So the relationship between the two couples was cordial enough, although it was not a close one. Every now and then they met in town for dinner or theater. Two or three times Martin and Jessie had been at Lamb House amid a bustle of guests and children. Jessie had declined the last few invitations and he had concurred. He really didn’t have the time to spare; he wasn’t his own master as Alex was. Besides, the Lambs’ was a different world. Alex, the Englishman, naturally had friends in many circles. Jessie and Martin, strangers both, were very slowly enlarging their little group one by one, or rather, two by two. Alex and Mary ran an expensive establishment; she was busy in the domain of art; he had countless business obligations. Their lives were complicated. The Farrells’ life was simple. And they were satisfied with its simplicity.
“You’re happy, Martin, I can see,” Jessie liked to say, not questioning or doubting, merely taking pleasure in his pleasure, and expressing the euphoria which had bloomed with her pregnancy. He, in turn, took pleasure in seeing that euphoria, and in the calm, fine trust between them …
He looked at his watch and quickened his walk. He was due in the operating room at eight. This was Mr. Braidburn’s day. “Mr.”—funny English mode of address to a doctor! And now Martin’s mind leaped ahead, away from his own concerns, toward the hospital where he had spent the larger part of this past year. Even when he was away from that building, his heart was still in it!
“What happened to the Eldridge girl over the weekend while I was away?” he would ask himself. “To the ironworker with the third-degree burns who’d got a piece of steel in the brain?” And his memory would go back in time to the story Pa had told so long ago of the scalded child in the farmhouse kitchen. Poor Pa! He’d had the will to help, but not the tools. Now Martin had those tools in hand.
There were just three young Americans and half a dozen Englishmen working in the wards and clinics, examining and selecting the patients to be discussed on the following day. Often Martin wondered how much these patients understood, as they were wheeled in before the instructors and assembled students. Most of them were simply too frightened to understand very much, he thought, which was just as well. God pity them: the paralyzed; the afflicted with their jerking limbs and senseless laughter; the soon-to-die.
Most of them were poor and inarticulate, struggling for words even when they must know clearly enough what they wanted to say.
“Doctor, will I walk and talk and be a person? Will I die?”
Their shabby imitation-leather pocketbooks, clasped stiffly on their laps, were sad to him. He dreamed of his mother. She had owned that same kind of shabby black bag. He dreamed that it was lying on the kitchen table at home. His mother was crying, “I’ve lost my pocketbook,” and he was telling her, “Why, here it is, Ma. Don’t you see it?” But she only kept on crying and wringing her hands. The poor moved him so.
He pitied animals. So soft he was! He must learn to hide it! In the laboratory he worked on monkeys and dogs. It made him sick to touch their fur, to win their trust only to terrorize them later. Yet it had to be done. How else to learn what cells do after stroke or how brain wounds heal? How else to learn anything;? Fortunately, Evan Llewellyn, wiry dark Welshman, great neurophysiologist and patient teacher, was kind to the creatures. He kept suffering to a minimum. Otherwise Martin could not have stood it It was a privilege when he was allowed to share a small basement laboratory with Llewellyn. Jessie, having overheard Martin talking about microscopes, had bought him a beautiful Zeiss, and there with Llewellyn and the Zeiss, during long afternoons and often late into the evenings, he laid the foundation of all he was to know about the pathology of the cell. He was becoming increasingly convinced of what Dr. Albeniz had said about the unity of all brain study: surgery, neurocytology, and even psychiatry were parts of a single discipline and ought not to be separated. The practitioners in these divisions must know what the others were doing.
“Too many neurosurgeons blunder into the brain,” Llewellyn declared.
He was nearly eighty, with cheerful eyes and a face remarkably unlined. “Never stop learning,” he would say. Whenever he was challenged for coming in on holidays or Sundays, he had an answer. “When you stop working, you’re dead, or might as well be.”
Martin thought: That’s what my father used to say. And a truer thing was never said, he added to himself, as he rounded the corner and made his way to Saint Bartholomew’s door.
Braidburn talked as he worked, his steady voice instructing and explaining. This was the third hour and he was tiring. A drop of sweat stood on his forehead; a nurse stepped forward to wipe it before it could slide.
“Look here. The size of an orange.”
Martin blotted seeping blood with gauze. A year ago he had been puzzled at first sight of these absorbent squares, each with its dangling black thread. Now he knew so much; also he knew how much he did not know. And he remembered his fear when a brain was first exposed beneath his own hands, when he was first permitted, under supervision, to take the knife.
“Sponge,” Braidburn ordered.
The patient was young. Martin had seen him first at the clinic, waiting on a bench with his wife and a couple of whining children. He had a wizened city face, a clerk’s face, respectful and scared. Relating his symptoms, his mouth had twisted.
“I can’t seem to stand up straight I feel like vomiting. The headache’s splitting and my eyesight’s queer.”
Through the ophthalmoscope Martin had observed the hemorrhaging retina and the enlarged head of the optic nerve.
“See anything, Doctor?”
“Well,” he’d answered kindly, evasively, “well need to take X-rays, you know. Then we’ll see about straightening you out.”
He had known then what the pictures would show: a tumor pushing up under the temporal lobe; slow growing, he would guess. Also, he had thought, or felt, that it would be nonmalignant; he had not voiced the thought to anyone. There was something odd about the appearance of the person when malignancy was present. Again, that was only a feeling he had. Pa used to have feelings like that about patients, too. But Pa had often been wrong.
This time Martin had been right: the tumor was benign and encapsulated. A little thrill went through him, remembering the pale wife and children. Also, he was pleased with himself.
“The rest is up to the gods,” Braidburn said now. “We’ve done all we can.” He looked up. “Close the flap, Farrell, please. Jasper, assist I’ve finished.”
There ought to be applause, Martin thought. Some of his fellow students complained that men like Braidburn were arrogant and difficult. Braidburn in particular had been labeled “manic-depressive.” But he was merely a man of moods. Martin loved him, as he loved all these men and loved this place.
A few hours later, he had just taken a seat at the bench downstairs with old Llewellyn when the telephone rang. Martin spoke a moment and hung up.
“My wife’s at the hospital in labor.”
“Hurry up, then, what are you waiting for?” Llewellyn cried.
Martin tore upstairs and started to race toward the taxi-rank. Mr. Meredith intercepted him.
“Llewellyn called upstairs. Get in. We’ll drive you.”
So it was that Martin went in a limousine to the meeting with his firstborn.
Meredith was considerately silent Martin wondered what he could be thinking. Perhaps the same thought that he himself had been stifling and that now had abruptly shot up again from some buried place in his consciousness. It had been foolhardy to permit a pregnancy! What if the child were like its mother? How terrible and cruel! The child would despise them, and rightly so, for having brought it into the world. And Jessie—poor Jessie—would be destroyed by guilt. Martin shook with fear. All the day’s contentment shivered away.
Meredith was saying, “I met Fleming once. Looks like anybody else. Penicillin will absolutely revolutionize medicine … though some patients are allergic to it. But I shouldn’t bother you with medicine today, should I?” He tapped Ma
rtin on the knee. “Just watch that Achilles heel.”
“What?” Martin asked in confusion.
“We all develop one, you know. The moment the child is born. Whatever happens to it after that will happen to you, every cut and bruise. Ah well, here we are. Good luck.”
At the desk they told him Jessie was already in the delivery room.
“Make yourself comfortable in the waiting room. We’ll call you as soon as we know anything.”
The waiting room was vacant except for a woman reading a book. When Martin entered she put it down and he saw that the woman was Mary Fern. She smiled.
“You were operating, so Jessie called me when the pains came very suddenly. I’ve been with her until just now.”
“Thanks awfully. Is she all right?”
“Very excited. Very happy, between pains.”
Martin sat down, took a magazine and couldn’t read it.
“You’re reading the same words ten times over and you don’t know what they mean,” Mary observed.
“I know.”
“Try a picture magazine, it’s easier.” She added gently, “I know you’re a doctor, but when it’s your own baby, I suspect you forget you’re a doctor, don’t you? So let me tell you, it’s not so bad having a baby. She’ll be all right She really will.”
“Thanks again.”
“I’m glad I happened to be in town. We’re staying in overnight.”
It occurred to Martin that he hadn’t been alone in a room with Mary since—since Cyprus, and seldom enough even then. This thought created an intimacy in the commonplace, impersonal room. Absurd! He smelled a slight fragrance: her perfume. When she turned a page he heard the faint jingle of an ornament on her gold bracelet For some reason the sound was irritating. He wished she would go home. Then he was ashamed of himself, and spoke to her pleasantly.
“The country must be beautiful this month.”
“Yes, it’s heavenly. But you’re making conversation. You don’t really feel like talking now. Don’t bother about me, please … I’ll just sit here and read.”
The stillness was oppressive. An hour ticked by. At every passing step in the hall he looked up, thinking it was for him. Mary looked up too; they exchanged anxious glances. She returned to the book, rustling the pages. The bracelet jingled. He wished again that she would leave.
Her presence, as he sat there with nothing to do but let his mind wander, brought him a mean recollection. At a luncheon table when he had first arrived at St. Bartholomew’s, Henry Barker had unknowingly humiliated him. Barker was Braidburn’s associate, a garrulous, informal man, rather un-English. Martin remembered every word he had said.
“To tell you the truth, when your father-in-law wrote to ask a favor of Braidburn, I thought probably a loan was being called in, a return for old friendship, you know. I can’t say whether Braidburn thought the same. We had no idea we were getting a gifted man. For you are that, Martin!” And he had gone on, “I look forward to meeting your wife. Only the other day we were talking about our visit to America with the Braidburns when we met your wife and her family. A lovely child she was, about fourteen, I should think. Tall for her age, with the most extraordinary blue eyes. I never forgot.”
Martin had said evenly, “That was Mary Fern. She’s married to an Englishman, and they live in Oxfordshire when they’re not at their flat in town.”
Mr. Barker had been confused. “Oh? How many sisters are there, then? I seem to remember only two.”
“There are just two. I married the other one.”
Why did he remember, keep remembering, such things? Why did he not expunge them like a chalk scribble on a blackboard? Just wipe them out?
Mary stood up. “I’m supposed to meet Alex’s mother and bring her home for dinner.” She looked at her watch. “Will you think it awful of me if I leave you?”
“No, no, go ahead. And give my best to Alex.”
“You’ll call me the minute you hear? We’ll be at the flat all evening.
“Of course.”
He watched her go down the street. She still had that slight sway in her walk. Her skirt swung gracefully. It was funny, a few years ago women all wore dresses to the knees. Now their skirts were three-quarters of the way to the ankle. How quickly one grew accustomed to change!
“Don’t you think Alex has done a lot for Fern?” Jessie had asked recently.
He had answered that he didn’t know what she meant. But he had known. Lamb House, status and freedom had made a woman out of a girl.
He watched her as far as the corner. A man turned to look after her as she passed; struck, maybe, by the blue eyes in the dark face? A mere accident of coloring and charm, and men, poor fools, were beguiled!
But what should all that matter to him? And he felt abruptly angry. It did not matter! His life was filled. He had his work, his home and now a child. And the child would be normal! Of course it would! By the law of averages it would; he ought not to have let himself succumb to any morbid thought that it could be otherwise, or to morbid thoughts of any sort. Such thoughts were wasteful and therefore stupid, and he knew better.
Think of bright things, good things, purpose; think not of the past, but of the years to come … I’ll come back again to Europe one day, he promised himself. I must see Epidaurus and the Temple of Aesculapius. I’ll bring my son with me! Yes, my son! I’ll teach him and show him things I never saw, never had. I’ll give him things I did have, too. My father’s arm would rest around my shoulder, drawing me to his heat when it grew cold. We’d sit on the steps and watch the sky light up from the first solitary spark to the streaming of the Milky Way. My father and I. Now my son and I. He’ll be tall and easy, not tall and rigid like me. He’ll have broad shoulders. I can hear his voice, its first deepening when he starts to become a man. This is what life is all about—
A man in a surgeon’s white coat was walking toward him. “Mr. Farrell?”
Martin stood up with a question on his lips, afraid to ask it.
“A healthy child, and your wife is all right, too. Just coming out of anaesthesia. You may see her now.”
They entered the elevator. “We had to do a Caesarian section,” the other man said. “Tried not to, but there wasn’t enough room. The spine, of course.”
Martin followed him down the corridor. He was struck with the oddity of himself in the role of follower. Was this how people felt toward him, waiting for his words to fall?
“I would not recommend having any more, Mr. Farrell.” Sober eyes admonished Martin. “I’m very, very serious about that.”
“I understand. Certainly not.”
The man switched to sympathy. “You’ve had a couple of bad hours.”
“Yes,” Martin said, and to his own shame was suddenly aware that his terrors had not been first for Jessie, but for his bay, his son. He wondered what anyone who could know that would think of him.
He went in to Jessie. Her face was white as the blankets, but her eyes were triumphant Filled with tender contrition, he stooped and kissed her forehead, and stroked her damp, curly hair. Murmuring, she closed her eyes.
“She’ll sleep now,” the nurse said. “Would you like to see the baby?”
At the nursery door he was shown a bundle wrapped in a pink blanket. He remembered that he hadn’t even inquired the sex of the child and he felt a draining disappointment.
“A lovely girl,” the nurse said.
He stared at the baby. She was unmarked by struggle through the birth canal, and she had long dark hair.
The nurse was jovial. “You could almost braid it, couldn’t you?”
He knew he was supposed to respond with the usual comic, awkward pride of the new father. But there was only a sinking in his chest His little son! And this was the last chance.
The baby opened her eyes. It was impossible, of course, but she seemed to be staring straight back at Martin. For more than a few moments they regarded one another. Then she yawned, the pink mouth making a perfect O
, raised her hand and dropped it in exquisite relaxation.
“She’s bored with our company,” the nurse said, laughing.
Against all rules, Martin put his finger into that miniature palm. At once the miniature fingers curled around his thick one. How strong she was! Already reaching out to life and grasping! The tiny thing! He felt a lump in his throat. The tiny thing!
And she was perfect, without a flaw. A rush of gratitude went through him; he felt the old warning tingle of rising tears. At the same time he wanted to laugh. Perfect, without a flaw! Beautiful, too, with a straight little nose, strong curved chin and thick lashes, lying now on cheeks whose skin was fine as silk. His girl.
“What will you name her?” the nurse asked.
He had to think a moment of the name they had selected for a girl.
“Claire,” he said, between the laughter and the tears.
“Her name is Claire.”
That night he sat down and wrote a letter. “Darling Claire, On this the day, almost the hour of your birth, I want to tell you how I feel before many of my thoughts can slip away. We don’t know each other yet, but already you are part of me, like my hand or my eyes. I wouldn’t have believed it possible. I love you so …”
Chapter 10
Sometimes Fern thought of the bed as a kind of throne, raised as it was on a shallow platform in the middle of the long wall. Everyone came to her here, where she leaned against fresh white linen pillows under a canopy upheld by carved mahogany posts. Neddie and Emmy climbed up to be read to; the baby Isabel was placed here in her arms to be fed.
Alex had said, “I read once that home is where the furniture has stood in one place for a century. You’re sure you don’t mind moving into a house that was finished long ago by other people?”
She had not minded, as long as she could have her books from home; art books, history, poetry and books her mother had read to her when she was a child. They all stood now on shelves in the yellow sitting room across the hall. Everything else in Lamb House had been there before her, except for the bed. She had not wanted to lie with her husband in the bed where his parents had conceived him. So the original had been taken down and stored away. In a London antique shop she had found a replacement almost like the first, but without any personal, known history and therefore, new.