The new apartment was complete a month or more before the wedding and Ned had officially moved in. Most of the time, Claire stayed there with him, too. She was perfectly aware that Jessie knew. They simply didn’t talk about it.
With a certain amount of reverse snobbism, or perhaps only to be different from her mother, Claire had always liked to say that she cared not a whit for things. Yet now, because these particular things were really her own, she liked to walk around touching them or just to look at them in the light that poured from the afternoon sky when the curtains were drawn back. Many of these new possessions were actually old: her grandfather’s leather set of Thackeray and Trollope, brought from Europe long before the century had turned and handed over with appropriate ceremony by her father; the blue-and-white quilt made by Grandmother Farrell that Aunt Alice had generously parted with for Claire; a lacquered Chinese chest that Jessie had been saving for a client, but had given to her when she saw that of all the objects in the shop, it was the single one that Claire really wanted.
Then of course there was a bed, the center, the heart of the new home. They had bought it together after days of searching: an outsized Victorian relic, large enough to make babies in blissful comfort and later to nurse them and play with them on winter Sunday mornings. They liked to fantasize.
“We used to think our parents’ bed was a ship or a castle,” Ned had told her. “Those shadowy halls could be a forest or an ocean full of scary things, and we’d run through them as fast as we could and pounce on that safe bed in the lamplight.”
Except for the children, Claire thought, there hadn’t been much joy in that bed. Not much joy anywhere for Mary Fern.
Ned’s key turned in the lock, and he came in looking, now that he had given up the umbrella and the bowler, like any prosperous, young American coming home from work. He hadn’t expected her so early, and she was pleased to surprise him.
She laughed, “You’re the only person whose face wreathes in smiles. I always thought that such a silly description, but you know, your face does wear a smile like a wreath. A conquering hero’s wreath.”
“Idiot,” he said, kissing her.
“I’ve brought stuff to eat, sandwiches from that great deli down the block. And Mother’s cook made a cake. I snitched it because Mother’s up in Vermont and there’s nobody at home to eat it.”
“When you said ‘stuff to eat,’ I thought you meant you’d cooked a dinner.”
“Heavens, no! I can’t cook, Ned. That’s one thing I never fooled you about. But I will learn. As soon as I’ve more time, I’ll really learn.” She had set the table in the kitchenette, and now she put out the food. “Here’s potato salad, here’s cole slaw, a French bread and a beautiful melon.”
“Leave that a minute and sit down. I want to tell you something,” Ned commanded. He sounded so serious that she turned at once from the refrigerator, but his eyes were smiling with excitement.
“There’s another silly expression that fits you. ‘His eyes danced.’ Isn’t that ridiculous? Have you ever seen eyes dance? I never have except for yours. They’re dancing right now.”
He grasped her hand and pulled her down. “Listen. Listen. Anderson called me in today and said we were going to the president’s office. For a minute, I got cold. Jergen never sees anybody. I didn’t think he even knew me except maybe from seeing me in the elevator or the men’s room. No, not even the men’s room—he has his own. But as we were walking down the hall, Anderson told me what it was about. They’re reorganizing the offices in Hong Kong. The operation there has been falling way behind and the top man is due for retirement anyway. So Jergen asked Anderson to make a recommendation, and—and, Claire, I’m it! I’m the one!”
Claire put her sandwich back on the plate. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“Me! Us! I’m to be head of the office! We’re going to live in Hong Kong! They know we’re being married and they were very nice about a honeymoon and all that, so we won’t have to be there until September first. Also, of course, they’ll pay for moving our stuff. What do you think of that?” And he sat back with his face wreathed in smiles and his eyes dancing.
She was perfectly sane and she had heard it all correctly. Still, the thing was totally unreal.
“I know it’s a shock. Here we were settled with a fine view of the East River, and instead we’ll be on the other side of the world with a view of the junks in Hong Kong Harbor.”
Claire wet her lips. Then she took a swallow of water. “But aren’t you forgetting something? I’ve got one of the most desirable internships in the world here at Fisk and a Fisk neurological residency next year. So this can’t make any sense to me, Ned.”
“Darling, I know it must be awfully upsetting to you. Anything as totally unexpected and sudden as this—I know.” He put his arms around her, his safe arms. She laid her head on his shoulder. Then she remembered something.
“You talked about writing. You used to dream about being an investigating journalist, probing in hidden places, exposing wrongs, you said.”
“Yes, I know, that was all very fine, but I’ve come up against hard facts and the hard facts are that you have to seize your opportunities. And this is my opportunity. A bird in the hand, as the saying goes. Darling, I’m sorry. So sorry to be confusing things like this for you when you’ve been so efficient, working so hard and still managing to get this apartment together and … and just doing the work of two people. I’m just damned sorry to do this to you.”
“Well then, do you have to?”
“A man wants to get ahead, Claire.” Ned spoke softly. “A man needs to. I want you to depend on me. That’s what being a man is all about.”
She drew away. Depend on him? Yes surely, in a way, but—
“Can’t we just rearrange our thinking and look at this as a great adventure?”
“ ‘Our’ thinking? I’m the one who is being asked to give up—”
Now Ned interrupted, “I’m not asking you to give anything up, Claire. We won’t be there forever, because I most certainly don’t intend to live in the Orient for the rest of my life, and anyway, that’s not what they plan. I’m sure we’ll be transferred. In fact, Anderson said, speaking unofficially, of course, it wouldn’t be more than four or five years.”
“Four or five years!”
“Yes. And you’d still be young enough to begin a residency then. Your father would get one for you. We’d have a lot of money saved up, too,” he said enthusiastically. “There’s extra pay for working overseas, you know.”
He didn’t see that she was devastated. There’d been a photo in the paper that morning of a woman who had come home to find her house burned down. All day that anguished face had kept rising in front of Claire’s eyes. And now her own face must be looking like that … But Ned was sitting there, looking as fresh as he always managed to look after a day’s work, not perceiving her at all.
He reached out to unwrap a sandwich.
“You must be crazy,” she said.
“Crazy?” he repeated mildly. It took a good deal, she knew, to ruffle him, and this steadiness, this calmness in storm, was a quality she had cherished in him. “Crazy?” he said, and this time he sounded hurt. “I thought you’d be thrilled for me. I don’t think you know how unusual this is. I’m the youngest man ever to head a foreign office for the firm, and I’m new on the job to boot.”
“Oh,” she cried, “oh, Ned, of course I know! I’m terribly proud of you.” Actually she hadn’t thought about it until just now. “I do see what a fabulous honor it is, I really do!”
“It’s more than an honor. I’ll be earning thirty-five thousand a year, plus all the extras!”
“It’s wonderful, of course it is! But what about me? I can’t just table my work, can I? I can’t just put it aside for a while and pick it up again sometime later when it’s more convenient, can I?”
“You could.” He spoke gently. “I know it’s not the ideal way, but it’s not impossible, especially in these circumstances.”
Dumbfounded, she made no answer. And he went on, “After all, you’re not a man. You don’t have to get through with it was fast as possible to earn a living.”
“Earn a living!” she cried now. “That’s not what it’s all about for me! I thought you understood me better than that! Medicine is all I ever wanted. Ned! It’s my—my life!”
“I do understand you. You know I do. And yet I thought I was your life. Your love and your life.”
Claire got up from the chair and leaned against the refrigerator. The hard slick metal cooled her burning shoulders and back. “Oh God!” she said, closing her eyes. When she opened them, he was staring at her. He looked frightened. She tried to speak very quietly now, with seemly control. “What I mean is, we can’t, we mustn’t lose contact with each other over this. You see—oh, I don’t want to sound conceited, but perhaps you don’t know how hard it is, don’t understand that this residency is an—an achievment. And it wasn’t my father’s name that did it. It was my own record. Dr. Macy’s daughter was turned down, and—and others were, and it’s not something I can possibly walk away from and begin over in five years.” She went suddenly weak. “Five years, Ned! Five years out of my life! I would never go back, and in your heart you must know it.”
“You could if you wanted to.”
She couldn’t answer. It occurred to her that the little supper, the fruit, the iced tea and the sandwiches looked pathetic, lying untouched on the table, waiting and wasted as she would wait and waste.
“If I don’t accept, I’ll stay an underling in the firm. Once you refuse a thing like this, they never offer you anything worthwhile again, don’t you understand?”
She did understand; that was the hard part of it. She knew it meant a harsh, continual struggle to survive out there in the world.
“My father left no great legacy, Claire. I’ve got to make it on my own.”
“I know you do.”
“I have a feel for this work. At any rate, it’s what I’ve got my start in and I can’t very well become a—a lawyer or a civil engineer, for Heaven’s sake, can I?”
“No.”
“And I like the work. Naturally, people like what they do well. But it’s really incredible to be paid so much for doing what you like—putting together words that can change people’s minds.”
“I see.”
“You get a feeling of power. Strength and power in a worldwide enterprise.” “I see.”
There was silence. Lowering her eyes to the floor, she studied their feet: Ned’s still in his good English shoes, russet with a fine gloss; hers in the summer sandals she had put on when she came home. They were careless, happy shoes made for running on grass or sitting beside a pool with a drink in hand. Her thoughts ran at this odd tangent. Then she raised her eyes.
“What shall we do?”
He stood up and strode into the living room as if the kitchenette were too confined for his feelings. Two or three times he walked the length of the room. She understood by the pounding of his feet that frustration was turning into anger. The he turned upon her. It came to her that she had never before seen his anger.
“How can you ask what we shall do! I’ve been trying my best to explain! How can there be any question? We’ll go where I can carve out a future for ourselves. It’s the man who supports the family, after all.”
“Not always, Ned.”
“Well, it’s still the pattern. The primary income is the man’s.”
“That will change. It’s changing now. Why am I not entitled to use my energy and brain as much as you are? Tell me, why?”
“Listen, Claire, I don’t want to get into an abstract argument. Sometimes, though, I wonder whether your mother really gave you the best example.”
“Ill say she did!”
“Not if this is the result.”
At ten-thirty they agreed to stop wrangling and went to bed. Exhausted, Claire fell immediately asleep but in the middle of the night woke up. The wind was blowing the shade. It was snapping, as if it were angry, which was absurd; but still it seemed as if the world were threatening at the window. She got up to close it and went back to bed and lay there thinking. She thought about all the hundreds of millions of men who had been born and died and will be born and die, so many transient little lives, each lifting its tiny head above the mass of the rest, each seeking out one other tiny body to cling to. With such fierce, tiny strength, they were drawn to one another as the magnet pulls toward the north. Why just this man, this woman, and no other?
I want a fabric to be woven between us, a strong, unbroken tissue, unblemished from beginning to end, not like Martin or Jessie or Alex and Mary.
Ned moved, making a sound like a mutter or a sigh. His dream was troubling him. What was his dream? She reached out her hand to wake him, to say, “Oh Ned, my dear and darling, what shall we do? Don’t leave me!” But thinking then it would be cruel to wake him from merciful sleep, she drew her hand away.
“What does he think?” Martin cried. “That medical training is something you put down and take up like a piece of knitting, as simply as that?” And she knew he was thinking: My girl, my brilliant girl, after your grades, your record, your potential, and you’re to give it all up so he can go off to an advertising job? An advertising job, compared with medicine?
“He could get a job elsewhere, after all,” Martin said more calmly. “Inconvenient, perhaps, but not impossible.”
“That’s exactly what Ned said about me.”
“Well, it’s entirely different, and I’m astonished that he doesn’t see it.”
“Dad, don’t turn your anger against Ned. Help us. Advise us. We’ve spent three days talking, and I don’t know how to solve it.” She wiped her eyes roughly. “I don’t want to cry. You know I hate crying.”
“Yes. Yes, you’re between a rock and a hard place, as my father used to say.” Martin sighed. “Sometimes I think we doctors ought to be like priests: don’t marry and don’t have children. When there’s no one you love and have to care about, then you can do what you want. Nothing can hurt you.”
“Well, we’re not priests, are we?” And she thought as she pressed him, of all the secret things written inside us, as on a scroll, unrolling back and back.
“Ah, you know in what direction my hopes lie! You’re my own and I want so much for you. How can I think clearly, fairly? For you I want the world and all that’s in it’ ”
“Then you don’t know how to solve this,” she murmured.
“You will have regrets either way—how I wish I could spare you!” he said gently. “Only remember that you’re not alone. I’m here, for what I’m worth.”
She thought: All of a sudden he looks the way he will look twenty years from now. He raised his eyes to hers. She thought she had never seen eyes of such soft, penetrating sadness.
The argument had gone into the second hour of the fourth day. “Machismo, Ned,” Claire cried. “That’s what it is! You have to play the dominant male to show you’re not like your father.”
“That’s a Goddamned rotten thing to say!” Ned cried.
She was instantly contrite. “I know it. I apologize. I didn’t mean it that way. But you are being a heavy male, you really are.”
“When you break free of your father and his ambitions for you, maybe you’ll grow up and be a woman,” he said coldly.
She was furious. “Maybe one day you’ll learn there’s more to being a woman than just taking care of a man.”
Don’t dodge the issue. Ever since I came to New York I’ve seen and thought—I haven’t spoken out but I’m going to now—you’re letting your father plan your life! How do you even know you wanted to be a neurosurgeon? He decided it for you when you were some sort of a child prodigy and now you—”
“You’re crazy! Nobody ever said I was a prodigy. Don’t make a fool out of me! Putting words in my mouth, or my father’s!”
The air quivered between them with the intensity of a summer storm.
“I’m going for a walk,” Ned said. “I need to get out Maybe it will clear out thoughts, being quiet for a while.”
She heard the elevator door clash open, followed by the whir of its descent. “Whither thou goest,” and so forth. Ought she not go to the ends of the earth with him? Had she not come from a long line of women who had done just that, following their men across oceans, bravely leaving home and parents, all the dear, familiar places? “Whither thou goest …” Yes, but women were different then, and I am different; certainly not better, only different I am a doctor first. Secondarily, I happen to have female organs. Why should I be controlled by a uterus and a pair of ovaries? Why should these make all the difference?
Maybe, maybe, he will come back from the walk with another point of view. Maybe he will come to an understanding of what I mean. You love a man, and suddenly you’re fighting. He turns into a stranger.
She got up and put a record on the player. This need for music, this, too, was a legacy from her father. Laying her head back, she willed herself into another place and time, while Respighi’s “Birds” rustled in Rome’s cypresses. Thousands of birds fluttered and wheeled against a background of triumpant Sunday bells. The birds filled her head. Most living of all living things, so free, whirling and beating through the windy sky! So free!
The door opened and Ned came back. He turned the record off.
“We’ve talked it all out,” he said, not looking at her. “We’ve gone as far, I think, as words can take us. So for the last time I ask you. Have you changed your mind? Will you come with me?”
She took a deep breath. “No, Ned. I can’t.”
His face was closed up tight, like faces at funerals. Who knows what regrets and terrors lie behind the faces you see at funerals?
“You see,” she said, “I have to do what I have to do.”
He looked at her. “Well, that’s it, then isn’t it? I suppose it has to be. I’ll take my things in the morning when you’re out. It will be easier that way.”
“Yes,” she said.
Once she had been standing on a sidewalk where a dreadful accident had happened in the street. Someone had been run over. She’d had the same sense of unreality then, queer and remote as voices heard across water or snow.
“Well,” he said and stopped. He opened his mouth again to speak and closed it without another word and went out. Again she heard the clash of the door and the whir of the elevator as he went down. But this time was the last. And silence fell.
The apartment looked abandoned although, two months after Ned’s departure, Claire was still living there. The cleaning woman had been in, leaving fresh towels in the bathroom and the morning paper on the coffee table. It was cold in the room, even though on the street below heat blasted yellow-hot as if from an untended furnace. She turned down the air conditioner and sat huddled, shivering and swaying. I must look old, she thought. Bitter old, and as desolate as I feel.
For almost a month now, she had known she was pregnant. And she sat with her secret knowledge, looking around the room as though in some corner of a cabinet or shelf lay an answer to her questions.
A closet door had been left ajar, and on the top shelf she saw a forgotten hat, that crushable Irish country hat which he had worn in England and brought with him when he came here. He had come here to be with her. That hat looked sad. In Hong Kong now he would be wearing a panama hat, wouldn’t he? Or maybe one of those tropical topees? Or did they only wear those in India? He would be wearing a white suit and drinking a gin sling in a garden, or else in some cool room where a ceiling fan turned slowly. No, that was Somerset Maugham in Singapore, half a century ago. In Hong Kong he would be in an air-conditioned room like this one, fourteen floors above the street. Would he be working late and thinking of Claire?
My nerves, she thought. Good God, my nerves! I’m a moth beating and bumping on a windowpane, trying to get out. Get out where?
Feeling ice-cold, she ran a tubful of hot water. But her shoulders and knees, protruding from the water, were still cold. And she wondered whether the creature inside her, the tiny, fishlike thing, could feel the cold. Some said it wasn’t really alive yet, but of course it was. There might even be a way in which it could sense the misery in its mother. Who really knew? It sleeps. It rocks in the warm pool and already contains within itself all that it will ever be: a cherub with curled lashes and a cleft in its chin like its father’s; a fleet running boy; a timid, good girl with large feet. To destroy these possibilities? Yet, to be a child without a father?
She got out of the tub and dressed herself, then began to cry. A tabloid writer would describe “heart-rending cries,” she thought disgustedly. I’m sick of tears. But the truth was that they were heart-rending. My heart is rent. I hope they can’t hear in the apartment below because I can’t stop. She slid to the floor and knelt with her face on the seat of the chair. I’m crying for everything. Why have I spoiled everything? Why has he spoiled everything? Damn him! Still, there’s nothing else I could have done. And now, this baby—
Think! Don’t let tears and fears carry you downhill! Fear rides a toboggan over the ice; once it slips past the brim of the hill, it can’t stop. So hold on, Claire, hold on.
Across the park in the heart of the city there waits a man with an expert knife, a skilled and sterile knife that can solve the problem, that can destroy or save, whichever way you care to regard it. Sub rosa he works, but he is well recommended. Doctors send their wives and their mistresses to him. Medical students send their friends.
Nevertheless, fear followed at her back. It pursued her into a waiting room which was no different from a dentist’s, with an etching of the Cologne Cathedral and a neglected sansevieria in green pot. It reminded her of those places where you take a crucial examination, where a pencil sharpener grinds, a proctor assembles a pile of blue books, and their crisp rustle tells you it is too late to run away and claim to be sick. Too late.
“Mrs. Blake,” the nurse called. For a moment she forgot that was the name she had given, so that the nurse had to repeat it. All heads in the room turned to Claire as she rose. They were all scared. And they all knew that was not her name.
It was done with extraordinay speed.
“Well, that wasn’t too bad, now, was it?” the doctor said.
He was three-quarters of the way out of the door. He hadn’t spoken a word up till then.
“No, it wasn’t,” Claire said, unclenching her teeth. Actually, the pain had been quite bearable. She remembered the sound of scraping and willed herself not to think of it.
“You can go home now,” the nurse told her.
“Can I do anything?”
“Well, I wouldn’t suggest a ten-mile hike. Rest today and take it easy for the next few days, that’s all.”
Heads went up again when she came out into the waiting room. She felt so sorry for them all. She wanted to say: Don’t be afraid, it’s not so bad. A young girl sat there, a child no more than fourteen. A couple sat there; they were no longer young. He was shabby in a crumpled summer suit. Probably they already had more children than they could afford. She felt so sorry for them all.
Out on the sidewalk she stood hesitating. Suddenly she didn’t want to go back to her apartment alone, which surprised her, for she had imagined herself, when this was over, going back to her own place and quietly resting, pulling herself together, not so much in body as in mind.
Mother was still in Vermont. She decided to go to her father’s. Having overcome his dread of water, he had rented a summer house again near a beach. She hailed a taxi and drove to Grand Central.
There was no one but Esther in her father’s house when she arrived. Claire sat down in the kitchen.
“You want something to eat, Miss Claire?”
“No thanks.” I only want not to be alone. “You just came back from visiting your folks in Florida, my father says.”
“Yes. Tarpon Springs. My kids live there with my mother.”
“It’s beautiful there, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but you can’t earn enough to support the kids.”
“How many do you have, Esther?”
“Me? I only have two. But my sister, she’s got eight here in New York. Six born since her man left her.”
“How do they live?”
“Oh, she on the Welfare. Gotta be.”
“Tell me, Esther. Why does a girl have all those children? I mean, because she’s all alone and—”
Esther raised her eyes. The lashes rolled slowly scornfully up from her cheekbones as if she were reluctant to reveal a deep, old enmity. “That’s just the reason. A girl gets lonely.”
Lonely, Claire thought, wondering. I’ll need to learn so much about people that I don’t know at all.
She got up and walked to the kitchen-door, looking out at the lawn where stood the picnic table, the string hammock and the barbecue, the apparatus of American suburbia. At the bird-feeder a cardinal feasted on sunflower seeds, while his partner picked up the overflow on the grass. Suddenly into the silence came a running flash and a flurry of desperate shrills.
“Oh, Esther, come!” Claire screamed. “The cat’s got the cardinal! Come! Run!”
Esther ran outside and came back. “It’s too late. Don’t look,” she said with surprising gentleness. “There’s nothing you can do.” And she turned Claire away from the pathetic heap of scarlet feathers. “Don’t you feel well, Miss Claire? My, you feel very hot. I’ll make you a cold drink.”
Without curiosity and disbelief, the girl looked into the face of this strange woman who could cry so over the death of a bird.
Toward dawn, Claire woke. A shaft of light fell into her eyes, making her head ache. Then she became aware of another ache, deep in some pit between her spine and her stomach. Something was knotted, tight and hard and sore. She felt her forehead. It was hot. Then she remembered yesterday, and alarm struck. Could there be anything wrong? No, no, surely there was nothing. It was only the natural effect of an unnatural procedure. It would certainly take a few days to feel normal again.
She drifted back into sleep, turning her head away from the irritating light. When she woke again, the soreness inside had turned to pain. She was shivering and her head was hot; it felt hollow. No, this surely wasn’t right.
She sat up in bed just as Marjorie came through the door. The girl’s long hair fell like a curtain over her shoulders.
“You said you’d do my braids for me.”
“Of course. Sit on the bed.” Claire raised her arms. They were weighted at the shoulders. She raised herself in the bed, forcing her strength, forcing cheerfulness. “Got plans for today?”
“Lisa’s mother’s taking Peter and me to the beach.” “Oh fine!”
People were thoughtful of these two who had no mother. Children without mothers. Mothers without children. Would hers have been a sturdy peaceable child like this one? An affable boy like Peter? No. These were predominantly Hazel’s children. Hers would have been someone different. But who? Her arms fell.
“I seem to be tired this morning,” she said. “Maybe you’d better ask Esther to finish.”
She lay back and dozed again. Whe she woke, the house was quiet and she had a sense of morning lateness. And she stumbled out of bed, calling, “Dad! Dad!”
Esther appeared at the foot of the stairs. “It’s ten o’clock. Your father left on the seven-forty-five,” she said in some surprise.
“And the children? Where’s everyone?”
“Enoch’s gone to his job and Miz Baily took the kids to the beach.”
“Oh yes. Marjorie told me.”
“You’re sick,” Esther said accusingly.
“I know. I’m sick.”
“I told you yesterday I thought you was.”
“I know. I need to see a doctor. I’ll get dressed.”
“You came all the way to Jersey in a taxi?” Tom Horvath repeated.
“Yes.” A surge of pain shook Claire, cold sweat dampened her hands. “First I thought of Dad. Then I thought better of it. Maybe we needn’t upset him with this.”
Tom Horvath looked at her seriously. “He will have to know,” he said.
“I’m very sick, aren’t I, Uncle Tom?”
“I’m afraid you are, Claire.” There was no reassurance in his homely face. “I’ll have to take you to the hospital.”
“Oh, can’t I go home? Tell me what medicine to take and—”
“Come, you know better than that You’ve an infection, dear girl. You’ve got a hundred and four fever.”
“Peritonitis?” Her voice trembled and chirped. Suddenly the room went dizzy with stripes and blocks of brilliant color. The chairs bent in the legs. The floor tilted, and Uncle Tom swam slowly toward her, curving his way through heavy water.
“Yes, Claire. Peritonitis.”
* * *
“Who did this, Claire?” “I can’t tell you.”
Her body twisted in the bed. Her stomach twisted. Was something holding her head in a vise? Was she vomiting or only feeling the need to?
Dad’s face came close. The eyes pinched up and there were knobs on the forehead. Then the face vanished. Hands did things. Nurses’ hands, delicate and chilly. Voices and echoes sounded at the end of a long corridor or somewhere in an empty auditorium. The ceiling spun like a top slowly wobbling before it falls.
She ripped, she tore and split. Cloth tore. Trees cracked open and animals shrieked. I can’t stand all the noise in this place, all this noise and all these bright lights in my eyes, she said. Ah, bloody froth and bubble of pain, rising and cresting! Hold on, hold on until it passes. Will it pass? Slide now as it ebbs, down and down, into a dark, burning trough. So hot, the glowing fire! Now rise again, splinter and crack. Rise up and up. Ah! Hold on! Hold on and twist. Oh God! How much? How long?
She opened her eyes in a later time. An hour? A year?
Lightly, quietly, she lay on clouds, on seafoam, in a white bed in a vast landscape where there was no sound: land of the dead?
Her father’s face leaned over her again. Blinking, she looked and looked again to make sure it was he.
“What day is it?” she whispered then.
“Tuesday.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“It’s the fourth day and the drugs have taken hold. Your fever’s down.”
“I’m going to be all right?” “Yes, thank God, you are.” “I almost died, didn’t I?” “Yes, Claire.”
“I’ve made so much trouble for you,” she said as reality rolled back.
“You surely did. Oh my darling, why did you do this to yourself?”
She sighed. He would want a lot of words, so many words, and in the end, they would say nothing. For how could she begin to explain it all?
“Tell us at least who did it.”
“No.”
“Claire, it’s your obligation to tell. The man’s outside the law.”
“I was, too, for going to him.”
“That’s true, but he’s a butcher. He’s got to be stopped.”
“No. He’s very skilled, I’m sure, but there’s always a risk. You know that. There’s a risk when you operate, too.”
“I operate to save life, not to take it.”
“Don’t be proud, Dad. And don’t make me feel more guilty than I already am.”
“I don’t want to. But talk to me! Don’t make me feel as if I’m facing some sort of conspiracy between you and this—this nameless person.”
“But it is a conspiracy. It has to be. It’s a conspiracy of trust,” she murmured. “I trusted him to help me and he trusted me not to talk.”
In anguish, Martin cried, “He didn’t help you!”
He took her hand. She felt the pressure of his hands on hers, although she had no strength to return it. Cool sunlight flickered peacefully over the walls and it pleased her to watch it.
“It’s so good not to have things hurt inside,” she murmured.
“Nothing hurts, Claire?”
They could understand each other’s most elliptical remarks. She answered, “Something always will, I guess.”
“You didn’t want to let him know, to call him back?”
“No.” She spoke with pride. “He made his choice once, didn’t her?”
“So did you,” Martin said quietly. He released her hand, got up and changed chairs. “I liked him in spite of myself. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“But I hated the marriage. I couldn’t help hating the thought of it. So in a way I’m relieved it’s not going to be. And also, because you loved him, I’m guilty as hell over being relieved. It’s so damned complicated! I can’t unravel anything.”
“Don’t try. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“We seem to do everything the hard way, you and I, with the best of intentions.”
“I know.” She felt the smart of starting tears and turned her head away.
“Dad? Let me sleep, please. Let me sleep now.”
Jessie stood by the side of the bed. Her lipstick was smeared. She must have been in an awful rush to go out like that.
“Well, Mama,” Claire said and remembered that she hadn’t said “Mama” since she had entered first grade.
“So, Claire. You’ve messed things up a little, I see.”
“I thought you were in Vermont.”
“I was. Your father telephoned me there. He got the number from my office.”
“He called you?”
“Yes. I’ve been here every day.”
“You’ve seen Dad, then?”
“No. There isn’t any reason to see him, so I take care not to.”
Like a child of separated parents, Claire had for just an instant a fleeting picture of Martin and Jessie standing together again; an unfounded, useless, silly hope, it was, the result, no doubt, of her own exhaustion.
“Well, what do you think of me?” she demanded. “I’m waiting for your opinion.”
Jessie regarded her. “What do you want me to tell you? That you’ve been wicked, or that you’ve been a fool? Or neither? Or both?”
“Tell me whatever you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything. I’m just glad you’re alive. Other than that, I feel numb.”
The nurse came in with a drink and a right-angled straw. “Lemonade for you. Drink it all, you need plenty of fluids. Can you manage?”
“I’ll help her,” Jessie said.
Claire made the introduction. “This is my mother, Miss McGrath.”
“Oh, Mrs. Farrell, pleased to meet you,” the nurse said, careful not to look at Jessie.
Jessie braced Claire’s head. There was surprising strength in her arms. It seemed to flow right down into Claire’s spine.
“Finish it,” she commanded.
When she had done so, Claire leaned back on the pillow. “Have they told you,” she asked, “that I may never be able to have a child after this?”
Jessie closed her eyes. When she opened them, her face had sunk into sadness. “They’ve told me.”
The room was still. The crash of a tray in the hall reverberated like an explosion.
“What else could I have done?”
“You could have had the baby,” Jessie said. It was more a question than a declaration.
“Without a father? I had my own experience of that.”
“You could have gone with Ned.”
“I’m to be a doctor. I have a life as a doctor. I’m Martin Farrell’s daughter.”
“I understand. Also you have your pride. I understand that, too.”
Claire smiled faintly. “Yes, you would.”
“I’m not sorry you didn’t marry him. I don’t have to tell you that. It would have been a miserable all-around situation—and not just for me.”
“I’ve told you, that old business had nothing to do with us.”
“So you say. But there’s no need to argue it anymore, is there? I’m only sorry it ended in the way it did for you.”
“It’s crazy,” Claire said, very low, “that I’ve been trained to save lives, yet I took a life away.” And after a minute, she repeated, “What else could I have done?”
“I can’t tell you. There’re just so many things I don’t understand. There’re just too many things I can’t solve, and this is one of them, and I never shall.”
“Do you know how I feel this minute?”
“Tell me.”
“As if nothing I may do after this can ever matter very much, as if the world were empty.”
“Empty? No, no.” Jessie shook her head so that the long gold earrings swayed like tassels. “It’s too full, Claire. Full of opposites and contradictions. There’s charity and hatred, there’s art and vandalism. There’s loving and not being loved. Oh my God, it’s so crowded with wanting things and fighting for them! And sometimes it’s sheer hell.” She sighed. Her eyes went vague. She seemed to be dreaming into the space above Claire’s bed, beyond the window and far out. Then abruptly she jerked her head back, crying cheerfully, “Empty, Claire? Never. Soon you’ll walk back into the world again and you’ll find out.”