Proud Flesh

by William Humphrey

  The parlor had undergone a restoration. The lowered windowshades had been raised to their tops and the room was aglare with sunlight. Under the direction of sister Lois the servant women had washed the soap off the mirrors and whisked away those bedsheets, and Lois’s hissed commands to them to hurry! hurry! bespoke the family’s sense of the unseemliness, the scandalousness, perhaps even the blasphemy of their premature mourning. They were gathered in the living room across the hall to recover from the double shock they had come through when one of them looked out the window and groaned. It was a repetition of yesterday. There came Eulalie bent over pulling her toy wagon, in which, her hands and feet hanging over the sides and trailing in the dirt, lay Amy. Eulalie had found her down on her knees in the cowlot with her blouse torn open smearing manure on her breasts, poking it into her mouth out of which had come word of her mother’s death and trying to force herself to swallow it.

  Cowdung poisoning: in forty years’ practice it was Doc’s first case of that. He would have used a stomach pump on her if he had had one. As it was he pumped her full of antibiotics, gave her a tetanus shot, and one to knock her out. To himself he said, “If it’s like this now just imagine what it’s going to be when they lower the old woman into her grave!” And running through the calendar of his upcoming o.b. cases, he considered whether he ought not to reschedule his vacation so as to be sure to be out of town for that event.

  So, bate them the first day. No criminal charges for that one. For it he would send them his statement. He would keep strictly to the letter of the law, and he had enough on them without padding the bill to put them all behind … Bate them the first day. Because they really had needed him then. They might not have known it when they came to get him, but events were already anticipating their precautions. He had gotten to Edwina Renshaw with not a moment to spare. Between her and Amy, and what with half a dozen of the other women showing sympathetic cardiac symptoms, not to mention a bit of emergency surgery he had been called upon to perform—never mind that—he could not have gotten away from there much before evening even if they had been meaning to let him go.

  She seems to get worse at night: start counting from there.

  “She seems to get worse at night.” This from the morose and menacing, the close-mouthed Clifford, was how, toward evening, his work finally done, his bag packed, hands washed, waiting to be driven back to town, he was informed that he would not be going home. Not asked if he would or could or thought he should stay. Told that he was spending the night there. Not even told that. Told, she seems to get worse at night.

  It was infuriating, it was outrageous—it was pure Renshaw. Only they could have done it. He knew them. He had known them all all their lives. He knew what they were capable of. Knew they were capable of anything where their mother’s health or happiness was concerned. He remembered her regaining consciousness to utter the name of that rebellious boy of hers, and he could guess the shame to the family’s pride that one of them should be missing from their number now. So they were just going to keep him there in personal attendance upon their mother while they went to fetch that one home. The hell with the rest of his patients—who just happened to be their lifelong neighbors and fellow-townsmen. They must just make do the best they could so long as Ma required his exclusive attention.

  But he figured, what, maybe twenty-four hours? The way they drove a car they ought to be able to get there and get home with him again in that time, no matter where he might be. Or if he had put himself beyond the range of a car, in these days of jet planes, hourly flights to anywhere in the world … Besides, Doc was not sure himself that she would survive removal to the hospital. That is to say, he was sure she would but afraid she might not. That if they consented, and she were transferred there on his recommendation and then she died … So he might fume to himself at their highhandedness (he could feel a sharp rise in his already high blood pressure) but the actual inconvenience to him, to his wife, to his practice—how great was it, after all? It would not be long before Edwina Renshaw resumed her place as just one of his patients instead of the only one. So although he already had enough in him to be dangerously explosive, he swallowed two more nitroglycerin tablets, and he put down the Renshaws’ rudeness to their grief and anxiety, and agreed with himself to overlook it. At the back of his mind lurked the suspicion that to have protested would have done him no good, and he was afraid to protest lest his suspicion be confirmed. Had he even then been agreeing to stay in order to defer the moment when he might be told he was staying whether he agreed to or not? Anyhow, he stayed, and it was tacitly understood between them that he was not to go near the telephone.

  And it was true, she did get worse at night. She did that night. Or maybe now he was getting hysterical about her. Right or wrong, he had thought it wise at one point to call them all to her bedside again—the whole clan packed inside the room and outside in the hall in hushed and tearful attendance. Hushed save once when her loud, labored breathing seemed to falter and they, thinking the end had come, dropped all restraint to sob and shriek and outdo one another in wild vows of penance if only she would not desert them. The whole clan save Ballard, of whose absence Doc was highly conscious. Lester’s meant less to him. It was Ballard of them all who most intimidated Doc, and while he had no inkling at the time of just how far removed from the scene Ballard was, he found his absence comforting. All that was contained in the name Renshaw seemed to Doc to be concentrated in Ballard, the smallest of the lot but like the Oxo cube, with the whole bull in it. He was to learn later, as if he did not know it already, that the older brothers were every bit as Renshaw as Ballard—maybe, in order to take up any slack caused by Ballard’s absence, a little more so.

  “What, exactly, for the record, Doctor, did they threaten you with if you should try to use the phone, let your wife know where you were, that you were alive, at least?”

  “You are a stranger here, sir, and don’t know these people like I do.” A Yankee, he found himself thinking, with no understanding of how far family feeling can sometimes go. “They didn’t have to draw me a picture. Think what they were doing. Carrying a man off and holding him against his will. Personal physician to their mother, if you please—like a queen. The hell with the health of the rest of my patients! Having gotten themselves in that deep, would they stop at making me regret any move I might make to get word to the outside? I thought about it. As the days went by I thought about it more and more. When I finally learned what I was in for—that they were going to keep me there until she died, however long that took, and that my duty was to see to it that she did not die—well, then the temptation to pick up the phone was sometimes almost more than I could resist. I knew what my poor Kate must be going through and I thought once that maybe even if I got caught at it they might let me get away with something like, ‘Honey, I know you must have been worried to death about me, but don’t worry, I’m all right, I’m just out here at the Renshaws’ and can’t leave because Mrs. Edwina is too sick.’ I didn’t, for one reason, because I didn’t know what they might do to her to keep her from telling you, Faye.”

  “But they must have known,” said Mr. Murphy, “that sooner or later they were going to have to release you. You don’t go so far, do you, Doctor, as to believe they were meaning … not to release you? Eventually they would have to, and then it would all come out, and they—”

  “It wouldn’t matter to them then. That would be after their mother had been granted her dying wish to see her missing boy.”

  “Those boys and girls and their mother were always real close,” the Sheriff commented. “That Renshaw blood is very thick blood.”

  He had had an assistant. Amy: rested, refreshed, scrubbed, powdered and perfumed, showing no aftereffects of her emotional debauch of the morning and with no wish to be reminded of it. Clear of eye, steady of hand, level of voice—hard to equate the neat, self-possessed, efficient-looking woman in the starched white nurse’s uniform, white lisle stockings and sensibl
e rubber-soled white oxfords, with the bare-breasted lunatic, face daubed with dung, whom Doc had seen, had treated, just hours earlier. To deflect any questions about herself, and to put him in his place, she was instantly all concern for him. He looked tired. He had had a long hard day. He was so conscientious, put so much of himself into his work. He should rest now. Her expression, bland and solicitous as it was, nevertheless had behind it some of her brothers’ steely will, and it cautioned him not to question whether she was now fit for duty, whether she could safely be entrusted with the patient whose condition she had so disastrously misdiagnosed before. Her manner with him was professional. They were doctor and nurse together on a case. He was not to get the notion that her indisposition of the morning had made him her doctor, with leave to question or counsel or prescribe for her.

  Perhaps after what had happened he ought not to have trusted her. He had trusted her because of what had happened. Its having happened once ensured that it could not happen again. And he was there—whether he would or no—in case of need. She was so eager to be helpful, to atone for her mistake. Her kinfolks would forgive her for plunging them into panic and unwarranted grief, but Amy could not forgive herself. Of course he had kept from her just how close she had come to bringing about the thing she feared. But surely he did not need to tell her. She knew her mother’s morbid, almost mad fear of death. She knew it better than anybody. Who but she, the one it would pain the most, was the one person to whom Edwina ever spoke of dying? The one thing that seemed to rob death of its sting for Edwina had been to sting Amy with it.

  Edwina lived in terror of death and every death reminded her of her own. Those surrounding her saw to it that none was ever reported to her, whether that of a former acquaintance—she no longer had any close friends—or celebrities or heads of government. Time had stopped in her shuttered world, and she must have supposed that Roosevelt was still in the White House, George VI still on the throne. While for her part she would willingly have left it to the lower classes to do all the dying, whenever a person from among them presumed to die she was, before people learned never to tell her about it, quite put out, as though such individuals ought to know their place better than to make themselves an unpleasant topic of conversation. She had cut herself off from old friends, and her circle of acquaintances also contracted as those who formed it grew old and infirm. She found it too painful, seeing in the deepening lines of their faces and the stiffening of their joints, her own mortality mirrored. Religion offered her no solace. To go to church was to be reminded weekly that before one could attain to the life everlasting one had first to depart this one, so, although religious, or at least superstitious, Edwina Renshaw practiced her faith in a personal God and stayed home on Sundays, where she might receive Him more intimately as an equal. She refused ever to attend the local annual Graveyard Cleaning Day; indeed, she would detour twenty miles out of her way to avoid driving past the gates of a graveyard. It was fifteen years since she had visited her husband’s grave, almost as long since she had mentioned him. Not that Edwina’s memory of her husband was so very painful; what was painful was that he was a memory, and that what of him was mortal lay moldering in the ground, and that on the other half of the stone above him where he lay was already carved her name and the year of her birth, followed by a dash and an expanse of waiting blank stone. Yet with all this she would, when she was feeling very well and with no thought of dying ever, taunt Amy with her death. Amy, who but for the disrespect to her mother would have held her hands over her ears and run screaming from the room. Amy, who would have died for her, as Doc himself once told her. It was the wrong thing to say. After thinking it over for a minute, and realizing that while Amy might be willing she was unable to do her that favor, Edwina had one more grudge to hold against her.

  So at last he had gotten around to his last patient of the day: himself. He had indeed had a long, hard day. He had been conscientious—he had been in terror of making some misstep!—and now he was fuming inwardly—while looking most agreeable—at his treatment by these people who owed him such different treatment, so that he himself was experiencing fibrillations. This had been brought on in part by the nature of the case. He had detected a tendency in his cardiac condition to act up whenever he was treating a cardiac patient. No mystery in this. The sight of his patient’s suffering frightened him. His having to hide his fright worsened his pain. So he had dosed himself well and gone to bed in the room assigned to him adjoining the sickroom, and he had slept soundly despite everything, worn out by the day he had been through. What had wakened him? He had come to suddenly with a sense of misgiving. He had tried to dismiss it from his mind and go back to sleep, but it persisted, grew, led him at last to get up and dress and go in to make sure everything was all right. It was two o’clock. Three hours past the time for the patient’s medication, which lay on the nightstand where he had put it, while Amy sat in her armchair with an innocent smile on her lips, purring in her sleep like a cat.

  VII

  So there he was, the prisoner of that crew of motherlovers, trying to keep her from dying on his hands in order to escape being lynched until those two got back with that missing one, and with, for a nurse, a woman so distraught with worry and so worn out with overwork, and yet so determinedly helpful, he had to watch her every minute to keep her from killing his patient through negligence, absentmindedness.

  It was one of those absolutely to be expected ironies of life: there lay Edwina Renshaw, the only thing keeping her alive, as one of her kinswomen had said to Doc, the hope of seeing that baby boy of hers one last time, and the family, not trusting to a wire, had had to send two of his brothers to fetch him home to his dying mother; meanwhile the child whom Edwina had never appreciated, never loved, never even liked, kept watch at her side hour after hour until she was ready to drop from exhaustion, her own breath hanging upon her mother’s labored breathing, her nails dug into her palms to keep herself from nodding—ready, when her mother did die, to throw herself upon the funeral pyre. A life as singleminded in its dedication as that of a saint in the desert Amy Renshaw had devoted to her mother, and she had never wavered in that faith, though continually mocked and scorned and flouted by the very goddess she worshiped. If like Amy you take criticism well, then you will get a lot of it.

  It was for this that Doc exempted Amy from the resentment he felt toward the rest of the Renshaw tribe for what they had done to him. This plus his certainty that Amy was not in on the plan to detain him. Oh, she would have been in on it if she had been asked, nurse though she was and aware of what it would mean to his practice. But they had known they did not need to implicate her. Amy undoubtedly believed that he was there working round-the-clock because he wanted to be, and that one or more of the town’s other doctors was taking his practice for him in the meantime. She would not have been able to imagine that he could want to be anywhere else when her mother lay at death’s door. Poor fool, ever ready to lick the hand that slapped her, while Kyle, his mother’s favorite, had brought her nothing but heartache. Heartache indeed, thought Doc, remembering the times he himself had had to dash out there and treat her for fibrillations brought on by her latest row with that boy.

  Every large family has one: an outsider, a defector, an escapee, or if the family’s frontiers be sealed off against escape, an internal emigre. This in the Renshaw family was Kyle, and as might have been expected, where total allegiance had been demanded, total alienation had resulted. The rest of them did not like Hazel; but with all her faults, Hazel was one of them. But that one apple that had fallen far from the tree, Kyle, he was not one of them, and he lost no opportunity of letting them know it. It was Kyle who, at one of their reunions, over dessert, after listening to them all run down their neighbors, their co-workers, their acquaintances, everybody outside the pale, had commented, “I learned a new word the other day. Xenophobia, X–E–N–O–P–H–O–B–I–A. Xenophobia. It’s a mental disease. The word is Greek, and means, ‘a morbid dislike of
strangers.’ It’s what you’ve all got. Our whole tribe has got it. All but me. Xenophobia.”

  “And do you know what mental disease you’ve got?” said Amy. “Just the opposite. Kin-o-phobia. K–I–N–O–P–H–O–B–I–A. That’s what you’ve got.”

  And he: “Yes, I can get along well enough with most anybody as long as they’re not kin to me.”

  And this was their darling. Not just his mother’s: the darling of them all. The last born of ten, coming at a time when his mother had long thought she was past conceiving, a change-of-life child, the one whose childhood had been fatherless, with brothers old enough to be his father and four grown sisters all of them rather late to marry and get children of their own, he had been worse spoiled than an only child. The rub was, he was what they had made him, and against outsiders they were obliged to defend him because it was all their very own traits, especially all their most prized faults, which in him were pronounced and gave offense. He was the final print of which they were the trial proofs. Kyle, the last of the Renshaws, the grounds at the bottom of the cup, was more Renshaw than any of them. Contrariness ran in the family: Kyle was the contrariest of the lot. All were quarrelsome: his was the most quarrelsome disposition of all. The stubbornness on which they all prided themselves became downright mulishness in Kyle. Willful and headlong, Kyle rushed in where even other Renshaws feared to tread. If crossed in anything he would go quite glassy-eyed with rage, and he sulked past the time when even his brother Clifford would have given up out of sheer weariness.