We had other blessings to be thankful for. Carol’s gold hair began to come out by the handful, proof that the new drug was taking hold, for hair loss was one of its side effects. She was soon balder than her father. I tried to get her outside by suggesting she wear a scarf, without avail. Finally I got her into New York, where she was fitted for a wig—a transformation so perfect that she now willingly bound her head in a kerchief. Pending the next marrow test, we looked for other incidental signs that the drug was taking effect. One was a depressed white count. Carol’s went down steadily, though not without its hazards since that left the patient wide open to infection—a delicate point of orchestration. One night I found her lying on the bed on her side, hugging a globe of the world for the pleasure of feeling its cool metal against her skin. I poked a thermometer into her mouth and found she had a temperature of a hundred and two. Dr. Cameron came and dosed her with his broad-spectrum antibiotics, but suggested she go into the hospital anyway for safety’s sake.
I walked out past St. Catherine’s to the bar and grill and back again so often through so many hospitalizations that I cannot remember which time it was that I stopped in the church on the way back to sit down and rest. I was dead-drunk and stone-sober and bone-tired, my head split and numbed by the plague of voices in eternal disputation. I knew why I was delaying my return to the hospital. The report on the morning’s aspiration would be phoned up to the ward from the laboratory any minute, and what I died to learn I dreaded to hear.
I got up and walked to the center aisle, where I stood looking out to the high altar and the soaring windows. I turned around and went to the rear corner, where stood the little shrine to St. Jude, Patron of Lost Causes and Hopeless Cases. Half the candles were burning. I took a taper and lit another. I was alone in the church. The gentle flames wavered and shattered in a mist of tears spilling from my eyes as I sank to the floor.
“I do not ask that she be spared to me, but that her life be spared to her. Or give us a year. We will spend it as we have the last, missing nothing. We will mark the dance of every hour between the snowdrop and the snow: crocus to tulip to violet to iris to rose. We will note not only the azalea’s crimson flowers but the red halo that encircles a while the azalea’s root when her petals are shed, also the white halo that rings for a week the foot of the old catalpa tree. Later we will prize the chrysanthemums which last so long, almost as long as paper flowers, perhaps because they know in blooming not to bloom. We will seek out the leaves turning in the little-praised bushes and the unadvertised trees. Everyone loves the sweet, neat blossom of the hawthorn in spring, but who lingers over the olive drab of her leaf in autumn? We will. We will note the lost yellows in the tangles of that bush that spills over the Howards’ stone wall, the meek hues among which it seems to hesitate before committing itself to red, and next year learn its name. We will seek out these modest subtleties so lost in the blare of oaks and maples, like flutes and woodwinds drowned in brasses and drums. When winter comes, we will let no snow fall ignored. We will again watch the first blizzard from her window like figures locked snug in a glass paperweight. ‘Pick one out and follow it to the ground!’ she will say again. We will feed the plain birds that stay to cheer us through the winter, and when spring returns we shall be the first out, to catch the snowdrop’s first white whisper in the wood. All this we ask, with the remission of our sins, in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Mrs. Morganthaler was trundling the supper trays to the recreation room when I got back to the ward, for those who could eat there. Carol was alseep in bed. Her arms were spread to the perennial vessels, one white, one red, hanging above the bed. The special nurse rose from her corner chair and whispered that now might be a good time for her to slip out for a bite of supper. I nodded, and she left, carrying her magazine under her arm.
I stood a while over the quietly breathing child. She had her wig off, and now without her hair I could see how perfectly shaped her head was. Child of the pure, unclouded brow … The stigmata were more marked than ever, those in the hands dark and numerous from many needles, the wound in the breast fresh under its cotton pad. The short strip of adhesive tape over the cotton bore its usual gold star, given for good behavior and valor under fire.
As I stood there, I sensed the door being quietly opened. Turning, I saw the face of Dr. Romulo, the young Filipino resident, thrust shyly into the room. He beckoned me out into the corridor. He took my arm and led me off a few steps. His face had the solemn expression of one bearing important news.
“We just got the marrow report back,” he said. “It’s down to six per cent. Practically normal. Carol’s in remission.”
sixteen
“The trouble with doubling recipes,” said Mrs. Brodhag, “is that some ingredients do a little more than double when you put in twice as much of them. Matter of proportion. Like the fellow says about people being created equal, well, some are more equal than others.”
I laughed extendedly at this, watching her complete her handiwork. From the pastry bag she squeezed eight green rosettes around the rim of the cake with meticulous care, then cleaned out the bag thoroughly for the eight red rosettes which were to alternate with them. The field of the frosting was white. Once again she washed out the bag to write, with a blue icing also separately mixed, Carol’s name in her flawless Palmer Method. She had been up since dawn.
“See that she gets plenty but the other kids do too,” Mrs. Brodhag said as she set the creation in my two hands. “It’s not the kind of thing I like to see ice cream glopped on top of, but if that’s what they want to do I guess we can’t object. And tell her there’ll be another ready for her when she comes home, though I don’t imagine she has to be told that. Don’t lay things on too thick, like I keep telling you.”
After parking the car in New York, I picked the boxed cake up carefully from the seat and, pushing the door shut with my knee, carried it down the street. A short distance up ahead I could see Mrs. Morano, the night nurse, turn into the church of St. Catherine for her morning prayers. I shifted the package to one hand in order to open the door. I walked to the front of the church, which had its normal smattering of worshipers. I set the cake down on an empty pew and joined the kneeling figures.
When I rose, Mrs. Morano was standing at the edge of the chancel. We whispered together a moment in greeting as we moved up the aisle.
“You heard about Carol,” I said.
“Yes, it’s exciting. That’s why I’m so sorry about this.”
“What?”
“The infection. It’s been going through the ward like wildfire. Half of the kids are in oxygen tents.”
“Carol?”
She nodded. “They had me phone you this morning, but you’d left. The new drug does depress the white count so terribly, of course, and leave them wide open to infection. It’s the old story—you can pick anything up in a hospital.”
“Staph?”
“I don’t know. They took a blood culture, but it takes a while for the organisms to grow out. They’re putting Chloromycetin into her, I think. Maybe you’d better go up.”
I hurried into the hospital. One look at Carol and I knew it was time to say good-by. The invading germ, or germs, had not only ravaged her bloodstream by now, but had broken out on her body surface in septicemic discolorations. Her foul enemy had his will of her well at last. One of the blotches covered where they were trying to insert a catheter, and spread down along a thigh. By afternoon it had traveled to the knee, and by the next, gangrened. Dr. Scoville could not have been kinder.
“Someone has ordered another tank of oxygen,” he told me that afternoon in the corridor, “but I think you’ll agree it won’t be necessary…. Well, hello there, Randy, you’re going home today.” Up, up, my head, for the sake of that childhood whom there is none in heaven to love, and none to love on earth so much as you. Up, up! “I’ve left orders for all the morphine she needs. She’ll slip away quietly. She doesn’t know us now. It’s just as well, because t
here isn’t much in the new drug, if it’s any consolation. We have a co-operative study on it, and the remissions are few and brief, and suspect because of the incidence of Meticorten administered with it. We can never be sure it wasn’t the Meticorten in this case. It would only have meant another, short reprieve—no pardon.” He sighed and went his busy way, to the ends of the earth.
I went back into the room. The nurse was taking her blood pressure. “Almost none at all,” she whispered. “It’s just as well. Only a matter of hours now at the most.” The wig was on a globe of the world on the table. The hands were free of needles now, spread out quietly on the counterpane, with their stigmata to which no more would be added. Her breathing slowed, each breath like a caught sob. But once she smiled a little, and, bending closer, I heard her call something to a comrade on another bicycle. They were flying home from school together, down the hill. “All her dreams are pleasant,” the nurse murmured. I was thinking of a line of old poetry. “Death loves a shining mark.” Now the flower-stem veins were broken, the flower-stalk of the spine destroyed. But through the troll I saw the fairy still, on her flying wheels, the sun in her hair and in the twinkling spokes. I had seen her practicing the piano in her leotard, there were so many things to do and so little time to do them in. I remembered how little labor the sprite had given her mother, so eager was she to be born, so impatient To Be.
The nurse stepped outside a moment, and I moved quickly from the foot of the bed around to the side, whispering rapidly in our moment alone:
“The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”
Then I touched the stigmata one by one: the prints of the needles, the wound in the breast that had for so many months now scarcely ever closed. I caressed the perfectly shaped head. I bent to kiss the cheeks, the breasts that would now never be fulfilled, that no youth would ever touch. “Oh, my lamb.”
The lips curled in another smile, one whose secret I thought I knew. I recognized it without the aid of the gaze, now sealed forever from mine, with which it had come to me so often throughout her childhood. It was the expression on her face when her homework was going well, the shine of pride at a column of figures mastered or a poem to spring successfully forged. It was the smile of satisfaction worn at the piano when a new composition had been memorized, on her bicycle when, gripping its vanquished horns, she had ridden past me on her first successful solo around the yard. Sometimes, as on that Saturday morning, she would turn the smile shyly toward me, taking added pleasure in my approval.
But this time the experience was not to be shared. She was going alone. Even without the eyes to help communicate it, there was a glow of the most intense concentration on her face, with that wariness of error or shortcoming that had always made it so complete and so characteristic. She had never seemed more alive than now, when she was gathering all the life within her for the proper discharge of whatever this last assignment might have been. Was it a sum of figures or a poem to nature she was undertaking in her dream? Or a difficult, delicate spray of notes, or the first ecstatic journey on the two-wheeler, with the promise of liberty on summer roads unfolding far ahead? I bent again to whisper a question in her ear, but there was no answer—only the most remote sense of flight upon the face. It shone like a star about to burst and, in bursting, yield me all its light at once—could I but bear the gift.
Even her wearied limbs had for the moment this tension, a vibrancy as of a drawn bow. But as the hours wore on, they seemed to slacken, and her features to relax as well. Perhaps the mission had been accomplished, and the hour of rest was at hand. Once, later that afternoon, the smile parted her lips again, this time widely enough to show that her gums were dripping. The enemy was pouring out of every crevice at last. The sight of these royal children pitted against this bestiality had always consumed me with a fury so blind I had had often to turn my face away. Now I was glad Carol could not see me standing there, alone, at last, on holy ground.
She went her way in the middle of the afternoon, borne from the dull watchers on a wave that broke and crashed beyond our sight. In that fathomless and timeless silence one does look rather wildly about for a clock, in a last attempt to fix the lost spirit in time. I had guessed what the hands would say. Three o’clock. The children were putting their schoolbooks away, and getting ready to go home.
After some legal formalities I went into the room once more to say good-by. I had once read a book in which the hero had complained, in a similar farewell taken of a woman, that it was like saying good-by to a statue. I wished it were so now. She looked finally like some mangled flower, or like a bird that had been pelted to earth in a storm. I knew that under the sheet she would look as though she had been clubbed to death. As for the dignity of man, this one drew forth a square of cloth, and, after honking like a goose, pocketed his tears.
The bartender had finished cleaning up after some last late lunchers and was polishing the glasses for the evening’s trade. After I’d had six or seven drinks, he said to me, “No more. That must be the tenth muddler you’ve snapped in two.” Perhaps he was hearing the voices too …
Passing the church of St. Catherine on the way to the car, I suddenly remembered the cake. I went inside, out of curiosity. It was still there on the pew, undisturbed. I picked it up and started out with it. An incoming worshiper took frowning note of my unsteady career through the lobby door.
Outside, I paused on the sidewalk, one foot on the bottom step. I turned and looked up at the Figure still hanging as ever over the central doorway, its arms outspread among the sooted stones and strutting doves.
I took the cake out of the box and balanced it a moment on the palm of my hand. Disturbed by something in the motion, the birds started from their covert and flapped away across the street. Then my arm drew back and let fly with all the strength within me. Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gathers itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate. The scattered particles of self—love, wood thrush calling, homework sums, broken nerves, rag dolls, one Phi Beta Kappa key, gold stars, lamplight smiles, night cries, and the shambles of contemplation—are collected for a split moment like scraps of shrapnel before they explode.
It was miracle enough that the pastry should reach its target at all, at that height from the sidewalk. The more so that it should land squarely, just beneath the crown of thorns. Then through scalded eyes I seemed to see the hands free themselves of the nails and move slowly toward the soiled face. Very slowly, very deliberately, with infinite patience, the icing was wiped from the eyes and flung away. I could see it fall in clumps to the porch steps. Then the cheeks were wiped down with the same sense of grave and gentle ritual, with all the kind sobriety of one whose voice could be heard saying, “Suffer the little children to come unto me … for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
Then the scene dissolved itself in a mist in which my legs could no longer support their weight, and I sank down to the steps. I sat on its worn stones, to rest a moment before going on. Thus Wanderhope was found at that place which for the diabolists of his literary youth, and for those with more modest spiritual histories too, was said to be the only alternative to the muzzle of a pistol: the foot of the Cross.
seventeen
Summer passed into autumn, and when in November a few white flakes sifted down out of the sky, Mrs. Brodhag decided to make the journey to her sister in Seattle of which she had for so long restively spoken. Perhaps she would make “other connections” there, in view of my having the house on the market. If I sold it—a result little foreshadowed by the processions marching through it behind an ever-changing leadership of brokers—and did move into a city apartment, I would hardly be needing her help. The trip to the airport was the first down the Parkway since the days when we had made so many. “—In both our prayers—” she raged in my ear against the roar
of jets. I pressed into her hand a St. Christopher medal, extricated with difficulty from the chain of the crucifix with which it had become entangled in my pocket. We smiled as she nodded thanks. Then she was a bird in the sky, then a bee, then nothing.
It was as many months again before I could bring myself to explore at any length the bright front bedroom, then only because the sudden sale of the house required its cleaning out. Dresses and toys and bureau articles were put into boxes and carried into the garage for the charity truck to haul away. Among the books and papers in the large desk drawer was a class letter from the sixth grade, a monumental scroll on which each individual note was pasted, wound upon two sticks like an ancient document. I read a few before stowing it into a carton of things to be kept for a still further future. One was a note from a boy reputed to have lost his heart to her, commanding her early return and with a P.S. reading, “You and I up in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” Into the carton were also tucked the home movies still sealed in their original tins. At last I found the courage to turn on the tape recorder.
I carried it down into the living room, of which the windows were open, the year being now once again well advanced into spring. It was twilight, and I turned on all the lamps.
After a whir of scratches and laughing whispers began some absurd dialogue Carol had picked up between Mrs. Brodhag and me, without our knowing it, about leaking eaves and how they should be got at. “You might as well be married the way she nags you,” Carol said into the machine she had herself initiated with this prank. Then followed some of her piano pieces, including the Chopin Nocturne I had managed to get on the tape the night of the unfortunate television program. I stood at the window with a heavy drink as each molten note dropped out of nowhere onto my heart. There was a long silence after the music, and I was about to end the entertainment as a poor idea when my hand was arrested at the switch by the sound of her voice. This time she read a selection to which she had a few words of preface:
The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 20
