Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

by Joyce Carol Oates

  For Scudder was an officer, or had been. But now Scudder sneered: “Not here. No more bloody ‘Lieutenant.’ Scudder will do.”

  Scudder had rebuffed the other volunteers. Scudder was dismissive and rather rude to the hospital staff and even to the physicians of Ward Six and Nurse Supervisor Edwards herself and so Henry did not take it personally, that Scudder might speak contemptuously to him.

  “‘Scudder.’” Henry pronounced the name as if tasting it: so uncommonly blunt.

  This opiate, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital! The smells of men’s bodies, in cramped intimacy. Body-perspiration, body-wastes, flatulent gases like noxious fumes. Enamel bedpans, soiled sheets. On soiled pillowcases, minuscule lint-like dots: “bedbugs.” And amid all this, such astonishing individuals as Scudder, from Norwich.

  In all of the Master’s prose, not one Scudder. From Norwich.

  Henry’s angina-heart beat heavily. Henry’s large unsteady hand pressed against the front of his vest, grasping.

  Scudder breathed harshly, at times laboriously. But Scudder was shrewd. Fixing Henry with a frank, rude stare: “And you? What is your name?”

  “Why, I’ve told you, I think—‘Henry.’”

  “‘Henry’ is what someone has baptized you. Tell me what, in your blood, you are: your surname.”

  Seated close beside Scudder’s cot, in a smelly, fly-buzzing corner of the ward, Henry stammered, “My s-surname? It scarcely matters, I am not wounded.”

  Irritably Scudder said, “What matters to me, about me, is not that I am ‘wounded.’ ‘Wounded’ is a damn stupid accident that happened to me, as it has happened to so many. My identity is not bloody ‘wounded’ and my intention is to outlive bloody ‘wounded.’”

  Scudder’s accent suggested middle class: father a tradesman? butcher? Not a public school background but military school.

  “Of course! I see…”

  Henry felt his face burn, in embarrassment. Nothing is so annoying as condescension, in the elderly for the young. He had hardly meant to insult this outspoken young army officer and could not think how on earth to apologize without further blundering.

  “Well, then? ‘Henry’?”

  This was the first time in his months as a volunteer at St. Bartholomew’s that one of the young men of Ward Six had asked Henry his surname, as it was the first time that a young bedridden man made it a point to turn to him, to look him full in the face, as if actually seeing him.

  Ah, the effect of those eyes! Bloodshot eyes, jeering eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, yet moist and quivering with life. Shyly, Henry murmured: “‘James.’ My surname is—‘James.’”

  Scudder cupped his hand to his ravaged ear, to indicate that Henry must speak louder.

  “My surname is—‘James.’”

  It was uttered! Henry was overcome by a strange, wild shyness. A deep flush rose in the face that had been described more than once as sculpted, monumental, his cheeks throbbed with heat.

  “‘James.’ ‘Henry James.’ Has a ring to it, eh? You are something to do with—journalism?”

  “No.”

  “Politics?”

  “Certainly, no.”

  “Not an MP? House of Lords?”

  “No!” Henry laughed, as if rough fingers were tickling his sides.

  “Retired gentleman, in any case. Damned good of you, at your age, to be mucking about in this hellhole.”

  Henry protested: “St. Bartholomew’s is not a hellhole—to me.”

  “What is it, then? Paradise?”

  Gravely Henry shook his head, no. He would not contradict this argumentative young man. Though thinking, as Scudder laughed, a harsh laugh that shaded into a fit of prolonged bronchial coughing: This is paradise, God has allowed me entry before my death.

  In Henry’s diary for that day not one but two red-inked crosses beside the initial S. And on the altar, a stiff, mucus-and-bloodstained strip of gauze, into which the lieutenant had coughed.

  “How reckless you are, dear Henry! I mean, of course, with your health.”

  Chidingly his friend spoke. With shrewd eyes she regarded him, the elderly-bachelor-man-of-letters who had long been an ornament, of a kind, at her Belgravia town house and at her country estate in Surrey, now, so mysteriously, and so vexingly, since the previous fall, disinclined to accept her invitations, and with the most perfunctory of apologies. Henry could only smile nervously, and murmur again how very sorry he was, how all-consuming this hospital volunteer program was, he regretted not seeing his old friends any longer but truly he had no choice: “The hospital depends upon its volunteers, it is so understaffed. Especially Ward Six, where some of the most badly injured and maimed men are housed. I must do what little I can, you see. I am painfully aware, my time to be ‘of use’ is running out.”

  “Henry, really! You speak as if you are ancient. You will make yourself ancient, if you persist in this”—his friend’s beautiful inquisitive eyes glanced about the drawing room as if to seek out, through the thickness of a wall, the locked closet, the secret altar, the precious relics laid upon that altar—“devotion.”

  The most subtle of accusations here. For a woman senses: a woman knows. You cannot keep awareness of betrayal from a woman. Henry laughed. His large, so strangely plebeian hands lifted, in a gesture of abject submission, and fell again, onto his trousered knees.

  “My dear, in this matter of ‘devotion’—have we a choice?”

  In Ward Six in the chill rainy spring 1915 there was young Emory, and there was young Ronald, and there was young Andrew, and there was young Edmund; and there was Scudder, who did not wish to be called Arthur.

  “‘Scudder.’ From Norwich.”

  Henry learned: Scudder had been “severely wounded” in a grenade attack, given up for dead with a number of his men in a muddy battlefield north of the Meuse River, in Belgium; and yet, bawling for help amid a tangle of corpses, Scudder had not been dead, quite. In a field hospital his shattered right leg had been amputated to the knee. His left leg, riddled with shell fragments, was of not much use. His wounds were general: head, chest, stomach, groin as well as legs and feet. He’d nearly died of blood poisoning. He suffered still from acute anemia. He suffered heart arhythmia, shortness of breath. He suffered “phantom pain” in his missing leg. His scarred and pitted skin had yet a greenish pallor. His ears buzzed and rang: he heard “artillery” in the distance. His tongue was coated with a kind of toad-belly slime. (That turned oily-black, when he sucked the licorice sticks Henry brought him.) His shoulders were broad yet thin-boned, like malformed wings. His legs, when he’d had legs, were somewhat short for his body. His head, covered in scar tissue, was somewhat small for his body. He was not yet twenty-eight but looked years older. No one came to visit him here: he wished to see no one. He had some family in Norwich, he’d even had a girl in Norwich, all that was finished, he refused to speak of it. He did not want the hospital chaplain to pray for him. Rudely he interrupted Henry reading to him from the London Times, how sick he was of war news. Interrupted Henry reading to him from one of Henry’s slender books of verse, so very sick of verse. He did not want “uplift”—he despised “uplift.” His teeth had never been good and were now rotting in his jaws. He could not feel sensation in the toes of his useless left foot. He’d bred maggots in the more obscure of his wounds, he claimed. Here at St. Bart’s he’d been scrubbed out, and scrubbed down, but there were flies here, too: “Big fat bastards, eager to lay their eggs.” He laughed showing angry teeth. He laughed without mirth as if barking. The wilder Scudder’s laughter, the more likely to become a fit of coughing. Such violent fits, such paroxysms, can cause hemorrhaging. Such fits can cause cardiac arrest. He was ashamed, forever bleeding through gauze bandages, “leaking.” His damned stump of a leg “leaked.” His groin, too, had been “messed up.” He hated it that the elderly gentleman-volunteer so readily wiped his face as if he were a baby, wiped his wounds that leaked blood and pus, and pushed him in the damned clumsy wheelchair like
a baby in its pram, even outside on the mud-graveled paths, even in cold weather.

  “Should have left me there, in the mud. Should have shot me between the eyes, bawling like a damned calf.”

  “Dear boy, no. You must not say such things.”

  “‘Must’ I—not? Who will say them, then? You?”

  It was a bleak April afternoon. Rain-lashed daffodils and vivid red tulips lay dashed against the ground in a tangle of green leaves. The hospital grounds were nearly deserted. There was a sharp rich smell of grass, of wet earth. The heavy wheelchair stuck in the gravel, the rubber-rimmed tires stuck, Henry pushed at the contraption with a pounding heart as Scudder kicked and laughed in derision. So painful was the moment, so suddenly revealed as hopeless, a bizarre elation swept over Henry, of the kind a man might feel as he leaps impulsively from a great height into the sea, to sink, or to swim; to drown, or to be borne triumphantly up. In the muddy gravel Henry was kneeling, in front of the aggrieved man in the wheelchair, trying clumsily to embrace him, murmuring, “You must not despair! I love you! I would die for you! If I could give you my—my life! My leg! What remains of my soul! What money I have, my estate—” Abject in adoration, scarcely knowing what he did, Henry pressed his yearning mouth against the stump of Scudder’s mutilated leg, that was damp, and warm, and bandaged in gauze, for the raw wound was healing slowly. At once Scudder stiffened against him, but did not push Henry away; to Henry’s astonishment, he felt the other man’s hand tentatively against the fleshy nape of his neck, not in a caress, not so forceful nor so intimate as a caress, and yet not hostile.

  In the chill dripping garden behind St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in April 1915 Henry knelt before his beloved in a trance of ecstasy, his soul so extinguished, so gone from his body, he could not have said his own illustrious name.

  “Mr. James!”

  Guiltily he started: yes?

  “You must come with me, sir.”

  “But I am just returning Lieutenant Scudder to—”

  “An attendant can do that, Mr. James. You are wanted elsewhere.”

  With no ceremony, Scudder in the heavy wheelchair was taken from the Master’s grip, pushed away along the corridor in the direction of Ward Six. With yearning eyes Henry stared after him but saw only the broad stooped back of the attendant and a movement of rubber-rimmed wheels; nor did Scudder glance back. In a hoarse voice Henry called, “Good-bye, Lieutenant! I will see you—I hope—tomorrow.”

  Lieutenant. Though Scudder had forbidden Henry to address him by his rank, Henry could not resist in Nurse Edwards’s presence. He took a peculiar pride in the fact that his young friend was a British Army lieutenant, and wondered if, in secret, Scudder did not take some pride in it, too.

  “You are very close with the lieutenant, Mr. James. You will have forgotten my warning to you, not to become attached to the young men of Ward Six.”

  It was so, Henry had long forgotten Nurse Edwards’s admonition. He was the sole volunteer remaining of the original group, all the rest of whom had been women; as these others had dropped away, pleading fatigue, melancholy, ill health of their own, new volunteers had appeared in Ward Six, as newly wounded men were continually being admitted into the ward. No bed remained unused for more than a few hours, even beds in which men had died of hemorrhaging, for space was at a premium.

  Henry murmured an insincere apology. His lips twitched, badly he wanted, like an insolent boy, to laugh in the woman’s face that seemed almost to glare at him, as if it had been polished with a coarse cloth.

  “Very well, sir. You must come with me.”

  Walking briskly ahead, Nurse Edwards led Henry into a shadowy alcove several doors beyond the entrance to Ward Six, and into a small, overheated room. “Inside, sir. I will shut the door.”

  Henry glanced about, uneasy. Was this the nurse supervisor’s office? A small maplewood desk was neatly stacked with documents, and there was a large, rather battered-looking filing cabinet; yet also a deep-cushioned chair and an ottoman, a lamp with a heavy fringed shade, on the wall a framed likeness of Queen Victoria and on the floor a carpet in a ghastly floral pattern, as one might find in the bed-sitter of a shabbily “genteel” female. As Henry turned, with an air of polite bewilderment, he saw Nurse Edwards lift her arm: there was a rod in her hand, perhaps three feet long. Before Henry could draw back, Nurse Edwards struck him with it several times in rapid succession, on his shoulders, on his head, on his uplifted arms as he tried to shield himself against the sudden blows. “On your knees, sir! Your knees are muddy, are they? And why is that, sir? Your gentleman’s trousers, why are they splattered with mud, sir? Why?”

  Henry whimpered in protest. Henry sank to his knees, on the floral-print carpet. Henry tried feebly to protect himself against Nurse Edwards’s grunting blows, yet could not avoid them, head bowed, wincing, red-faced with guilt, he who had never been disciplined as a child, nor even spoken harshly to, by his dignified father or his self-effacing mother or by any tutor or elder, until at last, fatigued by her effort, Nurse Edwards let the rod drop to the floor and panted, in a tone of disgust, “Out of here, sir. Quickly!”

  Like a man in a trance, the Master obeyed.

  5.

  In the bay window of the London brownstone that overlooked, at a distance, the mist-shrouded Thames, the Master lay part-collapsed on the uncomfortable leather divan, in a kind of stupor. How long had he been lying here, feverish and confused? Had he taken a taxi home from—where? The train station? The hospital—St. Bartholomew’s? And his left arm tingled from the shoulder to the wrist. And how warm he was!—he’d had to tear open the stiff-starched collar of his shirt. His housekeeper Mrs. Erskine had been summoned by the taxi driver, to help her dazed master up the stone steps of the brownstone, but that had been several hours ago and Henry was blessedly alone now, and could take up his diary to record, for this tumultuous day, two small red-inked crosses linked with the initial S; and to write, in a shaky but exhilarant hand This loneliness!—what is it but the deepest thing about one? Deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else: deeper than my “genius,” deeper than my “discipline,” deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep countermining of art.

  The flat mineral eyes widened: “Why, sir. You are back with us.”

  Another time, the elderly gentleman-volunteer had quite astonished Nurse Supervisor Edwards. He murmured yes in a deferential tone, with a small grave frowning smile: “As you see, Nurse Edwards. I report to you, to be ‘of use.’”

  “Very well, then! Come with me.”

  For the Master had no choice, it seemed. Only just to stay away from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, which was unthinkable.

  To be allowed re-entry into Ward Six, the gentleman-volunteer Mr. James had to demonstrate, as Nurse Edwards phrased it, his “good faith” as a hospital worker. What was needed in this time of crisis, with so many more wartime casualities than the government had predicted, and a severe shortage of staff, was not poetry and fine sentiments, but work. Mr. James would have to take on tasks of a kind not to be expected of the lady volunteers: he would have to prove himself a true hospital worker, a willing aide to any of the medical staff, including nurses and attendants, who required him. “You must not decline any task, Mr. James. You must not be loath to ‘dirty your hands’—or you will be sent away from St. Bartholomew’s.” And so, with a stoic air, the elderly volunteer donned a bulky cover-all over his tailored serge suit, and spent the remainder of that day aiding attendants as they pushed a meals trolley from ward to ward, and carried away uneaten food and dirtied plates afterward; in the hot, foul-smelling kitchen where the trolleys were unloaded, where garbage reeked and black-shelled roaches scuttled on every surface, Henry was nearly overcome by nausea, and light-headedness, but managed to rally, and did not collapse, and completed his assignment. Next day, Henry aided attendants who pushed a linens trolley from ward to ward, delivering fresh linen and taking away dirtied, sometimes very filthy linens to deliver to the
hot, foul-smelling hospital laundry in a nether region of the vast building. “Sir, you will want gloves. Ah, sir!—you will want to roll up your sleeves.” The hospital laundresses laughed at the elderly volunteer, made to stand at a vat of steaming, soapy water and with a wooden rod, so very clumsily, nearly falling into the vat, stirring befouled sheets in a tangle clotted and obdurate as, his fanciful brain suggested, the Master’s distinguished prose. Only go through the movement of life that keeps our connection with life—I mean of the immediate and apparent life behind which all the while the deeper and darker and the unapparent in which things really happen to us learns under that hygiene to stay in its place and what determination in this resolve! what joy! he would carry with him, secret and hidden as the nitroglycerine tablets in his inside coat pocket, through his travails at the hands of Nurse Supervisor Edwards, and he would not be defeated. Next day, the elderly gentleman-volunteer, who had never in his life wielded any household “cleaning implement,” was given the task of sweeping floors with a broom and using this broom to clear away cobwebs, some immense, in which gigantic spiders lurked like wicked black hearts and crazed flies were trapped; following this, Henry was given the task of mopping filthy floors stained with spillage of the most repulsive sort: vomit, blood, human waste. And another time though the Master staggered with exhaustion he had not succumbed to vomiting, or fainting; he smiled to think that surely his co-workers would report back to Nurse Supervisor Edwards that he had completed his tasks for the day. Thinking with childlike defiance The woman has put me to the test, I will not fail the test. The woman wishes to humble me, I will be humbled. On his way out of the hospital in the early evening Henry could not resist pausing at the threshold of Ward Six, to peer anxiously in the direction of his young friend’s cot at the farther end of the room, but he could not make out whether Scudder was there, or—perhaps that was Scudder, in a wheelchair?—but quickly Henry turned away, before one of the staff recognized him, to report on him to Nurse Supervisor Edwards.