Poorhouse Fair (4 page)

Many of the heads suspended on the white waves were turned to him by now. Lucas, with his big body and strange skin, was not inconspicuous. Dr. Angelo came up to him silently. "Yes?"

The doctor was a middle-aged Italian, highly handsome, though his head was a bit too big for his body, and his eyes for his head. It was as if the years of service and fatigue that had subdued his Latin mannerliness to mere staring, indeed dazed, gentleness had also been a drag on his lower lids: his green irises rode a boat of milk, under a white sky. Thus his eyes were targets.

"Conner thought I should come here."

"Why did Conner think that?"

"No reason, except to get me out of his way."

Angelo waited, the beautiful mouth smiling regretfully beneath the two ovals of gray hair symmetric on his upper lip. He held some cards in his hands but showed no sign of being interrupted. "Is the difficulty rectal?" he at last suggested.

"Oh, hell, no. No. It's just my ear. A little itching that comes and goes now and then."

"Could we have a look? Come over here, Mr--?"

"Lucas. George R."

"Yes. You have a wife. Did her legs improve?"

"Wonderfully. We're both wonderful. The ear doesn't pain at all now, but I guess that's always the way."

"Mm." Angelo led the way to his office, a brown desk shielded by frosted glass partitions, but open in the front. One entire pane was papered with licenses, permits and certificates of authority from state and federal bureaus.

"This ear?"

"The other."

Angelo inserted the nozzle of a brass funnel painfully deep into Lucas's head and murmured with a trace of pride, "Definitely inflamed. How have you been irritating this canal?"

"I try to keep it clear of wax," Lucas admitted, Ms voice made flat, loud, and hollow by the cold metal in his ear.

"How is the other?"

"First-rate. Never a twinge or anything."

"May we see?" And the frightening operation was repeated. Lucas wanted all metal to keep away from his body. With a certain brutality the icy intruder in his head squirmed, and Angelo's wet breath beat on the side of his neck. "Nothing," Angelo decided finally.

Lucas was sufficiently relieved to observe across the aisle from the office a gaunt woman, of seemingly prodigious length, switching her head back and forth on the pillow, as regular as a pendulum.

"Let's try this," Angelo said. A soft rubber mask was clapped over the bad ear; he winced. "Tender?" Angelo asked.

"A little, but you know ... nothing." It occurred to him, with a muffled inner jolt, that his ear was quite badly off; would have to be lanced. He had heard rumors all his life of this operation; nothing was more painful. It was brief, they said, a mere moment, an atom of pain, but of such pain as couldn't be bettered; the prick pierced all the layers of numbness right through to the ultimate, blue-hot sheet of pain that set the limit to suffering.

Angelo threw a switch at the side of his desk, by the radiator. "Just tell me the numbers you hear."

Lucas figured that if he passed this test he would be let off the lancing. At first it was easy. The voice was a woman's, very slow and ticky, like a phone operator's. He repeated after her, "13 ... 74 ... 5 ..." Her voice grew higher as she sank into a lake of viscid substance. "12," she called, "99." In the strain of listening the rustle of blood in his head created static. "Uh, 99." His tongue had become queerly cumbersome; his heart fluttered high in his chest. He missed the woman's next two cries, so deep and tiny had she grown. The head across the aisle turned left, then right on the pillow, like a whig-beat. Lucas ventured, "80?"

Angelo impatiently tore away the rubber cup. In his anxiety Lucas had pressed it hard against his skull; his ear smarted.

"Grace," Angelo called. "Grace!" To the girl who appeared he said, "Lucas. George R., please."

His eyes settled into fixity. The two irises enlarged and merged into one great opaque black pupil circled by considerate green, which shield pressed against Lucas's chest. Wriggling under this weight of attention Lucas's mind desperately sought to gain a glimpse of the phantom Grace and whatever cruel instruments she was bringing. How could he know what grim message the simple syllables of his name, in Angelo's mouth, had spelled to her? Smiling tirelessly, Angelo explained in monotonously intoned detail the clinical nature of his aural morbidity. Lucas caught none of it, except when Angelo, in specifying the location of the worst redness, made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and with a finger of the other hand rubbed the wrinkly part of the thumb skin and said, "Right in around here. Between seven and eight o'clock." A queer trick, his making the ear a timepiece; there was something insane in so much explanation.

All Grace brought was a blue card. Making swift marks on it, Angelo asked if he had ever had that upper molar pulled. Two years ago it had been noted as dead and liable to abscess.

"It never gave me no trouble."

"A submerged infection doesn't always declare itself to the nervous system. There are instances of an abscess at the root of a tooth--up in here, you see--" he touched one half of his mustache--"inserting poison into the bloodstream until the host suffers a coronary. Will you make an appointment please with Dr. Duff's secretary, you know the office? The second door to the left as you leave the ward." While saying this he fussed in his desk. "Now. Steady, please."

He came at the side of his eye with something long and thin.

Lucas reared away, half-rising.

Angelo smiled. The heavy beauty of his face loomed beyond a small rod of cotton-tipped wood, which he held up for Lucas to see. "We're going to apply a little zinc to ease the irritation." He did this, inserting the warm gray unguent with a careful twirling motion that tickled ultimate turnings dangerously near, Lucas felt, seats of pain. But Angelo, godlike, resisted the temptation, so understandable to Lucas at this moment, to prod a sensitive spot. He was soon done. He gave Lucas a small silver tube, several wooden wands, and a wad of cotton wrapped in orange tissue. The ointment was to be applied three times a day. If the trouble did not vanish in four days, return. Rolled on inertly by the sound of his voice, Angelo asked if Lucas were ready for the fair today, and said something implying that Lucas and his kind seized this annual opportunity to import hard liquor and get "a load on" behind the north wall.

Lucas had never heard of such a practice. "What year did this happen?"

Angelo looked surprised. "Every year. Don't you know about it? I forget, you're a married man."

"Oh--" Lucas felt himself expected to smirk. "I know enough. Being married doesn't mean you never lift your arm."

Angelo, for a moment uncertain, like a joking priest who has perhaps misjudged his company, laughed aloud in relief. "A patient some years ago told me that was the custom. He wanted to know if it wasn't a good idea medically. I told him it was a good idea cosmetically. That poor fellow's gone now. In fact his insides had been gone when he came here. I was afraid for a minute the rest of you had profited by his bad example."

"Well, no," Lucas easily lied, "we try to keep up the old traditions."

Angelo liked this, and they might have gone on and on, for the thought of corruption put a sinister bloom on the doctor's manner, but luckily for Lucas there was a distraction. The woman flapping her head across the aisle called "Miss. Miss." Angelo's ponderous eyes wavered, and heavily he pushed away from the desk.

Lucas left the three-sided box--box no doubt for some the entry to smaller boxes, more intricate chairs, and the final straps beneath the violet bulbs--light-headed. Passing Grace, the nurse, he saw she was a beautiful girl of twenty or so, her body firm as a half-green apple. He seemed to skate through the white cones of the doomed, and felt himself, mirrored in the waterless eyes watching, a cruelly vital toad. He was so rejuvenated he played hooky, ignoring Dr. Duff's door and making no appointment.

HIS WORDS with Amy, and the patch of frail grape cloth, reminiscent, in her quilt, had affected Hook poorly. Her speaking so plainly of death stirred the uglier humors in him. In the mid-mornings of days he usually felt that he would persist, on this earth, forever; that all the countless others, his daughter and son among them, who had vanished, had done so out of carelessness; that if like him they had taken each day of life as the day impossible to die on, and treated it carefully, they too would have lived without end and have grown to have behind them an endless past, like a full bolt of cloth unravelled in the sun and faded there, under the brilliance of unrelenting faith. Amy, with her sharp short view, had disrupted the customary tide of his toward-noon serenity. He consoled himself by contemplating the southeast horizon, where, in support of his prediction, luminous leaning cumulus clouds were constructing themselves.

Not that the sun was diminished yet. On the meadow beyond the wall, low where Hook stood, a rabbit paused, a silhouette of two humps, without color. When the creature lifted his head his chest showed its sharp bulge, and a lilac redness was vivid within the contour of his translucent ear--as Hook saw him he had but one ear.

In the wide darkness surrounding the constricted area Hook's eyes could focus on, stars began to dance. They shut off and on with electronic rapidity, midges of dazzlement, and when he sought to give them chase, they removed their field to a further fringe of the sky his eyes made, and with a disconcerting sensation of insubstantiality he realized he had been concentrating into the sun, and that he had had little sleep the night before. He retired early but slept little, waking at queer hours with the feeling of no time having elapsed. Hook shielded his spectacles with the cigar hand and moved the three steps to the wall. Once he had a hand placed on the abrasive tepid surface of a sandstone, he lowered his lids.

The wall, its height slightly waving, like a box hedge, enclosed four and a fourth acres. On the north the rear of the stone barn served as a section of the wall, near a wide gap once for wagons, marked by two pillars, in the mortar of which the hinges of the double metal gates of the old estate were still fixed. There was a less wide entry, more for men than vehicles, also gateless now, at the front--the east--leading into the central gravel walk. On the northeast corner, nearest Andrews, a small gate was kept padlocked, though in the estate's days it had seldom been; Mr. Andrews had intended the wall and the look of the buildings to say "Mine" more than "Keep Away." The Diamond County Home For the Aged lorded over a considerable agricultural plain in New Jersey. The main building, the home, was inexactly an embroidered cube, with a shallow, somewhat hovering roof, topped by the airy cupola. The west wing, once a ballroom, looked added-on but in fact was a portion of the architect's and the second Mrs. Andrews' conceptions. The substance of the great high house was wood painted a tempered yellow weathering toward orange. To the credit of the old carpenters their work still appeared solid, without being thickly made. Along the eaves fancy trim hung, lace wheedled from pine planking. Five lightning rods were braced by spirals of hand-forged iron. The sixth had partially collapsed and pointed diagonally. Maple, horsechestnut, cherry, walnut, apple, and oak trees had grown old on the grounds. There were several broad elm stumps as memorial to the blight.

Hook prayed, requesting that the spell be allowed to pass and that his children be restored to Mm in Heaven. The face of his daughter occurred to him, when she was twenty-two and not married a year. He asked that he be guided to act rightly on this day. Warm color touched his lids. His mind seemed a point within an infinitely thick blanket.

Steadied, he dared open his eyes. The grass had peculiarly darkened, growing waxier, in anticipation of the rain. The cigar had died beneath the conical ash. A sense of being menaced made him look up. Gregg approached rapidly, limping as he sometimes did though his legs were sound, out of sarcastic anger or excess of energy.

"Where the hell did Lucas get to?" he asked. "Conner must have made the bastard Garbage Supervisor and we'll be lucky if he ever tips his f.ing hat to us."

Hook was pleased to have an answer. "Well: ask Conner. There he stands."

Gregg, nearsighted in the way of small people, had difficulty making out the plump figure of their prefect, where he stood at a distance, by the porch steps.

THE REVERBERATION of descending all those stairs still sounded in Conner's legs, making them feel disproportionately big. From the window, he had watched Hook perform his rounds among the old people, tried to return to work, been wounded again by the complaining contents of the letter, and had let the humid importunate atmosphere Buddy was giving off get on his nerves. The air on his desk cooled; the slats of sunshine dimmed and disappeared. Returning to the window, he observed, through the blinds, a few flimsy clouds, perfectly white, strung like wash on the vapor trail of an airplane too high to see or hear. So near the ionosphere, so far from his fellow-modern watching below, was the aviator that relative to that breadth of blue his progress was imperceptible; yet the length of his trail, intact through half the firmament, bore witness to the titanic speed he was making, alone, in that airless cold.

A few clouds dropping their shadows shouldn't matter. Certainly the immense bowl above could not be filled. But Conner pictured the fair occurring in unblemished weather, like the weather on a woodcut. The weather of this one day would be, he felt, a judgment on his work; these people, having yielded all authority, looked beyond themselves for everything--sufficient food, adequate shelter, and fair weather on their one day of profit and celebration. He would be blamed, and strangely felt prepared to accept the blame, for foul skies,

He should be with them, his people. By default Hook was capturing the domain. Conner's jealousy deepened. And the aura of holiday, the general dislocation of duties, infected him, and he began the flights of stairs, but not so suddenly Buddy did not communicate, through the simple pink oval of his face caught in the corner of Conner's eye as he seized the doorknob, amazement.