“The worst risk would be septic shock.” Lacey’s words brought Ellen to a complete stop outside Helen C. White, the phone pressed to her ear. “But that’s nothing like what’s happening now, I mean. It’s a bad infection in his gut, is what they told me, probably started with a urinary tract thing. He’s already on two different antibiotics on IV.”
“All right.” Ellen stayed calm. Michael had had infections before; hardly anyone on Ward 57 escaped them because of all the open wounds and compromised immune systems. “Bacterial, you said?”
“Yes. But not that fucked-up Iraqi kind. What’s it called, acino-something?”
“Acinetobacter, I think. They gave us a flyer about it at one point.”
“Well, all he’s got is our good ol’ American e. coli—so that’s good.”
Wind pressed a newspaper sheet against the bike rack and sent candy wrappers into a knee-high tornado on the bare concrete plaza outside the library. It was Ellen’s third day in a row coming here to work; she’d reserved a faculty carrel in the basement after making sure it had no Internet access and little cell reception.
“When did it start?” she asked.
“He had a fever day before yesterday, I guess, but then it went away … and came back big-time last night.”
“Is he conscious? Is he in pain?”
“Yes, but sleeping a lot. No, I don’t think so.” Lacey hesitated. “That nurse he likes has been on shift … Rob Base or whatever.”
“Rob Beers. Good, I’m glad.” Ellen shifted her briefcase strap to the other shoulder. “You can talk about her, you know. About Jane. It’s not a verboten subject.” Even if she hasn’t called me about this. Or anything. “Is she all right?”
“Yeah, totally.” There was relief in Lacey’s voice. “There’s no contagion except for direct contact, so she’s wearing gloves and a mask. I mean, most of the time. And she’s cleaned up their room a little…”
“She’s staying in Mologne, is that right? In my room?”
“Yes. Look, I’ll do whatever you want, Ellen. If you want me to get all up in their business and make sure things are done like you say, I will. You know I can boss the shit out of those kids. Or I can … you know, keep it on the down low. And let you know what’s going on.”
“Be my mole, you mean?” Ellen laughed despite herself. “I don’t think that’s necessary. I’m sure Dr. Rodwick will get the infection under control, if it’s not already. Having Rob on duty will be good for him, and as for Jane…” She trailed off. “I’m sure she’ll figure it out.”
“Right.” Lacey sounded as if she wanted to say more.
“How much longer for you? That’s wonderful about Eddie’s vision.” Ellen shook her watch out of her sleeve to check the time.
“Well, we had T.O. orders for week after next but there was a snafu. No surprises there. So it’s looking like three weeks now.”
“Good, good.”
“Yeah, but … will I see you before then? Before we get out of here?”
“Probably not.” Cloud shadows skittered across the plaza, and Ellen stepped out from under the awning to feel the bright sunlight on top of her head. “I’m very busy with work—in fact I’m at school right now.”
“You said your classes were all being taught by someone else.”
“It’s not only about teaching, Lacey. I have to write too. That’s part of my job! In fact I have a tentative deadline for an introduction that … Never mind.”
“The thing is I think that Jane might—”
“I’m sure Jane is quite happy there’s half a country between us. She got her wish. Anyway, I can’t simply drop everything and fly back there whenever there’s a bump in the road!” Ellen closed her eyes to the sun, dismayed at how high-pitched her voice had become.
“Okay, I get it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a little preoccupied. Could I give you a call back later?”
“Don’t worry about it. Good luck on the writing.” Before Ellen could think of how to soften her tone, Lacey hung up. Had there been a faint emphasis on that last word? Good luck on the writing. So Lacey was mad at her now too. So what?
Edith Wharton wouldn’t have given two bits about someone’s hurt feelings when there was so much to be done in war-engulfed Paris. Aside from her own prodigious output of letters, editorials, and fiction, Wharton threw herself into war work: raising money, organizing charity efforts, hounding the Red Cross, and badgering friends and acquaintances to do more, give more, be more. During this time the eminent society writer became a single-minded formidable presence on the home front. Ellen had always avoided this time period in Wharton’s life (many scholars did, unhappy with the rich writer’s energetic prowar stance) but now all she wanted to do was to look right at what had happened to her favorite writer on the home front during war. So without allowing herself to dwell on the sadness in Lacey’s questions—or the worry about Michael’s fever, or the frustration of Jane, always frustration and Jane—Ellen briskly submerged herself in the library’s underground cement layers, flashing the guard her ID and a smile.
* * *
Ellen was working again. It had come back to her, slowly at first and then gaining speed, over the course of the last week and a half. She read now, in great swooshing gulps, both new texts and books that were as familiar to her as her own hands. She read in long, steady, intent stretches, pausing only to type a few notes, roll her neck, or pet Maisie. Her desire for words again was as physical as hunger—which made sense, because her appetite had come roaring back too. She ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She cooked for herself at home: steel cut oatmeal with dried cherries and brown sugar; buttery risotto with fresh radishes sprinkled in sea salt; one perfect piece of grilled salmon placed on top of a tangle of bitter greens. She went out to dinner with Serena, and with Debbie Masterson, and even (almost) with Paul, who canceled at the last minute. Ellen ate well, she slept well, and she read through Edith Wharton’s war fiction period—the novels, stories, and surrounding scholarship—as deeply as she knew how.
That copy of A Son at the Front was the first domino. After reading the novel and rereading the well-executed academic introduction, Ellen wondered what it would have been like to encounter this novel at Walter Reed in a popular edition. With an introduction that, yes, situated the text in both Wharton’s oeuvre and the political context of the day … but went on to explain what this novel could mean to readers today, at home during a war of the twenty-first century? Well, she asked herself, what did it mean to me? Now, after those months in the hospital at Michael’s side? Did Edith Wharton’s depiction of the wounded boys of World War I have anything to say to … Martha Whitehead, for example, whose boy three rooms down from Mike had lost both hands and most of his torso skin when a grenade blew up in the flatbed back of his truck? She had another son still stationed in Anbar Province. Or to Rosalie, who had run Ward 57’s nurses’ station since before the first U.S. invasion of Iraq? What could a book like this mean to any of the women who had gathered for spaghetti at Ellen’s invitation, burned-out on army incompetence and whooping it up at one another’s tales of woe?
What could it mean to Lacey?
Ellen started writing and she held on to both in her mind: years of knowledge about this writer, and the women at Walter Reed. She read and wrote, read and wrote. She kept it simple and personal, for the first time. And through the Wharton-studies grapevine she reached out to a half-dozen editors at literary publishing houses. Maybe, they said, when she pitched the idea of reissuing A Son at the Front and possibly other little-known Wharton books, with a new introduction “highlighting Wharton’s writing about war, now more timely than ever.” Send us a proposal.
A son at the front. What turned the key for Ellen was the title itself. And the realization that, of course, Wharton, badly married and famously childless, never had a son in the war either. This American-born Parisian writer, with no actual heir or child sent off to the truly unimaginable slaughter of young men (a war in which the total French casualties—over six million—added up to 73 percent of their fighting forces), worked from imagination to tell a story about a parent’s pain and fear during deployment. Actually, the stories of dozens of parents who make up Paris during those terrible years—a whole city racked with grief, endless funerals, a flood of wounded men, refugees, looting, blackouts, and food shortages. Wharton keeps her eye on those at home, Ellen wrote, putting aside scenes of fighting (though she made several trips to the front and knew the horrors there) in order to give us scenes like the excruciating one where a man asks a doctor about a medical exemption for his son, knowing the doctor’s boy is at the front. Or a divorced couple joined again by the fear of their son’s mobilization orders. Or a painter, devoted to art, afraid to sketch his son asleep on the night before he leaves, because he is suddenly made to think of what his boy would look like on his deathbed. How war reaches into the everyday at home and humbles, flattens, changes us.
Ellen wrote, and read, and wrote some more, marveling at all the things Wharton got right.
* * *
Later that day, Ellen drove home from the library in early twilight, listening to NPR headlines. The Senate is expected to take up a nonbinding resolution against the White House’s handling of the Iraq War later today. More on Senator Russ Feingold’s resolution to censure President Bush. Activists with the group Code Pink disrupted a speech by New York Senator Hillary Clinton calling on the presidential hopeful to oppose the Iraq War. One banner said: “We want a woman for peace, not just a woman.” Six people were arrested.
She let Maisie out into the yard and heated up a plate of yesterday’s vegetable curry with rice. She poured a glass of Riesling. Halfway through her dinner and The New Yorker she left her plate and called the nurses’ station at Ward 57.
No change in Mike’s fever, despite the antibiotics. He was now getting fluids and piperacillin to fight the possibility of getting bacteremic. Would she like to leave a message for the on-call resident? No, Ellen said. Thank you. She didn’t ask: And my daughter…?
The least appealing item on her to-do list read Jane’s room so she tackled it that evening. Changed the sour and dirty sheets, vacuumed, dusted, and tried to pick up without breaching any privacy boundaries—that was for her own self-interest as much as Jane’s. To the sounds of Brahms from a radio station out of Kenosha Ellen finished assembling the abandoned bassinet, and made space for a changing table. What about some kind of rocking chair? she wondered, and then had to sit on the bed under posters of howling punk rockers, overcome.
“Sure, a rocking chair!” she said to Maisie. “Where she can sit and crochet a layette!” If the dog was fazed by her exasperated tone, she didn’t show it. Ellen lay back on her daughter’s bed and stared at the ceiling. She knew as little about what was to come as Jane did.
In bed, after a long hot bath, rereading a favorite Alison Lurie novel, she suddenly laid it down to call the nurses’ station. No change. Possible transfer to ICU, but not confirmed.
By 6:00 a.m., she was dressed and drinking tea. Still no change. The team was with him now, evaluating options. Mike had had a bad reaction to one of the antibiotics—the night nurses’ notes showed that he had thrown up multiple times in the night—but appeared to be less nauseated now, though still feverish. They were going to try vancomycin next. “Was he in very much pain?” Ellen asked, aghast at the idea of him so sick. Worried for Jane, handling all this. Hard to say, was the answer. In and out of consciousness.
She took a long walk through the neighborhood with Maisie, umbrella-less in a light misting rain. Neighbors waved from cars on their way to school and work. What should she do? If she called, Jane would probably blow up at her for interfering, trying to take charge, doubting anyone else’s abilities. If she didn’t call, she’d have no idea how Jane was holding up. And how Mike really was. But the fact that Jane hadn’t called her said everything.
It was stupid, it was juvenile, but Ellen couldn’t figure out how to get past her own hurt feelings and the anger that still sizzled between the two of them. Shame at her own behavior, how she’d run out on all of them, saturated every thought. She was stuck. He’ll be fine, she told herself. And so will she. Let them handle it. Tugging at Maisie’s leash, why are you stopped?, she was surprised to see that they were back in front of their own walkway at home.
“All I got was a text from her,” Wesley said on the message he left midmorning. “Apparently it’s day three of the fever, which is, like, not good. They said something about pyelonephritis … if it spread to the kidneys. But she doesn’t sound like she’s freaking out. So … I don’t know if you guys have talked yet, but, uh, well I don’t want get in the middle of anything. Love you talk to you soon okay bye.”
In her carrel, a blue metal cubicle about the size and shape of a meat locker, Ellen bent her head over the minuscule text in an article the graduate student department intern had blurrily photocopied for her. She tried to shift the pages so that they caught more light from the fluorescent overhead strip above. After another quarter hour she gave up, rubbed her eyes, and took a drink from her thermos.
Now she felt afraid. Yes. It was too easy to conjure a vivid image of Michael, flushed and sweaty, tossing and turning, the brisk concerned actions of the nurses reaching arms over him to adjust drips, check monitors. Too late, she remembered all the other stories from Heaton, from Mologne—where sudden emergencies sprang up out of nowhere, and recovering soldiers actually died, or nearly did, from banal and asinine medical events, footnotes in some journal later on. A hairpin turn from being okay to not. She’d taken in those stories with appalling complacency, she saw now. That was them. And this is us.
Shouldn’t Ward 57 have taught her that what you thought was the worst, what you thought you could rest on once you accepted it, was never the end of the line?
Ellen took her phone and purse and went up three levels to fading daylight and cell reception. Please hold while I get the latest, the nurse said. It was a long wait. You should speak directly with Dr. Millhauser. What number can he reach you at?
She drove straight home, leaving all her work in the carrel. No one called. She swept the kitchen floor in small, careful circles. She made one poached egg, watching it turn in the rolling water, and ate it on top of a thick piece of buttered toast.
It’s different, she heard herself think. Her fear, this time. It wasn’t the floating existential dread that had suffocated her over the weeks and months Michael was deployed. That had led her to write all those letters. This was—she turned it over in her mind while she sat on the couch by the front window, book in lap—a clear, focused kind of being scared. Strange. The object of fear was the same: that Mike could die. But the approach to it, inside her, was a lightning-flared straight road, not the disorienting weight of a heavy cloud.
Why is that? Because she could understand death in a hospital, death on American ground, more than she could death by sniper or IED or friendly fire in a chaotic country half a world away? Because her mind knew the facts of one, and had to imagine bare horrifying fragments of the other?
“Stop it,” Ellen said out loud. He’ll be fine. Then she went upstairs to her study to make notes about Wharton and imagining war.
At 7:00 p.m., the nurse said no change, still fever. White blood count was higher. She put on a recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes and forced herself to listen to 1, 2, 8, and 10 before getting up from the floor of her bedroom. Halfway through brushing her teeth, she tapped Jane’s number into her phone before erasing it, one digit at a time. She took a half tablet of Ambien before she could argue herself out of it, and slept from 10:00 to 2:15 a.m. At first the night nurse tried to put her off until the morning and Ellen’s voice shook as she insisted on speaking with the on-call resident.
Michael had been moved to SICU an hour ago. First signs of sepsis were detected and now he was on vasopressors and corticosteroids, and being prepped for emergency surgery to try to remove buildup of pus.
“And my daughter…?” Ellen fought to control herself. “Have you seen her?”
“I’m sorry—who? What’s the relation to the patient?”
Ellen apologized and hung up. For one moment she held still, sitting up in bed. It was happening, then. It wasn’t over yet. The images that kicked her into action, though, were of Jane. What if Michael died while Jane was the only one there with him when it happened? What would that do to her girl? To her pregnant, terrified girl?
The next few hours passed in a series of strobe-lit events as Ellen raced to get there in time. Dressing in the dark, packing one small bag. Ringing the neighbors’ bell at 3:00 a.m. with Maisie, her leash, a bag of dog food. Messages for Wesley and her mother’s caretakers. Badger cab ride to Dane Regional Airport while she bought a ticket on the phone for the next flight to D.C. Six a.m. wheels up, running past surprised people in Reagan National, telling the taxi driver to hurry, please hurry, any way that he could but it was all right because as soon as he glimpsed her face in his rearview, as soon as she’d given the Walter Reed address, he knew. He knew. He blew two red lights and got her there in fourteen minutes.
When the sealed doors to SICU unpeeled Ellen burst in, blood pounding in her forehead and throat. “Whoa,” a guard said, and blocked her path. “ID and pass, please.”
“But—but I have to—”
“ID and pass, ma’am.” Ellen’s arms fell to her sides. Her long-term visitor pass was—where?—she hadn’t seen it in weeks. All the way over in Mologne, somewhere in her room. Her breath tightened. How would she make it there, and back?
“Mom!” A blue-gowned figure appeared at the end of the hallway, calling for her, waving energetically with both arms high. She pulled her mask down and began to run, dreadlocks bouncing: Jane.
Then she was there, pressing her big hard belly against Ellen, arms around her neck, and she was laughing and crying and talking fast into Ellen’s ear. “He’s okay, he’s okay, they didn’t have to operate because it’s on its way down! Mom! I’ve been calling and calling you.” Jane pulled away and held up her scratched cell phone. “See? I literally just called you again for, like, the nineteenth time in an hour! Where have you been? Wes told me you were coming and I called you and then Mike’s fever broke, Mom! It broke, on its own! Dr. Messenberg says he’s going to be okay! Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Ellen held Jane at arm’s length and scanned her everywhere: bags under her bright eyes, pink cheeks, the rows of holes punched in her ears, her strong arms, her heavy round belly under the blue surgical gown stretched tight. “You’re all right? Are you feeling all right?”
“Mom, don’t cry. Here. Come here.” Jane brought Ellen’s hand to the top of her stomach and held it there. “Can you feel that?” Ellen closed her eyes in the SICU vestibule and warmed to the feel of her daughter’s hand on hers. Together, they waited for the kick.