I began to hear that Nancy had come down with a cold that she couldn’t shake off. She had tried everything that everybody recommended but nothing seemed to work. She finally tried a doctor who gave her some prescriptions to relieve her aches and pains, but they didn’t. She had never had a cold that made her feel so bad.
I am terrified of the common cold. If you have a cold I won’t go near you. When I was a child I had colds frequently and coughed all night. It was scary to cough all night. I thought maybe I was going to lose my breath and die. My mother said that people didn’t die from coughing unless they were choking on a bone. the doctor said I would stop having colds when I was fifteen. When you are six or seven that seems light years away. But he was right. Ever since my fifteenth birthday I never had a cold of my own. That is to say, if you have a cold and cough in my face, I get sprayed with your germs, and your cold get a grip on me.
I stayed away from Nancy. And it got to be very embarrassing because everybody was asking everybody, which of curse, included me, for an opinion about her condition. Was it one of those colds that had to wait on spring for a cure? When I had seen her last? How did she look to me? I deliberately made incoherent replies and began to have the most awful feeling of guilt. A human being was my species, and I had turned my back.
One day I was so deep in thought about some personal concern that, in driving home, I took the short cut through Nancy’s street. It was a way that, for obvious reasons, I had been carefully avoiding. Suddenly, and then remorsefully was aware that I had driven past Nancy’s house without a glance, and that she, for all I knew, might have been sitting by the window wishing for a visitor. Clearly I had no choice but to risk exposure to what ever might befall me than do her the unkindness of sailing past her door as if she cold life or die for all it mattered to me.
I shifted gears, backed to her door, got out of my car and braced myself to stay for the obligatory twenty minutes at least, and not get the fidgets. I walked toward the porch stairs, and as soon as my foot touched the bottom step, I froze, the feeling, the knowing overwhelming me, that the prescience that grips me and will not let go, forcing me to face the hard fact of death in the offing.
I reached the top stairs, walked across the porch, and in the island way, knocked on the door, opened, called out my name, and waited for approval. When Nancy called back “come on in,” the nature of her illness was now clear to me in the sound of her voice that seemed to well up from some limitless depth of pain.
I stayed some two or three hours or more, and I was full of breezy talk as if Nancy’s world was the same as when I last saw it. It is my style in such situations. She was in bed in a downstairs room, and I said with mock reproach, “I thought you’d be up and baking an apple pie. That’s why I stopped by. I’ll never forget the piece you gave me out of that long pan. It was the best I ever tasted. Whenever you feel up to it, call me, and I’ll jump in my car and go get the makings.”
In an offhand manner I asked her how she was feeling. She said, as if in apology, that these days she was spending most of the time in bed, her cold still lingering and her body still hurting.
I asked her where she was hurting and she touched an area of her body where she supposed the cold had settled in some joint.
I thereupon told her a story, some of it true, some of it not, about a pain I had had once in some joint or other, which I thought would cure itself with home remedies. When it didn’t I went to a doctor who promptly put me in the hospital for X-rays and tests which showed up the cause and the cure became evident. Hospitals were havens.
Having pressed that point and, I hoped, impressed her with that point, I then pursued another. Didn’t she have a friend name Connie, who was often between jobs or between husbands, and at such times showed up on the island with some winnings from the (lottery) numbers, and stayed and played until it was gone. Why not call her tonight to find out if she was free to come and stay for a while until she, Nancy, was back on her feet. I added that from my recollection of her, Connie just didn’t seem the sort to say no to someone she liked.
I made a meal for Nancy. There was plenty of food in her refrigerator that she hadn’t felt like fixing or eating. She ate what I gave her to please me more than because she wanted it.
But it made us both feel better that she had something hot in her stomach.
Now it was time for me to go. I had obligations at home. I stood by Nancy’s bed, and my voice was very serious. I said, “Nancy, I’ve kept you company for a long time. I think you’ve enjoyed my being here. So now you must do something for me. I want it to be a promise. You must promise me that if you feel one more pain too bad to bear you will puck up the telephone and call the ambulance. I’m writing down the number, and I’ll leave it here beside you. Now I want you to say what I asked you to say. I beg you.”
And softly, Nancy said, “I promise.”
And I said, “I’ll come again tomorrow.”
I could not sleep that night. And the little sleep I had was troubled, jerking me awake. At half past six I got up for good, dressed, drank some coffee, and drove to Nancy’s house. I had t know whether or not she had lived through the night. I tried the door and it was locked. I knocked on the door and it stayed mute. I called Nancy’s name, and there was no answer. the stillness was overpowering.
I did not want to wake a neighbor at that early hour. And so I sat in my car, waiting for some stirring of life in some nearby house. There must be someone on that street who had some inkling of what I had to know.
Across the street, a sleeping house came awake. A child’s treble voice gave birth to the morning. A window shade shot up. Somebody coughed a routine morning cough. And presently the front door opened and man in is bathrobe came out on his porch to pick up his newspaper that had landed on the porch instead of the sidewalk.
It was Harry, a fisherman. Nancy’s good neighbor, who kept an eye out on her house whenever she was away. I got out of my car, crossed the street and said quietly, “good morning. I’m worried about Nancy. I saw her yesterday and didn’t like her looks. So I had to come over to see how she looked today. But he door is locked, and she didn’t answer when I called her name. There may be something wrong. Do you have a key?”
“What happened is she’s in the hospital. I saw the ambulance and me and my wife went over. That was toward dark last night. Nancy was taking it calm. She said she called the ambulance herself. Maybe that cold turned to pneumonia.”
We exchanged a few more words then I drove back home, and at a reasonable hour, called the hospital. I was told Nancy was undergoing tests and to come an see her later in the day.
In the late afternoon, I visited Nancy. She was sitting up in bed and looking cheerful. She had never been a patient in a hospital before, and everything had made her feel happy. She thought the doctors and nurses were wonderful. She said she felt good. She felt, of course, safe in that place of healing which was better than feeling scared at home alone.
She was brimming over with god news and told me gratefully that I had been right about hospitals. She was only sorry she had waited so long to find out for herself. The doctors had examined her inside and out and located the cause of her pain. In three weeks whey would operate and she would be a new woman, or at least as good as she used to be. At the end of three weeks they would operate. In the meantime, they were sending her home in a day or two to build herself up to go under the knife.
Now, like Nancy, I felt good too, maybe even better. I felt so good to have been wrong. My infallible intuition had been far from the mark. Maybe that knowing that anguish of knowing was over. Maybe Nancy was going to outlive us all.
I asked her if she called Connie. She said she had called her while she was waiting for the ambulance, and Connie had said for her to hang in there, she’d be on the island the day after tomorrow. I asked her for Connie’s telephone number if she know it off hand or her address if she didn’t I wanted to call her and tell her I’d meet her ferry and help her with w
hat ever needed doing.
When I left Nancy’s room I went to the desk to see if there was someone who could give me instructions on how to prepare Nancy for her operation, what to eat, how much to exercise, if any, how much rest. The nurse looked a little uncomfortable, I thought, as if I was being intrusive. But in the same moment she said with relief, “Here comes her doctor. You can speak to him.”
The doctor and I found a quiet corner at the end of the hall. I said that Nancy had told me about her coming operation and had sounded glad. She only wished she could have it tomorrow instead of having to wait three weeks. But she knew she had to build up her strength. Three weeks was not a lifetime. She could wait.
The doctor said quietly, “Her condition is inoperable. but she will die without ever knowing it. That is why I set that date. She will not live three weeks.”
I called Connie that night to make sure of the hour of her coming and to tell her the stark truth about Nancy’s sickness. She arrived at the time planned, and we stopped at the hospital before going to Nancy’s house to get Connie settled in.
We sat on either side of her bed, each trying to outdo the other in milking some outrageous story to the last ounce of laughter. We reach an age, beginning with our thirties, when acting becomes a natural part of our existence. Without it, in so many instances, we fail our fellow beings with gratuitous blunt truth that may hurt more than it helps.
At one time Nancy said she forgot she was in a hospital. She forgot she was going to have an operation. She did not envy us our wholeness. Her spirit, if hot her body, took strength from it. We brought her home the next day along with the medicine in that, in her mind, would prime her for the operation. We knew it was to ease her dwindling days. As the first week ended and the second week began, it was visibly clear that from then on, any day might be her last.
But Nancy stubbornly clung to life, holding on for several weeks longer, an exercise in willfulness beyond credibility. Every day her strength diminished and death stood ready to carry the burden of her body to some appointed place.
At such times she reached for our hands instead, making us help her out of bed, making us walk her up and down the room until the dying inside her subsided, and she cold sleep without fear of never waking.
She was fighting for time for all the things she had put off to let her house some first. she had never even taken one second to brake off a flower and tuck in a little girl’s tangle of hair. She had never telephoned anybody and said “Let’s stop whatever we’re doing a d go for a walk on this lovely day.” I think she had never felt the joy of just being.
When we spoke in praise of her house, expecting to please her, she made a grim line of her mouth and turned her head away. She probably blamed it for causing her sickness, wearing down her resistance, and using up so much of her strength that she didn’t know when she’d be ready for her operation.
One day when I had some errands for her, she said, “All I ever do is say thank you. I want to do more. Maybe there’s something you’ve seen in my house that you’d like to have. Whatever you saw, I wish you’d take it.”
I said, “I’d be delighted. I saw a small square pan in the kitchen. Some day I want you to make me an apply pie in that square pan that’s just the right size.”
She looked at me hard to see if I was teasing or if I really meant it. My face was serious. She said, “I wish I could tell you when.”
“We’ll keep our fingers crossed.”
That apple pie in that small square pan became a routine between us. Time and again she would hit for me to tell her about the coming miracle of my finding her in the kitchen making a square apple pie.
Then, all in one day, it was over. It was the day the doctor made his routine visit and found Connie lying limp across the couch with me standing over her, still in my coat, having just preceded him, and murmuring words of comfort to her for the anguish Nancy had just put her through with no one there to help. Connie alone, had had to walk Nancy up and down the room, a tour de force that she had somehow managed.
The doctor had been told of these excursions, but perhaps had not given thought to how devastating they must be to those involved, and on this particular occasion, to Connie, having to handle Nancy alone.
He called the hospital to prepare for Nancy’s arrival. He asked if Connie and I could take her to the hospital. We could. And, of course, there was someone to receive her. The doctor had told Nancy he wanted to observe her in the hospital for a few days.
When we got back to Nancy’s, Connie said, ”do you mind if I get drunk? I said with understanding, “Go ahead,” knowing that having received my consent, she wouldn’t, not wanting me to have to deal with it.
We sat around musing, sipping, telling each other about our misadventures, laughing a little hysterically. I don’t know what Connie felt, but I somehow suspected that this was the end of the story. The script would not be replayed, Nancy coming home again, and Connie and I resuming our roles. Everything comes to an end, one way or another.
Sometime in the night Nancy died. I often wondered if she died calling Connie and me to come walk her. And nobody heard. It was long ago written in the stars that that was the way it would be.
A Tale of Christmas and Love
Vineyard Gazette
Dec. 21, 1979
She did not remember ever playing with dolls. But she did not remember much of anything before she was four. That being so, she would not have denied the fact that in the year she was three, her mother had come toward her cradling a doll. Her mother then attached it to her unready arms, wrapping her weak embrace around the china creature, and thereupon stepped back to admire the picture of miniature mother and make-believe child.
What, she asked, was Deedee going to name her new baby, helpfully reciting a list of lovely real life names for her to choose from. Deedee brushed them aside. “Her name is doll, she said in a voice that would have sounded dry had she been older. Maybe in time she gave the doll a more agreeable name and learned to treat it tenderly. Or maybe in time, a surer guess, she abandoned it, leaving her mother with no choice but to threaten to give the poor thing away to some more worthy child, and to have to follow through in the face of Deedee’s instant acquiescence.
If her mother worried about Deedee’s rejection of mothering, she tried to find an explanation in the fact that Deedee, the youngest of three daughters, was probably holding fast to her special place as the resident baby and was simply not ready to share it with a blond and blue-eyed doll. Deedee’s family was colored – the description “black” not yet in compulsory use – and “colored” fitting them perfectly since they ran the whole spectrum of colors, every shade and every variation, with Deedee at the farthest end from the blond and blue eyed doll.
Her mother’s diagnosis of Deedee’s condition was as wrong as most empirical judgements. At Christmas time in her fourth year, the year her remembering began, when asked what she wanted for Christmas, she said with inmme3diate readiness, “A real baby.”
Her mother could not have been more undone. “You don’t even like dolls. What would you do with a baby? I’m still taking care of you. How can you take care of a baby?”
“You can teach me.”
“You’re not much more than a baby yourself.”
“I’m going to be five,” she held up five fingers to prove it.
Mother and daughter seesawed back and forth in a fruitless search for a resolution of the impasse. Until finally her mother told her she was sick of her foolishness and for her to go and play.
She was five, then six, then seven and through those years, particularly when Christmas was approaching their aging battle about babies would reactivate, the two facing each other in the most aggrieved way, presenting the same unacceptable pros and cons, and as usual, ending in a draw.
At eight, Deedee was old enough to know that she had been asking for a Christmas miracle, when there really weren’t that many to go around. She said to her mother, “I want some
books and some games for Christmas, and that’s all.” She gave her mother a lovely smile that said, “I really mean it.”
Then the Christmas she was nine, her miracle happened. Her mother said “I have a surprise for you. You have two little cousins coming from Chicago to live with us. Chicago is too cold for them. We’ll try to keep them warm and well. They’re a brother and sister, and that’s what they call each other, so we will too. He’s not quite three, she not quite two. They’re really only babies, and you can help me take care of them. They’ll be her e in time for Christmas.
There was such a swelling in Deedee’s throat that she could not speak. Her mother gave her a lovely smile that said; “I know how you feel.
The parents of the children, too young themselves, had found it impossible to keep two children warn and fed. There was no welfare for the people then. They could only feed on poverty. Deedee’s parents were well enough off to help when help was needed. An extended family was part of daily living. Sharing was a lifeline.
A Boston friend living in Chicago and coming home for Christmas brought the children to their new home on Christmas Eve. When Deedee and her sisters came in from play, coming in the back way as they always did to see what was happening in the kitchen, their mother said, “Sister and Brother are here. I’ve put them to bed upstairs. They had a long trip. Go see them before they fall asleep.
Her sister raced upstairs and Deedee couldn’t follow. She had waited so long for this moment to happen and now it was more than she could bear. Her mother said gently, “Go see your babies. They’re waiting.”
She went upstairs, walking slowly because she could walk no faster. It seemed a journey that lasted forever. She reached the open door and stepped inside. She saw the little boy tucked in at the foot of the bed, half sitting up, while her sister stood over him, telling each other how darling he was. Deedee loved him at once. He looked like a Christmas card angel, very blond and very fair, little trace of his black blood showing, and wiggling all over with friendliness.
The Last Leaf of Harlem Page 29
