Cast a Cold Eye (14 page)

The nurse came in and he said coldly, “In the future, would you take the trouble to close the door when you leave the room, particularly during these intimate moments?” Yet even as he began to speak, he felt himself blushing and the final phrase, to which he had meant to impart a sarcastic intonation, were mumbled out thickly, in a tone, almost, of apology. The nurse threw the cover over the bedpan and went out, closing the door behind her with a decisive click.

An hour later, young Dr. Z appeared, all gold fillings, hair era
brosse,
smile, and rimless spectacles. “We are going to reset that elbow for you,” he announced. “Anyone you want to get in touch with?” The young man opened his mouth to argue. He was free (was he not?), he reminded himself, to get up and dress and leave the hospital. He had only to refuse. The Xes, if it came down to it, could be summoned to bail him out of here. Dr. Z, after all, had no title or charter to his patronage. He had only to tell him that he preferred to have the arm reset, if necessary, in Cambridge, where he had friends and a regular physician; there was nothing in this preference that was derogatory to Dr. Z. The doctor, in his white gown, stood looking down at him, smiling rather inscrutably, as though he were very much aware of what was going on in the young man’s mind. “Those friends of yours,” he suggested, with a flick of the sterile glance in the direction of the dying chrysanthemums, “do you want us to give them a call?” A student nurse knocked and came in with a tray and a hypodermic needle. The young man’s jaws worked and he shook his head wordlessly in reply. It was too late; in the presence of this attentive listener he could not refuse Dr. Z what suddenly, in a curious fashion, appeared to be a favor, the favor of letting him operate on him. The abominable doctor smiled again, lightly, and tapped the foot of the bed in a negligent gesture that seemed to imply a mixture of contempt and approbation, as if he had had little doubt of the outcome of this conflict between them but was nevertheless satisfied to have won.

On the way up to the operating room, being wheeled breezily along by an orderly humming “
Who
?” the young man had a sudden clear sharp sense of all that he had omitted to do to attach himself to the life of this corridor from which now, irrecoverably perhaps, he thought in panic, he was being trundled away. “Stop,” he asserted faintly, raising his head on the pallet. The idea of defending himself still reached him as from a distance through the drug: Mr. Ciccone, he thought, would never have permitted this; in Mr. Ciccone, he considered tenderly, he had an ally, a veteran aider and abettor. Why, he demanded of himself, had he not taken the simple friendly course, yesterday, when he was sitting up in a chair, of offering to join his neighbor in a game of casino?

The orderly had paused to look down at him. “What’s the matter, chum?” he inquired. The young man struggled up from the confining blankets. They were waiting for the elevator, he realized; it was not too late, if he were insistent, to make a date with Mr. Ciccone for this afternoon or tomorrow; the fact that this notion was absurd made it appear to him all the more urgent and necessary, all the more talismanic. He jerked his raised head in the direction of Mr. Ciccone’s room. “I must speak to the patient in Number Three,” he pronounced, with an effect of hauteur and dignity. The orderly lifted shaggy red eyebrows, peered down the elevator shaft, shrugged, and consentingly set the stretcher in motion, retracing their way along the corridor. “Friend of yours?” he remarked.

In the flush of this victory over self and custom, the young man grew excited and voluble; a passing nurse turned back to look at them. “No,” he said. “To tell the truth, I’ve never actually seen him.” The orderly stared and bumped the stretcher to a standstill, but they were already opposite Number Three. The screen had been moved and the young man hastily nerved himself for the possibility that the real Mr. Ciccone might be something quite different from what he had imagined—a cantankerous misanthrope, for example, who would repulse his overture. But to his surprise the shaded room across the way into which his dilated eyes stared was empty, the bed made up and flat.

Fifteen minutes later, the young man expired under the anesthetic, before the operation proper had begun, the first case of its kind, as Dr. Z explained to Mrs. X, that he had ever come across in his entire practice, where the heart, without organic defect, sound as a bell, in fact, simply stopped beating.

II

Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?

W
HENEVER WE CHILDREN
came to stay at my grandmother’s house, we were put to sleep in the sewing room, a bleak, shabby, utilitarian rectangle, more office than bedroom, more attic than office, that played to the hierarchy of chambers the role of a poor relation. It was a room seldom entered by the other members of the family, seldom swept by the maid, a room without pride; the old sewing machine, some cast-off chairs, a shadeless lamp, rolls of wrapping paper, piles of cardboard boxes that might someday come in handy, papers of pins, and remnants of material united with the iron folding cots put out for our use and the bare floor boards to give an impression of intense and ruthless temporality. Thin white spreads, of the kind used in hospitals and charity institutions, and naked blinds at the windows reminded us of our orphaned condition and of the ephemeral character of our visit; there was nothing here to encourage us to consider this our home.

Poor Roy’s children, as commiseration damply styled the four of us, could not afford illusions, in the family opinion. Our father had put us beyond the pale by dying suddenly of influenza and taking our young mother with him, a defection that was remarked on with horror and grief commingled, as though our mother had been a pretty secretary with whom he had wantonly absconded into the irresponsible paradise of the hereafter. Our reputation was clouded by this misfortune. There was a prevailing sense, not only in the family but among storekeepers, servants, streetcar conductors, and other satellites of our circle, that my grandfather, a rich man, had behaved with extraordinary munificence in allotting a sum of money for our support and installing us with some disagreeable middle-aged relations in a dingy house two blocks distant from his own. What alternative he had was not mentioned; presumably he could have sent us to an orphan asylum and no one would have thought the worse of him. At any rate, it was felt, even by those who sympathized with us, that we led a privileged existence, privileged because we had no rights, and the very fact that at the yearly Halloween or Christmas party given at the home of an uncle we appeared so dismal, ill clad, and unhealthy, in contrast to our rosy, exquisite cousins, confirmed the judgment that had been made on us—clearly, it was a generous impulse that kept us in the family at all. Thus, the meaner our circumstances, the greater seemed our grandfather’s condescension, a view in which we ourselves shared, looking softly and shyly on this old man—with his rheumatism, his pink face and white hair, set off by the rosebuds in his Pierce-Arrow and in his buttonhole—as the font of goodness and philanthropy, and the nickel he occasionally gave us to drop into the collection plate on Sunday (two cents was our ordinary contribution) filled us not with envy but with simple admiration for his potency; this indeed was princely,
this
was the way to give. It did not occur to us to judge him for the disparity of our styles of living. Whatever bitterness we felt was kept for our actual guardians, who, we believed, must be embezzling the money set aside for us, since the standard of comfort achieved in our grandparents’ house—the electric heaters, the gas logs, the lap robes, the shawls wrapped tenderly about the old knees, the white meat of chicken and red meat of beef, the silver, the white tablecloths, the maids, and the solicitous chauffeur—persuaded us that prunes and rice pudding, peeling paint and patched clothes were
hors concours
with these persons and therefore could not have been willed by them. Wealth, in our minds, was equivalent to bounty, and poverty but a sign of penuriousness of spirit.

Yet even if we had been convinced of the honesty of our guardians, we would still have clung to that beneficent image of our grandfather that the family myth proposed to us. We were too poor, spiritually speaking, to question his generosity, to ask why he allowed us to live in oppressed chill and deprivation at a long arm’s length from himself and hooded his genial blue eye with a bluff, millionairish gray eyebrow whenever the evidence of our suffering presented itself at his knee. The official answer we knew: our benefactors were too old to put up with four wild young children; our grandfather was preoccupied with business matters and with his rheumatism, to which he devoted himself as though to a pious duty, taking it with him on pilgrimages to Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Miami, offering it with impartial reverence to the miracle of the Northern Mother and the Southern sun. This rheumatism hallowed my grandfather with the mark of a special vocation; he lived with it in the manner of an artist or a grizzled Galahad; it set him apart from all of us and even from my grandmother, who, lacking such an affliction, led a relatively unjustified existence and showed, in relation to us children, a sharper and more bellicose spirit. She felt, in spite of everything, that she was open to criticism, and, transposing this feeling with a practiced old hand, kept peering into our characters for symptoms of ingratitude.

We, as a matter of fact, were grateful to the point of servility. We made no demands, we had no hopes. We were content if we were permitted to enjoy the refracted rays of that solar prosperity and come sometimes in the summer afternoons to sit on the shady porch or idle through a winter morning on the wicker furniture of the sun parlor, to stare at the player piano in the music room and smell the odor of whiskey in the mahogany cabinet in the library, or to climb about the dark living room examining the glassed-in paintings in their huge gilt frames, the fruits of European travel: dusky Italian devotional groupings, heavy and lustrous as grapes, Neapolitan women carrying baskets to market, views of Venetian canals, and Tuscan harvest scenes—secular themes that, to the Irish-American mind, had become tinged with Catholic feeling by a regional infusion from the Pope. We asked no more from this house than the pride of being connected with it, and this was fortunate for us, since my grandmother, a great adherent of the give-them-an-inch-and-they’ll-take-a-yard theory of hospitality, never, so far as I can remember, offered any caller the slightest refreshment, regarding her own conversation as sufficiently wholesome and sustaining. An ugly, severe old woman with a monstrous balcony of a bosom, she officiated over certain set topics in a colorless singsong, like a priest intoning a Mass, topics to which repetition had lent a senseless solemnity: her audience with the Holy Father; how my own father had broken with family tradition and voted the Democratic ticket; a visit to Lourdes; the Sacred Stairs in Rome, bloodstained since the first Good Friday, which she had climbed on her knees; my crooked little fingers and how they meant I was a liar; a miracle-working bone; the importance of regular bowel movements; the wickedness of Protestants; the conversion of my mother to Catholicism; and the assertion that my Protestant grandmother must certainly dye her hair. The most trivial reminiscences (my aunt’s having hysterics in a haystack) received from her delivery and from the piety of the context a strongly monitory flavor; they inspired fear and guilt, and one searched uncomfortably for the moral in them, as in a dark and riddling fable.

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother’s unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. I do not know how my grandmother got the way she was; I assume, from family photographs and from the inflexibility of her habits, that she was always the same, and it seems as idle to inquire into her childhood as to ask what was ailing Iago or look for the error in toilet-training that was responsible for Lady Macbeth. My grandmother’s sexual history, bristling with infant mortality in the usual style of her period, was robust and decisive: three tall, handsome sons grew up, and one attentive daughter. Her husband treated her kindly. She had money, many grandchildren, and religion to sustain her. White hair, glasses, soft skin, wrinkles, needlework—all the paraphernalia of motherliness were hers; yet it was a cold, grudging, disputatious old woman who sat all day in her sunroom making tapestries from a pattern, scanning religious periodicals, and setting her iron jaw against any infraction of her ways.

Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother’s nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy. The religious magazines on her table furnished her not with food for meditation but with fresh pretexts for anger; articles attacking birth control, divorce, mixed marriages, Darwin, and secular education were her favorite reading. The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others; “Honor thy father and thy mother,” a commandment she was no longer called upon to practice, was the one most frequently on her lips. The extermination of Protestantism, rather than spiritual perfection, was the boon she prayed for. Her mind was preoccupied with conversion, the capture of a soul for God much diverted her fancy—it made one less Protestant in the world. Foreign missions with their overtones of good will and social service, appealed to her less strongly; it was not a
harvest
of souls that my grandmother had in mind.

This pugnacity of my grandmother’s did not confine itself to sectarian enthusiasm. There was the defense of her furniture and her house against the imagined encroachments of visitors. With her, this was not the gentle and tremulous protectiveness endemic in old ladies, who fear for the safety of their possessions with a truly touching anxiety, inferring the fragility of all things from the brittleness of their old bones and hearing the crash of mortality in the perilous tinkling of a teacup. My grandmother’s sentiment was more autocratic: she hated having her chairs sat in or her lawns stepped on or the water turned on in her basins, for no reason at all except pure officiousness; she even grudged the mailman his daily promenade up her sidewalk. Her home was a center of power, and she would not allow it to be derogated by easy or democratic usage. Under her jealous eye, its social properties had atrophied, and it functioned in the family structure simply as a political headquarters. Family conferences were held there, consultations with the doctor and the clergy; refractory children were brought there for a lecture or an interval of thought-taking; wills were read and loans negotiated and emissaries from the Protestant faction on state occasions received. The family had no friends, and entertaining was held to be a foolish and unnecessary courtesy as between blood relations. Holiday dinners fell, as a duty on the lesser members of the organization: the daughters and daughters-in-law (converts from the false religion) offered up Baked Alaska on a platter, like the head of John the Baptist, while the old people sat enthroned at the table, and only their digestive processes acknowledged, with rumbling, enigmatic salvoes, the festal day.