Random Winds (41 page)

“Thank you,” she said coldly, “I’m going home.”

Only an hour before she would not have believed she could despise him.

*  *  *

They talked till past eleven. Jessie parted the curtains and stood thoughtfully looking out into the night. Over her shoulder Claire could see that the rain had stopped; a ghostly glitter lay on the walls and trees, matching her own fearful mood. The curtains fell back with a taffeta rustle as Jessie turned around.

“You shouldn’t have taken the pictures,” she said.

“I had stuck them in my purse and I didn’t know what to do with them.”

They lay spread out now on the coffee table. Claire picked one up, then slapped it down.

“How I would hate her if I were you! Both her and Dad, but her the most!”

“Oh, I’ve had my fill of hatred, make no mistake about that! But you can’t keep it up, year in, year out. It’s corrosive. I guess that’s why I kept the whole business to myself until now. I didn’t want you to be corroded. Also, to be honest, there was a little matter of my own pride.” And Jessie smiled slightly, in the self-mockery that was her habit.

“She spoiled your one chance. She could have had dozens, couldn’t she? And she took your only one.”

“Damn it, yes, she did.”

The love seat at the fireplace held small silk pillows, round as jewels: amethyst, topaz, garnet. Jessie fussed with them now, patting and rearranging. Presently she said, “Yet I always knew I’d been foolish to marry Martin. And after all that—happened—it would have been more foolish to hold him. I could have done it, you know. He wanted to stay. Because of you and a sense of obligation. But I didn’t want that. I couldn’t bear what I knew he must be feeling toward me, in spite of his merciful denials.”

What could it have been like in bed? Claire wondered. All those books that were passed around among her friends—somehow one always thought of strong and handsome people doing the things that were described in those books. In sudden shame she flushed and could not look at her mother.

Jessie was moving around the room again, at the magazine rack now. She spoke abruptly.

“I heard from Aunt Milly that Fern’s husband was killed in the war.”

“How horrible!” And Claire had a quick flash, out of some old war movie, of a sky torn by terrible guns and battering rain, of a man lying in the mud with a leg torn away. “How horrible!”

“Yes. She’s had her share too. But she ought,” Jessie said somberly, “she ought to have married Martin in the first place. I knew it the first time I saw them together. Before they knew it.”

“What? Love at first sight?”

“Don’t scoff! It happens.”

“Pulp magazine stuff.”

Jessie smiled. The smile enlivened her mouth, but her eyes were still. “You’ll find out.”

“It’s just not real.”

“You’re sure you know what’s real and what isn’t? You’re sixteen and you already know that?”

“Well, I read, don’t I? I see things, don’t I?”

“But you haven’t lived them.”

Jessie played with the gold chains at her neck. She wore too many and they were too valuable. Why were they so important to her? Claire wondered. The thought was new. And all this business about love—how did Jessie know? Because she had gone through it herself? And this thought, too, was new.

“So what you’re saying is that they couldn’t help it?” Claire asked.

“I suppose I am.”

“That sounds almost noble.”

“Noble! Good God, I? You know better than that, after living with me all your life. No, it’s just that I’ve had to come to terms with things or go crazy. And people like me can’t afford to go crazy.”

Jessie picked up the photographs and shuffled through them. “You can keep these or destroy them,” she said, laying them back on the table. “Whatever you want. I don’t care which.”

“Not return them?”

Jessie shook her head. “They’d be a time bomb in that family. They’d wreck it.”

“You care if they do?”

“There are children! How can one wish that on children? It was enough when you—” She stopped. “And besides, that woman—that Hazel—never did anything to me.”

Ah yes, poor Hazel! Why did one think of her as “poor” when she was, after all, so snug and well off in her home? But there was something—She was so mad about Martin, it was embarrassing sometimes.

Jessie leaned over a photograph. She spoke reflectively, almost to herself. “Of course, I always knew he was an uncommon man. I always saw how far he’d go if he were given half a chance.”

“He talks about you sometimes. I think he might even like to see you. Why don’t you? People who’ve been divorced can still be civil to each other, can’t they?”

“A while ago you never wanted to see your father again. Now you want me to see him.”

The mind is so confused. You are old enough to understand how young you are and how contradictory everything is: other people, one’s feelings about oneself, everything. How long will it be before you ever get it all straightened out? Will you, ever?

And, almost angrily, Claire cried, “I don’t
want
anything! I only asked why—”

“All right, I’ll tell you why. I’m peaceful the way things are, the way I am. I don’t need to complicate my life with him or with my sister or anyone. I’ve nothing to say to him. I’ve made my way with no thanks to anyone except myself. Listen, I don’t want to hurt anybody, Claire; I only want to be let alone. I’m a realist. I’ve had to be.”

Jessie’s face, in the shaft of lamplight, was coppery gold. It burned. Intelligence was in it, and strength, and pain. Suddenly, through the opacity that separates one human spirit from the other, there came to Claire a flaring white translucence, an opening up, so that for an instant she entered into Jessie, lived as Jessie, was there in that other
instant of shudder and shock when the young girl first truly saw herself and knew she had been condemned when she was born.

Jessie got up. “I’m weary.” She stroked her daughter’s hair back from her forehead. “Come to bed. You’ve had a hard day. You’ve done a deal of growing up today.”

Alone in her room Claire stood brushing her hair. The rain had begun again, threatening the windowpane. Suddenly it came to her, so suddenly that she stopped the brush in midstroke, that she pitied, not Jessie only but her father, too. He—in all his competence and strength, he who was able to solve everything—she pitied him! And in this pity there was something new, another kind of love … Wasn’t that strange?

And now she felt the tightening of things and people. It was a feeling new to her, who had been particularly free in doing and thinking whatever she wanted. Those two, she thought, my father and the woman, Mary Fern—what sort of woman can she be, she with the dreaming eyes beneath a shady summer hat, with the long fingers lying on the silk lap? Those two have changed so many other lives besides their own! Because of them my mother and I live alone in this house; because of them there are Hazel, little Enoch and the babies—

What may come to me yet, to all of us, bound as we are to one another?

The day the office had opened, indeed the day on which the lease was signed, Martin had been terrified lest he had undertaken too much and wouldn’t be able to afford it. He was still, and probably always would be, a cautious heir to the Depression. But he need not have worried.

Very quickly the appointment book began to fill. Friends from the old bicycle and handball days had returned from the war and were sending referrals. More referrals came from new contacts in general practice and the specialties; his reputation was wider than he had known. So it became clear that, for the first time in his life, he would not only not be short of money, but would have it to spare, would have that freedom from constraint which comes when all one’s bills can be paid without wrinkling the forehead over them.

He came to his desk one afternoon while the office was still empty.

“You’re early,” the secretary said. He always thought of her as the “little” secretary, although she was over forty and had a perfectly good name: Jenny Jennings. “There’s no one booked till one-thirty.”

“I know. I finished at the hospital.” And he closed his door.

The truth was that he hadn’t finished at the hospital in any way he would have wanted to finish. The patient had died. Thrusting aside the sandwich and coffee on the desk, he went over, for the third or fourth time in the last hour, the agony of the morning.

Even before the hemorrhage started, he had known. Disaster had a certain feel and smell. He had known its warning breath often enough, and would know it again. That was in the very nature of the hard and sorrowful work he had chosen. Sometimes you were given an extra bit of last
minute luck to pull you out of a tight place, but not very often, and not today. From the evil growth attached to the carotid artery, the bright blood had just come gushing; Bearing down on the gauze packing, it had taken his whole strength in an attempt to stop the flow, but it had kept coming. And he had wished he were somewhere else, anywhere but there and then.

A circle of heads had surrounded him. He’d been aware of faces watching the open skull, watching him to see what he was going to do. But there had been nothing to do and they had all known it.

“The EKG is flat,” Perry had finally said at Martin’s shoulder. The words were mournful, final, like the sound of the sea in a shell. “There’s no heartbeat,” he’d said.

“Oxygen,” Martin responded, but it had already been brought. The tube was in the nostrils and someone was pressing on the chest of this young man who had been, so he had told Martin with pride, a varsity basketball player. Now he worked in a bank, and his wife had had twins last winter.

Martin had drawn off his gloves and slapped them furiously to the floor. Leonard Max, who was chief resident now, picked them up without a word. Then they both went to the locker room, where they put on lab coats to hide the tragic blood on their hospital gowns, removed the operating shoes and went down the hall to the waiting room to tell the family that the basketball player, the son, the husband, the father of the twins, was dead.

Later he had talked to Perry, protesting. “It need never have been if I’d got to him a year ago.”

“I know,” Perry said softly. Always he had been a foil when Martin was in trouble, offering some cheerful comment or remark to offset a stillness in Martin, offering as now his listening silence when events exploded.

“Idiots!” Martin cried. “Treating him for a neurosis when he complained of headache! Pressure of the job, the responsibility of twins, they said. My God, it’s shameful … Talk of the unity of the neurological specialties!”

He remembered now the young man’s courage and confidence, assumed, very likely, for who would not be terrified
to know that an evil something was swelling and tightening in his brain? But he had been quietly brave, reassuring his wife, shaking Martin’s hand, making a lame joke or two.

Ah, you saw so much death sometimes in this work, you wished you had become a dermatologist, or better yet, a math teacher, a car salesman, anything but what you were! Some deaths touched you with a knife-edge of anguish, just as some of the war-wounded still stayed visibly in mind, while others had faded, not because any were more worthy than the others, but because—well, they just did. And he remembered now the boy he would always think of as Chicago and how he hadn’t been as concerned about dying as he had been about losing that one finger.

Pa, Martin thought Pa had that terrible concern, so personal sometimes as to be almost unprofessional. He had tried to conceal it, but one always knew by the way he clenched his teeth on the pipe stem, so that his words came out all muffled. His mother would tell the children not to annoy their father that night because a bad thing had happened: a patient had died. And her eyes would be so troubled! Soft people, they had been.

Sometimes he could still feel flashes, for just a second or two, of the grief he’d felt when his father had died. And he was reminded of the day he’d met Leonard Max. It had been the young man’s first day on the job. Martin had asked him something or told him to do something, and when Max hadn’t responded at once, he had been impatient and spoken sharply. Afterward someone had told Martin that the boy had just got news that morning of his father’s death. He was finishing the morning’s work before taking the train home. And Martin, remembering his own father, had been so sorry and ashamed, more sorry than he could say. He had apologized to Max.

“I get impatient too quickly. I’m a damn-fool perfectionist. Forgive me.”

Now the “little” secretary opened the door. “Thought you might want a second cup of coffee, but you haven’t touched a thing,” she said reproachfully.

“I know. I’ve been thinking.”

“You’ve only got another fifteen minutes.”

Obediently, he unwrapped the sandwich now and leaned back in his chair. This room was where he really lived. It was the core and center of his life, when you came down to it. Here he sat to hear one anxious recital after the other, the tales of symptoms that would end either in success and health or in disaster. Each began here on the other side of this desk. Each was a new and terrifying adventure.

What did these people see when they first walked in here with the damp palms and the dry mouth of fear? They saw a neatly furnished room with cheerful pictures and many books. They saw a man with a calm, professional manner, a stranger on whose reputation their hopes were fixed. They could know nothing of
his
fears, his private guilt, empty longings and high ambition.

Jenny Jennings had put a sizable stack of mail before him to be answered. On top lay a still-unanswered letter from Mr. Braidburn. Martin hadn’t heard from him in years, hadn’t even gone to see him during the war. Why? Probably, to his shame, because he hadn’t wanted to be asked about Jessie or Claire.

Anyway, here was his letter, asking whether Martin had any suggestions for a most excellent young man who wanted to go to America. He had been doing some fine research in neuropathology and would like to combine that with further surgical training. Could Martin find a place for him in his laboratory?