Kinflicks (57 page)

Forcing herself to be amiable, Mrs. Babcock said, ‘Well, dear, tell me about yourself. What have you been doing for the last year?'

Ginny grimaced and searched for an answer. ‘I saw Clem Cloyd the other afternoon.'

‘Please,'
Mrs. Babcock said, closing her eyes. “Don't talk to me about that boy. I've never forgiven him for nearly killing you.'

‘He's changed.'

‘“Wolf cubs remain wolves, even though they may be reared among the sons of man.”'

‘But he
has,
Mother. He's a family man now — a wife and three children.'

‘So I hear. What of it? Attila the Hun had children, too, you know.'

‘Apparently Clem has become very responsible, Mother. And he no longer feels the need for his death-defying stunts. Father used to say he was a brilliant farmer.'

‘So your father said.'

‘Did you know he preaches?'

‘Are we talking about the same Clem Cloyd?'

‘I
told
you he's changed.'

‘I'll believe it when I see it. Which will be never.'

‘Well, he asks about you. He's very concerned about you.'

‘And what do you hear from Ira?'

‘Oh, not much,' Ginny replied blandly. ‘He's very busy this time of year selling trail bikes.' Was there no way to tell her own mother that Ira had kicked her out, that she hadn't heard from him at
all,
that she didn't know how Wendy was? She had spent several days getting up the nerve to phone them last night, but there had been no answer. What she
really
wanted was to ask her mother what to do. After all, what were mothers for? But she already knew what her mother would say: ‘Extramarital sex is vulgar.' And ‘Children need their mothers.' And ‘You must do your duty.' If the story didn't just finish her off within seconds.

They sat in silence, Ginny trying to decide whether or not to mention cerebral hemorrhage. Should her mother be told so that she could be preparing for instant death?
Was
there any preparing for instant death? How would you prepare? No, it was too horrible — knowing that at the next moment your brain might erupt in great geysers of blood, turning the contents of your skull into a gory mush. Panic clutched at her stomach and she grew dizzy. No, it was better for her mother not to know at all.

The two women exchanged strained smiles, the echoing silence starting to turn awkward, symbolic of the years of silence between them.

‘I thought I'd call Karl and Jim,' Ginny said casually.

‘Why?'

‘Well, just to tell them that you're sick and in the hospital. I'm sure they'd want to know.' In fact, she felt they should be placed on alert for a deathbed scene.

‘I don't really see the need for it. It's not as though I'm dying or anything! I mean, I didn't tell you all the other times, did I?'

‘No, you didn't. That's what I mean. I wish you had. Why do you have to be such a martyr all the time, suffering in obscurity?'

‘I can't see any point in getting everyone all upset over nothing, that's all. Just because I'm indisposed doesn't mean that you can bully me, Virginia Babcock Bliss. So please don't call them. I'll write them about it in my next letter.'

‘Do you promise?'

‘Yes, I promise. But I don't see that it's any concern of yours, frankly.'

‘It's just that you've always been so resolutely secretive about everything.'

‘
I
have been? Mata Hari is calling
me
secretive?'

‘Well, you're right. As a family, we just don't communicate, do we?'

The term ‘communicate' amused Mrs. Babcock. It was such a cliché, on the lips of every intense TV talk-show guest in the country. ‘Yes, I am aware that we don't — communicate,' she replied. ‘But you have to understand that that's one of my few remaining pleasures.'

Ginny snorted with laughter. She had to admit that her mother could really be very funny. Not often enough, unfortunately. Or rather, not at the right moments. ‘All right. Go ahead, Mother. Turn it into a joke. But it's the truth.'

Mrs. Babcock nodded tolerantly at her daughter. ‘Yes, dear, but I think you'll find that really important things eventually get themselves communicated. Not necessarily in so many words.'

‘If you say so,' Ginny said, thinking of her broken marriage, cerebral hemorrhage, all the various topics she was incapable of broaching.

Finally she stood up, saying lamely, ‘I have to find Dr. Vogel to ask him some stuff about the transfusion this afternoon.'

In fact, she had to grill him on the topic of her mother's bleeding stomach. She descended to the basement lab in the elevator. In one corner of the metal box was a small puddle of drying blood.

The elevator came to a stop. Ginny didn't move. She was transfixed by the blood. She felt nauseated, but she couldn't take her eyes off it. Whose was it? What sort of vessel had it sloshed out of? Was it healthy or diseased? What was its clotting time, its platelet lysis time? What type was it? As she stared, the puddle seemed to throb, in obedience to its absent heart. Blood, all the same everywhere — each person's the ionic composition of dilute sea water, containing cells that performed the same functions, governed by the same enzymes and hormones. And yet, in spite of all this sameness, like snowflakes or fingerprints, samples from no two people were identical. So many things to go haywire…

‘Miss?
Miss?'
An orderly in white stood impatiently outside the elevator.

‘Excuse me,' Ginny said, stepping out in a daze.

She walked into the impersonal green-walled lab office. The secretary's desk chair was empty. Ginny peeked around the doorway. Dr. Vogel in a white lab coat was peering through a microscope, continuously readjusting the focus. Next to him sat a centrifuge and a rack of test tubes. He was making hurried notations on a record form.

‘Dr. Vogel?'

He looked up. ‘I'm sorry, Miss Babcock. I'm very busy right now. Could you leave a message with my secretary?'

‘She's not here.'

He averted his eyes as Ginny walked over to him. ‘Would you say the transfusion hasn't worked?'

‘Well, she's just had one. And it performed the function we intended: It relieved her anemia and cut down her bleeding temporarily while we worked at isolating the cause. But of course her platelet count is back down now — to 25,000/mm.'

‘Compared to what?'

‘Compared to right after the transfusion, when it was in the vicinity of 100,000/mm.'

‘May I look?'

‘Well, I don't know…This is highly unconventional, Miss Babcock, your coming in here like this.'

Ginny looked through the microscope and saw clusters of transparent blobs on a grid of etched squares. So these were the culprits — her mother's languid platelets. They might even be her own, left over from the transfusion.

When she looked up, Dr. Vogel was holding a test tube with some red liquid in it, blood presumably, up to the overhead light. He studied it intently. Flipping on a fluorescent light directly over the counter, he picked up a second test tube and glanced back and forth between the two.

‘What are you doing?'

‘We're testing your mother's blood for platelet antibodies to determine if her ITP is being triggered by an autoimmune mechanism. We've incubated some of her serum with your blood and a sample of the drug your mother was on prior to admission, and we're checking for clot reaction.'

‘What
drug?'

‘Amitriptylene. Elavil to the layman.'

‘For
what?'

He glanced at her, amazed at the breadth of her ignorance. ‘For depression, of course.'

Of course? Ginny winced. Dr. Tyler had mentioned depression. Now this. What had her mother been depressed
about?
Mr Zed's death? The Major's death? Guilt swept over Ginny. Her children had been a disappointment. Ginny didn't know precisely what her mother had wanted from them, but she clearly hadn't gotten it. It was evident from the way she spoke of Jim and Karl — tolerantly, but with frowns and sighs. And presumaby she spoke to them of her in the same way. Maybe her mother was right after all: Important things
did
eventually get themselves ‘communicated,' one way or another.

‘Well, I think we have every reason to believe we're about to get this thing under control, don't you?' he asked.

Ginny struggled in the grip of her need to believe this. Due to having been reared by parents who were incapable of saying ‘I don't know,' she knew that she suffered from what the psychology texts at Worthley had labeled an Authority Neurosis. She had gone through life setting up tin gods who were supposed to restore to her the sense of certainty she had enjoyed under her parents' rule. Although this desperate longing for someone who really knew what he or she was doing remained, common sense told her that Dr. Vogel was just an ordinary flawed and confused mortal like herself.

‘I don't see why not,' she replied, not believing it. ‘But how sick
is
she?'

He blushed and averted his eyes. ‘Miss Babcock,' he finally answered, ‘you ask that as though I can give you a number on a scale from one to ten. I
can't.
Besides, I've been trained to save lives. I don't believe in writing patients off.' He bent over his microscope by way of dismissal.

Ginny glared at him. What did
that
mean?

Mr. Solomon and Sister Theresa were in the middle of a discussion when Ginny arrived at the sun porch to witness her mother's lunch.

‘…and so you see, Sister, there's nothing in man that is
vorth
extending throughout infinity. I mean
really,
Sister, vould you vish us on eternity? No, it doesn't make sense. Ve are a flawed species. The only thing to be said in our favor is that our bodies can rot and be devoured by grubs and vorms; and the elements that are released can go into making up the bodies of a different — and ideally not morally retarded — species.'

‘My dear Mr. Solomon, my heart goes out to you,' Sister Theresa said, fondling her ‘Not My Will But Thine' medal. ‘If that hope is the only force that sustains you, I don't know why you're still alive. I really don't. Perhaps it doesn't make
sense
to you that our Lord can esteem us and provide for us in spite of our many vanities and frailties, but can't you
feel
it in your heart? Look out there, Mr. Solomon,' she invited, gesturing in the direction of the factory. The electric chimes were playing ‘You'll Never Walk Alone. ‘When you see sunlight playing on the meadows, don't you feel here' — she patted the site of her missing breast — ‘that there are factors even
you
haven't taken into account, forces you know not of, that God's in His heaven and all's right with the world? Because, believe me, Mr. Solomon, He
is.'

‘Since you put it that way, Sister,' he said, patting his emphysematous lung, ‘no, I don't feel it here. I think…'

‘Stop it!' Mrs. Babcock screamed, hurling her bowl of cream soup on the floor. ‘Can't you two just
shut
up? You go on and on and on, saying the same things over and over again. Neither of you is affected by what the other says, or even listens to it! Why can't you just be quiet? Mrs. Cabel is the only one in this room with any sense.' She stood shakily, as the others stared with alarm.

She started her agonizing shuffle toward the door. Ginny jumped up and took her arm. They started down the hall, leaving the others to cope with the spilled soup and broken china.

‘Mother,' Ginny began, framing a gentle reprimand. True, her mother was sick, but there was no reason to turn into a savage.

“Not
one
word. Not one word.'

As Mrs. Babcock struggled up the hall on her aching legs, something happened. It was as though her brain were shifting gears. The hall telescoped — it looked miles long. She shuffled along, holding Ginny's arm. She could have been walking like this for minutes or for months. She didn't know or care.

Back in bed, she lay limp and lethargic. It was as though a plug had been pulled and her vital energies were flowing out of her. But it wasn't the weariness of depression. That she was thoroughly acquainted with. Depression was a very active state really. Even if you appeared to an observer to be immobilized, your mind was in a frenzy of paralysis. You were unable to function, but were actively despising yourself for it. This frame of mind was entirely different. Its only emotion, if it could be called that, was sublime indifference. Nothing mattered anymore. If she was dying, so be it. Languidly, she raised an arm and observed the bruises — dark red and deep purple and green. What did this grotesque arm have to do with her? For heaven's sake, what was all the fuss about?

A haze had settled in over the room. People were rushing around, doing different things to her pathetic body. Their voices as they questioned her urgently hummed and buzzed like angry bees. She wanted to tell them all just to relax and leave her alone.

Dr. Vogel, who had come running, turned to Ginny and said, ‘She seems all right. All her vital signs are in order. Maybe she's just tired out.'

As her mother lay limp, with blood from another donor running into her arm, Ginny watched ‘Westview General' on television. Doctors Turcott and Adrian, the two handsome bachelor main characters, were performing an impossibly intricate operation that was snatching a small boy from the jaws of death, and were at the same time cracking jokes and quoting Shakespeare and making dates with the surgical nurses, who somehow managed to look provocative in low-fashion sterile gowns and caps.

But gradually, as though catching an infection from her mother, Ginny felt herself being flooded with cosmic indifference. She just stopped caring — about the young surgeons on ‘Westview General,' about her ill mother, about Wendy and Ira. It was as though the incredible strain of the past few weeks had mounted to a point beyond which she could not go. Her system was simply shutting down; her emotions were closing up shop. There she and her mother lay, in their separate beds, awash on a healing sea of indifference.