by Belva Plain
“Then that must be it,” Stern said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
It seemed necessary for Paul to be saying something while he put his shirt on and knotted his tie.
“I’ve friends on Long Island who invite me to swim. I guess I’ll have to watch out for sunburn. And I’m really sorry to have bothered you for no reason.”
“No bother. I have plenty of time. In fact, I have nothing but time.”
Paul took the opening, for it seemed to be an opening. Besides, it would not even be decent to ignore the man’s injury.
“Your hand,” he began. “I hope it will heal quickly. You must be in a hurry to get back to work.”
“I shall not be going back to work.”
The cold, flat tone shocked Paul, so that his glance went automatically to Stern’s suffering face. It looked twenty years older than the lean patrician face he remembered.
“I’m not what you saw before, am I?”
And Paul could only reply, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m having a bad time. I’ve lost the use of three fingers.”
“Terrible!” Paul exclaimed, knowing the response to be entirely inadequate. Yet after all, there were no words suitable to so great a ruin as this one.
“Smashed it in a car door last month,” Stern said.
And he sat down, indicating with a gesture that Paul might sit, too. Apparently, he needed to talk about his tragedy. He must have been sitting here brooding all alone; there were no ringing telephones or clattering typewriters sounding from any of the inner rooms. In this room the blinds were half drawn, allowing a gloomy green light to be filtered in through the trees.
Paul’s eyes moved to the diplomas on the wall behind the desk and to the brown textbooks. Restorative Maxillary Surgery, he read. What was he doing here? The purpose for which he had come was now forgettable. If there had been any other human being in the office, he would have gotten up and left, but it seemed heartless to walk away from anyone so beaten, just as it would be to leave a sick stranger alone on a street corner without knowing what he was going to do or what was going to be done for him.
“A crazy accident,” Paul murmured, needing to fill the waiting silence, even with nothing more than a platitude. “They always say that home or your own car right near home is where most things like that happen.”
“So they do say.”
The gloom mounted. It was so palpable that Paul felt its chill on his skin. Then suddenly he began to see what was taking shape in his own head: that this event would have profound effect upon Iris, and that possibly it could in some way have to do with what Leah had told him a few hours before. He shivered and asked abruptly how the accident had happened.
Stern sighed. “It’s this war in Vietnam. We have a son, a marvelous boy, exceptionally bright, filled with potential, ideas, ideals—well, fiercely independent, and that’s the sad part of it: he’s become a radical, a rebel, and we can’t reach him.”
When he paused as if he were trying to draw a clear thread through his story, Paul interjected, “You told me about him when I was in the hospital.”
“I did? I don’t usually air my worries like that.”
“There was a blizzard and you were held up, so you sat in my room for a few minutes and we got talking.”
“I’m not a garrulous man,” Stern said with a troubled frown, as if it were important that Paul be aware of that. “It seems you’ve been the victim of one of the rare times when I talk too much.”
They would be rare times, Paul recognized. This was an unmistakably proud and private human being, one who would reveal himself only when under some extraordinary stress.
With a reassuring smile he said, “I don’t mind listening.” And it seemed to him that he had told Stern the same thing that other time too, but he couldn’t be sure.
“So, as I said, he’s always been fiercely independent, but now he’s older, and things are worse. He got himself arrested at the convention in Chicago.”
“These are confusing times, very hard on the young. It’s not like the Second World War when we knew what we were fighting for and what against.”
His remark was lame, a liberal’s cliché, Paul knew, and scant comfort for a parent.
“That may be,” Stern said rather sharply. “I happen to think we are fighting there to keep scoundrels from eating the world up, piece by piece. Anyway, we quarrel over the boy, my wife and I. She likes to say he just needs to find himself. What’s this business about ‘finding oneself’? Don’t they know who the hell they are? I’ve no patience with it.”
“Well,” Paul said gently, “sometimes one doesn’t really know who one is.” And he thought: Who am I? A banker, and a fairly shrewd one, who increases wealth and preserves it; also a philanthropist who takes pleasure in giving it away; a dilettante of art and music who feasts on them both but produces none himself; sometimes a politician scheming on behalf of the underdog; a lover—or was one—
“Anyway,” Stern resumed, “he was arrested. My wife wanted to go to him at once to help him, but I thought, and actually I still do think, he must live with the consequences of his actions. How is he to learn? Ideals are one thing and I understand them, but behaving like a hoodlum is another. I saw enough of hoodlums in Vienna.”
Paul groped mentally for the connection between the son and the hand, to which his gaze now moved. Stern, following the gaze, understood.
“So we quarreled and one thing led to another. Led to many things.…” He got up and raised the blind. “It’s dark as a cellar in here. I should have thought of it before. Is the light in your face? No?” And with his back to Paul he said, “She slammed the door on my hand.”
Paul was stupefied. She—Iris—did that!
“It was an accident, purely and simply an accident, and I have told her over and over that of course I know it was, that any fool would know it was.”
An accident. Relief washed over Paul, and his heartbeat, which had accelerated, slowed again.
“But she feels such guilt—” Stern’s voice broke and he stopped.
The breaking voice and the impressive tallness—the phrase fine figure of a man flashed through Paul’s mind—were painfully incongruous. On Stern’s behalf he felt humiliation, and knew he should not be a witness to such profound and intimate grief. He ought to find something kindly to say, make some suggestion—but what?—and leave. However, he did not.
Suddenly Stern turned about and, erect as a military officer, came to stand before Paul.
“I should apologize for this behavior in front of a stranger, and I do apologize.”
“We all have to talk sometimes,” Paul responded. “And it’s easier to talk to a stranger. You know what they say about the stranger in the airplane, whom you’ll never see again. It’s doubtful that you’ll ever see me again.”
“The man in the airplane. Yes, I see. Or perhaps if one has a father or an uncle, someone half again as old as oneself. Not friends, though, certainly not in communities like this where everybody knows about everybody else and what they don’t know, they invent.” He paused. “If I were Catholic, I would go to a priest, wouldn’t I?”
Yes, wrap one’s trouble in a package, hand it over, and maybe get it back a little lighter. When I had Ilse, Paul said to himself, I could do that. And he spoke very softly to Theo Stern, repeating, “I’m willing to listen.”
Stern sat down in the swivel chair. There were two creases in his cheeks, which were too young to be creased like that. And Paul wondered whether in time they might go away.
“She found me with a woman, here in this office. It was the night Steve was arrested and we argued, and I came here to have some peace. The last thing I wanted was a woman! I curse myself. The damned woman. She’d been waiting for me, waiting for weeks. I’d known it every time we passed in the halls. I was at loose ends that night, distraught about everything. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So—so it happened. You know how it is. The last thing I wanted
to do was to hurt Iris.”
Paul felt the sting of wrath. “The last thing” he wanted was a woman. Now the last thing he wanted was to hurt Iris. Which was it? Yet he began to see his way through the tangled tale: Iris must have been getting even. The incident at Leah’s place … Of course that was it. Ah, what was wrong with the two of them! They must have spoken unforgivable words to each other, words that each of them deserved. But the hand was a cruel price to pay all the same, all out of proportion to the crime. That talent! Swept out with the trash, gone forever. Poor devil! And Paul’s anger ebbed away.
The low voice with its hollow, tired tone continued. “She was in a frenzy. To tell the truth, she’s always been jealous, though she tries to hide it. And this was just too much. Of course it was. I knew that. It must have been unbearable for her. I know how I would feel if she ever—”
So Iris was yet another sufferer from that consuming sickness, jealousy. Well, she must have reason enough! How often in the years of his youth had not Paul tortured himself with the physical image of Iris’s mother and the man she married, the image of that man in possession of her! So the old, passion ramified, not dead yet, only sleeping its long sleep.
On a shelf behind Stern’s bowed head stood a photograph of Iris, alone this time, unlike the family picture that Paul had seen in the other office and memorized. Her lovely eyes gazed gently into space; the smile on her lips was very faint, unwilling almost, as if in reluctant response to the photographer’s command: a little smile, please. There was nothing of her mother’s kind of radiance about her. Yet in her dignity she was the fitting counterpart to the mature and handsome man who sat here now.
Paul opened his mouth to speak. “Perhaps—” he began, when Stern’s voice, rising as if he had an announcement to make, interrupted him.
“She tried to kill herself. At least it seemed that way, although she claims she didn’t. It was carbon monoxide in our garage. It’s possible she didn’t mean to do it. I think maybe she doesn’t know herself. Maybe in a way she did, and in another way she didn’t. That’s possible too.”
Paul’s mouth was dry. “And so—how is she?” he whispered.
“She’s all right. She was found in time.”
“And where—where is she?”
“At home.”
Suicide.…
“You’re quite sure there’s been no—no brain damage?”
Stern, looking surprised, replied, “Quite sure.”
Paul heard himself saying next, “I don’t understand. It’s terrible. Terrible.”
There came a few seconds pause, during which the two men saw into each other’s eyes, and Paul knew that his feverish reaction had been inappropriate.
Hastening to correct himself, he said, “I’m just so shocked that I don’t know what to say. You’ve had more trouble than anyone should have to bear.”
Stern gave a small, hopeless shrug. “I’ve seen terrible things in my time, in my work. One has to bear them. There’s no choice.”
A wind must have risen outdoors, because the leaves were shaking, so that the light in the room began a nervous motion, distorting Stern’s face, which receded into shadow, and emblazoning the bandaged hand that lay on the desk.
“What will you do?” asked Paul.
“I’ve been trying my damnedest to think. I’ve left home and come here to think in peace. But to tell the truth, I haven’t been getting anywhere.”
Only then did Paul remark the partly emptied suitcase lying open on the floor next to the desk. He spoke quickly.
“You’re not planning to stay away from home, are you?”
Stern, passing a weary hand over his forehead, said only, “It looks that way.”
“I see.”
How human beings punish each other! How Iris must have suffered to want, no matter how fleetingly, to die! This man, too, bewildered and wretched.… But along with his shock and pity Paul was aware, too, of anger at the colossal, blundering mess that these two seemed to have made.
Intelligence over emotion, he reminded himself then, and said more quietly, “I should think, if you were to leave each other, it would only compound your trouble. You have children—”
At the word children Stern winced and, stammering some in agitation, cried out, “Oh, God, yes, that’s part of what’s destroying me! Education, travel, all the things I wanted to give them, are going down the drain … have gone already. I don’t even know where I’m going to find college money for the next semester.”
Paul’s gaze swiveled almost automatically around the room, his experienced eye making rapid, astonished evaluations: on the wall near the door a rather good small neo-Impressionist landscape, on the opposite wall a grouping of very fine nineteenth-century bird prints in hand-carved frames, in the corner a tall, bronze, Art Deco torchère, on the desk three delicate Japanese ivories, and on Stern’s left wrist a heavy gold Patek Philippe watch.
These silent calculations were marked by Stern, who interrupted them to say “You’re trying to make sense of what I just told you.”
“Frankly, yes, although of course it’s no business of mine.”
“Some might say I have a tendency toward extravagance. I know my wife thinks so.” The short laugh lacked humor. “But a few dollars more or less don’t alter the basic fact that it’s expensive to live. I gave a great deal to charity, especially and understandably to refugee relief.”
“Understandably.”
“Often I ask myself why I should be alive when so many others died.”
As at that other time in the hospital Paul was drawn to Stern. Regardless of the difference in their ages and in spite of all strong disapproval, here was a spirit that answered to his own. Yet he could not refrain from saying “Yes, of course one gives, but not to the point of impoverishment.”
And Paul thought: I have absolutely no patience with people who live beyond their means. It’s my banker’s mentality. But he tried to keep from sounding reproachful when he spoke.
“Have you put nothing away at all?”
Stern shook his head sadly. “Very little, I’m ashamed to say.”
Irresponsible! A man with a wife and children giving to strangers, no matter how deserving; spending on charming, silvery landscapes.… And Paul drew a mental picture of the house in which Iris must live. If the office was like this, then the home must be a treasure box. What was to become of her, unused to want as she was, burdened with God knew how many varieties of guilt, over the rebellious son, over the severed fingers, over—and Paul shut his eyes as if to shut out the recollection of Jordaine’s ironic face. What was to become of her?
As if his fears had transferred themselves to Stern, the latter said slowly, “The pity is that none of this particular trouble is Iris’s fault. She seldom spends an unnecessary dollar. And this has been such a hard year for her anyway. She lost her father and took it badly. She was so close to him, much more than to her mother. I don’t know why. Iris is a very complicated human being, not that we all aren’t, but she—” He stopped.
The minor key in which these rambling words were spoken, with their hint of more sorry confessions, made Paul suddenly recoil. He, who had come here in what he had really expected to be a vain attempt to learn something, any little something, was now afraid of being told too much.
He brought the dialogue back to the immediate. “There must be something you can do, some way you can earn a living as a doctor without using your hands. Maybe you could teach your specialty.”
Stern shook his head glumly. “No. To teach surgery, one must be able to demonstrate it.”
A fly, unnoticed before, had suddenly began to buzz around the room, darting and alighting, repeating its path in aimless circles. Paul, drawing the inevitable analogy to human affairs, controlled his frustration and tried again.
“Well, then, is there anything else you could teach? Excuse me if I ask the wrong questions, but I know so little about medical careers.”
Stern, with a totally d
iscouraged expression, was following the fly’s frantic arabesques. “No. Nothing,” he said.
“But there has to be some solution for you. You do have general medical knowledge. I should think you might practice as an internist.”
“Mr. Werner, it is years, years, since I studied about the heart or the stomach. What do I know about them?”
“There are books. Isn’t it a matter of refreshing your memory?”
At that, Stern, who was already sitting erect, made himself taller in the chair.
“That would be a deception at best and a shameful fraud at worst. Without the right training, I’d be a second—no, a tenth—rater. If I can’t be perfectly qualified, and I mean perfectly, at the top of my field, I would rather be nothing. I would rather open a hamburger stand!” he cried. And with an agitated sweep of his good arm, knocked the telephone off the desk.
Paul, as he picked it up, said silently to himself, It’s a devilish business, dealing with a perfectionist. Aloud, he asked quietly, “So then it’s to be a hamburger stand?”
It took a few moments before Stern answered.
“I have thought—but no, it’s quite useless, not worth talking about.”
“Perhaps it isn’t useless.”
“Well, in my work I’ve had occasion to make repairs after cancer surgery, usually on faces, so in a way I became emotionally involved with cancer patients. I sometimes thought it was a specialty I might have studied if I hadn’t done what I did.”
“You’d like to be an oncologist?”
Stern shrugged. The gesture was becoming familiar, and Paul waited.
“I would need a two-year residency at a minimum, and I can’t afford it.”
“I thought they paid residents nowadays.”
“Not enough for my needs! Four children and a wife, no matter what happens between us. And three are in college next year. No, it’s no use.”
Something indefinable within Paul, prompted perhaps by a rage against fate, a rage going far back into his own past with its mistakes, wanted to deal harshly with this muddled man, with this entire muddle.
“Families rally in times of trouble,” he said. “Wives go to work.”
