She clutches at her necklace of freshwater pearls, and I watch her mouth as it moves.
“Baha’u’llah says the actions of those that persecute us are born out of innocence.”
Something about her reminds me of an old wooden ventriloquist’s doll I used to have as a child.
“It’s always best,” she says, trying to stifle a cough, “to kiss your killer’s hand.”
I hope she won’t notice as I reach up to scratch my scalp.
Communion
JOHN MURRAY
Her father was put in her bed, the big mahogany bed that had come over from Germany. Elsbeth went to sleep on a portable bed in Charlie’s room. In the end, her father would not sleep with her mother. He refused to sleep with her. By then his nature, his whole being, had changed. He flailed his arms, shouted, laughed for no reason, sometimes sang songs. When Elsbeth went into the room, he watched her silently from the bed like a caged animal. She tried reading to him, sections from the Bible or Tom Sawyer that he liked, but he shouted for her to stop after a few pages. This was in the ninth week. For the first eight weeks, he was still himself, able to walk around, but nauseated and dizzy when he stood up. Still, he pulled on his clothes in the morning and went out with her grandfather. They were bringing in the corn then, and her father tried to do the work he had always done. He was exhausted by lunchtime and had to come in and lie down on the sofa, sleeping for the rest of the afternoon with his head back and his palms outstretched—strange and otherworldly with the front of his head shaved, like a mental patient. The neurosurgeon had shaved the hair off the front of his head, up to the crown, so he could open up his skull. A piece of his brain had been taken out and looked at under a microscope. This was in the teaching hospital in Minneapolis, the university hospital, where he had been taken from the church.
Her father had collapsed during Sunday Mass. Charlie had begun screaming, and her father had to take him back through the church. She heard him talking to Charlie outside, carrying him up and down the path alongside the church, his shoes crunching loudly on the gravel. That was why he was the last to receive the Communion—everyone else had already sat down when he came in along the aisle, handed Charlie to her mother, and went forward to Father Figge. He was halfway up the aisle when he collapsed. He made a sighing sound, a long, loud yawn, and then fell to his knees. It almost seemed like an act of worship, like something connected with the ceremony. But the sound was wrong—it became a moan, a gasping sound, too loud and too long, and then her father fell sideways. His head struck the stone floor with a sound like a bowling ball dropped on cement—an unnatural sound. And for a moment the congregation, that church full of people, did nothing but watch, amazed, in awe perhaps. Father Figge stood holding the cup and the bread, his mouth hanging open, and the church was filled with a rhythmic sound of her father on the cold stone floor, eyes rolled up, jaw clenched, back arched, arms and legs stiff and thrashing, a dark stain appearing on the front of his pants like a curse, an irregular spreading stain shaped like a map—North America, South America, Continental Europe, and beyond.
It was Floss Melcher who knew what to do. She said loudly that he was having a fit, and ran out to get a stick to put between his teeth. His jaw was clenching and unclenching, and there was blood around his lips. She brought a piece of cherry-blossom wood, got down on her knees, and forced it between his lips with difficulty. He was working and thrashing on the ground, grunting like an animal, his face dusky. Floss also asked two of the men to roll him carefully onto his side, so that he would be able to breathe. Charlie began screaming. Her mother kneeled next to her father with one hand on his shoulder, trying to keep him down, still wearing her white hat with the false lilies around the edge, holding her handbag in the elbow of one arm. Father Jewett appeared to be praying, muttering words under his breath. Five minutes later, her father stopped jerking and lay still, breathing lightly through blue lips, unconscious. Four men took hold of his arms and legs and carried him out to the car park. Ern Wiltstein had backed up his Chrysler. They put him flat along the backseat, knees bent, arm hanging down lifeless on the floor. Decisions were made quickly. At that time there was no ambulance service in town and no hospital either, so they knew they had to drive to the city. Her mother rode with Ern Wiltstein. Someone decided that Charlie should go home with her grandfather. Floss took Elsbeth and said they would ride down to the hospital together; stopped on the way for ice cream, a cherry soda, peppermint chewing gum, and a pack of cigarettes.
Elsbeth did not want to turn away. She saw this about herself. She wanted to know, to see everything under bright fluorescent lights. She needed to have details, facts, the hard and practical truth. This was in her and always would be. She went with Floss to the white hospital room where her father had woken up, as if from a deep sleep. He was groggy and disoriented. He looked around the room as if he had never seen a room before. But to see him awake filled Elsbeth with confidence. She imagined that she had caused him to wake up by will alone. She stood in the corner of the hospital room and felt a kind of satisfaction. The nurses, clean and rasping in their starched uniforms and tight white stockings, moved around the room. They managed to get her father into a hospital smock (he could not lift his arms or legs properly), then took blood from his arm with a needle and large glass syringe, measured his pulse, temperature, and blood pressure. All of these measurements, the fact of them, seemed to make her father’s condition manageable. Elsbeth wanted to reassure her mother. But her mother was unreachable—terrified. She stood away from the bed, did not touch Elsbeth’s father, barely spoke. She looked young, like a girl dressed up in adult clothes—awkward and ordinary. When they took her father out of the room for a series of tests (X-rays of the skull, an angiogram, an electroencephalogram—Elsbeth was later to learn all of these terms), her mother sat down on the edge of a seat with her handbag in her lap and shook. Floss kneeled next to her on the floor and said she had a cousin who had fits, she had seen it before. She knew it could be controlled with tablets. It was possible for people to get on with their lives.
“You don’t just get fits,” her mother said.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t just get them.”
The room was a public room containing three other beds, but only one of the beds was occupied. An old man lay on this bed reading a newspaper. He held the paper up in front of his face and turned the pages loudly. Below, both lower legs lay out on top of the bed, fat and white, and there were bandages around his feet. Elsbeth could see that the feet were too short—the toes had been removed, so that his feet had become stubs. When he turned the pages of the paper, the old man looked at Elsbeth and she saw that one of his eyes did not open—he stared at her with his good eye, a malicious and angry stare, and she stared back. She could not be daunted, felt willing to see terrible things. She would not allow anything to shock her.
From the window, the hospital room overlooked a construction site. A crane was lifting long steel girders up onto a steel platform that had already been built. Men in white hats and leather gloves stood at the top, steadying the long pieces of steel as they swayed slowly onto the platform; through the thick glass Elsbeth could hear the distant rumble of the machines, the clang of the materials. Over the next three days, she would see the building take shape, the girders bolted into each other to form a frame, walls put into place, steady progress. The building rose from the ground, just as her father faded from it, slipped slowly from view, became a series of technical terms that carried nothing but an abstract weight.
Glioblastoma. This was what they called it. A tumor, a mass. Inoperable. It was taking over his brain, the frontal and parietal lobes, exploding silently and invisibly beneath his skull. It had caused him to lose his sense of smell. It had caused the seizure. It would continue to grow. It would cause building pressure inside the cranial vault. This was the term the neurosurgeon had used—cranial vault. The neurosurgeon was a short man with a scrubbed pink face who talked slowly. A day la
ter, he did surgery under a general anesthetic. He took out as much of the tumor as he reasonably could—decompressed it, he said—then patched it all up again and put back the bone. He came to see her mother while her father was still unconscious. He led her away along the corridor to a small glass office with carpet the color of gravy. He had beautiful hands. Pink sculpted fingers and clean fingernails. He pointed at a large wall-poster of the brain and skull in cross section, and another showing the effects of a tumor. That was when he used the term cranial vault. An expanding mass inside the cranial vault, he said. A glioblastoma. Aggressive. Quite beyond medical science. Months seemed possible, weeks more likely. It was all about pressure. They would work to keep the pressure down, but eventually this would not be possible and the brain would be squeezed out of the cranial vault entirely. There was no easy way to put it, he had never believed in creating false hope. Did he notice that Elsbeth had followed them down the corridor and stood behind her mother? It did not seem likely. She wore her pink lacy dress, pink headband, white kneesocks (still held up with elastics), smelled of coffee, perfume. It was she who caught her mother when she fell, put her arms behind her back, and lowered her to the floor with difficulty, looked down at her makeup-smudged face and told the neurosurgeon to go away. She kneeled over her mother, pulled the hair away from her face, took off the white hat with false lilies carefully and put it on the floor, found her handkerchief (white, starched, folded in quarters), and wiped her mother’s eyes, cheeks, and mouth with the precision of an undertaker. She put her mother’s head in her lap and kept her eyes on the technical diagrams on the wall, repeated the terms she saw there as if they would somehow make a difference.
A nurse came in to look after her father. This was always done in the country—the nurse came and lived in the house and took care of the sick person. The nurse was Elsbeth’s aunt on her father’s side—her father’s sister, only three years older. Her name was Lily, and she had married a farmer named Ralph Bittner. They lived on a farm a hundred miles to the south and were poor. All her father’s siblings—two girls (Lily and Esther) and a boy (Henry)—were poor. Elsbeth grew up slightly frightened of them. They were lean, hard people who did not smile. They visited at Thanksgiving and Christmas, brought gifts of food—a haunch of ham, a basket of fresh carrots and potatoes, three woodcock tied together by the feet. It was not possible to please or flatter them with words or gestures. They made Elsbeth feel as if she knew too much. She felt certain that they resented her mother for being happy and talkative, for her books and modern dresses, and for her choice to abandon a comfortable life in town for farm life, a life they struggled through. Lily had caught the state bus all the way north, then a local bus out along the main road. She walked from the main road with her suitcase.
Lily took charge, swept everything before her. She was a doer. She had trained as a nurse, then given it up to go on the farm with Ralph and have two children, raise them, do the work of a man during the harvest, develop a problem in her womb that made her so anemic that she needed a transfusion and then a hysterectomy. Now she propped them up with piecework as a home nurse, of which there was “plenty, make no mistake, plenty as need it, make no mistake.” She was paid to do this work, although payment was never discussed. The payment took place at the end—an envelope, usually, passed over shyly, imperceptibly, as she moved out the door.
She slept in the dining room on the ground floor. This had always been the fancy room of the house. It had a polished mahogany table, an oak sideboard with a mirror, a marble mantelpiece with an anniversary clock, and a pot filled with peacock feathers. A carved bust of Venus and a small abstract shape by Henry Moore sat on the sideboard. The curtains were red velvet and tied with a sash. On winter days, her mother sat at the table and polished her silver cutlery, arranging the pieces next to each other in long rows, taking a kind of pride in the different types of spoons: tea, dessert, serving, soup, coffee, sugar. A bed was carried in and the table was moved to one side. Lily unpacked her suitcase and arranged her things along the tabletop: two textbooks (one of anatomy, another of general medicine); a stethoscope and a blood-pressure machine; an otoscope and an ophthalmoscope; a thermometer in a thin metal case; a watch with a chain that could be pinned to clothes; a Bible; two back issues of Reader’s Digest; five bobby pins; two plastic tortoiseshell hair combs; a jar of Pond’s skin cream; one toothbrush and one tube of toothpaste; one white nursing uniform and a pair of white shoes; one set of civilian clothes—a baggy floral day dress with a cloth belt and a pair of flat black shoes; one beige hat; three pairs of underwear; one slip; one bra; one nightgown (pink rayon); and one robe (also pink rayon) with shiny cuffs and collar. She hung the clothes on coat hangers from the mantel. Elsbeth studied these belongings carefully when her aunt was out. There was almost nothing personal about them, nothing to indicate that her aunt was an ordinary person. And she did not see herself as an ordinary person, this became clear. She thought of herself as superior.
“It’s a crime you got out there,” Lily said to her mother. “Still have the outdoor facility. Women like us should demand something modern. Those facilities is a hazard and not good for the health, and you can’t expect us modern women, as knows something better, to keep on using them.”
Us. Modern women. That was how she saw herself. Elsbeth was sure that Lily had brought the textbooks just for show; she never opened the books. Her superiority came from her power as a nurse, her secret knowledge. She saw it as her role to take over. She gave her mother a long list of items she would need from the stores in town (new pillows and sheets, a plastic bedcover, powders and rubs, meat). She put her father in Elsbeth’s room and arranged bowls of water and cloths, syringes and needles, cotton wool and rubbing alcohol and medicines, then took over the washing and cooking. She believed in three square old-fashioned meals a day. Old-fashioned meals involved frying or roasting—and did not involve vegetables or fruit. She spooned lard into the pan freely, fried bacon, eggs, slices of hard German sausage or black pudding for breakfast; a piece of fried bread or leftover roast from the night before for lunch; a roast with potatoes and perhaps corn or beans for dinner, and always a pudding. She kept a weather eye on Elsbeth and Charlie at the table, refused to let them get up and leave until they had cleaned their plates. Everything tasted like oil. The house began to smell of it. This is what Elsbeth associated with Lily—the smell of oil on everything, and the slick, heavy food. It was food her grandfather liked, and he told his daughter so.
“Good to have real food,” he said to Lily. “Real food is better for you.”
“That’s well known, Father,” Lily said.
Everything was done in the white uniform. Elsbeth heard Lily get up before it was light, heard her washing in the kitchen, then walking to the outhouse. Some days, Lily chopped cordwood by the barn early, thunk, thunk, a shifting white shape at dawn—coming back quickly across the yard in her white shoes with a load for the stove. She washed the uniform and her underwear every night, at the laundry tub, rubbing hard with washing soap and a wire-bristled brush, rinsing and wringing, then hanging the clothes in front of the kitchen stove to dry overnight. And on Mondays she did all the washing, without being asked, starting before dawn, head down, arms working, not looking up or talking until it was all done and strung on the lines outside. She took control of the house. This left her mother in the position of having to accommodate Lily. Her mother baked and made tea and worked in the garden and felt awkward. She had never actually “run” a house in the same way, never had schedules or ways of doing things, nor had she cared to. She sat at the kitchen table with Lily and tried to engage her in conversation. Lily drank hot tea quickly, with her pinkie held out; wore her watch pinned to her breast and checked it constantly; kept the stethoscope, when she was inside, dangling around her neck as another trophy of her status. They talked about anything, everything, except what was really happening to her father. Death was a subject never discussed, although it was as vivid and present i
n that house as the floor and ceiling. This was the key to Lily—a hard-nosed avoidance of the truth in the guise of work. In front of her mother, Lily became a lady, talked about the garden, her children, played a kind of genteel game. When she got Elsbeth alone, she let down her guard and was quickly critical.
“A girl of your age should do more, I say that. Clothes washing you should do, and you can change the beds, look after the baby as well, take the load off of your mother. Your age, I was doing barn work, with no complaint, as well as caring for young children, because I had no mother. You understand? My mother went and died. I seen you. Don’t think I haven’t. I seen you lying around doing nothing.”
They were outside pegging laundry on the line. Lily kept working and did not look at Elsbeth, and said, “You got the curse yet? I got mine when I was twelve years old, painful as all get out, every month of my life. I know why they call it the curse—and I’ll tell you what—the day I got my hysterectomy was the best day of my life. It’s like a burden removed, make no mistake.”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you will.”
It was in Elsbeth’s nature to find fault, to undermine. She hated Lily quietly, did not believe her. There was no superiority there, she knew that, only bitterness. She saw it in Lily’s threadbare clothes and in her red, shiny hands—red from the work. She saw it in her short, sharp movements when she plumped a pillow or made up a bed, or drew up the drugs (corticosteroids, diuretics, later pain medicine) from the little bottles with typed labels. Elsbeth watched her cleverly, listened to her sentences with scorn. Lily spoke in a way that country people spoke. It infuriated Elsbeth that her mother bowed down to Lily, tried to entertain and please her with cakes and conversations, praised her tirelessness and efficiency. Worse, her mother agreed to let Lily take over her father. She let Lily usher them out when she gave him injections; listened to her talking about him as if she knew better (no loud talk in his room, no singing, no discussion of anything that might be upsetting—the brain of the patient with a tumor is not a normal brain, Lily said, it’s a brain that’s all beaten up, and can’t stand to be exerted). Even her father tried to flatter Lily, when he was still able. He teased her in the mornings, while Lily bustled about, cleaning and straightening. He spoke to her in the country way—not the way he spoke to her mother.
Writer, M.D. Page 21
