Part 24 (1/2)
”We'll take up where we left off, Esther,” she had said, with her sweet, martyr's smile. ”We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.”
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape.
”A man to see you!”
The smiling, snow-capped nurse poked her head in through the door” and for a confused second I thought I really was back in college and this spruce white furniture, this white view over trees and hills, an improvement on my old room's nicked chairs and desk and outlook over the bald quad. ” A man to see you!” the girl on watch had said, on the dormitory phone.
What was there about us, in Belsize, so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.
”Come in!” I called, and Buddy Willard, khaki cap in hand, stepped into the room.
”Well, Buddy,” I said.
”Well, Esther.”
We stood there, looking at each other. I waited for a touch of emotion, the faintest glow. Nothing. Nothing but a great, amiable boredom. Buddy's khaki-jacketed shape seemed small and unrelated to me as the brown posts he had stood against that day a year ago, at the bottom of the ski run.
”How did you get here?” I asked finally.
”Mother's car.”
”In all this snow?”
”Well,” Buddy grinned, ”I'm stuck outside in a drift. The hill was too much for me. Is there anyplace I can borrow a shovel?”
”We can get a shovel from one of the groundsmen.”
”Good.” Buddy turned to go.
”Wait, I'll come and help you.”
Buddy looked at me then, and in his eyes I saw a flicker of strangeness--the same compound of curiosity and wariness I had seen in the eyes of the Christian Scientist and my old English teacher and the Unitarian minister who used to visit me.
”Oh, Buddy,” I laughed. ”I'm all right.”
”Oh, I know, I know, Esther,” Buddy said hastily.
”It's you who oughtn't to dig out cars, Buddy. Not me.”
And Buddy did let me do most of the work.
The car had skidded on the gla.s.sy hill up the asylum and backed, with one wheel over the rim of the drive, into a steep drift.
The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see trees and gra.s.sland waist-high under flood water--as if the usual order of the world had s.h.i.+fted slightly, and entered a new phase.
I was grateful for the car and the snowdrift. It kept Buddy from asking me what I knew he was going to ask, and what he finally did ask, in a low, nervous voice, at the Belsize afternoon tea. DeeDee was eyeing us like an envious cat over the rim of her teacup. After Joan's death, DeeDee had been moved to Wymark for a while, but now she was among us once more.
”I've been wondering...” Buddy set his cup in the saucer with an awkward clatter.
”What have you been wondering?”
”I've been wondering...I mean, I thought you might be able to tell me something.” Buddy met my eyes and I saw, for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer's bulb, his face was grave, even tentative--the face of a man who often does not get what he wants.
”I'll tell you if I can, Buddy.”
”Do you think there's something in me that drives drives women crazy?” women crazy?”
I couldn't help myself, I burst out laughing--maybe because of the seriousness of Buddy's face and the common meaning of the word ”crazy” in a sentence like that.
”I mean,” Buddy pushed on, ”I dated Joan, and then you, and first you...went, and then Joan...”
With one finger I nudged a cake crumb into a drop of wet, brown tea.
”Of course you didn't do it!” I heard Doctor Nolan say. I had come to her about Joan, and it was the only time I remember her sounding angry. ”n.o.body did it. She She did it.” And then Doctor Nolan told me how the best of psychiatrists have suicides among their patients, and how they, if anybody, should be held responsible, but how they, on the contrary, do not hold themselves responsible.... did it.” And then Doctor Nolan told me how the best of psychiatrists have suicides among their patients, and how they, if anybody, should be held responsible, but how they, on the contrary, do not hold themselves responsible....
”You had nothing to do with us, Buddy.”
”You're sure?”
”Absolutely.”
”Well,” Buddy breathed. ”I'm glad of that.”
And he drained his tea like a tonic medicine.
”I hear you're leaving us.”
I fell into step beside Valerie in the little, nurse-supervised group. ”Only if the doctors say yes. I have my interview tomorrow.”
The packed snow creaked underfoot, and everywhere I could hear a musical trickle and drip as the noon sun thawed icicles and snow crusts that would glaze again before nightfall.
The shadows of the ma.s.sed black pines were lavender in that bright light, and I walked with Valerie awhile, down the familiar labyrinth of shoveled asylum paths. Doctors and nurses and patients pa.s.sing on adjoining paths seemed to be moving on casters, cut off at the waist by the piled snow.