Proud Flesh (26 page)

“Well, I can see from your face, Doctor, whose side you're on. Everybody takes her side against me. They all say, isn't it a pity, that poor dear girl, she just lives for her mother and all that old witch can do is complain about her. You must be very tired of hearing me, so I'll hush. But does she never complain about me?”

“Not to me, she doesn't.”

“It's so aggravating! That's her way of putting me always in the wrong. It's always been like that and I'm sick and tired of it, of being made to look like a monster of ingratitude. Does she never say anything to anybody? She's human, isn't she? Or is she? I sometimes wonder.”

“All I can tell you is, to me she has never spoken one syllable against—”

“Then the more fool she! I've given her plenty to complain about, let me tell you. I'm human, if she isn't.”

“Edwina, of all your children—”

“Amy loves me the best. Rrrrrrrr! If I hear that once more I'll scream.”

“She worships you. She is always thinking of you.”

“Well, I wish she would think about something else some of the time. I don't like knowing that anybody is thinking about me all the time. I would rather they never thought about me at all. How do you know what they're thinking about you? And don't tell me that if anybody made Amy what she is I'm the one. I know it. I admit I have done everything in my power to make my children all love me ahead of their wives and husbands and their children. I am a jealous woman—as jealous as Jehovah. My first commandment to my children was, thou shalt have none other before me. Ah, but I never said they were not to have any other after me. I wish Amy had had children. That would have given her something to think about without thinking about me all the time. That's what women are put here for, to have children, and when one doesn't she goes off on a tangent.”

“Most people—”

“I am not most people.”

No, she was not, Doc agreed, seeing in his mind Amy's face, grown frosty with that bleak pride in her self-sacrifice to her unappreciative mother which was all she had; unlike most people she had a daughter who would die for her—and regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth.

“She is not my only child, you know. I have to remind people that Amy is not my only child. Have to remind her of it, too, now and again. The world may think she's my only one but she's not. I've got nine others. Nine, and they love their mother just as much as Amy does, though she may put on the biggest show. The others all love me just as much as Amy does, and would without her telling them to all the time. They don't need her prompting.”

She herself did not know what made her treat Amy as she did. And for that reason, or lack of reason, there seemed to be nothing she could do about it. She tried. She really did. The depth of her dislike for this one child of hers obviously dismayed her. It frightened her to feel such unnatural feelings and not to be able to account for them or overcome them. She forced herself to be affectionate, and the fact that it was forced was plain even to poor affection-starved Amy, and turned her away more hurt than ever.

Then there was the maddening contrast she had always before her of Amy and her favorite. She and Kyle could not be together for five minutes without him saying something to provoke her; Amy never gave her a cross word. Edwina would come fuming fresh from some clash with Kyle and find Amy all care and attention, and all her anger would pour out over Amy's bowed and patient head. Anybody else would have looked daggers but Amy would just look at her with eyes full of love, and not even injured love, not even reproachful. She would just bite her lip and wait for the storm to blow over. She had forgiven her mother already. Provoking as it must have been to be forgiven when she had not asked to be and when she knew she did not deserve to be, this was no excuse for Edwina's animosity. She could not forgive Amy for being the child that Kyle was not.

And even worse: when she no longer had before her the contrast between her first-born and her last. When Kyle left and time passed and he never returned. Then Amy's solicitude became pure poison to her mother. She fancied she found the bitter taste of spite in it, like a dose of medicine disguised with sugar. The implication that she needed medicine, and that it would be bitter, was not lost upon her. Anybody else in Amy's position would have gloated over how her favorite had repaid her; Edwina's mistake was in thinking that Amy was anybody else.

What most maddened Edwina was that nothing she could do could provoke Amy nor bate the love Amy bore her. That image—that ikon—that idol that Amy had fashioned of her was a reproach and a goad to her, and she could not get at it to smash it, to topple it from its pedestal. Amy had enshrined it in a sanctuary where no one, not even its model—especially not she—could get at it and desecrate it. There she kept it inviolate, and before it she kept her votive candle always burning.

Then Edwina got old, and sick, and scared, and then she tried to make up to Amy a little for all her mistreatment and sought to gain a little of that attention and affection which she had only had to ask for all along. Not even ask for. Just accept. Just not repulse. Edwina's way of gaining forgiveness was characteristic of her. Not by showing Amy any love but by allowing Amy to love her a little. But that was all Amy asked for, and she, poor fool, was happy. Or rather, not happy, not happy at all, for she was in a state of anxiety bordering upon panic for fear her mother was about to die, knowing as she did that only that, the fear of imminent death, could ever make her mother speak a kind word to her. The trouble was, poor Amy did not know how to love a little. If only she might have been a little less ardent! She was awfully intense, eager. And eagerness does somehow repel people. It is not a matter of suspecting its sincerity. Eagerness just does somehow repel people. Amy really was guilty of indecent exposure of the heart. Of course she was driven to excess by her mother's lifelong rejection of her. She pursued her mother with all the ardor of a rejected suitor, and with the same outcome. Any could not locate in herself what it was that turned her mother from her. Her mother's unspecified suspicions of her made her suspicious of herself. She invented faults for herself. Better to confess to a known fault, however awful, than not to know what awful fault to confess to. It filled her with self-doubts, and sad to relate, that makes a person unattractive to others. Her mother could not tell her why she disliked her—it must be something too awful for words. Her mother seemed unable to tell herself why she disliked her—it must be something too awful for thought. And so poor Amy was filled not just with self-doubt but with self-hatred, and that, even sadder but even truer, makes a person still more unattractive. The world is ready to accept a person at his own self-estimation, especially if it be a low estimation.

Old and ill and expecting that she would be repaid as she knew she deserved to be for all her mistreatment of her, Edwina now did Amy the final injustice: she grew afraid of her. No doubt she expected Amy now to gloat over the signs of her failing strength and her dependency as she would have done if she had been Amy. With no reason whatever, or rather, with every reason in the world had it been anybody but who it was, she had grown afraid of Amy. And this too, the ultimate misunderstanding in a lifetime of misunderstanding, the ultimate injustice in a lifetime of injustice, Amy had borne with the patience of a saint.

Sitting there with her in that sickroom hour after hour, day after day, Doc knew he was in the presence of a saint. He knew because she brought out the Devil in him. He felt himself coming to understand and even to sympathize with Edwina, even to side with her, although to do so disgusted him with himself. Yet the selfless dedication of this paragon of daughters, so ill-rewarded and still so persevering, began to exasperate him, too. Imperfection is bearable, being the universal human condition; one glimpse of perfection makes it unbearable. To the ordinary selfish, sinful mortal, like Doc, there was something unnatural, something inhuman, something monstrous about a saint. There was also something very irksome. To live with a saint took the patience of a saint. No wonder the world rid itself of them by burning them at the stake, unraveling their live entrails and winding them on windlasses, boiling them in oil—driven to such atrocities in search of something for which their victim would be unable to forgive them.

If she were mine, if I were Edwina, I wouldn't be able to stand her either, Doc found himself thinking. All that meekness and goodness would make me contrary and mean to her, too. That foregone forgiveness for whatever I might do to her would only goad me into doing it. She would make me hate myself, knowing how far short I fell of her ideal of me, and that would make me hate her. It does make me hate myself, just imagining it. And for a moment Doc wondered whether that might not be Amy's unconscious motive for her obdurate love and forgiveness. Could it be that for some people, long-suffering, uncomplaining forbearance, returning good for evil, was a weapon, the most insidious, the most powerful of all, against which there was no defense? A kind of psychological jujitsu—the weapon of the weak—it employed your own force against you.

VIII

It was a question whether the Renshaws would not have monopolized his services to the neglect of the rest of his practice in any case that week, when with so many of their kin, elderly and infantile, under their roof, they were practically running a sanitarium out there. He was continually being called upon to attend one or another of them. The longer they were away from their own homes the more the elderly ones complained of ailments. The young ones, too. Their mothers, too, all in a state of nerves from sleeplessness, from protracted anxiety, suspended grief. Small wonder that none of those who were not in on the plot to keep him prisoner saw nothing remarkable in the fact of his being nearly always there: there were enough legitimate calls upon him almost to account for it. He ought to have had, in Amy, a trained assistant; but Amy was worse than useless to him, herself in need of his attention, a menace to his main patient, because of worry and overwork.

And so, all alone, himself unwell, exhausted, afraid, afraid to sleep for fear Amy might fall asleep at her post, forced to keep a lid on his simmering rage, disgusted with himself for his truckling to his captors, sick with uncertainty over his wife, unable even to bear to think of what might be happening to some of his other patients, he went his rounds of the house, from the children's ward, where an epidemic of summer colds had broken out, to the bedrooms of the various aged and infirm, sufferers from kidney gravel and sciatica and arthritis and other ills real and imagined, all this in that stifling heat. He had kept a list of all those whom he had treated and he intended to render a bill for his services that would bankrupt them, that would reduce them to such straits they would not be able to retain a lawyer to defend them against the criminal charges he intended to bring against them.

What had they threatened him with? Everything! Nothing! That was the hell of it. That was what made it all the more unnerving, all the more maddening, all the more humiliating: their sinister silence. They left it to his imagination, they never bothered to put into words what he might expect to happen to him should he try to escape or smuggle out a note or show himself at the window to the neighbors who came to ask after their mother, and whom he could imagine passing on to the Renshaws—too engrossed in their own troubles to keep up with the news—the information that there was still no clue to the whereabouts of old Doc Metcalf. Just as—with another rise in his blood pressure—he imagined them sharing a sigh over him with the pharmacist when they took in to have filled one of his prescriptions which, without any prompting, and with no acknowledgment, and certainly with no thanks from them, he dated from before his “disappearance.”

That was the part that rankled most: they had made a flunky out of him. Not only had they kept him prisoner, they had made him act a part, made him participate in the mockery that he was under no restraint to stay but was free to go whenever he pleased. That if he stayed it was out of choice, because of his concern for them. He had been forced to do their bidding without their having to bid him do it. He had been made not only to acquiesce but to collaborate in the wrong being done to him, and to do it cheerfully, as though there was nothing he would sooner be doing. He, their victim, had been obliged to relieve them of any necessity for threatening him. What was he to do—an old man, weak, not well himself—he was no match for any one of those bullies, male or female, much less for the whole bunch of them together? And what thanks did he get for the pains he took in order that they might be spared having to intimidate him openly? Plainly they despised him for his cowardly compliance. They just dared him to complain, even to look resentful. If he resented his enforced attendance upon their mother, then was he really attending her as he should? And if he was not—!

In the privacy of his room, there only did he rebel, and even there he fulminated in whispers, vowed vengeance in silence, savored secretly his coming retribution. Then on emerging to answer yet another peremptory summons to the sickroom, he flushed with fear lest these expressions of revolt which he had indulged himself in might have left telltale traces on his face like pilfered jam around a schoolboy's mouth.

His presence in the house—his detention—his captivity—was kept from all but the immediate family, and he was made to conspire in keeping it from them. By day, when not at the patient's bedside, he was confined to his room. Not that he was led back and forth under guard. It was simply understood that when he was off duty—he was never off call—he was to keep himself out of sight. To those house servants and the more distant kin who saw him only in the sickroom and only when they were summoned once more to be present at the end, it no doubt seemed that he had just dashed out from town in answer to the call. “Oh, Doctor, you are so good to give us so much of your time, to come so promptly when we need you,” said one of the old aunts once; he smiled a disclamatory smile. Also tacitly understood was the prohibition, when in his own room, against going near the window, where he might have been seen by, might even have been suspected of trying to signal to, the neighbors who called to ask after their mother.