From the Corner of His Eye

  trusted the instincts of the heart as much as logic, and the tearful entreaty of a beloved sister was a powerful restraint on common sense. She didn’t take time to pack; miraculously, an hour later she was on a plane to Spruce Hills, Oregon, by way of Eugene.

  Three hours after receiving the call, she was at her sister’s side. In the living room of the parsonage, under the gaze of Jesus and John F. Kennedy, whose portraits hung side by side, the girl revealed to their mom and dad what had been done to her and also what, in her despair and confusion, she had done to herself.

  Phimie received the all-enfolding, unconditional love that she had needed for nine months, that pure love of which she had foolishly believed herself undeserving.

  Although the embrace of family and the relief of revelation had a bracing effect, bringing her more to her proper senses than she’d been in a long time, Phimie refused to reveal the identity of the man who raped her. He’d threatened to kill her and her folks if she bore witness against him, and she believed his threat was sincere.

  “Child,” the reverend said, “he will never touch you again. Both the Lord and I will make sure of that, and though neither the Lord nor I will resort to a gun, we have the police for guns.”

  The rapist had so terrorized the girl, so indelibly imprinted his threat in her mind, that she would not be reasoned into making this one last disclosure.

  With gentle persistence, her mother appealed to her sense of moral responsibility. If this man was not arrested, tried, and convicted, he would sooner or later assault another innocent girl.

  Phimie wouldn’t budge. “He’s crazy. Sick. He’s evil.” She shuddered. “He’ll do it, he’ll kill us all, and he won’t care if he dies in a shootout with the police or if he gets sent to the electric chair. None of you will be safe if I tell.”

  The consensus, among Celestina and her parents, was that Phimie would be convinced in this matter after the child had been born. She was too fragile and too ridden by anxiety to do the right thing just yet, and there was no point in pressing her at this time.

  Abortion was illegal, and their folks would have been reluctant, as a matter of faith, to consider it even under worse circumstances. Besides, with Phimie so close to term, and considering the injury she might have sustained from prolonged hunger and from the diligent application of the girdle, abortion might be a dangerous option.

  She would have to get medical attention immediately. The child would be put up for adoption with people who would be able to love it and who would not forever see in it the image of its hateful father.

  “I won’t have the baby here,” Phimie insisted. “If he realizes he made a baby with me, it’ll make him crazier. I know it will.”

  She wanted to go to San Francisco with Celestina, to have the baby in the city, where the father—and not incidentally her friends and Reverend White’s parishioners—would never know she’d given birth. The more her parents and sister argued against this plan, the more agitated Phimie became, until they worried that they would jeopardize her health and mental stability if they didn’t do as she wished.

  The symptoms that terrified Phimie—the headache, crippling abdominal pain, dizziness, vision problems—had entirely relented. Possibly they had been more psychological than physical in nature.

  A delay of a few hours, before getting her under a physician’s care, might still be risky. But so was forcing her into a local hospital to endure the mortification she desperately wanted to avoid.

  By invoking the word emergency, Celestina was able quickly to reach her own physician in San Francisco. He agreed to treat Phimie and to have her admitted to St. Mary’s upon her arrival from Oregon.

  The reverend couldn’t easily escape church obligations on such short notice, but Grace wanted to be with her daughters. Phimie, however, pleaded that only Celestina accompany her.

  Although the girl was unable to articulate why she preferred not to have her mother at her side, they all understood the tumult in her heart. She couldn’t bear to subject her gentle and proper mother to the shame and embarrassment that she herself felt so keenly and that she imagined would grow intolerably worse in the hours or days ahead, until and even after the birth.

  Grace, of course, was a strong woman for whom faith was an armor against far worse than embarrassment. Celestina knew that Mom would suffer immeasurably more heartache by remaining in Oregon than what pain she might experience at her daughter’s side, but Phimie was too young, too naive, and too frightened to grasp that in this matter, as in all others, her mother was a pillar, not a reed.

  The tenderness with which Grace acceded to Phimie’s desire, at the expense of her own peace of mind, filled Celestina with emotion. She’d always admired and loved her mother to an extent that no words—or work of art—could adequately describe, but never more than now.

  With the same surprising ease that she had gotten a plane out of San Francisco on a one-hour notice, Celestina booked two return seats on an early-evening flight from Oregon, as though she had a supernatural travel agent.

  Airborne, Phimie complained of ringing in her ears, which might have been related to the flight. She also suffered an episode of double vision and, in the airport after landing, a nosebleed, which appeared to be related to her previous symptoms.

  The sight of her sister’s blood and the persistence of the flow made Celestina weak with apprehension. She was afraid she had done the wrong thing by delaying hospitalization.

  Then from San Francisco International, through the fog-shrouded streets of the night city, to St. Mary’s, to Room 724. And to the discovery that Phimie’s blood pressure was so high—210 over 126—that she was in a hypertensive crisis, at risk of a stroke, renal failure, and other life-threatening complications.

  Antihypertensive drugs were administered intravenously, and Phimie was confined to bed, attached to a heart monitor.

  Dr. Leland Daines, Celestina’s internist, arrived directly from dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Although Daines had receding white hair and a seamed face, time had been kind enough to make him look not so much old as dignified. Long in practice, he was nevertheless free of arrogance, soft-spoken and with a bottomless supply of patience.

  After examining Phimie, who was nauseous, Daines prescribed an anticonvulsant, an antiemetic, and a sedative, all intravenously.

  The sedative was mild, but Phimie was asleep in mere minutes. She was exhausted by her long ordeal and by her recent lack of sleep.

  Dr. Daines spoke with Celestina in the corridor, outside the door to 724. Some of the passing nurses were nuns in wimples and full-length habits, drifting like spirits along the hallway.

  “She’s got preeclampsia. It’s a condition that occurs in about five percent of pregnancies, virtually always after the twenty-fourth week, and usually it can be treated successfully. But I’m not going to sugarcoat this, Celestina. In her case, it’s more serious. She hasn’t been seeing a doctor, no prenatal care, and here she is in the middle of her thirty-eighth week, about ten days from delivery.”

  Because they knew the date of the rape, and because that attack had been Phimie’s sole sexual experience, the day of impregnation could be fixed, delivery calculated with more precision than usual.

  “As she comes closer to full term,” said Daines, “she’s at great risk of preeclampsia developing into full eclampsia.”

  “What could happen then?” Celestina asked, dreading the answer.

  “Possible complications include cerebral hemorrhage, pulmonary edema, kidney failure, necrosis of the liver, coma—to name a few.”

  “I should have gotten her into the hospital back home.”

  He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t beat up on yourself. She’s come this far. And though I don’t know the hospital in Oregon, I doubt the level of care would equal what she’ll receive here.”

  Now that efforts were being made to control the preeclampsia, Dr. Daines had scheduled a series of tests for the following day. He expected to recommend
a cesarean section as soon as Phimie’s blood pressure was reduced and stabilized, but he didn’t want to risk this surgery before determining what complications might have resulted from her restricted diet and the compression of her abdomen.

  Although she already knew that the answer could not be cheerily optimistic, Celestina wondered, “Is the baby likely to be…normal?”

  “I hope it will,” the physician said, but his emphasis was too solidly on the word hope.

  In Room 724, standing alone at her sister’s bedside, watching the girl sleep, Celestina told herself that she was coping well. She could handle this unnerving development without calling in either of her parents.

  Then her breath caught repeatedly in her breast as her throat tightened against the influx of air. One particularly difficult inhalation dissolved into a sob, and she wept.

  She was four years older than Phimie. They hadn’t seen a great deal of each other during the past three years, since Celestina had come to San Francisco. Although distance and time, the press of her studies, and the busyness of daily life had not made her forget that she loved Phimie, she had forgotten the purity and the power of that love. Rediscovering it now, she was shaken so badly that she had to pull a chair to the side of the bed and sit down.

  She hung her head, covered her face with her chilled hands, and wondered how her mother could sustain faith in God when such terrible things could happen to someone as innocent as Phimie.

  Near midnight, she returned to her apartment. Lights out, in bed, staring at the ceiling, she was unable to sleep.

  The blinds were raised, the windows bare. Usually, she liked the smoky, reddish-gold glow of the city at night, but this once it made her uneasy.

  She was overcome by the odd notion that if she rose from the bed and went to the nearest window, she would discover the buildings of the metropolis dark, every streetlamp extinguished. This eerie light would be rising, instead, from drainage grates in the street and out of open manholes, not from the city, but from a netherworld below.

  The inner eye of the artist, which she could never close even when she slept, ceaselessly sought form and design and meaning, as it did in the ceiling above the bed. In the play of light and shadow across the hand-troweled plaster, she saw the solemn faces of babies—deformed, peering beseechingly—and images of death.

  Nineteen hours following Phimie’s admission to St. Mary’s, while the girl was undergoing the final tests ordered by Dr. Daines, the beetled sky grew sullen in the early twilight, and the city once more arrayed itself in the red gesso and gold leaf that had indirectly illuminated Celestina’s apartment ceiling the previous night.

  After a day of work, the pencil portrait of Nella Lombardi was finished. The second piece in the series—an extrapolation of her appearance at age sixty—was begun.

  Although Celestina had not slept in almost thirty-six hours, she was clearheaded with anxiety. At the moment, her hands weren’t shaking; lines and shading flowed smoothly from her pencil, as words might stream from the pen of a medium in a trance.

  As she sat in a chair by the window, near Nella’s bed, drawing on an angled lapboard, she conducted a quiet, one-sided conversation with the comatose woman. She recounted stories about growing up with Phimie—and was amazed by what a trove she had.

  Sometimes Nella seemed to be listening, although her eyes never opened and though she never moved. The silently bouncing green light of the electrocardiograph maintained a steady pattern.

  Shortly before dinner, an orderly and a nurse wheeled Phimie into the room. They carefully transferred her into bed.

  The girl looked better than Celestina expected. Though tired, she was quick to smile, and her huge brown eyes were clear.

  Phimie wanted to see the finished portrait of Nella and the one of herself that was half complete. “You’ll be famous one day, Celie.”

  “No one is famous in the next world, nor glamorous, nor titled, nor proud,” she said, smiling as she quoted one of their father’s most familiar sermons, “nor powerful—”

  “—nor cruel, nor hateful, nor envious, nor mean,” Phimie recited, “for all these are sicknesses of this fallen world—”

  “—and now when the offering plate passes among you—”

  “—give as if you are already an enlightened citizen of the next life—”

  “—and not a hypocritical, pitiful—”

  “—penny-pinching—”

  “—possessive—”

  “—Pecksniff of this sorry world.”

  They laughed and held hands. For the first time since Phimie’s panicked phone call from Oregon, Celestina felt that everything would eventually be all right again.

  Minutes later, once more in a corridor conference with Dr. Daines, she was forced to temper her new optimism.

  Phimie’s stubbornly high blood pressure, the presence of protein in her urine, and other symptoms indicated her preeclampsia wasn’t a recent development; she was at increased risk of eclampsia. Her hypertension was gradually coming under control—but only by resort to more aggressive drug therapy than the physician preferred to use.

  “In addition,” Daines said, “her pelvis is small, which would present problems of delivery even in an ordinary pregnancy. And the muscle fibers in the central canal of her cervix, which ought to be softening in anticipation of labor, are still tough. I don’t believe the cervix will dilate well enough to facilitate birth.”

  “The baby?”

  “There’s no clear evidence of birth defects, but a couple tests reveal some worrisome anomalies. We’ll know when we see the child.”

  A stab of horror punctured Celestina as she failed to repress a mental image of a carnival-sideshow monster, half dragon and half insect, coiled in her sister’s womb. She hated the rapist’s child but was appalled by her hatred, for the baby was blameless.

  “If her blood pressure stabilizes through the night,” Dr. Daines continued, “I want her to undergo a cesarean at seven in the morning. The danger of eclampsia passes entirely after birth. I’d like to refer Phimie to Dr. Aaron Kaltenbach. He’s a superb obstetrician.”

  “Of course.”

  “In this case, I’ll also be present during the procedure.”

  “I’m grateful for that, Dr. Daines. For all you’ve done.”

  Celestina was hardly more than a child herself, pretending to have the strong shoulders and the breadth of experience to bear this burden. She felt half crushed.

  “Go home. Sleep,” he said. “You’ll be no help to your sister if you wind up a patient here yourself.”

  She remained with Phimie through dinner.

  The girl’s appetite was sharp, even though the food was soft and bland. Soon, she slept.

  At home, after phoning her folks, Celestina made a ham sandwich. She ate a quarter of it. Then two bites of a chocolate croissant. One spoonful of butter pecan ice cream. Everything was without taste, more bland than Phimie’s hospital food, and it cloyed in her throat.

  Fully clothed, she lay atop the bedspread. She intended to listen to a little classical music before brushing her teeth.

  She realized she hadn’t turned on the radio. Before she could reach for the switch, she was asleep.

  Four-fifteen in the morning, January 7.

  In southern California, Agnes Lampion dreams of her newborn son. In Oregon, Junior Cain fearfully speaks a name in his sleep, and Detective Vanadium, waiting to tell the suspect about his dead wife’s diary, leans forward in his chair to listen, while ceaselessly turning a quarter across the thick knuckles of his right hand.

  In San Francisco, a telephone rang.

  Rolling onto her side, fumbling in the dark, Celestina White snared the phone on the third ring. Her hello was also a yawn.

  “Come now,” said a woman with a frail voice.

  Still half asleep, Celestina asked, “What?”

  “Come now. Come quickly.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Nella Lombardi. Come now. Your s
ister will soon be dying.”

  Abruptly alert, sitting up on the edge of the bed, Celestina knew the caller could not be the comatose old woman, so she said angrily, “Who the hell is this?”

  The silence on the line was not merely that of a caller holding her tongue. It was abyssal and perfect, as no silence on a telephone ever can be, without the faintest hiss or crackle of static, no hint of breathing or of breath held.

  The depth of this soundless void chilled Celestina. She dared not speak again, because suddenly and superstitiously, she feared this silence as though it were a living thing capable of coming at her through the line.

  She hung up, shot out of bed, snatched her leather jacket off one of the two chairs at the small kitchen table, grabbed her keys and purse, and ran.

  Outside, the sounds of the night town—the growl of a few car engines in the nearly deserted streets, the hard clank of a loose manhole cover shifting under tires, a distant siren, the laughter of drunken revelers wending their way home from an all-night party—were muffled by a shroud of silver fog.

  These were familiar noises, and yet to Celestina, the city was an alien place, as it had never seemed before, full of menace, the buildings looming like great crypts or temples to unknown and fierce gods. The drunken laughter of the unseen partyers slithered eerily through the mist, not the sound of mirth but of madness and torment.

  She didn’t own a car, and the hospital was a twenty-five-minute walk from her apartment. Praying that a taxi would cruise past, she ran, and although no cab appeared in answer to her prayer, Celestina reached St. Mary’s, breathless, in little more than fifteen minutes.

  The elevator creaked upward, infuriatingly slower than she remembered. Her hard-drawn breath was loud in this claustrophobic space.

  On the dark side of dawn, the seventh-floor corridors were quiet, deserted. The air was redolent of pine-scented disinfectant.

  The door to Room 724 stood open. Lights blazed.

  Both Phimie and Nella were gone. A nurse’s aide was almost finished changing the linens on the old woman’s bed. Phimie’s bedclothes were in disarray.

  “Where’s my sister?” Celestina gasped.

  The aide looked up from her work, startled.

  When a hand touched her shoulder, Celestina swiveled to face a nun with ruddy cheeks and twilight-blue eyes that would now and forever be the color of bad news. “I didn’t know they’d been able to reach you. They only started trying ten minutes ago.”

  At least twenty minutes had passed since the call from Nella Lombardi.

  “Where’s Phimie?”

  “Quickly,” the nun said, shepherding her along the hall to the elevators.

  “What’s happened?”

  As they dropped toward the surgical floor, the solemn sister said, “Another hypertensive crisis. The poor girl’s blood pressure soared in spite of the medication. She suffered a violent seizure, eclamptic convulsions.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “She’s in surgery now. Cesarean section.”

  Celestina expected to be taken to a waiting room, but instead the nun escorted her to surgical prep.

  “I’m Sister Josephina.” She slipped Celestina’s purse off her shoulder—“You can trust this with me”—and helped her out of her jacket.

  A nurse in surgical greens appeared. “Pull up the sleeves of your sweater, scrub nearly to your elbows. Scrub hard. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  As the nurse slapped a bar of lye soap in Celestina’s right hand, Sister Josephina turned on the water in the sink.

  “As luck would have it,” the nun said, “Dr. Lipscomb was in the hospital when it happened. He’d just delivered another baby under emergency conditions. He’s excellent.”

  “How’s Phimie?” Celestina asked, scrubbing fiercely at her hands and forearms.

  “Dr. Lipscomb delivered the baby like two minutes ago. The afterbirth hasn’t even been removed yet,” the nurse informed her.

  “The baby’s small but healthy. No deformity,” Sister Josephina promised.

  Celestina’s question had been about Phimie, but they had told her about the baby, and she was alarmed by their evasion.

  “Enough,” said the nurse, and the nun reached through clouds of steam to crank off the water.

  Celestina turned away from the deep sink, raising her dripping hands as she had seen surgeons do in movies, and she could almost believe that she was still at home, in bed, in the fevered throes of a terrible dream.

  As the nurse slipped Celestina into a surgical gown and tied it behind her back, Sister Josephina knelt before her and tugged a pair of elastic-trimmed cloth booties over her street shoes.