A Reckoning (16 page)

Harriet had covered her face with one hand. Now she reached over and took Laura’s hand and clasped it hard.

“Women’s feeling for one another has been a buried world for so long, a cause of fear and shame,” Laura murmured, holding the warm young hand in hers. “Now at last we are beginning to understand the blessing.”

“Oh, thank you” said Harriet. “Thank you for everything.”

For a second Laura looked her straight in the eyes, then she asked the only question that really mattered: “You are going to be all right?”

Harriet nodded, got up, flung her bag round her shoulder, and gave Laura a dazzling smile. “If I could live the way you are dying!” she said unexpectedly.

“‘Down to hell and up to heaven in an hour’?” Laura laughed. “I must admit that so far—” but then she leaned over in a spasm of coughing, the cough she had managed to keep from happening for an hour. “You’d better go,” she gasped.

Mrs. O’Brien, who at that instant opened the door with her key and came in loaded with packages, was not pleased. Harried fled. “You shouldn’t have seen that girl.”

Laura lay on the sofa, sweat pouring down her face.

“Oh, yes,” she managed to say. “Oh, yes. It was important.”

Chapter XIV

Laura pushed her breakfast tray down to the end of the bed. She had managed three swallows of coffee, but toast, a poached egg were out of the question this morning. Even sitting high up with three pillows behind her, it felt as though she had a balloon in her chest pressing, pressing.

“It’s so hard to breathe,” she whispered when Mary O’Brien came for the tray.

“Dr. Goodwin will be here in a few minutes. He’ll know how to help you, dear.” It was the first time Mary O’Brien had used an endearment, and Laura wasn’t quite sure that was what she wanted, though in just a few days Mrs. O’Brien had become indispensable. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t work because then she was even more enclosed in her body, so she picked up the pile of mail that had been accumulating and went through it listlessly, three-quarters of it being, as usual, requests for money from every conceivable organization from Defenders of Wild Life to Amnesty International. These Laura dropped on the floor. But there was a letter from Amy Preston, whom she considered a real friend, and just because she was a real friend, it seemed impossible to face. Finally Laura did open it. “Isn’t it about time we met? What about lunch some time next week when you’re in town at the office?” Laura let the note fall.

At first it had seemed the easiest thing in the world to shed relationships, as easy as taking off one’s clothes before an operation. She had not even thought about Amy since she had begun this ultimate reckoning. And now she felt it quite impossible to see Amy, and next to impossible to tell her what had been happening. Someone else—Ann perhaps—would have to begin letting people know. Laura had the sensation of lying in a thicket, unable to see the sky for the mass of little branches and twigs. It felt like years since she had seen Amy, so much had happened, and now she was far far away, and there would never be time to catch up.

How had she ever managed to talk to Harriet? Yesterday was eons away, and Laura realized that very possibly she would never again be able to engage in a real conversation with anyone. I’ll just have to hobble along with Brother Ass and Mary O’Brien, she thought, managing to make herself smile at the image. Then she half-dozed until the doorbell rang, and in a few seconds she heard Dr. Goodwin’s quick, firm, step on the stair. Amazing how much character one could sense in the way someone climbed stairs! Mrs. O’Brien’s tread was so light, Laura often did not hear her coming.

“You sound like an army with banners,” she managed to say, as Jim Goodwin came in.

“My goodness, I hope not!” he answered. “Can I just wash my hands?”

“Of course, that door.”

He left the door open and talked as he opened the tap and washed and dried his hands. “Mrs. O’Brien says you didn’t eat your breakfast. Pressure on your stomach builds up as the lungs fill. I think I can do something to ease that for you.”

“Good.”

When he came back, he sat on the bed, took her wrist, and looked away as he found the pulse.

Laura liked his face, the narrow gray eyes and taut mouth. She had always liked it, but now it occurred to her that she was absolutely in this man’s hands, so it had become newly important that she trust him.

“Would you just sit up—slowly—and lift your nightgown up, so I can get an idea what’s going on? That’s it—that’s good,” he said, running the stethescope up and down her back and listening, listening.

“O.K. Mrs. Spelman, now lie back.”

This she gladly did. Sitting up had been tiring.

“Since when have you found it hard to breathe?”

“Every day this week, but sometimes for an hour or so I feel better. Sometimes I can eat a little.”

“It’s probably worse in the morning, isn’t it? Now I am going to drain some fluid out of your lungs. It won’t hurt, and I’m sure you’ll feel a lot better.”

It took a little while to get everything ready, and while he got out his instruments and what looked like huge plastic bottles—could there be that much fluid?—Jim Goodwin talked reassuringly in just the way, Laura suddenly remembered, that her father had talked when he was totally absorbed in fastening a fly to his fishing line. “It looks like an early spring,” Jim Goodwin said. “There are crocuses coming up in our garden—about two weeks early, I figure. The brooks are in flood. That’s the sound of spring, all right, in New England at any rate, isn’t it?” He gave a little cough. “Well, I guess we’re ready. Let me help you sit up again. I’m first going to anesthetize a little place on your back so you won’t feel the needle go in. O.K.?”

It didn’t hurt, but it was nerve-racking and seemed to go on forever as Jim Goodwin asked, “O.K., Mrs. Spelman?” every few minutes. Laura couldn’t see what was going on, but the tension of sitting up so long took its toll. Sweat poured down her face. And when at last he told her, “That’s fine,” and she could lie down, it took self-control not to cry.

“Would you like to see?” he asked, cheerfully holding up a bottle half-filled with dark-orange fluid. “I think you’re going to feel a lot more comfortable today.”

For a moment Laura waited for the shock of that dark-orange color to be absorbed. She felt like a whole world, a world of many countries, and in one country a frightful war was in progress although in another country, her mind, for example, everything was going on as usual—and she wondered how long it would be before the war spread and perhaps engulfed the world.

Dr. Goodwin was sitting now in a low armchair, jotting something down on a card.

“Did you expect—” she couldn’t phrase it—“is this normal? I mean, am I worse than you thought?” Laura could hear the phone ringing far away as Jim Goodwin carefully put the cap on his pen and tucked the card into a note case. She was watching him closely and was surprised to see that his hands shook, as they certainly had not done during the small operation.

“You are not quite like any other patient I have had. From what Mrs. O’Brien, said, you have been about certain errands of mercy—in your condition, that is highly unusual and very brave, I must say.”

“That young woman was suicidal—I mean I was afraid she might be—but,” said Laura with a smile, “I think it’s the last time. Besides,” she added, “why not spend what I have?”

Jim Goodwin sighed and passed a hand over his forehead before giving her a penetrating look. “I would very much like to get you to hospital for about three days.”

“I am worse then?” she was not going to let him off.

“Not worse than I expected,” he answered slowly. “Both lungs are affected, and when I first saw you, as you know, we had to face that there was not very much we could do at that stage.”

What Laura wanted to ask was, “How long?” But she couldn’t quite bring herself to utter the question. She closed her eyes.

“Why the hospital?”

“I would like to get more X-rays and then confer with a colleague about possible cobalt treatment.”

“No,” Laura said unexpectedly loudly. Then she saw Mrs. O’Brien in the doorway. “What is it, Mrs. O’Brien?”

“Your daughter, Daisy, is on the telephone. She was quite insistent that she must talk to you.”

“I can’t,” Laura murmured, even as she tried to sit up.

“Why don’t I have a word with her?” Jim Goodwin had leapt to his feet. “Is there a phone downstairs?”

“Come with me,” Mrs. O’Brien said. “It’s longdistance.”

Laura lay still. I just can’t cope with everything at once, she thought. Her whole being at that moment of Mrs. O’Brien’s appearance had been gathered up in fierce determination not to be carted off to the hospital. After a while she could hear low voices in the hall. Well, let them make the decisions, all except the hospital. For a little while still she was in command of her body, her dying body—dying in this strange war in one part of it. Laura lifted up one of her hands and looked at it. It was perfectly itself, even the liver spots and the slight swelling in the knuckle of her little finger were exactly as they had been two months ago. It had been a useful hand, she thought, good at holding a trowel, able to type very fast. But the war in her lungs was draining the strength of all the rest of her, and if she couldn’t eat? Somewhere she had read that patients with cancer of the lung die of starvation.

Her eyes were closed, and this time she did not hear Jim Goodwin’s firm step. She heard his voice and found it wonderfully reassuring. He had taken her hand in his and was holding it in a firm clasp.

“I had a talk with Daisy,” he said. “She wants to come this weekend, and since Mrs. O’Brien will be off for two days, I thought perhaps that would be a good idea.”

“You took it right out of my hands, didn’t you, Jim?” Laura had never called him Jim before. She opened her eyes then and caught his anxious look.

“No,” he said, “I told her I would confer with you and call her back immediately if you didn’t feel up to it. My thought was that you might prefer to have her here than our sending over a nurse.”

Laura nodded. He was right, of course. He was trying to help her.

He released her hand now and got up. For a moment he walked up and down, then went to the window and stood there looking out. “As for the hospital, we can put that off for a couple of weeks anyway.”

“I want to see the spring.” It occurred to Laura as soon as she said it that this was the first time she had looked forward. She had been trying so deliberately to let go, but she had said, “I want to see the spring.”

“I think you will,” Jim Goodwin said gently. “I think I can promise you that.” And that meant, Laura calculated, that she had a month.

She bit her lip, but that didn’t stop the tears flowing.

“Rest all you can. I’ll be back in a few days.”

And he was gone.

It was not going to be as easy as she had imagined to let go.

Chapter XV

During the next few days Laura kept very quiet. Mrs. O’Brien persuaded her to stay in bed till teatime when Aunt Minna came to read aloud. Ann was commandeered for one morning, to help Laura decide what letters must be written to inform old friends that she would be
hors de combat
for a month or more, and under doctor’s orders must lead a restricted life and not have visitors.

Draining the lung had certainly helped; she had slept better ever since Jim Goodwin’s visit, but eating was getting harder every day. Even a cup of tea sometimes brought on nausea. The only thing she had been able to swallow was oysters, tried at Mrs. O’Brien’s suggestion. But Laura was determined now to live till the spring, till the trees wore their gauzy early green, till the first daffodils. She wanted to see them, needed to see them more than any person, and that was strange. Or was it? Flowers, trees were silent presences and asked nothing. And perhaps the contemplation of beauty was the last resource. “Look thy last on all things lovely. Every hour. …” Yes, she would do that as long as she could.

Ben had telephoned, luckily in the late afternoon one day when Laura felt more energy then usual and could communicate something. “Darling Ben,” she said, “I listen to records, especially Mozart and Haydn, and I look at things, and talk to Grindle and Sasha.” Here she had laughed. “I expect I sound feeble-minded.”

“Mother!”

“Don’t sound anguished. I’m trying to tell you that all is well. I’m learning a lot.”

“But I want to come—as soon as this big painting is finished.”

He could not possibly know how relieved she was to learn that this visit at least could be put off.

“Of course you must finish it. What I wanted to tell you—” (but how to say it?)

“Is that people are no help. Is that it?” Trust Ben to catch her meaning even from three thousand miles away.

“Thanks for saying it for me. Oh, Ben, people drain me—it’s that—can you understand? When I talk I get a fit of coughing. But Aunt Minna comes every afternoon and reads. We have finished Hammarskjöld and now we are reading Trollope—so soothing.”

There was now a silence. A silence on the telephone with the interlocutor so far away opens up a huge hole.

“Are you all right?” Laura asked after a moment.

“I guess so.”

“Come when you finish that painting.”

Another silence, then a strangled voice unlike Ben’s, “You’re not dying, are you, Mother? You’ve got to tell me.”

“Maybe I am, darling. Everyone must sooner or later.”

“But—but you sound so casual about it—Christ, Mother, how can I stay here and paint? I’m coming back tomorrow.”

“No,” Laura said firmly. “You are not. Finish what you are doing. Please, Ben.”

“Very well, I’ll try.”

“I guess I’d better say good-by for now.”

“Good-by for now.”

She set the receiver down and lay back on the sofa.

“Well, you shouldn’t have talked to him,” Mary O’Brien said after one look at her. “You’re all tuckered out.”

“No, I’m glad I could. Ben is a very understanding person, Mary, but he wouldn’t have understood. I had to explain things myself.”

For the past few days, Laura had found herself calling Mrs. O’Brien “Mary.” It was the beginning of a new phase in their relationship. Nothing had to be explained, thank goodness, between Mary and herself, for Mary was the person who really knew about this illness, the one person Laura allowed to see her weakness, allowed to take over, without a protest. It had begun, this new phase, one morning when Mary had come for the breakfast tray, only tea and dry toast now and the toast rarely consumed, and Laura had asked her to sit down for a moment.