them

  Well, here we are! Loretta’s face took on her hospital-visit look, a broad, false smile, and Jules stood attentively behind her, feeling himself ten years old.

  “Well, Brock, hiya! You think we weren’t coming?” Loretta said, almost shouting with good will.

  “Hi. Hello. Good to see you,” Brock said, trying to smile.

  So the visit began. There had been eight, ten visits so far. Brock was not an old man; nevertheless his body was old, the doctor said; his heart was the heart of an old man, his kidneys and liver worn out, his stomach weak, all from drinking, drinking, or running around, or just living—the doctor had said this, or someone who had appeared to be a doctor but was maybe just a student; it was hard to tell. They were giving him tests. The tests alone had aged him, Jules saw. He had a worn, perspiring face, his hair sparse and receding from his faintly astonished, sullen face, his mouth slack, his cheek slack, the very look in his eyes slack and unfocused except when someone in white drew near—then he took on an uncanny look, almost a demonic look, as if he were prepared to fight. He’d told them a little about the tests but in the main had been secretive about them. Better not to know, Jules thought wisely. Better not to think about what was done in hospitals.

  Jules felt a tragic bridge between himself and his uncle, a bridge of kinship and despair. But he, Jules, was only twenty-seven years old and on the verge of a new life, feeling himself immortal, with a decent job for the first time in his career, wearing decent clothes, having put behind him the red dirt of the South and the Southwest, reborn in the North—for a month he’d been so down on his luck, so miserable, he had hired himself out in Texas as a dog- and cat-napper, catching stray pets at the edges of suburban lawns or in alleys and bringing them to a veterinarian who, in turn, sold them to an experimental medical laboratory at a profit Jules never quite found out, though he had tried, wanting to go in business for himself; he’d sunk that low; and, for a while, on his way back up, he’d hired himself out in St. Louis to a combination used-car sales company and finance-loan company, his job being to steal back the cars of debtors behind on their payments, a most adventuresome and thankless job, though needing brains and skill—he’d done all these crazy things, but now, after his twenty-seventh birthday, it looked as if he was going to turn out well after all.

  Activity down at the other end of the corridor—some nurses, an attendant. A patient seemed to be throwing up…or hemorrhaging. Jules kept his eyes upon his uncle, forcing Loretta to stay facing him also, wanting no fuss. The visits were bad enough, awkward enough—let them get no worse by bringing in the miseries of others. He dreaded Loretta’s exclamations, Oh, is that blood, look! or Where is that man’s leg? He judged her as not quite that stupid but playing a woman’s trick, unconsciously playing at ignorance and surprise in order to suggest the great distance between such horror and herself—she was a flowsy blond woman, good-humored, that was all, not marked for horror. Horror surprised her. But she had sense enough not to exclaim over Brock’s appearance. She was quiet about that. Something was going on in Brock’s face—his upper lip seemed to be eroding away, dissolving slowly. Week after week. The lower lip was normal but the upper lip tapered off on the left, sandy and grainy, very dry. Jules remembered having seen this before on other visits, noting it and not quite noting it, feeling that it was none of his business and why hadn’t the doctor mentioned it? Of course they hadn’t seen the doctor for three weeks. Maybe his uncle had leprosy. All the talk was of heart and kidneys and liver, mysterious internal devices. He tried not to notice his uncle’s lip.

  “And Maureen is fine, Brock, just fine, doing so well with her job, and she’s still going to school,” Loretta said. Actually Maureen had flunked out of the University of Detroit and she had a lousy job as a typist, but Maureen out catching city buses was a miracle after Maureen lying in bed for a year, and everyone knew it. “And she’s real pretty now, bought herself a spring coat, she’s never looked prettier. Or more healthy.”

  “Is she happy?” said Brock.

  “Oh, real happy! Sure she’s happy!” Loretta cried. “She would of come today except she had to go somewhere. It’s just wonderful how Maureen is back to herself again and…and all because of you.”

  Brock took this gravely. He believed it. Breathing raspily, lying in silence, he seemed to be contemplating the slender, mysterious Maureen. It was strange that she never came to visit him. They made excuses for her. But Maureen, frightened and abrupt, would never come to the hospital. “I want to see him but I can’t, I can’t! Let me alone!” she would cry angrily, anxious to get away, off on her own lonely life.

  Brock lay in silence for some minutes, thinking of her. “Well, I’m glad she’s got a job and all that,” he said finally.

  Now Loretta began to chatter again, about tenants in their building, kids with head-lice, bastards of kids who would steal you blind if you didn’t let them know who was boss, trash living upstairs and trash living downstairs, a window in the bathroom broken all winter and never fixed, water pipes leaking, a step in the stairway broken out, ADC mothers with bellies like watermelons and if you didn’t give way to them on the sidewalk they’d bounce right into you with those bellies—all of them nigger whores, of course—and she, Loretta, trying to get off the rolls if it killed her, and if it killed her trying to get Betty back home again, trying to get the family back together again, and she, Loretta, was scared to death just driving down here, for what if Jules ran into a nigger kid in the street? They swarmed all over the streets, everywhere. What if he ran into a kid and everyone piled out of the houses onto him and tore him apart? And what would they do to her?

  “Ma, not so loud,” Jules said.

  His attention was taken up by a nurse who made her way through the ward. She was younger than he but confident in her walk, silent in her white rubber-soled shoes, a honey-faced girl he would have loved to embrace, surprising her. He smiled at her; she glanced at him and lowered her eyes. He remembered having seen her before. His heart gave a pointless little leap. He had never gotten over his love for Nadine, though his misery should have ended that, and now all his relationships with women, whether public like this or private and physical, were darkened by the memory of Nadine, loosing in his veins a stupid melancholy. How he’d loved that girl! Hating her had only been a form of his love, hopeless as that love, and his obsession had fed upon itself for many months, for years, until the idea of Nadine was fixed and permanent in his head, so rigid that he could be unfaithful to her with any number of women and she, Nadine, remained not betrayed but somehow honored. He did not know whether to hate this weakness in him, this love, or to be grateful for it.

  While his mother went on to chatter bitterly about someone upstairs Jules excused himself and followed the nurse out of the ward. He walked fast, conscious of looking good, a pleasant young man, with a slight limp yet from a terrible blow he’d taken on the knee a while ago (in a fight with a man whose car Jules was reappropriating for the finance company, a Negro who had tried to smash his kneecap with a tire iron), and in the corridor outside he caught up with her. He approved of her clean white uniform and her shining hair.

  “Is there a coffee shop around here?” Jules asked.

  She stared at him, flustered. Jules was disappointed in the first instant by something unimaginative in her look, but he went on, walking with her slowly, heading her down the hall. “Every week we come to visit my uncle, but my uncle doesn’t seem to be getting better.”

  “Yes, I remember seeing you.”

  “My uncle isn’t getting any better. I wonder if he’s dying. Do you have the inside story?” Jules asked with a smile.

  She glanced from side to side. Her forehead was furrowed. “What do you mean, the inside story?”

  “Can you have coffee with me somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m on duty, I have to work.”

  “When do y
ou go off duty?”

  “Six.”

  “Let me come back and pick you up, then you can tell me the inside story,” Jules said, touching her elbow lightly. “Isn’t there always an inside story? About the doctors and the nurses? What goes on in surgery?”

  She reddened, not looking at him. “You’re not serious,” she said. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “I’m very serious. I’m not critical, I just want to know. Everyone wants to know about hospitals. People on the outside have great faith in hospitals and doctors but still we wonder. I spent a few weeks in a hospital in the South and found cockroach legs in my soup—the whole cockroach would have been one thing, I could just have flicked it out onto the floor and gotten rid of it, but pieces of a cockroach mean something more serious—you can’t hope to get to the bottom of it. What do you think?”

  “I’ve never seen a cockroach in anybody’s soup,” the girl said.

  “My uncle’s lip is eroding away. Nobody mentions it. I noticed on his arm a lot of red dots, needle dots. Are you people injecting cancer into him?”

  The girl stared straight ahead. “I’m not injecting nothing into nobody, except under orders,” she said.

  “Oh, not you, I don’t mean you, and if you were doing it it wouldn’t be on purpose,” Jules said cheerfully. “I mean some of the interns, the night shift maybe, aren’t they all experimenting? All those niggers in there, why not? A few cancer cells here, a new cancer drug here, one bed and then another—why not? The welfare people are anxious to cooperate.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the girl said.

  “I’m just talking to pass the time of day because I like you,” Jules said, his good mood wearing out slowly. “It’s nobody’s business what the doctors do to them, niggers or white. Why not experiment? I don’t judge anybody. If I were a doctor I might do the same thing myself. I’d always be trying out something new, and on the night shift nobody could stop me from transplanting toes and fingers, ears onto stomachs, for a laugh, sponges left inside wombs, a stainless steel fork poking out of a guy’s eye, in the interests of medical science. I’d discover new diseases and their cures all in the same night. I’d have a hell of a good time. I’ll meet you out in back at six then.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, six. I’ll be there. My car is white.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  “Six o’clock,” said Jules.

  He left her and turned back to his uncle’s ward, a little depressed. The perfume of the hospital was not Jules’s perfume; mixed with the light smell of a woman, it grew perverse and heavy. It blotted out the woman’s smell. He walked back slowly, his hands in his pockets, hearing a typewriter clicking somewhere and hearing beyond it a low dull mumble as of mumbling in a cave, mumbling in hell. We’ve been here for years! Waiting for you for years! a chorus of the dying might cry out as he entered the ward, eager for his youth.

  His youth…

  The night before, lying in the arms of a woman who was married to an acquaintance of his, he had had a terrible thought: the entrance to these women was all the same, every one of them the same, and yet he had never really entered, was always rejected. He was left outside, dismissed. He had never completed anything.

  A man in a bed near Brock’s sat up with a black rosary dangling between his fingers, gazing at Jules as if about to say, Yes, we men are always rejected. Jules looked away. It could not be possible that he, Jules, was growing up into a man like every other man—that there was no special skill in him, no grace or delicacy, no destiny in proportion to his desire. He wanted so much! Now, heading for his dying uncle’s bed, his mother’s bobbing, gossipy body, he felt that he wasn’t in a hospital so much as in a prison, loosed for the grounds, handed a minimal freedom. He would have liked to light a cigarette. Fear began in him, nothing serious, but when he returned to Brock and gazed upon that wreck, seeing accidentally again the red spots on his uncle’s arms, it seemed to him probable that the doctors were really experimenting with cancer cells—it wasn’t a joke but serious—injections followed by the growths of cultures, stained cells beneath microscopes, a sequence of antibiotics, antiviruses, anti-germs, secret potions brewed in the night by the brightest intern on the staff, destined for fame. Anything was possible.

  How triumphant to be a doctor!

  11

  Jules drove his uncle to the London Chop House for lunch and surrendered the car to the Negro parking attendant, himself above being a parking attendant and a little above being a chauffeur, but carrying some of their amiable servility about his shoulders—it was a way of getting along. He was dressed well, in a light summer suit that had cost over one hundred dollars, with a tie of steely light gray, his shoes polished, his hair neatly trimmed, his eye on his uncle’s belligerent, unsteady walk. Uncle Samson was not really Howard Wendall’s brother—it seemed hardly possible. Only the drinking linked them.

  Samson Wendall had his own tool-and-die plant in Wyandotte, Michigan, and he was on the market, money poured into him; he lived now in an immense Tudor mansion in Grosse Pointe itself with his fat wife and daughters, who must have spent most of their time gazing out the baroque windows onto the long, dipping, showcase lawn, waiting for Grosse Pointe ladies to call. None called. The Grosse Pointe Yacht Club did not beckon, neither did the Detroit Athletic Club, though Samson sneered viciously enough at that great building as Jules drove by it. “Look at that, take a look! One block behind them there’s nigger whores out on the sidewalk, hair bleached to hell, and there’s the DAC itself—how d’ya do?” Jules smiled and drove on. It was his duty with Samson not to be smart or inquisitive but only to be a son, a replacement for his wild lost cousin: he had popped up as his cousin, a boy named Joseph, had disappeared. To hell with Joseph, Joseph in Europe. Jules was in Detroit, driving Uncle Samson around adroitly. All he had to do, Samson said again and again, was to keep his mouth shut and his eyes and ears open. He was to work with the plant manager. He was to hang around Samson himself, learning things.

  “Hey, did you know I fly by jet now? Jet airliner?”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Jules.

  “Times sure have changed from the old days. God, they sure have,” Samson said with a sour smile.

  Of Jules’s father they never spoke.

  Of Jules’s mother Samson said, “Hear your ma has a little boy. Well, that’ll keep her young—women like to fuss around a little kid, eh?”

  Only of Jules himself did he speak, with the enthusiastic rush of words that Jules sensed might mean nothing, as they had meant nothing with Bernard Geffen. “First thing, we put you through college, take the right courses, get that out of the way. Cram it into your head, boy, and the rest you learn straight from me. I need someone I can trust. I like your face.”

  “Thank you,” said Jules.

  “Don’t thank me! I said I like your face. I trust you.”

  They entered the Chop House, descending into the expensive dark, and Jules bent politely to the hostess’s ear to ask for their table. Yes, he must have had a good face, everyone responded well to it. But was it the same face he himself saw? At the table with its red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, back in a corner, lost in the rich winecellar dimness of the place, sat someone named Yates, waiting for them. Samson was forty minutes late, having coughed up something in the bathroom off his office, while Jules, numb with a certain professional numbness he was cultivating, stared out the window at the suety air of Wyandotte, Michigan. Now Samson grunted hello to the man, shook hands, introduced Jules, sat down heavily, with that look of irritated expectation that belongs to portly, up-from-riches businessmen in Detroit, lunching at the London Chop House.

  “What a dark hole! They hiding something here?” Samson muttered.

  The other man responded at once with an appreciative bark, and Jules unfolded a napkin with a smile meant to be Joseph Wendall’s sm
ile. He felt responsible for this uncle, though Samson was a hundred pounds heavier than he and decibels louder even in his breathing, an enormous-chested man with gray hair, undistinguished except for his arrogance, carrying Howard Wendall’s assembly-line gut around with him above a straining, expensive belt. Jules hoped he would not drop dead before Jules’s job was more secure. Jules’s blood circulated freely in this uncle’s presence only when he, Jules, nodded yes to everything, however fanciful. The leading joke this noon was about Lady Bird Johnson. “It seems that Lyndon Baines was stepping out of his bathtub one morning, when who did he see…” Jules smiled ahead of time, taking the opportunity to look around the crowded restaurant, wondering if his face was growing thin with all the smiling he had to do. He did admire his uncle. He had always admired him for his money, spurred on by Grandma Wendall’s admiration and jealousy and his own mother’s hatred, knowing that success, for a man, must stir jealousy and hatred in the unsuccessful. He had gone to lunch with his uncle many times like this. At expensive restaurants downtown, at restaurants near the Fisher Center, in Dearborn, out Woodward, out at the airport, all of them business lunches at which he, Jules, was to sit and listen, a son, dutiful and quiet, with an intelligent, reliable look, having one drink and then allowing his elders to pass on to second and third and fourth drinks, as they always did.

  “This place sure is dark! If I knock something over there’ll be hell to pay for somebody,” Samson said. Like a character in a comic strip, he latched onto a certain observation and kept tossing it up with a petulant grin, as if everyone else were being gifted marvelously with it, a lifesaver to keep them afloat in the dangerous waters of conversation. “In these dark places they add up the bill and throw in the day of the month,” he said.