The Arrangement (32 page)

“I do not know.”

She was grateful somehow, for this small honesty. “Then when will it be over?” she said.

Dr. Nigst lifted his heavy shoulders and explained the surgery again. They didn’t know what was wrong with him, what was making this happen, only that if one of those clots stopped the blood to his leg, he would lose his leg. To his heart, a cardiac arrest. To his brain, he’d have a stroke. It was the worst story Mary Frances had ever heard. In her head, she began to write another.

*   *   *

In the morning, Tim’s foot was blue, then white. He thrashed and moaned but never seemed to rise above the morphine; he sweated through his sheets. The children came and went.
David brought newspapers. Norah brought her notebook, some chocolates and clean clothes, but Mary Frances’s silk party dress was like a wilted corsage; to take it off would be to give up in some way. She left the clothes folded in their bag.

David asked Dr. Nigst if he thought there would be another war.

Again, his shoulders rose and fell. “They say it is a pact in Munich, but yes. Yes, it feels like war again to me.”

“Yes,” David said, as though he could feel it, too.

“But who knows?” Dr. Nigst said. “Who knows.”

Rex and Edith knew. A cable came from California; the children’s passage home had been arranged. Norah’s German lessons, the accordion she hoped to learn to play, David’s last pining thoughts of his horrible girlfriend, they would have to leave it all behind.

“But Dote,” Norah said, “we can’t leave you alone with this. We can’t.”

Mary Frances looked at Tim, still and white under the wash of drugs.

“It’s already done,” she said.

Norah wept. David stood tall between the women, his hands clasped behind him, and Mary Frances could imagine him in the uniform he’d worn in school, perhaps another uniform, if things took the turn they seemed to be taking. Before all this, she would have cried with Norah, she would have begged David not to do anything rash. She would have gathered their thoughts into a neat package to take with them, all sorted and saved for later. Now it was all she could do to get them to their train.

*   *   *

In the morphine, Tim lay perfectly still. He sighed and hummed and slept, he ground his teeth until his jaw clicked against itself, but he did not move. When the morphine wore off, he prayed. He wept. He writhed as though someone had set the sheets on fire. When she touched his hand, he yelped as if she had struck him, and she had to learn not to touch him anymore. It was a whole new kind of horrible conversation they could not stop having.

She hovered near the bed, waiting. They could not tell her why he was still in pain. Sometimes she held his water glass while he slept, waiting until the same thing started up again.

*   *   *

When Tim’s foot turned yellow, Dr. Nigst said they would have to take his leg.

“How much?” Mary Frances said. Even just a little was too much, but she would give anything now, anything they asked to have Tim back.

“Please, just a moment, Madame, and I will tell Mr. Parrish about the surgery. If you would step outside—”

“Outside?”

“He is in tremendous pain. I’m sure you do not want to see—”

She didn’t even have to think about it; this new sure thing rose in her now and pushed her forward. She leaned over Tim, her lips to his ear. His hands were already twisting at the sheets.

She said, “Darling, that leg is going to kill you. They are going to cut it off.”

“Oh Christ please,” he said. “Cut it off, cut it off.”

She looked at Dr. Nigst as if she had won something. That would be the last of it: Tim would heal, he would come to walk again, and they would return to Le Paquis. It was just his leg. She had never been the sort of woman who allowed for the worst.

“Cut it off,” she said.

But somehow the pain got left behind.

*   *   *

Tim reclined in the hospital bed he had not left in weeks and held a book open in his lap. He turned pages he did not read. He looked at the book without seeing it, looked out the window, looked at her. She thought how hard it was not to hate the thing that pulled your lover into himself, no matter what it was. She wrote that down.

She wrote everything down now, what Dr. Nigst said or the nurses, what Tim said when he was lucid, what he screamed when he was not. She wrote to keep a stitch running through her thoughts, to have something to do with her thoughts, because what was happening was important and someday she would need to remember. Someday she would need to remember everything, even this.

And the words across the page, page after page, meant time moved forward. The light falling across the room, the nurse that came at noon, at four, the meals that came, uneaten now, she wrote to move from one to the next to the next. It was the darkness that was uncountable. In the dark, when all Tim could manage was a whimper, he begged her to drag him to the window, break a mirror, lift a pillow, please—would
she help him? Of course she would. In the dark, she would do anything.

But in the morning, the shots would come, he seemed better, and they bore on.

“Do you know,” he said, “from where they cut it on down, I can’t remember one goddamn thing about my leg.”

She lifted her eyes from her notebook. He was looking at the place it should have been, the drape in the sheets, the leg that wasn’t there but still somehow throbbed and burned and itched.

“I can’t either,” she said.

“It might have had an ingrown toenail, but I’m not sure now. I can’t remember. It looked like all the others.”

She had the sudden thought maybe she would cut her hair, cut it all off in a handful at the base of her scalp. She would like to be shorn. She would like to lose something that didn’t matter.

“We’ll find something,” she said. “Something that works. And once you’re better, we’ll go back to Vevey and our house and our garden.”

“Our garden? It will have to be your garden now.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. We’ll starve.”

Tim had started to tremble and blanch. The nurse was on her way.

“Tell me, Mary Frances,” he said. “Tell me how we will go back.”

And she began.

Vevey, Switzerland

Spring 1939

I
t would be the last time they took the train to Milan. They had no reason to take it now, no business in Milan, but they used to love to take the train, and these last times were what was left to them. Le Paquis was sold, their trinkets sorted, boxes packed. At the end of the week they would take the
Normandie
to New York, and on to California, the new home they would buy in the desert, the whole of Europe slouching toward war.

They spent money as if it were paper now: they bought books and left them in cafés, they drank gimlets and good wines and ate whatever they pleased: potato chips and beer for dinner, plates of fried minnows sparkling with salt. They bought gifts for everyone they knew, vellum stationery and broad-nibbed pens, Italian paintbrushes, hats, perfume. They bought fourteen months’ worth of
Analgeticum
, each ampoule wrapped in a cardboard comb and sleeve, nested like honeybees in a steamer trunk she’d pushed beneath the narrow bed at the
H
ô
tel Trois Couronnes
. When the
Analgeticum
ran out, Tim would lose his other leg. If he lived that long.

They bought the drugs from Dr. Nigst, and only the
Analgeticum
helped Tim’s pain, not the cobra venom or bee
stings, the careful diet or the mountain air, not morphine or whiskey or beating his head bloody against the hospital wall. And they sold the
Analgeticum
only in Switzerland, where the end of the world was coming soon.

The full trunk beneath the bed became a kind of liquid calendar. They had fourteen months. They knew how it was going to go; they had it all locked away. What was there to do but take the train once more to Milan? What was there to do but be together?

*   *   *

Tim woke, his midnight shot run out and the electric licking in his guts already chattery and loud. He watched the ivory face of the clock. He could hear Mary Frances breathing like the breath of the clock, slow measured rounds, the minute hand, the seconds, the dial spinning in him now faster and faster until he keened on his springs. He reached for Mary Frances, and Mary Frances reached for the ampoule and syringe. She scored the glass top with her teeth to break it open, drawing up the dose, fast into a muscle, any muscle—his arm, his hip, his thigh. He watched her face now, still sleeping or half sleeping, the thick hum of sleep on her breath and the needle aspirating in her closed hand. She rubbed the spot she’d hit and whispered things he could not focus to hear. Seconds more, seconds more; they waited.

It took longer to do everything now. Once the shot hit, she swung herself across his lap, one foot flat on the bed beside his hip, watching as he pressed himself against her. She smiled at him—oh, the mornings, the slow turns she made, her dark hair loosely braided down her back, her eyes always open,
her hands on the sharp new jut of his ribs. It was June; they had been married now three weeks, four days, and they rubbed themselves against each other every morning in one way or another, like flints and sticks, and half the time, miraculously, they caught.

The shot took hold and gave him time.

Later she bathed and dressed. Her head was empty in the morning; the day had yet to wear her down. She was working on a new book, several books, the coupling of sentences harmonic and loud like the coupling of trains.
The love-life of an oyster is a curious one. Spatting and spawning, spawning and spatting
. She relied on rhythms now, the blue ribbon in her hair matching the blue in her sweater, the blue shadow she painted on her eyelids down by the lash.
Spawning and spatting, spatting and spawning.

She called the line aloud into the other room.

“Tim? What do you think?”

He was probably asleep. But she knew one day she could do something wrong with the needle or the dose, she could leave too much within his reach. She knew he was probably asleep, but her hands gripped the edge of the marble vanity, and for a full five seconds, she couldn’t bring herself to go and see.

Then, “Darling,” he said. “I didn’t hear it. Come tell me again.”

*   *   *

The train left the station at ten, Tim navigating the narrow passageways with his crutches; he never stuttered at it, as if the leg had never been necessary in the first place. He loved
the swaying motion of the cars along the tracks, loved to watch Mary Frances sway in front of him, would follow her anywhere. To their compartment, and then the restaurant car, the dark scarred tables and wide views, the faded advertisements off-kilter above the windows, as they had always been.

And the same people worked the train as always; in the restaurant car, the old waiter and the young, their black jackets and long Parisian aprons, leaning against the bar of the kitchen with small glasses of vermouth and cigarettes. When the old waiter came for their order, tears leaked from both eyes that he did not wipe away; they might have been for them, for this journey, his country, it didn’t matter, really. Mary Frances told him she had missed their trips together. Tim asked about the weather. No one acknowledged the cause or need for crying.

“Your Asti, as always,” he said. “And something else?”

Tim tipped his hand to Mary Frances. She didn’t look at the menu, and the old waiter didn’t write anything down. In all their trips to Milan, all the things she’d eaten on this train, the old waiter had always pretended to listen to her order and then brought her what he wanted to, whatever was fresh and good from the kitchen, what he thought she’d like. She was flattered to be treated so carefully. Still, she said some things, he nodded and left, and she turned back to Tim.

They leaned into each other across the table, threading their hands together; they touched whenever they were near enough now, Tim’s foot resting on the seat next to her, his crutches by the wall. The train chuffed and runneled through the Alps, still distantly cragged with snow. Their Asti arrived,
popped and poured for them to toast their future or their pasts, but they just drank it down.

Soon the tunnel would appear ahead of the tracks, and always before they had dreaded it: the echo of their own travel, where they had been and where they were going disappearing in the blackness. Their waiters dreaded it, too, and the chef in his high white hat. But today they sat across from each other, and the dread never came. Whatever was happening to them had already been cast, was here, now. As they slipped into the darkness, Tim whispered something to Mary Frances, and she laughed the kind of low, throaty laugh not heard in public places anymore. The young waiter watched them and sighed.

When the train stopped at Domodossola, they made their way back to their compartment to wait for the border guards. In the corridor, they passed two Blackshirts, a man between them, his hands cuffed to each. You saw that sort of thing all the time now, their three faces sharing the same empty look, and Tim met it squarely, stopping to let them pass.

Their compartment was full of German tourists, their backpacks and girth, their ruddy faces and long legs a tangle in the aisle. They stood politely, to make room.

Tim was hurting now, she could see it in how his hands seemed to shimmer in his lap. She looked at her watch; it was too soon for another shot. She went into her bag for the pills to hold him, but she would give him a shot if he needed it, she didn’t care anymore. She had come to hate this as much as he did. The border guard appeared at the compartment door, but Mary Frances kept her eyes on Tim, his beautiful birdlike face so taut, his eyes so fragile. She swore she heard
something shatter and bent to her purse again. The pills were in here somewhere.

Finally she pressed a tablet into his palm. The compartment door slammed; the guards were running in the corridors. The Germans smelled of hay and sweat, their words chinking low in their throats, but Mary Frances watched Tim. Slowly his face released; he might have been asleep.