Kinflicks (14 page)

But here in the hospital there was nothing to look back on, to count forward from, with pleasure. There were no photos around to remind her of the children as babies, or of Wesley as a handsome young army officer, or of her wild white-haired father, or of any of the dozens of people that popped into her mind associatively at home. At home she could spend hours doing nothing but strolling through the rooms recalling incidents from the past. Here in this gleaming hospital, here in this anonymous green room, she had no past.

Likewise, there was nothing here to look forward to. Either she would die here or she would leave as soon as she was well. In either case, the hospital itself was merely a way station, a purgatory of the present..

But it was morbid to be thinking like this. Of course she wouldn't die here, couldn't even if she wanted to, which she had often enough in recent years. She was no longer young, but she wasn't old yet either. She hadn't paid her dues, done her time on earth. She wouldn't be allowed to close out her accounts this soon, she was sure of it. She would recover from this attack just as she had from the two previous ones; she would survive, no doubt to sustain yet another attack of this disease before long. Or of another disease. So it went.

Mrs. Childress was dabbing her ear lobe faithfully every fifteen seconds. Mrs. Childress' filter paper disks were usually masterpieces. She blotted the cuts in spirals, the large stains on the outer rim growing progressively smaller as they swirled toward the center, eventually disappearing altogether when the blood finally clotted. Dr. Vogel had only to glance at a disk done by Mrs. Childress to read how long clotting had taken, how copiously the blood had flowed. Miss Sturgill tended to be too impatient when she did the test; her blots would smear or merge, or she would dislodge the newly forming clot and upset the reading.

Mrs. Childress sighed sadly. Apparently her blood was failing the test once again. ‘Twelve minutes,' Mrs. Childress muttered to herself, shaking her head. ‘What we gonna do wid you, honey?'

‘The drugs aren't working then?'

‘Well, I don't know about
that.
You'll have to ask the doctor, honey.' Then in a whisper she added, ‘But if you want my opinion, dear, they ain't no tellin what would happen without ‘em. So you just keep takin' ‘em like the doctor says.' She handed Mrs. Babcock her prednisone, and Mrs. Babcock raised her hand to her mouth and placed the white pills on her tongue, like a communicant the wafer. Mrs. Childress held a cup of water to her hps. All that was needed was for Mrs. Childress to recite, ‘The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.'

Mrs. Childress held an enamel pan under Mrs. Babcock's nose. With tweezers she began pulling out the bloody cotton wads. They were saturated and had been on the verge of leaking. Mrs. Babcock held the pan and watched blood dribble from her nostrils onto the soaked cotton. Then she laid her head against her pillows while Mrs. Childress blotted her nose and mouth with tissue and started packing her nostrils with fresh cotton. Blood was oozing down her throat. She had to keep swallowing in order not to choke on it. Standing and walking increased the bleeding. But she still tried to get around as much as she could. For instance, she walked to the sun porch for meals. She figured that if she gave in to the temptation of lying around in bed all day, she never would get out of this place and back to her own house where the silver had to be polished, and the closets straightened, and a hundred different things she resolutely tried to look forward to.

‘Do you have to go into the bathroom?' Mrs. Childress' approach to this topic was an advance on that of Miss Sturgill, who would bark like an army sergeant, ‘How about a B.M. for us, Mrs. Babcock?'

‘No thanks,' Mrs. Babcock said, sitting up and swinging her legs slowly over the side. Mrs. Childress put the fur-lined suede slippers on Mrs. Babcock's feet, inspecting with a sympathetic grimace the giant moist purple bruise that covered most of Mrs. Babcock's left foot and ankle. It was throbbing dully as blood rushed to it. Mrs. Childress held out her arm, like a gentleman to a lady at a dance. Mrs. Babcock clasped it and stood up, her limbs aching as her faulty arterial system revved up.

And so she and Mrs. Childress began their thrice daily stroll down the dim hallway with its spotless white plaster walls and green marbleized tile floor. Mrs. Babcock negotiated the fifty feet to the sun porch by shuffling her feet forward a few inches at a time.

‘I had the strangest dream last night,' she told Mrs. Childress companionably. ‘I dreamed that Miss Sturgill and my daughter, Ginny, the one in Vermont, were whispering at the foot of my bed. I wonder what that means. Funny how real dreams can seem.'

‘Weren't no dream, honey. I seen her myself.'

Mrs. Babcock stopped. ‘You mean Ginny's
here?'

Mrs. Childress nodded.

‘But
why?'

‘Mrs. Yancy explained it to you. Don't you remember?'

‘She did?'

“How she had to go over at Europe, and how your daughter was comin' down to keep you company?'

‘Yes?' Mrs. Babcock honestly couldn't remember. Was it the drugs, or was it senility? ‘But I don't
need
someone here with me every day. You'd think I were dying or something.' She chuckled. When Mrs. Childress didn't laugh, she looked at her face questioningly, like a prisoner studying her jailer for some clue as to when she'd be paroled. Mrs. Childress' face was mask-like, but it was always mask-like when her sciatica was bothering her.

The others were already at their place at the table — Mr. Solomon, Sister Theresa, and Mrs. Cabel. The four of them were the only ones on the corridor who were ambulatory. The other dozen or so ate in their rooms and were seldom seen, either because they couldn't make it to the sun porch or because they chose not to try. Mrs. Babcock nodded and took her seat between Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Cabel. Mr. Solomon was a wizened little man with a band of frizzy gray hair encircling his bald dome. His glasses lenses were probably half an inch thick and magnified his eyes to the size of dinner plates. Behind these lenses his eyes were clouded over with the gray film of inoperable cataracts.

‘Nice day,' he said with a wide smile.

‘Yes,' Mrs. Babcock agreed coolly. She had known Mr. Solomon slightly for many years. He had been head of the jewelry department at one of the downtown department stores, and Wesley had always taken him their clocks and watches for repair. Wesley had also bought Ginny's high school graduation present from Mr. Solomon — a twenty-one-jewel white gold Lady Bulova wristwatch, which Ginny had since worn sporadically. Nevertheless, Mrs. Babcock preferred to keep her distance. After all, just because they were stuck in this hospital together was no reason for instant friendship, when twenty-five years of acquaintanceship hadn't produced it. Anyhow, why invest the emotional energy necessary to initiate a friendship when it would be terminated very soon by her leaving. And perhaps by his leaving as well. She couldn't be sure. He had emphysema and sounded awful, but she was no doctor.

Mrs. Babcock glanced out the window to check on the ‘nice day' Mr. Solomon had mentioned. The morning sun had just cleared one of the red clay foothills behind Wesley's factory. The face of the foothill was etched with interconnected gullies that fed run-off water into the Crockett River below. Because of the nature of her illness, Mrs. Babcock knew that she was bound to see the gully pattern as an arterial system, the huge gullies at the top branching down the face of the slope into dozens of lesser gullies, which branched in their turn into an intricate lacy design and eventually tapered off into nothingness.

Mrs. Cabel was grunting insistently. Mrs. Babcock looked in her direction, determined to be pleasant, no matter how upsetting she might find Mrs. Cabel's greasy hair and crossed eyes and sputtering efforts to make words. They had gone to the Episcopal church together for years; Mrs. Cabel had taught Mrs. Babcock's children in Sunday school. It certainly wasn't Mrs. Cabel's fault that she had had a stroke. But on the other hand, it wasn't Mrs. Babcock's fault either; and she didn't understand why, when she herself was sick, she should be required to function as a social chairman when she just wanted to be left alone. Of course, she could remain in her room for meals, and thus never have to see these people, but that wasn't the point. She needed to be up and around. If she could only be at home, she could do that without encountering at every corner fellow townspeople who were even sicker than she and who served merely to depress her. Why did Dr. Vogel insist that she be here? It wasn't as though she were dying.

Miss Sturgill came in pushing the food trays. Mrs. Babcock couldn't figure out why she looked forward to mealtimes when the food was invariably bland and unattractive. Perhaps it was because mealtime was one of the few activities in her day, and about the only activity she could anticipate with pleasure, the others being shots and tests and so on. She lifted the metal warming pan and confronted an ice cream scoop of Cream of Wheat, powdered scrambled eggs, limp greasy bacon, Mother's Glory white toast and strawberry jam.

Sister Theresa reverently crossed herself and folded her hands at chest level and bowed her head. Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Babcock froze guiltily in mid-bite, though Mrs. Cabel went on eating noisily. Sister was a large beefy woman with a red face and with gray hair pinned into a severe bun. She had taught for many years at the Catholic grammar school in town. She wore the hospital-issue gown and robe of green wash-and-wear material; around her neck hung a gold-plated medallion featuring praying hands and the phrase, “Not My Will But Thine.' Sister had cancer, had had one breast removed. Secondary tumors had popped up since in her lungs, and there was a chance that the other breast would have to go, too.

They ate in silence. Partway through her reconstituted eggs, Mrs. Babcock heard the theme from ‘Love Story' wafting up from the Southern Baptist church on the circle in downtown Hullsport.

‘I installed those chimes,' Mr. Solomon informed them with a modest blush.

‘They're lovely,' Mrs. Babcock assured him.

‘Vell, at least you can rely on them for a change.' They were gonging out the hour — six, seven.

‘What do you mean?' Mrs. Babcock asked.

‘Vell, they're electric The hand chimes only got rung if somebody vas there and felt like ringing them. But these go off every fifteen minutes vithout fail, rain or shine, day in and day out. And you get a different song every hour.'

‘Hmmm, yes,' Mrs. Babcock said doubtfully, remembering ringing the carillon bells herself as a member of the Southern Baptist youth group — prior to marriage and to Wesley's insistence that she convert to the more dignified Episcopal church. Ringing the chimes had been considered a rare honor then. People scheduled themselves months in advance. She and two others would climb the steep narrow steps into the white wooden bell tower. From there you could see across the Crockett to her father's factory, with the then-forested foothills behind it. You could see the white mansion where she lived, and the farm stretching out behind it, until the ridge on which the Cloyds' maroon house sat intervened. You could look down at the much lower steeples of the four other churches around the circle. The barn swallows that lived in the bell tower would be darting around at eye level. You could look past them down Hull Street to the train station, where a train might be arriving in great puffs of black smoke, pulling cars mounded high with gleaming chunks of black coal from southwest Virginia.

When the clock on the face of the train station read 4:55, they would begin the hymns, pulling carefully on their assigned ropes. Sometimes someone pulled the wrong one, or two discordant notes were sounded in unison, or the beat faltered. But usually it went pretty well, and ‘The Old Rugged Cross' or ‘Rock of Ages' or ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus' would peal out across the town and countryside, bouncing back and forth among the surrounding foothills. Townspeople, wherever they were and whatever they were doing, would stop everything to listen to the concert. And when the hands on the train station clock read approximately 5:00, the hymns would end and the hour would toll.

If it were winter and the sun were due to set soon, she and the others would sometimes stay up in the tower and watch for it, their chatter falling silent as the orange ball slid behind the jagged pines on a foothill that bordered her family's farm. As the bats in the tower began stirring in the dusk, the young people would descend to their families and their suppers. Somehow, this ritual gave them a comforting sense of control over the passing time of their lives.

But now, thanks to Mr. Solomon and modern technology, the chimes tolled every fifteen minutes, a different show tune every hour. People could confidently set their Accutron watches by the chimes. And no one had to go to the ‘bother' of clambering up that rickety bell tower every afternoon. There was progress for you!

Clutching the chrome bar on the tile wall next to the tub, Mrs. Babcock slowly lowered herself into the cool water. She would have preferred a good hot steaming bath, but Dr. Vogel forbade it, insisting that it would cause her blood to flow even more copiously. Settled in the tub with water to her chin, she regarded her submerged body. There was a dark blue cast to the water. At all the points where bone rubbed flesh — in other words, almost everywhere but on her inner thighs, her buttocks and her breasts — were huge bruises of variegated colors, according to their age. A bruise would start out black and blue, then mellow to purple, then green, then yellow, like a fruit ripening. Once it had faded completely, it would be replaced by a fresh new bruise, as the regenerated capillaries re-ruptured. Her flesh was a veritable rainbow. She could have provided a perfect instructional exercise for young children in the ways colors blend together to form new colors.