Y HAIR OUGHT TO BE DONE,” grieved Marian. “I don’t want Andy to see me this way. And a manicure.”Y HAIR OUGHT TO BE DONE,” grieved Marian. “I don’t want Andy to see me this way. And a manicure.”
The nurse had turned her over on her side facing the white dresser, and for some time she had lain there staring unhappily at her image in the mirror. Presently she closed her eyes so as not to see the greenish shadow creeping over her, blocking off into sharp angular segments her face and the narrow throat which, curiously shaded into definite planes, seemed transparent and no more than the esophageal skeleton itself. The always smooth-textured shining skin was drawn taut over the frame, flesh whittled by disease down to essential bone. Breathe deep, Effie thought, breathe long and deep now for these few hours must last you for eternity. Lifted up slightly against the pillows, Marian showed more plainly the devastation of her illness, and her long still body, sheet-covered, seemed already ready for its coffin. Effie felt herself drawn with pity and love for her, it seemed to her she had never loved anyone as she loved Marian for Marian was her own self and Andy and Andy’s happiness all in one and now she was dying, all of them were going, going, their little pattern was dissolving like a pretty formation of twigs and leaves floating down a river, separated and forgotten at the first obstruction. Marian was her child, too, hers and Andy’s, she was her sister, the two of them helping each other to stand before the storm, the hurricane, that was Andy’s love and Andy’s love withdrawn.
In her pink bedjacket the abnormal greenish pallor of the patient was more pronounced and with her blue eyelids drawn over glazing eyeballs the face spelled out the imminence of death. Effie looked beyond this out the window across the church spires, into the clouding sky for relief from the presence in the room, she looked down the street below, intently watched a man and woman wheel a perambulator of twins, all four alive, breathing, years, decades ahead of them somewhere up Lexington Avenue there. She watched a girl and boy dallying before the corner store, laughing because they, too, were triumphantly alive, each one hesitating to break the spell of each other’s presence yet with nothing more to say they merely stood there laughing, swinging a foot, inarticulate, wondering why they were held and with each moment increasing the secret fear of a pattern breaking up, fragments lost, plan forgotten.
“I’d like my fingernails painted red,” mused Marian, “as if I was all ready to go someplace. Oh my God, I’m going to die!”
Effie jumped, heart pounding.
“I’ll die, Effie,” screamed Marian, “and Andy will marry someone else, he’ll marry that Asta and they will laugh at each other and forget me!”
Her eyelids flew open, wild eyes begged Effie for denials, thin fingers pressed against mouth to hold back the cry of terror. Effie’s heart turned slowly over in her, the fear of death was loosed like a bat in the room, even the nurse, entering at the moment, took a sudden step backward as if blown back by the blast of dark terror that raced through the room. Effie’s throat locked with this freezing word, she could not speak nor could her widened eyes break away from Marian’s fierce inquiry, breathless, unable to look away or to smile, she gave back fear for fear, knowledge for knowledge. Yes, you will die, yes, yes, and no one can save you, no Andy, no lover returning, nothing, and he will be lost to you, murmuring in other live, vibrant arms, laughing in bedroom darkness, secretly exulting, your ghost forgotten as mine was once, is now.… But as soon as this swift certainty flashed between their fearing eyes denial surged forth and Effie burst out, “No, no, Marian, you won’t die, oh never, dear, and Andy’s coming, he’s coming only for you, so rest now. I’ll bring a manicurist, I’ll get someone to do your hair, I’ll be back.”
The nurse beckoned her into the hall, and shook her head. “She can’t lift her head for any hairdresser, Miss Thorne, she couldn’t stand it. No use.”
“Then what will I do?” Effie asked her, helpless, unwilling to disappoint the woman in the bed.
The nurse lifted starched white shoulders.
“Talk to her about her husband. You were related to him, weren’t you? That seems to be the only thing that pleases her. Maybe you’ve got some pictures of him she’s never seen—you knew him long ago, didn’t you, before she met him?”
“Yes,” said Effie thoughtfully, “I have some pictures.”
“Pretend you’re going for the hairdresser and run home for the pictures,” suggested the nurse, and added quietly, “Hurry.”
In her apartment later Effie went through her desk, collected all the photographs she had saved of Andy, snapshots, postcards, studio pictures as a boy, little celluloid medallions, showing a curled, round-faced baby lying on a bear rug, a shy four-year-old in a sailor suit, six years old in tight velvet kneepants, ruffled shirt, sulky mouth, leaning against his mother’s shoulder in Berman’s Studio, Cincinnati, or standing proudly beside his first bicycle, cap pulled down over radiant eyes. There, yellowed and carefully folded up, was his first poem, “A Boat Ride by Andy Callingham, age 8 years” … “I like to ride in great big boats …” here, in a drawer, was the letter he wrote to his mother from Aunt Bertha’s cottage in the Adirondacks, “Dear mother, we have not seen each other for a long time. There is a boy here named Fred. I had the nosebleed and I asked Fred for his hakerchef but he wold not give it he said it was new then he ran away from me and I could not catch him till Wilbur Street and the nosebleed got all over my new pants. I am mad at Fred. I hope you are well. Your sincere son Andy.”
There was the wedding picture of Charles and Alma Callingham, Andy’s parents, and the second wedding picture of Charles and Estelle, the newspaper picture of Charles Callingham, new history head at the State University. Here were school diaries, clippings of early school triumphs. The boy Andy, thought Effie, belongs to me and to no one else, and then suddenly she knew she must take all these treasures to Marian, paper dolls to amuse the little sick girl.
“There!” whispered the nurse, nodding toward Marian’s feverish joy in these relics. How happily and how completely Marian appropriated them, how possessively she forbade the nurse to touch them as they sprawled over the counterpane and slid to the floor. Even closing her eyes with drugged pain now and then, her greedy hands groped about to assemble all within her touch.
“He never told me about that poem,” she murmured, puzzled. “And look, Effie, look at the face with his first bicycle. The funny little face of him!”
“And here all dressed up except the stocking falling down,” Effie eagerly offered the Fauntleroy photograph. “This is his fifth birthday here, sitting on his Aunt Bertha’s lap; that was in Boston the year his parents went abroad and left him there. His aunt had just punished him for scraping all the frosting off his cake. Look how scared he looks!”
A smile, tender and wishful, played about Marian’s fine bluish lips, it sang through her eyes and the hands so lovingly lingering over these mementoes, a little lullaby of a smile, an emanation from the small scraps themselves, for it fluttered across Effie’s lips also, delicate, fleeting, an odd little ghost of lost happiness, a butterfly blown about by death. Effie, returning from this enchanted dreamland first, was flicked with pain by the quiet proud possessiveness of Marian’s hands on the boy’s pictures. Mine, mine, Effie cried inside herself, oh, surely these are mine if nothing else, and then, surrendering, frightened, defeated, hunting for some other solace, “If I had had a baby, if I had had a son that would have been mine, that at least she could not share, Andy’s and mine it would be—” she thought, desperate, defeated, pushing the scattered pictures toward Marian.
“If I had only had a baby,” said Marian, “something of Andy always with me forever. Ah, Effie, I should have had a son!”
Effie could only nod bleakly, heart numb. There are words that cannot be borne, suggestions so burning with anguish and despair that no heart can endure them, so Effie, her lover stolen, her dream of a son now stolen, got to her feet and motioning, speechless, that she was leaving, found her way out of the intolerable room.