The Collected Stories

  Lynch looked up quickly. “No,” he said, “she won’t be coming here. That’s impossible.”

  “Too far?”

  “No, she just lives over in Jersey, it’s not that. It’s just impossible, that’s all. “There was an embarrassed pause. “Look, I’m not trying to be mysterious or anything; don’t get me wrong. I’ll explain it to you some other time.”

  Awkwardly, they talked of other things for a while, and then Lynch got out his stationery box and began to write a letter. He was still working on it, tearing up pages and starting them again, when the lights went out at ten o’clock, and he had to strike a match for light to put his writing things away. It must have been after midnight when Garvey was awakened by a harsh, repeated, strangely muffled sound; in his dream it had been a dog barking far away. He opened his eyes and listened. It was the sound of weeping, desperately stifled as if by a pillow, and it came from Lynch’s bed.

  Garvey was permitted to share the secret about the girl a week or so later, one evening when the climate between them seemed right for confidences. And after that, for the rest of the long summer of waiting for Lynch’s lobe job, the shared secret brought Garvey into a special kinship, gave him a special responsibility.

  He had seen it coming all through supper. When the trays were cleared away, Lynch came over to sit on the chair between their beds, and that was when it came out. “Look, Frank, this is just between you and me, understand? I figure I’ll go nuts if I don’t tell somebody.” He drew the chair closer. “This girl I’ve been telling you about. It’s Kovarsky.”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Kovarsky. You know, the nurse.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned, Tom,” Garvey said. “Congratulations.”

  “Now, listen, don’t let on about this, whatever you do, understand?”

  “Oh, hell, don’t worry; I understand.”

  “I started dating her after I got home,” Lynch went on in his half-whisper. “I never messed around with her here. Thing is, see, there’s some kind of a regulation against nurses having personal contacts with the patients, and old Baldridge has it in for Mary anyway. She could lose her job if we’re not careful. Hell, I wanted to tell everybody. I felt kind of proud about it, you know what I mean?”

  Garvey started to speak, but Lynch said, “Sh-sh-sh,” for Costello was sauntering across the aisle, followed by Coyne.

  “Lynch, old man,” Costello said. “We need a pair of pants. The lad here turned in his clothes like a good boy, and now he needs a pair of pants. You still got that suit in your stand, haven’t you?”

  “Coyne?” Lynch said. “What the hell, Coyne, you mean you’re going out?” Garvey was surprised too. This was old stuff for Costello, but Coyne had been taking the cure conscientiously until now.

  “Ah, just for a couple beers,” Coyne said. “We’ll get back in time for the bed check at eleven.”

  “Well, look, Coyne, you’re welcome to the pants,” Lynch said, “whole suit if you want it, but I’d think twice about this going-out crap if I were you. I mean, you go out tonight, then you’ll want to go out tomorrow night, and pretty soon—”

  “Pretty soon he’ll be just like me,” Costello broke in. “Right, Lynch? One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.” He clapped Lynch on the shoulder and laughed. Coyne laughed with him, self-consciously, and so did Lynch, shaking his head. “Ah, don’t worry, Lynch, I’ll take care of the lad. Bring him back just like new, and that’s a promise. You got Professor Garvey here for a witness. Right, Professor?”

  Then they had gone toward the latrine, Coyne hugging Lynch’s blue trousers furtively under his arm. Lynch shook his head again. “Guess I sound like some kind of an old lady, preaching that way, but that bothers me. I mean, a single guy, all right, let him kill himself if he wants to, but Coyne’s married and he’s got a few responsibilities. I can’t see it. And that goes for you too, you bastard. I catch you goofing off, with that pretty wife of yours, I’ll break your head.” He laughed. “How about that—and I’m the guy that used to raise all the hell around here, on Report all the time. But you see? That’s what Mary’s done for me. It’s like I was married to her already.”

  “That’s fine,” Garvey said, “except for the business of having to keep it a secret. Must be pretty hard to take, when she’s around every day.”

  “It’s not too bad. For one thing she’s not around every day; half the time she works the other wards. And when she’s here we kind of wink at each other and whisper a little bit, like when she’s giving me a sponge bath or something. And then we write a lot of letters and I call her up when she’s home. Not on this portable phone here in the ward, you get no privacy on that bastard. I use the booth down the hall, you know? The one that’s supposed to be for the staff? I wait till nobody’s around and then duck in there. It is a pain in the neck in some ways, though. Like this week, she’s on the midnight-to-eight shift, you know? So a couple nights ago I thought I’d go into the nurse’s office around one, maybe get to see her alone. Jesus, fourteen different guys coming in for sleeping pills and aspirins; we never had a chance.”

  “You going to try it again?”

  “Ah, what’s the use. Be the same story. Besides, I got no business running around after midnight. I’m taking the cure this time, and anyway, after tonight she goes back on days.” He yawned and stretched his big arms, and then he leaned back with a reflective look. “Only thing that really bothers me, is the way some of these wise guys talk about her. You know the way a guy talks about a nurse—‘Boy, I’d like to get into her pants’; stuff like that. Sometimes I want to stand up and say, ‘Look, you bastards, lay off. That’s mine.’ You know what I mean?”

  After lights out, he went on whispering about his girl and their five months together. From the start they had found they could sit for hours over a couple of beers, just talking, and have a wonderful time, which was something he’d never been able to do with a girl before. And there were times, long afternoons on a sand dune, for instance, and nights in the rich, dark secrecy of her parked automobile, when Lynch felt almost sick because he knew he had never been so happy. He had not taken her “all the way,” however. “I could have,” he said. “I could have twenty different times, we were so close to it—I’m not saying that to brag or anything, I just mean I could have very easily—but I didn’t, and I think that was one of the things she liked about me at first. I guess all the other guys she’d been out with had knocked themselves out trying for it, and she got fed up with that stuff. I said, ‘Honey, I can wait. I know when something’s worth waiting for,’ and I think she liked that.”

  Coyne and Costello did not get back for the eleven o’clock bed check, but fortunately there were several other empty beds then, and many voices in the latrine, so the five-to-eleven nurse, Mrs. Fosdick, let it go with a familiar cry through the latrine door: “I want everybody out of there in five minutes.” But when she came back again just before her shift ended, an hour later, she meant business. Her flashlight was trained on Coyne’s empty bed this time, and Lynch tried to cover for him. “Coyne’s in the latrine, Mrs. Fosdick.”

  “Oh, yeah? How about Costello?”

  “I think he’s in there too.”

  “Well, they better be,” she said, and the flashlight went away. Mrs. Fosdick was a squat middle-aged widow who did her job exactly the way Miss Baldridge liked it, and everybody said she would be the next charge nurse if Miss Baldridge went back into the Army. “Coyne?” she called. “Costello? You in there?”

  There were muffled cries of “Yeah” and “Sure thing,” and a moment later the two of them came in to bed, giggling and weaving through the dark ward. “Jesus, that was a close call,” Coyne whispered to Lynch, tiptoeing across the aisle. “We just barely got in there, taking off our clothes, when she comes to the door and hollers in. Oh Jesus, I’m half loaded.” He sat down on the foot of Garvey’s bed and told them all about it, giggling and filling the air with his sharp breath. They had tak
en the bus to some gin mill about a mile down the road and started off with beer, but then they met these two broads—kind of old, he said, but not too bad—and Costello started buying shots all around. “He’s telling them his name’s Costello and mine’s Abbott,” Coyne said. “Jesus, that guy’s a million laughs when he’s half crocked. So anyway, here we are, drinking shots and having a big time, and all of a sudden I see it’s eleven o’clock. I says, ‘Jesus, Costello, we better shove off.’ He says, ‘Ah, don’t worry so much.’ Well anyway, I finally get him outa there, and he tells the broads we’ll be back at twelve-thirty.”

  “So you’re going out again?” Lynch asked him.

  “Sure, soon as that little Polak nurse, what’s-her-name, comes on duty. Kovarsky. Costello says he can fix it up with her.” He stood up and peered across the dark aisle.

  “Guess he’s in the office now, talking to her. Oh Jesus, what a night.” Then he loped over to his own bed and lay down to wait, and Garvey tried to sleep. But half an hour later he heard someone stumbling around Lynch’s bed again. “Lynch,” Coyne was saying, “You awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here’s your pants. Guess we’re staying in.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ah, my boy Costello. Now I can’t get him outa the nurse’s office. He’s been in there for an hour, got his arm kinda halfway around her, and every time I go to the door he gives me this big wink and makes a sign for me to leave ’em alone. Guess he’s really giving her the business.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Lynch said, with what seemed to Garvey exactly the right degree of disinterest. “How’s he making out?”

  “Ah, Christ,” Coyne said. “I don’t think he’s getting to first base.”

  Lynch put the pants away, turned over and settled himself for sleep.

  The next afternoon he came back from a visit to the forbidden telephone booth with a confidential grin. “I just heard all about Costello last night,” he told Garvey. “Said she couldn’t get rid of him till almost two. He was in there all that time trying to promote a date for himself.” He cocked one foot on the chair and rested a forearm on his meaty knee. “I got half a notion to take him aside and tell him he’s wasting his time.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I’m trying to keep this thing quiet, remember?” The feet came down and he straightened his back, hitching up his pajama pants. “First place, he’d never believe me, and in the second place he’ll find out soon enough, if he keeps it up. She’ll tell him if she has to.”

  About a week later his confidence seemed badly shaken. The portable ward telephone, a coin-operated instrument on a wheeled platform that could be plugged in beside the beds, was a constant source of quarrels among the patients; its users were always accused of hogging it. Costello began hogging it more than anyone else, but after the first few arguments it became a standing ward joke, especially among the men on his side of the aisle, who started calling him Lover Boy. He would lie in bed and talk very low into the phone for an hour at a time, sometimes shielding the mouthpiece with his hand.

  “You know who he’s talking to, don’t you, Frank?” Lynch asked one evening, half-smiling but looking annoyed. “You know who he calls up all the time?”

  “Oh, hell,” Garvey said. “How can you be sure? Could be a different girl every night.”

  “Look; when I tried to call her last night the line was busy until just about the time he got done over there. So tonight I listened real close when he made the call. It’s her number he gave.”

  “You mean just from the sound of the dial? You can’t tell anything from that.”

  “You don’t dial numbers in Jersey, you give them to the operator. And it’s her number he gave, right down to the J on the end.”

  They both watched Costello mumbling and grinning into the telephone. “Well,” Garvey said, “you’ll notice he does all the talking.”

  “Oh, sure, I know that. I know he isn’t making out or anything, don’t get me wrong. Just makes me a little sore, that’s all. I wonder what he talks about all that time.”

  As soon as Costello hung up, Lynch walked out to the telephone booth. When he came back he lay down and listened to his radio for a while. Then quite suddenly he snapped it off and came over to Garvey’s bed. “You know a funny thing, Frank? When I called her up I said—just a little sarcastic, you know, not sore or anything—I said, ‘Honey, you’re a pretty busy girl.’ Didn’t want to come right out and say I knew it was Costello, you know what I mean? Might sound like I was jealous. And I figured she’d tell me about it, like she did before, but she didn’t. Said it was her sister using the phone. So what could I say? Call her a liar? I don’t know what the hell to think.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Garvey said. “Probably just that she was afraid you might be jealous; might get upset over nothing.”

  “Well, yeah,” Lynch said doubtfully, “I guess you’re right.” He didn’t want to talk about it any more, and all the next morning he was silent and brooding until the mail came. But when he read the letter he received, and it looked as though he read it several times, he seemed relieved and pleased.

  Garvey caught his eye. “She still love you?”

  Lynch smiled, half embarrassed and half proud, and said yes, he guessed so. And that afternoon, when Mary Kovarsky took the pulses after Quiet Hour, she gave Lynch a look that sent the color rising flagrantly in his thick neck. Even with the mask covering half her face, it was a look conveying all the reassurance in the world.

  Everything seemed all right, then. Lynch had no further trouble getting his calls through, and Costello no longer hogged the portable telephone; apparently he had given up. Any traces of doubt were removed a month later, when it became evident that Costello had, as Coyne put it, gotten himself shacked up with something in the neighborhood, possibly one of the girls they had met that night in the bar, when Costello had been a million laughs. This was indicated—proven to Coyne—by the fact that he had begun going out three or four nights a week, sometimes taking Coyne along but always leaving him after the first few beers to go off alone. Soon he stopped taking Coyne altogether, and it was regularly reported that the headlights of a car came up to within a hundred yards of the latrine’s fire exit, where the car apparently picked Costello up and drove him away. Once he returned a white shirt he had borrowed from old Mr. Mueller, who held it up with comic chagrin to show it was smeared with lipstick. “Damn shirt’s been in my stand for two years,” he whined, surrounded by laughter, “and all I ever got on it was dust.” And Coyne, examining Costello’s bare back when he stripped to the waist in the heat of that same afternoon, swore he could see scratches, evidence that frenzied fingers had clawed him. “Damn, boy,” he said, “she really must’ve given you the business.”

  By now it was late summer, heavy and hot in the ward, and except during visiting hours the men would lie half-naked on stripped beds, too hot to read or write or play cards, while the radios droned. (“. . . It’s a high, high fly ball out to left field; Woodling’s under it—a-and—takes it, to retire the side. Say, men: Want a shave that leaves your face feeling like a million dollars? . . .”) Electric fans had been shelved at either end of the room, but their lolling wire faces barely stirred the sickroom air, barely lifted and let fall the dangling corner of a sheet. In order to survive the afternoon it was almost essential to have some promise of an evening’s reward, so beer parties in the latrine had become more frequent, arranged by telephoning a local delicatessen whose delivery boy had standing instructions to wait outside the fire exit until a patient slipped out to meet him. It was on just such a day, with a party planned, that Lynch received his final letter in the afternoon mail. He came over to Garvey’s bed with that odd, incongruous little smile that plays on the lips of the very shy when they announce a death. “It’s all over, Frank. She wants to call the whole thing off.”

  “Christ, Tom, what do you mean? Just like that? Out of a clear sky?”

  ??
?Wasn’t exactly a clear sky,” he said. “Seems that way now, but I guess I’ve known for a couple of weeks she was acting kind of funny—” He broke off, as if bewildered, far from satisfied with what he had said. “Ah, I don’t know, I don’t know, it just don’t sound natural. You want to read it?”

  “Not unless you want me to.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Go ahead—see if it sounds natural to you.”

  Mary Kovarsky’s handwriting was a blend of lifelessly even grammar-school scripts and girlish affectations. Some of her i’s were dotted with little circles.

  Dear Tom,

  I’ve been trying to write this letter for a long time but I guess I was afraid. I’m not as brave as you are about a lot of things. But I guess the only thing to do is write it and get it over with. If we go on this way one of us is bound to get hurt.

  I don’t want you to call me up any more or write me any more letters, Tom. I’ve thought about it again and again until I think I will go crazy or something if I think about it any more, and that is the way it’s got to be. If I ever wanted to get married to anybody it was you, Tom, but I guess I just don’t want to get married. Not yet anyway. I don’t feel sure enough of myself.

  After tomorrow I am being transferred to one of the Gen’l Med. Wards, so you won’t be seeing me any more and I think that will make it easier. I will send your letters and your foto back as I guess you will want them. You can throw mine away if you like. I wish you a lot of luck in getting well soon.

  Sincerely,

  Mary

  The party shaped up about nine. Two cases had been ordered and when Garvey and Lynch joined the group in the latrine the delivery boy had just arrived. Coyne brought the first case through the fire-exit door, and then old Mueller wrestled the second one inside, his scrawny back bent painfully. Costello gave him a hand, and they stowed both cartons in the shower stall, where they would be out of sight in case an angry nurse opened the door or an unfriendly attendant walked through. The parties always began the same way; after the hiding of the beer and a search for can openers, the first round of cans would be punctured with careful noiselessness, and the men would settle down to talk, very quietly at first, about the nurses on duty that night—whether they were good skates or could be counted on to make trouble. It was a big, ugly room of yellow-brown tile, staringly lighted by two big globes in the ceiling. The only places to sit down were the open toilet bowls that stood in facing rows against two of the walls, two or three steel chairs from the ward that had been left here from previous parties, and an overturned wastebasket.