Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (8 page)

“Whenever you like,” Clerfayt replied.

It was Sunday, and Lillian always found Sundays in the sanatorium harder to get through than weekdays. The Sundays had a false peacefulness, and lacked the routine of weekdays. The doctors paid no calls, unless it was essential, so there was one reminder the less that you were ill. On the other hand, for this reason the patients were all the more restless, and at night the Crocodile often had to collect bed-patients from rooms where they did not belong.

Lillian came down to dinner in defiance of orders; the Crocodile did not usually check up on Sundays. She had had two glasses of vodka to defend herself against the dreariness of dusk; but it did not do any good. Then she had put on her best dress—clothes sometimes gave one more of a lift than any philosophic comforting. But this time, even that had been useless. There was no throwing off the blues, the sudden attack of melancholia, the contending with God that everyone up here was prey to, and that came and went without visible cause. It had come fluttering upon her like a dark moth.

Not until she stepped into the dining room did she realize where it came from. The room was almost full, and at a table in the
center, surrounded by half a dozen of her friends, sat Eva Moser, a cake, a bottle of champagne, and a pile of gaily wrapped gifts in front of her. This was her last evening. She was due to leave tomorrow afternoon.

At first, Lillian wanted to turn back. Then she saw Hollmann, sitting alone next to the table of the three black-clad South Americans who were waiting for Manuela’s death. Hollmann beckoned to her.

“I drove Giuseppe,” he said. “Did you see?”

“Yes. Did anyone else see you?”

“Who?”

“The Crocodile? Or the Dalai Lama?”

“Nobody. And what if they did! I feel great. I was beginning to think I couldn’t drive the damned buggy any more.”

“Everyone seems to be feeling great this evening,” Lillian replied bitterly. “What do you think of that?”

She gestured toward Eva Moser. The girl sat with plump and overheated face, the center of attention for all her sympathetic and gloomily envious friends, who exaggerated their good will because it could not entirely dispel their envy. Eva Moser was like someone who has drawn the grand prize at a lottery and cannot understand why everyone else is so interested in her.

“Have you taken your temperature?” Lillian asked Hollmann.

He laughed. “That can wait till tomorrow. I don’t want to think about it today.”

“Don’t you think you have fever?”

“I don’t care. And I don’t think so.”

Why am I asking him? Lillian thought. Am I envious of him? “Isn’t Clerfayt eating with you tonight?” she asked.

“No. He had an unexpected visitor this afternoon. And why should he be coming up here all the time, anyhow? It must get dull for him.”

“Then why doesn’t he leave?” Lillian asked with hostility.

“He is leaving, but not for a few days. Wednesday or Thursday.”

“This week?”

“Yes. I suppose he’ll be driving down with his visitor.”

Lillian did not answer. She did not know for certain whether Hollmann was supplying this information intentionally, and since she did not know, she assumed that it was intentional and therefore did not ask anything further. “Have you anything to drink with you?” she said.

“Not a drop. I gave the rest of my gin to Charles Ney this afternoon.”

“Didn’t you buy a bottle of vodka this morning?”

“I gave that to Dolores Palmer.”

“Why? Have you decided to become a model patient?”

“Something like that,” Hollmann replied with a touch of embarrassment.

“This morning you were anything but.”

“This morning is a long time ago.”

Lillian pushed back her plate. “Who will I go out with at night from now on?”

“There are plenty of others. And Clerfayt is still around for the time being.”

“All right. But what about afterward?”

“Isn’t Boris coming tonight?” Hollmann asked.

“No, not tonight. And you can’t play hooky with Boris. I told him I had a headache.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” Lillian said, and stood up. “I’m even going to make the Crocodile happy tonight, so that there won’t be one unhappy soul in the place. I’m going to sleep. Good night, Hollmann.”

“Is something the matter, Lillian?”

“Just the usual thing. The panic of boredom. A sign of good
health, the Dalai Lama would say. I hear that when you’re really badly off, there’s no more panic. You’re too weak for it. How kind God is, wouldn’t you say?”

The night nurse had completed her evening round. Lillian lay on her bed, trying to read. After a while, she dropped the book. Once again the long night stretched before her, the waiting for sleep—sleep and then the sudden starting out of sleep and that weightless moment when you recognized nothing, neither the room nor yourself, when you hung in soughing darkness and nothing but fear, nebulous fear of death, for unending seconds—until the window slowly became familiar again and its frame was no longer a shadowy cross in an unknown cosmos, but once more a window, and the room a room, and the coil of primordial terror and soundless screaming became yourself once more, a being called Lillian Dunkerque for its brief time on earth.

There was a knock at the door. Charles Ney stood outside in a red bathrobe and slippers. “The coast is clear,” he whispered as he came in. “Come on over to Dolores’ good-by party for Eva Moser.”

“What for? Why doesn’t she just go? Why does she have to have a good-by party?”

“We want one, not she.”

“You’ve already had one in the dining room.”

“That was only to fool the Crocodile. Come on, don’t be a wet blanket.”

“I don’t feel like going to a party.”

Charles Ney smiled a perfectly lovely smile. “Come, columbine of moonlight, silver, and smoky fire! If you stay here, you’ll be mad at yourself for being alone, and when you’re there, you’ll be mad at yourself for having come. It’s all the same—so come!” He listened toward the corridor, and opened the door. The clicking of crutches
could be heard. A gaunt, elderly woman hobbled by. “Everybody’s coming. Here’s Streptomycin Lilly already. And here comes Schirmer with André.”

A graybeard in a wheelchair was rolled past them by a young man who pranced along behind the chair, doing a Charleston step. “You see, even the dead rise to offer Miss Moser an
Ave Eva, morituri te salutant
,” Charles Ney said. “Forget your Russian blood for one evening and remember your life-loving Walloon father. Get dressed and come.”

“I won’t dress. I’ll come in pajamas.”

“Come in pajamas, but come!”

Dolores Palmer lived a floor below Lillian’s. She had been there for three years, occupying a suite that consisted of bedroom, living room, and bath. It was the most expensive unit in the sanatorium, and Dolores took care to claim every privilege to which this entitled her.

“We have two whole bottles of vodka for you in the bathroom,” she said to Lillian. “I hope that’s enough. Where do you want to sit? Next to our debutante, who’s sailing forth into the real world, or among the feverish stay-behinds? Pick your place.”

Lillian looked around. It was a scene familiar to her: the lamps were draped with cloths; the graybeard was in charge of the record player; Streptomycin Lilly sat in a corner, on the floor, because the drug had affected her sense of balance and she tended to topple. The others sat around with the half-hearted, artificial Bohemian air of overage children secretly staying up too late. Dolores Palmer was wearing a Chinese gown, long and straight, with slit skirt. She had a tragic beauty of which she had not the slightest awareness. Her lovers were deceived by it, as travelers in the desert are deceived by a mirage. While they wore themselves out trying to be
interesting to her, Dolores really wanted something far simpler: a petty-bourgeois existence, but with a maximum of luxury. Grand emotions bored her, but she inspired them and was constantly having to contend with them.

Eva Moser sat by the window, looking out. Her mood had shifted violently. “She’s bawling,” Maria Savini said to Lillian. “Would you believe it?”

“Whatever for?”

“Ask her yourself. The craziest thing. She says this place is her home.”

“It
is
my home,” Eva Moser sobbed. “I’ve been happy here. I have friends here. Down there I won’t know anybody.”

There was a general silence for a moment. “You can stay on if you want to, Eva,” Charles Ney said finally. “There’s no one stopping you.”

“Yes there is! My father! It costs a lot of money for me to stay here. He wants me to get a job. What sort of job? I can’t do anything! Whatever I used to know, I’ve forgotten here.”

“We all forget everything here,” Streptomycin Lilly offered mildly from her corner. “Anyone who stays here for a few years is no longer good for anything down below.”

Lilly was the Dalai Lama’s guinea pig for new cures. At this time, he was trying streptomycin on her. She could not tolerate the drug very well; but even if the Dalai Lama were to discharge her, she would not have Eva Moser’s problem. She was the only patient in the sanatorium who had been born in the village, and could easily find a job anywhere. She was an excellent cook.

“What kind of job can I get?” Eva Moser was whipping herself up into a frenzy. “Stenographer? Who would take me? I’m a rotten typist. Besides, people are leery of stenographers who come from a sanatorium.”

“Be secretary to a man with t.b.,” the graybeard croaked.

Lillian looked at Eva as if she were a prehistoric animal which had crawled out of a crack in the floor. There had been other discharged patients who had said that they would like to stay—but they had only done so out of consideration for the others, to play down the curious feeling of desertion that often accompanied discharge. But Eva Moser was a different case; she meant what she was saying. She was genuinely in despair. She had become used to the sanatorium, and was afraid of life down below.

Dolores Palmer brought Lillian a glass of vodka. “That woman!” she said, throwing a look of disgust at Eva Moser. “No self-control! How she’s carrying on! It’s absolutely obscene, isn’t it?”

“I’m going,” Lillian declared. “I can’t stand it.”

“Don’t go,” Charles Ney said, leaning toward her. “Beautiful, flickering light in the uncertain darkness, stay a while. The night is full of shadows and platitudes, and we need you and Dolores as figureheads to bear before our tattered sails, lest we be trampled mercilessly under Eva Moser’s dreadful brogans. Sing something, Lillian!”

“What shall I sing! A lullaby for children who will never be born?”

“Eva will have children. Heaps of them. You can be sure of that. No, sing the song of the clouds that do not return and of the snow that buries the heart. The song of the exiles of the mountains. Sing it for us. Not for that strapping wench Eva. We need the dark wine of self-glorification tonight. It’s better to wallow in sentimentality than to weep.”

“Charles got hold of half a bottle of cognac somewhere,” Dolores commented matter-of-factly. She strolled long-leggedly over to the phonograph. “Play the new American records, Schirmer.”

“That monster,” Charles Ney sighed to her retreating back. “She
looks like the most poetical being on earth and has a brain like an almanac. I love her as one loves the jungle, and she answers like a vegetable garden. What’s to be done about it?”

“Suffer and be happy.”

Lillian stood up. As she did so, the door opened, framing the Crocodile. “Just as I thought! Cigarettes! Alcohol in the room! An orgy! And you here, too, Miss Ruesch!” she snapped at Streptomycin Lilly. “Creeping in here on crutches! And Mr. Schirmer, you, too! You ought to be in bed.”

“I ought to have been dead long ago,” the graybeard replied cheerfully. “Theoretically, I am.” He switched off the phonograph, pulled the nylon underclothes out of the loudspeaker and waved them in the air. “I’m living on borrowed time. When you do that, you live by special rules.”

“Is that so? And what are these rules, if I may ask?”

“To get as much as possible out of what life you have left. How you do that is up to you.”

“I must request you to go to bed at once. Who brought you here, may I ask?”

“My good sense.”

The graybeard got back into his wheelchair. André was chary of taking over the pushing of it. Lillian stepped forward. “Come on, Schirmer. I’ll wheel you back.” She pushed the chair to the door.

“So it was you who brought him!” the Crocodile said. “I might have guessed it.”

Lillian pushed the chair out into the corridor. Charles Ney and the others followed, giggling like children caught in mischief. “One moment,” Schirmer said, swiveling his chair so that he was facing the door. The Crocodile stood squarely in the doorway. “Three sick people could lead happy existences on the amount of life you’ve missed,” Schirmer pronounced. “I wish you a blissful night with your wrought-iron conscience.”

He swiveled the chair again. Charles Ney took over the pushing. He laughed. “What’s the point, Schirmer? She’s only doing her job.”

“I know. Only she does it with such a damned superior air. But I’ll outlive her! I’ve already outlived her predecessor; she was only forty-four and died in four weeks of cancer. I’ll outlive this bitch—how old is she, anyway? Must be over sixty. Or almost seventy.”

“What wonderful people we are.” Charles grinned.

“No,” the graybeard replied with fierce satisfaction. “We’re just people condemned to death. But we’re not the only ones. So are the others. Only we know it. They don’t.”

Half an hour later, Eva Moser came to Lillian’s room. “Have they brought my bed in here?” she asked.

“No.”

“Where can it be? My room has been emptied out. All my clothes are gone, too. I have to sleep somewhere. Where can my things be?”

It was one of the usual jokes, when someone was discharged from the sanatorium, to hide his things on the last night. Eva Moser was in a state. “I had everything dry-cleaned. Suppose they get my clothes all messed up. I’ll have to be careful about money, now that I’m going down.”

“Doesn’t your father look after you?”