Deathwatch - Final (3 page)

"Mother found him in bed with the last governess. The girl was wearing one of her own soft blue satin gowns, ripped down the center, the halves lying like jagged wings against the white sheets. She knew she'd never shut out the hideous picture: Andrew's mouth fastened on the girl's ruby-tipped breast, his fingers plunged between her naked white legs, her hands burrowing against his back, her voice a low scream.

" ‘Am I to have nothing?’ Mother bristled. ‘Nothing and no one?’ Her stomach was in a knot, her mind whirling. The girl sat up, clutching the sheet to her breasts--but not before Mother saw the sheen of the moisture on her full thighs and the bold light in her eyes.

" ‘Get out, Regina,’Andrew said. ‘Women who make monsters are not wanted here.’

"The girl tittered, and Mother fled.

"It would only get worse, she told herself. She was a prisoner here condemned to a loveless life, forced to watch him flaunt his lust for others. He would not let her love anyone--even him. Mother knew there were drugs in the locked medicine cabinet, she didn't care if it was quick or slow or easy or painful. She latched the outer door of the office and went in; then she broke the glass pane on the closet door with her fist and took the first thing that came to her hand. Inside the small brown vial there was a white powder, sparkling crystals. She spilled it into her palm, and she began to eat." Abby stopped.

"She's here right now," Ellie said. "She comes to us at night. Can't you smell her?" She wrinkled her nose, sniffing.

I caught a faint perfume: Parma violets. My eyes were dragged to the bedclothes, I knew Ruth scented the cupboards with lavender.

"Violets," Ellie whispered. "The first scent of spring."

The air seemed suddenly drenched with warm rain, earth.

"When we're separated, they'll make our new clothes from hers," Abby said. I saw she was livelier, more alert. "She likes you Stuart, the set of your shoulders, the way your eyes light. You don't smile enough--ah, but when you do."

I felt something brush my cheek, soft as fingertips trailing beloved flesh.

Ellie cocked her head. "She wants the surgery, sends him dreams to hurry. Ruth has been watering his wine, more and more. His hands will be steady, keep on with your work. She watches you."

I gave a small gasp, thinking back to times when I'd felt someone's keen stare while I turned the thin leaves of Saunders's heavy texts. Once the candle had gone out, and I'd heard the rustling sound of silk as if someone hurried from the room, wide skirts fluttering against the door jamb.

"You're her second chance. We're her salvation."

"Kiss us goodnight, Stuart," Abby said, and I leaned across the bed kissing each of their foreheads in turn. Abby's small arm went round my neck. She clung to me.

"Soon, Stuart," she whispered against my ear. I nodded thinking she meant the surgery.

"But only one of us can be chosen," Eleanor sad sadly. "Only one can survive...."

"Hush," I soothed, putting out the lamp. I left the nursery, the rational part of my mind saying it was nothing more than the fancies of two crippled girls, an imaginary game got up between them. Compensation it was called. Lonely, motherless, they invented her again. And lonely and friendless, isolated, I'd let them bewitch me with their half-truths and wishful thinking.

After that night, I made Ruth stay during the story hour. I didn't want to listen to or encourage their strange fantasies; but Abby and Ellie had no interest in my stories. I read tale after tale in Scheherezade; but I read to a pair of slack-faced dolls, their blank eyes upturned and fixed stonily on the white nursery ceiling. The only sound--apart from my thick voice--was the small, steady pricking of Ruth's needle--altering Regina's old gowns--in anticipation of their surgery.

***

"What is there to do or see hereabouts?" I asked the doctor one evening just before dinner. The month was dragging on. I felt the walls closing in; the silence was oppressive. It was just past five o'clock, he stood with his back to me looking past the library window at dead darkness. I sat in my usual place, a drift of papers and books under my nose, my eyes bleary from the dim light.

"Nothing," he said. He inhaled a small brown cigar, and I saw its glowing tip wink in the reflection of the glass. "I don't pay you to sightsee or carouse. I pay you to teach my daughters and bone up on surgical techniques."

"Am I your paid prisoner?" I said.

He stared back at me, his eyes hard. "What is there to do?" he mocked. "And don't bother asking Ruth or Gabriel. They won't answer."

He left abruptly, but not before he'd pulled another weighty volume--
A Textbook
of Pathology
--from the shelves and slammed it on the flat of the mahogany desk.

I was no slave I told myself; it was only a question of waiting ’til he fogged out some night, snoring on a couch or in his bed. So, twice I ventured out in search of company, taking the doctor's carriage. The first time I drove north toward Rhinebeck,  just inside the town limits I saw a white elephant of a place called the Beekman Arms Hotel, the oldest inn in America. Eagerly, I hitched the horse and sprinted up the brick walkway.

But it was dead winter, and apart from a few tight-lipped locals, there was no one to share an ale, or a joke with. I was a stranger, I was not stopping there, so the men talked around me in low voices and I felt walled off by their quick glances, by the way they turned back to their own cliques. I drank a brandy by the taproom fireplace. Northerners were narrow and suspicious, I thought. This wouldn't happen in the south. I stood up to go, paid my bill. I was going out the door when I caught the sound of the barkeep's quiet voice: "Lives in the house with the freaks. Teaches em."

"You can teach a two-headed cow to dance," another voice answered, "but that don't make it any prettier to look at."

I went out, wincing at the sound of soft, brittle laughter behind me. Earlier, the barkeep had asked me if I needed a room; I'd said no more than I lived nearby, that I was a tutor living with a doctor named Saunders. Stupid. I should have known better than to mention his name within 20 miles of the place.

The second time, I drove south toward Poughkeepsie determined to break the silent spell-like atmosphere of the house.

I cannot say what sent me back before I'd gone even two or three miles, unless it was the sight of the Roosevelt's house lit to the roofline, with a vast array of carriages entering, jockeying for spaces. There was obviously some huge party going on. I could see the dark silhouettes of figures moving up wide porch steps toward the doors. From across the frozen fields, I heard the distant sound of an orchestra, the violins clear and sweet.

Perhaps it was the thought of all those welcomed guests, people who knew one another as friends and lovers--and the contrast of my own loneliness. I lost heart, turned the horse around and returned feeling gloomier than when I'd left.

***

Now, I sat, watching the twins return to consciousness in the doctor's office. I felt a change coming. Certainly during the surgery, Saunders had been a different man--talkative, friendly. Perhaps the twins' deformity had been the thing that weighed all of them down, and their freedom would release him, too. With the thought, Saunders stepped lightly across the threshold, a bottle and two glasses in hand.

"It was good work, and good work calls for a celebration," he said, pouring. "Drink up, Stuart."

It was the first time he ever called me Stuart, and the wine was champagne--another first for me. I liked the giddy way it frothed inside the glass he handed me.

"Smooth," I said.

"As silk," he answered, and we both laughed, though I wasn't sure why. He called for more champagne and poured a round for Gabriel and Ruth, whose wide anxious eyes informed me they'd never seen the doctor in such a good humor.

We were both drunk and well into the fourth bottle when Ellie came to, her voice cutting like a scalpel through my champagne glaze.

"Pain," she screamed. "It hurts, it hurts, oh it hurts!" She struggled like a beached fish, and I saw the spasms take her. It was the after-effects of the ether; she began to gag.

Christ! She's vomiting, she'll drown! If she aspirates it, she'll die for sure
, I thought, panic invading me. I banged the wine glass down, ignoring the sound of it shattering, and raced to her bedside. I rolled her to one side, thumped her back, then thrust my fingers deep inside her mouth to snatch at the slimy clots of vomitus, scraping my skin against her teeth.

Only one of us can survive

Her hollow words jumped in my mind.

 "No," I shouted. "No! C'mon, Ellie, breathe, breathe!"

A greenish drool poured slowly from between her lips, there was no time to worry about a basin, I held her head and shoulders as best I could. Her stomach heaved--a welcome sight--and then she was merely sick, retching weakly over the side of the bed.

"Abby," she moaned. Her voice was a sob. I soothed her. Her sister was still asleep, Saunders had gone directly to her bed and was standing by.

Abby was blinking now; her hands swam around her head, but she showed no signs of throwing up. "Where am I?" she muttered a second before she opened her eyes. "Where's Ellie?"

"Lost," Ellie said, and at the time I thought she was still disoriented from the anesthesia or from her near crisis. I didn't know it was the true beginning of the change I'd half sensed earlier, or that it was the antithesis--a rotting corpse--to the vibrant new life I'd imagined.

"I'm lost," Ellie mewled again.

Then they both faded out, drifting into the regular rhythms of deep, undrugged sleep.

- 5 -

L
ooking back, I suppose the change—Regina’s ability to come through-- was nearly immediate. I saw it, I'm not sure if Ruth did then. It was the second day the twins were post-op, and Ruth had gone in to give them sponge baths. They were still loggy, and I was waiting for her to finish in order to check their incisions. I was only half aware of the slosh of her washcloth dipping into the basin, the soft slur of the sheet as she slid out a languid arm or leg to clean it--

"I'm finished, Doctor," Ruth said.  I felt a slight quickening--no one had ever called me doctor before--but I supposed I'd earned it, and I meant to play out the role by changing the girls' dressings with all the efficiency I could.

I went to Abby first, saw Ruth had dressed both her and Ellie in a pair of clean white nightgowns. The sides had been left unstitched to just below the level of the ribs--both to accommodate the bulky bandages and to make changing their drains and tubes easier.

I peeled the cotton nightdress upwards and, for a brief second, saw the swell of a woman's breast. Then it disappeared under the white folds of cloth. I felt my chest tighten, made myself go on with the examination. I began cutting through the thick wad of bandages, but my eyes were dragged again and again to the sight of the girl's pubes: a reddish fuzz glowed high between her thighs, as if she'd been shaved for the surgery, and the curly hairs were beginning to grow back.

Iodine, I told myself, swabbing the area with an alcohol dampened cotton ball, all the while I felt Ruth's eyes watching me. I began carefully going over the hip and abdomen area, tossing the used cotton balls into a tray Ruth held. I was looking for any signs of puffiness or infection around the long snaking incision, the angry-looking crosshatch of the sutures, but my heart was thudding at the sight of the dark V between Abby's pale legs.

I swallowed uneasily, but told myself I had to know. Ruth was standing just alongside me, and I bent over the girl, putting my back squarely in the older woman's line of vision. I lifted the neat folds of the nightgown, made my voice as casual as I could. "We just want to make sure there's no edema up along your side, Abby."

Her eyes fluttered, she took a deep breath. I saw the firm round of her right breast, a nipple as thick and brown as a cough lozenge and, just beyond the swell, a patch of long red tendrils of hair under her arm. With my left hand, I kept the sheet covering her; with my right, I probed her underarm, as if I were palpating the lymph nodes.

My fingers touched the silky hair, and I was suddenly, shockingly fully erect. I withdrew my hand so quickly it grazed the swell of her breast. I felt my lips part--heard the sound of a soft moan--but it was Abby.

"Did I hurt you?" My throat was tight.

Her eyes opened at the sound of my voice, she shook her head, no. "It itches--"

"Healing," I coughed into my hand, trying to get control. "All wounds itch when they're healing."

"No," she pointed, waving her finger in a slow sweep across her lower abdomen.

"Here?" I asked gently pressing a spot just south of her navel.

"No, lower." Her right hand lighted on the small thin rubber tube of the catheter.

"Perhaps it's loose," I said, my mind turning to medical details; if it were dribbling, the uric acid would make her uncomfortable.

I bent closer. My fingers closed on the flexible rubber, I was aware of the warmth of her skin, I smelled the lingering scent of the alcohol, and I tried to re-insert the narrow red catheter gently--there was a faint smell of violets, as if she'd bathed in a warm tub. I pressed the tube upward…..Violets. Regina…Regina….

Her hips switched rapidly, and my fingers slid lower so that the pads touched the damp glistening vulva, the folds falling over my knuckles.

I jerked my hand away, the catheter suddenly popped out, and a small warm spray of urine spurted out. Abby groaned softly. Even with her eyes closed, her face looked narrower. It had the clean lines of an older woman's with none of the smudginess of youth we call puppy fat--

"She's wet herself. I'll clean it," I heard Ruth say. "There, there, it's all right." She moved forward, her hand smoothing the girl's cheek.

"The tubing's tricky," I said, lying. "Especially on young girls--they're so--" The words died in the paste of saliva in my mouth. Abby (was it Abby?) was looking at me with a sharp intelligence, her eyes sparkling with a dreadful mirth. My heart was thudding in my chest. Abby's lower lip was caught between her teeth, and I knew, I knew she'd come. It could not be Abby, no.  I felt myself blanch, fought to control my voice. "I'll send Doctor Saunders in to check Ellie," I said, turning to the older woman.