Part 24 (2/2)
”Interviews!” Valerie snorted. ”They're nothing! If they're going to let you out, they let you out.”
”I hope so.”
In front of Caplan I said good-bye to Valerie's calm, snowmaiden face behind which so little, bad or good, could happen, and walked on alone, my breath coming in white puffs even in that sun-filled air. Valerie's last, cheerful cry had been ”So ”So long! Be seeing you.” long! Be seeing you.”
”Not if I know it,” I thought.
But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?
And hadn't Buddy said, as if to revenge himself for my digging out the car and his having to stand by, ”I wonder who you'll marry now, Esther.”
”What?” I'd said, shoveling snow up onto a mound and blinking against the stinging backshower of loose flakes.
”I wonder who you'll marry now, Esther. Now you've been,” and Buddy's gesture encompa.s.sed the hill, the pines and the severe, snow-gabled buildings breaking up the rolling landscape, ”here.”
And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all.
”I have a bill here, Irwin.”
I spoke quietly into the mouthpiece of the asylum pay phone in the main hall of the administration building. At first I suspected the operator, at her switchboard, might be listening, but she just went on plugging and unplugging her little tubes without batting an eye.
”Yes,” Irwin said.
”It's a bill for twenty dollars for emergency attention on a certain date in December and a checkup a week thereafter.”
”Yes,” Irwin said.
”The hospital says they are sending me the bill because there was no answer to the bill they sent you.”
”All right, all right, I'm writing a check now. I'm writing them a blank check.” Irwin's voice altered subtly. ”When am I going to see you?”
”Do you really want to know?”
”Very much.”
”Never,” I said, and hung up with a resolute click.
I wondered, briefly, if Irwin would send his check to the hospital after that, and then I thought, ”Of course he will, he's a mathematics professor--he won't want to leave any loose ends.”
I felt unaccountably weak-kneed and relieved.
Irwin's voice had meant nothing to me.
This was the first time, since our first and last meeting, that I had spoken with him and, I was reasonably sure, it would be the last. Irwin had absolutely no way of getting in touch with me, except by going to Nurse Kennedy's flat, and after Joan's death Nurse Kennedy had moved somewhere else and left no trace.
I was perfectly free.
Joan's parents invited me to the funeral.
I had been, Mrs. Gilling said, one of Joan's best friends.
”You don't have to go, you know,” Doctor Nolan told me. ”You can always write and say I said it would be better not to.”
”I'll go,” I said, and I did go, and all during the simple funeral service I wondered what I thought I was burying.
At the altar the coffin loomed in its snow pallor of flowers--the black shadow of something that wasn't there. The faces in the pews around me were waxen with candlelight, and pine boughs, left over from Christmas, sent up a sepulchral incense in the cold air.
Beside me, Jody's cheeks bloomed like good apples, and here and there in the little congregation I recognized other faces of other girls from college and my home town who had known Joan. DeeDee and Nurse Kennedy bent their kerchiefed heads in a front pew.
Then, behind the coffin and the flowers and the face of the minister and the faces of the mourners, I saw the rolling lawns of our town cemetery, knee-deep in snow now, with the tombstones rising out of it like smokeless chimneys.
There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan's grave.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am.
The doctors were having their weekly board meeting--old business, new business, admissions, dismissals and interviews. Leafing blindly through a tatty National Geographic National Geographic in the asylum library, I waited my turn. in the asylum library, I waited my turn.
Patients, with accompanying nurses, made their rounds of the stocked shelves, conversing, in low tones, with the asylum librarian, an alumna of the asylum herself. Glancing at hermyopic, spinsterish, effaced--I wondered how she knew she had graduated at all, and, unlike, her clients, was whole and well.
”Don't be scared,” Doctor Nolan had said. ”I'll be there, and the rest of the doctors you know, and some visitors, and Doctor Vining, the head of all the doctors, will ask you a few questions, and then you can go.”
But in spite of Doctor Nolan's rea.s.surances, I was scared to death.
I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead--after all, I had been ”a.n.a.lyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.
I kept shooting impatient glances at the closed boardroom door. My stocking seams were straight, my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans. Something old, something new....
But I wasn't getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice-patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder.
”All right, Esther.”
I rose and followed her to the open door.
Pausing, for a brief breath, on the threshold, I saw the silver-haired doctor who had told me about the rivers and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey, and eyes I thought I had recognized over white masks.
The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.
Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note (i) (i) By Louis Ames By Louis Ames With eight drawings by Sylvia Plath
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