9 Tales of Space and Time Read online

  “The fever. You have a little fever. It won’t hurt to have him look at you.”

  Bettyann was surprised at the intensity of Jane’s insistence. She realized that, for some obscure reason, the issue had transcended facts. She surrendered. ”I do seem to have. Maybe it was the open window.”

  “I’ll bring you some breakfasts.”

  “Please don’t, Mom. I . . .”

  But Jane was already leaving the room. Bettyann bit her lip. She lay listening to, Jane’s feet on the stairs . . .

  The postman came before breakfast was over. Jane carried Bettyann’s letter to her unopened.

  Bettyann took it. She wished site could explain why she could not show the letter to Jane. She could think of no explanation. Hurt, Jane turned to go. “Mom! Mom!”

  Jane came back and sat on the bed.

  “It’s all right,” Jane said. “It’s all right.” She tangled a hand fondly in Bettyann’s hair.

  “I was going to do something—and then I, I changed my mind. It was about my parents. I changed my mind.”

  “We understand”, Jane said.

  “Look! I’m all right. Let me get up. Let me help you with the house.”

  “Now! You stay in bed, hear me! Keep those covers up around you.”

  Bettyann was looking out the window at the snow and sunlight on the rooftops when she heard Dr. Wing’s car. She remembered during the quiet moment of waiting some vague and nearly forgotten girlhood spring moment or day or week during which—at the age of what? twelve? thirteen? —she had been deeply, profoundly, and everlastingly in love with him. She associated that time with music and lipstick and some nostalgic perfume—perhaps her first—and high-heeled shoes. He had come on a house call and for the whole day, or week, afterward she was able to sense his presence stamped indelibly upon every object in the living room. She smiled now at her former self, and the memory retreated and was gone. The confused emotions of home-coming crowded once more upon her conscious mind. Still, in some deep part of herself, she waited eagerly for him. And when he came into the room, she sat up, and suddenly conscious of her tousled hair, wished futilely that she had thought to comb it.

  “I didn’t expect you so soon,” she said.

  “Hello, Bettyann. What seems to be the matter this morning?”

  She compared his face with her last memory of it (the comparison that one always makes) and saw that he was no older than he had always been; she had last seen him shortly before leaving last fall for her first semester at Smith. It was a reassuring face. She had never quite taken it for granted as had, she felt, her parents taken his father’s. In childhood she glamorized him in secret for (she supposed) his self-possession and quiet authority, and consequently she always found something new to discover or to imagine about him. But now, while he had not changed, she had. Looking at him, still young, really, she felt almost his contemporary.

  “It’s just a slight cold,” Jane said.

  “Good time for it, eh, Bettyann?”

  She sniffled affirmation.

  He took out his thermometer. “Open up now. Any fever?”

  “Just a little,” Jane said.

  She took the chill thermometer. Watching him from around its uplifted shaft, Bettyann felt a mute and nonspecific gratitude for his presence. And knowing his life—or that is to say, knowing the fabric of common knowledge that one leaves as harvest to a thousand inquisitive minds in passings—she felt an irrational desire to reach out to him with her hand and feel his smooth hair, only slightly gray at the temples, beneath her finger tips. After his training and internship in the East, he had returned home to take over (during the accretion of time) his father’s practice, to marry a local girl, to see her (childless) and his father both die one cold and awful winter, and to see the bleak March rains upon the family plot in the cemetery pound withered flowers into clayey mud. An aura of loss, sadness, and knowledge surrounded him, and she wanted to say: I am like you. She, too, felt wisely mature. She wanted to do something for him in return for his service to others, as if it were in her power to deny the past and reconstitute the future. And as he bent over her, a year short of forty and handsome in a friendly and undistinguished manner, she studied his face: the clear blue eyes (slightly weary, she thought, from overwork), the sensitive lips, the smooth, bluish cheeks . . .

  She started to mumble something around the thermometer, but he wiggled a reproving finger.

  Bettyann concentrated on raising the mercury slightly above normal in the tube.

  She’s all right, he thought. She’s a nice kid.

  “How is Mr. Starke?” Jane asked.

  Dr. Wing shook his head.

  “It’s such a shame; he’s such a nice old man.”

  Was, Dr. Wing thought, having taken death for granted. Not really lifeless yet, but to Dr. Wing, dead. Dead now of morphine. In a week, in a month, of starvation. Metastasis and death. He had seen it in his wife. Radium and surgery and then, at the end, morphine when the pain was too great. No surgery for the old man, though, he thought. Unconsciously he rubbed his throat, thinking: Perhaps the old man was right, wondering if, with a similar biopsy, he would refuse surgery and cast away—what? —six months? a year?

  Weariness settled upon his body. Wife and friend and stranger all were interdicted by a force he could not control. How pathetically little he had done with his life, and now even the dreams were dead (for he had known dreams), and he was defeated in a deep and terrible manner that he scarcely understood. He hated the town for calling him back to it in his youth; he had a confused feeling that elsewhere he could have . . .

  Bettyann lay still. Old man Starke, she thought. I must go see him! Dying of cancer. I . . . I . . . I must go see him; today, I must.

  But suppose (she thought) suppose there’s nothing I can do, suppose I’m merely a freak, an oddity, suppose I have nothing to give, nothing to exchange.

  She felt she could not exist alone and without purpose. She felt that since she did not belong to mankind through the accident of birth, she must petition mankind for admittance. She felt that she would have to demonstrate her worth and prove that she was needed. She felt that one cannot receive without giving. She had to prove that she was . . . was . . . what?

  Dr. Wing looked at the thermometer. His eyes widened in surprise.

  Oh, dear! Bettyann thought. I raised it too much!

  Dr. Wing cleared his throat hastily. “Well, young lady,” he said. “Let’s try that over.” He shook the mercury down and checked the level.

  I’m getting careless, he thought. I must be getting old.

  Thinking of old man Starke, she watched Dr. Wing with a curious growth of emotion. His face in profile, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, the curve of his neck . . . I want to be like you, she thought. You do so much, you have so much to give, you belong so deeply.

  He looked at the thermometer again. “Ah,” he said. “That’s more like it. How do you feel, young lady?”

  He reached for her wrist, and, as his finger tips touched her, a little unnamed thrill ran through her body. “I feel fine, Dr. Wing.”

  That afternoon Jane protested only mildly when Bettyann said she wanted to go out. Dr. Wing had found nothing wrong with her.

  “Let me give you some money,” Jane said. “In case you need to buy something. Powder, lipstick. I guess it’s all back at Smith, isn’t it?”

  Bettyann was uneasy before the implicit question: Why didn’t you even have time to pack a bag? She avoided Jane’s eyes. “I’d better write and have my roommate send me my things.”

  “I’ll get the money. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine. I just want to go out and walk around a little.”

  Jane came back, holding her purse. She gave Bettyann ten dollars.

  “I won’t be long.”

  She left the house. Her summer coat was thin, and she walked quickly. Her breath was warm white mist before her. The sidewalks were clear of snow.r />
  She had thought of old man Starke at the instant she decided to leave the spaceship, and he seemed now—for reasons she did not fully understand—almost to be her justification for returning.

  She thought of her moving body as air uncertain and doubtful potential. And if she failed now, with old man Starke . . .?

  The world was so real and so immutable. She was so small and so weak. For a terrible instant she imagined herself and attraction in a carnival side show. It seemed that she would not be able to touch reality at all; that with her strange talent she was useless; that the world was fashioned by great, driving machines of steel and by forces generated impersonally and from afar.

  And deeply, the stirring of her basic question, formulated in the days when she still thought of herself as a human girl: How am I to fit into this sad-funny world, and what is my role?

  To reassure herself, she stopped beside the snow-covered bandstand in the park, knelt, and fashioned a hard snowball. Awkwardly, throwing like a girl, she cast it from her. She could still feel its cold tingle against her hand. It had been real, she had touched it and changed it.

  She looked across the park. The sunlight was thin and it glittered on the white crust of snow—beneath which, long ago, lay the bodies of the Civil War dead, North and South. But the town had grown, and the dead were grubbed out. The cemetery, changed by a goldfish pond, by circular plots of flowers, by gravel (and later, asphalt) paths, and by green slat benches, became a center for restrained Sunday merriment where children, Sunday school over, romped while parents were still in church. It also became the center of political oratory under the stars on alternate autumns, and the home of Saturday-night band concerts amid the restless gigglings of young lovers and the flutter of soft moth wings. The dead, betrayed somehow by events—equally as guilty as the survivors, no doubt, for having been human—were moved out of town and forgotten. The statue of General Lee (this was southern Missouri) was moved the year unity was demonstrated by the erection of a Memorial Hall in honor of the Spanish-American War veterans. General Lee went to the park across town, in a section no longer as respectable as it once had been. When that park, finally, by mutual and unspoken agreement, was surrendered to the town’s Negro population, the General’s statue was, one night, carted quietly away and—some say—sunk in Grenoble’s Mineshaft in Kendricktown. This shaft was now a small, still, and greenish swimming hole surrounded by huge boulders and chat piles and by decaying timber and mining equipment, and was, according to local legend, bottomless.

  The town and the world, she thought. How could she ever understand it? And standing here in the frozen park and thinking of the town, and trying to get the feel of life and the feel of living, and the feel of the living past, she felt a blind, desperate, throat-choking pride and hope and exultation. She thought of Sandburg’s immortal line: The People, Yes.

  But she. What could she do?

  She thought of the sixteen-year-old boy who stole the car and the Dutchman who planted the turnip seeds. In the community of their desire to be loved and wanted, they were tragic heroes. And yet what could she do? How could she bring such people the love they needed, and how unbetray the dead?

  Bettyann walked on more slowly now. Increasingly she dreaded her destination. She detoured by the Masonic Temple, she cut across a vacant lot. Old man Starke’s house squatted blunt and somber to the right. She was afraid. She looked away from it.

  She crossed the street in the middle of the block and walked slowly down a broad alley. The ground was frozen. Her feet were icy. Without being consciously aware of it, she speeded the circulation of her blood and brought the warm currents nearer to the surface of her skin. Her feet were no longer cold.

  Again she made and threw a snowball.

  Suppose . . . suppose . . .

  I can do tricks, she thought with sudden bitterness. I can always do tricks.

  On her left was an apartment building. Its second-story rear porch jutted out over the alley, and beneath it, between its supporting timbers and the wall, there was a section of concrete running the length of the building. Because of this, the ally was narrrower here than elsewhere. At the far end of the concrete there was a small wooden storeroom. Once it had been a barrier and a shield behind which a man, desperate with heart disease and numbered days, had clutched a gun. Sweat, cold and unnoticed, had doubtless beaded his upper lip and the palms of his hands. He had killed a man in a bar less than two blocks away. The sun was hot and the police were coming. He wished they would let him alone. He wished they would leave him to die slowly and in peace. He was not going to stand trial, so why did they bother him? His heart was beating irregularly. Adrenalin fired his blood. “I’m not coming out!” he cried at the policemen. There were two of them. They scattered at his voice. The man, his name was Bill, wished he could apologize to his ex-partner, whom he had just killed. They had once owned an insurance business jointly, and although that had been years ago, Bill had never out-lived the bitterness, until now, he bore his ex-partner for swindling him out of his half of the enterprise. Looking back on it from the perspective of death, he realized the futility of vengeance. And although it was too late, he at last admitted to himself that, had his own secret and unconscious conspiracies succeeded long ago, he, instead of his ex-partner, would have been the sole owner. And in the knowledge of mutual hypocrisy, he concluded that one dishonest man should always lose gracefully to his partner’s more successful dishonesty and never hold his partner accountable for greater nobility of action than he is prepared, himself, to exercise.

  Of the two policemen at the opposite end of the alley, one was his friend. His friend called, “Come out, Bill!”

  “No! Let me alone!”

  “I’m coming down there to get you. You’re under arrest. Give up, now. Don’t make me come get you.”

  “I’ll—I’ll . . . You keep away, hear me! Keep away from me!”

  And the policeman came, walking down the middle of the alley. Gun in hand. Talking. “Come on, Bill. Come on out. You know me, Bill.” Law had placed friend against friend and there were confused and transcendent loyalties, and later the policeman admitted that he did not actually believe that Bill would shoot him. Bill saw him, blue-clad and inexorable, beneath his wavering sights. He cried wordlessly, afraid to shoot, afraid not to shoot. And then, to equalize the contest, he stepped from his shelter, and they stood fifty feet apart, in the alley, facing each other. He fired, but his aim was bad. He fired again before the policeman who was his friend (and the policeman concealed near the mouth of the alley) began to shoot. When it was over, he was dead, and the policeman who was his friend was trying to cover a bleeding chest wound with his hand.

  Bettyann thought that life must sometimes be composed of paradox and terror. She wondered if there was still blood on the concrete beside the wooden shed. She walked on. She thought that the world was composed of discrete and different lives, and that maybe, if she could only understand just one of them, she could hold it up and cry, Here! Here it is! Look at it! and if everybody could understand it, the world might be different—that perhaps, seeking to understand, any life might serve.

  If only, she thought, I could get it down in paint—the policeman walking stubbornly forward to kill his friend.

  She was at the end of the alley now. She felt a sudden pulse of strength and courage. Her despair had vanished. From far away she heard or imagined she heard the tuneless melody of Whistling Red floating out across the town.

  She stood on old man Starke’s porch. She rang the bell and waited. After what seemed a long time, she heard footsteps echoing hollowly from the back of the house. Life seemed to have departed it, and the windows were sightless. The footfalls were ghost sounds.

  The door opened. A starched white nurse stood before her.

  “Hello,” the woman said.

  “I’ve come to see Mr. Starke.”

  “That’s very kind.” Her thin lips belied her words and seemed to label Bettyann as a member
of the morbidly curious world of strangers, “But I’m afraid . . .”

  “Please! I must!”

  “He wouldn’t recognize you.”

  “I must,” she said intently. Her face was white and her body was taut.

  The nurse shook her head.

  “Please phone Dr. Wing. He’ll tell you it’s all right.”

  The nurse hesitated. Then: “Come in, if you must.”

  Bettyann followed her.

  Old man Starke lay seemingly asleep. The room smelled of the terrible odor of cancer and of death that antiseptics could not conceal. He was shriveled and almost transparently pale. There seemed no more than a wrinkled handful of him against the pillow. His breathing was labored, and as she came nearer, she saw with mounting horror the silver pipe in his throat pulsing faintly, in and out, to the rhythm of his heartbeats. The nurse turned away and left her standing motionless.

  Old man Starke was no longer the friendly merchant who kept candy suckers behind the counter to give to children when their parents made purchases, with a gesture more complex than necessary to establish good business relationships. (“My, how she’s grown, Dave, and I think I have just the thing for her sweet tooth today” —always as if this generosity were not his usual practice, but something highly special just for you.) When Dr. Wing—not trusting his own findings, received the report on the bottled tissue from the laboratory that verified them—told the old man that it was cancer and tried to put him on the next train for a Kansas City surgeon, the old man said, “Take it out yourself; hell, you’ve been taking care of me for—what?—ten or fifteen years. I’d rather you do it, Jerry.” Showing fear not of the disease but of—strangers? “I can’t do it, Mr. Starke.” ”Nonsense, damn it, I’d trust you a hell of a lot farther than one of those K.C. big shots.” Cursing now because he was afraid and refused to show it. “I just can’t do it.” Whereupon there was a futile argument, during the course of which the old man learned—learned deeply, if at first he could not completely believe—that the diagnosis had come too late, that there would be a period of waiting, which surgery could prolong, and then there would be death. Terrified, then, old man Starke said (hacking almost continually in his excitement), “You can do it; you can fix me up better than anyone! I’m counting on you, Jerry.” And Dr. Wing—not without sympathy for the view, having seen the long and hopeless hospitalization, the ceaseless and finally useless surgery—said, “I’ll treat the symptoms as they occur.” And, taking the old man’s arm, “There won’t be any pain. I promise you that. You’ve got a year, maybe more, and after that, when the pain—we’ll see there won’t be any pain . . .”