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“Glomerulonephritis,” Enid wrote in her notebook. It was the first case that she had ever seen. The fact was that Mrs. Quinn’s kidneys were failing, and nothing could be done about it. Her kidneys were drying up and turning into hard and useless granular lumps. Her urine at present was scanty and had a smoky look, and the smell that came out on her breath and through her skin was acrid and ominous. And there was another, fainter smell, like rotted fruit, that seemed to Enid related to the pale-lavender-brown stains appearing on her body. Her legs twitched in spasms of sudden pain and her skin was subject to a violent itching, so that Enid had to rub her with ice. She wrapped the ice in towels and pressed the packs to the spots in torment.
“How do you contract that kind of a disease anyhow?” said Mrs. Quinn’s sister-in-law. Her name was Mrs. Green. Olive Green. (It had never occurred to her how that would sound, she said, until she got married and all of a sudden everybody was laughing at it.) She lived on a farm a few miles away, out on the highway, and every few days she came and took the sheets and towels and nightdresses home to wash. She did the children’s washing as well, brought everything back freshly ironed and folded. She even ironed the ribbons on the nightdresses. Enid was grateful to her-she had been on jobs where she had to do the laundry herself, or, worse still, load it onto her mother, who would pay to have it done in town. Not wanting to offend but seeing which way the questions were tending, she said, “It’s hard to tell.”
“Because you hear one thing and another,” Mrs. Green said. “You hear that sometimes a woman might take some pills. They get these pills to take for when their period is late and if they take them just like the doctor says and for a good purpose that’s fine, but if they take too many and for a bad purpose their kidneys are wrecked. Am I right?”
“I’ve never come in contact with a case like that,” Enid said.
Mrs. Green was a tall, stout woman. Like her brother Rupert, who was Mrs. Quinn’s husband, she had a round, snub-nosed, agreeably wrinkled face-the kind that Enid’s mother called “potato Irish.” But behind Rupert’s good-humored expression there was wariness and withholding. And behind Mrs. Green’s there was yearning. Enid did not know for what. To the simplest conversation Mrs. Green brought a huge demand. Maybe it was just a yearning for news. News of something momentous. An event.
Of course, an event was coming, something momentous at least in this family. Mrs. Quinn was going to die, at the age of twenty-seven. (That was the age she gave herself-Enid would have put some years on it, but once an illness had progressed this far age was hard to guess.) When her kidneys stopped working altogether, her heart would give out and she would die. The doctor had said to Enid, “This’ll take you into the summer, but the chances are you’ll get some kind of a holiday before the hot weather’s over.”
“Rupert met her when he went up north,” Mrs. Green said. “He went off by himself, he worked in the bush up there. She had some kind of a job in a hotel. I’m not sure what. Chambermaid job. She wasn’t raised up there, though-she says she was raised in an orphanage in Montreal. She can’t help that. You’d expect her to speak French, but if she does she don’t let on.”
Enid said, “An interesting life.”
“You can say that again.”
“An interesting life,” said Enid. Sometimes she couldn’t help it-she tried a joke where it had hardly a hope of working. She raised her eyebrows encouragingly, and Mrs. Green did smile.
But was she hurt? That was just the way Rupert would smile, in high school, warding off some possible mockery.
“He never had any kind of a girlfriend before that,” said Mrs. Green.
Enid had been in the same class as Rupert, though she did not mention that to Mrs. Green. She felt some embarrassment now because he was one of the boys-in fact, the main one-that she and her girlfriends had teased and tormented. “Picked on,” as they used to say. They had picked on Rupert, following him up the street calling out, “Hello, Rupert. Hello, Ru-pert,” putting him into a state of agony, watching his neck go red. “Rupert’s got scarlet fever,” they would say. “Rupert, you should be quarantined.” And they would pretend that one of them-Enid, Joan McAuliffe, Marian Denny-had a case on him. “She wants to speak to you, Rupert. Why don’t you ever ask her out? You could phone her up at least. She’s dying to talk to you.”
They did not really expect him to respond to these pleading overtures. But what joy if he had. He would have been rejected in short order and the story broadcast all over the school. Why? Why did they treat him this way, long to humiliate him? Simply because they could.
Impossible that he would have forgotten. But he treated Enid as if she were a new acquaintance, his wife’s nurse, come into his house from anywhere at all. And Enid took her cue from him.
Things had been unusually well arranged here, to spare her extra work. Rupert slept at Mrs. Green’s house, and ate his meals there. The two little girls could have been there as well, but it would have meant putting them into another school-there was nearly a month to go before school was out for the summer.
Rupert came into the house in the evenings and spoke to his children.
“Are you being good girls?” he said.
“Show Daddy what you made with your blocks,” said Enid. “Show Daddy your pictures in the coloring book.”
The blocks, the crayons, the coloring books, were all provided by Enid. She had phoned her mother and asked her to see what things she could find in the old trunks. Her mother had done that, and brought along as well an old book of cutout dolls which she had collected from someone-Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose and their many outfits. Enid hadn’t been able to get the little girls to say thank you until she put all these things on a high shelf and announced that they would stay there till thank you was said. Lois and Sylvie were seven and six years old, and as wild as little barn cats.
Rupert didn’t ask where the playthings came from. He told his daughters to be good girls and asked Enid if there was anything she needed from town. Once she told him that she had replaced the lightbulb in the cellarway and that he could get her some spare bulbs.
“I could have done that,” he said.
“I don’t have any trouble with lightbulbs,” said Enid. “Or fuses or knocking in nails. My mother and I have done without a man around the house for a long time now.” She meant to tease a little, to be friendly, but it didn’t work.
Finally Rupert would ask about his wife, and Enid would say that her blood pressure was down slightly, or that she had eaten and kept down part of an omelette for supper, or that the ice packs seemed to ease her itchy skin and she was sleeping better. And Rupert would say that if she was sleeping he’d better not go in.
Enid said, “Nonsense.” To see her husband would do a woman more good than to have a little doze. She took the children up to bed then, to give man and wife a time of privacy. But Rupert never stayed more than a few minutes. And when Enid came back downstairs and went into the front room-now the sickroom-to ready the patient for the night, Mrs. Quinn would be lying back against the pillows, looking agitated but not dissatisfied.
“Doesn’t hang around here very long, does he?” Mrs. Quinn would say. “Makes me laugh. Ha-ha-ha, how-are-you? Ha-ha-ha, off-we-go. Why don’t we take her out and throw her on the manure pile? Why don’t we just dump her out like a dead cat? That’s what he’s thinking. Isn’t he?”
“I doubt it,” said Enid, bringing the basin and towels, the rubbing alcohol and the baby powder.
“I doubt it,” said Mrs. Quinn quite viciously, but she submitted readily enough to having her nightgown removed, her hair smoothed back from her face, a towel slid under her hips. Enid was used to people making a fuss about being naked, even when they were very old or very ill. Sometimes she would have to tease them or badger them into common sense. “Do you think I haven’t seen any bottom parts before?” she would say. “Bottom parts, top parts, it’s pretty boring after a while. You know, there’s just the two ways we’re made.” But Mrs. Quinn was without shame, opening her legs and raising herself a bit to make the job easier. She was a little bird-boned woman, queerly shaped now, with her swollen abdomen and limbs and her breasts shrunk to tiny pouches with dried-currant nipples.
“Swole up like some kind of pig,” Mrs. Quinn said. “Except for my tits, and they always were kind of useless. I never had no big udders on me, like you. Don’t you get sick of the sight of me? Won’t you be glad when I’m dead?”
“If I felt like that I wouldn’t be here,” said Enid.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Mrs. Quinn. “That’s what you’ll all say. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I’m no use to him anymore, am I? I’m no use to any man. He goes out of here every night and he goes to pick up women, doesn’t he?”
“As far as I know, he goes to his sister’s house.”
“As far as you know. But you don’t know much.”
Enid thought she knew what this meant, this spite and venom, the energy saved for ranting. Mrs. Quinn was flailing about for an enemy. Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both husband and children in Mrs. Quinn’s case. On a Saturday morning, Enid called Lois and Sylvie from their games under the porch, to come and see their mother looking pretty. Mrs. Quinn had just had her morning wash, and was in a clean nightgown, with her fine, sparse, fair hair brushed and held back by a blue ribbon. (Enid took a supply of these ribbons with her when she went to nurse a female patient-also a bottle of cologne and a cake of scented soap.) She did look pretty-or you could see at least that she had once been pretty, with her wide forehead and cheekbones (they almost punched the skin now, like china doorknobs) and her large greenish eyes and childish translucent teeth and small stubborn chin.
The children came into the room obediently if unenthusiastically.
Mrs. Quinn said, “Keep them off of my bed, they’re filthy.”
“They just want to see you,” said Enid.
“Well, now they’ve seen me,” said Mrs. Quinn. “Now they can go.”
This behavior didn’t seem to surprise or disappoint the children. They looked at Enid, and Enid said, “All right, now, your mother better have a rest,” and they ran out and slammed the kitchen door.
“Can’t you get them to quit doing that?” Mrs. Quinn said. “Every time they do it, it’s like a brick hits me in my chest.”
You would think these two daughters of hers were a pair of rowdy orphans, wished on her for an indefinite visit. But that was the way some people were, before they settled down to their dying and sometimes even up to the event itself. People of a gentler nature-it would seem-than Mrs. Quinn might say that they knew how much their brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and children had always hated them, how much of a disappointment they had been to others and others had been to them, and how glad they knew everybody would be to see them gone. They might say this at the end of peaceful, useful lives in the midst of loving families, where there was no explanation at all for such fits. And usually the fits passed. But often, too, in the last weeks or even days of life there was mulling over of old feuds and slights or whimpering about some unjust punishment suffered seventy years earlier. Once a woman had asked Enid to bring her a willow platter from the cupboard and Enid had thought that she wanted the comfort of looking at this one pretty possession for the last time. But it turned out that she wanted to use her last, surprising strength to smash it against the bedpost.
“Now I know my sister’s never going to get her hands on that,” she said.
And often people remarked that their visitors were only coming to gloat and that the doctor was responsible for their sufferings. They detested the sight of Enid herself, for her sleepless strength and patient hands and the way the juices of life were so admirably balanced and flowing in her. Enid was used to that, and she was able to understand the trouble they were in, the trouble of dying and also the trouble of their lives that sometimes overshadowed that.
But with Mrs. Quinn she was at a loss.
It was not just that she couldn’t supply comfort here. It was that she couldn’t want to. She could not conquer her dislike of this doomed, miserable young woman. She disliked this body that she had to wash and powder and placate with ice and alcohol rubs. She understood now what people meant when they said that they hated sickness and sick bodies; she understood the women who had said to her, I don’t know how you do it, I could never be a nurse, that’s the one thing I could never be. She disliked this particular body, all the particular signs of its disease. The smell of it and the discoloration, the malignant-looking little nipples and the pathetic ferretlike teeth. She saw all this as the sign of a willed corruption. She was as bad as Mrs. Green, sniffing out rampant impurity. In spite of being a nurse who knew better, and in spite of its being her job-and surely her nature-to be compassionate. She didn’t know why this was happening. Mrs. Quinn reminded her somewhat of girls she had known in high school-cheaply dressed, sickly looking girls with dreary futures, who still displayed a hard-faced satisfaction with themselves. They lasted only a year or two-they got pregnant, most of them got married. Enid had nursed some of them in later years, in home childbirth, and found their confidence exhausted and their bold streak turned into meekness, or even piety. She was sorry for them, even when she remembered how determined they had been to get what they had got.
Mrs. Quinn was a harder case. Mrs. Quinn might crack and crack, but there would be nothing but sullen mischief, nothing but rot inside her.
Worse even than the fact that Enid should feel this revulsion was the fact that Mrs. Quinn knew it. No patience or gentleness or cheerfulness that Enid could summon would keep Mrs. Quinn from knowing. And Mrs. Quinn made knowing it her triumph.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
When Enid was twenty years old, and had almost finished her nurse’s training, her father was dying in the Walley hospital. That was when he said to her, “I don’t know as I care for this career of yours. I don’t want you working in a place like this.”
Enid bent over him and asked what sort of place he thought he was in. “It’s only the Walley hospital,” she said.
“I know that,” said her father, sounding as calm and reasonable as he had always done (he was an insurance and real-estate agent). “I know what I’m talking about. Promise me you won’t.”
“Promise you what?” said Enid.
“You won’t do this kind of work,” her father said. She could not get any further explanation out of him. He tightened up his mouth as if her questioning disgusted him. All he would say was “Promise.”
“What is all this about?” Enid asked her mother, and her mother said, “Oh, go ahead. Go ahead and promise him. What difference is it going to make? “
Enid thought this a shocking thing to say, but made no comment. It was consistent with her mother’s way of looking at a lot of things.
“I’m not going to promise anything I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m probably not going to promise anything anyway. But if you know what he’s talking about you ought to tell me.”
“It’s just this idea he’s got now,” her mother said. “He’s got an idea that nursing makes a woman coarse.”
Enid said, “Coarse.”
Her mother said that the part of nursing her father objected to was the familiarity nurses had with men’s bodies. Her father thought-he had decided-that such familiarity would change a girl, and furthermore that it would change the way men thought about that girl. It would spoil her good chances and give her a lot of other chances that were not so good. Some men would lose interest and others would become interested in the wrong way.
“I suppose it’s all mixed up with wanting you to get married,” her mother said.
“Too bad if it is,” said Enid.
But she ended up promising. And her mother said, “Well, I hope that makes you happy.” Not “makes him happy.” “Makes you.” It seemed that her mother had known before Enid did just how tempting this promise would be. The deathbed promise, the self-denial, the wholesale sacrifice. And the more absurd the better. This was what she had given in to. And not for love of her father, either (her mother implied), but for the thrill of it. Sheer noble perversity.
“If he’d asked you to give up something you didn’t care one way or the other about, you’d probably have told him nothing doing,” her mother said. “If for instance he’d asked you to give up wearing lipstick. You’d still be wearing it.”
Enid listened to this with a patient expression.
“Did you pray about it?” said her mother sharply.
Enid said yes.
She withdrew from nursing school; she stayed at home and kept busy. There was enough money that she did not have to work. In fact, her mother had not wanted Enid to go into nursing in the first place, claiming that it was something poor girls did, it was a way out for girls whose parents couldn’t keep them or send them to college. Enid did not remind her of this inconsistency. She painted a fence, she tied up the rosebushes for winter. She learned to bake and she learned to play bridge, taking her father’s place in the weekly games her mother played with Mr. and Mrs. Willens from next door. In no time at all she became-as Mr. Willens said-a scandalously good player. He took to turning up with chocolates or a pink rose for her, to make up for his own inadequacies as a partner.
She went skating in the winter evenings. She played badminton.
She had never lacked friends, and she didn’t now. Most of the people who had been in the last year of high school with her were finishing college now, or were already working at a distance, as teachers or nurses or chartered accountants. But she made friends with others who had dropped out before senior year to work in banks or stores or offices, to become plumbers or milliners. The girls in this group were dropping like flies, as they said of each other-they were dropping into matrimony. Enid was an organizer of bridal showers and a help at trousseau teas. In a couple of years would come the christenings, where she could expect to be a favorite godmother. Children not related to her would grow up calling her Aunt. And she was already a sort of honorary daughter to women of her mother’s age and older, the only young woman who had time for the Book Club and the Horticultural Society. So, quickly and easily, still in her youth, she was slipping into this essential, central, yet isolated role.
But in fact it had been her role all along. In high school she was always the class secretary or class social convener. She was well liked and high-spirited and well dressed and good-looking, but she was slightly set apart. She had friends who were boys but never a boyfriend. She did not seem to have made a choice this way, but she was not worried about it, either. She had been preoccupied with her ambition-to be a missionary, at one embarrassing stage, and then to be a nurse. She had never thought of nursing as just something to do until she got married. Her hope was to be good, and do good, and not necessarily in the orderly, customary, wifely way.
At New Year’s she went to the dance in the Town Hall. The man who danced with her most often, and escorted her home, and pressed her hand good night, was the manager of the creamery- a man in his forties, never married, an excellent dancer, an avuncular friend to girls unlikely to find partners. No woman ever took him seriously.
“Maybe you should take a business course,” her mother said. “Or why shouldn’t you go to college?”
Where the men might be more appreciative, she was surely thinking.
“I’m too old,” said Enid.
Her mother laughed. “That only shows how young you are,” she said. She seemed relieved to discover that her daughter had a touch of folly natural to her age-that she could think twenty-one was at a vast distance from eighteen.
“I’m not going to troop in with kids out of high school,” Enid said. “I mean it. What do you want to get rid of me for anyway? I’m fine here.” This sulkiness or sharpness also seemed to please and reassure her mother. But after a moment she sighed, and said, “You’ll be surprised how fast the years go by.”
That August there were a lot of cases of measles and a few of polio at the same time. The doctor who had looked after Enid’s father, and had observed her competence around the hospital, asked her if she would be willing to help out for a while, nursing people at home. She said that she would think about it.
“You mean pray?” her mother said, and Enid’s face took on a stubborn, secretive expression that in another girl’s case might have had to do with meeting her boyfriend.
“That promise,” she said to her mother the next day. “That was about working in a hospital, wasn’t it?”
Her mother said that she had understood it that way, yes. “And with graduating and being a registered nurse?” Yes, yes.
So if there were people who needed nursing at home, who couldn’t afford to go to the hospital or did not want to go, and if Enid went into their houses to nurse them, not as a registered nurse but as what they called a practical nurse, she would hardly be breaking her promise, would she? And since most of those needing her care would be children or women having babies, or old people dying, there would not be much danger of the coarsening effect, would there?
“If the only men you get to see are men who are never going to get out of bed again, you have a point,” said her mother.
But she could not keep from adding that what all this meant was that Enid had decided to give up the possibility of a decent job in a hospital in order to do miserable backbreaking work in miserable primitive houses for next to no money. Enid would find herself pumping water from contaminated wells and breaking ice in winter washbasins and battling flies in summer and using an outdoor toilet. Scrub boards and coal-oil lamps instead of washing machines and electricity. Trying to look after sick people in those conditions and cope with housework and poor weaselly children as well.
“But if that is your object in life,” she said, “I can see that the worse I make it sound the more determined you get to do it. The only thing is, I’m going to ask for a couple of promises myself. Promise me you’ll boil the water you drink. And you won’t marry a farmer.”
Enid said, “Of all the crazy ideas.”
That was sixteen years ago. During the first of those years people got poorer and poorer. There were more and more of them who could not afford to go to the hospital, and the houses where Enid worked had often deteriorated almost to the state that her mother had described. Sheets and diapers had to be washed by hand in houses where the washing machine had broken down and could not be repaired, or the electricity had been turned off, or where there had never been any electricity in the first place. Enid did not work without pay, because that would not have been fair to the other women who did the same kind of nursing, and who did not have the same options as she did. But she gave most of the money back, in the form of children’s shoes and winter coats and trips to the dentist and Christmas toys.
Her mother went around canvassing her friends for old baby cots, and high chairs and blankets, and worn-out sheets, which she herself ripped up and hemmed to make diapers. Everybody said how proud she must be of Enid, and she said yes, she surely was.
“But sometimes it’s a devil of a lot of work,” she said. “This being the mother of a saint.”
Then came the war, and the great shortage of doctors and nurses, and Enid was more welcome than ever. As she was for a while after the war, with so many babies being born. It was only now, with the hospitals being enlarged and many farms getting prosperous, that it looked as if her responsibilities might dwindle away to the care of those who had bizarre and hopeless afflictions, or were so irredeemably cranky that hospitals had thrown them out.
This summer there was a great downpour of rain every few days, and then the sun came out very hot, glittering off the drenched leaves and grass. Early mornings were full of mist-they were so close, here, to the river-and even when the mist cleared off you could not see very far in any direction, because of the overflow and density of summer. The heavy trees, the bushes all bound up with wild grapevines and Virginia creeper, the crops of corn and barley and wheat and hay. Everything was ahead of itself, as people said. The hay was ready to cut in June, and Rupert had to rush to get it into the barn before a rain spoiled it.
He came into the house later and later in the evenings, having worked as long as the light lasted. One night when he came the house was in darkness, except for a candle burning on the kitchen table.
Enid hurried to unhook the screen door. “Power out?” said Rupert.
Enid said, “Shhh.” She whispered to him that she was letting the children sleep downstairs, because the upstairs rooms were so hot. She had pushed the chairs together and made beds on them with quilts and pillows. And of course she had had to turn the lights out so that they could get to sleep. She had found a candle in one of the drawers, and that was all she needed, to see to write by, in her notebook.
“They’ll always remember sleeping here,” she said. “You always remember the times when you were a child and you slept somewhere different.”
He set down a box that contained a ceiling fan for the sickroom. He had been into Walley to buy it. He had also bought a newspaper, which he handed to Enid.
“Thought you might like to know what’s going on in the world,” he said.
She spread the paper out beside her notebook, on the table. There was a picture of a couple of dogs playing in a fountain.
“It says there’s a heat wave,” she said. “Isn’t it nice to find out about it?”
Rupert was carefully lifting the fan out of its box.
“That’ll be wonderful,” she said. “It’s cooled off in there now, but it’ll be such a comfort to her tomorrow.”
“I’ll be over early to put it up,” he said. Then he asked how his wife had been that day.
Enid said that the pains in her legs had been easing off, and the new pills the doctor had her on seemed to be letting her get some rest.
“The only thing is, she goes to sleep so soon,” she said. “It makes it hard for you to get a visit.” “Better she gets the rest,” Rupert said.
This whispered conversation reminded Enid of conversations in high school, when they were both in their senior year and that earlier teasing, or cruel flirtation, or whatever it was, had long been abandoned. All that last year Rupert had sat in the seat behind hers, and they had often spoken to each other briefly, always to some immediate purpose. Have you got an ink eraser? How do you spell “incriminate”? Where is the Tyrrhenian Sea? Usually it was Enid, half turning in her seat and able only to sense, not see, how close Rupert was, who started these conversations. She did want to borrow an eraser, she was in need of information, but also she wanted to be sociable. And she wanted to make amends-she felt ashamed of the way she and her friends had treated him. It would do no good to apologize-that would just embarrass him all over again. He was only at ease when he sat behind her, and knew that she could not look him in the face. If they met on the street he would look away until the last minute, then mutter the faintest greeting while she sang out “Hello, Rupert,” and heard an echo of the old tormenting tones she wanted to banish.
But when he actually laid a finger on her shoulder, tapping for attention, when he bent forward, almost touching or maybe really touching-she could not tell for sure-her thick hair that was wild even in a bob, then she felt forgiven. In a way, she felt honored. Restored to seriousness and to respect.
Where, where exactly, is the Tyrrhenian Sea?
She wondered if he remembered anything at all of that now.
She separated the back and front parts of the paper. Margaret Truman was visiting England, and had curtsied to the royal family. The King’s doctors were trying to cure his Buerger’s disease with vitamin E.
She offered the front part to Rupert. “I’m going to look at the crossword,” she said. “I like to do the crossword-it relaxes me at the end of the day.”
Rupert sat down and began to read the paper, and she asked him if he would like a cup of tea. Of course he said not to bother, and she went ahead and made it anyway, understanding that this reply might as well be yes in country speech.
“It’s a South American theme,” she said, looking at the crossword. “Latin American theme. First across is a musical… garment. A musical garment? Garment. A lot of letters. Oh. Oh. I’m lucky tonight. Cape Horn!
“You see how silly they are, these things,” she said, and rose and poured the tea.
If he did remember, did he hold anything against her? Maybe her blithe friendliness in their senior year had been as unwelcome, as superior-seeming to him, as that early taunting?
When she first saw him in this house, she thought that he had not changed much. He had been a tall, solid, round-faced boy, and he was a tall, heavy, round-faced man. He had worn his hair cut so short, always, that it didn’t make much difference that there was less of it now and that it had turned from light brown to gray-brown. A permanent sunburn had taken the place of his blushes. And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been just the same old trouble-the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name that people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.
She thought of them sitting in the senior class. A small class, by that time-in five years the unstudious, the carefree, and the indifferent had been weeded out, leaving these overgrown, grave, and docile children learning trigonometry, learning Latin. What kind of life did they think they were preparing for? What kind of people did they think they were going to be?
She could see the dark-green, softened cover of a book called History of the Renaissance and Reformation. It was secondhand, or tenthhand-nobody ever bought a new textbook. Inside were written all the names of the previous owners, some of whom were middle-aged housewives or merchants around the town. You could not imagine them learning these things, or underlining “Edict of Nantes” with red ink and writing “N.B.” in the margin.
Edict of Nantes. The very uselessness, the exotic nature, of the things in those books and in those students’ heads, in her own head then and Rupert’s, made Enid feel a tenderness and wonder. It wasn’t that they had meant to be something that they hadn’t become. Nothing like that. Rupert couldn’t have imagined anything but farming this farm. It was a good farm, and he was an only son. And she herself had ended up doing exactly what she must have wanted to do. You couldn’t say that they had chosen the wrong lives or chosen against their will or not understood their choices. Just that they had not understood how time would pass and leave them not more but maybe a little less than what they used to be.
“ ‘Bread of the Amazon,’ ” she said. “ ‘Bread of the Amazon’?” Rupert said, “Manioc?”
Enid counted. “Seven letters,” she said. “Seven.”
He said, “Cassava?”
“Cassava? That’s a double s? Cassava.”
Mrs. Quinn became more capricious daily about her food. Sometimes she said she wanted toast, or bananas with milk on them. One day she said peanut-butter cookies. Enid prepared all these things-the children could eat them anyway-and when they were ready Mrs. Quinn could not stand the look or the smell of them. Even Jell-O had a smell she could not stand.
Some days she hated all noise; she would not even have the fan going. Other days she wanted the radio on, she wanted the station that played requests for birthdays and anniversaries and called people up to ask them questions. If you got the answer right you won a trip to Niagara Falls, a tankful of gas, or a load of groceries or tickets to a movie.
“It’s all fixed,” Mrs. Quinn said. “They just pretend to call somebody up-they’re in the next room and already got the answer told to them. I used to know somebody that worked for a radio, that’s the truth.”
On these days her pulse was rapid. She talked very fast in a light, breathless voice. “What kind of car is that your mother’s got?” she said.
“It’s a maroon-colored car,” said Enid.
“What make?” said Mrs. Quinn.
Enid said she did not know, which was the truth. She had known, but she had forgotten. “Was it new when she got it?”
“Yes,” said Enid. “Yes. But that was three or four years ago.” “She lives in that big rock house next door to Willenses?” Yes, said Enid.
“How many rooms it got? Sixteen?” “Too many.”
“Did you go to Mr. Willens’s funeral when he got drownded?”
Enid said no. “I’m not much for funerals.”
“I was supposed to go. I wasn’t awfully sick then, I was going with Herveys up the highway, they said I could get a ride with them and then her mother and her sister wanted to go and there wasn’t enough room in back. Then Clive and Olive went in the truck and I could’ve scrunched up in their front seat but they never thought to ask me. Do you think he drownded himself?”
Enid thought of Mr. Willens handing her a rose. His jokey gallantry that made the nerves of her teeth ache, as from too much sugar.
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so.” “Did him and Mrs. Willens get along all right?” “As far as I know, they got along beautifully.” “Oh, is that so?” said Mrs. Quinn, trying to imitate Enid’s reserved tone. “Bee-you-tif-ley.”
Enid slept on the couch in Mrs. Quinn’s room. Mrs. Quinn’s devastating itch had almost disappeared, as had her need to urinate. She slept through most of the night, though she would have spells of harsh and angry breathing. What woke Enid up and kept her awake was a trouble of her own. She had begun to have ugly dreams. These were unlike any dreams she had ever had before. She used to think that a bad dream was one of finding herself in an unfamiliar house where the rooms kept changing and there was always more work to do than she could handle, work undone that she thought she had done, innumerable distractions. And then, of course, she had what she thought of as romantic dreams, in which some man would have his arm around her or even be embracing her. It might be a stranger or a man she knew-sometimes a man whom it was quite a joke to think of in that way. These dreams made her thoughtful or a little sad but relieved in some way to know that such feelings were possible for her. They could be embarrassing, but were nothing, nothing at all compared with the dreams that she was having now. In the dreams that came to her now she would be copulating or trying to copulate (sometimes she was prevented by intruders or shifts of circumstances) with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners. With fat squirmy babies or patients in bandages or her own mother. She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it, and she would set to work with roughness and an attitude of evil pragmatism. “Yes, this will have to do,” she would say to herself. “This will do if nothing better comes along.” And this coldness of heart, this matter-of-fact depravity, simply drove her lust along. She woke up unrepentant, sweaty and exhausted, and lay like a carcass until her own self, her shame and disbelief, came pouring back into her. The sweat went cold on her skin. She lay there shivering in the warm night, with disgust and humiliation. She did not dare go back to sleep. She got used to the dark and the long rectangles of the net-curtained windows filled with a faint light. And the sick woman’s breath grating and scolding and then almost disappearing.
If she were a Catholic, she thought, was this the sort of thing that could come out at confession? It didn’t seem like the sort of thing she could even bring out in a private prayer. She didn’t pray much anymore, except formally, and to bring the experiences she had just been through to the attention of God seemed absolutely useless, disrespectful. He would be insulted. She was insulted, by her own mind. Her religion was hopeful and sensible and there was no room in it for any sort of rubbishy drama, such as the invasion of the devil into her sleep. The filth in her mind was in her, and there was no point in dramatizing it and making it seem important. Surely not. It was nothing, just the mind’s garbage.
In the little meadow between the house and the riverbank there were cows. She could hear them munching and jostling, feeding at night. She thought of their large gentle shapes in there with the money musk and chicory, the flowering grasses, and she thought, They have a lovely life, cows.
It ends, of course, in the slaughterhouse. The end is disaster.
For everybody, though, the same thing. Evil grabs us when we are sleeping; pain and disintegration lie in wait. Animal horrors, all worse than you can imagine beforehand. The comforts of bed and the cows’ breath, the pattern of the stars at night-all that can get turned on its head in an instant. And here she was, here was Enid, working her life away pretending it wasn’t so. Trying to ease people. Trying to be good. An angel of mercy, as her mother had said, with less and less irony as time went on. Patients and doctors, too, had said it.
And all the time how many thought that she was a fool? The people she spent her labors on might secretly despise her. Thinking they’d never do the same in her place. Never be fool enough. No.
Miserable offenders, came into her head. Miserable offenders. Restore them that are penitent.
So she got up and went to work; as far as she was concerned, that was the best way to be penitent. She worked very quietly but steadily through the night, washing the cloudy glasses and sticky plates that were in the cupboards and establishing order where there was none before. None. Teacups had sat between the ketchup and the mustard and toilet paper on top of a pail of honey. There was no waxed paper or even newspaper laid out on the shelves. Brown sugar in the bag was as hard as rock. It was understandable that things should have gone downhill in the last few months, but it looked as if there had been no care, no organization here, ever. All the net curtains were gray with smoke and the windowpanes were greasy. The last bit of jam had been left to grow fuzz in the jar, and vile-smelling water that had held some ancient bouquet had never been dumped out of its jug. But this was a good house still, that scrubbing and painting could restore. Though what could you do about the ugly brown paint that had been recently and sloppily applied to the front-room floor?
When she had a moment later in the day she pulled the weeds out of Rupert’s mother’s flower beds, dug up the burdocks and twitch grass that were smothering the valiant perennials.
She taught the children to hold their spoons properly and to say grace.
Thank you for the world so sweet,
Thank you for the food we eat…
She taught them to brush their teeth and after that to say their prayers.
“God bless Mama and Daddy and Enid and Aunt Olive and Uncle Clive and Princess Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.” After that each added the name of the other. They had been doing it for quite a while when Sylvie said, “What does it mean?”
Enid said, “What does what mean?”
“What does it mean ‘God bless’?”
Enid made eggnogs, not flavoring them even with vanilla, and fed them to Mrs. Quinn from a spoon. She fed her a little of the rich liquid at a time, and Mrs. Quinn was able to hold down what was given to her in small amounts. If she could not do that, Enid spooned out flat, lukewarm ginger ale.
The sunlight, or any light, was as hateful as noise to Mrs. Quinn by now. Enid had to hang thick quilts over the windows, even when the blinds were pulled down. With the fan shut off, as Mrs. Quinn demanded, the room became very hot, and sweat dripped from Enid’s forehead as she bent over the bed attending to the patient. Mrs. Quinn went into fits of shivering; she could never be warm enough.
“This is dragging out,” the doctor said. “It must be those milkshakes you’re giving her, keeping her going.” “Eggnogs,” said Enid, as if it mattered.
Mrs. Quinn was often now too tired or weak to talk. Sometimes she lay in a stupor, with her breathing so faint and her pulse so lost and wandering that a person less experienced than Enid would have taken her for dead. But at other times she rallied, wanted the radio on, then wanted it off. She knew perfectly well who she was still, and who Enid was, and she sometimes seemed to be watching Enid with a speculative or inquiring look in her eyes. Color was long gone from her face and even from her lips, but her eyes looked greener than they had in the past-a milky, cloudy green. Enid tried to answer the look that was bent on her.
“Would you like me to get a priest to talk to you?”
Mrs. Quinn looked as if she wanted to spit.
“Do I look like a Mick?” she said.
“A minister?” said Enid. She knew this was the right thing to ask, but the spirit in which she asked it was not right-it was cold and faintly malicious.
No. This was not what Mrs. Quinn wanted. She grunted with displeasure. There was some energy in her still, and Enid had the feeling that she was building it up for a purpose. “Do you want to talk to your children?” she said, making herself speak compassionately and encouragingly. “Is that what you want?”
No.
“Your husband? Your husband will be here in a little while.”
Enid didn’t know that for sure. Rupert arrived so late some nights, after Mrs. Quinn had taken the final pills and gone to sleep. Then he sat with Enid. He always brought her the newspaper. He asked what she wrote in her notebooks-he noticed that there were two-and she told him. One for the doctor, with a record of blood pressure and pulse and temperature, a record of what was eaten, vomited, excreted, medicines taken, some general summing up of the patient’s condition. In the other notebook, for herself, she wrote many of the same things, though perhaps not so exactly, but she added details about the weather and what was happening all around. And things to remember.
“For instance, I wrote something down the other day,” she said. “Something that Lois said. Lois and Sylvie came in when Mrs. Green was here and Mrs. Green was mentioning how the berry bushes were growing along the lane and stretching across the road, and Lois said, ‘It’s like in “Sleeping Beauty.” ’ Because I’d read them the story. I made a note of that.”
Rupert said, “I’ll have to get after those berry canes and cut them back.”
Enid got the impression that he was pleased by what Lois had said and by the fact that she had written it down, but it wasn’t possible for him to say so.
One night he told her that he would be away for a couple of days, at a stock auction. He had asked the doctor if it was all right, and the doctor had said to go ahead.
That night he had come before the last pills were given, and Enid supposed that he was making a point of seeing his wife awake before that little time away. She told him to go right into Mrs. Quinn’s room, and he did, and shut the door after him. Enid picked up the paper and thought of going upstairs to read it, but the children probably weren’t asleep yet; they would find excuses for calling her in. She could go out on the porch, but there were mosquitoes’at this time of day, especially after a rain like the afternoon’s.
She was afraid of overhearing some intimacy or perhaps the suggestion of a fight, then having to face him when he came out. Mrs. Quinn was building up to a display-of that Enid felt sure. And before she made up her mind where to go she did overhear something. Not the recriminations or (if it was possible) the endearments, or perhaps even weeping, that she had been half expecting, but a laugh. She heard Mrs. Quinn weakly laughing, and the laughter had the mockery and satisfaction in it that Enid had heard before but also something she hadn’t heard before, not in her life-something deliberately vile. She didn’t move, though she should have, and she was at the table still, she was still there staring at the door of the room, when he came out a moment later. He didn’t avoid her eyes-or she his. She couldn’t. Yet she couldn’t have said for sure that he saw her. He just looked at her and went on outside. He looked as if he had caught hold of an electric wire and begged pardon-who of?-that his body was given over to this stupid catastrophe.
The next day Mrs. Quinn’s strength came flooding back, in that unnatural and deceptive way that Enid had seen once or twice in others. Mrs. Quinn wanted to sit up against the pillows. She wanted the fan turned on.
Enid said, “What a good idea.”
“I could tell you something you wouldn’t believe,” Mrs. Quinn said.
“People tell me lots of things,” said Enid. “Sure. Lies,” Mrs. Quinn said. “I bet it’s all lies. You know Mr. Willens was right here in this room?”
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