Chapter VIII

DAYS BEGAN to take on shape and they went by. At first Ethel and Rosemary came together to see him every afternoon. It was not long before he ceased to look forward to this visiting hour. They spoke with such common-place cheer. They stood beside his bed and, all down the ward, others stood and spoke in the same way. Mr. Gibson felt as if he were in the zoo and human beings came here to make noises at the animals that communicated good will but little else. As if men in a hospital ward had lost their reason, their ideas, their imaginations. They were bodies healing, and nothing more.

During the second and third weeks, Ethel often came alone, saying that Rosemary was resting. And Ethel gave the cheerful trivial news. Mrs. Violette was a great expense, but they would keep her if Ken insisted. The weather was charming. Rosemary? Oh, Rosemary was being sensible, eating well, getting along fine. Mr. Gibson beat down a jealous sense that the two of them got on and the house ran too well without him. He wished he could get out of here. He didn’t say so. He said he was getting along fine, too.

Paul Townsend dropped in once or twice, and spoke cheerful commonplaces. Shame this had to happen. Everyone well at home. Getting along fine.

Only when one or another of his fellow teachers came and the talk went—as it had gone so many years of his life—flitting through remembered books, did Mr. Gibson receive a sense of nourishment from the visitation.

One day, Rosemary came alone. Ethel had been speaking more and more seriously of staying on permanently. Today she had gone looking around for jobs. To Mr. Gibson’s shock, Rosemary proposed to go job-hunting herself.

“After all,” she said, and she was standing on both feet, much as Ethel did, “a substitute is going to finish off your year, Kenneth, and then it is summer. You are not the richest man in the world.… You shouldn’t work at anything this summer, after these injuries.… And in spite of the insurance, you know we can’t recover all the cost of all of this.” She looked very bleak for a moment. “But there is no reason why I can’t help. I’m well now …”

She was well enough. She looked physically quite sound. He didn’t know what made him fidget. He seemed to catch overtones of Ethel’s briskness and practicality in Rosemary’s voice … The new man in the right-hand bed was frankly listening to every word being said, and Mr. Gibson couldn’t quite black out his own consciousness of this fact, either.

“A woman needn’t be a parasite,” said Rosemary, “unless, I suppose, she’s married to some fabulous captain of industry who can afford a parasite …”

“Or likes them,” he murmured. “Some men are old-fashioned.” He revised his thought, sternly. “If you would enjoy a job,” he told her, “of course, Rosemary. How … how is the garden?”

“All right, I guess.”

“Have you tried to paint the little wall?” He was groping back after something far away, the other side of the fog.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t. I could never be a painter, Kenneth. Just a dabbler. Ethel says, you know, people go in for things like that in retreat from reality, and I’m afraid I haven’t been aware enough of the … well, the economic world … the commercial world … the real world.”

(Mr. Gibson thought to himself, Yes, this is Ethel. But it is good for her.)

“I guess I was more or less sheltered for too long,” said Rosemary.

“We-ell …” he considered. “I dunno as I would call it that.” A prison is a shelter, he was thinking, in a way. But …

“I see now,” she said vigorously. “There was something too dreamy and not quite tough enough about the way I let things go on. If I’d had more sense … if I had faced up to facts … I needn’t have ever gotten into such a state as I was in …”

“As you were,” he said admiringly. “You sound like a very determined young woman now.”

“I am.” She smiled. The praise had pleased her. “There are jobs I could do, now.”

“Yes.” He knew. Jobs for rude health. First stepping-stones toward working experience. “Well,” he sighed, “I never proposed to keep you wrapped in what the British call cotton wool … forever.” He looked at the detestable ceiling.

Curly-locks, curly-locks, wilt thou be mine?

he intoned …

Thou shalt not wash dishes nor yet feed the swine,
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
And feed upon strawberries, sugar and cream.

He’d made her laugh. (If the laugh was a bit artificial, a bit strained, perhaps this was because the man in the next bed was wearing such a look of shocked contempt on his whiskery face.)

“What an unbalanced diet!” cried Rosemary, attempting to be gay.

“Much too rich and probably fattening,” Mr. Gibson agreed, looking drowsy. Covertly he inspected her new briskness. Was it real? Was it Rosemary? Was he wrong to so dislike it?

“Do you need more books?” she said suddenly. “I wasn’t sure …”

He squirmed his head. “It’s an effort to hold a book, I find,” he said miserably. “Maybe I have had too steady a diet of poetry. When ‘life is real, life is earnest’—and there I go.” His own smile felt somewhat artificial.

“Ethel has told me so much about you,” said his wife. “How you always have helped people—”

“Oh, now …” he sputtered. He disliked this kind of pious judgment. Like everybody, he had only and ever tried to be comfortable.

“Just the same,” said Rosemary resolutely, “Ethel and I are going to take care of you, for a change.”

(Mr. Gibson didn’t like the sound of this, one bit. But, he thought, perhaps she needed to get rid of the burden of gratitude and if this was her way, he would have to bear it.) So he told her, willing his eyes to twinkle, that he fancied this would be delightful.

After she had gone, he gave the back of his head to his curious neighbor, and mused on this meeting. Rosemary’s vigor and resolution, he perceived, was a strain upon her. She was pressing herself to be something she had never been. But perhaps now needed to be? Well, if she needed to feel useful to him and this was her way, why, he must acquire the grace to receive.

He would just have to shuck off his sense of dismay, the illogical notion that he had been receiving, formerly, and now lost something precious. If Rosemary saw duty, why, he should understand this. He had seen duty and enjoyed the doing of it, often enough. He must obliterate this baseless feeling that something … some hidden thing … was very wrong within Rosemary. After all, he mused in sad whimsicality, if man cannot live by bread alone, neither can woman be satisfied by cream and strawberries.

He tried to keep from his old habit of quoting in his mind. Too many poems were about love. Maybe all of them.…

Mr. Gibson had a bit of a shock one day, when he discovered that some badly smashed bones in his thigh had grown back together somewhat awkwardly. Unless he wished to go through a series of attempts at bone-breaking and repairing that would be expensive (and no results guaranteed) he would be lame.

He said, to Ethel, to Rosemary, this was not important. It did not really matter if he limped a little.

But when he tried to walk, when he realized how he must limp, henceforth … it mattered some.

At last he went home. Ethel came to fetch him in a taxi. Rosemary kept the hearth: she met him at the cottage door. Still on crutches, Mr. Gibson swung himself into the living room, eager for the sense of home upon his heart.

It did not come. The colors looked a bit on the cute side. The furniture was obviously “furnished” furniture. What he remembered so fondly must have been totally subjective. Surely there were also subtle displacements. Chairs stood at other angles. He sat down, feeling pain.

Jeanie Townsend came to the door bearing flowers and greetings, and everyone had to pretend that the little house was not already bestrewn to capacity with flowers. But the child was welcome. She helped, with her presence and her good manners, this moment to go over all their heads and pass.

Then, her father ambled in after her, wearing his leisure clothes. The white T-shirt tight to his fine muscular torso set off the deep tan of his arms and neck. After the hospital ward, he was almost offensively healthy and powerful.

“Darn shame,” said he, as he had already said twice before in the hospital, “a thing like this has to happen. Guess we never know, do we? Oh thanks, Rosie.”

Rosemary was serving tea with trembling hands.

“I guess you’ll be well taken care of, like me,” grinned Paul, “by a regular flock of females.” His big brown hands were startling upon a frail cup and saucer.

“Waited on hand and foot,” said Mr. Gibson, accepting with his pale claw a slab of pound cake from Ethel. (She had always considered this a great delicacy, but Mr. Gibson rather enjoyed, although of course it wasn’t wise, some frosting on a cake.)

“That reminds me,” said Ethel, “speaking of waiting on … About Mrs. Violette, Ken. She isn’t worth what she is costing.”

“If both of you are going into trade,” said Mr. Gibson mildly, “who is going to wait on me, hand-and-foot, then, pray tell?”

“But we aren’t going yet,” said Rosemary quickly. “Not until you are perfectly well again.” She was sitting on the edge of a chair and her attitude was like that of a new servant in a new situation, too anxious to find her place, and to please. He longed to say to her, “Sit back, Rosemary. This is your house.”

Ethel was speaking. “Even so, when we do go off to work, Ken … I don’t like the idea of a foreigner left to her own devices. They all need supervision. They have little extravagances, you know. Things disappear from the icebox.” Her somewhat craggy face was rather amused by human frailty.

Jeanie said, “We’ve had Mrs. Violette for more than a year. She keeps everything so clean …”

“Ah,” said Ethel, “but there’s only you, dear. Your poor grandmother—whereas, here … why, there is nothing to keeping a house like this. I’ve kept my apartment and held a job for years. And with two of us to share off … both grown and able-bodied. Be a cinch.”

Paul said, “Rosie’s fine, now.”

Jeanie’s eyes glistened. “I like Mrs. Violette,” she said.

“A waste,” said Ethel. “I prefer doing for myself.”

Mr. Gibson, munching pound cake, knew with a pang that it would be impossible for him even to ask his sister Ethel how long she proposed to live in his house. After she had come so promptly, so generously, giving up all she had been doing for his and Rosemary’s sake? He could not ever suggest that she had better go. Mrs. Violette would go, instead.

So the chairs would stand at angles that subtly annoyed him. The menu would include pound cake and certain other dishes. Rosemary wouldn’t be mistress of her own house, not quite. Ethel would sleep in the second bed in Rosemary’s room.

He was ashamed. He wrenched at his thoughts. How mean he was! How petty, selfish! (What a fool he was, too!) Thirty-two from fifty-five leaves twenty-three, and no matter how many times he tried the arithmetic, he never got a better answer.) He had his place, his own bed he had made, cozy among his books.

Ingrate! Here in this pleasant cottage, with two devoted women, both anxious to “take care” of him, why could he not count his blessings and give over, forever … wipe out and forget a foolish notion that he, Kenneth Gibson, was destined to love a woman and be loved, on any but the present terms? Which were fine … he shouted at himself inside his head. Admirable! His days would be sunny with kindness and good will and mutual gratitude.

Paul Townsend got up and stretched. He couldn’t seem to help exuding excess health. He said he had to go, he’d left off in the middle of trimming his ivy. “And by the way, Rosie,” he said with his warm smile, “if you really want some cuttings there are going to be millions of them.”

Rosemary said, “Thanks so much, Paul, but I don’t suppose I’ll have the time …”

“Of course you’ll have the time!” cried Mr. Gibson, shocked. “Don’t let me be in the way …”

She only smiled and Paul said he’d save a few dozen in water anyhow, and Jeanie, who had been seen but not heard most of this time, as she got up to go, said sweetly, “I’m awfully glad you are home again, Mr. Gibson.”

By the tail of his eye, Mr. Gibson perceived on Ethel’s face a look he knew very well. It was the look she wore when she was not going to say what she was thinking. This was fleetingly disturbing. In just that moment, Mr. Gibson felt quite out of touch.

“Forgot,” said Paul in the doorway. “Mama sends regards and all that. Say, why don’t you hob—come on over and sit with her sometimes. Gibson? She’d love it.”

“I may do so, some day,” said Mr. Gibson as cordially as he could, and Rosemary let the Townsends out.

“They have been so nice,” she said returning. “More tea, Kenneth?”

“No, thank you.” Mr. Gibson dug about in his head for a topic to mention aloud. “Jeanie is a quiet one, isn’t she? Nice child.”

“I don’t suppose she’s especially quiet with her contemporaries,” Ethel said. “Although she certainly does sit like a cat watching the mouse.… Deeply attached to her father. Unconsciously, of course, she’s scared to death he might marry again.”

“Why do you say that?” inquired Mr. Gibson.

“She’s bound to be,” said Ethel. “And of course, he will. That’s inevitable. Man in his prime and a very attractive man to women, or so I imagine. And well off, too. I doubt if he can help himself. Some blonde will catch him.” Ethel took up the last piece of pound cake. “I presume he is actually only waiting for the old lady to die. Although until he gets Jeanie launched off to school or into a romance of her own, he may sense there would be trouble from that quarter.”

“Trouble?” said Rosemary politely.

“The inevitable jealousy,” said Ethel. “A teenager, especially, can be so bitter against a step-parent.”

“I don’t know Jeanie very well,” murmured Rosemary rather unhappily.

“They don’t intend to be known, these teen-agers,” Ethel said. “They like to think they are pretty deep.” She hooted. They weren’t too deep for her, the quality of its tone implied.

Mr. Gibson had known quantities of young people as they filtered through his classrooms. But the relationship, there, he reminded himself, was an arbitrary thing. They were supposed to respect him, on the surface at least. He had had many bright chattering sessions listening to the tumble of their inquiring thoughts. They’d show off to teacher. He would be the last to know them in a private or social capacity. He said rebelliously, nevertheless, “They feel deep.”

“Don’t we all?” said Ethel with one of her wise glances. “Shall I tell you whom I am sorry for?” she continued. “That’s old Mrs. Pyne, poor soul.”

“I don’t feel as if I know her well enough to be sorry or otherwise,” continued Mr. Gibson, for this was at least talk.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Ethel. “That to be old and ill and dependent upon, of all things, a son-in-law, is a pretty dismal fate? I see them wheel her out on that front porch of theirs every day and there she sits in the sun. Poor old thing. She must know, whether she lets herself admit it or not, that she is a nuisance. She must know it’ll be a relief to all concerned when she dies. If ever I get old and helpless,” said Ethel forcefully, “me for an institution. Remember that.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” said Mr. Gibson with a touch of asperity. But he was doing anguished sums in his head. Take twenty years. Rosemary would be fifty-two, not many years older than Ethel was right now, and no one could be more the picture of strength than Ethel. But then he, Kenneth Gibson, would be seventy-five … ancient, decrepit, possibly ill … possibly—oh, Lord forbid!—another Professor James. Then would Rosemary be waiting for him to die?

He said wearily, “I’m afraid I had better lie down for a while. I’m sorry.”

They sprang to assist him to his own place, where, on his own couch, among his books—his long beloveds—he tried to rest and remember without pain the bleak, the stricken pity on Rosemary’s face.

One of his legs simply was not the same length as the other one. He could never conquer that little lurch in his body. He was lame. Old. Done for. So he was.