Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (12 page)

How matter-of-factly we accepted the long, hot, dry summers, the soul-killing winters, the droughts, the tornadoes, the blizzards. The worst weather in any part of the country is equaled in Somerset. We accept it as normal.

I am not certain why the apple trees are so important. In the early spring, tempted by a hot sun into folly, they bloom prematurely year after year, and are like torches of white light. There is always a late frost that turns them black, and then they are just trees, growing more and more crooked, producing scant fruit, lovely to climb, however.

In Mr. Larson’s store, where I buy my groceries when I am home, I learn from Agnes McCombs that a station wagon and two cars have arrived early this morning with students and a doctor from Harvard. Agnes leaves and I say goodbye absently. I am thinking of yet another rite of passage that took place here, in old Mr. Larson’s store when I was thirteen. He always handed out chunks of “homemade baloney” to the children while their mothers shopped, but that day, with the tidbit extended, he regarded me with twinkling eyes and withdrew the meat impaled on a two-pronged fork. “Mebbe you’d like a Coke, Miss Janet?”

He is so old, eighty, ninety. I used to think he was a hundred then, and he changes little. His hands are like the apple trees. I ask him, “Why are they here? What are they doing?”

“Didn’t say. Good to see you home again, Janet. The old house need any repairs?”

“Everything’s fine. Why’d Miss Dorothea let them in?”

“Money. Been six, seven years since anyone’s put up at the Sagamore. Taxes don’t go down much, you know.”

I can’t explain the fury that is threatening to explode within me, erupting to the surface as tears, or a fishwife’s scolding. Mr. Larson nods. “We figured that mebbe you could sidle up to ’em. Find out what they’re up to.” He rummages under the counter and brings out a letter. “From your dad,” he says, peering at the return address. “He still thriving?”

“About the same. I visited him last month. I guess he thought of things he forgot to tell me and put them in a letter.”

Mr. Larson shakes his head sadly. “A fine man, your dad.” After a moment, he adds, “Could be for the best, I reckon.”

I know what he means, that without Mother, with the town like it is, with his only child a woman nearing thirty… But he doesn’t know what Father is like or he couldn’t say that. I finish my shopping and greet Poor Haddie, who is back with the truck. He’s been making his delivery to the Sagamore House. He will bring my things later. Leaving, I try to say to myself Haddie without the Poor and the word sounds naked, the name of a stranger, not of the lumbering delivery “boy” I have known all my life.

I have other visits to make. Dr. Warren’s shingle needs a bit of paint, I note as I enter his house. He doesn’t really practice now, although people talk to him about their sore throats and their aches and pains, and now and again he suggests that this or that might help. If they get really ill, they go to Hawley, twenty-eight miles away, over the mountain. Dr. Warren never fails to warn me that the world isn’t ready for a lady doctor, and I still try to tell him that I am probably one of the highest-paid anesthesiologists in the world, but he forgets in the intervening year. I always end up listening to advice about sticking with nursing where a woman is really accepted. Dr. Warren delivered me back there at the house in the upstairs bedroom, with my father assisting gravely, although later he broke down and cried like a baby himself, or so Dr. Warren said. I suspect he did.

Dr. Warren and his wife Norma make a fuss over me and tears are standing in my eyes as they serve me coffee with cream so thick it has to be scooped up in a spoon. They too seem to think I will find out what the flatland foreigners want with our town.

Sagamore House. I try to see it again with the eyes of my childhood: romantic, forbidding, magnificent, with heavy drapes and massive, ornately carved furniture. I have a snapshot memory of crawling among the clawed feet, staring eye to eye at the lions and gargoyles and sticking out my tongue at them. The hotel has shrunk, the magic paled and the castle become merely a three-storied wooden building, with cupolas and many chimneys and gables, gray, like everything else in the town. Only the apple trees on the wide velvety lawn are still magic. I enter by the back door and surprise Miss Dorothea and Miss Annie, who are bustling about with an air of frantic haste.

There are cries and real tears and many pats and kisses, and the inevitable coffee, and then I am seated at the long work table with a colander of unshelled peas in my lap, and a pan for them.

“…and they said it wasn’t possible to send the bus any more. Not twenty-eight miles each way twice a day. And you can’t argue with that since no one’s done a thing about the road in four years and it’s getting so dangerous that…”

A cul-de-sac, I am thinking, listening first to Dorothea and then to Annie, and sometimes both together. Somerset used to be the link between Hawley and Jefferson, but a dam was built on the river and the bridge was inundated, and now Somerset lies dying in a cul-de-sac. I say the word again and again to myself, liking it very much, thinking what a wonderful word it is, so mysterious, so full of meanings, layers and layers of meanings….

I know they want to hear about my father, but won’t ask, so I tell them that I saw him last month and that he is about the same. And the subject changes briskly, back to the departure of the last four families with school-age children.

The door from the lobby is pushed open and the Harvard doctor steps inside the kitchen. I don’t like him. I can’t decide if it is actually hatred, or simple dislike, but I wish he were not here, that he had stayed at Harvard. He is fortyish, pink and paunchy, with soft pink hands, and thin brown hair. I suspect that he whines when he doesn’t get his way.

“Miss Dorothea, I wonder if you can tell me where the boys can rent a boat, and buy fishing things?” It registers on him that he doesn’t know me and he stares pointedly.

I say, “I’m Janet Matthews.”

“Oh, do you live here, too?”

Manners of a pig, I think, and I nod. “At the end of First Street. The big white house that’s afloat in a sea of weeds.’’

He has trouble fitting me into his list of characters. He introduces himself after a long pause while he puckers his forehead and purses his lips. I am proud of Dorothea and Annie leaving him alone to flounder. I know it is an effort for them. He says, “I am Doctor Staunton.”

“Medical doctor.”

“No.” He starts to turn back toward the door and I stop him again. “What is your doctorate, Dr. Staunton?”

I can almost hear the gasp from Dorothea, although no sound issues.

“Psychology,” he says, and clearly he is in a bad temper now. He doesn’t wait for any more questions, or the answer to his question to Dorothea.

I go back to shelling the peas and Annie rolls out her piecrust and Dorothea turns her attention back to the Newburg sauce that she hasn’t stopped stirring once. A giggle comes from Annie, and we all ignore it. Presently the peas are finished and I leave to continue my walk through the town, gradually making my way home, stopping to visit several other people on the way. Decay and death are spreading in Somerset, like a disease that starts very slowly, in a hidden place, and emerges only when it is assured of absolute success in the destruction of the host.

The afternoon is very hot and still, and I try to sleep, but give it up after fifteen minutes. I think of the canoe that we used to keep in the garage, and I think of the lake that is a mile away, and presently I am wrestling with the car carriers, and then getting the canoe hoisted up, scratching the finish on the car.

I float down the river in silence, surprising a beaver and three or four frolicking otters; I see a covey of quail rise with an absurd noise like a herd of horses. A fish jumps, almost landing in the canoe. I have sneaked out alone, determined this time to take the rapids, with no audience, no one to applaud my success, or to stand in fearful silence and watch me fail. The current becomes swifter and I can hear the muted roar, still far ahead, but it seems that any chances to change my mind are flashing by too fast to be seized now, and I know that I am afraid, terribly afraid of the white water and sharp pitches and deceptive pools that suck and suck in a never-ending circle of death. I want to shoot the rapids, and I am so afraid. The roar grows and it is all there is and now the current is an express belt, carrying me along on its surface with no side eddies or curves. It goes straight to the rocks. I can’t turn the canoe. At the last minute I jump out and swim desperately away from the band of swift water, and I am crying and blinded by my tears and I find my way to shore by the feel of the current. I scrape my knees on a rock and stand up and walk from the river to fall face-down in the weeds that line the banks. The canoe is lost, and I won’t tell anyone what has happened. The following summer he buys another canoe, but I never try the rapids again.

And now there are no more rapids. Only a placid lake with muddy shores and thick water at this end, dark with algae and water hyacinths. I am so hot after getting the canoe on the car, and the air is so heavy that it feels ominous. A storm will come up, I decide. It excites me and I know that I want to be at home when the wind blows. I want to watch the ash tree in the wind, and following the thought, I realize that I want to see the ash tree blown down. This shocks me. It is so childish. Have I ever admitted to anyone, to myself even, why I come back each summer? I can’t help myself. I am fascinated by death, I suppose. Daily at the hospital I administer death in small doses, controlled death, temporary death. I am compelled to come home because here too is death. It is like being drawn to the bedside of a loved one that you know is dying, and being at once awed and frightened, and curious about what death is like ultimately. We try so hard to hide the curiosity from the others, the strangers. And that is why I hate the Harvard doctor so much: he is intruding in a family matter. This is our death, not his, to watch and to weep over and mourn. I know that somehow he has learned of this death and it is that which has drawn him, just as it draws me, and I refuse him the right to partake of our sorrow, to test our grief, to measure our loss.

The storm hangs over the horizon out of sight. The change in air pressure depresses me, and the sullen heat, and the unkempt yard, and the empty house that nevertheless rustles with unseen life. Finally I take the letter from Father from my pocket and open it. I don’t weep over his letters any longer, but the memory of the paroxysms of the past fills me with the aftertaste of tears as I stare at the childish scrawl: large, ungraceful letters, carefully traced and shaky, formed with too much pressure so that the paper is pierced here and there, the back of the sheet like Braille.

It is brief and inane, as I have known it would be; a cry for release from Them, a prayer to an unhearing child who has become a god, or at least a parent, for forgiveness. Statistics: every year fifty thousand are killed, and she was one of them, and 1.9 million are disabled, and he was one of them. Do all the disabled bear this load of guilt that consumes him daily? He is Prometheus, his bed the rock, his guilt the devouring eagles. The gods wear white coats, and carry magic wands with which they renew him nightly so that he may die by day.

Why doesn’t the storm come?

I wait for the storm and don’t go down to the lake after all. Another day, I tell myself, and leave the canoe on the car top. I mix a gin and tonic and wander with it to the back yard where nothing moves now. I stare up at the ash tree; it has grown so high and straight in the twenty years since we planted it. I remember the lightning that shredded the cherry tree that once stood there, the splinters of white wood that I picked up all over the yard afterward. The following week Father brought home the tiny ash stick and very solemnly we planted it in the same spot. I cried because it wasn’t another cherry tree. I smile, recalling my tears and the tantrum, and the near ritual of the tree planting. At eight I was too old for the tears and the tantrum, but neither Father nor Mother objected. I sit in the yard, letting the past glide in and out of my mind without trying to stop the flow.

At six I dress for dinner with Dr. Warren and Norma. This is our new ritual. My first evening home I dine with the doctor and his wife. They are very lonely, I suspect, although neither says so. I walk through the quiet town as it dozes in the evening, the few occupied houses tightly shaded and closed against the heat. Norma had air-conditioning installed years ago and her house chills me when I first enter. She ushers me to the far side, to a glassed porch that is walled with vines and coleus plants with yellow, red, white leaves, and a funny little fountain that has blue-tinted water splashing over large enameled clam shells. I hesitate at the doorway to the porch. Dr. Staunton is there, holding a glass of Norma’s special summer drink which contains lime juice, rum, honey, soda water, and God knows what else. He is speaking very earnestly to Dr. Warren, and both rise when they see me.

“Miss Matthews, how nice to see you again.” Dr. Staunton bows slightly, and Dr. Warren pulls a wicker chair closer to his own for me. He hands me a glass.

“Edgar has been telling me about the research he’s doing up here with the boys,” Dr. Warren says.

Edgar? I nod, and sip the drink.

“I really was asking Blair for his assistance,” Edgar Staunton says, smiling, but not on the inside. I wonder if he ever smiles on the inside.

Blair. I glance at Dr. Warren, who will forever be Dr. Warren to me, and wonder at the easy familiarity. Has he been so lonesome that he succumbed to the first outsider who came in and treated him like a doctor and asked for help?

“What is your research, Dr. Staunton?” I ask.

He doesn’t tell me to use his first name. He says, “I brought some of my graduate students who are interested in the study of dreams, and we are using your town as a more or less controlled environment. I was wondering if some of the local people might like to participate, also.”

Vampire, I thought. Sleeping by day, manning the electroencephalograph by night, guarding the electrodes, reading the pen tracings, sucking out the inner life of the volunteers, feeding on the wishes and fears…