Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
A Widow's Story (5 page)
February 16, 2008.
To Richard Ford
Ray is definitely feeling better but I am not going to tempt fate by going on too long optimistically. Thanks, Richard, for your moral support. It is greatly appreciated . . . Maybe you could (come down from Maine) and drive all the Princeton afflicted around. That could be your “new phase.” Biographers would be thrilled. How much easier than writing . . .
Much love to both,
Joyce
(
Richard Ford
,
hearing that Ray was hospitalized
,
very gallantly offered to fly down to Princeton and “drive me around”—an offer of such generosity
,
I was deeply moved even as common sense advised me to decline.)
February 17, 2008, 4:08
A.M.
To Emily Mann
Ray is said to be improving—and I think that this is so—but he has such a long way to go & is so weak & prone to fevers, I’m dreading the future; somehow I don’t think that he will ever be “well” again—this experience has been so ravishing. And in any case I have to see it as a presentiment of what lies ahead, unavoidably. I can’t sleep for thinking of all that there is to do, that I doubt I can do . . .
However, you did get through a worse and more protracted experience so I suppose that I will, too. Night thoughts are not productive but—how to avoid them?
I put together a little packet of snapshots to bring to Ray, to cheer him up, and came across the most beautiful photo of you and Gary, taken some years ago by Ray at one of our parties. . . . I’m sure that I’d given you a copy at the time.
Much love,
Joyce
(Emily Mann’s husband
,
Gary Mailman
,
stricken by a virulent infection following a medical procedure by a physician associated with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City
,
was hospitalized for ten days at about the time Ray was in the Princeton Medical Center—Emily’s and my hospital vigils overlapped by a few days. Gary nearly died and recovered slowly afterward at home
,
over a period of several months. But he did recover.)
Forever after you will recognize those places—previously invisible, indiscernible—where memory pools accumulate.
All waiting areas of hospitals—hospital rooms—and in particular those regions of the hospital reserved for the very ill: Telemetry, Intensive Care. You will not wish to return to these places where memory pools lie underfoot treacherous as acid. In the corners of such places, in the shadows. In stairwells. In elevators. In corridors and in restrooms, you have memorized without your knowing. In the hospital gift shop, at the newsstand. Where you linger staring at news headlines already passing into oblivion as you peruse them while upstairs in your sick husband’s hospital room an attendant is changing bedclothes, or sponge bathing the patient behind a gauze screen, unless the patient has been taken to Radiology for further X rays shivering and awaiting his turn in another corridor, on another floor. Memory pools accumulate beneath chairs in waiting areas adjacent to Telemetry. It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.
Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—
But he was looking so well yesterday
,
what has happened to him overnight—
You would not wish to blunder into another’s sorrow. You will have all that you can do to resist your own.
Chapter 13
“I’m Not Crying for Any Reason”
February 17
,
2008.
This morning at 7:50
A.M.
arriving at the hospital—ascending in the elevator—at the fifth floor turn left, to Telemetry—breathless/hurrying/eager to see my husband—(for always the first glimpse of a hospital patient, in his room in his bed unobserved, is fraught with meaning)—carrying the hefty Sunday
New York Times
for us to read together—and at the farther end of the now-familiar corridor—past the now-familiar nurses’ station—there is room 541—there is Ray’s bed—empty—just the stripped, bare mattress.
“Mrs. Smith?—your husband is in room five thirty-nine. Just this morning he was moved. We tried to call you but you must have left home . . .”
And so entering this room—which evidently I’d passed a moment ago without glancing inside—I am trembling so visibly that Ray wonders what is wrong with me—the blood has drained from my face—I am trembling in the aftermath of a shock as profound as any I’ve ever experienced, or am I trembling in the aftermath of relief—for here is Ray in the new bed, in the new room—a room identical to the previous room, with the identical bedside table and on this table the vase of flowers from friends—Ray is no longer wearing the oxygen mask, nor even the nasal inhaler—since his oxygen intake has improved, and there is the possibility of his being discharged from the hospital this Tuesday— he smiles at me, greets me—“Hi honey”—but when I lean over the bed to kiss him a wave of faintness sweeps over me, suddenly I begin to cry—uncontrollably crying—for the first time since bringing Ray to the hospital—my face is contorted like a child’s, in the throes of an agonizing weeping—“I’m not crying for any reason, but only because I love you”—so I manage to stammer, to Ray, “—because I love you so much”—and Ray’s eyes well with tears too, he murmurs what sounds like, “Something like this—I’ll be knocked out for two months—”
Like drowning swimmers we are clutching at each other. Someone passing in the corridor outside sees us, and looks quickly away. Never have I cried so hard, so helplessly. Never in my adult life. And why am I crying, is it purely out of a sense of
relief . . .
Something like this. Knocked out two months.
Always I will remember these words. For this is how Ray assesses the situation: pneumonia has interrupted his life. These days in the hospital and his weakened state will result in his editing-work being slowed, delayed.
He isn’t thinking of the future in the way that I have been thinking of the future—he’s thinking of the May issue of
Ontario Review
, the responsibility he bears to the writers whose work he’s publishing. Meeting a deadline. Paying his printer. Paying his contributors. Mailing, distribution. He isn’t thinking of anything so petty as
himself.
Maybe Ray isn’t capable of thinking of himself, in the terms in which I can think of him.
Maybe no man is capable of thinking of himself, in the terms in which a woman can think of him.
“Lean on me, Mr. Smith. That’s good. Good!”
A physical therapist named Rhoda, very nice woman, is walking with Ray in the corridor outside his room, in the effort of exercising his leg muscles. Lying in bed for several days has weakened Ray’s legs—it’s astonishing how quickly muscles begin to
atrophy
. Earlier this morning I’d been encouraging Ray to push hard against my hand, with his foot—to exercise his leg muscles in this way—and he’d pushed hard, very hard it seemed to me; but Rhoda is telling Ray that when he’s discharged from the hospital it won’t be to his home but to Merwick Rehab Center, not far from the Medical Center. Not only must Ray regain his ability to walk normally, he must regain his ability to
breathe.
How bizarre all this would have seemed to us, a week ago! This shuffling man in hospital pajamas, trying not to wince with pain, leaning heavily on a young woman therapist’s arm, an IV gurney tugged in his wake.
As Ray is walking—unsteadily, leaning on Rhoda—but he is walking—I am thinking
Don’t fall! Don’t fall please.
In the hospital corridors it isn’t uncommon to see patients walking slowly with or without therapists—tugging IV gurneys in their wake. All these days, hours—the IV line has been embedded in the crook of Ray’s bruised right arm—dripping in the antibiotic that, like a magic potion in a Grimm’s fairy tale, has the power to save his life.
An attendant arrives, to take Ray to Radiology for X rays.
It seems that a “secondary infection”—“of mysterious origin”—“nothing to worry about”—has appeared in Ray’s left lung—which is to say, in Ray’s (previously) uninfected lung.
“But—is this bacterial, too?”
(How matter-of-factly this adjective rolls off my tongue—
bacterial.
As one might say
infinity
,
light-year
,
a trillion trillion stars—
in the naive speech of the non-scientist.)
The smiling young attendant—female, dark-skinned, cheery and sturdy-bodied—her name tag is Rhoda—says with the bright smile she lavishes on all patients and patients’ relatives who ask such naive questions of her—“Ma’am, I don’t know! The doctor will tell you.”
Which doctor, I wonder—Dr. I
_
, or Dr. B
_
?
Bacterial.
One thing that I have come to know—the nightmare-vigil has so impressed me, for life—we are not so much surrounded by invisible and very greedy life-forms as enveloped by them—at every instant of our lives—and before our births, in the womb—we are flesh-vessels for these microscopic life-forms that require us for warmth—for warmth and nourishment—those bacteria that benefit us we call, with anthropomorphic instinct,
good
; those bacteria that seek to ravage us, and destroy us, we call
bad.
It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is
exceptional.
So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!
“Infection”—another problematic term. For by definition any infection is
bad
—but some are
not-so-bad
as others.
“Mr. Smith, can you tilt your head this way?—that’s great.”
One of the nurses is shaving Ray’s jaws, that have grown stubbly. This is a task I might have done for Ray myself—or, if we’d thought of it, I could have brought him the right sort of mirror and Ray could have shaved himself.
“Your husband is very handsome, Mrs. Smith. But you know that.”
Without his glasses, eyes closed, Ray does look handsome—his cheeks are lean, and remarkably unlined for a man of his age—his forehead is marred by the faintest frown lines, scarcely visible in this light. As the nurse deftly shaves him, wipes away lather—I feel a sense of unease, that Ray is becoming adjusted to the hospital setting, ever more comfortable with the eerie passivity such a setting evokes—as in Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
in which the young German Hans Castorp arrives as a visitor at the tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos, in the Swiss Alps, in the decade before the outbreak of World War I, and as if in fairy-tale enchantment remains for seven years.
After Ray is shaved he returns to the
New York Times
scattered across his bed. The visit to Radiology—he was gone for forty minutes—seems to have had no discernible effect upon him—one in a succession of hospital tests—at least not so invasive as others.
Both his arms are bruised, discolored from blood-drawing. Even for a stoic the constant blood-drawing is becoming painful but he doesn’t complain, Ray isn’t one to complain.
He seems not to recall his
mildly delusional
state of the other day, nor am I likely to remind him.
A room in a nurse’s house! How convinced Ray was, that this was where he’d been situated, for what reason he could not have said. I want to think that one day—maybe—when he’s well, and home—and the hospital vigil is but a memory—I will tell him about this notion of his, and we might laugh about it together.
And how does the remainder of this Sunday pass?—languidly reading, talking, listening to choral music played on a Sunday arts channel on TV. By coincidence this is the identical Sunday-afternoon classical music program that is broadcast on the radio, to which we often listen at home.
Once listening to a recording of Mozart’s
Requiem Mass
Ray had remarked in that bravado way in which, when you’re young, you might speak of dying, death as if you had not the slightest fear of it—“Promise me you’ll play that at my funeral.”
“But you said the same thing about Verdi’s
Requiem Mass.
”
“I did? I
did
?
”
This was years ago. This was another lifetime. We were living on Sherbourne Road in Detroit, Michigan. We were living then in the aftermath of the so-called Detroit riot of July 1967—fires, gunshots and looting only two blocks away on Livernois Avenue—a nightmare cacophony of fire sirens, police sirens, random shouts and cries—National Guardsmen deployed to protect municipal property with rifles—an acrid smell of smoke, smoldering fires that lingered for days—this
racial tinderbox
of an American city as cliché-speech described it that was at the same time our home.
In the hospital, on this February afternoon in 2008, decades later I don’t want to think of this. Of our innocence, ignorance.
We’d been very happy in that house on Sherbourne Road where in an upstairs room—a former child’s room pink-walled and unfurnished except for a desk, a straight-back chair and a single bookcase—I would write my novel
them
while Ray commuted to the University of Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River in Canada.
I was teaching English at that time at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit-run institution at Six Mile Road, about a mile from our Sherbourne Road house. I loved my classes at U.D. and I was very friendly with most of my (mostly male) colleagues but within a year I would leave to teach, with Ray, at the University of Windsor where we remained from 1968 to 1978 in a single-storey brick house on the Detroit River across from Belle Isle . . .
Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into
infinity.
In the late afternoon of Sunday, February 17, 2008—as dusk comes on, and deepens to night—it’s decided between us that I will go home early today, and return early in the morning. How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.
Discharged to the rehab clinic on Tuesday?—a few days in rehab and then—home. By next Friday? Next weekend?
I kiss my husband good night. My very nice husband with his smooth-shaven jaws. It is not an extraordinary leave-taking for it feels so very temporary—I will be returning to this room so soon.
“Good night! I love you.”