CASTLE 4 by Edith Pearlman
The hospital – red brick High Victorian Gothic – had been built atop a low hill just after the Civil War. It was named Memorial Hospital but was soon referred to as the Castle. The structure had been modernized inside, many times, but the balustrades and turrets and long thin windows from which you could shoot arrows at your enemies – all these remained.
And, like a true medieval fortress, it cast its formidable shadow on the surrounding area; and everyone who worked in it or lived near it or occupied its rooms – everyone felt its spirit: benign maybe, malign maybe, maybe neither at least for now. The place harbored secrets – electronic information, sneaky bacteria – and it was peopled by creatures who had wandered in or maybe had lived there since birth like the AIDs babies, the short gut babies, the babies lacking a brain stem: all abandoned to the Castle by horrified parents who sometimes even fled the state. There were beautiful ladies-in-waiting – waiting to die; and crones whose futures were no happier; and tremulous knights, and bakers with envelopes of magical spices. There was an ugly guard with a kind heart.
* * *
Victoria Tarnapol had been born in the Castle but had rarely been back since that uncomplicated event nearly six decades ago. And so, returning, even to run the silly gift shop, seemed momentous.
* * *
Zeph Finn had been born nowhere special, but for the past year and a half he had lived in the Castle’s domain, first in the residents’ quarters and now in the top flat of one of the nearby three-deckers. He rarely went anywhere: he shuffled from Castle to flat, flat to Castle. He had ventured forth tonight, however, to a pot luck party. And now a pretty girl had asked him something, for God’s sake what, oh, what do they always ask. “I do regional anesthesia,” he guessed.
“Oooh, do you. What region – the Boston area? Do you move from one hospital to another hospital?”
Silent, Zeph moved from this guest to another guest. Most of the pot luck people here were doctors and knew that a regional anesthetist specialized in nerve blocks. Many knew Zeph. Because of this familiarity he’d agreed to drop in, a box of cheese straws under his arm. The host, chief of the Emergency Room, was one of his few friends – his dogwalkers, he called them; they dragged him outside whenever he’d been noticeably unresponsive for a while.
He had no girlfriend at present. He never had a girlfriend for long. But there were some women who saw in his numbed silence, his reluctance to meet your eye, something to work with. They hoped to rescue him. Rescuing the Rescuer, ha! A doomed enterprise.
“He’s married to his specialty,” somebody once said to somebody.
“Oh, no,” said the other somebody. “He’s engaged to his cart.”
Zeph had heard this joke and was not offended. Who wouldn’t feel an abiding affection for that cart of scrupulously ordered drawers, with a disposal container attached to one side. Needles, syringes, label tapes, and IV catheters in the top drawer. More needles and ampoules in the second. Continuous nerve block sets in the third. Emergency stuff in the fourth, and drugs whose names scanned like poetry according to a would-be girlfriend who had memorized them as an aid to seduction. “Lidocaine, ephedrine, pheolephrine, epinephrine,” she began, and then got stuck on atropine, poor puppet.
When he left the party he walked home along half of the perimeter of the hospital grounds, looking up at the edifice every so often. A huge parking lot floated from the rear. Some old timers – that is, docs who were young in World War II – remembered the year-by-year expansion of the lot.
But long before that brutal felling of trees, neighborhoods were forming just beyond the perimeter. At the beginning of the last century a subway station was constructed near the Castle and the three-deckers were built. They became – they were expected to become – dwelling places for the poor. Birthed together like litters, block after block, the houses were clapboard, and each floor had a porch. There was a plot of land in the back of each to be shared by all three tenant families, Irish then, now folks from faraway places: there were the Filipino blocks, the Venezuelan area, Little Brazil . . . Many adults worked in the Castle; others took the subway to jobs in town. Each neighborhood had a few restaurants, a bar, a grocery, a couple of day care centers.
The area had one unexpected feature, discovered when the three-deckers were erected. This was a stream, mostly underground, but running for a while through a little wood. The earth was more swamp than soil; strange bushes and spindly, widely spaced trees thrived in it; nothing could be built on its softness; you couldn’t even hide there. The city, acknowledging the piece of land unprofitable, might have embellished it a bit, put up markers to indentify the vegetation, made a sanctuary of it for people and birds. But the city left it alone. The two public schools among the neighborhoods of the Castle each had a playground and a basketball court, and one had a baseball field. And so kids ignored the little forest. The only people to visit it during the day were peculiar children, perhaps shunned by their boisterous fellows, perhaps preferring isolation. Zeph went there occasionally to smoke and very occasionally to snort.
This summer the woods were being explored by two sixth graders from the Filipino community, Joe and Acelle, Joe because he liked plants and insects, Acelle because she liked Joe. Every afternoon Joe tolerated Acelle’s almost wordless presence. Her chief occupation when school was out was helping her only sister – their mother was dead. When not busy with that task she followed Joe, obeyed him, adopted his ideas. Sometimes, though, she just lay down and listened to the birds. “My house is too quiet,” she explained.
“Mine isn’t.”
Acelle’s flat held three people at its most crowded; Joe’s was occupied always by a festival of relatives. Even the basement had been taken over. The only real silence was in the doc’s place on the third floor. Joe could go there any time, even when it was empty; and when Zeph was there it was as good as empty.
For a few hours each day these children waded, climbed trees, chased rabbits, dissected worms, and built a kind of teepee which they called Castle 2.
* * *
There were three entrances to Castle 1. The wide one designed for horse-drawn wagons was now used by ambulances. Another served the parking lot, and had become willy-nilly the main entrance. The former main entrance with its five arches – four windows and a door – welcomed people who came on foot, or by bus: who walked up the numerous stairs to the door or were wheeled up a winding ramp by a feeble relative or, if their arrivals coincided with his, by Zeph.
This was the access that Zeph preferred. So at dawn the morning after the party he was climbing the stairs, carrying a knobby walking stick, his legacy – his only legacy – from his father. He went through the big doorway into the old beamed hall and then into an old-fashioned elevator like a cage, and then down to the surgical suites, thoroughly up-to-date. He began the ritual of changing his clothes and scrubbing up. Zeph had a limited wardrobe – he was still paying off college and medical school debts, would be doing so for years – but he always wore a jacket and tie to work. You would expect these garments to smarten him up. In fact they made him seem more shambling and unaware: a tall loose-limbed guy carrying a stick for no apparent purpose . . . “Your stick – maybe there’s a sword hidden inside,” a wannabe had suggested.
“I’ve never looked,” he fibbed.
As for his head: he had brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze onto one side of your neck or the other. “Make contact,” his preceptors had urged. “Look at me,” pleaded women of all types. Contact? Look? Not in his repertoire. He had been self-sufficient all his life. He got through Medical School by virtue of a good memory and deft fingers. And despite that continuing interest in the sides of patients’ necks, he didn’t flunk bedside manner; the soft voice and the thoughtful answers to their questions told patients he was in their corner even if he didn’t want to meet their eyes. Some patients may have even preferred the averted glance.
Zeph’s eyes, if you did get a glimpse of them, were dark blue. When he was giving general anesthesia – he occasionally got non-regional assignments – he leaned over the patient and asked him to count backwards from ten and there was a kind of cobalt flash just before seven. But mostly Zeph’s job was regional, continually administering exactly the right amount of blocking drugs to exactly the right nerves, and a little sedation too. The less stuff given the better, but there must be enough of it to keep pain at a safe distance. Zeph considered all pain his mortal enemy, all patients of either gender his suffering mother, all surgeons dragons indifferent to the cruelties they were practicing. The patients’ conversation during this partially sedated state included long sleepy pauses between phrases and sometimes between words; but the talk only occasionally turned into jabberwocky. The dialogue began in a confidential mode and soon acquired a tone of intimacy, though the topics were unromantic. Birdwatching. Jazz. Immigrants, too goddam many. Zeph’s responses were invitations to say more, continuing the palaver while his hands and eyes kept busy. What color is the bobolink? You prefer Bird to Coltrane? Yes, many people here were born elsewhere; have you traveled yourself? – a response intended to blur insult if anyone had heard it; often the entire surgical team were Fellows from the Asian rim or the subcontinent, though the surgeon in charge was usually Yankee. Or Jewish. Sometimes Irish. Zeph was Irish on both sides, though his father had not been a surgeon, not any kind of doctor, just a feckless hippy who named his one child Zephyr and willed him a walking stick and did talk jabberwocky.
When Zeph paid his post-operative visits a few hours after the surgery, the patients did not seem to remember these conversations and sometimes they did not even remember the man now standing beside their bed with his eyes on their neck. Being forgotten didn’t trouble him. He’d learned also to tolerate the next string of visits to the next day’s batch of surgical patients, though he always entered the room as if he were metal and had neglected to oil himself. He swiveled his eyes until they briefly met the eyes of the person on the bed. He said his silly name. He shook hands if the patient seemed so inclined. He was here to answer questions no matter how trivial they seemed. He sat down, preferably on a chair, on a stool if necessary, indicating that he was in no hurry. He answered the queries and he wrote a note or two on his clipboard, and when the questions were done (though some were repeated and repeated) he took over the conversation, explaining in the most lay terms possible the nature of the dope, its duration, its possible side effects, the probability of nasal intubation, and the unavoidable necessity of tethering the patient’s wrists to the side rails. “I’ll be taking care of you,” he said. And then, with a little less effort than earlier, he met the patient’s eyes again. And shook hands, maybe, and said good-bye.
Now, at 6:30 in the morning, he walked in his paper slippers to the OR anteroom, where he was the first doctor to arrive but the second member of the team; the scrub nurse was always waiting. She helped him into his mask and gloves and he entered the pearl and silver sanctuary. He checked the treasures in his beloved cart. The other docs padded in. Then the first patient, supine on wheels. Things began.
This patient was an overweight man of fifty-seven with diabetes and a raging need for a knee replacement. “I’m going to insert the needle now, just as I explained,” said Zeph, and even as he spoke the needle was reaching the necessary nerve. Zeph lowered his head towards the patient’s head so they could speak and Zeph could meanwhile watch the monitors and not get in the way of the surgeons, already clustered at the knee like jackals. “Are you feeling anything in your left foot?” said Zeph and a nurse scratched its sole. “No.” The nurse pinched the thigh. “Do you feel anything in your left thigh?” “No.” Zeph announced “Ready” in a firm voice never yet heard outside of the operating room.
The patient told Zeph about sailing: “Nothing like it, you are master, you are jubilant, you yourself are the . . . are the . . . ”
“Wind?” suggested Zeph.
“Out of body . . . out of mind . . . you are made of air and sky.”
“Water?”
“Marshmallow . . . peanut butter.” Zeph reduced the Verset. “Come out with me sometime, Doc.”
“Love to.”
The next patient was so talkative that Zeph added diazepam to her IV, and then joined in her complaints about children and grandchildren; and you would think, if you heard his responses, that dealing with recalcitrant offspring was his life’s interest. The third, a boy with a supposedly operable tumor in his abdomen, was a general. Zeph, unable to communicate with this child sunk in artificial sleep, noted that the tumor was extensive and not completely excisable. The final surgery was a lumpectomy, nice and clean. The woman on the table flirted with him and he flirted right back; kept her as close to full awareness as possible. “Have you ever been in love, Blue Eyes?” she giggled.
Afterwards, a mute shower, his second of the day, while the chatter that had clung to him drained into the hospital’s sewer.
* * *
One day, shortly after a rain, something unfortunate happened. While sliding on her backside down the bank towards the stream, Acelle was stabbed by what felt like a dagger. It was in fact only a bit of narrow branch. It would have done little damage had she been wearing jeans, but today she’d worn last year’s party dress. So below the striped mini her legs were bare and her upper thigh and even part of her buttock were vulnerable to the miniature weapon; worse yet, the thing had its own pointed twiglet, which had entered the flesh easily enough but, Joe saw, would be a bitch to dislodge. “It’s like a fishhook, pointing backwards,” Joe explained to Acelle. “They make fishhooks that way on purpose . . . so they can’t be pulled out the way they came in, the fish can’t get loose.”
She was lying on her stomach. “Pull it out anyway.”
He bent and looked closely at the little bit of tree that seemed to be feeding on her tenderness. “No, the fishhook will rip you. It went in slanted like a splinter. It’s very near the . . . skin, the surface. Maybe I could cut your skin and lift it out.”
“Maybe you could stop talking and do it.”
He took out his imitation Swiss Army knife. He and she had been enjoying it all summer. It was his birthday present. Even this knock-off was so expensive that all his relatives had to chip in. “I should sterilize the blade.”
“Spit on it.”
Instead he turned around and urinated on it and on his hands. Then he gave her his wadded up and filthy handkerchief to hold between her teeth. He used two of his fingers to stretch the affected area between the forefinger and middle finger and he made a swift cut with the point of the blade, just deep and long enough to flip the twig out with the flat of the blade. The nasty twiglet came too. The thing lay on her thigh; he brushed it off. The bleeding narrowed to a trickle.
“It hurts a lot but not as much as before,” said Acelle. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
* * *
Near the main entrance – the de facto main entrance, not the original one that Zeph entered every day with his stick under his arm – was the gift shop that was now Victoria Tarnapol’s to manage. It was a place where an empty-handed visitor could pick up a box of scented soaps or an embroidered handkerchief or a glass candy dish to delight a moribund patient. A rotating rack of paperbacks was useful, and games and puzzles for children. And since Victoria’s ascendancy two round café tables and little chairs had appeared, and she served coffee and tea and a slice of the pastry she baked at home early in the morning. Her mini-café became popular – many visitors did not like the hospital cafeteria, where you could overhear conversations between doctors about conditions you’d prefer not to know existed.
Mr. Bahande, a security officer, was posted near the glass-walled gift shop. At first he merely nodded to the new manager. But one morning he had to skip breakfast because his older daughter – she had a face like a goddess, she had a spinal deformity – had trouble settling herself at her workbench, and the younger one was late for school, and so he had to make all three baloney sandwiches, his, Acelle’s, Camilla’s. And so, on his mid-morning break, when he usually walked in the hospital garden, he headed hungrily for the cafeteria. But he stopped to look at a ship-in-a-bottle in the gift shop window; he’d like to try making one of those things, and then, looking up, looking further in, he saw the café tables, one of them occupied by a man slumped with worry, and behind him, in a little recess, the manager. Her gray hair was cut close to her narrow head. The slide of her nose was interrupted by a bump, adding beauty to a face which was already distinguished. She was slicing something and the sight of that something pulled him right in. It was linzer torte. It turned out to taste better even than Marie’s, God rest her soul.
He came in every morning at 10:15. He ate various breads, various coffee cakes, various pies; also citron gateau and baklava and a puff inside which seemed to float not chocolate but its divine essence. He liked them all but he preferred the less sweet pastries. She began to make more of those, fewer of the sugary ones.
Since the gift shop was rarely busy until eleven they were able lightly to pass the time of day. One morning – the treat was gingerbread with pieces of ginger in it – he asked her to join him at his table. After a moment of confusion, during which her palms reached for her sculpted hair – she washed her hands again and cut a slice for herself and sat down opposite him.
* * *
Without discussion Joe and Acelle went to the Castle, using the old entrance, the one Zeph favored. In the Emergency Room Acelle gave her name and the family’s insurance number. She knew it by heart because of her sister’s frequent visits. The doctor thought Joe was Acelle’s brother and allowed him to remain in the cubicle but when he examined her he pulled the curtain. “I’m going to wash this out for you and then give you a Novocain and take a few stitches; they’ll reabsorb. But have your mother change the dressing every day and put on this ointment, and don’t take a bath tonight. I’ll give you a tetanus shot for good measure.” After doing exactly what he said he’d do he rolled her onto her back and lifted her easily – she was a small girl – and stood her up. “Dizzy?” His hand on her shoulder steadied her for a few necessary minutes. “Sitting will be painful for a few days.” He flicked open the curtain to reveal Joe, waiting on a stool, a plastic bag holding Acelle’s bloody underpants on his lap. “Did you make that incision, dude?”
“Yes,” said Joe.
“Good job.”
“Good job,” echoed Acelle as they left, and she attempted to take his hand, and after a few moments he allowed it to be taken.
* * *
And now Zeph prepared to visit patients scheduled for surgery tomorrow. He put on fresh scrubs because people like to see their doctors in costume.
The first was an old childless widow with cancer of the tongue. It was advanced – she had ignored it, had skipped appointments with dentist and doctor, had worn a kerchief whatever the weather, had invented excuses not to visit her few friends still living, all incapacitated anyway. But yesterday Fate in the form of a fissure in the sidewalk tripped her. The ambulance attendants, placing her swelling hand on her thigh, gently removed the tell-tale babushka. The lesion bulged like an apricot. The Emergency Room orthopod splinted her broken fingers and she was whisked to Head and Neck, and examined, and talked to, and scheduled for surgery.
Of course the mutilated tongue slurred her speech. But Zeph understood it all, giving her the occasional gift of a direct gaze. “I taut . . . go way,” she fabricated. He knew she had not thought it would go away; she thought instead that discovery would mean instant yanking out of the organ and death shortly afterwards, whereas secrecy would mean prolonged if solitary life. She wanted to know – she had resorted to a pad of paper now, managing the pencil with her less damaged hand – how much of her mouth they would leave. Her surgeon wouldn’t say.
“She can’t say, Mrs. Flaherty. Neither can I. But I can tell you that there are many ways therapists can restore some patients’ speech.” She had to be content with that, and also with his now averted gaze, though he did press her hand. “U eye oy,” were her parting syllables.
He didn’t feel like a nice boy. In two days when he made his post-op visit she wouldn’t be able to manage even those vowels; and if therapy could help this half-tongued woman it would be a miracle. But he hadn’t lied.
He looked at the next patient’s chart. An unsingular history. White female; thirty-six years old; unmarried; healthy; one pregnancy, terminated. No immediate family. Complaint: back pain lasting several months, recent inability to walk without severe pain. Xrays and an MRI of the vertebrae showed a mass obscuring L4 and L5 but revealed nothing more about this secret. A needle biopsy had told more. Stage 4. Her name was Catherine Adrian.
Faint lines fanned from the corners of her eyes. Shallow vertical grooves, one on each cheek, enclosed her sculpted mouth in loving parentheses. Her jaw was long and slender. He could make these observations freely because she was asleep and he could comfortably look at her face.
He glanced at his clipboard. He had three more patients to visit, to reassure about tomorrow, to convince that they were in good hands, or at least that their pain from the knife would be managed to their satisfaction. He’d come back to Ms. Adrian later.
As if on cue she opened her eyes. They were blue, almost as dark as the ones he avoided in his mirror.
“Hello, Ms. Adrian. I’m Zephyr Finn, your anesthetist.”
“How nice.”
In Ms. Adrian’s room there was both a chair and a stool. Zeph sat on the side of her bed. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”
“Say that I’m curious.”
“About . . . ?”
“I want to see what it looks like, this alien that’s wrapped itself around my spine. I’d like to watch on a screen while they disappear it.”
“Some back operations are done with regional anesthetic,” he parroted. “Patients on the table can watch a monitor. Most close their eyes. But we don’t know the depth of your growth and we can’t risk touching an organ while you’re awake.”
“Can you preserve the thing in alcohol?”
“I can ask the surgeon.”
She sighed. “Whatever they find, there will be an end to my pain.”
She would soon be paralyzed, he guessed. “Yes,” he said with assurance.
And then – as if she were under his care already, as if he had administered a nerve block and a sedative and was keeping her lightly awake – he talked. The volumes by the side of the bed were childrens’ books – The House At Pooh Corner, the novels of Peter Dickinson, Grimm. “I read those too,” he said. “My only genre. That small amount of magic.”
“Chaste pleasures.”
“Endings never final . . . ”
She taught mathematics at a local junior college, not a very good one. “I do mainly remediation, I try to make things interesting, some of them fall asleep anyway. I’m a soporific; perhaps I’m really in your game . . . ”
‘Game’ took them to chess and Scrabble and the Red Sox – he avoided mentioning participatory sports; she probably had played tennis, poor thing. An hour went by. More time would have passed had the surgeon not entered the room to find his best anesthetist sitting on a patient’s bed. Robotic again, Zeph got to his feet. “Good afternoon, Dr. Schapiro.”
Dr. Schapiro nodded and took Ms. Adrian’s hand in his. “How are you feeling today,” he began. Zeph walked towards the door, turned, flashed his eyes at hers. She flashed back.
The mass had wangled its way inwards from its clawhold on L4. A frozen section done in the OR confirmed that the tumor was a ferocious beast; it had already eaten bone; bits of it must be all over the place.
* * *
Hector Bahande and Victoria Tarnapol gradually exchanged life stories – Hector’s hopes when he came to this country and the things that bedeviled him one after another – his child’s affliction, his wife’s death, rest her soul, the necessity to find a job near home. Victoria had been a youngest daughter persuaded by her sisters to quit art school and take care of their ailing mother. Mama kept ordering her to find a husband who could install all three in a better flat. “Maybe if you cooked better . . . ”
“She won’t last forever,” Victoria was falsely assured. Well, Mama was dead at last. Victoria was not sure she would ask God to rest her soul. “How does your older daughter occupy her time?” she said to Hector.
His face shone. He was short, he had a little paunch (helped along by his recent indulgences), a lumpy nose, not much of a neck, a noticeable mole on one cheek. “She carves,” he said, his homely face shining. “She carves animals and small human figures.”
Oh, Lord, sweet little lambs, daring odalisques. She was sorry she’d asked.
“Shall I show you?” His hand was already in his pocket. “Most are bigger; this is a mini.”
It was the figure of a dog – a puppy, really – peeking in solemn distress, no cuteness at all, from the jacket of a man. You knew it was a man because the buttons were on the right side and he was wearing a tie, its stripes delicately incised. He had no head and his torso ended just below the frayed jacket.
“Are there more of these?” she asked sharply.
“Many, many, but bigger.”
“Does she sell them?”
He shrugged. “There’s a man comes to look, takes one or two, comes back with a little money.”
Pimp . . . “Perhaps I could do the same, and give you a bigger percentage.”
He carefully wiped his mouth. “Miss Tarnapol . . . ”
“Victoria.”
“Hector is my given name. Victoria, forgive me, who buys a carving here? People want tissue boxes decorated with shells.”
“Yes of course . . . but I still have friends in the art world. I was also a sought after window dresser for a time. Hector . . . may I come and see the others?”
“I will bring you two tomorrow.”
He brought a unicorn and a round figure that looked at first like an unpainted Russian doll. The unicorn was smiling. The Russian doll’s carved face was not smiling, and her arms in relief pressing themselves to her stomach suggested that this would not be an easy labor, that she would perish from it, that the nine or ten dolls nested within her bulk would crumble there.
“Your dealer probably gives you ten percent of what he gets for these. Let me try to sell them and I will retain the ten percent. I’ll peddle the unicorn first and put the doll in the gift shop window as advertisement. NOT FOR SALE the card will read . . . intriguing.”
“Nobody will be intrigued – a woman about to die in childbirth.”
“We’ll see.”
She placed the unicorn in a gallery about to open in her own town of Godolphin just over the Boston line. She placed the next piece he bought in an already flourishing place in fashionable downtown. She persuaded a dress shop owner to display a Myna bird with a stocking cap, each stitch visible. An environmentalist bought it, perhaps making sense of its ambiguous message. Victoria split her own com-mission with the dress shop proprietor and from then on one of Camilla’s pieces always occupied a place of honor, and some people began to come in not primarily for clothing but to see what was on display, though they usually bought at least a skirt and sometimes a whole outfit.
* * *
As the weather grew colder and school began, Joe and Acelle abandoned the woods for Joe’s house. They had to be quiet during this one shared afternoon hour. Neither of their families would approve of their blameless activity: reading Zeph’s Anatomy book in Zeph’s monkish bedroom. They called the room Castle 3.
Anatomy wasn’t altogether strange to them. In sex education they had seen a coy diagram of a sperm shooting up towards his partner the ovum; and they knew there were times he would fail to reach her – her monthly, maybe, or Fate, maybe. “But Fate may be against you,” warned the teacher. They had seen artists’ renditions of various tumors, some like sacks of vermicelli, some like furry fungus. And when a popular football player injured his knee, the television anchor informed them – separately, for each was at home, but they conferred about it later – that the knee was one of the most complicated joints in the body. Certainly it seemed loaded with ligaments, meniscuses, tendons, and cartilages. The whole apparatus looked untrustworthy, she told Joe.
“Interdependent,” he corrected.
Her father’s knee gave him a shitload of trouble. She’d like to borrow the book for a night and bring it home to Camilla, who could look at the various two dimensional drawings and carve a knee in her own peculiar style. But Joe would never permit the book to leave the room. So one day Acelle herself tried to draw versions of the joint. Joe was muttering the names of the facial nerves, probably memorizing them. Zeph’s book was open on the bed, and they were kneeling before it. He kept repeating his sequence, and she kept drawing. Then he turned towards her. “Lacrimal Lingual Mandibular. Aren’t you through yet? Ophthalmic.”
“Yes.” She’d come back to the knee.
They turned a few pages, and found the Circulatory System.
And there it was: just what she’d been waiting for – a lumpy device with chambers and ventricals and arteries and atriums – atria – looking nothing at all like a valentine. Yet in one of those ventricles love got born, and then leaped to somebody else’s ventricle, from one heart to another, that’s how it was, it happened in every story she’d read. It happened in palaces and cities and farms and in the neighborhoods. You could be a princess lying in a Castle bed, you could be stuck in a wheelchair, you could be a security guard, you could be a woman with hair like a boy’s. The anatomy book did not identify which chamber was the seat of love, but the anatomy book was shy, like Zeph, like Joe . . .
“It’s getting dark,” said Joe.
“I’d better go home.”
“Tiptoe,” he warned.
* * *
Catherine would receive her useless chemical infusions as an inpatient – to fetch her on a gurney in an ambulance every day, and meanwhile try to slow the decay of the other organs, was too impractical even for the nitpicking insurance company. “So I’ll die here, of one thing or another.”
It was their five o’clock visit – the only one of the day. This was her most alert half-hour. By the end of the first week they knew everything about each other – her long deteriorating love affair; his compliant mother who followed Old Walking Stick from commune to commune, Zeph in tow, until she died of exhaustion; his difficulty talking to anyone who wasn’t on the table; her disappointment with the trajectory of her life. He described special places in the Castle. There was a memorial tomb containing a Civil War soldier in the basement, so big you could sleep on it yourself – he sometimes had done so. The Residents’ Crash Room, where anyone with a free quarter of an hour could lie undisturbed on the bed. “I kept Treasure Island under the pillow.” The hospital Chapel, so plain and undenominational that, when empty of sobbing people, it seemed like a railroad waiting station at two in the morning.
He always brought pastry from Victoria who saved it for him. Catherine managed a bite; after a while Zeph ate the rest. One afternoon, after leaving Catherine, he went into the gift shop and bought the suffering doll. “Pre-eclampsia,” he diagnosed. Victoria quietly took down the NOT FOR SALE sign and wrapped the thing. Zeph put it on a shelf in his room.
The time came when Catherine’s organs insisted on failing – kidneys, liver. “Without the chemo I might feel less sick.”
“You might.”
“I think I’ll order it stopped.”
He didn’t reply.
“What would you do if you were me?”
“If I were you? If I were you I’d marry me.”
“Oh . . . why don’t I, then.”
IV poles were their best men. Zeph had invited Joe and Joe had invited Acelle. The Justice of the Peace ignored the ages of these witnesses – they could write their names, couldn’t they. Through the three narrow archers’ windows a pale sun illuminated Catherine’s pale face. The groom had remembered to supply the bride with flowers, and he had bought rings for both of them. His “I do” was firm, surprising everyone but Catherine. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Her breath was bitter.
He had signed up for vacation beginning that day, and as a family member he was permitted to sleep on a folding cot beside her bed. The walking stick stood aslant in the corner. It did conceal a sword, as Zeph knew. One night Zeph drew the sword out of its sheath and swished at the air, back, forth. Catherine laughed a little. He reinserted it.
From the cot he held her hand as both pretended to sleep.
She died a week later of renal failure – more or less peacefully, as such things go.
* * *
Camilla didn’t become the rage, but she acquired a small reputation in the city, and she banished the crook who called himself a dealer. Victoria persuaded her to entrust her work to a small respectable agency with a good publicist. Camilla made the condition that her own photograph never appear and her disability not be mentioned. Pride, Victoria expected, could be overcome as time went on. Money came in. The Bahande flat was gradually improved until it looked like a home.
“But what about your ten percent?” argued Hector one day after dinner in the refurbished flat. Victoria had cooked the meal in their kitchen – fish, a salad, fruit, walnut bread. Joe had spent the evening reading Richard Dawkins. Acelle worked on her knitting: a scarf for someone. Zeph watched Camilla carve a cat’s head for his walking stick: one feline eye had a congenital droop. Only Camilla knew that Zeph was planning to give the stick to her father. When Joe said he was going home, Zeph had interrupted his silent concentration to keep the boy company on the walk. The girls went to bed.
Hector and Victoria were now sitting on the porch, Joe’s painful knee elevated on a wicker stool. “Your ten percent,” he said again.
“I’m aging, not an agent. I’m glad someone else is doing that hard work. I’m suited to a gift shop.”
“You have been a gift to us,” he said softly. How handsome he looked in his new shirt – though no more handsome than in the security officer’s uniform which he put on every day. “As for old – you are not much older than me,” leaning forward but not yet touching her.
“I’m sixty.”
He nodded without surprise. “I’m forty-five, and my bad joints make me fifty. Come live with us.”
She considered this suggestion. Her sisters would never speak to her again – that would be a blessing. She was an experienced caretaker. The family’s nutrition would improve. She could keep an eye on the romances developing in the neighborhood.
“Together we can walk to the Castle,” she said; and he took that as the acceptance it was.
Edith Pearlman is the author of three story collections: Vaquita (University of Pittsburgh Press), Love Among the Greats (Eastern Washington University Press), and How to Fall (Sarabande Books). Her stories have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and in The Best Short Stories from the South. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.