by Dennis Bock
I needed only one last ampoule. One sunny morning I sat quietly on the front step of the infirmary, gaunt, frail and grey, yet filled with resolve. I knew this trial would soon be over. As I gathered my strength to continue on, a young woman from the main desk approached to tell me that Mrs. Bethune was calling on the telephone. She then helped me inside, my elbow in her tender grasp as if I were an eighty-year-old pensioner, to where the receiver of the telephone sat on a handsome edition of Walden Pond. I picked it up and heard Frances’s voice. She was in tears.
“Please, Norman, promise me only this.”
I waited.
“Promise you’ll do nothing,” she said. “It was my fault. I was foolish.”
“What happened?” I said. I’d heard of her new companion, a pioneer in children’s speech therapy at Johns Hopkins who was, according to a letter she’d sent some weeks before, a kind and elegant man.
She’d spent the weekend with him in Pittsburgh, she said, where he’d gone for a conference. She’d humiliated herself, following him around like a puppy until he sent her away.
I imagined their time together, the humiliation. It was a reflection of my own callousness. “Did he do anything else?” I said. “Did he touch you?” I was overwhelmed by jealousy and rage.
This is a shameful episode in my life that pains me now to recount, especially to you. I was not the man I am today, please understand that. I was seized by an insanity I’d never known before and have not known since. But this abject, perverse insanity shaped me for the better, which is why I include the episode here. Through adversity we reach the stars, I’ve always enjoyed that thought. Since then I’ve attempted to live up to it in my own way, by pursuing the work I do. Back then it directed me away from the darkness of self-destruction and allowed me to see what awaited me.
What did I do? I dragged myself across two states with a mind to wreak revenge on a man I’d never met. The man who’d taken my place at my wife’s side. Through the window of my train compartment I watched the flickering lights of sleeping villages and desolate whistle-stops. The world was indifferent to my passage and the murderous hate I carried.
It was early morning when my train pulled in at Pennsylvania Station. Commuters ran for their connections; young boys waved newspapers in the air that tomorrow would feature the face of the murderer I would become. Weakened further by my journey, I was jostled and bumped as I made my way out onto Liberty Avenue and hailed a cab. Frances had named the hotel where the man I was looking for could be found. It was a respectable establishment only four blocks from the station. I took a room there, rested for the balance of the morning, then journeyed down into the street. I purchased a pistol, left a note for the speech therapist at the front desk and waited for evening.
I held the pistol in my right hand. A surgeon’s hand. I sat in wait by the window of my room, watching the street, listening for footsteps just beyond my door. My fingers felt every bit as dead as that cold steel. Was it my destiny to be the first Bethune to kill not in war but in a last, defiant act of love? Could this be so wrong? Would I not be vindicated? I knew the man hadn’t touched her, but he had abused her nonetheless. He had led her to believe that he could replace me and had failed to do so. He had dashed her hopes, as I had so often done.
The pistol grew slippery with my nerves. I paced. I was sick to my stomach. The afternoon and evening wore on. I stared at the gun, barely able to believe that I was there, about to commit this crime, but also convinced that this was, in some bleak narrative, a merciful end to my story. I was no more than an embodiment of gloom: not a dime to my name, my wife gone, my health destroyed. I had seen death so often that another would make little difference either way.
When the knock came I raised my eyes from the pistol to the door, more fearful than I’d ever been. Trembling, I rose and placed the gun under the bed pillow, then walked over and opened the door. Standing before me was a short man, already undone by life, it seemed, around forty years old. He wore a grey suit and shoes of tired leather.
He tipped his hat. “Doctor Bethune?”
When he entered, I closed the door and crossed the floor to stand by the window. “Drink?” I said.
“No,” he said.
I stared at him.
“You’ve come all this way to speak with me?” he asked. “I understand you’re ill.”
“It’s none of your concern how far I’ve come.”
He stood awkwardly, hat in both hands.
I picked up my glass. “I’ve lost my wife to you, so there probably isn’t much left to say. Should I talk to you? Should I ask how things are going between you? Should I express an interest in your affair?”
“No,” he said.
“We agree on at least one thing, then,” I said.
He was standing in front of the closed door. I poured a glass of whiskey, then turned and walked it over to him. My hand brushed against his when he took the drink. He didn’t raise the glass, just stood there watching me.
“I understand you are separating, legally separating,” he said. “I would not come between a man and his wife.”
“What about a dying man and his wife?” I said, reaching under the pillow. “What about that?” Then I hit him across the face with the butt-end of the pistol. “Would you come between them?”
His head jerked back again and again as I kept hitting him. A wound opened on the left side of his face. I didn’t stop until he fell to the floor.
It was then that I looked into his eyes. Then I knelt beside him and wept, begging his forgiveness.
I tended to his wounds and sat with him in silence. When he was able to walk I delivered him to the hospital, then rode the train back to the Adirondacks and strode firmly, as morning broke across the hills, into my second life.
*
I hope Ho will do me the kindness of never writing a poem about me. He would find only confusion and contradiction. He might even imagine horns sprouting out of my head. I would tell him as much, if I could. But if he chose to look, to really look, what would he discover in a man like me? Ho is an observant fellow, after all, and just might, one day, take after the Chinese poet whose work he has committed to memory. His eyes hang a moment longer than they would otherwise, collecting a last glimpse, a delicate wrinkle. Isn’t this the modus operandi of the poet? He is one for details unobserved by others. He notices habits, tics, hidden joys and fears. Who knows? When I am here, watching, he is so deferential as to be almost invisible. He glances at a certain cherished likeness set here, to my right, angled just so to catch the light. It has not moved in weeks, despite the fact that he often takes it up in his hand and looks for my likeness in the soft features. It is a painting. But no, the portrait isn’t what it seems, I want to tell him. Despite the likeness. It is not who I would like it to be. Despite the thrill of possibility, despite this deepest wish.
Ho has learned the peculiarities of a stranger. No doubt he thinks this need for pure undeniable order is common to all foreigners, strange incomprehensible devils that we are. But he cannot always be right, perceptive though he is. He will tell his friends that I devote all my writing efforts to medical and administrative matters, offering this as another example of my commitment to this cause. He would not be far off in thinking that. I have devoted a great deal of time of late to the last of my three textbooks, as well as the ongoing struggle to keep up with the monthly medical reports I’m responsible for. The light in my window signals the sleeplessness of a devoted man. But he knows nothing of this secret text, yours and mine. Here you have the re-imagining of a life in all its crepuscular beauty. Perhaps he would, if he knew, revere the efforts of this exploration. But despite his poet’s soul these words would make as much sense to him as a Shakespearean sonnet or a Catholic mass. You see, I have been here long enough that he cannot imagine me having a past anywhere else. And can I blame him? As far as
he’s concerned I have stepped out from the clouds. I’m only as good as his best poem, perfectly internalized and subjective. Not entirely real, in any case, and conjured from the mists. Any life outside these mountainous walls, though richly imagined, can be no more real than the promise of Belgian chocolate or American tobacco.
I see him out in the night, a small dark figure set against the towering rock of the Jui Li San Mountain and hear him talking with the other boys as they smoke their local tobacco. The rancid plumes disappear in a laugh. Quiet talk of the war, girls, food, the things boys like to talk about—but certainly also about the man at the edge of the village hunched obsessively over his trusty Remington. The mad white doctor, they might say, the bloody terror, the saviour, the half-deaf surgeon who fell from the sky. The man who in a rage yells and throws dull scalpels at terrified nurses. What must they think of me? What sort of poem do you shape in the image of a stick of a man who moves like a machine between patients without rest for three and four days at a time? In the absence of sleep I dunk my head in buckets of freezing water. My raging is easily enough explained away. It might even be understandable. In any case, they do not judge, and bless them for that.
*
Another clear evening. I have been studying the moon from my window. Do you know the Shelley poem?
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth.
It is my honour to share Shelley’s moon with you tonight.
*
Last night Ho came to strip off the ribbon as he usually does. I lay still, too anxious and distracted to sleep. He worked silently, first rewinding, then releasing the small wheel from its housing. His hunched silhouette at my desk, a young, slight Bethune, I thought. He rose, then slipped out the door.
*
Man’s absurdity survives like diamonds in this peasant land, and we are reminded of this with depressing regularity. I recall not too long ago we were lacking blood of a certain type, namely B positive. There was nothing unusual in this, since blood supply is as constantly uncertain as the air is thin up here. Countless times I have used my own veins to demonstrate the donor procedure to these peasants, but an infuriating mystery and fear still surrounds this basic operation. One afternoon, a dying man was admitted to my care. We checked all the patients’ charts and found that we had a compatible donor only a few beds down. I called on him and, through an interpreter, informed him of the situation. Perhaps the expression on my face registered my disbelief and disgust when he refused. He shook his head from side to side like a child standing at the edge of a lake, afraid to take his first swimming lesson. He put his hands over his eyes.
I said, “Tell him he is a brave man.”
My interpreter did so.
I said, “Tell him he kills the Fascists to save his comrades-in-arms.”
My interpreter did so.
I said, “Tell him it is strange that he is willing to die for his brothers, yet refuses to give them his blood.”
My interpreter did so.
I said, “Tell him this is a feather tickling your arm compared to a bullet.”
My interpreter did so.
I offered to demonstrate the procedure myself. The man shook his head in terror. I held the cannula for him to see. I said, “This is not a bullet. This is a pinprick.”
He pushed my hand away.
He smelled of the mountains he’d spent the last two years fighting in. Even after several days with us he carried the scent of the soil and horses and the ragged clothes he’d worn for months and of the men he’d killed and seen killed. These smells had soaked into his skin. He was fearful not of the small prick in his arm but of the modern wonder of science. It didn’t involve pain or sacrifice or death, only the elementary truths of his world. I might have remembered that, but I didn’t care to.
I ordered him restrained, and he whimpered as the cannula entered his arm. I both hated and pitied him. After his blood was introduced to the patient, I stood in the cool sunlight and watched the distant peaks shining in the north, at the edge of Mongolia.
Tonight the lilies in their clay pot outside this window look as though they’ve turned to charcoal. It is as if my staring at them all week has bled the lustre from their stems and leaves. The failed light has robbed them of their colours. Maybe I likewise have been robbed of my own certainty.
But isn’t that the point? A certain man is a lazy man. Here I am, committed as never before, yet robed in doubt. If only my father had known the feeling.
I never looked at that man again. It shames me to say I passed in front of his bed half a dozen times afterwards and didn’t once even glance at him.
*
Another month gone. We are with the Third Regiment Sanitary Service at Shin Pei, West Hopei. A warm glorious spring rain spilled over the countryside this afternoon. Now I see moonlight sparkling in the puddles outside my window. The moon insists that we take note, all of us, even those too timid to look up.
Envelope Six
I left Madrid in springtime, gathered my few things together and retreated. I told my associates my work was done, that I was needed elsewhere. They pretended to be sorry. Was there not enough work here? What could be so urgent as to force me to abandon Madrid?
The documentary was finished, I explained, and I would take it to America to raise money for the Republic. I would report stories of our progress here to the outside world. Your mother understood. I told her the night I finished her portrait.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”
Months later I was sitting at a table at the Bentley Park Hotel in New York struggling with that feeling of unease I was telling you about. The feeling I described to you of thinking Pitcairn was hiding something from me. Do you remember me telling you that?
It was not him hiding the truth. Months ago, when I recalled that conversation for you, I was not strong enough to relive it truthfully. Now, perhaps, I am.
“You’re a slippery fish tonight,” I said.
“Nerves, I suppose.”
“Let’s have a drink, then,” I said, summoning the waitress.
I remember thinking that he was trying to rediscover the camaraderie we’d shared in Madrid not that long ago, eight or nine months. Certainly not long enough to explain his discomfort. Men generally are changed by too much living, I thought, too much adventure, too much ducking into bomb shelters. I saw it in myself. Perhaps this was why he’d come to America.
Hoping to put him at ease, I said, “Isn’t it true that when you’re out there, all you want is to come home? You’re sitting in some dingy cellar wondering why the hell you’re there, wishing it all away. Then, poof—you’re suddenly home and safe in your comfortable bed and you still can’t help thinking: why am I here?” I said, “People like us, Frank, with the choice to come or go, we’re the difficult ones, aren’t we.”
He didn’t say anything.
“War’s a bloody beautiful sport,” I said, “until you see what it’s done to you. Sometimes I think it’s a lot safer not to leave it at all.”
He said, “I’m not even sure you know about it.”
“What would you have me know that I don’t know already?” Of course, I took this as a knock against me. I looked him in the eye, ready for a more serious challenge.
I realized then that he wanted to talk about your mother.
Was he going to tell me that she’d gone back to Sweden, or come to America in search of her father’s legacy? Or was he going to tell me she was up in Chicago retracing his footsteps, that she’d simply quit the war and wasn’t the person I’d thought her to be?
The drinks came, and he took a long swallow.
“Well, why the face?” I said. “You look like you’re going to be sick on me.”
“They took her in a second time, right after you left. I don’t know if you heard that. Madrid was full of cutthroats and informers. You know how it was. Calebras was a f——ing jingoistic fraud. You know as well as I do.”
“Yes.”
“Kajsa was convinced he’d teamed up with Sorensen and Sise. They wanted to humiliate you. They each had their own reasons. But that didn’t matter. Calebras wanted the mobile unit under his name. They wanted the glory to go to the Spanish. The others just wanted to get you out. They thought you were cracking up. Sise thought you had a death wish. He always said you were a reckless son of a bitch. Sorensen didn’t like your grandstanding, your chasing after reporters all the time. He said your claim that it was all for the good of the unit was horses——t. Your fundraising, too. It was all about your vanity, he said. You were more important than the wounded, the cause, the war.”
