AS LEONARD’S PHARMACY prospered in the post-war boom, he began to work shorter hours. Two extras were hired to work behind the counter—a somewhat silly older man and a housewife who wore noisy costume jewelry—while Leonard devoted himself to filling prescriptions and ordering the pharmaceutical stock, keeping abreast of advances by reading the medical journals.
As a schoolboy, Leonard had felt the desire to become a doctor. He was the middle child of three—his father had been a cobbler, a harsh, honorable man who beat his children with a strap when they were disobedient; his mother had been sweeter, mild and ineffectual (they were both dead now). Leonard had been a great student, the one groomed to be a professional. There was an older brother, small-boned and soft-spoken like himself (but not so quick), who had always been kind to Leonard. His younger sister Eppie had never been quite right in the head. She was dull and dispirited, she seemed to care for nothing; when you brought her things to play with, she let them fall from her hands. She was all right in school; she learned to read and write with her class, but she would never play. At recess she sat by herself, unbuttoning and buttoning her shoes or pulling up grass. Once she climbed up a tree and would not come down. Before she entered high school, Mrs. Taber took her to a store to buy a gym suit, but Eppie would not try it on; she crossed her arms in front of her chest and wrapped them about her sides, rocking up and down; when they pleaded with her, she beat her elbows against the counter. At home she took to lying in bed and feigning illness; one morning she was found hiding crouched under the bed.
In her teens Eppie was put in a state institution. The family went to visit her twice a month. Eppie never complained, despite the horror of the place. Her father tipped the orderly to make sure that she was kept clean, and she was, she said. Leonard was the most loyal in his visits: for years he never forgot her birthday. Once, to Leonard alone, his mother confessed a lingering suspicion about Eppie’s birth and delivery. The doctor, she said, had wrenched so hard with the forceps that he had left, beneath the ordinary scabs, visible dents in the infant’s skull. “He meant well, I suppose,” Leonard’s mother said. “Who knows?”
Thereafter the whole notion of being a doctor sank in Leonard’s estimation, in the deep figurative sense of something falling, slipping away: a sinking sensation. He had no fascination with the dreadful; the responsibility had become abhorrent to him.
He still loved the intricacies of medicines; at a time when the influx of new drugs developed since the war was overwhelming, the quality and extent of his stock was unparalleled in the neighborhood. He was known for being able to explain, when asked, just what good a particular substance was going to do for you. Physicians themselves often phoned him with questions.
His partner Nat still handled the books; he was twenty years Leonard’s senior, and he was now talking about selling his interest and retiring to Florida. Leonard was not ready to buy out the business: he was conservative in his ways of accruing money and he distrusted credit. Still, his stocks had done well, and he began to tease his partner about the luxuries of Miami sunshine.
In his expanded spare time, Leonard was active in volunteer work for the town’s Community Chest. He was a regular at monthly meetings, and in the autumn he canvassed door-to-door collecting donations. His photograph appeared in the local paper for having pledged a continuing supply of medicines and bandages to the Ambulance Fund. Leonard watched the total of donations increase with the excitement with which he watched a baseball scoreboard; it was his hobby now.
This year he and Rhoda were invited to the annual kick-off fund-raising party at the home of a surgeon named McPhearson. To Leonard it was simply a meeting in evening dress; Rhoda was both excited and dubious. The McPhearsons’ place was farther out in the suburbs, in swooping hilly country where the houses had manorial lawns and the streets had no sidewalks. “It’s that one,” Leonard said, “the one that looks like a castle.” “Tudor,” Rhoda said.
Mrs. McPhearson took their coats at the door; she was a plain woman in a black dress, wearing a pearl necklace that seemed bound by gravity to settle into the hollows of her collarbone. Rhoda surveyed the living room with vague disappointment; the room was large, but instead of the dark, spindly Chippendale and Hepplewhite reproductions which Rhoda and her friends all had, or the boxy sectional sofas they had recently come to prefer, there were squat Victorian hand-me-downs. There was even a maroon velvet chair similar to one at home that Rhoda had considered throwing out, but here it looked, not floridly overstuffed, but chilly and settled in its corner.
Rhoda sighted Richard Fern and his wife, Evvie, across the room; they were the only people there Rhoda really knew. Leonard had persuaded Richard to take an interest in last year’s projects, so he too had been rewarded with an invitation. Evvie made her way to them, brushing aside guests who parted before her rustling urgency. “Rhoda!” she squealed. “You look elegant.” Rhoda was wearing black; she did have an air. Evvie looked jolly and tasteless in a flounced turquoise dress, but pretty: assured and innocent under all the makeup. Richard came up to join them and put his hands on both their shoulders. “Best-looking gals in the room,” he said.
At dinner Rhoda was seated between Leonard and a gentleman whose card identified him as Dr. Findlay, a thick-necked, red-faced man with graying hair. “Do you practice locally?” Rhoda asked. “I’m a surgeon,” he said. “I specialize in the biliary tract.”
“Ah,” Rhoda murmured, “so people come to you. From all over, I’ll bet.” He shrugged modestly, laying aside his grapefruit spoon.
Dr. Findlay waved away the maid who was attempting to put a plate of soup in front of him. “I can’t stand soup,” he explained to Rhoda. “Too messy. Only way to eat it is to lap it up like a dog. You can’t do that in company. At home that’s how I eat soup—my wife too—I taught her. Only way.”
“Oh, Dr. Findlay.” Rhoda laughed, getting the idea. “You’re a character.” Dr. Findlay stiffened.
“You could always tell people it was the French way,” Rhoda suggested. “At home whenever I burn something I tell my little girls that’s how the French do it. They’re too little to know any better. I used to teach French, so they believe me.”
Dr. Findlay showed no sign of being charmed by the cleverness of this. “Do you teach the girls to speak French?”
“Well, the oldest won’t say a word, but the youngest knows a little. I ask her, Quel âge as-tu? and she says J’ai SANK ans.” Rhoda’s voice squealed with stubborn perkiness as the sense that she was boring this man deepened.
“I know a doctor out your way,” Dr. Findlay offered. “Good man. Dr. Hofferberg. An internist.”
“We know them socially,” Rhoda said.
“He’s quite an interesting fellow. Bright, you know, witty. He has that younger wife with the remarkable figure. I was teasing him about her, I couldn’t help it—how does an old dog like you keep up the pace? I asked him. He said to me—You know what they tell you when you’re younger, that the best is yet to come. Ha, ha.” Dr. Findlay, in his amusement, sputtered sauce on his chin.
Rhoda was mildly disgusted. But her instinct to hold the man’s attention was stronger than her dismay at what impressed him. “One time,” she said, warming to the occasion, “nine or ten years ago, we were staying downstairs from them at a hotel and we kept hearing this thumping noise from their room.” She proceeded to tell at length the saga of Herb Hofferberg’s prank. She had thought the episode tasteless at the time, but in the face of Dr. Findlay’s amused snorts, she expanded the details, shaped a plot to it. At the tale’s end he tapped her on the arm by way of appreciation. “Fooled you, didn’t he?” Heads turned at the sound of Dr. Findlay’s laughter. Rhoda smiled, as though easily masterful.
After dinner they listened to a long stretch of speeches by civic leaders. Dr. Findlay performed a mock pantomime of dozing off and snoring for Rhoda’s benefit; she shook her head to feign laughing when he raised his head and winked at her. Leonard caught a glimpse of this and gave her a stern look.
When the speeches ended, they were free to rise, mingle, and prepare to leave. Rhoda turned to Leonard as though saving the last dance for him; she was ready for familiar company. Dr. Findlay reached from behind to shake Leonard’s hand. “You have a charming wife,” he said, putting his hand on Rhoda’s shoulder. “I’m keeping her,” Leonard said.
On the pathway across the lawn, amid the sound of goodbyes called out behind them, Evvie Fern sidled up to Rhoda and whispered, “Did you see the jewelry—did you see the rocks on some of those women?” Evvie’s husband, on Rhoda’s other side, said, “You know what I noticed—there was a lot of expensive bridgework there.” Richard was a dentist. “Several thousand dollars was walking around in the mouths of some of those people.”
Rhoda laughed. “That’s a good one.” Her high heels clattered against the flagstones as she shook off the Ferns and hastened down the walk. Leonard came up from behind her just as she reached the street; he was calling softly, “Why are you walking so fast?” in a tone of mild irritation.
“Oh,” she said. She was unwilling to look at him—she felt caught. For a moment her resources failed her. In the pause of awkwardness she rallied, and turned upon him her stiff but nonetheless winning smile, the last look of interest left in her that night. She took his arm. Only when they were home and Leonard had gone to sleep and she lay in bed reading her book did her features once again arrange themselves into the taxed and helpless look, the released strain, particular to the loneliness of those who are natural with no one.
Rhoda was rather proud of the job she had done preparing Claire for the first day of kindergarten. Claire knew the alphabet, she could write her name, and she could spell cat, dog, and mother out loud, which was as much as Rhoda could teach her without poaching on the school’s domain. The night before her first day Rhoda reviewed with Claire the names of children she had played with who would be in her class, but Claire, soaring with eagerness, was above such reassurances. “KINDAgarden,” she screamed, running through the house, and would not go to bed until threatened that a shortage of sleep would make her sick and absent.
Walking with Claire down the school’s hallway the next morning, Rhoda was startled by the din coming from the kindergarten classroom—a continuous wail of sound, like the roar of a crowd, marked by the claps of wooden blocks smacked together and occasional high shrieks—she had forgotten how noisy it always was in the primary grades; the walls were yellow tile, like a public restroom, and shouts echoed. Miss Stacey, the perennial-spinster teacher, stood at the door, looking girlishly eager, nudging the children inside.
Every toy in the room had been dragged forth by five-year-olds reckless with guesses at what to do and frenzied by the sudden saturation of company. A boy shrieked as he held a flat wooden puzzle over his head and overturned it so the pieces rained like pellets. Two girls fought over a miniature tea kettle, while groups of children chased each other, gasping and giggling. The boy who had discovered the checkers kept yelling, “Bombs away!” as he scattered the box’s contents. “Go on,” Rhoda said. She dropped Claire’s hand.
At one end of the room a wooden Junglegym loomed like a giant Tinkertoy; Claire climbed it to the top. When she hung by her knees, a boy screamed that he could see her underpants. “So what,” she said, climbing down. “Bye-bye,” Rhoda waved from across the floor, edging out the door.
Two weeks later Rhoda reported to Miss Stacey for a special consultation after school. When she returned home she took Claire aside for a serious talk, shooing Suzanne away. “This is private. Go play outside.”
“I understand,” she said, trying to look down at Claire gravely, “that the other children have been calling you a schmatah. Miss Stacey didn’t even know what it was. It’s an old rag.”
“I know,” Claire said.
“It’s not even something you call a person. She said the children run around all day screaming Schmatah Claire Taber at you.”
“They do not,” Claire said. “They never do.” The fibbing irritated Rhoda.
“You’re too shy. Miss Stacey says even when the other children ask you to play, you don’t play along.” “‘She’s very unaggressive’—I heard all about it—‘doesn’t assert herself.’ You have to learn to be pushier. That’s all there is to it. Real tough.”
Claire squirmed, skinny in her overalls. “I also heard that Rita Shepp and Janey Littauer have been nasty to you. That Rita made a fuss about not wanting to hold your hand for the Mexican Hat Dance.”
“She did not. Did not.”
“All right,” Rhoda said. “Talk’s over. Go play outside.”
Released, Claire ran out the door, past the front-yard shrubs, over the lawn (she was not supposed to run on the grass) across the street to where Judy lived. From the living room window Rhoda could see her standing in the Finches’ driveway, knocking on the screen door. Judy Finch was three years older and had been Claire’s friend ever since her family had moved to the neighborhood a year ago. Together the girls spent their afternoons warding off the attempts of Judy’s younger brother to play with them. He was actually a year older than Claire, but by Claire’s alliance with Judy she considered him a baby. Rotten kids, Rhoda thought. Remind me not to have them in my next lifetime. She indulged momentarily in guessing, like a shopper passing the time pleasantly, what else she might do. Be a person in white slacks who sat under palm trees drinking Bacardi cocktails.
For their honeymoon she and Lenny (she had called him Lenny more often then) had stayed a week in Bermuda. She had wanted the French Caribbean, which was beyond their budget. In Bermuda the air was clean and mild and moderate, intensified in midafternoon when the famous pink beaches had a hard, bright, holiday glare. Although neither of them drank as a rule, in the early evenings they sat in a café on the harbor and sipped exotic mixtures from pineapples, nursing them long after darkness fell and the lights shone in store windows. They admired the tactful manners of the waiters. “It’s a tiny little island,” Rhoda said. She had been very keen then never to be awed by anything.
She was amused, remembering. Certainly she had been nervous and wary before the honeymoon. During their engagement Lenny had presented her with a book called A Manual for Marriage. He had underlined in pencil the sentence, “It is the degree of affection between a married couple which truly determines the success of their sexual life together,” so that she wouldn’t think he was clinical simply because he was modern. They discussed the desirability of waiting to have children (she was glad not to have to argue about this), and he had sent her to a doctor, a friend of his, to be fitted for a diaphragm. Reading the book had excited her, but when she felt the prod and spread of the metal instruments measuring the mouth of her cervix, she was alarmed that it would be like that, mechanical and violating. It was not. It was active and orchestrated, with plotted falls and rises, and if she did not feel completion, what she felt in aftermath was a tenderness—a blurred sensation, like the faint swelling around the lips from kissing—and a deepened admiration for Leonard.
She had a good memory, which she did not often exercise; she could remember, for instance, the linen suit she had worn on the ship, and the street where she had bought it in Newark; also the unbecoming way she had worn her hair then, with those awkward puffs over the ears. God, the lipstick they had used in those days, like India ink: you had had to scrub with Brillo to get it off a coffee cup. Of her physical self she remembered chiefly that her waist had been trimmer and no blue veins had shown in her legs when she wore shorts. At thirty-six, Rhoda was aware that her small, long-nosed face had grown stronger of feature and more important-looking, despite certain textural losses in the skin. She was not poignantly aware of aging because she had no special attachment to her youth in any stage. Her childhood, admittedly better than most, she saw as full of needless stupidities and privations.
Occasionally a sense of the past gripped her suddenly. This morning she had been polishing the mahogany china cabinet in the dining room. It was a favorite piece—a Baker copy of a Sheraton sideboard—with seashell scrolls and narrow inlays of lighter wood along the borders of the drawers. As she had been taught to do, she dipped a cotton swab in lemon oil to get at the crevices. What a good girl I am, she mused lightly, rubbing so the shadings of burl, well-matched on the lower drawers, showed richly. In the flush of accomplishment and the faintly dizzying odor of furniture polish, she felt a sharp lowering into melancholy. She had an absurd and painful urge to show her mother what she was doing. Intensely and desolately she missed her mother. The lack of her was terrible.
As a rule she kept her eyes on the present. She had a liberal’s sense of the historical past as something you were always advancing from. In the waves of nostalgia that sometimes overtook Leonard, he had once or twice made her feel that she had neglected to notice things now gone. Her own opinion was that things (like Nipponware tea sets) or ideas (like Utopian Socialism) passed out of the everyday life around you because they died of natural causes, of revealed defects, and were replaced by better.
She knew, although they had never discussed it, that Leonard, since the early days of their marriage, had been disappointed by what he might have called her inadequate interior life. She saw it in the stiffening of his shoulders when, without thinking, she spoke to him when he was reading even a newspaper. The children, too, bristled at her voice breaking into their solitary games. This was unjust; she was more reflective than they knew. She was not so shallow or so careless as to take her own life for granted, for instance, but by this very knowledge, she clung fiercely to the surroundings she had made for herself, the objects of choice.
Rhoda watched the big horse-chestnut tree from the front porch. The tree was pretty in spring with its white blossoms; now the chestnuts were falling, their yellow innards squashing underfoot on the sidewalk. There was no use for them. The other day she had caught Claire trying to eat one, making a face at the bitterness.
She heard squalling from across the street where the children were playing. Suzanne had joined them. From the cries, Rhoda gathered that Suzanne had just hit Mikey Finch in the chest and pushed him into the bramble bushes. “You don’t hit somebody else’s brother,” Judy was yelling. “You’re a guest. Get off my property.” She pushed Suzanne onto the sidewalk. Wordless as an ogre, Suzanne was butting her head into Judy’s stomach. Judy shrieked for help, while Claire ineffectively pummeled her sister. “What is going on?” Mrs. Finch called out, slamming the screen door, and pulled the two children apart. “The sidewalk,” Suzanne said, breathing heavily, “is public property.”
“She hits everybody,” Judy was saying. “Even when you come to visit at their house, she hits you when you’re a guest. I would never do that. Nobody regular would.”
“You are noble,” Mrs. Finch said. “A saint.” She turned to the others. “Go home, you two. It’s suppertime.”
Rhoda fed the two girls their supper, and they waited with her for Leonard to come home. At the sound of his entry—the dog always heard it first—there was a great scuffle across the living room to the front door. Claire’s shrill voice was the loudest. There was no question that they preferred their father. It was natural, if painful.
Leonard was different with each of his children. With Suzanne he was discreetly companionable. Since turning nine she had been obsessively interested in bears (“Guess what my favorite animal is,” she demanded of anyone who came to visit), and he took her to the Bronx Zoo, where they stopped respectfully before each cage in the bear section and read the signs out loud to each other. On warm nights like this one, they played catch out of doors after Leonard had his dinner, and Claire (who was too little to go out after dark) could hear the smacking sound of the ball passing from hand to hand in the driveway. When they came indoors Claire wailed complaints until he tickled her and swung her so that she could touch the ceiling, mimicking her squeals of excitement until she became too wild and he had to put her down. She tried to climb his leg. “You’re a tree,” she said, shinnying. She grabbed hold of his sweater. “Stop that,” he said.
Claire continued; she could hardly believe he minded—only once had he yelled at her hard enough to frighten her, when she had spilled her milk three times in a row. “Get down from there,” Rhoda commanded. “You’re a witch,” Claire said.
“It’s somebody’s bedtime,” Rhoda said. “School tomorrow, remember?”
In the emptied days with both children away at school, a new and pleasant concern arose. Nat Shrimpke, Leonard’s partner, was finally about to enjoy his retirement to Miami: Leonard had bought out the older man’s share and was now full owner of the pharmacy. There was to be no fanfare about the changing of hands; the name—Front Street Quality Drugs—was to stay the same. Rhoda suggested an opening day gala with some small cosmetic item given free to each customer, but Leonard brushed aside the idea; “It’s not Macy’s basement, you know.” “All right,” she said, “I know when to mind my own business,” and she pulled her upper lip down like a flap, holding it stretched shut with her hand. “You look like Mortimer Snerd that way,” he said. He was very happy.
Surprisingly, what he did care about was the décor; he planned a major revision. After hours, he showed Rhoda the rows of small, dark drawers behind the counter. “You never can find anything in them. In the front too—it looks like a poor student’s garret with all this old brown wood around and the Latin labels. It needs lots of glass, I think—make it look airy and light. People always used to confuse learning with the antique, a little dustiness impressed them. Those days are gone gone.”
“Gone with the wind,” Rhoda said, casting her eyes up melodramatically. Still it troubled her faintly to think of Nat’s aisles of cabinets stripped, gutted, and reconstructed. “What about the tradition of the folksy smalltown druggist? It means nothing to you, you moderne thing, you.”
“It means superstition, that’s what. Stupidity and stubbornness.” He had these odd streaks of hardness in him. At Friday night discussions after services at the temple he was beginning to insist on the notion that you could be a Jew without believing in a revealed God. (The rabbi thanked him for raising the level of disputation.)
Now he threw himself into the project of remodeling the pharmacy. From the library he brought home books on the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. Once she caught him looking at photographs of Gaudí’s apartment house in Spain. “I trust that’s not what you have in mind,” she said. “Of course, it might help business by making people feel sick.” He chuckled.
In the end he did less refurbishing than she expected. He settled for a larger display window, glass shelves and counters, fluorescent lights, and a floor of beige linoleum squares marbled with white. She called it his “ice palace”—half-alarmed that it might seem cold and unwelcoming—but once the goods were on the shelves, it looked very simply like what it was: a well-stocked store.
“It looks quite human,” she said, by way of applause.
“Aha,” Leonard answered. “You can see it’s really true what they say—there’s a very high human pleasure in the perception of order.” She couldn’t believe he was talking about a drugstore. He was not.
“My, my,” she murmured. She was actually moved in some distant way by what he’d said. The rows of bottles, arranged in degrees of size, became interesting; her eye began to form patterns of the labels’ colors. She settled for predicting, “I know it’ll be a big hit.”
There was, in fact, no way to tell whether it was a big hit or not. The same customers frequented the store, providing approximately the same amount of business. Leonard was not sure what he’d expected, but he felt a vague disappointment, so that eventually even the most rapturous compliments on the store’s new look galled him. For perhaps not the first time in his life he became falsely modest as a symptom of faint bitterness. “I like it,” he would say, shrugging.
Rhoda was so used to his working late hours that when she came home from shopping in the late afternoon and walked upstairs to change her shoes, she almost tripped on the threshold when she heard his voice saying, “Is that you?” He was lying in bed reading a newspaper. Her first thought was that something had gone wrong at the store so that he’d had to close early. The fluorescent lights—she’d always thought the electrician had been too offhand when he explained about the wiring. “I just got so tired all of a sudden,” Leonard said.
“That’s awfully sensible of you to come home when you’re not feeling well,” she said, sitting on the bed. “Not like you at all.”
He seemed better later in the evening; he ate lightly, then he went back to the bedroom, although he kept the light on. There was nothing apparently wrong with him and she wondered if he were simply in low spirits now that the store was done, a post-holiday letdown. But it wasn’t like him to choose to be sick.
The only person in the family who actually liked staying still was her father. “Not that my father wasn’t an intelligent man in his day,” Rhoda said, later in the night, as she straightened the pillow on her own bed and readied herself for sleep. She was lying under the covers while Leonard got up to close the window. She had been reading; a bestseller lay with its face down on the night table.
“You’ll break the binding that way,” Leonard said, coming over to the bedside and shutting the book properly. “But your father’s not so old. How old is he? Sixty-five?”
“Sixty-eight. Look at the way he walks. He’s been an old man probably since he first came to this country. Nothing was the way he’d imagined. What did they know when they came? None of them knew anything. My mother came a year after to join him and she found him sleeping on a park bench.” This did not sound true as Rhoda said it—perhaps her father, who could fall asleep anywhere, had just been dozing over his paper—she had never thought about it before. “I think he never recovered from the humiliation. They were very well-off, his family. Very formal people, you should see them in the pictures, all sitting up straight like stuffed owls. He wasn’t raised to take bad luck gracefully, if you know what I mean.”
“You weren’t even alive then.”
“I know,” Rhoda admitted. She had absorbed her mother’s stories so totally that it surprised her that she hadn’t been there. “But he looks very pompous and handsome in the old pictures. Completely different, very self-assured. But maybe he just had a good photographer and he was always the same.”
Rhoda, who now took her father on occasional outings in an effort to maintain his interest in life, had brought him that morning to see Leonard’s remodeled store. “Very beautiful. Clean,” he had said. “Finish your business here. I’ll wait outside in the car.” Waiting outside in the car was a device he had developed years before, when his wife’s visits had extended to hours of talk-talk-talk. He would wait, stiffly sitting behind the wheel of the old Hudson, sometimes leaning on the horn when he grew impatient. Now that Rhoda was his caretaker, he seemed to find comfort in the habit of waiting for her; today she had found him slumped asleep in the front seat.
“He gets on my nerves,” she said. “And yet in his own way he likes company.”
“I think,” Leonard said, shutting off the lamp and getting into bed, “he’s gotten worse in the past year, since your mother passed away. But he deserves respect. He’s a dignified person.”
Rhoda said, rolling to the edge of her bed that was nearest to Leonard’s, “He has terrible table manners.”
When Rhoda awoke, there was the sound of a mosquito in the room. She had been reading a historical novel about an heiress on a clove plantation in the West Indies and in her half-stirred waking she wanted to make some joke to Leonard about how they needed mosquito netting. He was the lighter sleeper; there was a good chance he’d been bothered by the noises. But, no, the sound was his snoring—short, whistling wheezes. Something was wrong: he was gasping for breath. He must be dreaming, as the dog did, that he was being chased. “Wake up,” she called, nudging him. “It’s just a bad dream, it’s all right.”
A terrible choking hiss issued from his lips and his chest heaved as though thrust upward by some rudely brutal push. Again she nudged him: he would not wake up. She switched on the lamp. His face was contorted with the effort to breathe and the sounds of his rattling gasps became louder—frightening: they were nothing like Leonard; they were the animal noises of extremity. With one guttural push there appeared on his mouth a foam of blood-tinged sputum; it dripped down the corners of his lips onto his face; like a drunk or a baby, he did not feel the mess of it. “Oh, my God,” Rhoda called out, shaking him. (Was it all right to shake him?)
She struggled with his jackknifing torso to prop him upright with the idea that this might help his breathing. I don’t know what to do, she was moaning to herself. I don’t know what this is. She went to the hall to phone for an ambulance, hearing, all the while she spoke, the whoops of his unearthly efforts for air.
Her voice was high and hoarse as she gave her address. “Tell them to send,” she tried to say slowly, “whatever they send for a heart attack. I don’t know what it is.”
Having called for help, she gave up thinking what to do—leaving it to doctors, to hospitals—and surrendered to participation in the mounting horror. All the while she waited for the ambulance she called his name, a vain effort to share in the peril of his struggle, primitively to beat a drum for his heart. (It could not be his heart. He was forty-two years old.) She wanted to drown out the sound of his hideous gasping. She did not know when the sound stopped and she continued to call his name. (Now it’s over, she thought. He can rest, he can recover.) He was livid and moist: pity poured from her like a flooding pool, which made her think of the children. I’m the only one awake, she thought wildly; it was newly terrifying. Leonard. She shook him once more.
She would not leave him until the doorbell downstairs sounded four times; before she ran to unlock the door for the emergency squad, she stood for a moment; then she touched the corners of his mouth with her knuckles to wipe from them the still-wet smear of spittle, tinged with blood.
The red light on the top of the ambulance was whirling—she could see it through the low-hanging branches of the chestnut tree in the front of the house. A policeman and two men in white jackets with emblems on the pockets were standing in the doorway. “He’s in the bedroom straight at the top of the stairs,” she said.
“Mrs. Taber,” the policeman said. “If you’ll tell me where your coat is.” She was still in her nightgown.
“I’ll get it,” she said. “I’m all right.”
She went to the hall closet.
“Are there children?” the policeman asked. “How old is the oldest?”
“Nine.”
“Think they’ll be all right until we call someone from the hospital?” Rhoda nodded. The two men were bringing Leonard down on a stretcher. She watched them slide him into the back of the ambulance; waiting in cold readiness was an array of tubes, machines, a mask—they would not let her look. They made her sit in the front seat, separated by white metal doors, as the ambulance shrieked its way to the hospital.
She waited in the corridor, her nightgown flapping foolishly about her ankles. The policeman, who had followed in his patrol car, waited with her. He paced outside the phone booth, looking in to check on her, as she called Sally Finch to come stay with the children. An accident, she was saying; it was the only word she could think of. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. We hope so too. They were heavy sleepers, the girls, you could move Claire from one room to another and she would sleep right through. She thought of them, innocent and oblivious in their beds.
The policeman gestured for her to sit in a chair while a clerk asked her questions for the forms. The harsh, curative smell of antiseptic was making Rhoda feel sick. The odor would be familiar to Leonard when he came to. She was embarrassed before the policeman because her voice wavered. She was explaining that she didn’t have her Blue Cross card with her when a doctor tapped her on the shoulder from behind.
He led her to a small square office which had been painted a bright, shocking, senseless yellow. He’s going to ask me to sign a release for an operation, she thought; how fat he is, so young too, you’d think a doctor would know better; but he was saying, cardiac arrest, dead on arrival, know how you must feel. She was sobbing quietly, all the while thinking that she had lived for years under a misunderstanding about life, always missing the point that the core of it was tyrannically physical. “He was so intelligent,” she heard herself whispering. She was going to say other things, truisms, to manufacture a eulogy on the spot, to make conversation with this man. The sound of her own voice jolted her.
She was sorry that at the moment the doctor had given her the news she’d been thinking of other things. She was trying to memorize what he’d said. She wanted to ask him to tell her again. “I have to go home,” she said.
Afterwards Rhoda was to have no clear recollection of how the news was disseminated. The first days of mourning were confused and besmudged with social activity; masses of people swarmed the house. Someone else told Suzanne—she never knew who, her brother Andy perhaps—and she could vaguely remember telling Claire in her low, lecturing voice, something crazy about how people’s hearts worked.
Rhoda preserved in herself a faint sense that she had perhaps heard wrong. A mistake: it was against all logic as well as against all decency. All around her in her own house she heard the voices of lesser people, still spitefully breathing, full-blooded, and distasteful in their familiarity. They were all more likely cases for fatal effects. Hinda’s Stanley was six years older and had an ulcer. Her father, shuffling and stooping, inexplicably continued in the same middling health he had “enjoyed” for years. The fury she felt contemplating possibilities, permutations of disaster unrealized, made her want to jump out of her skin, to rend her clothes and tear her hair: the ancient mode, after all.
The children had no such sense of protest. Claire, in particular, was so little that the shock met no resistance in her; she was accustomed to being behindhand in understanding the way things were. It disturbed Rhoda when people inquired too closely after the children. The children were fine; currently Claire was at the Finches’, Suzanne was staying with Andy; they were so fine that she could not be unwell, she had a sense of reserving herself for them, of resisting sleep so that she might be awake when they returned and continued in their relentless needs to be fed, provided for, talked to. They were blocking her from the luxury of mourning.
These things she thought when she could distinguish particular sentiments in her own will. At other moments she was at the mercy of something more simple and blurred. The fabled numbness of new widows had not set in. She felt instead a constant abstract panic, as though a room just behind her was on fire, and she had somehow to act as though it did not concern her, to pour coffee for guests amidst the roar and the flickering, to set her mouth in conversation: it was all for the good of some normal continuance she could barely remember; meanwhile bodies turned, screamed, and burned. People took her hand to soothe her.
Of the actual, specific, wrenching pain that Leonard was gone she could not think. She would think of it later; she had put it aside to save herself. It was all she could do now to speak in sentences; a syllable was constantly rising in her gorge—something wordless like the vague horror of flames outside her vision—she fought to keep it down, as one fights nausea. It was the natural translation of an anguish so acute that it ran rampant through the body. She felt as though she had been dragged through streets, not allowed to rest. All this served to distract her with a sense of unjust bodily discomfort, and dwelling on this, she bore it fretfully like a patient.