American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (40 page)

 
She may be right, too.

  Before she or Edna could say anything, the bell over the door chimed again. In came Hal Jacobs. “I saw you put out the CLOSED sign from across the street,” Nellie’s husband said. “Why so early?”

  “We’re having a—a family discussion, that’s why,” Nellie answered.

  “I’ve found out about Nicholas Kincaid, Father Jacobs,” Merle Grimes said, sounding even harder than he had before. “I’ve found out
all
about him.”

  “Have you?” Hal whuffled out air through his gray mustache—almost entirely white now, in fact. “I doubt that. Yes, sir, I doubt it very much.”

  “What do you mean?” Grimes demanded. “I know he was a Confederate officer. I know he was going to marry Edna till he got killed. And I know she never told me what he was. What else do I need to know?”

  As far as Nellie could see, that was plenty. But Hal Jacobs said, “The other thing you need to know is what Teddy Roosevelt knew, God rest his soul—Edna and Nellie were both spies during the war, working with me and Bill Reach, God rest his soul, too, for I’m sure he’s dead.” Nellie was even surer, but her secrets, unlike Edna’s, were unlikely to come out. Her husband went on, “Whatever Edna told you—and whatever she didn’t, too—she asked me about first, because of what we were doing. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Behind his spectacles, Grimes’ eyes widened. “I . . . think I may, sir,” he answered. Unconsciously, he straightened towards, if not quite to, attention. But then his gaze swung back to Edna. “Don’t you think almost marrying a Confederate went too far?”

 
  Oh, she went further than that,
 Nellie thought. Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged the words from her, though. And Edna did a splendid job of picking up the cue Hal had given her. “I didn’t almost marry him on account of I was a spy,” she replied. “But Washington was occupied, like you said yourself. And Hal asked me not to talk about anything that went on that had to do with the coffeehouse and spying even a little bit, just to be on the safe side. So I didn’t.”

  Hal had never asked her to do any such thing. He knew that, and so did Nellie, and so did Edna herself.

  But Merle Grimes didn’t know it, and he was the one who counted here. “All right,” he said after a long, long pause. “We’ll let it go, then. God knows I do love you, Edna, and I want to be able to love you and trust you the rest of my days.”

  Edna did the smartest thing she could have: instead of saying even a word, she threw herself into Merle’s arms. As the two of them embraced, Nellie caught Hal’s eye.
Thank you,
 she mouthed silently. Her husband gave a tiny nod and an even tinier shrug, as if to say it wasn’t worth getting excited about.

  They’d been married for almost ten years. Till that moment, Nellie had never been sure she loved him.

  She was now.

 
H
ad Lucien Galtier not cut himself, he might not have found out for some little while that his life was about to change. It wasn’t a bad wound, like the time when he’d laid his leg open with an axe. But he was sharpening a stake that would support some green beans when spring came, and the knife slipped, and he gashed himself between thumb and forefinger.

 
  “ ‘Osti,”
 he hissed.
“Calisse de tabernac.”
 He put down the knife and the stake, pinched the lips of the wound shut, and went to the house to get a clean bandage. He hoped that would do the job, and that he wouldn’t need stitches. If he did, though, he was reasonably sure he could get them for nothing. There were advantages to having a doctor for a son-in-law, even if Leonard O’Doull would tease him for being a clumsy old fool even as he sewed him up. Lucien hurried up the stairs, quietly wiped his boots on the thick, soft mat in front of the kitchen door, and went inside.

  Marie was sitting at the kitchen table, one hand on her belly, tears running down her face.

  “Marie?” Galtier whispered, his own cut forgotten. His right hand dropped to his side. Blood started dripping on the floor.
“Qu’est-ce que tu as?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said, springing to her feet with as much dismay and guilt as if he’d caught her in the arms of another man. “Nothing, I tell you. What have you done to yourself? You’re bleeding!” He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his left hand. “This is truly nothing,” he said. “A slip of the knife, that’s all. But you . . .”

  Marie might pause during her day’s work for a cup of tea. Never, in all the years he’d known her, had she paused because she was in pain. That was literally true; she’d gone on working till ridiculously short stretches of time before she bore her children, and she’d got back to work after each birth much sooner than the midwife said she should. For her to hold herself like that and weep was . . .
The end of the
world
was the first thing that occurred to him.

  An instant later, he wished he’d thought of a different comparison.

  “I think it could be that we both should see our
beau-fils
,” he said.

  Marie shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she insisted. “I’m just . . . tired, that’s all.” Hearing her say that frightened him as badly as seeing her sit there crying. He knew she must have been tired at times through their close to thirty-five years of marriage. She was a farm wife, and she’d raised six children. But she’d never admitted it, not in all the time he’d known her, not till now.

  “Here.” He went to the closet and got her a coat. “Put this on, my dear. We are going into town, to talk with Leonard O’Doull.”

  “I don’t need to see the doctor,” Marie insisted. “And how can you drive the motorcar with your poor hand hurt?”

  To keep her from going on about the hand, he let her bandage it, which she did with her usual quick competence. As long as she was taking care of him, she seemed fine. But, once she’d done the job, she argued less than he’d expected when he draped the coat over her shoulders. “Come on,” he said. “Our son-in-law will tell you why you are tired, and he will give you some pills to make you feel like a new woman.”

  “It could be that you are the one who feels like a new woman,” his wife retorted. But, that gibe aside, she kept quiet. She let him lead her out to the Chevrolet and head for town. Her acquiescence worried him, too.

  Leonard O’Doull’s office was on Rue Frontenac, not far from the Église Saint-Patrice on Rue Lafontaine—the church over which Bishop Pascal no longer presided. Dr. O’Doull’s office assistant exclaimed when she saw the bloody bandage on Lucien’s hand. “He’s vaccinating a little boy right now,
Monsieur
Galtier,” she said. “As soon as he’s done, he’ll see you.” But Lucien shook his head again. “It’s not me he needs to see. It’s Marie.” That made the office assistant start to exclaim again. Just in time, she thought better of it. “Sit down, then,” she said. “He’ll see you both soon.”

  A howl from the part of the office out of sight of the waiting room told Galtier exactly when the vaccination was completed. A couple of minutes later, a city woman in a fashionably—even shockingly—short dress came out with her wailing toddler in tow. Normally, Lucien would have eyed her legs while she paid the assistant. That Marie was sitting beside him wouldn’t have stopped him. That Marie was sitting beside him not feeling well did.

  Their son-in-law stuck his head out into the waiting room as soon as the city woman and her son left.

  Like his assistant, he saw Lucien’s bandage and wagged a finger. “What have you gone and done to yourself now?” he asked with mock severity. “Don’t you think I get tired of patching you?”

  Again, Galtier said, “I didn’t come to see you on account of this scratch. Marie is not well.”

  “No?” Dr. O’Doull became very serious very fast. He almost bowed to his mother-in-law. “Come in, please, and tell me about it.” As Marie rose, O’Doull nodded, ever so slightly, to Lucien. “Why don’t you wait here?”

  “All right,” Galtier said. He knew what that meant. His son-in-law would have to look at, perhaps even have to touch, parts of Marie only Lucien would normally look at and touch. He could do that much more freely if Lucien weren’t in the room with the two of them. Galtier understood the necessity without liking it.

  He buried his nose in a magazine from Montreal. All the articles seemed to talk about ways in which the Republic of Quebec could become more like the United States. Galtier was far from sure he wanted Quebec to become more like the USA. The people writing the magazine articles had no doubt that was what Quebec should do.

  Every so often, he noticed he was reading the same sentence over and over. It wasn’t because the sentences sounded so much alike, though they did. But he couldn’t stop worrying about what was going on on the far side of that door.

  After the longest half hour in Galtier’s life, Marie came out again. Dr. O’Doull came out with her, saying,

  “Please sit here for a moment, if you would.” She nodded and sat down beside Lucien. O’Doull continued,
“Mon beau-père,
 I would speak with you for a few minutes. Come in, please.”

  “Very well.” Galtier didn’t want to get up. He wanted to stay there beside Marie. But he saw he had no choice. “Is everything as it should be?” he asked his son-in-law.

  “Well, that is what I want to talk to you about,” O’Doull answered.

  Numbly, Galtier walked to the door. Dr. O’Doull stood aside to let him go through. Galtier had thought he was afraid before. Now his heart threatened to burst from his chest at every beat. O’Doull waved him into his own personal office. Lucien sat in the chair in front of the desk.

  His son-in-law opened a desk drawer. To Galtier’s surprise, he pulled out a pint bottle of whiskey.

  “Medicinal,” O’Doull remarked as he yanked out the cork and took a swig. He held out the bottle to Galtier. “Here. Have some.”

 
  “Merci.”
 Lucien drank, too. It wasn’t very good whiskey, but it was plenty strong. He coughed once or twice as he set the bottle on the desk. O’Doull corked it. With a smile that might have come straight from the gallows, Galtier asked, “And now,
mon beau-fils,
 have you a bullet for me to bite on?” He’d forgotten all about his cut hand.

  And so had Leonard O’Doull, which was an even worse sign. “If I did, I’d give it to you,” he said.

  “Your wife has a . . . a mass right here, in her belly.” He put his hand on his own belly, on the spot that corresponded to the one Marie had been holding when Galtier had walked into their kitchen, a little more than an hour before.

  “A mass,” Galtier echoed. Dr. O’Doull nodded. He had surely used the mildest word he could find to give Lucien the news. Though Galtier hadn’t had much schooling, he needed only a moment to figure out what the younger man was talking about. “A tumor, do you mean?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” his son-in-law answered, as gently as he could. “She should have an X ray. It is possible she should have a surgical operation.”

  “Possible? Only possible?” Lucien said. “What does this mean?”

  “It depends on what the X ray shows,” O’Doull answered. “She told me she first began feeling this pain a year and a half or two years ago, though it was less then. That means it could be—God forbid, but it could be—that there has been some . . . some spread of the mass. If the X ray shows there has . . . In that case, there would be less point to an operation.”

 
In that case, an operation would do no good, because she would die anyway.
 Again, Lucien didn’t need his son-in-law to explain that to him. He forced his mind away from it. “She had this pain for two years?”

  “So she told me,” Dr. O’Doull replied.

  “And she said nothing? She did nothing? In the name of God,
why
?” O’Doull sighed, uncorked the whiskey bottle once more, and took another drink. “I’ve seen this before among you Quebecois. Why? Maybe because you hope the pain will go away by itself and you won’t need to go to the doctor. Maybe because you simply refuse to let pain get the better of you. And maybe because you’re just too busy to get out of the house and into town to do what needs to be done.” Slowly, Galtier nodded. Any or all of those reasons could have fit Marie. He didn’t think he had the nerve to ask her. Even if he did, he doubted he would get a straight answer. “Is it that you can take this X-ray picture?” he asked.

  “No. I have no X-ray machine here,” O’Doull answered. “She will have to go to Quebec City, to the capital. If she has the operation, she will have to have it there, too.”

  “All right. We will do that, then.” Lucien didn’t hesitate, even for a moment. He wondered how much the required treatment would cost. He wished he hadn’t bought the Chevrolet. If he had to, though, he could sell it. Marie mattered more than money, and that was all there was to it. He did ask, “This operation, it will cure her?”

  His son-in-law’s shrug was more weary and worried than Gallic. “Without knowing what the X ray will show, without knowing what the surgeon will find, how can I answer that? Be fair to me, please.”

  “I’m sorry.” Lucien bent his head and rubbed his eyes. “Let me ask you a different question, then. You have been a doctor for a good many years now. From what you see, from what you know, what do you think the chances are?”

  Leonard O’Doull’s lips skinned back from his teeth in what wasn’t a smile. “I wish you hadn’t asked me that, because now I have to answer it. From what I have seen, from what I know . . . I wish things were better,
mon beau-père.
 That’s all I can say. I wish things were better.” He made a fist and brought it down on the desk.

  “I will pray,” Galtier said. Here lately he’d been thinking he’d got ahead of life. His laugh held only bitterness. No one ever got ahead of life, not for long, and life had just reminded him of it.
Why wasn’t it
me?
 he wondered.
Dear God, why didn’t You take me instead?
 That question had no answer. It never would.