Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  “Yes, Mama. Yes, Papa,” I said. “I'm here.”

  My mother smiled then. My father sighed and relaxed. They were comforted.

  I wonder now if, in some way, I thought I could be Mathilda after that. I wonder if I thought I could act like her at least, with her charm and her daring. If so, I should have known better. Of course, I didn't think about any of that then. I only thought to ease their suffering, to help them heal, to be a good nurse.

  I did everything right. Everything. But it meant nothing. They got away from me. Their lungs full of fluid, they drowned in their bed, first my mother, then my father. I was helpless to hold them back.

  Mathilda and I buried our parents on an Indian summer day in Nagawaukee's graveyard, under the lurid, mocking sugar maples. Neighbors and friends had been with us all morning, but now, on the way home, their buggies turned off one by one onto other roads, until there was no one else, either before or behind, and we were alone. At the gate, I jumped down and fumbled with the new latch.

  “Here, like this,” Mathilda said, coming up beside me. Her eyes were so red and swollen that she could barely see, but the gate opened easily under her fingers. In all those months I'd been away, the house and the farm had become hers.

  I knew exactly what was in the kitchen, since I'd taken each dish at the door. There was white bread, brown bread and pumpernickel. There was hot potato salad, cold potato salad, scalloped potatoes and sweet potatoes. There was venison, corned beef, a ham, a turkey, two chickens and a duck. There was tongue, pork sausage, white sausage, blood sausage and braunschweiger. There were hard rolls and sweet rolls, cherry preserves, cauliflower in cream, leeks in cream, creamed corn, sugared carrots, sauerkraut, pickled beets, apple pie, pumpkin pie and tapioca pudding. The door of the icebox would hardly close and bowls and plates hung precariously over the edges of the kitchen table and covered the counter and the seat of every chair. A dozen pears, a rhubarb pie and a jar of tomatoes had found their way into the front room and three cheeses and a tin of molasses cookies congregated on my mother's daybed in the back.

  “Can I make anyone a sandwich?” I asked.

  “Oh, throw it all away!” Mathilda cried. “How can you stand to look at it?”

  She ran upstairs, sobbing, and Rudy and Ruth and I stood not looking at each other.

  “I bet Ruth is hungry, aren't you, honey?”

  But Mathilda's behavior had upset her. She burst into tears and followed her mother.

  “Eat something, Rudy,” I said. “No point in letting it go to waste.”

  My father disapproved of wasting food. He sucked marrow from bones. He ate skin and tendons and gristle, and he expected us to do the same. We were not allowed to “spoil our supper” by eating between meals but once, when I was seven, I was so hungry I opened the icebox. Just looking at some food, I thought, might ease my stomach. In a back corner, behind the meat and the butter, there was a little cup of something thick, rich and white. A week or two before, my mother had made a vanilla custard that was so sweet and creamy I had licked my spoon until all I could taste was the silver. Could this portion have been forgotten? And if it had been forgotten, who would notice if I took just one little bite?

  I reached deep into the cool interior, slid my finger gently along the smooth surface and carried a tiny ridge of the whiteness back to my mouth. But as soon as my tongue touched my finger I knew it wasn't custard. It was something terrible—slimy and disgusting. I wiped my tongue on my sleeve and turned to go out to the pump to wash my hands. My father was standing in the doorway.

  “What are you doing in the icebox?”

  It was impossible to lie to my father. “I thought it was some custard, but it's gone bad or something.”

  “Your mother wouldn't keep bad food in the icebox,” he said, reaching around me to pull the cup of white stuff out.

  I had nothing to say to this. It was true that she was very careful, but it was also true that custard tasted awful.

  “What have I told you about eating between meals?”

  “It's wrong.”

  “How do you know your mother isn't planning to use this custard?” He frowned at the gully my finger had made.

  “She forgot about it.”

  He looked at me sharply. He hated lying. Maybe she hadn't forgotten it. How did I know?

  “You thought you'd just take it. Is that right? Steal it and spoil your supper. Stick your finger in it so it's no good to anyone else.”

  It was difficult to tell which of these he thought the worst offense. He was shaking the cup under my nose now. I turned my face away.

  “No, I …” But what he said was true. I tried a different tack. “I was hungry.”

  He sighed. “You have to learn to control yourself, Amanda. Do you see me stealing food out of the icebox, spoiling my appetite so I can't eat my good supper?”

  “No, Papa.”

  He slammed the cup down at my place at the table. Then he crossed to the drawer and took out a spoon and banged that down beside the cup. “You want this? You eat it. Now.”

  Even had it tasted good, I wouldn't have wanted it any longer. The idea of doing so blatantly what he had forbidden repelled me. My stomach tightened. My throat constricted. I felt sick.

  “I can't.”

  “You should have thought of that before you stuck your grubby finger in it, shouldn't you? Now eat it.” He took hold of my shoulders and pushed me down into my chair.

  Slowly, I pushed the spoon into the white mass. It felt almost like ice cream, only not so cold and much more slippery. I lifted the spoon, tried not to breathe through my nose and stuck the stuff into my mouth. I swallowed as quickly as I could, but it stuck on my tongue. I forced it down in large spoonfuls, trying not to taste it, not to feel it in my mouth, not to think about what I was doing. My father watched, his arms crossed, waiting.

  The tip of my spoon scraped the bottom of the cup when my mother walked in.

  “Amanda! What are you doing? Henry? What is she doing?” She grabbed the cup away from me and stared at us.

  “She started that custard. She's got to finish it,” he said.

  “Custard!” She thrust the cup in front of him. “This isn't custard, Henry! This is lard!” Now she banged the cup down on the table. “Didn't it taste awful?” she asked me. “What did you want to eat that for?”

  “I didn't. I …” But I couldn't explain. I didn't want to put my father in the wrong. And really, he hadn't been wrong. I had disobeyed. I'd been stealing food out of the icebox. If it had really been custard, I probably would have eaten it. Probably I would have spoiled my supper, whatever that meant. My father was sniffing what remained in the cup now, frowning, as if he still didn't quite believe us.

  Suddenly, my stomach gave a horrible turn. I ran out the kitchen door and into the woods behind the house. I was still retching under a honeysuckle bush when my father came up behind me. He handed me his handkerchief.

  “I'm sorry, Amanda. I should have listened to you,” he said. He tucked the damp strings of my hair behind my ears.

  It made me want to squirm, his saying that. I tried to push the words away. “I shouldn't have been in the icebox,” I said.

  “Well, you won't do it again, will you?”

  “Never ever!”

  “That's my good girl.”

  I would have eaten that lard a hundred times over to hear those words.

  I stepped into the hall now, took my father's jacket from its hook and slipped my arms into its sleeves. The cuffs dangled far below my hands. The jacket smelled of pipe tobacco and hay, molasses and grease, as all of his barn jackets had, ever since I could remember. I stuck my hands in the pockets—shreds of loose tobacco, two washers, a pencil stub, a list for the lumberyard—“eight 2×4s, four 4×6s, ten 2×8s,” each number formed precisely, just the way he entered them in his ledger. He made his eights by drawing two balls, one on top of the other. “Like a snowman,” he'd said to me as I sat on his lap, the pencil he'd ju
st sharpened in my hand. I suppose he taught me to write, although I'd never given that a thought, believing it no more than my due as his child. I remembered his huge fingers wrapped around my tiny ones as he guided my hand—a hand I wouldn't even recognize as my own now—over the page, until we'd made all the numbers up to ten.

  “Look at how she's going to town, Mother,” he'd said.

  Later, when he discovered I had his knack for figures, he showed me off every chance we got. “Mandy'll tote up the bill,” he'd say. “Watch this.” He'd hand me a slip with a column of numbers and in a second or two I'd announce the total. What I liked best, though, were the early mornings when we quizzed each other while we milked, just us and the cows in that big warm barn.

  I took the jacket off, folded it, and set it near the front door. Maybe Rudy could use it, or one of the Manigolds. I went upstairs to my parents' bedroom.

  Mathilda refused to answer me when I knocked on her door. I could hear her singing “Lavender's Blue” to Ruth, her voice unconvincing, quavery, broken by sobs, while I sorted through the drawers, separating things to give away from things we ought to keep. My mother's dresses smelled of lavender water. She kept them perfectly, the sleeves and bodices stuffed with paper to hold their shape, old shawls draped over their shoulders to keep the dust off. It looked as if there were six copies of my mother in the wardrobe, each without a head. I was far too tall to wear those dresses, but perhaps Mattie would want one or two. I carried them to the attic and closed them in a trunk.

  That night I woke up sweating, my heart racing.

  “Good,” I thought.

  I hoped I, too, would be ill. I hoped I would die. How could I have brought such disaster on them and yet suffer hardly a cough myself? I writhed in my bed, desperate for the fever and delirium, the heavy limbs and cloudy head that would overwhelm the sharp, clear picture of what had happened, the irrevocable fact that they were no more, not one, not the other, both gone forever from the earth. But it was only fear that made my heart beat faster. There was no escape for me. I could not even cry.

  “I can't stay any longer,” I told Mathilda the next morning. “I have obligations.”

  I was ready. I had repacked my little bag even before the funeral. No sense waiting until the last minute, my mother always said.

  “You'll be fine,” I told Mathilda. “Rudy will help you.”

  Rudy drove me to the station and I didn't look back, not once, although I could feel Mathilda staring after me with those red, swollen eyes, all the way to Nagawaukee.

  Back in our mustard-colored room, Eliza was kind. She brought me coffee while I unpacked.

  “I did the best I could for them,” I told her, and tried to tell myself. “Now I have to get back to work. My sister doesn't understand how busy we are here.”

  Under the tissue in the top drawer of my dresser, I slipped my father's list of lumber and my mother's hairbrush in which a few strands of her hair were tangled. Again, I woke at night in a panic. I was going to have to start my life all over again from scratch, I thought. There was nothing behind me now, nothing to stand on. And then I thought of Mathilda, and I clung to her image to right myself, to pull myself back to the surface.

  In the daylight, it was better. I worked a day shift and, at the hospital, wounded men clamored for my attention. I had to remember dosages and schedules. I had to bandage and massage and produce soothing words. As if those things mattered! As if they would make any difference! I knew better now, but I did what I was supposed to do just the same. Were there others like me, who knew that all of our efforts were only a way to pass the time, to distract and comfort ourselves? I studied the faces of the doctors and nurses, even of the orderlies. Was I the only one who understood? “I don't care if you don't like it,” my mother used to say when I complained about church or school. “You can act right.” And that was true too. I could act right, and I did.

  And so, although I was no longer so confident, no longer so sure of my every move as I had once been, I kept busy. I volunteered to take the worst patients, the most contagious, the most pitiable injuries, the men who threw their bedpans across the room in a fury. None of it bothered me.

  I had been back only a few days and was running up the stairs from the dispensary when somewhere between the second and third floors I heard a familiar voice.

  “Damn,” he was saying. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”

  “What's the matter?” I hurried to turn the next landing. There I saw what the trouble was—papers everywhere, in ragged heaps and shingling the steps nearly to the top of the flight where Clement stood.

  “Oh, dear,” I said, or something sympathetic like that, but I couldn't help smiling a little as I bent to gather the pages that lay near me.

  Clement stood still, looking down at me glumly. “One of the nurses asked me to take these to the basement on my way out.”

  “I don't think she meant for you to throw them.”

  “You don't say.” He laughed. “And it seemed like such a good idea at the time.”

  He came several steps closer to me and began to collect the pages from the stairs. “This is going to take me hours to sort out! Do you see a folder for Zimmerman? Stuart? O'Toole?” He held up papers and dropped them again, one by one, to the floor.

  “Well, you're not going to do it that way, are you?” I said. “Here. This won't be so bad.” I cleared a few steps and began sorting the loose pages alphabetically, making neat piles. “Join in any time.”

  If not for me, I'm sure he would have buried Charles Bo-gusewski's ulcerated stomach in Peter Halliday's chart, and Peter's gassed lungs in Ronald Faculjak's chart. “No one's going to look at these things again, anyway,” he said.

  But I wouldn't permit such a thing. “Accurate record-keeping is essential,” I told him, “even when the files are going to the basement. You'd be surprised how often doctors need to revisit the course of an illness.”

  I hadn't meant to be funny, but he laughed, and very soon we were talking and laughing more than filing. The things we said were too vacuous and nonsensical to bear repeating, even if I could remember them, but we put a great deal of effort into amusing each other. Certainly it was the most pleasant half hour I'd ever spent sorting papers. When we'd finished, I helped him carry the folders down to the records room, and there we spent another ten minutes, talking steadily, but not saying very much, until he asked, “Would you like to have dinner with me on Thursday?”

  Eliza lent me her rabbit-fur stole. I wasn't ready at seven, what with the number of times we had to rearrange my unmanageable hair, but luckily he was late and we were watching out the window by the time he came down the street. Eliza assured me that the two-seater he was driving was a very good kind of car to have. We drove all the way up to Appleton to eat at a supper club.

  “This place has the best steak,” he said. “You have to try it.” He told the waiters how long a steak should be cooked and how much ice to put in a glass.

  “I guess I'll have a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “Coffee! You don't want to ruin a meal like this with coffee! The lady'll have champagne.”

  “Clement, I couldn't!”

  “Why not? You don't like it?”

  “I've never had it, of course.”

  “Well, you've got to try champagne.” And the waiter had already gone, so what could I do?

  He was right. Now I knew why people liked a drink. My champagne was fizzy and almost sweet. Nothing like the whiskey my father used to swallow on cold winter nights.

  After supper we went dancing. “Amy,” he said, as the band played “The Blue Danube,” and he waltzed me smoothly around the floor. “I'm going to call you Amy.”

  Such a light, pretty name. No one, not even Joe, had ever called me Amy before.

  “It suits you,” he went on. “It means love, you know, in French.”

  My face got hot, and I had to look at the floor, but I stored the moment up, so that later I could examine again and again just t
he way he said it, and recall the scent of starch on his shirt collar and the warm press of his hand against my back.

  It turned out that we always drove far away when we went out. We went to Madison and Fish Creek and Racine and several times to Chicago. It was romantic, thrilling, to drive so fast along those long dark roads, to find out what lay behind those doors he ushered me through, his hand hovering a whisper from my waist, to dance in those dark places to colored music, to eat steaks and snails. I would get so tired that I would fall asleep on the way home.

  Some evenings I said, “Why don't we just be cozy tonight, get a hamburger someplace close?”

  And he'd say, “You want a hamburger, I know the best hamburger place in the country.” And we'd wind up all the way in Fort Atkinson or Sheboygan or Fond du Lac.

  It was just like with Joe, except better, since this time no one was saying “Hadn't you better think about this?” or “You're young, what's your hurry?” When my mother said those things, what she really meant was, it's all very well to be friends with Catholics, but you don't want to marry them. And what Joe's mother meant when she said, “Of course, she's a sweet girl, but sweet isn't everything,” was that Lutherans make excellent neighbors but aren't fit to be wives. Clement, as far as I could tell, had no religion, and that suited me. When I thought of God, now, He was hovering somewhere over France, not paying any attention to me at all.

  Generally, I wouldn't let a man put a hand on me if we weren't dancing, unless maybe he wanted a good-night kiss, but the first time Clement touched me, we were parked somewhere along the edge of Lake Michigan, water so vast, you couldn't see to the other side. That night he only ran his fingertips over my face—my eyelids, my cheeks, the outline of my lips—carefully, gently, yet firmly, as if he were painting my features on my face. Nobody ever did anything like that to me before. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to respond, so I waited to see what would happen next.