Proud Flesh

by William Humphrey

  She was doing what she knew how to do, what she had had years of experience in doing, and doing it for the person whom she was most eager to do it for, most grateful to be able to do it for: why, she wondered, was she so anxious, so apprehensive—and then wondered why she had wondered. Had she not reason enough to be anxious and apprehensive? What greater calamity could befall her than to lose Ma? Yet she felt a sense of foreboding not entirely to be accounted for by her dread of her mother’s death. Terrible as that was to contemplate, she felt a foreboding that her mother’s death would be succeeded by something else, something equally terrible, though she could not imagine what that might be and was appalled to find that she could suppose anything might be equally terrible. A feeling of great oppression weighed upon her. She had difficulty drawing her breath. Her heart was in constant tension. Moments of dizziness, of faintness would come over her, moments when she did not know where she was or who she was or why she was who she was and not somebody else. Soul-sickening moments of dislocation when she would have to reach out and grasp the nearest thing to steady herself, to recover herself. This would be followed by a feeling that she could only call “disgust,” though why disgust, disgust at what, she could not explain. But it was disgusting. She felt as if she had been turned inside out. As if her very soul had soured and risen like gorge in her mouth. She kept feeling an urge to confess to something, so strong an urge that she would have confessed to anything, but she did not know what to confess to. She did not know what she meant by it, yet she said to herself, “I am ready. I have done all I can do. If that is not enough …” and along with this a panicky sense that she was not ready at all and that she had not done all she could do—but what was it she had not done?

  They say it is essential to a patient’s recovery that he have full confidence in his doctor and his nurse. Those who say that are not doctors and nurses and do not realize that that confidence is equally necessary to the doctor and the nurse. Let them feel the lack of it and their self-confidence diminishes, and with it some portion at least of their skill. Amy knew that Ma lacked confidence in her. She was in dread of Ma’s waking and seeing in whose sole care she had been put.

  It was in this very room, and when Amy was just starting out as a nurse, that her mother first refused her care. It was at the birth of her baby brother, Kyle.

  That had been a worrisome delivery, a messy delivery, one necessitating an episiotomy, and still the baby could not get born, for it was a big one, and the mother, past the age for this and deathly afraid, was too tense in body and mind to cooperate with the doctor. Too late, he, Dr. Metcalf, saw that he ought to have been more firm in insisting that she go to the hospital—then newly built—and have a Caesarean despite her sentimental attachment to the room and the bed in which all her other children had been born, and never have risked such an incision as he had just made under conditions as primitive, potentially as septic, as these. His task was not lightened any by the corps of volunteer female assistants hovering about being helpful with advice and hot water. The two Negro women were worse than useless, the older one, Rowena, because she refused to take seriously this increasingly serious situation, and who fancied she was cheering the patient on by pshawing at the whole business and boasting of how easily she had gotten through it; the younger one, Eulalie—because she was young and scared half to death by what she was seeing—almost required medical attention herself when that incision was made. And all this while right in the house there had been a graduate nurse. Once reminded, Dr. Metcalf remembered that she had recently finished her training. Let Amy be sent for at once. The moment was critical; to its mother’s extreme discomfort, the baby was beginning at last to emerge.

  Amy came without being sent for. Trained to know all the things that could go wrong, and sensing that this was taking far too long, she came just then on her own, meeting Eulalie at the door going to fetch her. Her entrance caused a most unexpected and shocking scene, a scandalous scene, painful for all present, for Amy devastating.

  When she saw her eldest child at the foot of her bed Edwina Renshaw shot her such a hostile glare that all the women—Dr. Metcalf was too occupied just then to notice—snapped around to look. Gasping with pain and unable to speak, Edwina tried to rise, pushing back against the headboard, clutching for the bedclothes to cover herself with, pointing a finger at arm’s length at Amy. She gave a growl, then in a voice that must surely have carried to her men down around the pear tree, she yelled, “You get out of here! Get her out of here! Get her out of here!”

  Even Dr. Metcalf forgot his pressing duties for a moment to gape in astonishment. No one knew where to look for embarrassment. As for Amy, she was powerless to move. Stunned speechless and perishing of shame, she stood trembling like a puppy punished for it knows not what offense. Then it was as if it had happened all over again as the full force of it struck her mind. She fended off a woman who advanced as though to steady her before she should faint and fall to the floor. She could feel a smile twitching upon her lips, and she heard herself, accompanied by her baby brother’s first cry, whimper like a beaten and bewildered puppy. She shuddered, turned, and glided from the room on steps as trancelike as a sleepwalker’s.

  A nervous collapse that put her to bed struck Amy later that day, triggered when, returning home from a long solitary, rambling walk, she had come upon Rowena burying something wrapped in bloody newspaper in the manure pile at the foot of the garden, and realizing what it was, turned sick, then while making her way to the house to lie down, had seen the sodden mattress from her mother’s bed lying on the grass where it had been brought to be scrubbed and aired, and, flapping on the clothesline, her bedsheet, which despite boiling in lye soap, still showed a large pinkish stain.

  Not even the joyful news that the baby was a big bouncing boy, and that despite the hard delivery both mother and child were doing well, could dispel the hush that enveloped the house as it puzzled over Edwina’s unprovoked and shocking outburst. To Amy it seemed to be a house silenced by second thoughts about her. Could something so shocking be unprovoked? That was the question she heard people asking one another, or asking themselves, in the silence that surrounded her. She shrank from being seen, even by the servants. What may have been intended as looks of sympathy seemed to her looks of wonder, of speculation—even of sudden awful enlightenment. And if she was wrong, and they were looks of sympathy, the question remained, sympathy for what? For being misunderstood and mistreated, or for having some hidden, some hushed-up affliction, some mental or moral deformity unknown to herself, exposed to view?

  “Amy!” she could hear people saying. “Amy? If it had been any one of the other girls … But Amy?” Of course, such a scene was unthinkable between Ma and any of her daughters. But the distinction a person who might say that was trying to make was that it was most unthinkable of all for it to be Amy. Amy was devoted to Ma. Devoted to her. To have identified Amy to a recent acquaintance of the family who had asked which one she was, anybody would have said, “Amy is the one who is so devoted to her mother.” And surely the person would have said, “Oh, yes. That one.”

  And, until now, might have added that that one was evidently her mother’s favorite, too.

  And to a recent acquaintance that might very well have seemed to be the case, although only to a recent acquaintance. Someone for whom Ma was putting on what she herself called her “parlor manners.” Outside the parlor her feelings for Amy were perhaps not quite so warm and tender, as those who knew her better all knew. It was ironical: Ma demanded, and got, tireless devotion from all her children, but the one she got the most from … well, she seemed somehow to find Amy’s tireless devotion tiresome. To be sure, Amy was perhaps excessively, maybe even annoyingly attentive. It was not that she wanted more than her share of Ma’s love; it was just her share that she wanted, and Ma made her work harder for her share than she did the others. To be always told what a treasure she had in Amy must have seemed to Ma to imply a disparagement of her other eig
ht—now nine—children, and perhaps she somewhat resented Amy for this. That was contrary of Ma. She was contrary; she admitted it—though there was perhaps a touch of self-complacency in the admission. Ma did expect to be forgiven easily for her little faults. She did not expect to be judged very severely for her contrariness. Indeed, she thought it was rather lovable. Even rather adorable. And Amy did not stint in her adoration.

  Now this unexpected scene, this unprovoked and shocking, this humiliating scene. Amy felt herself disowned. Shut up in her room alone, confined to her bed, ashamed to be seen, the house whispering all around her, she felt herself to be in a maze, a puzzle. But unlike a puzzle, in which one starts at the edge and tries to find the path to the center, Amy was at the center and found her way repeatedly blocked as she tried to get out to the edge.

  So Dr. Metcalf had a third patient to see when he came on one of his postnatal visits to the mother and the new child. Not on his first such visit, nor his second, nor even his third, because Amy insisted there was nothing the matter with her, that she was just resting, and forbade Eulalie to speak to the doctor about her. But on the fourth day, when she still had not left her room, Eulalie disobeyed her orders and sent the doctor in to see her.

  What could a doctor prescribe for a patient suffering from rejection and public humiliation by the person she loved most? It was her dread of seeing anybody that had kept her shut up, especially of seeing anybody who had been a witness to her mortification. The doctor’s intrusion was unbearably embarrassing and she was infuriated with Eulalie. Aware that she must look haggard—perfectly ghastly—she protested that there was nothing the matter with her. She felt naked. As if he were examining her with her clothes off. She shrank from his quizzical gaze. He did not help her out any. When she asked brightly after Ma his reproving silence and his searching look crushed her. He conjured up an image of the new mother with her baby guzzling at her breast unembarrassed by any self-reproaches for the way she had treated anybody in the world while she, Amy, was ashamed to hold up her head, and left her feeling crushed with neglect and self-pity. It all embarrassed her even in an impersonal way. How embarrassing for a stranger to have witnessed such a scene in a family that prided itself on its solidarity! And yet she was very glad to see the doctor. Really overjoyed. Grateful to Eulalie for sending him to her. She was eager to assure him that nothing was the matter with her and to excuse Ma’s conduct.

  She assured the doctor that Ma was now suffering the most awful pangs of remorse and she begged him to tell her the next time he saw her that she must not do that. That she, Amy, had forgotten all about it, and that she, Ma, must forget it too and think of nothing now but herself and the baby.

  And what apology, what explanation for her behavior could she have given? It was something she could not explain to herself. It was something that needed no explanation. It was just one of those outbursts, momentary, impersonal—completely impersonal—unaccountable, attributable to nerves and—but who knows what makes us do some of the things we do? And at the same time there was a perfectly rational explanation for it. Or rather, not rational, not rational at all, just the reverse, but perfectly understandable and even admirable, or if not exactly admirable, certainly very excusable and even very endearing. Modesty. Plain, old-fashioned modesty—something the women of Ma’s generation had so much more of than those of Amy’s own emancipated, not to say abandoned, one did. To give it its right name: prudishness. True, Ma had never been typical of her generation in that particular before; on the contrary, she would have been called anything but prudish. But consider the circumstances. She had never been put in such an embarrassing, such an awkward and undignified and although at first it might sound paradoxical, such an unmotherly position before. Possibly even “modesty,” even “prudishness,” did not cover all the subtleties of this most unusual and delicate situation. Perhaps there was something here that could not be put into words. Something touching upon some old deep-seated superstition or taboo, something akin to Noah’s shame at being seen naked in his tent by his son, Ham. Though to be sure, Noah was not in hard labor at the time but was drunk, and Ham was not a registered nurse.

  She blamed herself. She ought to have heeded the inner voice that had warned her to stay away from her mother’s room. She had had a premonition that something like this would happen. Something untoward and unpleasant. It was this, no doubt, that accounted for her having waited until the last minute before going. Of course she could not have foreseen what did happen, but she had definitely felt reluctant to go. Ma was right. Ma was always right. Her being there was improper.

  What significance was there in the fact that while she searched for far-fetched and occult explanations of Ma’s treatment of her there had been all along a simple and natural and very touching one? Ma had wanted to spare Amy, as she would any child of hers, the sight of her travail, and the self-reproach which the sight would entail. What child, seeing what Amy had seen, its mother’s swollen, split, bleeding body, could ever forgive itself for having caused her that pain? What child, once it knows how babies are made and how born, can ever again feel that it was wanted, that it was sent for, not the byproduct of a moment’s passion, the punishment for a moment’s pleasure? The significance of the fact that Amy sought other, out-of-the-way explanations while that obvious and comforting one was there all along, was that she did not believe it. It was inadequate to the vehemence of that “Get her out of here!”

  Throughout all the succeeding years, extending right up to the present moment here in the same room, there were times when her remembrance of that penetrating glare, that pointed finger, that piercing cry, “You get out of here!” and even worse, that appeal to the others present to “Get her out of here!” stripped all Amy’s explanations from her and drove them before it like dry leaves in a winter wind, leaving her bare and huddling. In an unguarded moment her mother had revealed a distrust, a dislike—a hatred of her. No matter how she tried, nothing Amy could do could change that fact. Then with a patient sigh she would tell herself that this was her cross to bear through life. Every person had his. Hers was—and the very irony of it made it seem like something fated—to be, every minute of her life, in every cell of her being, a daughter, a daughter decreed and born, as some people are born fools; to be a daughter such as other mothers dreamed of having, and to have been given to the one mother whom nothing she did could please, one who welcomed, demanded, from all her other children the very idolatry that Amy was so eager to bestow upon her, but spurned hers as the Lord spurned Cain when he offered Him the fruits of the ground.

  That scene in her mother’s bedroom, and its aftermath, had had more to do than her horoscope with the shape that her career, then just beginning, had taken. Not that she had ever dreamed of being a Florence Nightingale or an Edith Cavell, but she had hoped to find in nursing a more varied life than her life in nursing had been, and surely Ma’s exposure of her to all those people that day in her bedroom had confirmed in her a tendency toward loneness. She had never been outgoing; after that it was harder still for her to meet the world. In her case to meet the world would have meant working on a hospital staff or in a doctor’s office, and now she shrank from that, preferring instead to work as a private nurse in people’s homes, alone and at night. Certainly that bedroom scene and the ones that followed it, what she saw in the garden, the blood-stained bedclothes, had given her a distaste for obstetrics, work which she would have had to do in a hospital—who knew? maybe it had contributed to her lack of desire for children of her own. As her career was her life, whatever shaped the first shaped the second, and Amy had known from the start that choosing to be a night nurse was to choose not to marry. It was one more inadequacy to feel before people, especially Ma, but she resigned herself to life as a single woman. Luckily for them both, she and Ira had found each other. They were meant for each other. They fitted together like the two halves of a broken dish. Like the two halves of a broken plate that had gotten dispersed and had miraculously b
een rejoined. Mended together, they made a presentable plate; they themselves knew that the plate was for display only.

  To Amy’s distress, Dr. Metcalf that day had taken her side, or what he thought was her side, against her mother. To this day he still did that—or would have if Amy had let him. She now declined to discuss Ma with him. She would tolerate no criticism of Ma, especially none made in her defense. She had made him promise that he would say nothing about her to Ma and that whenever Ma asked about her he was to say there was nothing the matter with her.

  Why wait? said he.

  Amy did not understand.

  All right, he had said; when she asked him, that was what he would tell her.

  “Ah, you mean she hasn’t asked about me,” said Amy. “I was afraid you would say that. I was afraid you would say that. That shows how bad she’s feeling. She’s afraid to ask. You see, as I told you, she is full of—”

  “Your mother,” he said, “is full of—milk.”

  Disrespectful of her as it was, even she had laughed. Then suddenly the situation was exactly reversed. The same cast with their roles reversed. There was she in her sickroom with Dr. Metcalf attending her when the door opened and there, with her baby in her arms, stood Ma. Amy had shot her a glare, had pushed back against the headboard, had clutched at the bedclothes to hide herself. She had almost yelled, “You get out of here!”

  Dr. Metcalf had risen at once to leave.

  “Don’t go!” she and her mother had cried as one. She would not have had it otherwise, but she could see that her mother had chosen a time when the doctor would be there so as not to be alone with her, that she had brought along the baby for added protection, though pretending that she had brought him to show Amy, and the bitterness of it she could almost taste. Ah, yes, she knew what bitterness was, though praised to her face so often for her sweetness. Hers, too, was a human heart, and in that poor soil grew more weeds than flowers. The weeds of resentment and jealousy, the weed—most noxious of them all—of self-righteous selflessness. She had tried simply to be a good gardener and root them out while they were still only seedlings.