Louisa gave a sniff at his retreating figure. Yet his careless phrase about her service had pleased her. She felt needed. She was also needed at the office, but more, she was needed here. Jeannie needed her. There was no one else in the house she could imagine nursing Jeannie properly. She smiled with a look of stern gratification and bent nearer the lamp to read the new instructions she had crumpled in self-generated shyness.
The red spots popped out like suddenly ripening strawberries, borne on pinkish runners that darted here and there like rivulets of water. The red spots covered all her sight, and began to glow and seethe with heat. She could feel their hot radiation all about her, and from somewhere beneath the wild scarlet pattern, Jeannie’s hoarse little voice cried bewilderedly. Louisa struggled, opened her eyes, and the red pattern drew back from the sides, revealed the children’s room, contracted to Jeannie’s shoulders, neck, and face just above the white sheet.
Louisa was across the room in an instant. “There, now, I’ll turn your pillow over so it’ll be cool again. How’s that?”
Jeannie fell back and twisted her head from side to side on the turned pillow, “Miss Trott—Miss Trott, I don’t feel good.”
Louisa’s breast tightened, and its congested pain was repeated throbbingly in her head. She could stand anything, she thought as she salved Jeannie’s chest, except the sight of a child suffering, of her Jeannie suffering. How frightful that mothers had to watch their children suffer through so many diseases! Chicken pox, whooping cough, measles—how agonizing it must be! She smoothed the blondish hair back from the child’s forehead, which was so hot her fingertips seemed to cling to it. Should she take the temperature again? An hour ago it had been a hundred and two. Dr. Marlowe said this morning that the crisis for the children should come in twenty-four hours. Louisa looked at her wristwatch, saw that it was six-fifteen, and thought that it was just about the time she ordinarily had tea in her room, when Jeannie would come knocking and hold out her hand for the chocolate marshmallow cookie Louisa would give her from a long box. . . . Louisa slid the wristwatch strap nervously up and down on her wrist, which had grown thinner the past two days.
“Water,” Jeannie said, at the same time as Eleanor the baby started puling from the bottom of the wooden pen.
Jeannie’s water glass was full of little air bubbles, so Louisa hurried to draw a fresh glass from the tap in the bathroom. Over the sound of the running water, she heard Eleanor losing the milk she had got her to drink a few minutes before.
“Miss Trott?” Mrs. Holpert’s voice came querulously from the other room.
“Just a minute.” Louisa wrung out a washrag, caught up a basin of water and Jeannie’s glass and hurried into the children’s room.
“My feet hurt,” Mrs. Holpert murmured.
The image of Mrs. Holpert’s dead-white, varicosed feet and ankles came between her and Jeannie’s pink and red face. The disease had bloated Mrs. Holpert’s feet as Dr. Marlowe had said it might. In fact, all his dismal prophesies had been fulfilled by one or another of the three patients. All except the ear running, which Louisa dreaded as a last straw from Mrs. Holpert.
There was a knock at the hall door.
“Just a minute, please!” Louisa called, giving Eleanor’s face a wipe.
Mrs. Dusenberre stood at the door with an armful of gladiolas. She looked curious but subdued, and made no move to step inside Mrs. Holpert’s foyer. “I thought—I mean, I brought these for Mrs. Holpert,” she said, staring at Louisa out of a long, sheeplike face.
Louisa took the flowers she extended. “What’s the matter?” Louisa asked nervously, for Mrs. Dusenberre had fixed her eyes on her as though one or both of them had lost her mind. Louisa wanted to say, “But you wouldn’t come in and help. Oh, no!” But Mrs. Dusenberre did not look bright enough to be of any assistance. “Thank you, Mrs. Dusenberre. I’ll give them to her and tell her you sent them.”
Mrs. Dusenberre nodded. “Is everybody all right?”
Louisa’s three were calling again, and harassedly, in the semidarkness, Louisa closed the door upon Mrs. Dusenberre.
As she turned toward Mrs. Holpert’s room, a pain struck her like a hammer in the head. She clutched the corner of a table and looked onto a universe of pulsing spots and ringing space. For an instant, she felt as though she were dying. Could she be getting the disease? she wondered. But that was unthinkable. Simply unthinkable. . . . She lifted her head and set her plain face firmly. She stared before her until she stared the spots out of countenance and she could see Mrs. Holpert’s doorway and the glow from her light. Whether she was going to get sick or not was one of those things she would just have to put out of her mind, because there was nothing she could do about it one way or the other.
What happened in a crisis? Louisa wondered. What did a crisis look like? She took it for granted one stayed up all night, which she did, reading, dozing, watching at the bedsides of the three whose fevers seemed to be mounting toward a terrific explosion. Night or day did not much matter anymore. Nor did the fact that today was Saturday, her precious Saturday on which she usually washed her hair, took an outing in the park with a book, pottered about the house doing all the odds and ends left over from a busy week. Now it was the middle of Saturday afternoon, and her room upstairs seemed miles away. When once during the afternoon she thought of herself in relation to the room upstairs, she felt quite lost. Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he? she wondered as she sat in the armchair in Mrs. Holpert’s room, half dozing, strangely half alert. She had an odd but not unpleasant sensation of being a mote that floated in space. She felt an unfamiliar freedom and mobility that seemed to increase her vision of things, even her enjoyment of things, like the Vermeer reproduction over Mrs. Holpert’s bed, and the cluttered back garden, whose leaves she stared at for longer and longer intervals. She felt closer to Gert for some reason, too. Perhaps, she thought, all her relationships to things had been dislocated. Or perhaps the explanation lay in the mysterious disappearance of time.
She remained in the detached state throughout the afternoon, listened impersonally to Dr. Marlowe as he told her that the turning point had not yet come, that it would probably come tonight. She must have asked him what to expect, for she was aware of his looking at her strangely as he paused in the reading of Jeannie’s thermometer.
“The fever will go down suddenly. Then they’ll probably want something to eat,” he told her.
“Oh.” It sounded like a pleasant event, not at all what she had imagined.
“And how are you feeling?” Dr. Marlowe asked. “You don’t look too well to me. Maybe I’d better take your temperature.”
“Oh, no. I’m fine,” Louisa replied.
“Okay.” He put away the thermometer without telling Louisa its findings. “Don’t know what they’d be doing without you. You’re swell.”
When he had gone, Louisa sank back into the armchair. She hated herself for feeling tired, but after all, she thought, what else was there to do except rest until she was needed? She pulled an ancient National Geographic magazine out of the stand by her chair and tried to fix her attention on an article on phosphorescent animalcules. . . . But she fell into a half sleep in which she had more horrible dreams about rubescent fields, about a large black-winged animal like a bat that went half flying, half scrambling across great snowy mountaintops which became finally rumpled white bedclothes. She awakened squirming in the chair.
The doorbell was ringing impatiently at the front of the house.
Louisa went up the hall, not with her usual elastic step, but rather staggeringly. She was dimly aware that her hair must be a sight, that she could not remember the last time she had combed it, or the last time she had looked into a mirror.
“Flowers for Miss Trott,” the boy said.
“I’m Miss Trott,” Louisa replied.
The long white box was laid in her arms, and she carried it automatically back to Mrs. Holpert’s apartment, where she laid it in the armchair. She straightened up and rubbed her hands slowly, wondering what she should do next.
Then the white of the oblong box, glaring white in the light of the reading lamp beside the chair, caught her eye and demanded attention. The sheen on its white paper awakened her suddenly with a strange excitement. The simple purity of its form was the most beautiful thing in the room. She bent over and read her name, which was printed large on a big card. Flowers. For her.
She lifted the top, and wax paper rose a little over the sides, releasing a subtle, nostalgic fragrance. She parted the paper and found white roses, a great white cloud of them at one end of the box. She lifted them out gently, for their long stems bore heavy thorns. Louisa thought she had never seen such roses. They were robust, almost oversized, like something out of one of her own dreams.
A little envelope fell at her feet. She held the roses against her body and opened it. It was in Mr. Bramford’s familiar writing.
With kindest regards from one who misses you very much.
Clarence Bramford
(over)
And in smaller, more angular writing:
If you are able to leave your charges for a while Sunday evening, perhaps you can have dinner with me. Shall call you Sunday morning.
C.B.
All at once she was weeping, with her shoulders hunched and the card and envelope caught up against her forehead. It was her nerves, she thought, nothing more. But she suspected she might be pitying herself, so she tried to stop. It was self-pity, for no one had sent her flowers since . . . She did not care to remember. Above all, she supposed, she had been surprised that Mr. Bramford had sent her flowers. He was not really the kind of man who sent flowers. Certainly he was very frugal in his habits. Louisa wanted to weep again at this unexpected, undreamed-of token of his concern. Dinner on Sunday. Tomorrow! How nice it would be to have dinner with him, she thought. And how terrifying, too, for she could not really imagine—
A wail from Jeannie brought her back abruptly to where she stood, to the realization that a thorn of the roses she held tightly had gone into one finger. She laid the roses down and went forward. This, she thought, would be the beginning of the crisis.
It was a night of wringing out cold towels, of wiping faces, of holding water glasses, of performing the same duties she had performed for the past three days. Only now, more or less, the woman and the two children seemed to need her all at the same time. Once during the night, Louisa found herself staring at a half-empty bowl of chicken soup and toasted cheese on crackers on the table beside the easy chair, wondering how they got there, and remembering slowly that Mrs. Dusenberre had brought them. She saw the flowers, too, and remembered.
“What a shame, what a shame,” she murmured to herself as she took the roses up from the chair. “They’ll be all wilted!”
But they were not wilted in the least. They made a handsome group in the big blue vase on the foyer table. Louisa stood back to look at them, reeled a little against a doorjamb and steadied herself. She removed the vase to the children’s room where she could see them better. Their vigor made her feel less tired. She noticed now that they were not one dozen but two. How kind Mr. Bramford was, she thought, and wished he were here now to keep her company.
“Nonsense! What could he do?” she said aloud. It was merely that it would have been nice to have a friend to lean on. For she did feel so tired.
“I’m hungry.”
Louisa turned around.
“Miss Trott, I’m hungry,” Jeannie said, frowning as though this condition were as unreasonable as that of being sick.
“Bless your little heart!” Louisa said. “Bless you, bless you!”
Louisa went into the kitchen and prepared a scrambled egg and buttered toast and poured a glass of milk, so quickly it was all on the tray before she knew it. She felt dazed and elated. Jeannie was well. It was over!
She fed infinitesimal mouthfuls into Jeannie’s pink face, while thoughts of Mr. Bramford, of Mrs. Dusenberre, of the morning that was pushing energetically through the back window, and of her brother Gert went swimming around in her head. She turned off the electric light and watched the duller but surer light of day begin to fill the room. She stood in the middle of the floor, tall and smiling and victorious, with her lank coppery hair all askew about her head like arrested flame. She felt very quiet and calm inside, and somehow, contrary to all reason, full of a happy, inexhaustible energy.
“Jeannie. Jeannie?” Louisa said, as though she were about to tell Jeannie something. But she wanted only to hear the child’s voice in answer.
“More,” Jeannie said quietly.
Louisa returned to the plate of egg and the fork. She was thinking of her brother Gert, thinking that she should write him a letter immediately, today, even though she sent it into a void, that she should even try to send him a package of something. She would also send her sister Aina in Copenhagen another package. A few of her packages had got lost, and she had grown discouraged about transoceanic mails. But there was nothing to do but try. Good lord, her own sister! And brother! And here she was, in America, living off the fat of the earth!
“Miss Trott?”
“Yes, Mrs. Holpert,” Louisa called. “Couldn’t you take some milk toast and some weak coffee?”
“I was just going to say,” Mrs. Holpert sighed.
In the kitchen, preparing Mrs. Holpert’s breakfast, Louisa hummed to herself as she generally did only on Saturday afternoons, when she pottered about at her own tasks. She cut one of the roses and put it in a single-stem flower vase on Mrs. Holpert’s tray.
She thought of Mrs. Dusenberre, of how she had closed the door upon her stupid face, of Mrs. Dusenberre’s kindness in bringing the chicken soup and crackers. And smiling in a way she would have thought rather stupid herself, had she looked into a mirror, Louisa went to the big vase and removed five of the white roses.
I’ll take these to Mrs. Dusenberre, she thought, and started with them toward the door.
Then, remembering the early hour, she stopped and looked at her watch. It was only six-twenty. She had better take the flowers up later.
Besides, she must look dreadfully untidy herself. She stumbled into the bathroom, got the washrag and towel she had brought down from her own room, then climbed upstairs to the bathroom at the end of the hall. The house was silent. Neither Mr. Noenzi nor anyone would thwart her this morning.
She closed the door, and felt content with the room’s familiarity. Then, as she went to draw her tub, the handle of the ventilator caught her eye. But strangely, it did not chill her with a sense of violence as it always had. It did not look as though a murderer held its other end. It was just a homemade handle. Maybe that was how tired she was, she thought. She wondered when the doctor would come that morning, and imagined how pleased he would be with his three patients. Then she remembered Mr. Bramford. He would call this morning, and ask her where she would like to dine. And she would suggest the Plaza.
The Plaza Hotel!
Louisa dropped the washrag and the towel and leaned back against the door. She could envisage it now, Mr. Bramford and herself opposite each other at a table laid with white linen and silver, with candlelight in a big room filled with soft music. Of course, Mr. Bramford would like the Plaza Hotel, too. . . . The ski train, the black Persian lamb coat, even the week at the Plaza. . . . Suddenly, ever so dimly but surely, like the light of the morning she had just watched enter through Mrs. Holpert’s back window, it all seemed possible, and within the realm of truth.
Part II
MIDDLE AND
LATER STORIES 1952–1982
A BIRD IN HAND
As Douglas McKenny neared
his door with the new parakeet from the dime store, a neighbor called out, “Hello, Mr. McKenny! Got a new bird?”
His neighbors were under the impression that he bought quite a few birds and gave them away to children, perhaps.
“Nope,” said Mr. McKenny. “Lampshade. How’re you, Mr. Riley?”
He walked on. Just as he reached his stoop, a small girl skipped up and stopped, breathlessly.
“Oh, Mr. McKenny, can I see it?”
“It’s not a parakeet, honey, it’s a lampshade,” Mr. McKenny said, smiling at her. “How’s little Petey?” He had given her the parakeet four years ago, when she was hardly higher than his knee.
“He’s swell, Mr. McKenny. He can say the first part of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ But he always gets stuck on ‘what so proudly.’”
“Well, you bring him around to me sometime and we’ll see if we can get him over that,” he said kindly, patting her on the head.
“Okay, Mr. McKenny!” She darted off like a bird herself, whirling a broken yo-yo around and around on its string.
Mr. McKenny trudged up the stairs. He hadn’t wanted to tell a lie. But the less his neighbors knew, the better. He went in and out of the house with parakeets all the time, and always took the trouble to make the bundles and packages he carried them in look different. Sometimes he put a cage into a pillow slip, so that it would look like his laundry. Often he carried a good-sized Schrafft’s cake box in a paper bag to the dime store and brought a bird back in it with his fingers under the string, just as if it were a cake from the Schrafft’s around the corner.
He put the new parakeet in a cage by itself, talking to it soothingly all the while. “Here, Billy, Billy. . . . Nice Billy. You and I are going to get along fine, aren’t we?”
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