Terrible Virtue (3 page)

I
NEVER KNEW HOW
the training program found out. Perhaps one of the other students spotted me coming out of the house on Christopher Street before I took the ring off the third finger of my left hand. Perhaps a doctor or nurse overheard me throwing up morning after morning. I stood in the small closet, retching over the bedpan, sweat from the fever and the nausea running down my sides, and raged against my body for betraying me, and this alien creature for taking over my life, and myself for my weakness, though I wasn't sure whether I meant weakness for giving in to Bill or to my morning sickness.

My glands grew more inflamed, as the doctor had predicted. Bill took care of me, as he'd promised. He sent me to Dr. Trudeau's famous sanitarium in upstate New York.

They stuffed me with milk and eggs and creosote capsules that made my mouth taste like a tar pit. They forced me to sit, robe-wrapped, on open porches for endless hours, then sent me on forced marches with other lungers, as they called themselves. I refused to use the word. Fevers made us blush, and a nurse with a skull's smile carved into her face called us her apple-cheeked darlings. Rotten to the core, she added under her breath. I balled my hands to keep
from slapping her. The posture was becoming habitual. I missed Bill. I missed my old slender body. I missed freedom.

Days were long and stultifying. Nights were filled with cold sweats and terror. A week into my stay, a girl of about six or seven arrived, her eyes wide with fear, her thin arms clutching a teddy bear. The nurse with the death's-head smile wrestled the bear away from her and tossed it into the big metal drum where contaminated items were burned. A stuffed animal cannot be sterilized. The flames licked the thin wholesome atmosphere. The child stood staring, too frightened to cry.

Death hovered over the premises like a threat of bad weather. One day, the middle-aged woman in the room upstairs was there; the following, she was gone. A week later, the nice young man in the next cottage vanished. A few days after that, the little girl evaporated. No one mentioned the disappearances. The staff aired out the vacant rooms and changed the names on the row of mailboxes outside the great hall. The child might as well have gone up in smoke like her teddy bear. The woman and man might have vaporized into the health-giving air.

I had to save myself. One morning I sneaked out before dawn and made my way to the railroad depot. I hid until the train came in, then wired Bill from the first stop.

He was waiting at the Grand Central Terminal. I saw him as soon as I stepped down from the train. He towered above the crowd, his eyes raking the arriving passengers. He saw me and began to cut through the mob. I ran toward him. We embraced awkwardly around the child. His kiss tasted of life.

YEARS LATER, AFTER
I became famous, the doctor who delivered Stuart wrote to ask whether my long and arduous ordeal
had planted the seeds of my crusade. “It was a hard night for both of us,” he concluded.

A hard night for both of us. Ah, doctors. Ah, men. They're such authorities on the hardship of childbirth. I, on the other hand, had been an expert on the subject since the day—how old was I? three? four?—when a neighborhood woman told me to go out and play and under no circumstances to come near the house again until I was called.

Her warning was pure incentive. I pulled a crate over to the window, stood on it, and peered in. My mother was thrashing on the rumpled bed, her face red and raw with pain, her hair matted, her mouth opened in a scream that shook the window. I was sure that she was on her way to heaven and I would never see her again.

She didn't go to heaven that time, or the time after, or all the times after that, but she grew increasingly distant. No, that's not fair. She wasn't distant, only harassed and driven and going down for the count.

I had learned about the agony of childbirth early, but until Stuart was born, I never knew the other side of it. When the doctor put him in my arms, flushed and furious at being dragged into this unforgiving world, I understood my mother's inability to regret. And later, when Bill berated me for neglecting the children, when Stuart talked about waiting for the ferry, when Peggy began to haunt my dreams, I would take out the memory of holding Stuart that first dawn and wonder how they could misunderstand me so completely. Surely, if I hadn't loved my firstborn, I would not have got pregnant again, and once more after that. I wanted a girl.

Having Peggy was a revelation. It wasn't that I loved her more than the boys, only differently. I whispered secrets I would
never tell anyone into the translucent pink seashell of her ear. I murmured promises about her future. I knew her as I could never know my sons.

BILL SANGER

YOU HELD OUR BABIES, AND YOU UNDERSTOOD. HOW HARD IS IT TO LOVE A HELPLESS NEWBORN, PEG? AND A CAPACITY FOR LOVE WAS SOMETHING YOU ALWAYS HAD. ONE MIGHT SAY A PROMISCUOUS CAPACITY. NO, I TAKE THAT BACK. YOU WERE MY WIFE. YOU WILL ALWAYS BE MY WIFE, DESPITE THE TAWDRY MORASS OF DISAPPOINTMENT AND BITTERNESS AND HEARTBREAK. BUT MY ENDURING LOVE DOESN'T BLIND ME. YOU'RE NOT BLAMELESS. SOME THINGS CAN BE LAID AT YOUR DOOR. PEGGY CAN BE LAID AT YOUR DOOR
.

THOUGH I'D COME
to motherhood reluctantly, I doted on the children. But I didn't indulge them. Children crave rules as much as they do love. I gave them plenty of both. I wasn't the one who set fire to a house with three sleeping children in it.

WE MOVED TO
Hastings-on-Hudson. The country would be better for the children. And Bill had decided to build me a dream house. I didn't remember asking for a dream house, but what woman in her right mind would turn one down? In the meantime, we were camping out in a rented cottage. Every evening he took the 5:33 from the city, I left the children with the German nurse and met him at the station, and we walked to the new house. The theory was that the contractor would build during
the day and Bill would supervise at night. More often the contractor built during the day and Bill tore down at night.

That evening I stood in the unfinished living room watching him hack out a fireplace the contractor had just installed. During the past few months, he had gone after an arch that didn't soar in life as it did on paper, a staircase, and a wall. A dream house admits no imperfections.

I stood watching him, trying not to think of the mounting costs, just as I tried not to worry about the unpaid butcher's bill when he brought home opera tickets or a bouquet of hothouse flowers. Sometimes when I looked at him over the tickets or the flowers he held out to me, I saw my father coming up the dirt path to the house in Corning, carrying a new book on utopianism or a bottle of Irish whisky. But that was ridiculous. You couldn't compare a bottle of whisky to opera tickets. One was weakness, the other beauty. Nor could you put a dollar sign on art, Bill always said. That was why I hadn't argued about the rose window.

The rose window would be the glory of the house. It would sit at the top of the staircase and bathe our lives in radiance. He was making it himself, and I was helping. That was another reason I couldn't protest. The window would be a tangible expression of our love. Night after night, weekend after weekend, we leaded and welded the ruby petals until our fingers bled, and our eyes stung, and our tempers were as jagged as the shards of glass.

Meanwhile, the rented cottage was our way station. It was too cramped for our rambunctious family and too architecturally undistinguished for Bill's exacting taste, but we'd be moving on in no time. That was why I hadn't bothered to unpack all the boxes. And that was why that afternoon a few weeks after
we moved in, I couldn't find the thermometer. I was furious at myself. What kind of a mother of three, what kind of a nurse, doesn't unpack the thermometer as soon as she sets foot in the house?

I rummaged through another box. It was hopeless. I went back to the children's room and laid my palm on Peggy's forehead. It was hot as bread just out of the oven. And there was something worse. She'd stopped crying. She wasn't even whimpering. She lay in the crib still as a cadaver.

I picked her up—it was like cradling a fire—carried her downstairs to the hall where the telephone was mounted, and lifted the earpiece off the wall. The operator came on the line. My mind went blank. I couldn't remember the doctor's number.

“I want Dr. Sherwood,” I bleated into the phone.

Hastings was a small town. The operator said she'd connect me.

Dr. Sherwood's nurse told me he was with a patient.

“It's an emergency,” I shouted.

“You can give me the symptoms, and I'll report them to the doctor.” Her tone was intended to calm. I forced myself to describe Peggy's symptoms as coolly as I could.

She told me the doctor would call me back shortly.

“I'll hold on,” I said.

I looked down at Peggy, hot and lifeless in my arms. A cold compress. Why hadn't I thought of a compress before I made the call? But I couldn't risk leaving the phone now. The nurse would return and find no one there. Her voice came back on the line, finally.

“Dr. Sherwood will be there in half an hour.”

“Fifteen minutes,” I begged. “Please. She's burning up.”

Looking back at it now, I see those days in the hospital as a dress rehearsal. Keeping watch beside the crib. Listening to
her labored breathing. Sponging her small body. No matter how gentle I was, she cringed and cried. The pain of being touched was too much for her.

Then, miraculously, her fever broke. Two months later, she was crawling and giggling and getting into everything; three, she began to walk. Shortly after that, Bill and I had the fight about the brace, the first fight about the brace.

For some reason I can't remember now—maybe one of the boys had a cold, maybe Bill had said he'd be late, maybe it was the maid's day off—I didn't meet Bill at the station to walk to the new house that night. Instead, he came straight home to the rented cottage. I was in the kitchen scrubbing a pot, so it must have been the maid's day off after all. I had burned the cocoa again. Somehow I always managed to. I'd resolve not to take my eyes off it for a minute, but then I'd pick up an article about working conditions in textile mills or infant mortality in urban slums or women being humiliated and harassed for marching for the vote, and the next thing I knew cocoa was boiling over onto the stove like an erupting volcano.

I was standing at the sink, scouring and gazing out the white-curtained window above it. The small garden in the backyard was going to seed. Mrs. Ferris, who lived next door, had said she'd be happy to show me how to ready it for winter, but I'd never got around to taking her up on the offer. I didn't have the patience to spend hours on my knees battling nature when workers were toiling under inhuman conditions and children were dying and women were being assaulted because they wanted to cast a ballot. Sometimes I thought how much easier life would be if I were like the other women on the street, child-obsessed, husband-dutiful, house and garden proud. The way my mother would have been if she'd had a house and garden to be proud of.
Sometimes, like my father, I raged at them for their indifference to the world's injustices.

I heard the front door open and close, the rattle of hangers in the front closet as Bill hung up his coat and took off his hat, and the sound of his shoes on the wide oak boards of the hall. He came into the kitchen carrying a bulky brown-paper-wrapped parcel. I glanced at it uneasily as he put it on the table. It was too oddly shaped to be a painting. Perhaps it was a piece of sculpture for the new house. Whatever it was, I was pretty sure we couldn't afford it.

He came up behind me at the sink and pressed himself against me. I leaned back into him. One hand cupped my breast, the other found its way beneath my skirt and petticoat and into my bloomers.

“Where are the children?” he murmured into my ear.

“Safe in bed.”

I put down the pot and stood holding on to the sink, letting the pleasure overtake me. Then I turned to him. He unbuttoned his fly and lifted me onto the counter. It was some time before I noticed the package again. Then I asked him what it was.

“A brace.”

I thought he was speaking architecturally. “What kind of a brace?”

“For Peggy's leg.”

I tugged my clothing into place, walked to the table, and unwrapped the package. The device looked like something out of a medieval torture chamber, all hard metal and leather straps. I lifted it. It must have weighed seven or eight pounds. It did not belong on a child's leg. I saw Peggy dragging her encumbered limb like a wounded animal. I imagined her retreating into a corner, listless, miserable, fearful. I watched her spirit die.

“Peggy doesn't need a brace.”

“The doctor says she does.”

“The doctor says she does,” I mimicked. “I could fill a book with the mistakes I've seen doctors make.”

“You have to face it, Peg. That was infantile paralysis she had, not the flu.”

“I say it was the flu, and I've nursed enough patients to know.”

He stood staring at me for a moment. “I don't understand why you're so stubborn about this.”

“Stubborn! I'm not the one who wants to put that”—I pointed to the contraption—“that thing on my daughter's perfectly healthy little leg.”

He went on staring at me for another moment. “Is that what this is about?” he asked finally. “Your daughter—not ours but yours—and her perfection? Because anything less than perfect is impermissible. Anything less won't make up for your own childhood.”

I stood staring back at him, my lover suddenly turned enemy. I never understood how that could happen so quickly. “This has nothing to do with my childhood,” I said calmly, more calmly than his absurd accusation deserved.

“Let's just try the brace for a few days and see if it helps.”