Proud Flesh (24 page)

Looking about for a wastebasket in which to discard the empty ampule, he saw on the patient's nightstand the ampule of adrenalin that he had left the evening before for use in case of just such an emergency. Perhaps that should have put him on his guard right then. But what did he, a small-town doctor, a simple GP, know about such deep matters? He was no psychiatrist and certainly no detective. He was to have to become something of both in order to survive his ordeal, but he did not know then that his ordeal had begun.

VI

Only one person could have done it: the one who would most rather not have done it, the one predestined to do it, at whose birth the presiding fates had decreed that she would do something like this—Doc's next patient.

Anybody but Doc would have thought, seeing that unused ampule, that it could have been anybody in the house but one. Doc knew that that ampule had gone unused not by one of those who did not know how to use it but by the one who did know. Only Doc knew so much about the troubled, touching, contrary relationship between Amy and her mother. Knowing all that he knew, he felt a little to blame for what had happened. He ought to have foreseen something like this.

Amy would have sat at that bedside all through the night. If any of her sisters had offered to relieve her at her post she would have refused. Or if she had consented to rest for a while it would have been only for a while, and she would not have rested. It would have been on one of her watches that it had happened. It was Amy's fate to be the person in attendance at the time of her mother's death. It would be the fitting end, it would sum up their history. She had failed her mother in everything; now for the final failure. Now to fail her in what she was: as a nurse, professionally. We have all had that happen to us: the very fear of doing a thing makes us do it—who can say? maybe makes us do it in order to get rid of the fear. She had sat alone, the only person awake in the entire house, alone in that dim blue sick-light, conscious that the entire family was depending upon her to watch over their mother and bring her safely through the night. Doc could just see her sitting there in that half-darkness with the fear growing upon her that during her watch her mother would die, until there came a moment when her dread brought to pass the thing she dreaded: she looked at her mother and she was dead. She would not even have verified her terrible surmise, as she would have done, she being a nurse with long experience, had her patient been anybody but who it was. She would have drawn that bed-sheet up over her mother's face and in her eagerness to begin blaming herself would have set the servant women to draping the parlor in mourning and would—Doc could see her doing it—have gone herself out to tie that black crepe ribbon on the door knocker.

So it was as much for Amy's sake as for his own that he prayed as he sat there for the medicine he had given her to save Edwina Renshaw for the time being, at least, so that her death might not be attributable directly to the shock she had been put to. It was not for Edwina's sake. He had never liked Edwina Renshaw. How could you like anybody who liked herself so much? He had never liked Amy, either—how could you like anybody who disliked herself so much?—but he both pitied and admired Amy, and he had always taken her side in the conflict between her mother and her—although it was Edwina, not Amy, who made him her confidant and tried to enlist his sympathy. Somebody had to take Amy's side—she never took her own. Amy sided with her mother against herself. It made your head spin, the way Amy could twist things to her own disadvantage. It also made your stomach turn. For her mother's mistreatment of her Amy always had a hundred excuses, for herself never one. To see it was touching, it was exasperating, and it was … well, repellent. Though of course the minute you felt that, you felt ashamed of yourself for it. For Amy was so selfless, so patient, and so misused. Her mother herself knew she misused Amy—and made Amy pay for the knowledge. Her inability to supply a motive for her malice made her all the more malicious. Doc was not surprised when he was called upon next to attend Amy.

The parlor had undergone a restoration. The lowered windowshades had been raised to their tops and the room was aglare with sunlight. Under the direction of sister Lois the servant women had washed the soap off the mirrors and whisked away those bedsheets, and Lois's hissed commands to them to hurry! hurry! bespoke the family's sense of the unseemliness, the scandalousness, perhaps even the blasphemy of their premature mourning. They were gathered in the living room across the hall to recover from the double shock they had come through when one of them looked out the window and groaned. It was a repetition of yesterday. There came Eulalie bent over pulling her toy wagon, in which, her hands and feet hanging over the sides and trailing in the dirt, lay Amy. Eulalie had found her down on her knees in the cowlot with her blouse torn open smearing manure on her breasts, poking it into her mouth out of which had come word of her mother's death and trying to force herself to swallow it.

Cowdung poisoning: in forty years' practice it was Doc's first case of that. He would have used a stomach pump on her if he had had one. As it was he pumped her full of antibiotics, gave her a tetanus shot, and one to knock her out. To himself he said, “If it's like this now just imagine what it's going to be when they lower the old woman into her grave!” And running through the calendar of his upcoming o.b. cases, he considered whether he ought not to reschedule his vacation so as to be sure to be out of town for that event.

So, bate them the first day. No criminal charges for that one. For it he would send them his statement. He would keep strictly to the letter of the law, and he had enough on them without padding the bill to put them all behind … Bate them the first day. Because they really had needed him then. They might not have known it when they came to get him, but events were already anticipating their precautions. He had gotten to Edwina Renshaw with not a moment to spare. Between her and Amy, and what with half a dozen of the other women showing sympathetic cardiac symptoms, not to mention a bit of emergency surgery he had been called upon to perform—never mind that—he could not have gotten away from there much before evening even if they had been meaning to let him go.

She seems to get worse at night:
start counting from there.

“She seems to get worse at night.” This from the morose and menacing, the close-mouthed Clifford, was how, toward evening, his work finally done, his bag packed, hands washed, waiting to be driven back to town, he was informed that he would not be going home. Not asked if he would or could or thought he should stay. Told that he was spending the night there. Not even told that. Told, she seems to get worse at night.

It was infuriating, it was outrageous—it was pure Renshaw. Only they could have done it. He knew them. He had known them all all their lives. He knew what they were capable of. Knew they were capable of anything where their mother's health or happiness was concerned. He remembered her regaining consciousness to utter the name of that rebellious boy of hers, and he could guess the shame to the family's pride that one of them should be missing from their number now. So they were just going to keep him there in personal attendance upon their mother while they went to fetch that one home. The hell with the rest of his patients—who just happened to be their lifelong neighbors and fellow-townsmen. They must just make do the best they could so long as Ma required his exclusive attention.

But he figured, what, maybe twenty-four hours? The way they drove a car they ought to be able to get there and get home with him again in that time, no matter where he might be. Or if he had put himself beyond the range of a car, in these days of jet planes, hourly flights to anywhere in the world … Besides, Doc was not sure himself that she would survive removal to the hospital. That is to say, he was sure she would but afraid she might not. That if they consented, and she were transferred there on his recommendation and then she died … So he might fume to himself at their highhandedness (he could feel a sharp rise in his already high blood pressure) but the actual inconvenience to him, to his wife, to his practice—how great was it, after all? It would not be long before Edwina Renshaw resumed her place as just one of his patients instead of the only one. So although he already had enough in him to be dangerously explosive, he swallowed two more nitroglycerin tablets, and he put down the Renshaws' rudeness to their grief and anxiety, and agreed with himself to overlook it. At the back of his mind lurked the suspicion that to have protested would have done him no good, and he was afraid to protest lest his suspicion be confirmed. Had he even then been agreeing to stay in order to defer the moment when he might be told he was staying whether he agreed to or not? Anyhow, he stayed, and it was tacitly understood between them that he was not to go near the telephone.

And it was true, she did get worse at night. She did that night. Or maybe now he was getting hysterical about her. Right or wrong, he had thought it wise at one point to call them all to her bedside again—the whole clan packed inside the room and outside in the hall in hushed and tearful attendance. Hushed save once when her loud, labored breathing seemed to falter and they, thinking the end had come, dropped all restraint to sob and shriek and outdo one another in wild vows of penance if only she would not desert them. The whole clan save Ballard, of whose absence Doc was highly conscious. Lester's meant less to him. It was Ballard of them all who most intimidated Doc, and while he had no inkling at the time of just how far removed from the scene Ballard was, he found his absence comforting. All that was contained in the name Renshaw seemed to Doc to be concentrated in Ballard, the smallest of the lot but like the Oxo cube, with the whole bull in it. He was to learn later, as if he did not know it already, that the older brothers were every bit as Renshaw as Ballard—maybe, in order to take up any slack caused by Ballard's absence, a little more so.

“What, exactly, for the record, Doctor, did they threaten you with if you should try to use the phone, let your wife know where you were, that you were alive, at least?”

“You are a stranger here, sir, and don't know these people like I do.” A Yankee, he found himself thinking, with no understanding of how far family feeling can sometimes go. “They didn't have to draw me a picture. Think what they were doing. Carrying a man off and holding him against his will. Personal physician to their mother, if you please—like a queen. The hell with the health of the rest of my patients! Having gotten themselves in that deep, would they stop at making me regret any move I might make to get word to the outside? I thought about it. As the days went by I thought about it more and more. When I finally learned what I was in for—that they were going to keep me there until she died, however long that took, and that my duty was to see to it that she did not die—well, then the temptation to pick up the phone was sometimes almost more than I could resist. I knew what my poor Kate must be going through and I thought once that maybe even if I got caught at it they might let me get away with something like, ‘Honey, I know you must have been worried to death about me, but don't worry, I'm all right, I'm just out here at the Renshaws' and can't leave because Mrs. Edwina is too sick.' I didn't, for one reason, because I didn't know what they might do to her to keep her from telling you, Faye.”

“But they must have known,” said Mr. Murphy, “that sooner or later they were going to have to release you. You don't go so far, do you, Doctor, as to believe they were meaning … not to release you? Eventually they would have to, and then it would all come out, and they—”

“It wouldn't matter to them then. That would be after their mother had been granted her dying wish to see her missing boy.”

“Those boys and girls and their mother were always real close,” the Sheriff commented. “That Renshaw blood is very thick blood.”

He had had an assistant. Amy: rested, refreshed, scrubbed, powdered and perfumed, showing no aftereffects of her emotional debauch of the morning and with no wish to be reminded of it. Clear of eye, steady of hand, level of voice—hard to equate the neat, self-possessed, efficient-looking woman in the starched white nurse's uniform, white lisle stockings and sensible rubber-soled white oxfords, with the bare-breasted lunatic, face daubed with dung, whom Doc had seen, had treated, just hours earlier. To deflect any questions about herself, and to put him in his place, she was instantly all concern for him. He looked tired. He had had a long hard day. He was so conscientious, put so much of himself into his work. He should rest now. Her expression, bland and solicitous as it was, nevertheless had behind it some of her brothers' steely will, and it cautioned him not to question whether she was now fit for duty, whether she could safely be entrusted with the patient whose condition she had so disastrously misdiagnosed before. Her manner with him was professional. They were doctor and nurse together on a case. He was not to get the notion that her indisposition of the morning had made him
her
doctor, with leave to question or counsel or prescribe for her.

Perhaps after what had happened he ought not to have trusted her. He had trusted her because of what had happened. Its having happened once ensured that it could not happen again. And he was there—whether he would or no—in case of need. She was so eager to be helpful, to atone for her mistake. Her kinfolks would forgive her for plunging them into panic and unwarranted grief, but Amy could not forgive herself. Of course he had kept from her just how close she had come to bringing about the thing she feared. But surely he did not need to tell her. She knew her mother's morbid, almost mad fear of death. She knew it better than anybody. Who but she, the one it would pain the most, was the one person to whom Edwina ever spoke of dying? The one thing that seemed to rob death of its sting for Edwina had been to sting Amy with it.