FOR FOUR DAYS NOW, Lizzie has been sleeping alone in the house by the cove, waiting for word that Belle Prokoff can come home. When she wakes in the night, in her narrow bed in the guestroom, the silence is so dense she feels as though she has fallen out of time. In daylight, it is the smell of wood she notices most, and the uncluttered spaces. It is a house startlingly empty of machines — no computers, blenders, telephone answering devices; there is not even a television, only a portable radio perched on the deal table in the living room and another in the kitchen. She is ashamed of the Apple she brought from the city, with its nasty plastic smell, its bleeps and red lights, and relegates it to the back of the closet.
“Maybe tomorrow,” the doctors tell her every morning, and so she hangs on, scrupulously refraining from rolling back the lid of the ancient desk or rifling through the closets or in any way behaving like the snoop she longs to be. On the landing at the top of the stairs is a portrait of a frowning young woman, executed in large fierce brushstrokes. Her face is mostly swirls of color, with an eye roughly blocked in that somehow adds to her look of scorn; she is wearing a red dress and holding a paintbrush. Lizzie has checked the signature, a faint BP in the lower right-hand corner, and always stops to stare at it on her way upstairs. Sometimes, lingering in the hallway, she imagines opening the drawers of the weathered oak dresser under Belle’s bedroom window and finding a whole cache of love letters tied with silk ribbon, or old photographs of Belle and Clay Madden walking hand in hand. But she will not permit herself to hunt for them.
Anyway, during the day, Nina is there to preserve her from sin. Lizzie is convinced that Nina doesn’t have to try to be good, she simply is good. The very planes of her face, her gray eyes, even her shining dark hair, austerely parted and falling smoothly to her shoulders, seem to signify a serenity that radiates from within. Lizzie is half in love with her already, though her efforts at conversation keep petering out. Nina concentrates on household chores with a gravity, a singleness of attention, that could equally be applied to prayer.
Finally, on the fifth day, the doctor says “Tomorrow” instead of “Maybe tomorrow,” and Nina begins chopping up soup greens and baking pumpernickel rolls; she sets up the special toilet seat, with the raised platform and the supporting bars, and makes a final adjustment to the hospital bed that has been installed in the dining room, cranking its levers and tucking in the blankets. Lizzie, trying to do her share, goes to the kitchen to clean the red saucepan that held the soup and scratches its enamel with steel wool. Nina assures her that it does not matter, though she looks a little sad.
The next morning, before they leave, Lizzie stands watching Nina plump up the pillows on the red velvet couch and arrange them in a heap at the corner.
“Is that how she likes them?” she asks anxiously.
“Oh, no,” Nina says. “I just do it for myself. She doesn’t notice one way or another, she’s got her mind on higher things. I’m just going to pick some flowers, and after that we can go. That’s one thing she does care about, having flowers around, and planning the garden. We have big discussions about border plantings.” It is the longest speech Lizzie has heard her make.
“I don’t even know what border plantings are.”
“But you probably know about the higher things. You can talk to her about them.”
“Well, you’ve certainly gotten yourself into a mess,” Belle says derisively that evening, when she and Lizzie are alone.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not exactly the job you signed on for, is it? Playing nurse to a bedridden old woman.”
She is ensconced in the hospital bed downstairs, where Lizzie and Nina installed her before Nina left for the night. It was Nina, however, at Belle’s request, who helped her to undress, while Lizzie was shooed out into the kitchen.
“I don’t mind,” Lizzie says, conscious of the feebleness of this response. “And anyway it’s mostly just bruises. You’ll be fine in a week or two. They said so.”
“Hand me one of those yellow pills. I may be fine in a week or so. Or I may have a blood clot in my brain. That can happen with concussions. And I’m old, I’m not going to heal the way you would. I’m just telling you to think it over. It’s going to be extremely boring at best, and it could be a lot worse. I won’t blame you if you decide to go.”
“But then who’ll look after you?”
“Some sort of nurse, I suppose. Don’t imagine you’re indispensable. You don’t even look strong enough to be any good to me. What happens if I have to go to the bathroom in the night?”
“Nina bought a bedpan.”
“You weren’t hired to empty bedpans,” Belle snaps. Lizzie remembers Paul saying the very same thing, and blushes.
“I don’t mind,” she says again, more staunchly this time. “Really, it’s no good thinking about it now, anyway. We might as well see how it works out.”
“All right. But you look like the squeamish type to me. I don’t want you playing martyr. You can leave any time you want. No hard feelings, no reproaches. And I’ll pay you two weeks’ wages. What have you been doing with yourself for the past few days?”
“I read a lot,” Lizzie says. “I joined the library in town. And I went for walks along the beach.”
“Would you like me to get you a television?”
“No, honestly. I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I have no objections to them myself, it’s just that I never acquired the habit of watching. So you really didn’t miss the city?”
“Not a bit.”
“You must be a different breed from me, then. I hated it here when we first moved out. Especially the quiet. It was like something out of a horror movie, right before the guy comes up the steps with the ax and murders them all. I even missed the noise of the buses outside my window. But you probably didn’t grow up in a city.”
“No.”
“You’re not very forthcoming. If we’re going to live together we might as well talk to each other. So where did you grow up?”
“In Fairfield,” Lizzie says, and Belle laughs.
“What’s so funny?”
“I knew it was Connecticut. Were you rich?”
“Not really rich, just sort of comfortable, you know? I mean, where money wasn’t a worry.”
“And what was a worry?”
Lizzie hesitates; only the sneer about Connecticut makes her say what comes next.
“My mother was knocked down by a car when I was fourteen, and she never really recovered. They kept operating on her, and trying different medicines, but so many different parts of her brain had been damaged the doctors never knew what would go wrong next. Sometimes she’d see double, or she’d lose her balance suddenly, or her speech would be fine one minute and slurred the next. And then she started bleeding into her brain, and she died.” It is the first time she has told this story so flatly, with dry eyes, or failed in the telling to say how gallant her mother was, how she made a joke of things until almost the end. She feels ashamed, as though she’s been showing off, trying to prove to Belle that she too knows something about suffering.
“I’m sorry,” Belle says.
“It’s all right.”
“Of course it’s not all right … What about that man who was with you in my hospital room?”
“Oh, God, you saw him.”
“Why shouldn’t I have seen him? He was right by my bed. So who is he?”
“A painter.”
“Ah. I remember now. You accused him of only wanting to see me because of Madden. Not the first time that’s happened, but thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“He had an accent, didn’t he?”
“He’s Australian.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met an Australian painter. So did you take him to the studio while he was here?”
“Yes. He drove me out that afternoon, you see, to start work, and the house was empty, and then we went next door and your neighbor said you’d been taken to the hospital. So I got him to drop me off there, but then he came upstairs. I didn’t mean him to.”
“Did you take him to the studio before or after you came to the hospital?”
“After … why?”
“I’m trying to reconstruct events. I’m interested in your character, since it seems I’ll need to rely on you. Tell me about your course at Columbia. You can’t just be studying the art of the nineteen forties.”
“I’m mostly doing English literature, actually. With a specialty in the nineteenth century.”
Belle gives her a sharp look. “I thought you came here to interview me about a thesis on art history.”
“I know … that was Heather, really. I just sort of came along to keep her company.”
“So you deceived me.”
Lizzie bows her head; she wonders if she should explain about Paul and Clay Madden, but lacks the nerve.
“Never mind. How do you get along with Nina?”
“I think she’s wonderful.”
“Good. Well, if you’re going to stay here for a while, you might as well invite your Australian for a weekend. That should keep you from getting bored.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Lizzie says primly, and then the phone rings; she jumps up and hurries through the open doors into the living room.
“Take a message. Say I’m fine and take a message.”
“Prokoff residence,” she says, as she has been saying all day. Since Belle got back, the phone has rung a dozen times — someone from the Guggenheim, from the Walker Art Center, the Rose Museum at Brandeis, several galleries in New York; none of the callers, Lizzie notes, identifies herself through name alone, but always by affiliation. Belle has directed her to take down their numbers and say she will get back to them when she is well enough.
“May I then speak to Miss Prokoff?” a man says irritably.
“I’m sorry she can’t come to the phone right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because she can’t get out of bed.”
“Is that Nina?”
“No, it’s Lizzie.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m the graduate student Miss Prokoff hired to help out for the summer.”
“Right … then kindly tell me how she is.”
“Who the hell is it?” Belle calls out.
“May I tell Miss Prokoff who’s speaking?”
“You may. It’s Ernest. Ask her when she’s going to get a phone by her bed, for God’s sake.”
“It’s Ernest. He wants to know when you’re going to get a phone by your bed.”
“Tell him I’ll think about it. Say I’ll phone him as soon as I can.”
She relays this message to Ernest, but he persists. “What precisely is her condition?”
“She’s just bruised her spine, that’s all, and her hip. And had a concussion. Nothing is broken except a rib.”
“I know that, young lady. I’ve been phoning the hospital twice a day. I mean what is her precise condition as of this moment?”
“She’s in bed,” Lizzie says desperately.
“You told me that already. Is she fully conscious? Is she in pain? Can she move?”
“She can move, but it’s very hard for her.”
“Thank you, that was most informative,” Ernest says, and hangs up.
“My God,” Lizzie says, returning to Belle’s side. “What a mean man.”
“He’s one of my dearest friends,” Belle says. “He’s kept me sane for years. Give me another yellow pill; this one isn’t working.”
“You only took it a few minutes ago.”
“None of them work,” Belle says, grimacing. “What day is it today?”
“The eleventh.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s my wedding anniversary. My forty-first. Imagine that.” She looks mockingly at Lizzie, raising an eyebrow.
“Did you get married out here?” Lizzie asks timidly, that being the most neutral question she can think of.
“No, we got married in one of those poky little towns on the Hudson. A place called Ardsley.”
“Was that where your parents lived?”
Belle laughs. “No, it was where I found someone who would marry us. He wanted to get married in a church, but I was a Jew and he hadn’t been to church in fifteen years, so they all said no. Then a Unitarian minister in Ardsley said he’d do it, so we took the train up there.”
“Just the two of you?”
Belle looks at her suspiciously. “Why are you asking these questions?”
“I’m trying to imagine what it was like.”
“You can’t. It was such a different time. There was a war on. And even people were different then.” Her voice is suddenly groggy as though the pill might be kicking in after all. A minute later her head droops onto her chest; Lizzie is about to tiptoe out when Belle speaks again, her words slurring together.
“The minister looked like Ichabod Crane … I kept looking at his nose, thinking, This can’t count, this isn’t a real marriage. But he was a good man, very good … you can’t… and then a dog followed us to the station, a little collie, he was afraid it wouldn’t find its way back. The woman was tending the graves behind the church, she came in to be our witness, she brushed the dirt off her hands. Afterwards he told us always … always to forgive each other … do you see. Do you, Belle … I felt like I was confessing to a crime. Do you, Belle, take this man …”
Her voice trails off. Lizzie imagines her standing very straight, shoulders flung back, jaw thrust forward: Do you, Belle … do you, Belle, take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? Yes I do.