After the Fire (5 page)

“Yes,” Gerald said, replying to Dad's question, “I'm very sure. We had a neighbor who'd been wounded during the Korean War. They had to rebuild his face. It was fascinating to me, a marvel of science and art, what they did. I knew almost at once when I saw him that that was what I wanted to do with my life.”

He spoke precisely, as he did everything with precision, whether slicing an apple, folding a sweater, or as now, laying the knife at the top of the plate, parallel to the edge of the table.

Dad inquired, “How long does it take to be certified in plastic surgery?”

“Three years at least.”

“So then,” said Francine, “you must be looking for a residency right now.”

“Yes, I've sent out a good many applications.”

“You will want a first-class teaching hospital.” And when Gerald nodded, she added, “There are none around here. The local hospital would hardly do for you.”

“That's true.”

They were sparring over Hy's head. Of course Francine
is glad that he will have to leave here, she thought. Why does he never talk to me about it? What is behind this?

“At least they pay you fellows these days,” Dad said. “Years ago, interns and residents were expected just to be grateful for the opportunity to learn.”

“They pay, but not very much, especially if a person has debts.”

“Ah, yes. You owe the university here for their loan, Hy tells me.”

“And I still owe for the care of my mother before she died.”

“You're an ambitious young man. And responsible. I take my hat off to you.”

Hopeless, thought Hyacinth.

As if he had sensed her mood, Dad changed the subject to the tulips. “So nice of you to have brought these flowers. Makes you think spring can't be far away.”

Now Gerald addressed Francine. “They reminded me of this yellow wallpaper. I always think this room, and this whole house, belong in a magazine.”

A desultory conversation passed across the table. Hy barely heard it. A lump of cold fear lay in the pit of her stomach.

“What do you say we go in and have a brandy?” suggested Dad. “You can practically feel the wind chill seep through the walls.”

“You all go,” Hy said. “I'll clear the table and load the dishwasher.”

He's going away, God knows where to, she thought. Am I to wait three years? He will find somebody else.

Gerald said promptly, “I'll help you.” And turning to Francine, “Don't worry, I know that goblets don't go into the dishwasher. I'll be very careful of them.”

He was trying so hard to please! But why should he care about Francine's opinion if things were coming to an end?

“No,” Hy said, contradicting him, “I'll do it myself. Go finish the chess game with Dad.”

When she looked around from the sink, Francine was standing in the doorway regarding her with a faintly sad expression on her face.

“I'll do the goblets for you,” she offered quickly.

“Eight goblets, water and wine for goodness' sake! Why is everyone making such a stupid fuss about them?” Hy blurted. And an instant later, aware of her own brusque tone, she blurted again, “Sorry. I guess I'm tired or something.”

“Not tired. Worried,” Francine said gently.

“I'm not at all worried. Why should I be?”

She was not going to open any space for the discussion that her mother probably wanted.

“I don't know why you should or should not be worried, Hyacinth. That's for you to tell me if you want to. If you think I can help.”

“Only if you have changed your opinion about him.”

Part of her wanted to cry out: “I'm afraid. I wish somebody—you or somebody—would tell me what to do. I don't know whether I should ask him first, or wait for him to ask me first. In there at the table listening just now, he even seemed strange to me. I don't know—”

“My opinion is still that Gerald is very charming and
intelligent. He speaks well. He tries to please, and as I've said from the beginning—”

Jim shouted from the hall, “Francine, come in here and invite Gerald to stay overnight. He thinks it'll be too much trouble. But the road is a sheet of ice. You'd have to be crazy to get into a car in weather like this if you didn't have to.”

“Of course. It's no trouble at all to have you stay. We have plenty of room.”

Gerald hesitated. “I've got work at home, paperwork due Monday.”

“You can leave here by noon tomorrow,” Jim insisted. “The roads will have started to melt by then. And you'll still have plenty of time to do your work.”

“You're very kind, but really, I've driven on ice before—”

Hyacinth stood there, alone under the light in the center of the hall, waiting. Why are you begging him to stay? He doesn't want to. Can't you see that?

But Dad had decided. “Go on up, Hy, and show him Paul's room.”

They went upstairs. “You didn't want to stay,” Hyacinth said, “and you shouldn't do it if you don't want to.”

“You're angry at me,” Gerald said in some surprise.

“Yes. Or no, not angry, but hurt. You had all these plans that you were just describing, and you've never said a word about anything to me.”

“I was going to do it today, but I lost my nerve. I didn't want to spoil the day.”

“Spoil the day? What do you mean?”

“Sit down, and let me explain.”

She sat down on the bed and stared at his moving lips. He was about to say something that would shatter her. She knew it. And she sat up tall, waiting.

“I wanted to tell you this when we were alone. I already have a residency—two of them, as a matter of fact, and both first rate. But unfortunately, they're both in Texas.”

“And why is that unfortunate?”

“Well, it—it's not exactly a cheap or easy commute to Texas, is it?”

His words, which usually flowed easily, came awkwardly. His smile was wan.

“Go on,” she said.

Opening his arms wide and breaking into a lament, he cried to her, “I've known about this for the last two weeks, and Hy, I haven't dared to ask. Will you wait for me? I've been so afraid of your answer. But will you?”

Then the facts struck her. “You mean we can't see each other for the next three years? What are you saying? Why?”

Softly, he put his arms around her rigid shoulders and replied, “One word explains it.
Money
.”

“But you said they pay you.”

“You're forgetting that I also have debts.”

“You can't mean this,” she whispered.

“Darling, I do. I have to.”

“You always tell me that a week away is too long.”

“And so it is.”

“Yes,” she whispered, “there must have been something in the air tonight, some poisonous premonition.
When we were at the table, I looked at you once and felt such pain! Do you understand? And I was angry, angry at the world. I didn't know why. It was as if somebody had died or gone away forever.”

“Not forever,” he protested.

“None of this makes sense. Other couples manage. Do you think I'm going to stop working, for heaven's sake?”

“It's not that simple. Unmarried, I get a room at practically no charge. Married, I don't.”

“I never said anything to you about marriage, did I?”

“Well, what else would we be doing?”

“Staying together. Being together.”

“No. I'm not going out to any hospital like that. I go either singly or with a proper wife, like everyone else there. No halfway measure.”

“So then this is a proposal?”

“Very definitely a proposal, with a proviso. We'll have to wait.”

She looked at him in dismay, in despair.

“Here,” Gerald said, taking a notebook and pen from his pocket. “Let me show you in dollars and cents so you'll see what I'm talking about.”

She watched his moving hand with its delicate blue veins and fine oval nails, this hand that knew every curve of her body. Her mind, in panic, was already leaping ahead of his additions and subtractions. Dad, she thought, he will help. He's not a rich man, but he will.

“There has to be a way,” she said. “I'll ask my father.”

“For money, you mean?”

“Of course.”

“I can't do that. I can't ask for money from him, of all people.”

“I don't expect you to do the asking. It's only natural for me to be the one. And why do you say, ‘from him of all people’?”

“I should think the answer is obvious. The humiliation—”

“—will be mine, not yours.”

“Well, I'll feel it. It's about me, after all.”

“You weren't humiliated when you accepted the money from the medical school.”

“There's no comparison. That was a loan.”

“Then make this a loan. You can repay it when you start your practice.”

There was a long silence, until with great reluctance Gerald responded, “I really don't like the idea.”

“But I like it.”

He smiled. “So now I'm finding out why they say you're stubborn.”

She smiled back. “All of a sudden, I'm feeling normal again, now that I know this has only been about money. I thought—oh God, I thought you had changed your mind about me.”

He laughed. “You're crazy. You're really crazy.” Then seriously: “This whole business may not be as easy as you seem to think it will be. You can't have forgotten your mother's opinion of me.”

“That was months ago! Besides, if Dad wants to do it for us, he'll do it, no matter.”

There was another silence until Gerald broke it again. “Well, ask then. I certainly can't.”

Often that spring, Hyacinth thought how on some far day she would look back on this time as old people do, as Granny did, endlessly reminiscing about that season of hopes fulfilled, when everything—kisses, tears, champagne, good wishes, white dresses, and flowered hats— all come into bloom.

“I'm very thankful that I can do this for you,” Jim declared on that night when it all happened. “It will free your spirit, Gerald, to forge ahead with your work. There's nothing like a too-thin wallet to distract a man.”

“So it is an established fact,” Francine observed. “Engagement, commencement, wedding, and off to Texas?”

“Two weeks after graduation,” Hyacinth said, now flushed and pink with a joyful heat.

They were in the living room. The fire was low, and the music, to which Jim had been listening when she had come to interrupt him, was also low; the Verdi
Requiem
would be forever afterward linked to this event.

“I would like both of you to know,” Gerald said at once, “besides how grateful I am, more than I can ever say, that I shall not be taking Hyacinth away from you. She's told me how you miss your sons, so I promise that after my training, we will come back here and we will stay. Doctors don't move around. I'm going to remember,” he added, this time speaking directly to Francine, “or at least I'm going to try to remember, not to call Hyacinth ‘Hy.’ She tells me you hate it.”

“That's all right, Gerald. You must call her whatever she wants. I'm really not such an ogre, you know.”

Her smile this time was gracious, and her embrace warm. What she was thinking, Hyacinth could not imagine. Certainly she could not have been taken too much by surprise. And too, very probably, she had changed her mind about Gerald. At the very least, she must see how he was trying to please.

These last weeks of the term before commencement, when his calendar was nearly empty, might have been purposely arranged to let him fit himself into the life of the house. The spring was exceptional, a long stretch of cool, green weather after a hard winter.

Jim was establishing a new perennial border on the shady side of the house. Together he and Gerald searched through gardening manuals for flowers that would thrive there, bought seedlings from the nursery, and worked outdoors together through the lengthening evenings until dark. Rarely had any of Jim's sons given him quite as much time and attention as Gerald did. They painted the lawn chairs, went fishing, shopped for a new barbecue grill, and set it up.

A lovely peace filled the air. At the turn of the road lay a stretch of woods whose owner had no objections to innocent users of his land; here Hyacinth and Gerald took long walks, sat on a log, and held long, searching conversations in a silence and serenity that were an astonishment to him. It seemed to her that they were growing even closer now, and in a new way.

At Granny's house one night, they let themselves be deliciously overfed. Afterward they were regaled with
tales of the old days, when the town was surrounded by grand estates, with their prize cattle and private railroad cars; of the chauffeured Pierce Arrows on the shopping street; of the band playing “Over There” in 1917. Before they left, Granny brought forth gifts knitted by herself: two sweaters, one for each, a matching dark blue pair. Hyacinth had felt uneasily that Gerald might be bored, for Granny could sometimes talk too much and for too long about things that interested her but might well be of no interest to anybody else. But no, he had found her “most delightful, a dear old lady, a character.”

Everything was organized by May. On a glorious morning in perfect sunshine and with stately tradition, from “Pomp and Circumstance” to the prideful presentation of diplomas, Hyacinth through shining eyes saw Gerald receive his degree: doctor of medicine. Afterward at home he was introduced to all the obligatory relatives and friends. Later in the evening he was even shown off to Martha the Nemesis and the rest of the “in crowd.” Seemingly by accident, Hyacinth had strolled with him past her house. They all made introductions; Hy, observing Martha's mild but undeniable surprise, embarrassed herself by her inner conflict between a sense of triumph and a sense of her own foolishness for giving a damn what other people thought.

Preparations for a small wedding ceremony in the garden were then in order. The brothers bought their plane tickets. Hyacinth selected the wedding dress, while she and Francine ordered the engraved invitations. A few gifts had already arrived, and thank-you notes were sent. The journey to Texas had been carefully mapped.

It was Dad who suggested, who in fact insisted, upon the party after the ceremony. “It's all right not to have a crowd at the service, if that's how you feel, Hyacinth, but you'll regret it if you don't have some celebration afterward. And besides, after living in this neighborhood, going to school here all your life, it's unfriendly not to include people. What do you say, Francine?”