Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (16 page)

“This afternoon? Can you come here, or should we bring the stuff to your place?”

“You got him up last night?”

Sid nods. “I felt I should.”

I watch Myra and Al Newton leave their table, stop at Dorothea’s counter to pay the bill and leave, and I am struck by their frailty. They both seem wraithlike. Is anyone in Somerset under sixty? I suppose the Newtons must be closer to seventy-five. I ask, “Where are the other boys this morning?” The dining room is empty except for the three of us.

“A couple of them are out fishing already, and the rest are probably still sleeping. I’m taking Victor and Mickey to Hawley to catch the bus back to Boston later today,” Roger says, and then adds, “Probably Doug will be the next to go.”

“Doug? I thought he was one of the more interested ones in this whole thing?”

“Too interested, maybe,” Roger says.

Sid is watching both of us and now he leans forward, resting his chin on his hands, looking beyond me out the window at the quiet street. “Janet, do you remember any of your dreams from last night?”

I think of what I said over the telephone. Scraps here and there. Something about putting flowers on graves in one of them. I shake my head: nothing that I can really remember.

“Okay. You’ll hear them later. Meanwhile, take my word for it that some of the guys have to leave, whether they want to or not.” He looks at me for another moment and then asks, in a different voice altogether, “Are you all right, Janet? Will you be okay until this afternoon? We do have to process the tapes and record the data, and I want to sort through all of them and pull out those that seem pertinent.”

It is the voice of a man concerned for a woman, not of a graduate student concerned for his project, and this annoys me.

“Of course I’m all right,” I say, and stand up. “For heaven’s sake, those are dreams, the dreams of someone who had too much to drink, at that.” I know I am flushed and I turn to leave. Have I embarrassed them with erotic dreams, concerning one of them perhaps? I am very angry when I leave Sagamore House, and I wish I could go up to the sleep room and destroy the tapes, all of them. I wish Dorothea had shown just an ounce of sense when they approached her for the rooms. She had no business allowing them to come into our town, upset our people with their damned research. I am furious with Sid for showing concern for me. He has no right. In the middle of these thoughts, I see my father and me, walking hand in hand in the afternoon, heading for the drugstore and an ice-cream cone. He is very tall and blond, with broad shoulders and a massive chest. He keeps his hair so short that he seems bald from a distance. He is an ophthalmologist with his office in Jefferson, and after they dam the river he has to drive sixty-three miles each way. Mother worries about his being out so much, but they don’t move, don’t even consider moving. On Sunday afternoon he always takes me to the drugstore for an ice-cream cone. I blink hard and the image fades, leaving the street bare and empty.

I am too restless to remain in my house. It is a hot still day and the heat is curling the petals of the roses, and drying out the grass, and wilting the phlox leaves. It is a relentless sun, burning, broiling, sucking the water up from the creek, leaving it smaller each day. Without the dam the creek probably would dry up completely within another week or two. I decide to cut a basket of flowers and take them to the cemetery, and I know the idea comes from the fragmentary dream that I recalled earlier. I haven’t been to the cemetery since my mother’s funeral. It has always seemed such a meaningless gesture, to return to a grave and mourn there. It is no less meaningless now, but it is something to do.

The cemetery is behind the small white church that has not been used for six years, since Brother MacCombs died. No one tried to replace him; they seemed tacitly to agree that the church should be closed and the membership transferred to Hawley.

It is a walk of nearly two miles, past the Greening farm where the weeds have become master again, past the dirt road to the old mill, a tumbling ruin even in my childhood where snakes curled in the shadows and slept, past the turnoff to Eldridge’s fishing camp. I see no one and the sounds of the hot summer day are loud about me: whirring grasshoppers, birds, the scuttling of a squirrel who chatters at me once he is safely hidden.

The cemetery is tended in spots only, the graves of those whose relatives are still in Somerset have cut grass and a sprinkling of flowers. My mother’s grave is completely grown over and shame fills me. What would Father say? I don’t try to weed it then, but sit down under a wide oak tree.

I took at the narrow road that leads back to Somerset. Father and I will come here often, after I have made the grave neat and pretty again. It will be slow, but we’ll take our time, walking hand in hand up the dirt road, carrying flowers, and maybe a sandwich and a thermos of lemonade, or apples. Probably if I start the proceedings during the coming week, I can have everything arranged by next weekend, hire an ambulance and a driver…

I am awakened by rough hands shaking my shoulders. I blink rapidly, trying to focus my eyes, trying to find myself. I am being led away, and I squirm to turn around because I feel so certain that I am still back there somehow. I almost catch a glimpse of a girl in a yellow dress, sitting with her back to the oak tree, but it shimmers and I am yanked hard, and stumble, and hands catch me and steady me.

“What are you kids doing?” I ask, and the sound of the voice, deep, unfamiliar, shocks me and only then do I really wake up. I am being taken to the station wagon that is parked at the entrance to the lane.

“I’m all right,” I say, not struggling now. “You woke me up.”

Sid is on my right and Roger on my left. I see that Dr. Staunton is in the wagon. He looks pale and worried.

I remember the basket of flowers that I never did put on the grave and I look back once more to see it standing by the tree. Sid’s hand tightens on my arm, but I don’t try to pull away. Inside the wagon I say,“Will one of you tell me what that was all about?”

“Janet, do you know how long you’ve been there at the cemetery?”

“Half an hour, an hour.”

“It’s almost six now. I… we got to your house at three and waited awhile for you, and then went back to the hotel. An old man with a white goatee said he saw you before noon heading this way with flowers. So we came after you.” Sid is sitting beside me in the back seat of the wagon, and I stare at him in disbelief. I look at my watch, and it is five minutes to six. I shake it and listen to it.

“I must have been sound asleep.”

“Sitting straight up, with your legs stretched out in front of you?”

We drive to my house and I go upstairs to wash my face and comb my hair. I study my face carefully, looking for something, anything, but it is the same. I hear voices from below; the sound diminishes and I know they are playing the tapes, so I hurry down.

I see that Sid has found my dream cards, the typed reports, and I am angry with him for prying. He says, “I had to know. I found them earlier while we were waiting for you.”

Roger has the tape ready, so I sit down and we listen for the next two hours. Staunton is making notes, scowling hard at the pad on his knee. I feel myself growing tenser, and when the first tape comes to an end, I go to make coffee. We all sip it through the playing of the second tape.

The dreaming students’ voices sound disjointed, hesitant, unguarded, and the dreams they relate are all alike. I feel cold in the hot room, and I dread hearing my own voice, my own dreams played by the machine.

All the early dreams are of attempts to leave Somerset. They speak of trying to fly out, to climb out, to swim out, to drive out, and only one is successful. As the night progresses, the dreams change, some faster than others. Slowly a pattern of acceptance enters the dreams, and quite often the acceptance is followed swiftly by a nightmare-like desire to run.

One of the dreamers, Victor, I think it is, has a brief anxiety dream, an incomplete dream, and then nothing but the wish-fulfillment acceptance dreams, not even changing again when morning has him in a lighter stage of sleep.

Sid motions for Roger to stop the tape and says, “That was three days ago. Since then Victor has been visiting people here, talking with them, fishing, hiking. He has been looking over some of the abandoned houses in town, with the idea of coming here to do a book.”

“Has he…” I am amazed at how dry my mouth has become and I have to sip cold coffee before I can ask the question. “Has he recorded dreams since then?”

“No. Before this, he was having dreams of his parents, caring for them, watching over them.” Sid looks at me and says deliberately, “Just like your dreams.”

I shake my head and turn from him to look at Roger. He starts the machine again. There are hours and hours of the tapes to hear, and after another fifteen minutes of them I am ravenous. It is almost nine. I signal Roger to stop, and suggest that we all have scrambled eggs here, but Staunton vetoes this

“I promised Miss Dorothea that we would return to the hotel. I warned her that it might be late. She said that was all right.”

So we go back to Sagamore House and wait for the special of the day. On Sunday night there is no menu. I find myself shying away from the implications of the dream analysis again and again, and try to concentrate instead on my schedule for the next several months. I know that I have agreed to work with Dr. Waldbaum on at least six operations, and probably there are others that I agreed to and have forgotten. He is a thoracic surgeon and his operations take from four to eight or even ten hours, and for that long I control death, keep life in abeyance. I pay no attention to the talk that is going on between Roger and Sid, and I wonder about getting an ambulance driver to bring Father in during the winter. If only our weather were more predictable; there might be snowdrifts six feet high on the road, or it might be balmy.

“I said, why do you think you should bring your father home, here to Somerset?” I find that my eyes are on Staunton, and obviously he thinks I have been listening to him, but the question takes me by surprise.

“He’s my father. He needs me.”

Sid asks, “Has anyone in town encouraged you in this idea?”

Somehow, although I have tried to withdraw from them, I am again the center of their attention, and I feel uncomfortable and annoyed. “Of course not. This is my decision alone. Dr. Warren tried to discourage it, in fact, as Dorothea did, and Mr. Larson.”

“Same thing,” Sid says to Roger, who nods. Staunton looks at them and turns to me.

“Miss Matthews, do you mean to say that everyone you’ve talked to about this has really tried to discourage it? These people are your father’s friends. Why would they do that?”

My face feels stiff and I am thinking that this is too much, but I say, “They all seem to think he’s better off in the nursing home.”

“And isn’t he?”

“In certain respects, yes. But I am qualified to handle him, you know. No one here seems to realize just how well qualified I really am. They think of me as the girl they used to know playing jump rope in the back yard.”

Dorothea brings icy cucumber soup and we are silent until she leaves again. The grandfather clock chimes ten, and I am amazed at how swiftly the day has gone. By now most of the townspeople are either in bed, or getting ready. Sunday is a hard day, with the trip to church, visits, activities that they don’t have often enough to become accustomed to. They will sleep well tonight, I think. I look at Sid and think that he should sleep well too tonight. His eyes are sunken-looking, and I suppose he has lost weight; he looks older, more mature than he did the first time I met him.

“Are you going to set up your equipment tonight?” I ask. “Any of the other boys volunteer?”

“No,” Roger says shortly. He looks at Sid and says, “As a matter of fact, we decided today not to put any of them in it again here.”

“You’re leaving then?”

“Sending all the kids back, but Sid and I’ll be staying for a while. And Dr. Staunton.”

I put down my spoon and lean back, waiting for something that is implicit in the way Roger stops and Sid looks murderously at him. I watch Sid now.

“We think you should leave, too,” he says.

I look to Roger, who nods, and then at Staunton. He is so petulant-looking, even pursing his lips. He fidgets and says, “Miss Matthews, may I suggest something? You won’t take it amiss?” I simply wait. He goes on, “I think you should return to the city and make an appointment with the psychiatrist at Columbia.”

“And the others you are sending out? Should they also see doctors?”

“As a matter of fact, I do think so.”

Sid is examining his bowl of soup with great care, and Roger is having trouble with his cigarette lighter. “But not them?” I ask Staunton, pointing at Roger and Sid.

“Them too,” he says reluctantly. Sid looks amused now and Roger manages to light his cigarette.

“Is this your opinion too?” I ask Sid. “That I should see Dr. Calridge?”

“No. Just go away from here, and stay away.”

Dorothea is bringing in a cart now and I wonder how much she has heard. I see her lined face and the pain in her eyes and I know that she has heard a lot of it, if not all. She catches my gaze and nods firmly. Then she serves us: sizzling ham steaks, french fried fruits, pineapple, apple rings, bananas, sweet potato soufflé.

It is after eleven when we are finished with dinner, and by now Sid is almost asleep. He says, “I’ve got to go. Will you set things up, Rog?”

“Sure. Damn shame that Doug pooped out on us. We need all the data we can get now.”

“I can do the recording,” I say.

At almost the same instant Staunton says, “I thought I was going to record both of you tonight.”

Roger and Sid look embarrassed, and Sid says after a pause, “Dr. Staunton, if it’s all the same with you, we’ll let Janet do it.”

“You really think I’m that biased? That I can’t get objective data?”

Sid stands up and steadies himself with one hand on the table. “I’m too tired to be polite,” he says, “and too tired to argue. So, yes, I think you’re too biased to record the dreams. Roger, will you show Janet what we’re doing?”