Proud Flesh (25 page)

Edwina lived in terror of death and every death reminded her of her own. Those surrounding her saw to it that none was ever reported to her, whether that of a former acquaintance—she no longer had any close friends—or celebrities or heads of government. Time had stopped in her shuttered world, and she must have supposed that Roosevelt was still in the White House, George VI still on the throne. While for her part she would willingly have left it to the lower classes to do all the dying, whenever a person from among them presumed to die she was, before people learned never to tell her about it, quite put out, as though such individuals ought to know their place better than to make themselves an unpleasant topic of conversation. She had cut herself off from old friends, and her circle of acquaintances also contracted as those who formed it grew old and infirm. She found it too painful, seeing in the deepening lines of their faces and the stiffening of their joints, her own mortality mirrored. Religion offered her no solace. To go to church was to be reminded weekly that before one could attain to the life everlasting one had first to depart this one, so, although religious, or at least superstitious, Edwina Renshaw practiced her faith in a personal God and stayed home on Sundays, where she might receive Him more intimately as an equal. She refused ever to attend the local annual Graveyard Cleaning Day; indeed, she would detour twenty miles out of her way to avoid driving past the gates of a graveyard. It was fifteen years since she had visited her husband's grave, almost as long since she had mentioned him. Not that Edwina's memory of her husband was so very painful; what was painful was that he was a memory, and that what of him was mortal lay moldering in the ground, and that on the other half of the stone above him where he lay was already carved her name and the year of her birth, followed by a dash and an expanse of waiting blank stone. Yet with all this she would, when she was feeling very well and with no thought of dying ever, taunt Amy with her death. Amy, who but for the disrespect to her mother would have held her hands over her ears and run screaming from the room. Amy, who would have died for her, as Doc himself once told her. It was the wrong thing to say. After thinking it over for a minute, and realizing that while Amy might be willing she was unable to do her that favor, Edwina had one more grudge to hold against her.

So at last he had gotten around to his last patient of the day: himself. He had indeed had a long, hard day. He had been conscientious—he had been in terror of making some misstep!—and now he was fuming inwardly—while looking most agreeable—at his treatment by these people who owed him such different treatment, so that he himself was experiencing fibrillations. This had been brought on in part by the nature of the case. He had detected a tendency in his cardiac condition to act up whenever he was treating a cardiac patient. No mystery in this. The sight of his patient's suffering frightened him. His having to hide his fright worsened his pain. So he had dosed himself well and gone to bed in the room assigned to him adjoining the sickroom, and he had slept soundly despite everything, worn out by the day he had been through. What had wakened him? He had come to suddenly with a sense of misgiving. He had tried to dismiss it from his mind and go back to sleep, but it persisted, grew, led him at last to get up and dress and go in to make sure everything was all right. It was two o'clock. Three hours past the time for the patient's medication, which lay on the nightstand where he had put it, while Amy sat in her armchair with an innocent smile on her lips, purring in her sleep like a cat.

VII

So there he was, the prisoner of that crew of motherlovers, trying to keep her from dying on his hands in order to escape being lynched until those two got back with that missing one, and with, for a nurse, a woman so distraught with worry and so worn out with overwork, and yet so determinedly helpful, he had to watch her every minute to keep her from killing his patient through negligence, absentmindedness.

It was one of those absolutely to be expected ironies of life: there lay Edwina Renshaw, the only thing keeping her alive, as one of her kinswomen had said to Doc, the hope of seeing that baby boy of hers one last time, and the family, not trusting to a wire, had had to send two of his brothers to fetch him home to his dying mother; meanwhile the child whom Edwina had never appreciated, never loved, never even liked, kept watch at her side hour after hour until she was ready to drop from exhaustion, her own breath hanging upon her mother's labored breathing, her nails dug into her palms to keep herself from nodding—ready, when her mother did die, to throw herself upon the funeral pyre. A life as singleminded in its dedication as that of a saint in the desert Amy Renshaw had devoted to her mother, and she had never wavered in that faith, though continually mocked and scorned and flouted by the very goddess she worshiped. If like Amy you take criticism well, then you will get a lot of it.

It was for this that Doc exempted Amy from the resentment he felt toward the rest of the Renshaw tribe for what they had done to him. This plus his certainty that Amy was not in on the plan to detain him. Oh, she would have been in on it if she had been asked, nurse though she was and aware of what it would mean to his practice. But they had known they did not need to implicate her. Amy undoubtedly believed that he was there working round-the-clock because he wanted to be, and that one or more of the town's other doctors was taking his practice for him in the meantime. She would not have been able to imagine that he could want to be anywhere else when her mother lay at death's door. Poor fool, ever ready to lick the hand that slapped her, while Kyle, his mother's favorite, had brought her nothing but heartache. Heartache indeed, thought Doc, remembering the times he himself had had to dash out there and treat her for fibrillations brought on by her latest row with that boy.

Every large family has one: an outsider, a defector, an escapee, or if the family's frontiers be sealed off against escape, an internal emigre. This in the Renshaw family was Kyle, and as might have been expected, where total allegiance had been demanded, total alienation had resulted. The rest of them did not like Hazel; but with all her faults, Hazel was one of them. But that one apple that had fallen far from the tree, Kyle, he was not one of them, and he lost no opportunity of letting them know it. It was Kyle who, at one of their reunions, over dessert, after listening to them all run down their neighbors, their co-workers, their acquaintances, everybody outside the pale, had commented, “I learned a new word the other day. Xenophobia,
X
–
E
–
N
–
O
–
P
–
H
–
O
–
B
–
I
–
A
. Xenophobia. It's a mental disease. The word is Greek, and means, ‘a morbid dislike of strangers.' It's what you've all got. Our whole tribe has got it. All but me. Xenophobia.”

“And do you know what mental disease you've got?” said Amy. “Just the opposite. Kin-o-phobia.
K
–
I
–
N
–
O
–
P
–
H
–
O
–
B
–
I
–
A
. That's what you've got.”

And he: “Yes, I can get along well enough with most anybody as long as they're not kin to me.”

And this was their darling. Not just his mother's: the darling of them all. The last born of ten, coming at a time when his mother had long thought she was past conceiving, a change-of-life child, the one whose childhood had been fatherless, with brothers old enough to be his father and four grown sisters all of them rather late to marry and get children of their own, he had been worse spoiled than an only child. The rub was, he was what they had made him, and against outsiders they were obliged to defend him because it was all their very own traits, especially all their most prized faults, which in him were pronounced and gave offense. He was the final print of which they were the trial proofs. Kyle, the last of the Renshaws, the grounds at the bottom of the cup, was more Renshaw than any of them. Contrariness ran in the family: Kyle was the contrariest of the lot. All were quarrelsome: his was the most quarrelsome disposition of all. The stubbornness on which they all prided themselves became downright mulishness in Kyle. Willful and headlong, Kyle rushed in where even other Renshaws feared to tread. If crossed in anything he would go quite glassy-eyed with rage, and he sulked past the time when even his brother Clifford would have given up out of sheer weariness.

His mother never tried to conceal her partiality for this Benoni of hers from the rest of her children. Nor did they resent it. Being so much older than he, some of them almost of a different generation, they were not in competition with him for her affection. As one by one her older children, despite all Amy's intercession, brought her the inevitable disappointments, Edwina turned more and more to Kyle—and Kyle was the greatest disappointment of them all. In her heart of hearts Edwina acknowledged that they got along so badly because they were so much alike. This made her love him all the more but it did not make it any easier to get along with him. And the irony was, when she and he had quarreled she was obliged to hide it from the others because she had openly favored him over them, to lie for him and put on a smile, sometimes with sass of his still ringing in her ears which his brothers, had they known of it, and had she not intervened to protect him, would have fought one another over which of them was to have the pleasure of thrashing him for.

“He's got no father to quarrel with, you see. Poor boy!” Edwina once explained to Doc.

Beginning over nothing, needing no cause, simply the clash of two identical wills, both powerful, both combative, quarrels between Edwina and Kyle never stopped short of verbal violence—sudden squalls blowing up into loud lashing gales. Headlong, heedless, soul-shattering recriminations which left them both white and trembling, left her in a condition requiring a visit from Doc—a fact which she kept from Kyle, and made Doc keep from them all. Nothing was ever left unsaid; they flayed each other raw, reopened every old wound, remembered all their unsettled disputes—and all their disputes went unsettled—in all their painful details. For old injuries from each other they both had total recall. Nor was any injury ever afterward repaired. Neither could bring himself to apologize, neither would give the other a chance to apologize. Over the lacerations they inflicted upon each other, tissue formed like proud flesh over festering wounds. Sullen, stubborn, unforgiving, most loyal to their mood when most in the wrong, they would let days go by without speaking to each other. Should another member of the family or one of the Negroes be so foolhardy as to try to make peace between them, both turned in fury on him.

Their last quarrel (another house call by Doc) had differed from all the others only in proving to be the last. Like all the rest, it had begun over some trifle. They had stormed and railed at each other, and when Kyle had had his say he had slammed out of the house and into his car and driven off. He had taken no belongings with him, intending no doubt to return home that night or the next day. But this time it must have come over him that he was a man, and the world was wide, and he had just kept going.

One summer day, out of school and idle, Kyle had swollen so with self-conceit over his marksmanship with his air rifle that he persuaded Lester, then a grown man already, but who trailed after his little brother like smoke behind a fire, to let him shoot a dime from between his fingers at twenty paces. They had practiced the trick out behind the toolshed where most of Kyle's errant schemes were hatched, and when he had grown sufficiently self-confident went, as he always did to show off his latest stunt, to find whichever of his brothers was about. They found Clyde and led him back behind the toolhouse out of range of possible discovery by Ma or any of the Negroes. Lester held out the dime with fingers which trembled hardly at all, such was the trust Kyle was able to inspire in him. Then Kyle, just about to raise the rifle to his shoulder, had seen that his was not the role that Clyde admired in the act. Lowering the gun, Kyle had insisted that Lester change places with him. Now Lester had been given no chance to practice the trick, and while he was a better shot than Kyle, he lacked Kyle's boundless self-confidence, or perhaps what Lester had that Kyle lacked was the fear of hurting his brother. But neither protest nor pleas availed. And so, shaking his head even as he was taking aim, and even as he was squeezing the trigger already saying to himself, “I told you so,” Lester fired. The BB had taken the thumbnail clean off. What Doc remembered was a pale-faced boy with a jaw set like a steel trap who never uttered a whimper.

Doc knew these Renshaws, as he knew most people, too well. A doctor, an old doctor, physician to some families for as long as forty years, got to know everybody too well. Because that too was part of his job: to act as confidant, confessor, go-between in those thirty-years' wars that marriages turned into, in the endless wrangling between parents and their children. And the thanklessness of the job! Not to be stopped from pouring out their life's secrets, they then resented him for knowing them! And the futility of it! That one lying there, Edwina Renshaw: she retained him, Doc had sometimes thought, solely to grumble to him about this daughter of hers now digging holes in her palms with her nails to keep herself alert, this paragon of filial dutifulness, the most loving daughter a mother ever had.

“She comes between me and the others,” Edwina had complained to him. “She keeps them from me. If they need anything she makes them come to her for it. If they get into any sort of difficulty she makes them keep it from me. She's the one they must turn to for any help. Oh, she says she does it to keep me from worrying, and possibly she believes that, who knows? Who knows what really goes on inside that head of hers? Oh, she doesn't try to turn them against me. She tells them to love me. She never stops telling them, so that now she thinks that if they love me it's because she tells them they must, that I owe it all to her. She's taken my place, that's what she's done. She's made her brothers and sisters—my children—into her children. They treat me as if I were their grandmother. If she wants children why doesn't she have some of her own? That's what a woman is for, and any woman who doesn't, there's something the matter with her. She's incomplete. In-com-plete, you understand?