Random Winds

  He sat down on the porch step next to the apples, with a dog on either side. A fox barked from the woodlot across the road. Low on the horizon, just above the trees, Orion shone. You couldn’t be Pa’s son, he thought, without having learned something about the constellations. The sky looked lonely, the universe larger and more lonely than at other times and in other places.

  If he could hear some music, it would be a comfort, he thought, remembering the soaring voices and soaring strings. All the lights! All the life! Why couldn’t he just accept?

  Alice had gone with Fred to live with his parents in Maine and she, a woman with no place of her own, was not complaining. Although, who knew how she really felt about it? Her letters were always cheerful. But then, Martin wasn’t given to talking much about his feelings, either.

  “You’re letting the cold air into the house.” Jean stood in the doorway. “I’m going to bed. You coming up, too?”

  Martin and the dogs went in. “Soon. I thought maybe I’d go over some things in Pa’s desk.”

  “Oh, I wish you would! If he had only let me take care of things! I always wanted him to, but he didn’t believe in a woman doing all that. I know the bankbooks are somewhere in the desk. I guess you can find them.” She hesitated. “I don’t want to bother him by asking how much money there is, as if I expected him to die.” Tears stood in her eyes, puddled there, but not overflowing. “So it would be a good idea if you’d look things over. Only don’t stay up too late. You need your rest.”

  The old rolltop overflowed with paper. Out of childhood came the recollection of his mother’s exasperated voice: “if you would just once let me straighten this mess up, Enoch!”

  Under a pile of prescription blanks, old postcards, letters, calendars and samples of medicine in cardboard containers, lay a marriage certificate and birth certificates, Alice’s and Martin’s own. Also Enoch Junior’s, Susan’s and May’s. Why on earth had Pa kept those? Here was the mortgage agreement, which should be in a safe deposit box in case of fire. Here was the disability policy, small at best, but invalid now at age sixty-five, just when you were most likely to need it. Martin swallowed outrage. And here three savings-bankbooks, tossed in the muddle. He opened them and added the sum. Four thousand, four hundred eighty-three dollars and seventy-six cents. He rummaged incredulously for another book, but there was none. This was it. This was all Pa had, after a lifetime of labor.

  He sat in a kind of stunned despair. The pity of it! Four thousand dollars and this modest house, an upended box devoid of comfort or grace, that needed every kind of repair anyway. How often had he not heard the story, told with pride, of how this house had been acquired?

  “I had my eye on it, at the crossroads, and only three and a half miles from Cyprus. The bank was glad to make the loan. I had a good reputation already; and I’d only been in this country six years.”

  So then, this house and a basket of apples left by a grateful patient. And who would take care of them now, except their son?

  It must have been hard for his mother. He remembered the time Pa had dropped a hundred and twenty-five dollars. He’d had the money stuffed in his pocket on his way to town to pay bills.

  “I even made you a leather purse,” his mother had mourned. “Why don’t you use it?”

  And Pa had been ashamed. “I forgot.”

  There were the times he had actually given money to patients. “They had nothing,” he would say, and his mother’s lips would grow tight and thin, as though she were fastening them together with a pin. She’d been afraid to speak, having never got over the honor of being married to him. If she had ever had regrets, she had not admitted them, probably not even to herself. True to her stern beliefs, she would accept without complaint whatever burden the Lord might see fit to lay upon her.

  For a long time Martin sat, then abruptly reached for a piece of paper and a pen. He could have poured out pages of his grievous disappointment, but nobody beside himself cared about that. Each man bore his grievous dissapointments alone. So the pen slipped rapidly across a single sheet of paper.

  “Dear Dr. Albeniz, Thank you for waiting until I could reach a final decision. I appreciate your patience and your understanding … grateful and honored by your offer …impossible because of my family situation …regret Very good wishes.”

  Short and sweet. He put his hands over his face. His sadness was so vast it emptied him. He was hollow, floating in chill gray sadness, in shreds of vapor, fog and whispers. Everything that had been so bright and pulsing had just quietly slipped away, fallen from his outstretched hands. Gone. All gone.

  A great wind rushed past the house. Wind of the world, carrying a hundred million hopes away. Not just mine. Remember that.

  And rolling the top down on the scattered papers in the desk, he went upstairs to sleep in the maple bed which had been his ever since he had outgrown a crib.

  The year hurried toward its close. The lakes froze; a thin film of dimpled ice hardened and thickened. Among the neighbors Christmas preparations made a pleasant bustle as tins of peanut brittle and homemade fudge were carried from house to house. Pine sprays with red bows were hung on front doors and small boys careened down the hills on their Flexible Flyers.

  Christmas morning brought a sugary, fresh fall of snow. Shortly after six o’clock, Martin was called out. When he got back it was almost time for dinner. Pa looked up questioningly.

  “Anything important today? Anything I ought to know?”

  “I think I’ve finally persuaded Mary Deitz to have the goiter operated on.”

  “She’s had that goiter fifteen years! Cut, cut, that’s all you young fellows know how to do.” Pa was having one of his cranky days.

  “I’m not the one who’s going to do it, more’s the pity.”

  “Hmph. You were telling me something the other day about something in the—the ventricle … I don’t remember. What was it again?”

  “The ventricologram, you mean?”

  “Yes, that’s it. How does that work again?”

  “Well, it’s—you remove the ventricular fluid and you inject air through a hole in the skull. Then you can tell by X-ray where the air has moved within the brain. That’s putting it very simply, of course.”

  “Hmph. I dare say there’s good in a lot of this new stuff. But these fellows don’t know everything, Martin. Just because they fasten their names onto some high-sounding articles, don’t let them fool you.”

  “No, Pa. I won’t let them fool me.” He looked so small and old, standing there. And also, in a dreadful way, he looked childish.

  “What’ll happen when you fellows have divided up the whole human body among yourselves, hey? One’ll study the left ear, the other will study the right knee! Why, there won’t be a doctor among the lot of you fit to treat a whole patient!”

  Pa had used to say, “You will see such marvels in your lifetime, Martin!” But now illness and the hidden envy that can corrupt old age had changed him into someone else. And his son’s heart ached.

  The Christmas table was set in the dining room which was on the chilly side of the house. Pa felt the cold. “I don’t know why we had to eat in here,” he complained.

  “I’ll put the electric heater near you,” Martin offered.

  “No, wait, I’ll get it,” Jean said. “You carve the turkey, Martin.”

  That had been his father’s job. All those years of Christmas and Thanksgiving turkeys, of Easter hams, eaten in this room! It would be Martin’s job now, so he guessed he’d better learn. Strip the leg off first, take apart at the joint, now cut the wing. Now slice neatly from the breast.

  “My, that’s expert,” his mother said heartily. “Enoch, will you say the grace?”

  “Let Martin do it.”

  “For what we are about to receive, Father, we thank Thee,” Martin murmured.

  The platters passed between the three of them. Pa’s plate was mounded with creamed onions, turkey, mashed turnip, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauc
e. He had not lost his enormous appetite. Silently, voraciously he ate, gazing with abstracted eyes at the sideboard array of Jean’s best cut-glass bowls and her “good” dishes.

  “Those dishes were given to us when we were married,” Jean said suddenly. “And do you know, there’s only been one broken, and it wasn’t done by me. It was one of the neighbors helping clear the table. That’s why I never like anyone to help me. Even if they don’t break things, they chip them.”

  There was a silence. Martin tried to think of something to say.

  “I do wish Alice were here,” Jean remarked.

  He understood that the remark was partly an expression of a real wish and partly an effort to break the silence. He tried to cooperate. “Do you suppose she’ll have a chance to visit before spring?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. The roads are awfully bad and the train connections are dreadful. She’d have to travel all the way east to Boston, and then come west again.”

  “I imagine she’ll do it all the same,” Martin guessed.

  “Oh, she might at that. She’s a good daughter, Alice is. And I know she wants to see her father. Anybody like to try my mincemeat? I brought two jars up from the cellar. It’s so good the next day with cold turkey. Enoch! Enoch! What is it?”

  Pa’s hands clutched at his chest. “I don’t feel well.” He pushed his chair violently away from the table. “I have a terrible pain. Terrible!” he cried, very loud.

  And while in an instant of dumb shock they stared at him, he stood up, stretched tall and reaching, stiffened, buckled at the knees and toppled. His face struck the edge of the table with a dreadful, tearing sound. Then the chair broke, splintering as Enoch and the chair both crashed to the floor.

  “Oh God!” Jean screamed. “Oh God! Enoch, get up! Martin! Enoch! Get up!” Her cry was to repeat itself in Martin’s ears for the rest of his life, and Christmas was to be marked with the memory of it forever.

  Enoch was laid out in the parlor between the two front windows. People came with proper grave faces, bending to the widow, who, her first spasms of weeping past, sat quietly acknowledging their hushed sympathy. They looked down at the dead man in his dark suit and his secret dignity: I have gone beyond your small concerns and I know what you cannot know. They stood looking with embarrassment and fear. They walked, risen on the balls of their feet, and with the same grave, tragic faces, left the room.

  They stood in knots on the porch, on the walk and in the road, hailing one another, greeting briskly.

  “Want a lift home, George?”

  “Say, when’d you get the new car?”

  Alone in the evening, Martin went back into the room. It was not his father’s face that moved him most, it was his hands. Wasn’t that strange? Yes, his hands, folded on the chest where the undertaker had arranged them, waxy and larger than life. Were they really that large or was it because of something the undertaker had done? Hands, that marvelous circuitry of brain to hand that can curve to catch a ball, clench to a smashing fist, or open to touch with gentle palm. Marvelous, marvelous. My father’s hands.

  And somewhere out of his most cursory readings in psychiatry, Martin remembered: Was it Freud who said that the greatest blow to a man is the death of his father? All the knotted, complicated web of memories, resentments, comfort and confidence, humor and wisdom and stubborn foolishness—everything, all of it that made me and that I shall carry through my years lies here. You try to make some order out of it, and there is none. It ends in this.

  My father, you’ve gone so far away. I think that if I talk loud enough, surely you will hear me. I can’t understand why it is that you can’t hear. You lie there, but you’ve gone. Everything’s stopped in you. It terrifies me, this death of yours. I’ve seen death so often by now, but not your death. There are things I would like to have talked to you about when you were yourself and well. In so many ways Ma has been the head of the household, for somebody had to try to manage things. But you were always the heart. You were the heart.

  In the pile of letters that arrived during the next week, there came a note from Jessie Meig.

  “Father and I were so sorry to learn of your father’s death. He was a kind, old-fashioned man. He will be missed. If you ever have time, would you come to visit us? Would the Sunday after next for tea at four be all right?”

  He whipped the letter against the table’s edge. Be damned if he would walk into that house again! What did they think of him, for God’s sake? Why should he want to visit there? A small fury surged in his chest, and then receded. Very likely they weren’t thinking anything. Then he felt foolish.

  He looked at the letter again, at the blunt black strokes: an unusual script, individual and strong, rather like Jessie herself. He wondered what life was like for her now in that house with her sister gone. Not that they had been that warm toward one another! Still, a sister was a sister. He was tempted to accept. Admittedly, and not unnaturally, he was a little curious. Why not? But on second thought, he decided he really didn’t want to go.

  A few weeks later his mother reported, “Jessie Meig telephoned today. She wondered whether you had got her note.”

  He was ashamed of his rudeness. Perhaps he had been more than rude? Perhaps even terribly unkind, rejecting the well-meaning, outstretched hand? Then he had a mental picture of Jessie, seated in the enormous wing-chair, almost curled within it, as though she felt protected by the wings. He had forgotten how small she was, and he thought: Out of pure decency, I ought to go.

  So, on the following Sunday afternoon he strode up the walk between the iron deer, stood under thawing icicles on the porch and entered the house he had never expected to enter again.

  Chapter 7

  Jessie put the remainder of the lunch into a bag and capped the Thermos. “Do you want to drive, Martin, or shall I?”

  “It’s your car. You drive.”

  Summer had barely peaked and already the first small signs of its wane were beginning to appear. Blueberries, powdered with pale dust, were thick along the roadside. Queen Anne’s lace stood stiff and starched in the fields.

  Ever since winter’s end, Jessie had been going along with Martin on his far country house calls. He wasn’t quite sure how the habit had been formed; he thought vaguely that it might have been her father who had suggested it At any rate, that negative, inhibiting person had been surprisingly cordial during these past months.

  “It’ll do you good to get out more,” he had said.

  Certainly that was true. Jessie’s need for companionship was visible enough. Martin understood, because the same need was in him. He missed good talk, that quick comprehension which comes when the associations and the bent of mind are kin. Most of his boyhood friends had dispersed; those still here at home were married and there was no place for Martin in their households. After five close years, he felt the loss of men like Tom and Perry. It seemed sometimes that in all of Cyprus the one person to whom he could really talk was Jessie Meig.

  The father went upstairs in the evening now, leaving the library to them. Martin had come to take his place opposite Jessie at the chessboard. She usually beat him! There was music on the radio; there was pleasant comfort.

  “You’re worried about something again,” she said, taking the wheel. “I can always tell.”

  “I am. It’s that place we stopped at before lunch. I’m still feeling sort of sick about it.”

  “The woman with the cough?”

  “Cough and nausea. She’s lost sixteen pounds in the last two months. I know it’s a malignancy. I’m so sure I’d take a bet on it.” He shook his head in recollection of the dreary young woman with the delicate face. “I told them she needs to go to the hospital for tests. I was as emphatic as I could be without using the word ‘cancer.’ I said she must go, that there was no choice. The husband kept saying, ‘She’s just weak after birthing and she’ll be all right.’ He assured me! And anyway, the hospital was out of the question. Who would take care of the kids? Then he fol
lowed me outside and told me he’d be careful, he knew she’d had too many kids too fast. She wasn’t strong like some women. He’d see she had no more. Oh, she’ll have no more!” Martin said grimly. “She won’t be alive nine months from now.”

  “Trouble started in the ovaries, I suppose.”

  “Why, yes, I’ve a pretty good idea it did. But how do you know? Were you guessing?”

  “You told me something once about another case that sounded like this one. I would never want to be a doctor, but still I do like to listen to you and I do remember things.”

  “And I—if I couldn’t have been a doctor, there’s nothing else in the world I would have wanted to be.”

  Around a bend, they were slowed almost to a stop by a wagon with an enormous load of hay. From the top of the pile a woman called cheerfully, “Hi, Doc!”

  “That’s good fodder you’ve got there,” Martin called back.

  “Yes, and we’ll be needing it before you know it. The older I get, the shorter the summers get.”

  “Just don’t throw that back out again unloading!”

  “They like you, Martin,” Jessie said when they drove on. “I like them.”

  In his few short months of practice he had been touched a dozen times with powerful emotion and the emotion of power. In their houses, in the beds where the fevered lay with brilliant eyes, they turned to him in trust. Touching their sick flesh, he could feel their engulfing gratitude and admiration. Something swelled in a man then: might one call it a kind of love? And yet he knew, although they did not, that what he did was often not enough and should be better.

  “Most illness is self-limiting,” he mused aloud now. “Fluids, bedrest and warmth will cure most ailments in a matter of days. But what bothers me, Jessie, is the other kind. This morning’s case, for instance. I’m stymied, battling distance and lack of facilities and ignorance. The patients’ ignorance and my own. Mostly my own.” And he repeated his thoughts aloud, “What I do could be done so much better!”