The Plague and I
She looked over at us. Kimi was asleep. Eileen had slipped her movie magazine under her mattress. The new little nurse said, “Well, I won’t report you this time but next time the Charge Nurse will hear about it.” She rustled self-consciously out. Eileen reached down and got out her movie magazine again, then looked over at Minna and said, “Bitch.” Minna had her eyes closed. The Bible was conspicuously placed on her bedside stand.
The staff at The Pines did not discuss tuberculosis with the patients. If you asked the doctors or nurses about your progress or lack of progress you got a noncommittal stare and no information. However, the Medical Director did issue printed pamphlets on tuberculosis, its cause and cure. These were in the form of Lessons and were mailed to the patients every few days.
My first lesson on tuberculosis began; “Tuberculosis is contagious: The germ is thrown off in spray or sputum from the nose and throat. Patients must ALWAYS cover the nose and mouth when sneezing and coughing. Handshaking and kissing are means of spreading the germ. Do not wipe the hands or face on the bedclothes. Do not swallow sputum. It is dangerous! It may be the start of that complication known as intestinal tuberculosis. . . . The careless patient is not conscientious and lacks Character. If he will not learn he should be sent home.”
I asked Kimi if she knew how she got tuberculosis. She said, “I don’t know exactly but I think it was from the high mark. I went to American high school from eight to three-thirty and Japanese school from four to six. My father required me to get high mark in both school. I ended up with two diploma, two honor pin and tuberculosis.” I asked her if anyone in her family had ever had t.b. She said, “No, but the Japanese as a race have no resistance to tuberculosis. When I had my tonsil removed and my throat did not heal my doctor suspected tuberculosis. I have a light case but with no resistance, who knows, I may die within the year.”
She asked Eileen how she got t.b. Eileen said, “Well, it says here that it’s contagious and handshaking and kissing are means of infection. I guess I got it from handshaking.” She laughed. She said that, as both her mother and father had died of t.b., her gramma was forever telling her that she was going to get it. “I guess she’s glad now,” she said. Minna said, “Eileen Kelly, that’s a horrid thing to say about youah pooah old grandmaw.”
Eileen said, “A hell of a lot you know about it. You’ve never seen my gramma. And how did you get t.b., Little Eva? From some ole Yankee travelin’ man?” Minna said, “Ah was nevah strong. Ah was a real sickly child, all big blue eyes and spindly legs. Mama said she nevah in the world expected to raise me.” Eileen said two short bad words.
Minna ignored her and went on with her story. She said, “Ah used to have real bad attacks of pleurisy every wintah and the doctah used to give me light treatments. He nevah x-rayed mah lungs and the doctah at the t.b. clinic said Ah’d had t.b. for yeahs and yeahs. Ah’m real bad. Cavities in both lungs . . .” “And a big one in your head,” Eileen finished rudely.
I told them about the man in my office and everyone was very incensed. Kimi said, “It is so hard to tell with men. They all seem to cough and spit so much.” Then the nurses came for the supper trays and it was time for the House Doctor.
Eileen, from her large assortment of perfumes with atomizer tops, chose a heavy, musky scent and sprayed plenty of it on her hair and on her pillow, Minna used some violet toilet water and arranged her Bible within easy reach on the coverlet, but the new young doctor merely looked in the door and said, “Everybody fine?” and left. From behind him, the Charge Nurse winked and I almost fainted. After they had gone Minna said, “No wondah he didn’t want to come in—it smells like a hoah house in heah.” I thought what a pretty word whore was with a Southern accent.
On October fifth, Kimi had an x-ray and the next day was given fifteen minutes a day reading-and-writing time. The Charge Nurse came in before rest hours and said, “Miss Sanbo, you may read and write for fifteen minutes a day,” and Kimi said, “Thank you very much, but I do not think I will have the time.” Eileen said, “When can I have reading- and -writing time?” Minna said, “Oh, Ah thought you already had youah readin’-and-writin’ time.” There was a terrible silence and Minna covered her mouth and said, “Oh, hush mah mouth, what have Ah said?”
After supper the Charge Nurse took Eileen to her office for a little talk. She delivered her back in about a half hour, red-eyed and defiant. After the Charge Nurse had left, Minna said, “Ah declaah, honey, Ah didn’t mean to tell. Ah really thought you did have readin’-and-writin’ time.” Eileen said wearily, “Oh, shut up!” Then she crawled to the foot of her bed and turned the radio very loud.
Minna had only one visitor but he came on the stroke of two each visiting day and stayed the full two hours. It was “Sweetie-Pie,” her adoring husband. Sweetie-Pie was about fifty years old, bald, fat and doughy-faced, but he brought Minna flowers and candy and bath powder and fruit and bath salts and jewelry and perfume and bed jackets. She always referred to him as though he were a cross between Cary Grant and Noel Coward and said often, “Ah just don’ know how I was lucky enough to get that big ole handsome husband of mine.”
Once, right at first, Eileen had said, “You can stop right after the ‘big old,’” and strangely enough Minna began to cry. She said that “she loved that big ole handsome man” and that he was her “Sweetie-Pie” and after that nobody said anything. After all if it made her happy to think dough-face was handsome, that was the important thing.
The day after she gave Kimi her reading-and-writing time, the Charge Nurse told her she could walk to the bathroom once a day. Kimi was ecstatic until after breakfast when she stood up to put on her robe. Then Minna said, “Oh, honey, youah so tall, youah just enohmous! I had no idea you were so big!”
Kimi, looking as though she had been slapped, said, “The Japanese are such little fellow, already I felt like Gulliver with the Lilliputian.” I said, “But you’re not very tall, Kimi.” Kimi said, “Oh, yes, already five and one half feet and probably still growing.” I said, “But I’m five feet seven,” and Eileen said, “And I’m five feet five.” Minna said, “And poah little me can’t reach five feet with high heels. It’s shuah lucky foh me that Sweetie-Pie says that good things come in small packages.” Eileen said, “And I can get just as sick to my stummick on a little of your guff as I can on a whole lot.” “And the bite of a little rattlesnake is just as deadly as the bite of a big one,” Kimi said, moving slowly and regally out the door.
VII
Heavy, Heavy Hangs on Our Hands
THE FIRST TWO weeks at The Pines went whizzing by. Everything was new, everything was interesting, and I was sick. In spite of Eileen, Minna, washwater girls, store girls, Charlie, Bill, the store boy (who delivered the store girl’s orders) and visitors, I rested and rested and rested and rested. And as the Medical Director had predicted, the resting grew easier, my pulse pulsed slower and I relaxed more as long quiet day succeeded long quiet day.
Exactly two weeks, to the day, after I entered the sanatorium I slept the whole night through and the next morning I didn’t cough at all when I woke up. By ten o’clock my sense of well-being was so great it was almost choking me. I had energy, my brain was clear, I didn’t ache any place, and I loved The Pines and everyone in The Pines. The depression and terrible sense of foreboding I had been wearing around my shoulders since the night I learned I had tuberculosis, had been mysteriously lifted off during the night and though it was a cold foggy morning and both the washwater and my hot-water bottle had been lukewarm, I brushed these off the day like a crumb off the bedclothes. I felt well!
At noon Miss Muelbach, whom Eileen had christened Gravy Face, brought the mail and threw it at us so that a letter from Mother went into my cup of tea. “Poor thing,” I thought as an aura of sweetness and light flared up around me, “probably tired.” I smiled benignly at Miss Muelbach and she glared stonily back at me. I started to wipe the tea off Mother’s letter but she said, “You know you’re not supposed to
read your mail until you’ve eaten your dinner.” “Oh, I’m not going to read it,” I said so sweetly I was almost singing. “I’m just wiping the tea off it.” “Well, all right then,” said Gravy Face and stumped out of the room on her gray hairy legs.
Mother’s letters have always been a delight and she is such an untiring and fluent letter writer that the family often refers to her as “Scrib.” In my letter writing I usually take some small incident and by a process of lies and poor descriptions build it up and up into something dull but very long. Mother never bothers with such deceit. She merely sits down at her desk and writes what is going on at the moment.
This letter told me that one of the dogs had run a thorn in his foot. That a neighbor was just outside the window improving the shining hour by cutting the last living branch from his wife’s poor little prune tree. That she had just baked an applesauce cake. That Anne was begging her to find a school that did not include “rhythmetic” in its curriculum. That large boys of sixteen and seventeen knocked at the door constantly to ask if Joan could come and pitch for their baseball teams. That Dede was making a coat and with her usual hardheadedness was not taking any advice from anyone. Mother wrote, “It is quite difficult for me to sit quietly by, evening after evening, watching her try to force the sleeves in upside down.” That Alison was still surrounded by “the locusts,” as mother called her high school friends, who descended on the house after school and ate everything that wasn’t metal or hadn’t been baked in a kiln. That Madge was just then playing the piano very beautifully in spite of a bandage almost to the shoulder on her right arm. Mother said that Madge hadn’t yet revealed whether the bandage denoted t.b. of the bone or that she was preparing to get off work, later in the week. That everyone missed me terribly but the children were becoming very well adjusted to my absence.
The whole letter was as much a part of Mother as though she had snipped off a piece of herself and sent it to me. I read it for the fourth time just before rest hours and that day, at last, I was able to think of home and the children without the slamming of a coffin lid as an off-stage noise. I spent the rest hours making plans for the future and they differed from any previously made because they were based on a premise of “when I get well” instead of “if I die.” The rest hours still seemed two hundred hours long and I was still cold but there was some reason for it now. It was like bearing the pain to remove a sliver instead of bearing the pain just to bear pain.
When at last the nourishment cart came clanking down the hall, I didn’t have my usual end-of-rest-hours nervous frustration. I felt relaxed and refreshed. As I was drinking my buttermilk, a nurse came in and brought me a large box of pale pink carnations, my favorite flower. The nurse took the box and returned with the carnations jammed into what appeared to be a large hunk of spleen. Closer observation showed it to be merely a pottery vase, shaped and colored to look like spleen. At least it had not impaired their smell and lying on my side close to the edge of the bed, in a direct line with the cold raw wind, was almost as satisfactory as burying my face in the carnations.
The room was very quiet. Eileen was writing a letter under the covers, Minna was sleeping and Kimi was using her fifteen minutes’ reading-and-writing time to look at some movie magazines, generously delivered in person by Eileen early that morning. I smelled my flowers and listened to the faint scratch of Eileen’s pen, the soft little swish as Kimi turned a page. Suddenly the Charge Nurse was in the room. She was angry and her really beautiful blue eyes sparked. She said, “It has been reported to me by other patients that there is noise in this ward in the evening. Is that true, Mrs. Bard?” I said, “Why, er, uh, er . . .” Eileen said, “Who’s the snitcher?”
The Charge Nurse turned and gave her a look like a dipper of ice water. She said, “I want to know if the report of noise in this room at night is true.” Kimi said, “How many people have reported this noise?” The Charge Nurse said, “What difference would that make, Miss Sanbo?” Kimi said, “If many people have reported the noise it must be the radio because if the noise were sufficient for many people to hear, the nurse would also hear it and stop it. We occasionally exchange pleasantry in the evening but not for the ear of the whole ward.” The Charge Nurse looked completely baffled. She said, “But this patient said,” and we knew then that it was one particular patient, “that she could hear you laughing and talking.” Not one of us said anything. The Charge Nurse said, “She said that she heard you very plainly, Mrs. Bard.” I said, “But I haven’t spoken out loud since I got here. How could she recognize my voice? All whispers sound alike you know.” Eileen said, apparently to herself but in a very audible voice, “Dirty little snitcher.” The Charge Nurse said, “You will hear more of this!”
I noticed that not once had her accusations included Minna. I also remembered that Minna had that morning gone with her for a throat examination. I could almost hear that “hush mah mouth, what have Ah said?” I looked over at her but she was feigning sleep with her white eyelashes lowered over her pale eyes. I was sure I hadn’t talked any more than anyone in the hospital and certainly not one millionth as much as Eileen, but I was frightened. What if I should be sent home for breaking rules? Me, a grown woman. Whether or not I had broken the rules was unimportant, the important thing was the implication that I hadn’t been intelligent enough to see what was being done for me.
Eileen said, “It seems goddamn funny to me that the Old Dame never once looked at Little Eva. It also seems goddamn funny that Little Eva was with the Old Dame this very morning. Hush mah mouth, what did you say, you dirty little snitcher?” Minna kept her eyes closed but her lids twitched noticeably. Kimi said in a voice as gentle as breath, “In Japan, I believe it is customary to pour boiling oil over the tongue and down the throat of a betrayer.” Minna turned her face to the wall.
When Charlie came in to put up the beds, Eileen told him what had happened. He said, “There’s one in every ward. I don’t see why they do it unless it’s because they like to keep things stirred up.” I said, “But I didn’t do anything wrong.” He said, “Oh, you won’t convince the Charge Nurse of that, because she’s convinced that everybody’s wrong and she just loves a chanct to point it out to them. Right or wrong, you’ll probably get a letter from the Medical Director.”
My beautiful sense of well-being was gone and in its place was such a feeling of dread and depression that it shriveled my stomach and tied my intestines in knots. When the House Doctor made rounds and asked how I felt, I told him I felt as if I’d swallowed an outboard motor. He laughed, punched me in the stomach and ordered a sedative. The Charge Nurse compressed her lips and wrote it down.
After pulses she came for me in a wheelchair. She took me down to the examination room and told me that there was no room in the hospital for ungrateful patients who did not obey the rules. I told her that I had not broken any rule. She said that the patient who reported me had said that she could not rest in the evening because I made so much noise. I said that that was obviously ridiculous and for her to ask the night nurse. She said that she was going to take the matter up with the Medical Director and I said that I didn’t see what she had to take up. She didn’t answer, merely swelled her nostrils and wheeled me back to bed.
When Katy brought my sedative, I told her the whole childish incident. She said, “You know that’s one thing that’s wrong with this place. They forget how important peace of mind is in resting. Oh, well, the worst you’ll get will be a letter from the Medical Director, so drink this and have a good sleep.” After lights out and just before we went to sleep, Kimi said, “I forgot to tell you that Indians used to stake an informer to the ground, then press on his eye socket and pop out his eyeball like a grape.”
The next day I got my letter. It was a quotation: “‘Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. . . . Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, the fortune and th
e happiness of every one of us, and more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. Anyone who plays ill is checkmated—without haste, but without remorse.’” The letter was signed by the Medical Director.
That night my stomach was in knots again and the House Doctor ordered another sedative. When Katy brought the sedative, she read the letter and passed it to Eileen and Kimi. Eileen read it and said, “I only play checkers myself.” Kimi said, “I cannot believe in the omnipotence of one who never overlooks a mistake, particularly since I have been taught that ‘to err is human, to forgive divine.’” Katy said, “And a grudge will soon rot the pocket you carry it in. What do you say we wipe the slate clean and start tomorrow off fresh?”
I was glad to, Minna was pitifully eager, Kimi agreed but Eileen said, “You don’t remove a skunk’s smell by paintin’ out his stripe.” Katy said, “Come on, honey, for the sake of the cure, let’s have peace.” Eileen said, “The first time you get a knife in your back it’s the other fella’s fault. The second time it’s your fault. Little Eva’s had her knife in my back about three times. From now on she’s strictly poison.” Katy winked at Kimi and me and left. Eileen crawled down to the foot of the bed and turned the radio so that it was clear and loud.