What will come of me
After the fern has feathered from my brain
“YET ONE MORE SPRING,” JOY DAVIDMAN
My eyelids felt as heavy as granite, and I lifted them as if pushing a rock up Shotover Hill. In blurred vision I saw white curtains and glimmering steel, and I squinted against the glare. Where was I? The bed was hard and small, the pillow flat beneath my head as I lay supine. Somewhere far off, or was it close by? There was metal clanging against metal and the whispered voices of the serious. Cotton gauze covered my thoughts, and my brain wouldn’t fire. Had I drunk too much? Was this a hangover?
Polished tile floors.
Fluorescent lights too bright.
I attempted to move, only slightly, when the pain arrowed from my hip in both directions—down my leg and across to my groin. An involuntary cry erupted, and I remembered everything in one flash: Kay and Austin squealing onto High Street to carry me to bed. Kay whispering that it was she who had been calling when I fell—a premonition that something was amiss. I’d had a fitful and harrowing night swallowing the leftover codeine from my dental work and never dulling the pain. At sunrise the ambulance was called and roared in to transport me to Wingfield Orthopaedic Hospital. The X-rays and needles, the crying out, and the blessed and blissful absence of pain when the medicine soared through my veins.
With my cry a nurse appeared, her white cap a swan in flight at Jack’s pond.
“Mrs. Gresham,” the nurse said quietly. “I see you’re awake.”
“Where is the doctor? I need to know what’s wrong.” My logical mind burst like a flash through the fog: Diagnose. Solve. Fix.
“You have a broken leg,” she said in the weirdly placid voice of one trying to keep a hysterical person calm.
“I know that part.” My voice was shattered, fragile as the remainder of me. Someone had plaited my hair into two braids, and they fell over my shoulders with white ribbons at the ends. I had never worn my hair this way, and the omen seemed morbid—I was no longer myself. The blanket over my left leg was tented, a metal cage below to keep the fabric from resting on the broken bones.
“Did I have surgery?” I asked.
“No, but the doctor will be in soon to speak with you.”
She inserted a syringe filled with golden fluid into my upper arm, and I did nothing but watch her push in the needle, a distracted observer waiting only for the relief. What did Jack say about pain? God’s megaphone to the world.
Well, God, I’m listening.
Then their names roared through my mind like twin lions: Davy. Douglas.
They were thirteen and eleven by then. Had anyone called them? Did they know I’d broken my leg? Where was Jack? Didn’t Kay call him at Cambridge?
I turned my head to the window that ran the full length of the wall. Outside shimmered the glorious idyllic autumn of England. The views weren’t any less beautiful than those from Jack’s rooms, as the hospital was on Oxford’s campus. The expansive green lawn, flowers crowding one another for attention, and roses so pink they seemed painted. But inside the room—metal and plastic, poles and sterile chairs of steel with the lingering stench of alcohol and vomit.
A great rustling came from the doorway, and my muddled thoughts wondered if they were bringing me a roommate. I turned my head slowly to see Jack rush through the door. He wore a wrinkled black suit; his tie was askew; his face was slack with fear.
“Jack!” My voice broke. I’d known it all along, but seeing him run through that door, his hair windblown, his eyes on me, I loved him as deeply as any man I’d known.
“Joy.” He came to my bedside and knelt, not taking avail of the chair. “You’re awake.”
“You’ve been here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said and reached beneath his spectacles to wipe at the tears that had risen in his own eyes. “I’ve been here.”
“You didn’t have to leave school . . .” My voice trailed off.
Jack rose and brought the chair to sit and face me. “Is there pain now?”
“The medicine the nurse just shot into my arm says no.” I tried to smile but could not. “What happened, Jack? I know I fell and then spent the night at home, but since they’ve brought me here . . .”
“You don’t remember?”
“On and off, like broken puzzle pieces. I know there was an X-ray machine, and medicines and hushed voices. So much fuss for a broken leg, Jack. Too much fuss. Let me get the plaster and go home.”
Outside came a great whoop of laughter from a group of students walking through the grass. Life was outside these walls and that window. I looked to Jack with a desperate plea. “I want to go home.”
“There’s news, Joy. The doctors have asked me if I’d like to keep it from you, but I cannot. Lies must not be told, not to you, not to anyone.”
Fear engulfed me in a toxic fog, closing my throat and filling my chest with that familiar wing-flapping anxiety. I reached for Jack’s hand and took it in mine, held to it as if to a life raft. “What is it?”
“They will come talk to you.”
“I want you to tell me, Jack. What do you know?”
“It’s either leukemia or another cancer.” The two diagnoses scattered about the room like dark dust, like evil.
“Not the real kind,” I said with some depth of understanding that there was no such thing as an “unreal” kind. “It’s rheumatism. That’s what they kept telling me. It’s fibrositis, they said.”
“They were wrong. Whatever it is, Joy, it’s in your leg.” Pain twisted Jack’s face. He held so fast to my hand that I did not want to tell him that it hurt. “The doctors say the X-rays show that your femur looks as though it has been eaten by moths.”
“Well then, maybe it has,” I said, but a sob broke free. “Maybe Old High Street has a moth epidemic and we don’t know and . . .”
Jack leaned close to me, wiped at my tears, and kissed me as gently as one can in a hospital bed. If I could have fallen out of that bed into his arms, I would have. If I could have dropped to my knees, I would have been on them already. Instead I clung to Jack, his hands tangled with mine. “No. It can’t be something so bad as that. Not now.”
He kissed me again and then, resting his hand gently on my cheek, said, “I can’t lose you, Joy. I love you so much. I’ve been such a fool, such a bloody fool. I should have been loving you and saying it every day for as long as I’ve known.”
“Jack . . .” My voice was quiet, as if I might scare away his confession. “You love me?”
“With all I am,” he said.
“Because I’m dying? Is this a consolation gift?” I wiped at his tears and then at mine.
“Joy, you are not dying. And even if you are, this love has been here all along. Sometimes it takes a great shake from God to awake me from my insolence, to make me admit feelings that exist.”
“Pain,” I said and closed my eyes. “God’s megaphone.”
Tears were in the corners of his soft and full lips, and he kissed me again. I tasted his grief as he spoke, his breath then whispering in my ear. “Who knows when friendship crosses that borderland into love, but it has. Long ago it had, but it’s just now that I can give words to the truth.”
He lifted his head, and I touched his cheek. “I’ve loved you for so long, Jack. And here I am at my worst and you proclaim your love? God does work in mysterious ways.” I kissed him again and tasted the tobacco, the warmth.
“At your worst?” He shook his head and his spectacles fell from his face, landed on the worn cream blanket covering my diseased body. “You are beautiful to me, Joy. You are all that is beautiful.” He tucked a stray hair back from my face. “All of my life I have thought of love in a literary sense, part of a story or fairy tale. But love is really true; I know that now. Eros—I haven’t loved completely until now. I know that.” His voice held the truth of every word spoken, a man broken by death’s threat.
“Oh, Jack,” I said, tears clogging my voice. “I haven’t stopped loving you for one minute. Even when you told me not to, when you told me to accept philia, when you told me you loved blondes.” I laughed and he did too, an absurd humor in a room smoked with fear.
Jack rested his cheek against mine. “I’ve kept you close, needing you as air and water, as garden and forest even while I told you no. When you aren’t with me, I think of you. When you are gone, I miss you. I’ve been a tosser, keeping you near and yet pushing you away. You’ve become the other part of me. You’re the very first person I want to share a thought or a moment with. Oh, the fool I’ve been.”
He dropped his head onto my chest, and I placed my hand in his thinning hair, ran my fingers across his neck and then his shoulders under his shirt, felt the skin of the man I loved. “How can a woman be happy and fearful in one same moment?” I asked. “I have dreamed of us in this way for all these years. Here I am at my most ugly and there you are, loving me.”
He lifted his face and smiled at me. That grin that had caught me at the Eastgate, the one he gave when I told a great joke or edited a mangled line or quoted a poem from memory or beat him at Scrabble with a Greek word he’d forgotten.
“Is it the pain meds?” I asked with a laugh.
He kissed me again. “Everything I’ve written since the day you walked into Eastgate has been tangled with you. How could I have not seen it at all?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s now,” I said. “You see now.”
Then his face changed; the seriousness was etched in every line. “Let me get the doctor for you, Joy. We have so many decisions.”
“For just a few moments, before we hear the death knell they might bring. Will you just hold me?” I paused. “Do you remember the poem I wrote, the poem I wrote when I was young and healthy? ‘What will come of me; After the fern has feathered from my brain . . .’” I trailed off. “It was about my death, which seemed impossible, merely a concept.”
“‘Yet One More Spring.’ I remember.” He pressed both his warm palms onto the top of my head as the door swished open and two doctors entered with clipboards and stern expressions. “You will have many more springs . . . many . . .”
Jack lifted his hands, and I asked him without yet looking to the doctors, “My sons. Have they been told?”
“Not yet. I’ve sent for them. They’ll arrive on the train tomorrow, and I’ll collect them from the station and bring them here.”
“Warnie?”
“Yes, and he’s devastated. He loves you too. He could not even accompany me here; he returned to the Kilns.”
The doctors shifted their weight, but I kept my eyes fixed on Jack. “When can I go home?”
“There’s no going home to Old High Street, Joy. You’ll be here for a long while, and then you are coming home with me. I’ll never be apart from you again.”
The first doctor stepped up then, and the long litany of my ills began.
It could be leukemia, but they believed it was another cancer, and that it had spread. My left leg bones were dust, and there was a lump in my left breast. There would be surgeries, and if cancer, then radiation.
“It’s a dire diagnosis,” the second doctor said. “If it’s breast cancer, as I believe, then it has gone undetected for far too long.”
“I’ve been to the doctor,” I said. “I’ve been telling them how tired I am, how unremittingly tired I am. I’ve told them about the lump in my breast. About my heart doing funny jumps. About the pains in my bones. About my nausea. They said it was middle age and stress.” Anger prodded my body to attempt to sit, but a great pain exploded, down my leg, up my side. “I told them,” I wailed.
“How long has it been there? The lump. How long?” Doctor One looked at Doctor Two.
“At least seven years. I told my doctors in America about it, and then again Dr. Harvey here.”
I looked to Jack, desperate to turn back time, to have someone tell me to take out the ticking time bomb in my breast. “Remember when I told Humphrey about it? At dinner that night? And he too said it was nothing to worry about. And then the eight doctors who prodded me in London and told me again that it was my thyroid. It can’t be cancer. They would have known then.”
“We can’t change that,” Doctor One said. “But we can do everything to treat it now.”
“How?”
The list was egregious—leg surgery, removal of the ovaries, breast surgery, radiation. Rehabilitation. Months and months of it all, unless of course I died in the middle of the torture meant to save me.
When the room was empty, the doctors departed, and Jack gone to check on Warnie and bring me some things from home, I turned my thoughts to Jack and his pain, as mine was numbed by medicine. He had lost his mother in this same way, the greatest grief of his life buried fathoms deep in his psyche. All his life he’d avoided looking directly at that great anguish, and here I lay, making him relive it. Was it the reason he’d hesitated to love from the very beginning—the ghost of loss looming behind us, a menace of death?
“God,” I said out loud to the empty room, “how could you be so cruel to those you love? You demand too much of us.” I closed my eyes, and my weeping was silent as I allowed the knowledge to wash over me.
Jack loved me.
And I was dying.