone, melted like a sugar cube in a glass of water.
The door between the kitchen and the garage was open. Two cars were there, Theo having taken a taxi to his office, where he would sit all day doing—what? Iris had no idea, perhaps just staring and thinking, as he did at home.
Maybe she ought to drive somewhere, go up into Connecticut on back-country dirt roads, find a pond, sit down, and look at the water. It would be something to do. She took the keys from the hook on the back of the kitchen door and got into the car. She was so tired. For a second she glanced at the car’s right-hand door, the instrument of the crime, then started the engine. The fine costly mechanism softly hummed and thrummed.
“Always open the car’s windows and the garage door,” Papa said long ago when he was teaching her to drive. “Carbon monoxide is odorless. It kills without warning and only takes minutes.”
“Only minutes?”
“Yes, you feel sleepy without even realizing it, while the gas creeps.”
An easy death without blood or pain. And yet to die so young would be a pity. I’d have to think a lot more before I’d do it, she thought. I don’t know.
When she laid her head back on the seat, a beam of sunlight, shafting through the corner window of the building, struck into her eyes. And through the dazzle, behind the closed lids, came pictures, all of Theo’s face: coming out of the office with that woman that night, contorted in shock as he grasped his mutilated hand, bent over hers as he approached her in the act of love—his face.
The motor hummed; vaguely she felt its subdued, vibrating thrust. The shaft of sunlight quivered, moving through the summer leaves, through the drowsy day. Sleepy … sleepy.
When finally they removed the oxygen tent, Theo was able to speak to her, answering her question before she asked it.
“It was the gardener who found you. He came by to get lime for the lawn, heard the motor running, and looked in.”
So small, she was, lying there. She had never seemed so small, nor her eyes so beautiful, and sad.
“Why? Did you really want to do this?” he asked, imploring.
“I thought about it, but I didn’t want to.”
He thought perhaps he understood, but he wasn’t sure. And now that she wasn’t going to die, he felt free to be angry. Did they not have enough troubles without adding this? But he said nothing, only sat there looking at her sad eyes.
Suddenly she cried out, “You haven’t told the children or my mother?”
“No. I knew you wouldn’t want me to.”
“And if I had died?”
“I would have said it was an accident.”
“Ah,” she whispered. “Thank you.” Then she said, “It was an accident.”
“If you say so.”
“I’m very tired, Theo.”
“I know.” He stood up. “I’ll be back in an hour. You rest.”
Out in the hall he remembered that he hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t said any loving words. But if he had done so, he would have started to cry, and he couldn’t let that happen. It would have been like shoving a toboggan down a hill; after that first push it has its own gathering momentum.
When he had passed the nurse’
s station, he felt them looking after him. Probably no one believed the story that Iris had fainted in the car; they would have connected the event somehow to his fingers, which were now throbbing again under the bandages. And they would be right.
Ah, to hell with them, with the whole damn world.…
On the fourth morning he took Iris home, where she went straight to her room and lay down. When Pearl brought up a tray of food, she took a few mouthfuls and pushed it aside.
“Mrs. Stern looks awful bad,” Pearl told Theo.
“She’ll be all right in a few days. She’ll get her strength back,” he replied, that being an expected, stock reply.
But he was a physician, and he knew that it would not be so simple for Iris to “get her strength back.” How tortured she must have been! He supposed he would never know whether she had really intended to die. Possibly she herself did not really know. Then he wondered where she could have been on the night of the accident; he tried to reconstruct the two or three minutes from the time she alighted from the train to the slamming of the door, he could remember thinking that she had been all “charged up.” Where, where could she have gone in her new red silk and her jewelry? And he concluded: probably out with one of the women she knew who lived in the city, maybe that two-time divorcée Joan Somebody. They would have gone to an expensive restaurant and commiserated with each other about how rotten men are, and Iris would have told what she’d seen that night at his office. God Almighty, if he could only undo it, or if he could only make her see it as the worthless escapade it had been!
She was having a hard time being near him. She could not meet his eyes. Not that it was comfortable for him to meet hers either. Fortunately the house was large enough for them to avoid each other for hours at a time. Only in the dining room at their stilted meals that could not be omitted—for were they each to take a plate and hide somewhere apart?—were they forced to confront each other.
“Why do you look away from me?” he asked abruptly one morning later that week. “You keep turning your head toward the door.”
