A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  “Can’t you be quiet,” Brooks whispered furiously. “My mother is very ill.”

  “Oh, sorry,” said the intern. Laura opened her eyes and caught his lifted eyebrow and a muffled giggle from one of the nurses, and she hated them.

  The elevator crept from floor to floor, an interminable progress, now made in complete silence, a self-conscious silence, exposing Laura, she felt, to incurious resentment. What do they care? She thought. I’m just another body to be carted around and done things to. Why did I ever allow Jim to persuade me? To be trapped like this. Very far away down an interminable tunnel she evoked the apple tree in flower in her garden, Mary waving at the door. Would she ever see them again?

  “There, at last!” Ann breathed, as Laura was wheeled out on the floor and into her room. “And it’s a single room, thank God.”

  “And you can look out on some pretty dreary roofs,” Brooks added. “But at least there’s some sky.”

  Ann meanwhile was unpacking the suitcase. She took the transistor out, set it at the station with classical music, and laid it beside Laura under her pillow.

  “Now I have some hiding place down here I’ll be all right,” Laura said. “It was just that awful feeling when we were dumped in the hall!”

  “Of course,” Ann said.

  “Wouldn’t you like us to stay until they have been in to check on you?” Brooks asked. He managed, Laura noticed, never to look at her and was now staring out of the window at the pigeons wheeling over the roofs. “Carrier pigeons, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said.

  “What about your supper? Do you suppose Dr. Goodwin will have seen to that?” Ann asked. Under the spell of the hospital they all felt stiff and ill at ease.

  “I doubt it. But I can’t eat anything much anyway. It doesn’t matter.”

  A young nurse in starched white bustled in with a thermometer and took Laura’s pulse while she waited. Laura was grateful that this one didn’t chatter. “Someone will be in in a little while to ask you a few questions. Can I do anything to make you more comfortable, Laura?”

  Laura winced at the first name when she did not even know who this person was but caught Ann’s eye, and they smiled, for Ann, she suspected, knew exactly what she was thinking. When the nurse had left, Ann said, “This first-name business! I suppose they want to make patients feel they are all one big family.”

  “Well,” Laura thought it over. “I noticed that Jim Goodwin began to call me Laura when I became rather ill—people in hospitals return to infancy, I suppose.” Laura closed her eyes, afraid a coughing fit was about to seize her. “Maybe you’d better go now,” she managed to say.

  “Will you be all right?” Ann asked at the door. “Try to rest.”

  “I’ll be all right. Jim promised to look in at seven.”

  “Well then, I guess we’d better be getting home,” Brooks said.

  “Just one thing,” Laura suddenly remembered. “If Ben comes, I want to see him.”

  “Jim Goodwin told us no visitors,” Brooks said firmly.

  “I told him—Ben.”

  “It’s all right,” Ann intervened. “Don’t worry.”

  “Why hasn’t Ben come? We called him weeks ago.” Brooks sounded cross.

  “He’s finishing a painting. I asked him to finish it first,” Laura explained.

  “Oh, my God,” Brooks said between clenched teeth.

  “Come on, Brooks.” Ann took his arm.

  “All right,” he said crossly.

  “You rest now, dear Laura.” And then at last they were gone.

  One way of handling what Brooks was finding it hard to handle was anger, of course. But Laura knew more than ever that her instinct to keep the family at a distance had some reason in it. Their anguish could only ricochet against her, and she had no wall to protect her from it now.

  She was exhausted and tense. No possibility of dozing off. There was too much noise, and the transistor when she tried it for a moment only provided some soupy music, so she lay wide-awake, waiting, and was quite glad to see the intern come in with his pad and pen and sit down in the armchair across the room.

  “How old are you, Laura?”

  “Sixty.”

  While he asked the routine questions, and she answered, Laura took him in: a thin, self-conscious young man with a quaintly long neck and protruding Adam’s apple. There was something seedy about him that Laura found attractive—his tufted eyebrows and small gray eyes behind huge, round glasses made him look a little like a ruffled owl.

  Of course the questions had to do only with illness. By the time he was through this young man would know all about her years in the sanatorium, about her hysterectomy, and about her damaged lungs—and that is all he would know. Laura was amazed to discover that she was struggling to make a connection on another level. In a hospital one is reduced to being a body, one’s history is the body’s history, and perhaps that is why something deep inside a person reaches out, a little like a spider trying desperately to find a corner on which to begin to hang a web, the web of personal relations. Yet she had imagined she was through with that, that personal relations had become irrelevant.

  “You look as though you could do with a good night’s sleep, doctor.”

  “Do I?” He shot her a shy smile. “The thing is, I’m on duty for thirty-six hours, and this is the last hour. It’s been rather busy here.” Then she caught his glance, a personal glance for the first time.

  “You’re Dr. Goodwin’s patient.”

  “He’s an old family friend. His father was my mother’s doctor.”

  “That’s great,” said the young man. “You’re in good hands.”

  “I didn’t want to come in here at all, but he persuaded me. I’m dying, of course.” And then as Laura saw the man wince, she asked quickly, “What’s your name?”

  “Dr. Edwards. John Edwards.”

  “Don’t people often say they’re dying, Dr. Edwards?”

  Now a faint smile appeared. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean they are, you know. I’ve seen patients pull through when there didn’t appear to be the slightest hope.”

  “The will to live.” Laura gave a deep sigh. “It’s so strange.”

  “Built in,” John Edwards said. He got up. “I’m sorry but I must go. I have three more patients to interview.”

  Of course to do their work they couldn’t afford to come in contact with a patient’s soul. There was always that out. Laura looked at her watch. Only four, and Jim wouldn’t be here for hours. Better try to settle down. But that was just what she was not going to be permitted to do. A different nurse came in to take a blood sample, and Laura reacted violently to the puncture. She felt outraged that her body, weak as it was, should be attacked in this brutal way.

  “Come on, Laura, it’s not that bad,” the nurse said crisply.

  “I’m so tired,” Laura said, ashamed of behaving like a child. Tears started in her eyes.

  “There—see, it’s all over.”

  Laura tried to turn away onto her side and had a violent fit of coughing, the first since she had entered the hospital. In a second the nurse was holding her with evident expertise. Sweat poured down Laura’s cheeks. And then finally it was over.

  “I’ve rung for another nurse,” the nurse said as she left.

  But no nurse came, and Laura was just as glad. She lay still, feeling her heart thud on inside her. I’m really so ill, she thought, why did Jim have to do this to me?

  Then in a few minutes a contraption with two bottles suspended from it was wheeled in.

  “What’s that thing?” Laura whispered.

  “I.V.”

  “Oh.” Laura withdrew deep inside herself while the tube was inserted and the tape taped. This she would have to have out with Jim when he came. But for now, she was not about to watch life seeped into her drop by drop. she turned her head away.

  “Perhaps you’d like to be a little lower? Shall I try rolling the bed down?”

  “No, thanks. I’m afra
id of coughing.”

  “Anything else I can do?”

  “Move the orange juice so I can reach it.”

  It was this lack of imagination that made hospitals such engines of torture, she was thinking. You have orange juice all right, but it is set just out of reach by someone in a hurry who never really puts herself in a patient’s place. A patient is simply a small cog in the machine. Laura had dreaded coming here, but she was amazed at how quickly all the horrors began. Someone across the hall had a soap opera going on TV. She couldn’t catch words, but the continuous intense murmurs prevented rest. Then there were voices, too, people visiting patients in nearby rooms. Why did people always appear to raise their voices when saying good-bys?

  Laura turned her head from side to side trying to find a comfortable position. She took a sip of orange juice, and it stayed down.

  After that she must have dozed off, for, sensing that someone was looking down at her, she opened her eyes and there was Jim Goodwin.

  “Oh,” she breathed. “Jim.”

  “You’ve had a little sleep,” he smiled. “That’s quite a feat in this noisy place.”

  He pulled up a chair and sat close to the bed. Laura was so glad to see him that she almost forgot about the I.V., but then she saw the transparent tube and the bottles.

  “It took some doing to get a private room,” he went on. “You know you can close the door. There’s no law against that.”

  “Good,” she murmured. “Close it when you go.”

  “Tomorrow you are set for X-rays at nine. We’ll know a little better what is going on when that has been done. And while you’re here we’ll get the lungs drained—that should ease things. I can see you’re having rather a time breathing.”

  While Jim talked gently about these factual things, Laura felt something less tangible, a kind of transfusion of compassionate interest, but even as she felt this balm, she resisted its effect, which was to make her weep.

  “I’m so tired, Jim,” she said.

  “I’m going to prescribe something to give you a long night’s rest. The I.V. will begin to have an effect by tomorrow, too.”

  “I wish—” but the words stuck in her throat and came out as a humiliating sob. She turned her head away.

  “You’ve had a hard day,” Jim was saying, holding her hand in his warm clasp. “Don’t try to talk.”

  But she must manage to utter what had to do with her integrity as a person. “Jim, you promised.”

  “What did I promise? I know I promised you’d see the spring, and I bet you enjoyed seeing the trees in flower on your way here, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Laura smiled. “I did.”

  “I bet Mary will find a way to have you lying outdoors when you get home. Don’t you have a chaise lounge somewhere?”

  He was cajoling her now, but Laura was not going to allow herself to rest in his kindness and imagination—not yet. It took an immense effort, but she lifted herself up a little to look him in the eyes.

  “I want those bottles taken away,” she said.

  She saw the pupils widen in Jim’s clear eyes. Then he bowed his head, looking down at his hand clasping hers.

  “Laura, I don’t think I can do that.”

  “You promised to let me die in my way.”

  “All I am doing is trying to make you a little more comfortable. The I.V. will not arrest what is going on in your lungs, Laura. It’s mostly water, with a little glucose. You’ll feel a little less exhausted, that’s all, and your mouth won’t feel so dry. You’re dehydrated.”

  Laura lay back to consider this. “Maybe you’re right. I have to see Ben—he may come while I’m here. But I hope not,” she added.

  “He can wait a few days surely. I have given orders that you are not to have visitors, not even family.”

  “But it’s so lonely here,” she said to her own astonishment. “If Ben comes, please let him see me.”

  “Hospitals,” Jim sighed. “We do the best we can, but—”

  “I’m losing myself, my identity. It scares me.”

  “Just hold out for two days, Laura. Then you’ll be home again, I promise.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “If you want to see Ben, I’ll leave word that he can come in for a half-hour.”

  “Thank you,” Laura whispered. Her throat was tight from trying to keep back tears.

  “They’ll bring you an eggnog and something to help it stay down. Try to rest. Think spring,” Jim said with an anxious smile. He gave her hand a squeeze and then let it go.

  “The apple tree,” she murmured. She saw it very clearly, an apparition behind her closed eyes. When she opened them, Jim had gone and the door was closed.

  Panic. She had thought she wanted the door closed, but now she was terrified. I might die and no one would know. I might cough myself to death—quickly she felt for the bell and pressed it as hard as she could.

  Chapter XX

  Twice in the night Laura waked and did not know where she was for a moment. There seemed no way to get comfortable in the hard hospital bed with only one pillow behind her head. A neon light on a building opposite shone with nightmarish intensity, yet Laura didn’t want the shade pulled. The room was too much like a cell, and at least she could see the sky as the dawn slowly, slowly dimmed artificial lights and bathed the sleeping city in a wan real light hours before the sun rose.

  She had finally dozed off into a deep sleep when she was roused by feet in the corridor, and a nurse coming to take her temperature, a different nurse of course. They were never the same, so there was no way to make contact, and Laura settled for being completely passive, hardly responding to a good morning, turning her head away.

  Eventually they would come with a stretcher, she supposed, to wheel her down to X-ray, but before that she must try to get to the bathroom, brush her teeth, go to the john. It was now half-past six, so there was infinite time, and before making the effort of getting up Laura gave herself an hour. It was strange how the hospital atmosphere had anesthetized her capacity for thought—or feeling, for that matter. She felt absolutely naked in a glare of light, frozen there in a complete suspension of being. She tried floating, but always just as she had almost achieved that blessed state someone came in, or she was interrupted by the repeated call for a doctor. She tried the transistor and for a little while caught the end of a Mozart quartet. Breakfast trays were being distributed, but she supposed she would not get one. Instead the empty bottles on the contraption at her side were exchanged for filled ones.

  How was she to get to the bathroom anyway? But that at last was a real challenge, something to occupy her mind, and she found that she could wheel the contraption with her into the bathroom, and in fact it gave her some support. Even sitting up, let alone standing, made her feel terribly dizzy and weak. She was just emerging from the bathroom feeling quite triumphant when a nurse caught sight of her and rushed to her side.

  “Laura, for heaven’s sake, what are you doing?”

  “Going to the bathroom. Is that not permitted?”

  “You’re supposed to ring for a nurse.”

  “Oh, well, you’re all so busy, I thought I’d invent a way.”

  “Let me help you. At least you didn’t wrench the tube out,” the nurse said, as one might tell a small child who had done something naughty that at least there was no damage.

  “I thought I had been quite clever.” Laura sank back into the bed. The nurse was reading her chart. “No breakfast,” she said.

  “I wonder whether you could find a small bottle of lavender somewhere. I know it was packed.”

  “Here you are.”

  “Thank you.”

  Laura poured a little in her hand and put it behind her ears, as Sybille used to do in Switzerland. “That’s better,” she said and closed her eyes. She must try now to leap as gracefully as possible from one small moment of respite to another. And soon enough she was being helped to slide from her bed to a stretcher and wheeled away dow
n endless corridors, stared at by people in ordinary human clothes on their way to make visits, in and out of the elevator, a bundle of nothingness being taken nowhere. She was left in a brilliantly lit waiting room, with nothing to shield her eyes, flat on her back as she was, a room filled with people in wheelchairs and one old man on a stretcher like hers. Complete suspense, this state of absolute waiting, created a stupid amount of tension, and she wondered why. She was in their hands, the bright, efficient young women who called out a name and disappeared into the X-ray room, but they were not hands one could rest in. There was no handclasp here like Jim Goodwin’s to pump reassurance into her. Identity reached zero. Soon, she thought, I shall forget my name.

  But when at long last she heard “Laura Spelman,” she responded foolishly by trying to get up.

  “Oh, no, Laura, don’t you move. We’ll wheel you in.” And it proved surprisingly easy to slide from the stretcher onto the table. What was not easy was to remain sitting up while the machine was rolled down against her back, and to stay still. The first try was a disaster as Laura bent over wracked by a coughing spell.

  “It’s all right, Laura, you just lie down and rest.”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, but lying down was no good, and once more a stranger had to lift her and hold her and wipe her sweating face with a kleenex.

  “Brother Ass is not behaving very well,” she managed to utter.

  “Brother Ass?” This nurse, Laura noted, had a pleasant voice. That was a help.

  “My body—it’s on some wild caper.”

  “Oh, I see.” The nurse gently stroked Laura’s back.

  After a while she tried again and was confident that all was well. Then there were more X-rays taken from the front this time—and finally Laura was wheeled out into the bright lights to wait what seemed an eternity until the nurse said the X-rays had developed well. But I can’t ask—I can’t know, Laura thought. That nurse with the kind voice knows how bad things are, but I don’t.

  Laura closed her eyes and pretended to be dead, so that she couldn’t take in anything more around her. She slid into a cocoon of total passivity, down the interminable corridors, feeling slightly nauseated, and into the elevator where again people talked as though she were not there.