Charms for the Easy Life (15 page)

I said, “You can watch your mouth with me, or I’m going to take those plaster casts and shut them up in this drawer to which you so ill-temperedly referred.”

If my grandmother had said this, it would have worked. I did not faze him. He said, “I told you to open the goddamn drawer and read the letters.”

If he had had a knife to my throat he could not have sounded more threatening. I opened the drawer, and there lay a bundle of what seemed to be thirty or forty letters tied with a rawhide string.

I asked him if he intended for me to read all of them. He said he did. They looked to have been read many times. Their familiarity was no doubt soothing to him, but still I didn’t think I should spend all this time with one patient. I told him I had another young man to work with, and that I would read the new, unopened letter on his nightstand. That was it.

Still curled in his ball, he said, “Then Goddammit, read it.”

I opened the letter and read without thinking, without stopping. It was written in that loopy, childish hand that turns back on itself, a ridiculous style that indicated a frivolous girl who thought herself clever. The horror of my mistake was not revealed to me until I finished reading:

He began to whimper. Then he started to sob and moan into his pillow. I sat by him because I thought it was the right thing to do. Watching him suffer was a sort of penance. I watched my tears fall and spread on my handbag, and I wondered when a nurse was going to come and throw me out. But nobody came. I guess the nurses were so used to seeing the patients’ emotional states rotating from hope to despair and back again that another one’s sobbing was no cause for alarm. I thought I should stay and clean up the mess I had made, as if I could piece a ruined life back together, as if I could touch him and coax him into saying that he would be fine and she wasn’t the girl for him anyway. Had this been a movie, not only would he have done this, but he would’ve fallen in love with me and then a month later we would’ve laughed about the circumstances of our union. His hands and eyes would’ve been restored. He would’ve turned out to be wealthy beyond my dreams. We would’ve played rummy in the hospital sunroom until he was released and we could be married in grand style. But this wasn’t a movie. This was a sour-smelling room of defeated young men sleeping on sheets circled with blood and urine that they wished their mother or sister or wife would come and change. Their idea of continuity and rhythm in life had become smoking cigarettes and waiting for mail. They had seen more in the past months than I could bear to imagine. I would never see anybody roasted to the deck of a burning ship thousands of miles from home.

What the patient said to me next wasn’t true to any image from any movie. He said, “Go away. Go to hell.”

I jumped up and ran for the ladies’ room. I put the letter in my pocket, thinking another volunteer could come behind me and torture him all over again. From somewhere I heard a phonograph. Helen O’Connell was singing “Six Lessons from Madame LaZonga.” I have loathed the song and the singer ever since.

I hid in the ladies’ room for probably half an hour, rereading the letter, floored by this silly girl’s cruelty, and mine. After a while, the dime-store paper, the envelope, the little blue-inked dollops of writing became despicable things in and of themselves, and for all my reading, I knew only now for the first time the power of a word. I was the accessory to a common crime of the day, but the fact that thousands of young men were receiving letters like this did not excuse me. It has been a matter of considerable regret that I was turned loose with the intimacies of another person’s life when everything I knew about love I had learned from watching my mother and Mr. Baines and from reading Edith Wharton, whose characters rarely managed to get it right. Part of me wanted to turn myself in at the nurses’ station and say to them, “I am young and ignorant and foolish. Therefore, I am going home.”

It took everything I had for me to come out of the ladies’ room and meet the other patient. I remember wondering whether I could redeem myself with him. I peeked into the ward and saw the first young man still curled on his side. Had I had more experience or common sense or wisdom I would have braved apologizing to him, but, I am ashamed to say, I did not. He was transferred to the neuro ward soon after this. How many times have I told myself that it was not my fault, that he was full of problems already? On a later visit I passed him in the hall, shuffling along in old-man slippers, his robe stained, his hair matted, a glassy-eyed lost boy leaning on the arm of a fat nurse. I let him have a good look at me, my spontaneous and thoroughly feeble attempt to give him permission for revenge, but he stared straight through me. I seemed to have been forgotten. Everything seemed to have been forgotten.

The next young man appeared pleasant, exceptionally pleasant for someone missing both arms up to the elbows. His eyes were not bandaged, but he told me he felt he was looking at me through thick gauze. I didn’t ask him any personal questions, but he volunteered that he was the baby of the family and that his mother had gladly sent her three sons to the Navy in spite of the deaths of the Sullivan boys, five brothers in one family who had been killed in the Pacific. He was from Lumberton, a nearby town, and his mother came and read to him every other Sunday. As she read, she fed him little broken pieces of peanut brittle. A round red tin with a Currier and Ives scene on the lid and a library copy of Daniel Boone: The Pioneer Scout were on his nightstand. I imagined that outside of the outright death of a child, a mother could experience no sight more pitiful than the baby of her family missing an arm or a leg, missing anything, really.

He was anxious to dictate a letter to his mother. He lay back with his chin up, his bandaged elbows up by his ears. He closed his eyes to help concentrate his mind. He was such a nervous, twitchy person, scratching one half an arm and then the other into his side. He would dig hard, gouging, actually. It was disturbing, and I wondered why this was not hurting him. The sight went completely through me. Once he settled down, he began dictating the letter. He seemed to speak directly to his mother:

After the letter to his mother, he said he wanted to write his sister in Georgia to tell her about the moth product. He was very intent on spreading the word around to his family. He spoke as if, from his hospital bed, he was protecting them from some menace. He even said to me, “Say! Do you use Larvex?”

I told him that I did, and that it worked wonderfully, just as he described. That seemed to please him. Telling him what he wanted to hear, I suppose, was kind of a ragtag redemption. After we wrote his sister, I asked him what he wanted to do. He said, “What I really want to do is read that book.”

I told him I would read a chapter. He showed an eager boy’s gratitude, and he burrowed himself down in his covers to listen. He stopped his wretched scratching. I remember the first line of the chapter: “Daniel Boone’s mind was as sharp as his hatchet.” The young man’s eyes were closed, and his face showed the contentment of one who had retreated far to the rear, far back with a mother whose bountiful heart allowed her to sit for three hours on Sundays reading a boys’ book to her boy. I bet she was the kind of mother who would’ve dropped everything, yanked off her apron and thrown it in the corner to rush to the hardware store for Larvex, and harassed the clerk when he couldn’t locate it on the shelf. I bet she sat up at night and read and reread letters from her baby, which is how she would’ve thought of him, crying both in pain for his loss and with relief that the war, for him, was over. He had such a sweet face, the delicate features of a young girl, the longest eyelashes in the world.

On the way home from the hospital I told my grandmother about the two patients. She said something incredible. She suggested that I write the first one’s girlfriend even though I had been told not to do so, and then correct several impressions the second boy had made.

I asked her what sorts of impressions.

She said, “Those regarding his reason.” Then she said, “You have to ask yourself if these young men would be better served by your writing the truth as you know it or the truth as they think they see it or wish it to be. If you had a son in the hospital and got an obsessive letter about moths, would it be good for you or bad?”

I said that it would be bad, that I would worry.

She said, “And he’s going to mend nicely. All the sparrows will leave his head. All his reason will return. Why not give his mother a break from worry? Do you see the point?”

I saw the point. I trusted my grandmother. Everything she had ever said had been true, and I had long since learned to do whatever she told me to do. Trusting her to guide me in this circumstance was like falling backward like her chloroformed women, knowing that not only would I be caught, but I would be caught before I realized I was falling.

We arrived back home that afternoon on the heels of my mother, who had just returned from having thrown half of the Raleigh Junior League out of the Red Cross workroom for what she termed their “ignorance and insubordination, both individually and as a group.” My mother’s job was assigning daily tasks, and that day she had instructed the workers to pull threads in sheets, cut long strips, or roll already cut strips into bandages. The regional office gave her weekly quotas to fulfill, and she had already earned several certificates of merit for surpassing the quotas. But this time the workers fell into such an uproar over their assignments that she finished the day with only about twenty percent of the requirement met. It was my understanding that some of the women could become territorial over these tasks, and that the Junior Leaguers and society idlers felt they were too often assigned to pull threads. There was (phenomenal to report) some prestige in using the scissors and rolling the bandages. The women brought their complaints to my mother, implying that they needed to be treated with a certain deference. My mother told us, “We all argued into a fight. Even the woman who accused another woman of snatching her scissors teamed up against me.”

My grandmother asked what happened next. She loved sporting stories, particularly boxing stories by Ring Lardner, and this tale had all that kind of potential. She said, “Did they call each other names?”