Who cared? After all, Building Seven was different. The hundred-odd patients of its three yellow wards had nearly all escaped the place at least once or twice over the years, and had every hope of escaping again, for good, as soon as their X rays cleared up or as soon as they had recovered from various kinds of surgery; meanwhile, they did not think of it as home or even as life, exactly, but as a timeless limbo between spells of what, like prisoners, they called “the outside.” Another thing: owing to the unmilitary nature of their ailment, they didn’t think of themselves primarily as “veterans” anyway (except perhaps at Christmastime, when each man got a multigraphed letter of salutation from the President and a five-dollar bill from the New York Journal-American) and so felt no real bond with the wounded and maimed.
Building Seven was a world of its own. It held out a daily choice between its own kind of virtue—staying in bed—and its own kind of vice: midnight crap games, AWOL, and the smuggling of beer and whiskey through the fire-exit doors of its two latrines. It was the stage for its own kind of comedy—the night Snyder chased the charge nurse into the fluoroscopy room with a water pistol, for instance, or the time the pint of bourbon slipped out of old Foley’s bathrobe and smashed at Dr. Resnick’s feet—and once in awhile its own kind of tragedy—the time Jack Fox sat up in bed to say, “Chrissake, open the window,” coughed, and brought up the freak hemorrhage that killed him in ten minutes, or the other times, two or three times a year, when one of the men who had been wheeled away to surgery, smiling and waving to cries of “Take it easy!” and “Good luck t’ya, boy!” would never come back. But mostly it was a world consumed by its own kind of boredom, where everyone sat or lay amid the Kleenex and the sputum cups and the clangor of all-day radios. That was the way things were in C Ward on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, except that the radios were swamped under the noise of Tiny Kovacs’s laughter.
He was an enormous man of thirty, six and a half feet tall and broad as a bear, and that afternoon he was having a private talk with his friend Jones, who looked comically small and scrawny beside him. They would whisper together and then laugh—Jones with a nervous giggle, repeatedly scratching his belly through the pajamas, Tiny with his great guffaw. After a while they got up, still flushed with laughter, and made their way across the ward to McIntyre’s bed.
“Hey, Mac, listen,” Jones began, “Tiny’n I got an idea.” Then he got the giggles and said, “Tell him, Tiny.”
The trouble was that McIntyre, a fragile man of forty-one with a lined, sarcastic face, was trying to write an important letter at the time. But they both mistook his grimace of impatience for a smile, and Tiny began to explain the idea in good faith.
“Listen, Mac, tonight around twelve I’m gonna get all undressed, see?” He spoke with some difficulty because all his front teeth were missing; they had gone bad soon after his lungs, and the new plate the hospital had ordered for him was long overdue. “I’ll be all naked except I’m gonna wear this towel, see? Like a diaper? And then look, I’m gonna put this here acrost my chest.” He unrolled a strip of four-inch bandage, a yard long, on which he or Jones had written “1951” in big block numerals, with marking ink. “Get it?” he said. “A big fat baby? No teef? And then listen, Mac, you can be the old year, okay? You can put this here on, and this here. You’ll be perfect.” The second bandage said “1950,” and the other item was a false beard of white cotton wool that they’d dug up from a box of Red Cross supplies in the dayroom—it had evidently belonged to an old Santa Claus costume.
“No, thanks,” McIntyre said. “Find somebody else, okay?”
“Aw, jeez, you gotta do it, Mac,” Tiny said. “Listen, we thought of evvybody else in the building and you’re the only one—don’tcha see? Skinny, bald, a little gray hair? And the best part is you’re like me, you got no teef eiver.” Then, to show no offense was meant, he added, “Well, I mean, at lease you could take ’em out, right? You could take ’em out for a couple minutes and put ’em back in after—right?”
“Look, Kovacs,” McIntyre said, briefly closing his eyes, “I already said no. Now will the both a you please take off?”
Slowly Tiny’s face reshaped itself into a pout, blotched red in the cheeks as if he’d been slapped. “Arright,” he said with self-control, grabbing the beard and the bandages from McIntyre’s bed. “Arright, the hell wiv it.” He swung around and strode back to his own side of the ward, and Jones trotted after him, smiling in embarrassment, his loose slippers flapping on the floor.
McIntyre shook his head. “How d’ya like them two for a paira idiot bastards?” he said to the man in the next bed, a thin and very ill Negro named Vernon Sloan. “You hear all that, Vernon?”
“I got the general idea,” Sloan said. He started to say something else but began coughing instead, reaching out a long brown hand for his sputum cup, and McIntyre went to work on his letter again.
Back at his own bed, Tiny threw the beard and the bandages in his locker and slammed it shut. Jones hurried up beside him, pleading. “Listen, Tiny, we’ll get another guy, is all. We’ll get Shulman, or—”
“Ah, Shulman’s too fat.”
“Well, or Johnson, then, or—”
“Look, forget it, willya, Jones?” Tiny exploded. “Piss on it. I’m through. Try thinkin’ up somethin’ to give the guys a little laugh on New Year’s, and that’s whatcha get.”
Jones sat down on Tiny’s bedside chair. “Well, hell,” he said after a pause, “it’s still a good idea, isn’t it?”
“Ah!” Tiny pushed one heavy hand away in disgust. “Ya think any a these bastids ‘ud appreciate it? Ya think there’s one sunuvabitchin’ bastid in this building ‘ud appreciate it? Piss on ’em all.”
It was no use arguing; Tiny would sulk for the rest of the day now. This always happened when his feelings were hurt, and they were hurt fairly often, for his particular kind of jollity was apt to get on the other men’s nerves. There was, for instance, the business of the quacking rubber duck he had bought in the hospital canteen shortly before Christmas, as a gift for one of his nephews. The trouble that time was that in the end he had decided to buy something else for the child and keep the duck for himself; quacking it made him laugh for hours on end. After the lights were out at night he would creep up on the other patients and quack the duck in their faces, and it wasn’t long before nearly everyone told him to cut it out and shut up. Then somebody—McIntyre, in fact—had swiped the duck from Tiny’s bed and hidden it, and Tiny had sulked for three days. “You guys think you’re so smart,” he had grumbled to the ward at large. “Actin’ like a buncha kids.”
It was Jones who found the duck and returned it to him; Jones was about the only man left who thought the things Tiny did were funny. Now his face brightened a little as he got up to leave. “Anyway, I got my bottle, Tiny,” he said. “You’n me’ll have some fun tonight.” Jones was not a drinking man, but New Year’s Eve was special and smuggling was a challenge: a few days earlier he had arranged to have a pint of rye brought in and had hidden it, with a good deal of giggling, under some spare pajamas in his locker.
“Don’t tell nobody else you got it,” Tiny said. “I wouldn’t tell these bastids the time a day.” He jerked a cigarette into his lips and struck the match savagely. Then he got his new Christmas robe off the hanger and put it on—careful, for all his temper, to arrange the fit of the padded shoulders and the sash just right. It was a gorgeous robe, plum-colored satin with contrasting red lapels, and Tiny’s face and manner assumed a strange dignity whenever be put it on. This look was as new, or rather, as seasonal, as the robe itself: it dated back to the week before, when he’d gotten dressed to go home for his Christmas pass.
Many of the men were a revelation in one way or another when they appeared in their street clothes. McIntyre had grown surprisingly humble, incapable of sarcasm or pranks, when he put on his scarcely worn accounting clerk’s costume of blue serge, and Jones had grown surprisingly tough in his old Navy foul-weather ja
cket. Young Krebs, whom everybody called Junior, had assumed a portly maturity with his double-breasted business suit, and Travers, who most people had forgotten was a Yale man, looked oddly effete in his J. Press flannels and his button-down collar. Several of the Negroes had suddenly become Negroes again, instead of ordinary men, when they appeared in their sharply pegged trousers, draped coats and huge Windsor knots, and they even seemed embarrassed to be talking to the white men on the old familiar terms. But possibly the biggest change of all had been Tiny’s. The clothes themselves were no surprise—his family ran a prosperous restaurant in Queens, and he was appropriately well-turned-out in a rich black overcoat and silk scarf—but the dignity they gave him was remarkable. The silly grin was gone, the laugh silenced, the clumsy movements overcome. The eyes beneath his snap-brim hat were not Tiny’s eyes at all, but calm and masterful. Even his missing teeth didn’t spoil the effect, for he kept his mouth shut except to mutter brief, almost curt Christmas wishes. The other patients looked up with a certain shy respect at this new man, this dramatic stranger whose hard heels crashed on the marble floor as he strode out of the building—and later, when he swung along the sidewalks of Jamaica on his way home, the crowds instinctively moved aside to make way for him.
Tiny was aware of the splendid figure he cut, but by the time he was home he’d stopped thinking about it; in the circle of his family it was real. Nobody called him Tiny there—he was Harold, a gentle son, a quiet hero to many round-eyed children, a rare and honored visitor. At one point, in the afterglow of a great dinner, a little girl was led ceremoniously up to his chair, where she stood shyly, not daring to meet his eyes, her fingers clasping the side seams of her party dress. Her mother urged her to speak: “Do you want to tell Uncle Harold what you say in your prayers every night, Irene?”
“Yes,” the little girl said. “I tell Jesus please to bless Uncle Harold and make him get well again soon.”
Uncle Harold smiled and took hold of both her hands “That’s swell, Irene,” he said huskily. “But you know, you shunt tell Him. You should ask Him.”
She looked into his face for the first time. “That’s what I mean,” she said. “I ask Him.”
And Uncle Harold gathered her in his arms, putting his big face over her shoulder so she couldn’t see that his eyes were blurred with tears. “That’s a good girl,” he whispered. It was a scene nobody in Building Seven would have believed.
He remained Harold until the pass was over and he strode away from a clinging family farewell, shrugging the great overcoat around his shoulders and squaring the hat. He was Harold all the way to the bus terminal and all the way back to the hospital, and the other men still looked at him oddly and greeted him a little shyly when he pounded back into C Ward. He went to his bed and put down his several packages (one of which contained the new robe), then headed for the latrine to get undressed. That was the beginning of the end, for when he came out in the old faded pajamas and scuffed slippers there was only a trace of importance left in his softening face, and even that disappeared in the next hour or two, while he lay on his bed and listened to the radio. Later that evening, when most of the other returning patients had settled down, he sat up and looked around in the old, silly way. He waited patiently for a moment of complete silence, then thrust his rubber duck high in the air and quacked it seven times to the rhythm of “shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits,” while everybody groaned and swore. Tiny was back, ready to start a new year.
Now, less than a week later, he could still recapture his dignity whenever he needed it by putting on the robe, striking a pose and thinking hard about his home. Of course, it was only a question of time before the robe grew rumpled with familiarity, and then it would all be over, but meanwhile it worked like a charm.
Across the aisle, McIntyre sat brooding over his unfinished letter. “I don’t know, Vernon,” he said to Sloan. “I felt sorry for you last week, having to stay in this dump over Christmas, but you know something? You were lucky. I wish they wouldn’t of let me go home either.”
“That so?” Sloan said. “How do you mean?”
“Ah, I don’t know,” McIntyre said, wiping his fountain pen with a piece of Kleenex. “I don’t know. Just that it’s a bitch, having to come back afterwards, I guess.” But that was only part of it; the other part, like the letter he’d been trying to write all week, was his own business.
McIntyre’s wife had grown fat and bewildered in the last year or two. On the alternate Sunday afternoons when she came out to visit him she never seemed to have much on her mind but the movies she had seen, or the television shows, and she gave him very little news of their two children, who almost never came out. “Anyway, you’ll be seein’ them Christmas,” she would say. “We’ll have a lot of fun. Only listen, Dad, are you sure that bus trip isn’t gonna tire you out?”
“’Course not,” he had said, a number of times. “I didn’t have no trouble last year, did I?”
Nevertheless he was breathing hard when he eased himself off the bus at last, carrying the packages he had bought in the hospital canteen, and he had to walk very slowly up the snow-crusted Brooklyn street to his home.
His daughter, Jean, who was eighteen now, was not there when he came in.
“Oh, sure,” his wife explained, “I thought I told you she’d prob’ly be out tonight.”
“No,” he said. “You didn’t tell me. Where’d she go?”
“Oh, out to the movies is all, with her girlfriend Brenda. I didn’t think you’d mind, Dad. Fact, I told her to go. She needs a little night off once in a while. You know, she’s kind of run-down. She gets nervous and everything.”
“What’s she get nervous about?”
“Well, you know. One thing, this job she’s got now’s very tiring. I mean she likes the work and everything, but she’s not used to the full eight hours a day, you know what I mean? She’ll settle down to it. Come on, have a cuppa coffee, and then we’ll put the tree up. We’ll have a lot of fun.”
On his way to wash up he passed her empty room, with its clean cosmetic smell, its ragged teddy bear and framed photographs of singers, and he said, “It sure seems funny to be home.”
His boy, Joseph, had still been a kid fooling around with model airplanes the Christmas before; now he wore his hair about four inches too long and spent a great deal of time working on it with his comb, shaping it into a gleaming pompadour with upswept sides. He was a heavy smoker too, pinching the cigarette between his yellow-stained thumb and forefinger and cupping the live end in his palm. He hardly moved his lips when he spoke, and his only way of laughing was to make a brief snuffling sound in his nose. He gave one of these little snorts during the trimming of the Christmas tree, when McIntyre said something about a rumor that the Veterans Administration might soon increase disability pensions. It might have meant nothing, but to McIntyre it was the same as if he had said, “Who you tryna kid, Pop? We know where the money’s coming from.” It seemed an unmistakable, wise-guy reference to the fact that McIntyre’s brother-in-law, and not his pension, was providing the bulk of the family income. He resolved to speak to his wife about it at bedtime that night, but when the time came all he said was, “Don’t he ever get his hair cut anymore?”
“All the kids are wearing it that way now,” she said. “Why do you have to criticize him all the time?”
Jean was there in the morning, slow and rumpled in a loose blue wrapper. “Hi, sweetie,” she said, and gave him a kiss that smelled of sleep and stale perfume. She opened her presents quietly and then lay for a long time with one leg thrown over the arm of a deep upholstered chair, her foot swinging, her fingers picking at a pimple on her chin.
McIntyre couldn’t take his eyes off her. It wasn’t just that she was a woman—the kind of withdrawn, obliquely smiling woman that had filled him with intolerable shyness and desire in his own youth—it was something more disturbing even than that.
“Whaddya looking at, Dad?” she said, smiling and frowning at once. “You
keep lookin’ at me all the time.”
He felt himself blushing. “I always like to look at pretty girls. Is that so terrible?”
“’Course not.” She began intently plucking at the broken edge of one of her fingernails, frowning down at her hands in a way that made her long eyelashes fall in delicate curves against her cheeks. “It’s just—you know. When a person keeps looking at you all the time it makes you nervous, that’s all.”
“Honey, listen.” McIntyre leaned forward with both elbows on his skinny knees. “Can I ask you something? What’s all this business about being nervous? Ever since I come home, that’s all I heard. ‘Jean’s very nervous. Jean’s very nervous.’ So listen, will you please tell me something? What’s there to be so nervous about?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know, Dad. Nothing, I guess.”
“Well, because the reason I ask—” he was trying to make his voice deep and gentle, the way he was almost sure it had sounded long ago, but it came out scratchy and querulous, short of breath—“the reason I ask is, if there’s something bothering you or anything, don’t you think you ought to tell your dad about it?”
Her fingernail tore deep into the quick, which caused her to shake it violently and pop it into her mouth with a little whimper of pain, and suddenly she was on her feet, red-faced and crying. “Dad, willya lea’ me alone? Willya just please lea’ me alone?” She ran out of the room and upstairs and slammed her door.
McIntyre had started after her, but instead he stood swaying and glared at his wife and son, who were examining the carpet at opposite ends of the room.
“What’s the matter with her, anyway?” he demanded. “Huh? What the hell’s going on around here?” But they were as silent as two guilty children. “C’mon,” he said. His head made a slight involuntary movement with each suck of air into his frail chest. “C’mon, goddamn it, tell me.”
With a little wet moan his wife sank down and spread herself among the sofa cushions, weeping, letting her face melt. “All right,” she said. “All right, you asked for it. We all done our best to give you a nice Christmas, but if you’re gonna come home and snoop around and drive everybody crazy with your questions, all right—it’s your funeral. She’s four months pregnant—there, now are you satisfied? Now willya please quit bothering everybody?”
The Collected Stories Page 16
