In the privacy of his room, there only did he rebel, and even there he fulminated in whispers, vowed vengeance in silence, savored secretly his coming retribution. Then on emerging to answer yet another peremptory summons to the sickroom, he flushed with fear lest these expressions of revolt which he had indulged himself in might have left telltale traces on his face like pilfered jam around a schoolboy’s mouth.
His presence in the house—his detention—his captivity—was kept from all but the immediate family, and he was made to conspire in keeping it from them. By day, when not at the patient’s bedside, he was confined to his room. Not that he was led back and forth under guard. It was simply understood that when he was off duty—he was never off call—he was to keep himself out of sight. To those house servants and the more distant kin who saw him only in the sickroom and only when they were summoned once more to be present at the end, it no doubt seemed that he had just dashed out from town in answer to the call. “Oh, Doctor, you are so good to give us so much of your time, to come so promptly when we need you,” said one of the old aunts once; he smiled a disclamatory smile. Also tacitly understood was the prohibition, when in his own room, against going near the window, where he might have been seen by, might even have been suspected of trying to signal to, the neighbors who called to ask after their mother.
Much can be said though nothing be spoken. Doc understood the Renshaws’ silence perfectly. He was constantly nagged, though, by anxiety over whether they understood that he had understood them. So he acted with such alacrity upon their unspoken commands that he often anticipated them, perhaps even exceeded them. Abject now, he did what he thought they wanted of him without their having to suggest it, much less order it, much less threaten him, much less use force. He gave them every out, every face-saving way. How could he know when he had done enough when he did not know what enough was and when he was terrified to think what might happen to him if what he had done was not enough? Take that matter of his window once again. Not content with never approaching it, almost cowering away from it into the farthest corner, he took to keeping the shade drawn so that it was night all day in his cell, and hot and close as the black hole of Calcutta.
The house had the atmosphere of a tomb and the few sounds outside the house were funereal: the plaint of the mourning dove, the shriek of a jay, the daylong dirge of the pickers at work in the distant cottonfields. Inside people walked on tiptoes, spoke when they met, if they spoke at all, in husky whispers.
Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee: though fifth in the list of the Ten Commandments, that one came first with the Renshaws. Even Doc, though he owed all his present trials to it, could not but give grudging admiration to the Renshaws’ filial fanaticism. Each of them behaved as if his own life hung in the balance with their mother’s. When they said that without Ma they would not be able to go on living, it was no mere expression. Who would love them in despite of all their imperfections when she was gone? What authority would overlook their offenses? Who—although she was actually stronger than any man, yet could plead a woman’s defenselessness, a widow’s self-dependence, a mother’s fond love—would spread her wings for them to hide under and escape reprisal from those whom they had transgressed against?
Doc began to understand their truculence. The Renshaws were angry in advance at a world in which their mother would no longer be, and in which few but themselves would notice the difference her absence made. In their mother’s passing they foresaw the passing of their way of life. They fought to preserve her in defiance of custom and propriety and good measure with the fanaticism of a last remnant of devotees to the cult of a dying god. Through the black scowls they wore to camouflage it could be seen red embarrassment, as though they were shamed by this mortal illness of their deity whose deathlessness they had maintained to a disbelieving world.
For days they had not rested but had kept themselves within earshot, ever-ready to come running in response to the doctor’s summons. They had kept themselves undistracted for fear of missing his call when it came. Each time—and Doc himself lost count of the number—they were summoned for the end they had worked themselves up to the pitch of anxiety and despair, and each time they were sent away carrying their feelings with them undischarged. The suspense was more than flesh, even flesh of Edwina Renshaw’s flesh, could bear. Now the anguish of waiting made them long for the very thing they dreaded. When she did die their guilt over the relief they felt would drive them wild; meanwhile the mere suspicion of it drove them—and drove them to drive Doc—to greater and greater exertions to preserve her.
Such was the power of the old witch’s spell that even Lois’s twice-divorced husband, Leon, showed up to join the vigil over her. Doc was witness to the welcome he got from his double-ex, as Leon made his appearance during one of Lois’s rare turns on watch with him in the sickroom.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Why, Lois, I just heard that Ma was sick and I thought—”
“Ma! What do you mean? She’s not ‘Ma’ to you any more. What’s it to you if she is sick? What business is it of yours?”
“Well, Lois, hon, I just—”
“Hon! Don’t you ‘hon’ me!”
“I just meant to say—”
She shut the door in his face and resumed her seat with a hmmph! But Doc could see that she was not displeased at this testimony of her mother’s far-reaching domination.
That would have been during one of the periods when Edwina was conscious, or semi-conscious. It was then and only then that Amy yielded her post. At the first flutter of her mother’s eyelids poor Amy fled. And so her mother never knew of her constant care. It was always one of her other daughters whom she found watching over her. Did she notice this? Did she, who was to blame for Amy’s never being there, and who would have been displeased if she had been, hold it against her? Edwina was capable of that.
The sisters, intending to share the duty of sitting with their mother among themselves and to exclude from it sisters-in-law and suchlike, had begun by dividing the day into four six-hour watches. But Amy, tireless, self-sacrificing Amy, could seldom be induced to relinquish the post. As she was a trained nurse and more useful there than they, and as she was accustomed in her work to long sick watches, and as they could never win any argument with her, her sisters let Amy have her way.
She had grown touchy. In a reversal of their customary roles, Amy now found herself being watched and worried over by her sisters, and Amy did not like being watched or worried over. “Look after yourselves,” she told them. “I’m all right. I’m not special. You will all be just as sorry as I am.” It sounded almost like a threat. Amy knew her sisters meant well, but when they worried that she was driving herself too hard in looking after Ma she reacted as though they meant to cast doubt upon her endurance, her professional competence.
Amy’s monopolizing the bedside watching left her sisters idle. Those three seemed to be vying with one another in showing the most concern for their mother by showing the least concern for her own personal appearance. Hair uncombed (in Lois’s case untinted and starting to streak with white), faces unmade (in Hazel’s case unwashed), they neglected even to dress but instead slopped about the house all day in wrappers and carpet slippers. Doc’s award for tackiness went to Hazel, hands down.
They did not remain idle for long. Very soon they were immersed together in something, and Doc just hoped to God it was not he who had roused them. For roused they were: roused, wroth and resolute. With those three harpies out to get him, some poor devil was a gone gosling. Doc wondered why he had so readily assumed that the cause of their displeasure was a man, then wondered why he had wondered.
Doc, upon some enforced errand of mercy about the house, would happen upon them caucusing in some corner, their heads nodding together in grim agreement like three cobras to the same tune. They were always deep in papers, which they always gathered to the
m at his approach. He soon learned that they had thrown themselves into the chase after their brother Kyle. Some little delay was being encountered in tracking him down. He had moved about a lot, it would seem, and they were having to trace him through old addresses … Doc suspected the truth was, he had been found but was refusing, possibly under torture, to come back with them. If he could have seen the look on his sisters’ faces he would have held out against whatever torture was being applied to him. In any case, his continued absence gave the three sisters something to do with themselves instead of just wringing their hands over Ma, or over Ma’s will, in the case of Hazel, who wandered about the house looking for that nonexistent document without letting herself know that that was what she was doing. It lessened their feelings of uselessness and gave them a sense that they were doing something for their sick mother even though she might never know about it. It roused them from their state of shock. Unable to face it herself, Edwina Renshaw had done nothing to prepare her children for her death. They could not accept it; they rejected it angrily. Their anger sought an object; it found one ready-made in Kyle.
For this task of bringing their baby brother to bay the three sisters were better suited than Amy. She was childless but they were mothers and could put themselves in Ma’s place and feel a dying mother’s disappointment toward an undutiful favorite child. Indeed, all three were just then feeling rather piqued at their own children, with whom this family crisis had rejoined them. Comparing notes, each found that her sisters had also begun, coincident with Ma’s coming down sick, to detect in their children signs of the disobedience, the ingratitude, the independence, the disrespect for age and authority and tradition so prevalent among the younger generation. Each grew more incensed against her own offspring from what she learned now about those of the other two. With Gladys, hatred of youth had been a cause ever since, at thirty-nine, she relinquished her own—her ruling passion after her love of her family. The two emotions were really heads and tails of the one coin, for Gladys traced the waywardness of today’s youth to the decline of families with a strong, old-fashioned family sense, like her own, and on this she put the blame for young men on buses who let her stand while they sat, unmarried mothers, boys with long hair, dropouts, campus agitators, dopefiends—for the disappearance of decency, manners. She herself had children not a great deal younger than Kyle. He must be made an example of to them. Hers was the most implacable hatred of them all for Kyle, or quickly grew to be. For if to Amy the family was a religion, to Gladys it was a state; and if to Amy her brother’s defection was apostasy, punishable by excommunication, to Gladys it was treason, punishable by—well, corporal punishment, at the very least. So, with stout Gladys at their head, lean, hungry Hazel next and long-grudging Lois bringing up the rear, the three sisters set out in pursuit of their renegade brother, a sense of mission, along with a mounting discontentment and a consequent severity toward their own children, growing upon them by the hour. To their agents in the field, Ballard and Lester, they dispatched on every outgoing mail suggestions and exhortations, pursuing the unfilial one with all the fury of the Eumenides. They saw themselves as avengers not just of Ma, but of all mothers everywhere dishonored by their children.
Their cause was Doc’s cause. The sooner that boy was trapped and brought home the sooner Doc would be allowed to go home. Why then had Doc found himself half-hoping that Kyle would elude them, or would resist their pleas, or would defy their threats, and preserve his independence?
Meanwhile Doc’s assistant, the assiduous Amy, was fast becoming his major problem. Amy was headed full speed—full Renshaw speed—for a nervous breakdown. He was no psychiatrist, but you didn’t need to be one to see that. He once made the mistake of beginning a conversation with her, meant to be soothing, with the words, “When this is all over you ought to take a good—” and she nearly broke down on the spot. Half-hysterical with concern for her mother, half-dead with exhaustion, she nonetheless insisted not only on being in almost round-the-clock attendance in the sickroom, she insisted that he let her relieve him, that if he was to do his job he must get some rest, he looked ready to drop. So he was, and she was one of the prime reasons for it. He was never more nervous about the patient upon whose survival his own depended than when he was supposed to be resting while Amy spelled him beside the sickbed. Yet a second time, roused from sleep by sudden fear, he had found her asleep at her post. He did not dare tell the poor thing of it. Once, after refilling the bottle of dextrose which fed the patient intravenously, she forgot to reopen the pinch-clamp on the rubber tube. Once, in place of the adrenalin he had asked for, she had handed him from out of his kit an ampule of morphine sulphate, which was not only counterindicated in the case, but would very likely have proved lethal. He had actually filled his syringe with it. He had caught the error in the nick of time. Out of kindness he had concealed it from her. It would have killed Amy to know what she had very nearly done. It had very nearly killed him. There he was, then, with all of them ready to lynch him should he let the old lady die before those two got back with their missing brother, and with, for a nurse, a woman so flustered, so distraught with anxiety and overwork, so conscious that her unconscious mother expected the worst of her, and yet so determined to do her best, he had to watch her every minute to see that she did not kill his patient accidentally.
The three sisters were in constant confabulation, drafting letters and telegrams, poring over what seemed to be a map which although he pointedly did not look at it they always folded away at Doc’s approach. They had set up their headquarters in the kitchen, had chosen as their working hours the night, after the Negro women had finished their chores and gone off to their quarters. There, with the house asleep all about them, they spread themselves out upon the table, read and weighed the day’s reports from the field and plotted their strategy for the morrow, fortifying themselves from out of the coffeepot on the range with a black bitter brew as thick as pitch. They were still there one night—or morning—anyhow at an hour when a poor old man himself not in the best of health ought to have been home in his own bed—when Doc, being careful to disturb nobody’s rest and despising himself for his craven consideration of his captors, made his way downstairs to sterilize a hypodermic needle. Asleep on his feet, he had arrived at the kitchen door before he realized that the Weird Sisters were inside holding their midnight sabbat, then realized that by his stealth he had arrived there without their knowing it, either. Lois, in that thin little angry insect hum of hers, was reading aloud to the others.
“‘This is more of a job than you might imagine because the telephone directory here is a little bigger than ours back home. Five books, one for each borough, each about as thick as the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. We found a good many Renshaws. None named Kyle but might turn out to be, such as Renshaw’s Bar and Grill, Renshaw & Whitcomb Pontiac-Olds, etc. Have now checked out about a quarter of these. So far no luck but will keep going down the list as many as we can get to each day. Meanwhile we have put a notice in the paper. Saw one in the “Personals” that said Angie please come home all is forgiven. Ours does not say all is forgiven. Please either. This a.m. went with an officer from the Missing Persons Bureau to the city morgue. I have always had a pretty strong stomach but what we saw today was nearly too much for me.’”
He could imagine what doing that must have cost them! To go to the police and admit that they had allowed one of their own to stray so completely out of their ken. To have the name Renshaw—even that of one unworthy of it—on the book of a precinct house, listed among the runaway husbands and amnesia victims and alimony fugitives!
“I don’t know why,” said Hazel, “they feel they have to do everything together. If they split up and one did one thing while the other one did something else they would cover twice the territory.”
“The letter goes on: ‘This is where every dead body that is found with no papers on it is brought and they keep them until somebody claims them or not. How long they keep them without a
nybody claiming them before they dispose of them I don’t know but some we saw today had been there too long. Some of them have died of natural causes but many of them of very unnatural causes. I won’t go into any details.
“‘As you can see by the letterhead we have changed hotels. This one costs twice as much as the other one. Up here if you want segregation you have got to pay for it.’”
“Well,” said Hazel, “they are never going to find him unless—”
“Boroughs?” Mr. Murphy asked Doc.
“Boroughs,” said Doc. “Five boroughs. And then I heard her say they were never going to find him unless—It was all I could do to keep myself from screaming.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said Mr. Murphy, whose accent grated upon Doc’s ear like chalk dragged across a slate, “that they expected to find one person among nine million without—?”
“No, sir,” said Doc. “They did not expect to ‘find’ him. It may come as a surprise to you, but us folks down here have heard of New York City. They never expected to find him. They were doing their duty. Their dying mother wished to see her missing son, and they were looking for him.”
But that was not all. The only evidence they had that New York City was where Kyle was, was a story four years old that somebody from town, up there for the World’s Fair, had seen in Times Square a man he thought was Kyle Renshaw and had hailed him. What convinced the man that it was Kyle was that he pretended not to have heard and disappeared into the crowd. That would be like Kyle, all right.
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