Chapter Three

By the time I found the wall switch at the bottom of the stairs, Duff had stopped yelling. Jack was on the floor, clutching the stair rail and trying to pull himself up.

Franny came down to report that nothing was wrong with Duff except he was feeling rather embarrassed. She and I stupidly tried to help Jack to his feet until I realized how much pain we were causing him. Then Duff came downstairs, putting on his glasses.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Gee, I’ve never done anything like that before. Is Dad all right?”

“I’m OK,” Jack said. “I’ve sprained something, that’s all.”

“I’m going to call a doctor,” I said.

“We don’t know any doctors here. And we don’t have a phone.”

“We could go to Mrs. Reddy’s and phone,” Duff suggested. “I’m sure she’d know a doctor.”

“At this hour of the night?”

“She’ll realize it’s an emergency,” I said. I ran to my room and put on a sweater and a pair of jeans.

“You’re not going out alone at this hour of the night,” Jack yelled.

“Franny can go with me. Put a coat on, Frances.”

“I’ll go too,” said Duff.

“No, stay with your father. Don’t let him move from that floor.”

“You’re not blaming me for what happened, are you?” Duff asked plaintively.

“Of course not.” I hugged him briefly and Franny and I ran out to the car.

Maybe this is where I should report that I never loved my husband. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even like him very much in the early days of our marriage.

He was a copywriter at Marks and Chapman, and I was a secretary to an account executive. I had never paid any particular attention to Jack (I was trying to captivate one of the agency artists at the time) but then we got chummy at an office Christmas party and went off in a taxi to a westside hotel.

A few weeks later, during which Jack asked me to lunch and dinner a number of times and I refused, I found I was pregnant. The next time he invited me to lunch I accepted and told him about my condition. He offered to marry me and after three martinis I accepted.

There just wasn’t any other answer, since an abortion was out of the question. I just couldn’t forget my Catholic upbringing that much, or my ethical convictions either. And I wasn’t about to go home to Hartford to my widowed mother, who was a pillar of her parish church and a great one, besides, for the old “I told you so” about the evils of the big city.

On the positive side, Jack was presentable, if not exactly handsome. He made good money and was on his way to making more, according to rest­room gossip. Of course he was as dull as a rusted butter knife, with few interests other than his work. He did have a certain competence as a copywriter, and an even greater one as an administrator, which Marks and Chapman soon recognized.

And so we were married and Duff was born seven months later. I used to wonder if he would someday find out the date of our wedding and compare it with his birth date. On the other hand, I suppose such things don’t matter to kids nowadays.

I tried to be a good wife, but I don’t think I ever reached the level of Jack’s hopes or even his expectations. I never cheated on him (maybe because no one attractive ever asked me) but I ignored him a lot. We never quarreled much, but we were never very friendly either. Then after his first heart attack, I began to feel guilty about it. I suppose that was the main reason I went along with the idea of the trip and then staying at the farm.

I was feeling particularly guilty that night as I drove to Mrs. Reddy’s. One additional thing that was nagging me was the fact that I had intended to leave a lamp lit at the bottom of the stairs and was too lazy to get up and attend to it when I remembered it later in bed. I confessed that to Franny.

“If anyone should be blamed it ought to be Duff,” she said. “If he hadn’t started yelling, the thing would never have happened.”

“He was dreaming. He couldn’t help it.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone dreaming while walking around.”

“Wasn’t he in bed?”

“Lord, no. He wasn’t even in his bedroom. He was in that big storage room where all the junk is, or at least that’s where he was coming from when I saw him.”

“He was walking in his sleep then.”

“He sure didn’t look like he was asleep, although he did seem frightened. Lord Almighty, I was certainly scared enough myself.”

“It was probably the result of his being in a strange bed, or maybe it was something he had for dinner.”

“We all ate the same things and none of the rest of us had nightmares,” said Franny.

We turned into the Weber drive. I was hoping that someone would still be up, but the house was dark. I rang the bell and when that didn’t bring an immediate response, pounded on the door. After a minute or two, a light came on and a man opened the door to the length of chain and peered out.

“I’m sorry to bother you at this time of night,” I said, “but my husband had an accident. I’m Mrs. Caine.”

“Caine?” For some reason that seemed to alarm him.

“We’re from New York. We’re staying at my husband’s family home.”

“Oh, yes. I was out in the barn when you came before.” He unloosed the chain and opened the door. He was stocky and balding, wearing pajamas.

“My husband fell and injured his leg. I’d like to use your phone to call a doctor.”

“Come in, come in.” He ushered us into the living room just as his wife came down the stairs, followed by Mrs. Reddy, both in their robes but seemingly wide awake.

“Mrs. Caine’s husband got hurt. She wants to call a doctor,” Emil Weber said.

“It’s his leg,” I said. “I think he may have dislocated something or maybe it’s broken.”

“I’ll call Dr. Fowler,” Mrs. Weber said. She went to the telephone stand in the corner, dialed and waited.

“That’s one thing we have here that I’ll bet you don’t have in New York,” said Mrs. Reddy. “A doctor who’s willing to come to your house at any time of the night.”

“It’s hard to find a doctor like that,” I agreed.

Dr. Fowler answered the call, seemingly almost immediately. Mrs. Weber identified me and then put me on the phone to describe Jack’s injury. I also mentioned his heart condition.

“Your husband almost certainly needs to be x-­rayed, and he may also need to be hospitalized for a while. I’ll be there in half an hour,” the doctor told me.

“Your man will get the best of care from Dr. Fowler,” said Mrs. Weber after I hung up. It seems to me now that she and her mother exchanged brief glances when I mentioned Duff’s nightmare, but I thought nothing of it at the time.

“And if your husband needs nursing, we’ve got a first-­class nurse right here in Stephanie,” said Mrs. Reddy.

Stephanie hadn’t impressed me very much, but at that time I didn’t think we’d have need of her services. I drove back to the Caine farm at a reckless speed, the more so since I wasn’t familiar with the curving, uneven road. Then Franny and I rushed into the house and found Jack, sitting on the floor now with his back against the wall, playing gin with Duff.

“You’d better start looking sicker before the doctor comes,” I said.

“The leg honestly doesn’t hurt as much as before,” Jack said. “It’s kind of numb now, although it hurts if I try to put any weight on it.”

Dr. Fowler arrived within ten minutes. He was a small, spry seventy or so, wearing an old-­fashioned white linen suit and glasses with a ribbon. He knelt and examined Jack’s leg quickly.

“Fractured coxa—broken hip,” he said laconically, then took a stethoscope from his bag and checked Jack’s heart. “Ticker’s OK, near as I can tell, but he’ll have to go to the hospital to have that hip repaired. Ashland is the nearest and it’s where I’m affiliated, not that that matters.”

“Couldn’t we take him back to a New York hospital?”

“You could, I suppose, but I wouldn’t—not if it was my hip.”

“How long will I need to be hospitalized?” Jack asked. He had turned paler, but he was trying to smile.

“Not too long, I should think, once the hip is reduced. We can get you into surgery and do that early on the schedule today.” He took a vial out of his bag and shook a few capsules into my hand. “Give him two of these with a glass of water. Now we need an ambulance and a stretcher.”

He said he would telephone for the ambulance from the Weber house. I went out to his car with him, wondering if he had any more alarming information to give me out of Jack’s hearing.

He didn’t. He assured me that he saw no reason for Jack’s not making a complete recovery from the accident.

“How soon can he go back to New York then?”

“I suppose he could go as soon as the bone is repaired and immobilized, if there’s a real necessity for his going.”

“I guess there’s no immediate necessity.”

“Maybe you think he can get better care in New York. I can guarantee you we have the most modern facilities here and, although I won’t know until I see the X rays, I think your husband’s fracture is a relatively uncomplicated one.”

“Well, whatever is best for him.”

“That’s the way to look at it. And I’ll be glad to consult by telephone with any New York medical man you like.”

He gave me a courtly bow and got in his car. Then he lowered the window and said, “If your son has any more trouble sleeping, give him a couple of those capsules.”

“He won’t have any more trouble,” I said. “Duff has always slept like a log.”

Dr. Fowler nodded and drove off. When I went back into the house, Jack had taken the medicine and within minutes he was feeling better. We all sat on the floor and played four-handed rummy until the ambulance came forty-­five minutes or so later.

The two attendants put Jack on the stretcher and carried him out, while I packed his toothbrush and shaving equipment. Then Franny got in the ambulance with her father and Duff and I followed in the Chevy to Ashland Hospital.

There Jack was whisked into a gown and onto a table and rolled down to the X-­ray room, where he spent about half an hour. Then he was brought back to a cheerful looking room and given some more medicine that put him to sleep almost immediately.

He was scheduled for surgery at eight o’clock and, at Dr. Fowler’s suggestion, the staff orthopedic surgeon was going to put a pin in his hip. The X rays had shown the fracture to be of such a nature that the cast could be a simple one, allowing him some degree of mobility on crutches. Also, a cardiologist would be checking Jack before the operation and would stand by during it. If he deemed it advisable, the cardiologist would get in touch with our Dr. Raphael in New York before anything was done to Jack.

So all seemed well, or as well as could be expected. I intended to stay at the hospital until after the surgery, but I saw no reason for Duff and Franny to lose a whole night’s sleep, even though they both pleaded to stay. I can still swear that I saw tears in Duff’s eyes then.

Even though he didn’t have a license, I felt that this was an emergency that justified his driving the car home. As I have indicated, I wasn’t concerned at all about his ability to handle the Chevy or even about his driving judgment. He had shown himself to be skillful as well as cautious behind the wheel.

As he and Franny got in the car I asked him, “What were you dreaming about anyway a while ago?”

He looked at me very seriously, his blue eyes, as always, seeming oversized behind his fairly thick glasses. “I thought I saw a crazy-­looking man on a horse,” he said. “He tried to ride over me.”

Franny laughed and I laughed and Duff drove away. On the way home—I learned much later—he tried to sexually molest his ten-­year-­old sister.