Collected Novels and Plays (24 page)

The woman put an arm round her shoulder. “No,” Vinnie said distractedly. “Tell me right out, don’t be afraid.”

“He’s been given a second transfusion. The doctor will talk to you presently. Now, what have you had to eat?”

She had had nothing, wanted nothing, but Lady Good rang for broth and toast, and only allowed their talk to continue in earnest after the traveler had lowered the cup from her lips. “First of all,” she said then, “I love Francis. Almost as much as I love Benjamin. You won’t be offended by my saying that?”

“Not at all. You mustn’t spare
my
feelings,” replied Vinnie in a dry whisper, as if Lady Good had confessed to an impropriety.

The Englishwoman bowed her head. “I can’t help it, I feel I’m partly to blame. He wasn’t himself yesterday, but I had no inkling. I kept talking throughout lunch like—”

“You mustn’t!” exclaimed Vinnie, her eyes filling with tears at last, her mouth working.

“—like the silly woman that I am—while he—”

“Hush!” Vinnie leaned forward. The vision of another person’s emotion had roused and defined her own. The situation lost its dreadful strangeness. “You mustn’t think that way! Francis has told me all about you, how much you mean to Ben, so please! Please!” Her words, for all the good will they conveyed, carried a certain implied reproof. Francis was
her
son. If anyone blamed herself it would be Vinnie who did so,
without flinching—not Lady Good. “Look!” She blinked back tears and blew her nose, then, gently taking the other woman’s wet chin in her hand, raised it until their eyes met. “I can bear it. Can’t you do the same, for my sake?”

“Ah, you’re braver than I!”

The little shrug with which Vinnie disclaimed this insight only illustrated the truth of it. “Tell me what you can,” she said. She fixed her gaze on Lady Good’s flat, creased lips.

“Well, of course,” she heard as they began to move, “the person we have most to thank is Mrs. McBride. Without her he would surely have
bled to death. She’d been to a late film with her cousin, you see, and had no sooner come in than she heard a moan from his lavatory. The ambulance was there in a matter of minutes.”

Vinnie held up her hand, struggling to speak. She recalled now that Lady Good had said “transfusion,” but it hadn’t registered yet. Hearing on the telephone no more than that Francis had made an attempt upon his life, Vinnie had assumed him to have swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. In this one way she had often imagined her own suicide. “Bled …?” she finally brought out.

“Dear Mrs. Tanning, how thoughtless of me! Of course you’d not have known, would you? I somehow took for granted—”

“It’s not your fault,” whispered Vinnie. “Give me a moment, though, before you go on.”

Within her range of vision stood a plant that had stalks covered with pink bristles, and big triangular leaves, greeny brown, each of which seemed to have split open to reveal a jagged form, membranous and pink. It wasn’t a plant she would have chosen for display in a hospital. Now I’ll be sick, she thought. The idea of cutting had always appalled her. She had never doubted that the prick of a needle could put the princess to sleep for a hundred years. If
Francis as a child ran to her with the slightest rose-thorn-scratch on his hand, something would rise in Vinnie’s throat; she grasped her own hand in a panic of empathy. Oh God, she thought—for there would be scars as well, at his wrists no doubt where cuffs might easily slip back to reveal them, perhaps even at his throat—and her hand flew to her own throat and its thornless roses. Until now Vinnie hadn’t thought to ask, how could he do this to
me?

“All right,” she nodded nevertheless. “Mrs. McBride found him. She’s Ben’s nurse?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say—?” Here Vinnie checked herself. “You were there, too!” she exclaimed, confronting Lady Good with the fact.

“Yes, I was there.”

Vinnie’s curiosity left her. She refused to profit by another’s advantage. “Has Ben been told?” she asked instead.

“No. He’s here in the hospital, on the floor above, as a matter of fact.” Lady Good proceeded to tell all she knew about the radioactive medicine. “At nine o’clock this morning,” she finished, “I peeked in his door—only the nurses are allowed to go into the room—and waved and chatted, naturally, as if I were just there to say hello. I’m sure he could tell nothing from my face. Dr. Samuels said it
would be most foolish to upset him at such a time.”

Well then, Vinnie would bear the full consciousness by herself. She touched Lady Good’s arm. “Do me a favor, Prudence, dear—may I? I think of you as Prudence—and get some rest. You’ve had none all night.”

“I have, though—from two o’clock till just before calling you, at seven. The doctor gave me something.” Lady Good looked helpless. “He said there was nothing for me to do.”

“Well, you’ve been wonderful, believe me.” Too late Vinnie caught the note of dismissal in her words. “Or is there,” she added, embarrassed, “something else I should know?” It crossed her mind to question Lady Good about recent circumstances that might have driven Francis to will his own destruction. That she didn’t came in part from her conviction that it was nobody’s business but hers—neither
Prudence’s, nor the doctor’s, nor even poor sick Ben’s. Her upbringing had taught Vinnie to be humiliated by violence of any description. You couldn’t discriminate. It was wicked to murder, but no less so to
be
murdered; it gave rise to speculation, it hinted that the victim had knowingly roused an immoderate passion. If some ugly motive lay behind Francis’s deed, she prayed he hadn’t been so foolish as to betray it in front of
outsiders. It would be a painful enough thing for her to live alone with.

But Francis, she knew and thanked God for the knowledge, didn’t go around shooting off his mouth. He was blessed with tact and judgment far in advance of his years. Often, indeed, Vinnie would have preferred him to be more open about himself, to tell her what he was doing, what
his friends were like. She recalled in particular one afternoon when, just back from abroad, he’d fallen from a real animation into a silence, a sullenness. A
cold hand closed upon her heart. She had let herself forget, till then, how he could injure her. Still, as Francis no longer confided in her, she assumed he confided in no one. Useless, for instance, to ask Lady Good where he had spent the previous evening, and with whom.

Jane’s name, however, was already jotted down in a little notebook Dr. Samuels carried. This cheerful person came upon them now, just as Lady Good was agonizing over whether to tell Mrs. Tanning what she hadn’t yet heard. He solved her problem by shooing her blithely away, begging her not to start a jealous scene; all he wanted was a private word with her companion. “Are you sure it’s Mrs. Tanning?” he went on, taking Vinnie’s
hand to show he was joking. “Why, she looks more like that young man’s sister! And stop worrying your pretty head over
him.
He’s coming along elegantly!”

Alone with Vinnie, his tone changed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he smiled. “I’m not a comedian at heart.”

She couldn’t hide how much this put her at ease. The rough humorous attentions of certain men filled her with disgust.

“I’m a doctor of the old school,” he continued, sociably reminiscing. “At my age I can’t be anything else. Oh, I use up-to-date methods. What I’m doing for Ben might be called revolutionary in a modest way. But I’m old-fashioned in that I never really got the hang of the so-called psychiatric approach. I’m not proud of that one bit. I’m just admitting it to you because you look to me like a perfectly lovely
and intelligent woman who never got the hang of it, either.” He grinned and slapped his knee. Vinnie smiled in spite of herself, thus proving Dr. Samuels equipped—if only accidentally—to deal with a disturbed mind. “Now,” he said, “with a patient like your former husband we have the plain human problem of persuading a man who’s been spoiled all his life by getting his own way—” “Spoiled rotten,” Vinnie put
in with a sensible but weary shake of the head—“persuading him that, while he’ll never be as well as he once was, he’s not nearly so ill as he’d like to think.”

“He’s always lived by charm,” sighed Vinnie. “Now he’s begun to see that charm isn’t all, and he’s like a little boy, he doesn’t know what to do. I honestly think Francis is more grown up than his father will ever be.”

“I wish I knew your son better,” the doctor resumed after a thoughtful pause. “I had no clear picture of him (that’s how psychiatrists talk) during my stay at the Cottage. I was saying, Ben’s state of mind is an easy one for an old fuddy-duddy like me to handle. Most states of mind are. Then one comes up, like your boy’s here, where I have to admit right off the bat that I’m beyond my depth. I just don’t trust
myself to see into the motives.”

“Neither do I,” declared Vinnie gratefully. “He’s always been way beyond me. I guess you and I are both in the same boat.” With a sweet smile of complicity she let one hand rest on his starched white sleeve.

It didn’t surprise her that, whatever there was to find out about Francis, the doctor, so far, hadn’t succeeded. In fact it rather pleased her, as though her son had made a vital scientific discovery or written a book nobody could understand. It didn’t mean that
she
, once in the room with Francis, wouldn’t know—mothers always did know. But outsiders lacked such sharp eyes. Behind her pleasure, if it was pleasure that Dr.
Samuels had been so hard put to produce in her, lay the fear of his prying out something—she couldn’t think what; it waited, vague and awful, a skeleton in her closet, something bare, grinning, of which any medical man had been trained to recognize the littlest finger-bone. She resorted now to a tried and true social blackmail, one that worked not only in Savannah but up North, in the following way. Meeting for the first time—especially under painful
circumstances—a lawyer, a college professor, a traffic cop, Vinnie would start to practice a democracy unorthodox in its purity. She would look, say, a minister straight in the eye and speak to the human cipher she saw there, sweetly but firmly ignoring whatever a lifetime in the Church might have bestowed upon such a man, some understanding of good and evil, possibly, or gift for comforting the bereaved—to say nothing of his investment with divine authority. Soon the
minister would be feeling, with her, that his most casual allusion to Scripture was a blow
below the belt. Vinnie held the unspoken opinion not that you should modestly hide your light under a bushel, but that you should have no light to hide; and much as this attitude infuriated her in her friends—“They don’t read, they don’t think, they sit all day at the card-table!”—she found it indispensable in any crisis involving a
professional man. Right now, like a kind of Circe, she had set about transforming the all-seeing doctor into the
man
—the decent blind insignificant man, belonging to her world and to no other. But Dr. Samuels hadn’t lost his sprig of moly—given him by the god whose caduceus was the very emblem of practiced medicine—and it was with a sinking dismay that Vinnie took in his next words.

“So, I’ve called in a younger man, who’s had all the training I lack in these cases, for his opinion. I want you to talk to him, too—oh, not today,” he chuckled, seeing her stricken face, “but tomorrow, the day after, as soon as you feel stronger. By then, Dr. Sullivan will have had time to interview Francis.”

“Am I to see Francis?” asked Vinnie feebly.

“By all means. I’m taking you to him now. He’s conscious, but we’re keeping him under morphine. You stay with him as long as you like.” The doctor slapped his knee to show that he was a busy man. “I’m sure Ben would be pleased to see you, by the way.”

“Ben? Wouldn’t he—?” she began, horrified.

“Wouldn’t he what?”

“Suspect, from my being here …?”

“Then lie to him!” laughed the doctor, his bald brown head agleam. “Tell him you’re passing through town on your way to visit friends.”

Vinnie stiffened. “I’m afraid I’m not very good at that.”

“Suit yourself. Ben values your friendship, he’s told me how much. It’d do him good to see you. In two or three days, of course, we’ll have to tell him the whole story.”

Vinnie closed her eyes. “I’d give anything to spare him this ghastly, ghastly shock. Does he
have
to know?” She knew he did. If nothing else, he’d see Francis’s scarred wrists. “I know, I know …” she said, and started wearily out ahead of Dr. Samuels.

“One moment, Mrs. Tanning.” When she turned he was shaking his finger at her. “My dear lady, we don’t help those we love by hiding disagreeable things from them, any more than we help ourselves by refusing to face these things.”

What haven’t I faced? Thought Vinnie, squaring her shoulders.

The doctor kept right on. “I honestly don’t know why Ben
isn’t
as sick as he thinks, living in an atmosphere where people spare him, coddle him, treat him like the senile invalid he’s sure to become if this nonsense doesn’t stop. Believe you me, he’s strong enough in mind and body to cope with a far greater shock than this. I don’t know that it won’t do him good to cope with something real for a change. It
might just lead him nearer to life.”

These were ideas that Vinnie herself tried scrupulously to live by. But they left her uncheered, skeptical, even, of their relevance to the moment at hand. Something
real!
she thought wryly—real as a nightmare! She looked Dr. Samuels straight in the eye, as though she had found him out. He said no more, but beckoned her down two lengths of shining linoleum. Pausing in front of a door ajar, he expressed a final doubt. “Lady Good did tell you
precisely what happened to your son?”

“Yes, oh, yes!” said Vinnie, rapidly nodding.

The doctor made the gesture of washing his hands. “It’s unlikely, I’m afraid, that he’ll be able to lead a normal life, in the fullest sense.”

“Naturally, naturally!” she brought out with a sound like laughter. What on earth was he trying to say?

“We’ll do all we can for him, though, Dr. Sullivan and I.” And with this the little doctor, to whose solicitude there were limits, bowed her into Francis’s room and went his way down the corridor.