9 Tales of Space and Time Page 16

  When Jane brought Bettyann home, there was a letter waiting. “Wait till you get into bed to open it.” Jane said.

  It was from the Dean. It hoped the illness in the family was not as serious as it had seemed.

  “Illness?” Jane said.

  “I had to explain why I left. I didn’t have a chance to tell anyone. I wrote a letter. I didn’t want the college to get upset, think they’d lost me—think I was kidnaped—send hysterical telegrams to you.”

  “Oh,” Jane said.

  “She wants to know if I’ll be back for the start of next semester. That’s only three weeks away.”

  “If you’re feeling all right, dear, perhaps . . .”

  “She talked to my teachers, and they waived the finals. They’re giving me full credit and my mid-term grades.”

  “That’s wonderful!”

  Bettyann dropped the letter and Jane bent to pick it up.

  Why is everyone so good to me? Bettyann thought. To me. She turned over and buried her face in the pillow.

  Jane stood beside the bed. She sensed Bettyann’s emotions, and she could think of nothing to say. She left her silently. It was all she could do to keep her feet from hurrying. Downstairs, she picked up the phone and dialed Dave at work. “Dave! Guess what!” She held up the letter in order to read it. “Listen to this!”

  It did Bettyann no good to protest; she had to stay in bed. ”Dr. Wing, this is silly!” she said Tuesday. She was angry with him, but instantly she repented. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” She wanted terribly just to call him Jerry, Jerry, dear.

  “And I suppose,” Wind said, “you’ll want to know how he’s doing today? He had an easy night.”

  “. . . have you tried treating him with X rays? Mightn’t that . . .?”

  An uncertain little thrill touched Wing briefly. Not long ago he remembered thinking, as if the thought had stolen into his mind, of trying X rays on the old man. “You know,” he said, “that occurred to me the other day. God knows why. You wouldn’t use X rays for a deep-seated cancer like that . . . No, Bettyann. If you get it in time, you can sometimes localize it and destroy it. But if you don’t—if it once gets away from you—there’s not much you can do.”

  “Maybe,” Bettyann said, “maybe the cancer’s stopped growing. How can you tell? Maybe there was something you did in your treatment that actually stopped it.”

  “Things don’t happen like that.”

  “But you said he’s better . . .”

  “Temporarily. It’s only superficial.”

  “He’s not going to die,” Bettyann said intently.

  “He isn’t?”

  I mean, I’ve just got a feeling, Dr. Wing. He’s not.”

  “No, Bettyann, no. Not a chance. Not one in a million”

  “He’s not! Oh, now, please. We don’t want to argue. I don’t like it, to argue with you. I like so much better to agree with you. Like a good . . . patient should.”

  “That’s the spirit.” He stood up. “Well, I’ve got to move along.”

  “Don’t go yet! Please!”

  “I’d like to stay, Bettyann,” Wing said. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than sit here all afternoon with you.”

  True, he thought. That’s true: I don’t want to leave you.

  “You’ll come by tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be by. But not really for a professional visit. Just to see you aren’t up helling around. You’re going to stay there for a little while and keep out of trouble.”

  “Good-by, Doctor,” she said.

  By Wednesday she was so frustrated she could have wept. To forestall boredom, she changed various part of her body into amusing shapes. Take the foot now and web it for long-distance swimming, so. The thigh, here, slenderize it to sculptured sleekness; and the calf of the legah . . . What a pinup-girl I could be! (And how would Jerry react to me in a slinky formal with everything adjusted around and about and smelling of some daringly fatal cologne like Black Widow’s Insanity?)

  She tossed and turned and set her lips and promised herself: I’m going to get up come hell or high water!

  She imagined herself at some exotic party. (Well, why not? I’m an adult now. Nearly.) There would be a huge dance floor full of moonlight. Jerry would hold her tightly, and they would waltz. They would be the perfect couple, and the subject of universal approbation and envy.

  And then, her fancies dissolving, she decided that perhaps she wasn’t really the sophisticated type.

  She picked up her book and resumed reading.

  But after a while her attention wandered. She day-dreamed again. She would take into account all of Jerry’s smooth and considerate gestures—the grace with which he would light her cigarette (it seemed incumbent on her to be smoking), how deftly he would field her coat, how properly he would open doors and place chairs for her. And in return for all these small, visible manifestations of captivity, she would reward him with love and understanding.

  Oh! Nonsense! she thought.

  Jerry, Jerry! Let me get up. I’ll be a good girl. And then: Jerry, dear, I do love you, Jerry.

  Jane stopped Wing as he was leaving on Thursday.

  “Dr. Wing! Doctor!” she called. “Will she be able to go back to school in another week?”

  Hat in hand he stopped “Oh? Is she going back that soon? I had thought . . .” He did not finish the sentence. Thought what? he asked himself. An angry welter of emotions rose in him seemingly out of nowhere. A thief was coming to steal something intangible away from him.

  “Her Dean wrote her. They want her to come back for next semester.”

  She’ll go back to school, Wing thought, and she’ll change, and she’ll find some idiot freshman utterly unworthy of her; and when she comes back this summer, she will come with a new love to remember and she will be a new personality.

  “Jane, I’ve told you, I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with her. I talked to Dr. Albertson again yesterday and told him what I’d been doing. He doesn’t know either.”

  “She seems all right now” Jane said. “She looks so healthy, so full of energy.”

  Wing felt that if she were to go away now, he would lose her forever. He was suddenly at a loss to define his professional responsibility. It was terribly important to him that she remain. He recognized the heartbreaking pace of time. A moment, brief as a candle in terms of a lifetime and possessed of an impossible brightness, was fading and would never recur: for Bettyann was in love with him. He viewed this as objectively as though it were a clinical detail. He was unable to face with equal candor his own emotions because he dared not let them become real and be recognized as elements of the real world. And yet if she returned to Smith, the barrier of dreams between the two compartments of himself would collapse; the fantasy world would lose its colors and loss and sadness would seep outward into his life.

  “Well, Jane.” he heard himself saying, “I’d say, yes. If nothing else happens, I’d say it would be all right.” With a sense of frightening emptiness, he turned to the door. “Oh!” he said. “I don’t think there’s much point in my coming around tomorrow. Unless you call tire, I won’t look in until one day next week.”

  Saturday morning was clear and warmer. Bettyann awoke with the first direct sunlight. Within an hour the snow was melting. Little plinks of water dripped from the icicles under the eaves.

  She lay listening for her parents to get up, and when she heard them stirring, she got out of bed and tiptoed to the closet. She dressed herself quickly.

  There! she thought. I’m up! Thank God, I’m up! I’ve humored them all far too long, site thought.

  Dr. Wing, she thought, bearing down heavily on the professional sound. Stay in bed, she mimicked his voice.

  Where was he?

  Jerry! she thought. Why didn’t you come Yesterday? There was a dull ache in her heart. He doesn’t care. I’m just another patient. Oh, Jerry, Jerry, can’t you see! Her lips thinned in vexation as she brushed her hair.


  He could have phoned! she thought. Well, I won’t put up with it.

  He’ll see.

  I’ll go right down to his office. I’ll find out how old Mr. Starke is. I’ll sit on his desk. I’ll ask him foolish questions. I’ll haunt him all day until he’ll wish he’d never heard my name.

  He’ll see.

  Gathering up her toothbrush, she trooped resolutely to the bathroom.

  When she came downstairs, Jane was just starting breakfast.

  “What are you doing up!” Dave said.

  She dropped into a chair. “I had to. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I won’t get sick again. I promise you. Not ever again. I couldn’t stand it!”

  “We’d better phone Dr. Wing and find out what he says,” Jane said.

  “Can’t keep her in bed forever,” Dave said.

  “I’ve read, I’ve read, I’ve read! I’ve read Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, I’ve read James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, I’ve read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, I’ve read a Western novel of yours. I’ve read How to Play Bridge in Ten Easy Lessons, I’ve read nineteen of E. Haideiman-Julius’ Little Blue Books and I now know what every young girl should know, and I’ve read part of Plato’s Republic. I’m never going to bed again!”

  Dave laughed. “Okay, okay, okay!”

  But after breakfast Jane insisted on phoning Wing.

  “It’s all right,” Jane said. “He said he guessed we’d kept her in bed as long as physically possible. And he wants you to come down to see him this morning if you can, Bettyann.”

  “I’ll drive you down, and I guess you can walk back, if you want to, or take a cab. But I’ve got to go over to Frank’s and pick up my shotgun first, if you don’t mind the ride.”

  “Good, good,” Bettyann said. She hurried for her coat. “I’ll be ready in a second.”

  “Did he say what he wanted her for?” Dave asked.

  “No. I imagine he wants to make some tests or something.”

  In the car, Bettyann felt that she had never been happier. The bright sunshine glistened on the windows of the houses. The sky was blue and distant. Under the tires of the car, the melting snow slushed sleepily.

  She’s coming out of it fine, Dave thought. She’s recovering from whatever she learned about her parents. When she gets back from Smith next spring, she’ll tell us then what she’s afraid to now, and we’ll laugh about it together.

  He felt no need for conversation. It was pleasant enough just driving quietly along the street. He remembered again the time she had picked up the sparrow without alarming it. (“By thinking right,” she had said, meaning, he supposed, thinking in the correct manner to communicate the harmless nature of her intentions toward it.) A little shudder passed down his spine; and he found he quite enjoyed the sensation. I wonder what Jane suspects? She probably wonders the same thing about me. We’re neither of us going to be as surprised as Bettyann will anticipate . . . But he was curious . . . I wonder, he thought for the hundredth time, what her parents were like?

  Here, around Bettyann, was the town.

  The old longing came to paint. She thought it would be a good idea to take up painting when she went back to Smith. Not that painting was enough. But as a . . . hobby, perhaps. The thing to do, she decided, was to become very wise. (Jerry, she thought. Did I actually manage to put anything in his mind without him knowing it? Can I gain information and pass it along secretly for others to think about. Plant ideas . . . if I ever have ideas?)

  Old man Starke is going to get well, she told herself.

  That was a bulwark against her no longer stridently insistent sense of isolation. She had proved that she was useful; and she had proved, somehow, that she belonged.

  They passed the house where Burton Roscoe and his wife used to live. Bettyann remembered them vaguely, and the sight of the house brought further memories. She wondered if they were dead. After he and his wife had been committed to the State Asylum in the city of Nevada, the town had lost track of them.

  He had been a small, slender man with a thin brown mustache. His wife was more substantial, and between the two of them, they owned considerable property and possessed considerable wealth until they gave it away. (That they had given it away was something the town did not learn until later.) She had been prominent in society before she withdrew suddenly and took to solitary hymn-singing. Shortly thereafter he abandoned his practice, and the two of them moved into a cabin they owned on Spring River. That was in the summer. Passing fishermen remarked that they appeared to be much addicted to Bible reading. The summer passed them as had the world; the leaves turned autumn’s crisp colors. Winter threatened from afar. The first reports came in of savages in the forest, nude, unkempt, eating berries and grasses. The clock had been stopped and time turned back. They had circumscribed the Garden of Eden in the Genesis of their minds as a spot seven miles above Highway Sixty-Six where Spring River encounters a decaying dam. The sheriff, when the first severe frost came, gathered himself a posse and brought them in.

  Bettyann thought of the man and his wife, and her mind was filled with pride and wonder. She wished she could reach out across the land to touch everyone—touch the infinite variety of Everyman—and know his secret soul. She was no longer frightened; she felt her isolation vanishing completely. There was a blend of nobility and foolishness in mankind that was somehow reassuring, and old man Starke would live. She felt now that someday she would be able to understand the people, yes. But perhaps she confused the more valuable and eternal qualities of unvocal love and deep and sustaining faith for understanding—for who can ever understand the people, yes? And out of this she felt that someday she would be able to reach out and touch the distant world that is not composed of steel and stone but of individuals, and in a quiet way and by degrees affect it. But she thought that she might not want to change man even if she could, for fear that in the changing she would lose something of infinite worth. It seemed to her that there was a precious essence that should be inviolate and that what changing one must do should be, paradoxically, in that hard separate world beyond the individual. That world must be changed so that poverty does not subvert justice, so that Everyman will have enough of the physical necessities to be turned—by his own better nature and of his own free will—from blind jealousy and colossal destruction. And all the while, she thought, one should preserve a generous measure of hatred and fear and foolishness—of living—as sublime monuments to imperfection and injunctions to humility.

  Dave stopped the car. Calling, “I’ll be right back,” he went in to get the shotgun. Bettyann relaxed and was grateful for the warmth of the sun and the exciting air.

  Dave came back and headed the car downtown.

  The houses around them were a stately and dignified two and a half and three stories tall and of another time. Many of them had huge full porches. Nearly all of them had gables or spires or turrets or widow’s walks or other peculiar details of construction that had pleased the fancy of their builders, who had, in their time, the harmless conviction that, because they were respectable and substantial citizens and knew what they wanted, what they wanted was desirable. But the rooms were too large and too numerous. Now, although the lawns and driveways were kept up and the hedges trimmed, the houses looked deserted. The upper windows (often curtainless) seemed to hint that beyond them was a dark, musty void of sealed-off rooms, unfrequented by light and laughter and only occasionally visited by the matron of the house. And even these visits, one might guess, were without immediate physical reasons—were, in reality, nostalgic pilgrimages made out of respect for the past and dead era lying bundled in the steamer trunks, and hovering over the moth-eaten carpets rolled and standing endwise in the corners, and the sheet-draped Victorian chairs and end tables.

  As he drove, Dave thought that the world was changing at an astonishing pace. He thought that during his lifetime a new world had grown up to superimpose itself on the old. Realities were blurring into nonr
ealities and nonrealities were shimmering into focus. The structure of the real world was changing and the values of the real world were changing. A new world had not yet reached definition; an old world had not yet faded into fantasy and memory. He looked at Bettyann seated beside him. There was more difference between her world and the world of his youth than between his and Shakespeare’s. It was a marvelous thing to consider. Her generation would act upon and be acted upon by a wider variety of events than his generation could dream of.

  “The town has changed a lot since you were born,” Dave said.

  Bettyann thought Dave referred to its physical appearance. “I’ve noticed.” It seemed then the subject for a painting. How would it be, she thought, to show a modern building and paint within it, as a part of it, shadows of other buildings that had stood where it stood now, and the forest before that—all apparent, all integrated, expressing change and continuity and somehow the struggle of building and the faces of men?

  “Here we are,” Dave said. “I’ll let you out. You want me to wait for you?”

  “No, you go on, Dad. I may be an hour or so.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I may not.”

  “Okay, see you for lunch.”

  Bettyann hurried up the stairs. Her heart was ready to burst with happiness. It was so good to be alive, to belong, to . . .

  The waiting room was empty. Wing came out of his inner office in answer to the door chime.

  “Hello, Bettyann,” he said. “Evelyn takes Saturday off, so I’m my own receptionist. Come on in.”

  In his office she stood close to him. “I suppose it’s some more tests?”

  “No,” he said. “No, as a matter of fact, it’s not.”

  His tone caused the sunlight to dim. Something caught in her throat.

  “It’s about Mr. Starke. He died last night.”

  A great and terrifying blackness encompassed everything. She knew that Wing was talking, but she was not listening to the words. She could not believe what she had heard. Dead! The floor seemed to crumble away from her and the walls dissolve.