She went on in her small voice about San Francisco and whiskey and how whiskey was all that Mary Alice needed—really, really.
By now it was plainly too late to put anything into that blue open mouth, gaping subhumanly for air, sucking for it, then more and more slowly wheezing it out again. Somebody in the little crowd that had gathered said, “It’s a fit. Don’t let her tongue go back,” but I knew it was not a fit at all, and I ran toward the ship for help.
The children were hurrying to me, their faces still pale from the intensity of their farewells, and twisted now with concern. They pushed almost past me toward the knot of people, and I turned them around toward the side of the ship again as I ran, and said, “It’s all right. A passenger feels ill. She fainted, but it’s all right.”
“Is it my old lady?” one of them asked, and I said, “Of course not!” I was determined not to let them see Mrs. Marshall, for if she was dying she might have to fight it, and that was not for the children to know about yet, if I could help it. So I kept my voice calm for them, and my hands firm and gentle on their shoulders, but for the faces staring down curiously from the deck I let my own face show what I feared was happening. I called up to the young barman, spruce in mufti to meet his sweetheart, “Get the doctor! Hurry. Tell him to hurry!”
He stared for a second, freezing like me, and then he ran along the narrow deck and through the door, and another boy, the monkey boy the children loved the most, came down the bobbing gangplank, smiling warmly at them. “Keep them for me, Jantje,” I said, and he took their hands and walked away with them toward the bow of the ship and the open river water.
I found I had their grey topcoats, and as I looked down again at the woman I put them over her carefully, perhaps to try to hide her from the flat stares of the little crowd, perhaps only to make it seem to her poor sister that it could possibly matter whether she were covered or bare as newborn. Her heart had almost stopped, and what air it could pull through her darkening mouth whistled slowly out, unused. She was suffocating as surely as if a cord had tied off her windpipe. I wished I could hide it from the sister, that I could put her little white-gloved hand, as I had done my children’s, into the kind grasp of one of the seamen and send her along the quay toward the open water. But her look reassured me by its transparent blankness; she was shocked into safety for a time longer.
A cabin boy stared with horror at Mrs. Marshall’s gaping dark face as he thrust a glass into my hand. I sniffed it—the ship’s best brandy. Somebody must have relayed the sister’s small prayer for whiskey as best he could. I would have liked to drink half of it in one gulp, for plainly Mrs. Marshall could not, and my stomach felt strange and I was breathing from the top of my lungs, carefully. I put the little brimming glass between two of my suitcases, and because I had nothing else to do I took one of Mrs. Marshall’s ankles from the old porter. It was astonishingly heavy, like stone, and as I let it thump down upon the inspection table he picked it up again, without reproach, in his big, twisted, dirty hand.
The doctor was there, in civilian clothes, and without any preamble he and I started talking rapidly, easily, softly, in French, which neither of us had ever done before in our few chats on the ship. No, he said, almost no pulse … always complications … get her onto the ship … may have only a few minutes … injections … at least she did not die at sea, always very bad for the morale … this is very bothersome.… He muttered orders in a low, angry way at two of the crewmen, who ran up the wagging gangplank for the ship’s stretcher.
The sister said, more loudly than I would have thought possible from her, “All she needs is some whiskey. That saved her in San Francisco.”
The doctor glared briefly at her and then asked me in French, “Who is this person?”
“Her sister.”
He asked her in English, in a curt, disapproving way, “Well, who gave her whiskey?”
The sister said firmly, looking up at him like a determined, unabashed child, while Mrs. Marshall’s heart gave another great desperate jump and stopped again, “You weren’t on the ship yet. A friend who is a nurse was saying goodbye to us and—”
He interrupted her haughtily. “And I am not a nurse. I am a doctor.”
Oh you God-damned Prussian-trained Nazi-broken bastard, I thought. Protocol. Professional honor. My mind spat.
The crewmen were unfolding an ugly, stained khaki stretcher. The old porter and I lifted Mrs. Marshall clumsily onto it while they held it. She seemed made of cold lead, and her head arched back hungrily for some of the air we were breathing. Her sister tried to take her hand, but it fell into the pouch of stiff canvas.
“She’ll be all right soon,” I was saying without any shame. “He’ll give her a shot to help her heart. He’s a good doctor. A shot will be better than whiskey for your … for Mary Alice.”
And then I closed a door on the past few minutes and turned toward my children and the things I had to do next. I waved to them where they stood with Jantje, watching the barges and the gulls, and with hardly a thought of the two old women in the ship I looked for the porter on the quay. When I saw him standing like a waiting horse beside the possible pasturage of my row of bags and boxes, I smiled at him.
His eyes filled with a kind of alcoholic urine. “Those poor, poor ladies,” he said, and even though I had left them deliberately, my own eyes flooded with tears for them, which I ignored with an almost ferocious resentment.
All right, all right, I said angrily to the other parts of me. So I wanted to be last off the ship! But I’ll be damned to hell if I’ll let this hurt my girls and me, and all the fuss and bother of getting us this far. Life, death—they must know about it anyway. This will be life, not death. That is the way I talked to myself, while I reached for the glass of cognac I had put between two of my bags and thrust it, by now somewhat warm, at the old man.
He took it as if it were a natural thing to gulp a tot of four-star Fine Champagne on the quay, and then, with a swipe at his still brimming eyes, he yelled for a taxi—a prowler who had probably made two trips already into the city and was back for the last load of crew or officers. I counted the bags again as they thudded into the back of the car, and then I pushed the children onto the seat and gave the old man some money and once more we all said a warm, sad thank-you-and-until-we-meet to Jantje and I put my foot up into the car, thinking, Oh dear kind God here we are here we are at last quick driver into the city away from the salt smell and the sea gulls hurry hurry—and a voice called down my name with real desperation, twice.
We stood, the driver and Jantje and I, with our feet half here, half there.
The doctor was leaning against the rail, high above us, and his jaw was slack and he looked as if he were in panic or in a frantic state of disbelief. He must have run faster than he had been able to since the Gestapo broke all his leg bones after one of the first professional roundups in Amsterdam, for he panted and his thin grey hair was awry.
“But why is he calling me? Why me?” I asked angrily. I pulled my foot down onto the ground.
Jantje turned toward me, and even before the doctor spoke I was saying very fast and soft, “Can you stay here longer with the children? They’ll be all right with you.”
He looked at me wisely, and crawled past me into the back of the cab.
The doctor called down in a peevish way, “She is dead. She is dead,” and I did not realize until later that he was speaking to me in Dutch or German, for I knew already what he was going to say.
I turned back to the children, with Jantje sitting now between them. They looked with unfathomable resignation into my troubled and perhaps angry eyes, which I tried to make nicer for them but could not. Then again one of them asked, “Was it either of our old ladies?” and again I said no and that I would be back soon and that Jantje would stay with them. The taxi was riding low, loaded with everything I possessed in the world, almost; I did not even bother to ask the driver to wait. He had a fat, although youngish, neck.
; I walked back to the gangplank. The end of it was by now some three feet off the quay, and a crewman who a few days before had chased my ball of yarn across the deck and then tossed it to me with a saucy grin helped me haul myself up as if I were the Queen’s first lady. His face was crumpled with a grievous surprise—the kind that had made the old porter cry, and then me.
From the top of the gangplank the doctor called again to me, as I crawled awkwardly toward him, “She is dead!” He was speaking in French, as he had done beside the customs table, and I cried up to him like a parrot, “Yes, yes, she is dead!” He took my elbow, and we ran in a dignified, cautious way down several corridors I had never known were in the ship, past the galley ovens and into dimmer regions, now awash with suds, where the filthy stevedores had walked for coffee or a glass of Genever. I had to talk sternly to myself for a few seconds, for my breath faltered and my tongue went dry, and my heart banged with primitive fear and civilized resentment.
Then I saw in a doorway the face of the barber, who also carried cases of beer up and down stairways between haircuts. He was a very stupid man, with enormous eyes and ears, and the crew called him Jackie the Clipper because he clipped their hair and also because he sailed in and out of every port with unexpected sexual prowess and a resulting state of alcoholic debilitude that only Rabelais could describe. There was Jackie then, peering at me with his great eyes, and in spite of the latent expectancy in them, the postponed amatory gleam and quiver of being in port again, they swam with tears that I knew were as real as my own helpless acceptance of the fact of Mrs. Marshall’s death.
“Hello there, Jackie,” I said in a mechanically cozy way as I pounded behind the rigid doctor down the corridor. Everybody talked to Jackie like that. I felt comforted by his great, drowned, simple look, and got my breath back. Whatever was next did not appall me anymore.
We were in a low white room half full of painted pipes twisting carefully along the walls and ceiling and even the floor. There seemed to be several people, but I remember only the doctor, stooping under the pipes, and, on the floor, the very small body of Mrs. Marshall with her jaw dropped and her hands looking as peaceful as a dead bird’s claws, and the equally small sister standing with her back to us, holding their two heavy black handbags and my girls’ topcoats. I did not know what to do, so I stepped over the high threshold and put both my arms around the living one, who seemed to shrink even smaller and cleave unto me as I know those words mean it. She sobbed in a way I had not heard before—with passion, but also rather like a rooster crowing. There was nothing ridiculous about it, and as I felt her feathery body pressed so completely, so unthinkingly against mine, I knew that I was blessed. I said softly a lot of things about how gay her sister had been at the silly tea, and how well she had looked that morning in the cabin next door, how untroubled—all half lies made without cavil.
The great eyes of Jackie the Clipper floated in the dark hot air of the corridor by the door, and I could feel a frightened hush through the depths of this unknown ship I had ridden so blandly for so many days and weeks. Having a dainty corpse upon it was something nobody wanted, but I was agreeing with the grey-faced impatient doctor that God had been good to all of us to postpone it this long.
“A sea burial is very bad,” he said over his shoulder as we two hurried down the corridor. His French was impeccable, and by now I knew that his wife was waiting for him, after three months of voyage. “You cannot imagine a sea burial,” he said, but he was mistaken and I could, so I agreed with him and said I could not. “And now here is the address of the hospital. Of course there are some complications: American Protestant corpse, Catholic Belgian port, Dutch ship. But the sister seems intelligent. The Red Cross will take care of everything. Give them half an hour and then call the hospital and have the sister speak with you.”
And so on, very firmly, and I said yes and no and certainly, and tried to seem efficient, and all the time I was storming and roaring, but pretty much the way a child will when the light has been turned off and the door shut and he has heard his parents drive away in the family car. I could yell until I burst, but there was no real use. There I was, after so much trying to be, excited and somewhat scared in a strange land, with two little girls to watch over, and instead of our going at our own speed to a decent hotel and then wandering, as we had planned, toward the Zoo through the streets with all their new smells and sounds, I had already left the children with a Dutch steward and an unknown Belgian cabby and gone back down into the ship’s depths to look at a dead woman, and was about to devote myself to getting her decently into some sort of coffin or urn or whatever in her god’s name she would have wanted—and above all I must help the one still living, the birdlike sister whose name I did not even know. If the dead woman had not had a sister who still lived and must go on living, I would be free of the whole thing. I felt impotent and rebellious, and shook hands in a short way with the doctor, who already looked years younger at having rid himself so neatly of so many unexpected and unwanted responsibilities. He became almost debonair as we reached the top of the gangplank. By now it was a good four feet off the quay, and two sailors hoisted me down. I did not look back.
The children were pale and puzzled in the dim taxi. “Yes, the passenger died,” I said to them and Jantje. He seemed upset and sad. He told me her name, Mrs. Mary Alice Marshall, and said that her sister was either Miss or Mrs. Pettigrew, and I looked at the piece of paper the doctor had given me and it was Miss. Jantje said they were very nice quiet ladies. Then he told me the cabdriver had kept the meter running but he had said that was a shameful thing to do in such a case, and later the children told me Jantje got out of the taxi and almost had a brawl with the driver before the little box was turned off. He left us, and the children looked after his springy back, his dark small simian head, with possibly as much plain love as they will ever feel for a man they trust.
‘Then we turned to each other, and I told them again that it had not been one of their old ladies. The children sighed and said good, and then we discussed the imminent problem of what to do with the remaining sister, Miss Pettigrew. They were both resigned and realistic about it, and filled with a real compassion, which to me seemed far past their expected capacity for such things, so that for the rest of that long day they did not protest in any way about having to eat lunch in a “nice tearoom” with the gentle little woman instead of in the glittering restaurant I had vaguely described to them, or about missing the Zoo entirely and staying alone in the hotel—a hateful thing—while I made numberless telephone calls to the Consulate and tried to get permission for cremation in the anti-cremation city, or about having late baths and supper in our rooms instead of going to see Charlie Chaplin, as we had thought of doing, because I had to make more telephone calls to Holland and California for Miss Pettigrew, whose voice had turned with repressed hysteria into an unmanageable but still genteel squeak. My girls were fine girls.
So was Miss Pettigrew a fine girl. She moved through the whole grim thing with hardly a falter, and accepted my presence unquestioningly. I, remembering my first resentful anger and the way I had heard my mind snarling, was abashed and suspicious at the same time. How could anyone stay as thoughtful and as self-possessed as this small aged lady, and how could he go on letting me parley intimate and even secret details of her life and her dead sister’s for assistant consuls and functionaries and priests and doctors without hating not only my guts but my children’s guts and my furtherest ancestors’ guts? I saw that in a way I hated hers—or, at least, her dead sister’s—and I bowed meekly before this knowledge, all the while snatching looks and words with my girls, and ordering tea and toast and a tot of rum sent to Miss Pettigrew’s room, which I had naturally seen was next to ours. How she must hate me, I insisted to myself so that I would not feel myself hating her over all the larger and less ugly necessities, like What would the children really like for supper, and What valise did I put the toothpaste in, and Did I really say to the curé that I tho
ught it was abominable to have to ship a body to Amsterdam to get it cremated or did I just mean to?
Miss Pettigrew and I discussed sleeping pills with brittle detachment. She had some; she seldom took them; she planned to take one or perhaps two that night; if I would be so good as to ask the night clerk to call her at seven, she would be ready for the morning train into Holland to stay with the friend of a dear friend. I knew she would do all this—or, at least, I felt that I knew it, and also I wanted her to. We said good night in a detached and carefully offhand way, and I went next door to eat a roasted chicken with my children. We talked softly, knowing who was next door and not wanting to sound as if we were too happy, but we had a very nice time. Just before I got into bed, an envelope slid under the door (she had been awake all the time), with a precisely written, lady-like note and two American dollars for a lunch or tea I had forgotten about. It asked for my address to be left with the clerk, so that Miss Pettigrew could write a letter I hoped I would never get.
We slept well that night, without any troubled dreams that we could remember in the fine grey daylight, and went on to Bruges. The only way I showed protest against what had happened was that when the children talked lengthily about dying and asked over and over again about turning black and decaying and how long it took, I felt inexpressibly annoyed and snapped at them and even said things like “For God’s sake, stop talking about it! So she died! So let’s forget it, shall we?” And they would look patiently at me and I would feel ashamed of myself and talk more gently and discuss at length the processes of disintegration and the effects of no oxygen on the bloodstream, as we slid along the silent canals of the dead town and the guide called out “All heads down” for the bridges.
Sister Age Page 4
