Cast a Cold Eye (13 page)

What he had seen, however, of conditions in the private wing did not inspire him to transfer to the men’s ward for the mere privilege of playing the rebel there. He was determined simply to get well and be shut of this place as quickly as possible. He had been put in the hospital by his friend, and by his friend’s wife, whom, as a matter of fact, he had been leaning forward to kiss when he fell off the ladder in the studio. They had sent him a bunch of bronze chrysanthemums and left him more or less to himself; he could imagine that Mrs. X regarded the fall as some sort of “judgment” for their series of desultory indiscretions; she had not, in any case, during their single stiff visit to his bedside, directed her eyes fully into his.

For this, the young man was thankful. For his own part, he had no wish to see either of the Xes again and had only feared that the accident, and the whole atmosphere of crisis surrounding it, would enclose him in a triangle by a sheer convention of the prevailing social geometry. Whatever had happened to prevent this—whether Mrs. X had “told” her husband, whether he had “guessed,” or whether the accident had brought home to them what a nuisance, after all, other people (guests, in particular) really were, a common discovery of couples—the young man did not care. Throughout their visit, he himself had chattered incessantly about the hospital, Mr. Ciccone, the personal traits of the different nurses, never stopping to inquire about the farm, the pig, the projected dinner party, Mr. X’s painting, while husband and wife exchanged glances, like promissory notes on a future conversation, indicating that they would never have believed, if illness and isolation had not shown them, how intensely trivial and self-centered this friend in the nightshirt was.

The solitude in which they left him, and the repudiation of their transient intimacy, gave the young man occasion to assess in his own terms the twenty-four-year-old person who, shorn of all identifying marks and validating references, was lying cranked up in the scarred hospital bed. His preoccupation with the gossip of the corridor was, he quite readily conceded, a confession of envy and inferiority. He felt a sort of jealousy of this whole
affairé
world of illness and medication from which he was excluded. He wished to know its language and be accepted by it, yet the consciousness that his injury was a minor one made him hesitate to trench upon it. He believed that the nurses looked askance at him and treated him with subtle discrimination, as though questioning the professional wisdom of the doctor in detaining him here so long. He would have liked to say that he agreed with them, that he, too, could not understand why a mere fractured elbow should require so protracted a stay in bed, to assure them that it was not of his own desire but by the arbitrary will of another that he was there presuming on their patience.

This sense of his own nothingness in contradistinction to some darker reality had been threatening him, he now perceived, from childhood. The tone of his mother’s voice, sad, velvety, genuflectory, pronouncing the words “They’re
poor
” came back to him now with horror. “And are we rich?” he heard himself pipe. “No, dear, just comfortable”—the tone was of modest complacency, tinted with social awareness. In Cambridge, among his fellows, with the Xes, even, on their farm, he had achieved a minor entrée—he could be
found,
like a point on a social graph. But here, where no attachments secured him, where no one knew his history or his friends, he felt himself suddenly floating, uncircumstantiated, a mere transparency, and this sense of himself as an absence was so compelling that he was startled by the sight of his face, which looked at him through its eyeholes like a Christmas mask when they brought him in a mirror to shave by. The mortification of being alone, unvisited, unjustified, of having his name spelled wrong every day on the menu he was given to check for his choice of dishes, of having no bedroom slippers or pajamas (à la mode enough in Cambridge but a source of daily wonder here) had so wrought upon him that he had anticipated, without realizing it, an actual pauperization of his features. The sight of the familiar gold forelock, full lips, and snub nose was terribly disconcerting, as though he looked upon himself in effigy.

To exist, he suddenly became convinced, was an act of deliberate impersonation. Mr. Ciccone, across the hall, being shaved with an electric razor by a party of laughing student nurses, was a living warrant of this; Mr. Ciccone, imitating old age in a high infirm quaver, was both actor and
régisseur
—he had seized his part from the director and was executing it
con amore.
The young man listened with envy; the juvenile bit assigned him and, with him, his whole class and generation of soft-voiced, accommodating extras was too shadowy; he had no cue to rise to in the play. What was it, he asked himself, that sustained Mr. Ciccone and, for that matter, all the lively old mountebanks of the era—Yeats, Augustus John, Freud, Einstein, Churchill? Surely not belief in the self, since the self, as these old men knew, was a joke, a nothing, a
point du départ.
Mere virtuosity perhaps, and a growing closetful of stage effects—the paunch, the wrinkle, the limp; the jowl, the shank, the bald pate. In the Santa Claus suit of old age, beneath the padding and the pillow, some spry punchinello had hold of the vital principle of artifice.

The young man had been in the hospital two or three days and was sitting up, with bathroom privileges, before a certain suspicion that had been attaching itself to Mr. Ciccone became a verified fact. Mr. Ciccone, like Homer, was not a single individual but a collaboration. There were, astonishingly, four old men on the corridor, of whom the one called Mr. Ciccone was only the ringleader—four old men, bedded in private or semi-private rooms, two of them incontinent, all insubordinate, unsubdued, sworn enemies, every one, of the bedpan, the catheter, and the needle. Antiphonally or singly, they kept up a sort of plain chant, a thin, wheezy dirge that went on, all day long in its eerie unaccentual modality:

At certain times of the day, this cry became more vociferous, when the student nurse, for example, passed through the wing with the penicillin injections. Her entry to the semi-private rooms, at the far end of the corridor, was announced by a violent hubbub: imprecations, sobbing, pleading, the occasional crash of falling furniture. The young man would lay aside his book and wait for the authoritative creak of the head floor nurse proceeding to the scene, the sound of feminine chiding (“Mr. Wright, you’re not being thoughtful, you’re not being thoughtful
at all
”), the shriek, and then the after-cry, piercing, long-drawn-out, that vibrated through the corridor as the young nurse went on to the next room, to the women, who made no sound, and finally to Mr. Ciccone and himself.

In the case of two feeblest old men down the hall, sincerity and trumpery, so far as the young man could determine, were blended in the act of resistance. The needle, of course, did not hurt much, but in the lumbar regions of their spirit,
something
, plainly, was being violated. They were childish, in the nurses’ phrase; there was a blur in their minds between actual pain and the imagined representation of it; they did not trouble to distinguish and acted out every fancy with a pure, innocent sort of expressiveness. Mr. Ciccone, by contrast, was a conscious artist and a borrower. Sometimes, in the afternoon, the young man would overhear him softly rehearsing a sound effect that he had picked up from one of his coevals, essaying it again and again, tentatively, like someone practicing on a flute.

Later, in the after-supper lull, the mournful phrase, fully developed, would suddenly issue from Mr. Ciccone’s room, to be taken up again by one of the other Methuselahs, reminded by it of his own aches and miseries, so that the whole corridor would echo with the plaint of the old men, and the single, stolid night nurse would clump, scolding, into the diet kitchen, shut the door, and heat herself a cup of coffee.

This troupe of ancients, as if to confirm the young man’s theories, was handled by the hospital staff, at any critical juncture, with precisely that mixture of indulgence and asperity that characterizes the plain man in his relations with the artist. On the night that the two incontinent old fellows broke a draining-tube and drank a bottle of gentian violet between them, climbed out of bed and shouted in the corridor, an orderly, like a stagehand, came whistling down the hall to subdue them. “What will they think of next?” a white-haired nurse demanded, poking her head gratuitously into the young man’s room; doors slammed, lights went on, the elevator gates clashed. Only Mr. Ciccone’s room remained dark and almost ostentatiously peaceful, though the young man’s ear caught the sound of a dry chuckle, repeated at intervals. Yet the fact was, as the cleaning woman, shaking her head and her mop, confided to the young man in voluptuous brogue the next morning, one of those old rapscallions had just missed a date with Saint Peter.

All the while, the women patients were silent.

He had learned from one of the nurses that a woman was dying of cancer somewhere in the private wing, but only once, during his first days in the hospital, did he hear a woman’s voice that was not that of a nurse or a visitor—a young woman’s laugh and the sound of a door closing on it. This feminine silence began to disturb him very much; the idea that sick women of various ages and complaints were lying, blanketed, all around him, behind half-closed doors, each sheltering her unknown portion of suffering with a kind of uterine possessiveness, had the effect on him of a tactile sensation—as though he were encased in felt. He found himself with a strange, pressing desire to uncover that female suffering, to make it reveal itself to him by a sob, a gasp, a murmur, to have his ear know its contours, like a pleasure. On the fourth night of his stay, he was awakened suddenly, out of a deep sleep, by prolonged shrieks coming from the darkness, a woman’s voice raised again and again in screams of such appalling vibrancy that his hair stood up on his head. “
The cancer patient,
at last!”—the jubilant exclamation sprang out of him, quite unintentionally. He sat straight up in bed to listen, trembling with cold and excitement. Here there was no question of hearing or not hearing; these cries transfixed him with horror and yet he listened to them, fascinated, in the tingling stealth of discovery. He knew immediately that he was not meant to hear; these shrieks were being wrung from a being that yielded them against its will; yet in this fact, precisely, lay their power to electrify the attention. “A dying woman screaming in the night,” the young man repeated musingly, as the cries stopped, at their very summit, as abruptly as they had started, leaving a pounding stillness, “this is the actual; the actual, in fact, is
that which should not be witnessed.
The actual,” he defined, pronouncing the syllables slowly and distinctly in a pedagogical style, “under which may be subsumed the street accident, the plane crash, the atrocity, is pornography.” Closing his eyes, he sank back on a long breath of relief.

He awakened the next morning with a vivid feeling of joy and liberation, as if during the night a responsibility had been sloughed off. He felt blithe and ready to live, selfishly and inconsiderately, like the expressive old men; the actual no longer drew him with its womanish terrors and mysteries, its sphinx-rebuff and
invidia.
“Cast a cold eye on life, on death,” he sang out, borrowing from old Yeats’s tombstone. “Horseman, pass by.” He was positively elated, in fact, to be young, healthy, and hungry, and, as he meant to tell Dr. Z as soon as he appeared on his rounds, determined to go home to Cambridge on the one-o’clock train. This elation induced in him an unusual talkativeness; to the fat grumpy old nurse who came in with the thermometer, he could not resist an allusion to what he had heard during the night. The old nurse surveyed him tersely, shook down the thermometer without comment, unpinned her watch from her uniform, and, snapping her fingers impatiently, extended her veined hand for his pulse. “Maternity case,” she finally surmised, handing him his toothbrush and the tin basin. “You won’t hear a sound out of Mrs. Miller [mentioning the name of the cancer patient]. She’s quiet as a lamb next door.” The young man turned white at the thought of that deathly stillness so near him; he had imagined the next room to be empty, for not a sound had issued from it, and passing it on his trips down the hall to the bathroom, he had observed that the door was always shut. The next question was drawn from him by a compulsion; he did not wish to ask it and threw it out with diffidence: “She is under opiates, I suppose?”

The nurse surveyed him again with a short, measuring movement of the eye. “Brush your teeth, now,” she commanded curtly. “You know we are not permitted to give out information about the other patients.” She withdrew the bedpan from the commode, jerked off the towel that shrouded it, and slid it under the covers. “Put your light on when you’re through,” she directed. The young man sat up. “But I am allowed to go to the bathroom!” he exclaimed. “Not this morning,” she said firmly. “Doctor says we are to stay in bed this morning.” “But why?” demanded the young man, now thoroughly alarmed and suspicious. The nurse’s creased face snapped shut. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she retorted. “Doctor will be in early to see you.” “I demand—” cried the young man after her, as she bustled out, leaving the door open, but he broke off, conscious of absurdity, for what he had been about to say was “I demand to see a lawyer,” which was ridiculous, for he was certainly free to get up and dress and leave the hospital. The idea of flight suddenly offered itself to him as the only feasible solution. He pictured, with a return of his early-morning gaiety, the rubber-soled chase down the corridor, the escape down the fire-stairs. His imagination, however, faltered at the thought of the office: to leave without paying was unthinkable, yet would they be likely to take a check from him under such unusual conditions? He feared, all at once, to put this question to the test. He felt unequal to the imagined commotion—the painstaking verification of identity, the call to his bank in Boston—and for what purpose, he asked himself, would I do all that, for the mere assertion of my individuality? For the sake of another, he reasoned, I could conceivably do it, if it were a question of rescue or sacrifice; but for
myself
? He lay back dutifully on the bedpan and in a moment put on his light.