Collier ran to him.
“What is it!” he cried.
Kleinman lifted his head slowly.
“She is cured,” he said in awed tones.
“What?”
The intern moved quickly to the bed. Kleinman spoke to him and to Collier.
“The fever is gone,” he said. “Her temperature, her respiration, her pulse beat—all are normal. She has been completely cured of pneumonia in …”
He checked his pocket watch.
“In seventeen minutes,” he said.
Collier sat in Kleinman’s waiting room staring sightlessly at the magazine in his lap. Inside, Ann was being x-rayed.
There was no doubt anymore, Ann was pregnant. X-rays at six weeks had shown the fetus inside her. Once more their relationship suffered from doubt. He was still concerned for her health but, once more, was unable to speak to her and tell her that he believed in her. And, though he’d never actually told her of his renewed doubt, Ann had felt it. She avoided him at home, sleeping half the time, the other half reading omniverously. He still couldn’t understand that. She’d gone through all his books on the physical sciences, then his texts on sociology, anthropology, philosophy, semantics, history and now she was reading geography books. There seemed no sense to it.
And, all during this period, while the form in her body changed from a small lump to a pear shape, to a globe, then an ovoid—she’d been eating an excess of salt. Doctor Kleinman kept warning her about it. Collier had tried to stop her but she wouldn’t stop. Eating salt seemed a compulsion.
As a result she drank too much water. Now her weight had come to the point where the over-size fetus was pressing against her diaphragm causing breathing difficulty.
Just yesterday Ann’s face had gone blue and Collier had rushed her to Kleinman’s office. The doctor had done something to ease the condition. Collier didn’t know what. Then Ann had been x-rayed and Kleinman told Collier to bring her back the next day.
The door opened and Kleinman led Ann out of his office.
“Sit, my dear,” he told her. “I want to talk to David.”
Ann walked past Collier without looking at him and sat down on the leather couch. As he stood, he noticed her reaching for a magazine. The Scientific American. He sighed and shook his head as he walked into Kleinman’s office.
As he moved for the chair, he thought, for what seemed the hundredth time, of the night she’d cried and told him she had to stay because there was no place else to go. Because she had no money of her own and her family was dead. She’d told him that if it wasn’t for the fact that she was innocent she’d probably kill herself for the way he was treating her. He had stood beside the bed, silent and tense, while she cried, unable to argue, to console, even to reply. He’d just stood there until he could bear it no longer and then walked out of the room.
“What?” he said.
“I say look at these,” Kleinman said grimly.
Kleinman’s behavior had changed too in the past months, declining from confidence to a sort of confused anger.
Collier looked down at the two x-ray plates, glanced at the dates on them. One was from the day before, the other was the plate Kleinman had just taken.
“I don’t …” Collier stared.
Kleinman told him, “Look at the size of the child.”
Collier compared the plates more carefully. At first he didn’t see. Then his startled eyes flicked up suddenly.
“Is it possible?” he said, feeling a crushing sense of the unreal on him.
“It has happened,” was all Kleinman said.
“But … how?”
Kleinman shook his head and Collier saw the doctor’s left hand on the desk grip into a fist as if he were angered by this new enigma.
“I have never seen the like of it,” Kleinman said. “Complete bone structure by the seventh week. Facial form by the eighth week. Organs complete and functioning by the end of the second month. The mother’s insane desire for salt. And now this … .”
He picked up the plates and looked at them almost in belligerence.
“How can a child decrease its size?” he said.
Collier felt a pang of fear at the mystified tone in Kleinman’s voice.
“It is clear, it is clear,” Kleinman shook his head irritably. “The child had grown to excess proportions because of the mother drinking too much water. To such proportions that it was pressing dangerously against her diaphragm. And now, in one day, the pressure is gone, the size of the child markedly decreased.”
Kleinman’s hands snapped into hard fists.
“It is almost,” he said nervously, “as if the child knows what is going on.
“No more salt!”
His voice rose in pitch as he jerked the salt shaker from her hand and stamped over to the cupboard. Then he took her glass of water and emptied most of it into the sink. He sat down again.
She sat with her eyes shut, her body trembling. He watched as tears ran slowly from her eyes and down her cheeks. Her teeth bit into her lower lip. Then her eyes opened; they were big, frightened eyes. She caught a sob in the middle and hastily brushed her tears aside. She sat there quietly.
“Sorry,” she murmured and, for some reason, Collier got the impression that she wasn’t talking to him.
She finished the remaining water in a gulp.
“You’re drinking too much water again,” he said. “You know what Doctor Kleinman said.”
“I … try,” she said, “but I can’t help it. I feel such a need for salt and it makes me so thirsty.”
“You’ll have to quit drinking so much water,” he said coldly. “You’ll endanger the child.”
She looked startled as her body twitched suddenly. Her hands slipped from the table to press against her swollen stomach. Her look implored him to help her.
“What is it?” he asked hurriedly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The baby kicked.”
He leaned back, muscles unknotted.
“That’s to be expected,” he said.
They sat quietly a while. Ann toyed with her food. Once he saw her reach out automatically for the salt, then raise her eyes in slight alarm when her fingers didn’t find the shaker.
“David,” she said after a few minutes.
He swallowed his food.
“What?”
“Why have you stayed with me?”
He couldn’t answer.
“Is it because you believe me?”
“I don’t know, Ann. I don’t know.”
The look of slight hope on her face left and she lowered her head.
“I thought,” she said, “maybe … because you were staying …”
The crying again. She sat there not even bothering to brush aside the tears that moved slowly down her cheeks and over her lips.
“Oh, Ann,” he said, half irritably, half in sorrow.
He got up to go to her. As he did her body twitched again, this time more violently, and her face went blank. Again she cut off her sobs and rubbed at her cheeks with almost angry fingers.
“I can’t help it,” she said slowly and loudly.
Not to him. Collier was sure it was not to him.
“What are you talking about?” he said nervously.
He stood there looking down at his wife. She looked so helpless, so afraid. He wanted to pull her against himself and comfort her. He wanted to …
Still sitting, she leaned against his chest while he stroked her soft brown hair.
“Poor little girl,” he said. “My poor little girl.”
“Oh David, David, if only you’d believe me. I’d do anything to make you believe me, anything. I can’t stand to have you so cold to me. Not when I know I haven’t done anything wrong.”
He stood there silently and his mind spoke to him. There is a chance, it said, a chance.
She seemed to guess what he was thinking. Because she looked up at him and there was absolute trust in her eyes.
�
�Anything, David, anything.”
“Can you hear me, Ann?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
They were in Professor Mead’s office. Ann lay on the couch, her eyes closed. Mead took the needle from Collier’s fingers and put it on the desk. He sat on the corner of the desk and watched in grim silence.
“Who am I, Ann?”
“David.”
“How do you feel, Ann?”
“Heavy. I feel heavy.”
“Why?”
“The baby is so heavy.”
Collier licked his lips. Why was he putting it off, asking these extraneous questions? He knew what he wanted to ask. Was he too afraid? What if, despite her insistence on this, she gave the wrong answer?
He gripped his hands together tightly and his throat seemed to become a column of rock.
“Dave, not too long,” Johnny cautioned.
Collier drew in a rasping breath.
“Is it …” he started, then swallowed with difficulty, “is it … my child, Ann?”
She hesitated. She frowned. Her eyes flickered open for a second, then shut. Her entire body writhed. She seemed to be fighting the question. Then the color drained from her face.
“No,” she said through clenched teeth.
Collier felt himself stiffening as if all his muscles and tendons were dough expanding and pushing out his flesh.
“Who’s the father?” he asked, not realizing how loud and unnatural his voice was.
At that, Ann’s body shuddered violently. There was a clicking sound in her throat and her head rolled limply on the pillow. At her sides, the white fists opened slowly.
Mead jumped over and put his fingers to her wrist. His face was taut as he felt for the pulsebeat. Satisfied, he lifted her right eyelid and peered at the eye.
“She’s really out,” he said. “I told you it wasn’t a good idea to give serum to such a heavily pregnant woman. You should have done it months ago. Kleinman won’t like this.”
Collier sat there not hearing a word, his face a mask of hopeless distress.
“Is she all right?” he asked.
But the words hardly came out. He felt something shake in his chest. He didn’t realize what it was until it was too late. Then he ran shaking hands over his cheeks and stared at the wet fingers with incredulous eyes. His mouth opened, closed. He tried to cut off the sobs but he could not.
He felt Johnny’s arm around his shoulders.
“It’s all right, boy,” Johnny said.
Collier jammed his eyes shut, wishing that his whole body could be swallowed up in the swimming darkness before his gaze. His chest heaved with trembling breaths and he couldn’t swallow the lump in his throat. His head kept shaking slowly. My life is ended, he thought, I loved and trusted her and she has betrayed me.
“Dave?” he heard Johnny say.
Collier grunted.
“I don’t want to make things worse. But … well, there’s still a hope, I think.”
“Huh?”
“Ann didn’t answer your question. She didn’t say the father was … another man,” he finished weakly.
Collier pushed angrily to his feet.
“Oh shut up, will you?” he said.
Later they carried her to the car and Collier drove her home.
Slowly he took off his coat and hat and let them drop on the hall chest. Then he shuffled into the living room and sank down on his chair. He lifted his feet to the ottoman with a weary grunt. He sat there, slumped over, staring at the wall.
Where was she?—he wondered. Upstairs reading probably, just as he’d left her this morning. She had a pile of library books by the bed. Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Descartes, Darwin, Bergson, Freud, Whitehead, Jeans, Eddington, Einstein, Emerson, Dewey, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, James—an endless assortment of books.
And the way she read them. As if she were sitting there and rapidly turning the pages without even looking at what was written on them. Yet he knew she was getting it all. Once in a while she’d let a phrase drop, a concept, an idea. She was getting every word.
But why?
Once he had gotten the wild idea that Ann had read something about acquired characteristics and was trying to pass along this knowledge to her unborn child. But he had quickly put aside that idea. Ann was intelligent enough to know that such a thing was patently impossible.
He sat there shaking his head slowly, a habit he’d acquired in the past few months. Why was he still with her? He kept asking himself the question. Somehow the months had slipped by and still he was living in this house. A hundred times he’d started to leave and changed his mind. Finally he’d given up and moved into the back bedroom. They lived now like landlord and tenant.
His nerves were starting to go. He found himself obsessed with an overwhelming impatience. If he was walking from one place to another he would suddenly feel a great rush of anger that he had not already completed the trip. He resented all transport, he wanted things done immediately. He snapped at his pupils whether they rated it or not. His classes were being so poorly conducted that he’d been called before Doctor Peden, the head of the Geology Department. Peden hadn’t been too hard on him because he knew about Ann but Collier knew he couldn’t go on like this.
His eyes moved over the room. The rug was thick with dust. He’d tried going over it with the vacuum whenever he thought of it, but it piled up too fast to keep pace with. The whole house was going to pot. He had to take care of his laundry. The machine in the basement hadn’t been used for months. He didn’t want to know how to operate it and Ann never touched it now. He took the clothes to the laundromat downtown.
When he’d commented once on the slovenliness of the house, Ann had looked hurt and started to cry. She cried all the time now and always the same way. First, as if she were going to continue for an hour straight. Then, suddenly, with lurching abruptness, she would stop crying and wipe away the tears. He got the impression sometimes that it had something to do with the child, that she stopped for fear the crying would affect the baby. Or else it was the other way around, he thought, that the baby didn’t like …
He closed his eyes as if to shut out the thought. His right hand tapped nervously and impatiently on the arm of the chair. He got up restlessly and walked around the room running a forefinger over flat surfaces, wiping the dust off on his handkerchief.
He stood staring malignantly at the heap of dishes in the sink, the unkempt condition of the curtains, the smeared linoleum. He felt like rushing upstairs and letting her know that, pregnancy or no pregnancy, she was going to snap out of this doldrum and act like a wife again or he was leaving.
He started through the dining room, then halfway to the stairs he hesitated, halted completely. He went back to the stove slowly and put the flame on underneath the coffee pot. The coffee would be stale but he’d rather drink it that way than make more.
What was the use? She’d try to talk to him and tell him she understood but then, as if she were under a spell, she’d start to cry. And, after a few moments, she’d get that startled look and stop crying. As a matter of fact she was even beginning to control her tears from the outset. As if she knew that the crying was not going to work so she may as well not start at all.
It was eerie.
The word brought him up short. That was it—eerie. The pneumonia. The decrease in fetal size. The reading. The desire for salt. The crying and the stopping of it.
He found himself staring at the white wall over the stove. He found himself shuddering.
Ann didn’t tell us the father was another man.
When he came in she was in the kitchen drinking coffee. Without a word he took the cup from her and poured the remainder of it into the sink.
“You’re not supposed to drink coffee,” he said.
He looked into the coffee pot. He’d left it almost full that morning.
“Did you drink all of it?” he asked angrily.
She lowered h
er head.
“For God’s sake, don’t cry,” he rasped.
“I … I won’t,” she said.
“Why do you drink coffee when you know you’re not supposed to?”
“I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“Oh-h,” he said, clenching his teeth. He started out of the room.
“David, I can’t help it,” she called after him, “I can’t drink water. I have to drink something. David, can’t—can’t you! …”
He went upstairs and took a shower. He couldn’t concentrate on anything. He put down the soap and then forgot where. He stopped shaving before he was done and wiped off the lather. Then, later, while he was combing his hair, he noticed half his face still bearded and, with a muffled curse, he lathered again and finished.
The night was like all the others except for one thing. When he went into the bedroom for clean pajamas he saw that she was having difficulty focusing her eyes. And, while he lay in the back bedroom correcting test papers, he heard her giggling. Later he tossed around for several hours before he slept and all that time she kept giggling at something. He wanted to slam the door shut and drown out the sound but he couldn’t. He had to leave the door open in case she needed him during the night.
At last he slept. For how long he didn’t know. It seemed only a moment before he lay there blinking up at the dark ceiling.
“Now am I alien and forgotten, 0 lost of traveled night.”
First he thought he was dreaming.
“Murk and strangeness, here am I in ever night, hot, hot.”
He sat up suddenly then, his heart jolting.
It was Ann’s voice.
He threw his legs over the side of the bed and found his slippers. He pushed up quickly and padded to the door, shivering as the cold air chilled the rayon thinness of his pajamas. He moved into the hall and heard her speaking again.
“Dream of goodbyes, forsaken, plunged in swelling liquors, cry I for light, release me from torment and trial.”
All spoken in a singsong rhythm, in a voice that was Ann’s and not Ann’s, more high-pitched, more tense.
Duel Page 24
