The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (22 page)

He is a deserter, and now the Doctor has deserted him—isn’t this what he deserved?

It is only when Nurse Anne appears in his room, swiping the dust off his bedside table with her hand, that Albert realizes hours have passed.

“This isn’t Versailles. Lunch will not be brought to you on a platter.”

He is afraid to ask her where the Doctor has gone. If he doesn’t ask and if no answer is spoken maybe it won’t be real, like one of Walter’s fleetingly improvised concoctions.

“Coming?”

“Yes, yes,” and he is grateful for the arm she offers.

At the table, secure between the warmth of Marian and Walter, he arranges his food in such a way as to make it appear eaten.

“I will have that,” Elizabeth says.

“Here,” Albert offers.

“You
are
just like my brother,” she says. “So generous.”

For a moment Albert wonders if he has woken up into another life in which he is simply someone’s brother.

“No, Elizabeth,” Nurse Anne says. “One dinner is plenty.” She nods at Rachel’s plate, where usually half of the meal remains. “One and a
half
.”

“Help me with my puzzle?” Elizabeth asks when the plates are cleared and lunch is done.

“He is not your brother,” says Marian.

“You think I am nobody,” Elizabeth says. “I’ve had shocking dreams, you know. Even you would be afraid.”

But Albert wants to wait in his room while the smell of the Doctor’s pomade still hangs in the air.
He will be right back.

“He has divine urgencies of his own,” Marian says to Elizabeth.

“I am feeling a bit dizzy,” Albert says.

He walks as quickly as one can who has claimed to be dizzy. In his room, the smell of the Doctor’s pomade is beginning to fade and the stench of his own forgetting has returned. Before he shuts the door, he hears the rumble of an argument down the hall, and then the veteran’s voice grows loud enough to be audible. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know what you said.” It is Walter. “You know what you said to him. You’ve upset him. You have frightened the hunger out of him.”

“Walter,” says Marian. “We are wasting an opportunity for me to go outside.”

“Why would I be thinking of someone who isn’t worthy of my thoughts?” the veteran says. “I am not thinking of anything but what is in front of me. And I’m not even thinking of that because that would be you.”

“I will join you, Marian,” Walter says.

“Listen, you,” the veteran says.

Listen.

And into the room comes Albert’s father’s voice.
Il revient. Il revient.

Here, Albert, a story just for you.

The prince with one swan wing woke to discover a young woman standing over him, carrying an armful of chopped wood and a concerned look on her face.

“Perhaps you should see a doctor?” she said. “You don’t look very well.”

“It’s the swan wing, isn’t it?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “The wing is quite beautiful. You just look a little tired.” The prince sat up in the hopes of looking less tired.

“Do you know a doctor?” he asked, in as casual a tone as he could muster.

“I only know Dr. Knowall,” the young woman said, putting down her armful of wood in order to take a seat on the knoll of soft blue moss beside him. The girl was very lovely. She smelled deliciously of pine needles.

“He is my father.” And with that, she began to cry. The prince offered her his sleeve but she waved it away. “It will pass,” she said. “It always does. It’s just . . .” and she began to cry harder, but eventually it did pass and she was able to tell the prince the story in its entirety.

Her father, after many exhausting, ill-paid years as a woodcutter, had grown tired of it. Around this time, a stranger passed through their village. One night, the girl returned home to discover that her father had invited this stranger to dinner. The stranger said he was a doctor and over several nights—and several hearty dinners cooked by the girl at her father’s insistence (“She is a wonderful cook,” he told the stranger, which was true, the girl assured the prince) the stranger regaled them with stories of his rich doctor’s life.

“Doctors,” he exclaimed loudly, his mouth full of beef stew, “live well.” He took another swig of wine. “They drink well too. There’s never a day they go without. Never a day they are bored.”

“How do I become a doctor?” the girl’s father asked eagerly. All his life he had worked and worked, with little to show for it except piles of wood.

“Funny you should ask,” said the stranger, raising a finger. The girl had learned over the course of several dinners that when the man raised his finger it meant he was about to embark on a lecture. He used his hands quite a bit when he spoke. The girl had also learned to serve him from across the table to avoid those quick hands.

“First,” he declared, wagging that finger, “you must buy yourself an ABC book with a cock as a frontispiece.”

“Where do I get such a book?” the girl’s father asked.

“Funny you should ask.” The man rummaged through his bag and pulled out an ABC book with a cock as a frontispiece.

Her father, the girl explained, though she loved him dearly, was easily duped. Amazed by the coincidence of the stranger having just the book he needed in his bag, the father sold his wood-hauling cart and the donkey that pulled the cart for the money to purchase the ABC book from the stranger. As soon as the transaction was complete, the stranger left under cover of the night.

The girl’s father did everything the book instructed: he purchased a smock and other clothes that pertained to medicine; he got a sign that read
doctor knowall
and hung it outside his home.

“This was several weeks ago,” the lovely girl said, beginning to cry again, “and there’s not been a single patient.
I
am the new wood-hauling cart.”

The girl was very lovely. “Perhaps,” said the prince, “perhaps I could be your father’s first patient. I am trying to stay awake long enough to watch night turn into day. Perhaps he could help me.”

“I doubt it,” the young woman said. “He isn’t a very good doctor. Still, all my father wants is to cure someone. You could help me by making him believe he cured you.”

And so Dr. Knowall gave the prince a potion and the prince gave Dr. Knowall some money and the young woman was able to buy a new wood-hauling cart and a new donkey so she no longer had to serve as both cart and donkey. And though the potion didn’t help the prince stay awake long enough to see night turn into day—in fact, it only seemed to make him sleepier—it did make him feel better.

Puff, puff went Albert’s father’s pipe. Puff, puff went the story on their little lives.

“Why did the potion make the prince feel better when it didn’t help him stay awake?” Albert asked his father. The waxy swirl of his father’s scarred cheek spun like a pinwheel in the flickering light.

Puff, puff went his father’s pipe, smoke drifting up to where the story still hung around them like a cloak.

“Does it matter?”

No, Albert thinks now, wrapped in his father’s voice. From where he lies on his bed, he can see a piece of the sky. It is the same sky that shelters the Doctor too, wherever he is. No, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is his return. If his father’s voice could return after all those lost years, the Doctor will return too, and if he returns, Albert will show him how much better he is.

Ring
(
shadow ring
). The fringe of dawn appears over the trees lining the square outside the Palace of Justice and there is the clatter of merchants’ carts as night turns into day again. A sliver of moon still shines faintly in the sky as the sun comes up, evidence of the night before, and Albert remembers the Doctor has gone, that he hasn’t come right back. The warm touch of Nurse Anne’s hand on his arm startles him.

“You can’t sleep your life away.”

“The Doctor said he would be right back,” Albert says. He cannot keep it to himself any longer.

“The Doctor has gone to Paris,” she says. “He will be back. Oh, now, it’s not the end of the world. Hold out your hand.”

She places her seashells in his outstretched palm.

“Keep them for a little while,” she says, and then glides out the door and down the hall.

He sits up, brushing the wrinkles out of his slept-in clothes. He is
here
,
he reminds himself, smelling the seashells until he has smelled the sea right out of them. But his head aches and his ears are ringing. He has started to sweat. He is so thirsty. He slides out of bed, leaving the seashells on the bedside table. There is dirt on the bedcovers from sleeping in his shoes but he cannot stay to brush it off. He cannot stay still. Trembling, he walks down the hall in search of the warmth of Marian and Walter.

“I cannot hear another word about your blackened nerves,” Marian is saying to Walter in the courtyard. “I cannot be distracted. I must be vigilant. My lack of vigilance is exactly why I’m breathing with only one lung today.”

“A morning constitutional?” Walter says when he sees Albert, taking his arm. “Why are you trembling?”

“It always begins like this,” Albert says, but he can’t explain the rest. He can’t explain what comes next. If he doesn’t explain it, maybe the urgency won’t arrive.

“Come,” and Walter takes Albert’s arm gently, not squeezing.

“Albert, you
are
trembling,” Marian says, taking his other arm.

“I am terribly thirsty,” he says.

“You are sweating,” Walter says, wiping his hand on Albert’s pants leg.

“Stop exaggerating, Walter,” Marian says.

“I wish I were,” says Walter.

“Let’s stroll.”

“Thank you. Yes, a stroll,” Albert says, as if such a thing were possible.

And that is how it comes to be that he, Marian on one arm and Walter on the other, walks around and around the asylum courtyard, past the vegetable garden, underneath the birch trees, past the stained-glass window where Jesus walks and walks and walks on the road to Cavalry.

“This is quite a pace you keep, Albert,” Walter says, his breathing quickening.

“It’s good to be quick,” Marian says, patting Albert’s arm, looking out of the corners of her eyes, wincing at the light around the edges of the clouds.

“Thank you,” Albert says.

“Oh, don’t be a fool,” Marian says.

Marian and Walter are still here, and so is Albert. The urgency has not come upon him; it has not obliterated him. They are all here together, walking and walking under the same sky whose ominous smears do not mean the end of him. In fact, the sun is creeping out from behind the clouds; though she is afraid, Marian stays.

He has not disappeared. Their feet are walking him back, back into
here
, into
now.
A fleeting illumination through the pitch-dark of his mind: while he was still on the road, those horse’s eyes staring at him—
It is better not to thrash
—sinking and sinking into the mud. He hears the horse still, squealing until the mud fills its nostrils and its mouth, until the horse is only those eyes above the surface, staring. Albert is not thrashing; he doesn’t need to thrash. Marian and Walter are walking him out of the mud.

“You are making me dizzy,” Nurse Anne calls from the doorway. “Breakfast is getting cold. And what have you done with my seashells, Albert?”

“We won’t stop just yet,” Walter says. “Though perhaps we could slow down.”

“They are on my bedside table,” Albert calls over.

“Well, don’t worry yourself,” Nurse Anne says in a voice that says:
Worry
. “Don’t worry.
I’ll
get them. I wouldn’t want to
interrupt
you.”

Ring
(
shadow ring
).

“Never mind her,” Marian says. “Pay attention.”

And Albert does.

Walter whispers something to Marian that Albert cannot quite make out.

“Of course he is,” Marian says, reaching across Albert to thwap Walter on the chest with the back of her hand. “Of course he is. I never doubted it.”

Albert’s waistcoat is damp with sweat, but underneath the hands of Walter and Marian his arms have stopped trembling. The three of them move through the minutes as if the minutes were nothing; their beautiful feet move forward together, having a conversation of their own. Albert’s astonishment fills him until it is spilling over, into Marian, into Walter, until they are walking, astonished, together.