No Place for an Angel (27 page)

“Poor Barry,” she said. “Poor Barry.”

Charles was not with her. “He'll come if he can,” she said. “If he gets the message he'll come.” She touched his hand and head, her flesh like splashes of water. “We've got to see your doctor; where is he? Oh, I'm not alone. I found Mario in Catania—Mario Marcadante. He'll talk to the doctor, talk to everybody. Do sleep if you can. I brought some American aspirin.”

“Aspirin! It's worse than that, Irene. Worse than that!” He gripped the sheets. Did he have to perish in front of her to make her understand?

“I know that, Barry. It's just that aspirin is all I have.”

He closed his eyes. “It's hot . . . hot,” he murmured. “It must be July.”

“Just about,” Irene confirmed.

She got him water, coaxed the aspirin down him, turned his pillow and wrung out a cloth for his head.

“It was in July the other thing happened,” he rambled. “That day in Arkansas. I was marrying her in a week and lying under the jeep in her father's back yard and I heard them, and they never intended any of it. Oh, to marry her, sure, that was fine, but none of it about the art school. It was all a lie and they were going to get me out of it, as soon as we had got married, and the worse of it was that she knew, she knew it! She was lying too, and had been and would. She had heard the whole plan and the money for the art school was going to be mine and she went to drawing class day after day, talked and walked and lived it, all I dreamed about. It was a lie. I was flat out under her father's jeep to repair it, with oil dripping in my face and I heard it all. They were going to get me over that foolishness. They had never considered doing anything else. It was not till then I stole the money. I would never have thought of taking money otherwise.”

Irene nodded. “Of course not, darling,” she said.

“She followed me to New York. Sorry about everything. We'd have a new start. We got married. It was a lie, just a lie. A scheme to get me back to Arkansas. A hold on me forever. She never saw she had done anything wrong. She never saw she had done anything at all, except what was right. She thinks she's holy; she loves me forever; she's pretty and rich and sexy as hell. I could beat her to a pulp and she'd never know the truth. She ruined me, destroyed me. Now she's pursuing. She'll follow me forever. She'll never let go.”

“I won't let her in,” Irene promised.

“You don't take me seriously.”

“Would I be here at all if I didn't? Now, Barry, it's just the fever. You're going to be okay.”

“I hope you aren't too sure,” he said. “Irene, please be a little bit worried.”

“I keep telling you that I am.”

But if so, why laugh? he almost said, but had no strength to continue the argument. She had laughed; he knew it. He had heard it tinkle like ice in a glass, the kind of ice you chipped with an ice pick off a whole blue cold square, tightly crystalline at the core, the jagged lumps losing their sharp edges on the moment of entering the clear water. “Remember ice?” he almost said. (She would have thought he was raving again.)

She thinks I'm one of the twins, thought Barry. She knows too many strong people; she is too strong herself, and so she isn't careful. How can I live again, how can she know enough to let me? He did not know, but he had to trust her anyway.

Irene and Mario sat in the doctor's office, and though the white streets were baked dry and hot, the interior was cool and shuttered, faintly damp, smelling of ether and antiseptics, and Irene, in her sleeveless dress, almost shivered. The doctor was
scrubbed, immaculate, rather handsome. His face was dark and florid, his jacket flawlessly starched and white. There was no sign of his profession anywhere; no diploma was hung up, no nurse to be seen. Irene got the fleeting feeling that anyone might have come in off the street and put that jacket on. She did not trust Italian medicine and while still in Rome had telephoned to an American doctor, a friend from Charles' army days who had liked Italy and decided to come back to start a practice. He could not go with her, he said, but promised to give what advice he could on the phone and, if she really got desperate, to fly there.

Mario talked with the Sicilian doctor. Irene could not follow his accent; perhaps she was frightened, as he seemed to speak a correct, businessman's Italian. The gist of it was that Barry's injury to his knee, which had resulted from a motor-scooter accident he had on some rocks by a roadside near Agrigento, was three days old before the doctor had had a chance to look at it. Now he could only hope to have arrested the infection. This fever, these aches, quite possibly came largely from grippe. It was only a coincidence that the grippe—

Out in the street Irene blurted out her fears. “I don't believe it, I don't believe a word of it. Italian medicine is the closest thing to witchcraft.” She stopped trying to be tactful. “It's clear he's aching because the poison is everywhere. I'm going to call Dr. Archer. . . .”

“Stop it,” said Mario, and backed her out of the sun, into an empty doorway. He snapped her bag shut; she had been fumbling in it for gettoni to initiate a call. “Call him if you have to, but not in this mood. You're trembling.”

“But what can I do? I can't sit around here and watch him die. He's an artist,” she added, rather lamely.

“Maybe he's not dying. Maybe the doctor is right. It's only a summer fever.”

“It's all connected. If he has to have a leg amputated in this godforsaken. . . .”

“The doctor is not that bad,” said Mario.

“How would you know?”

“Okay, I'm just a stupid wop. Why did you want me to come? To chauffeur you?”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . .” She fell silent and walked at his side to a bar. He sat her down and ordered her something.

“One always feels at the mercy of doctors. That is the trouble,” Mario said. “For myself I have always watched animals closely. They cure themselves when sick. It was after I escaped from Rome I stayed at my aunt's villa near Siena. She had so many animals, a little goat used to run in the house and play. He had black hooves, very small and sharp. When sick he would not eat, or graze—even a goat. A goat will eat anything, but when sick? No, he looked out for a special herb.”

It all seemed like more talk to Irene. She felt the total responsibility of Barry narrow down to her. How could anyone sit making charming conversations about goats while Rome burned? If the doctor had been there, he would have joined in with Mario. He would have known about a goat, too. That was the part that made her wild. But in one way Mario was right; she had to calm down.

“Now let me get it straight,” she said. “Everything he told you.” And from thenceforth launched herself, wholehearted and, at least in her view, singlehanded, into the struggle. I'm going to do everything I can, was her resolve.

Hardly sleeping at all, she sat up for two nights with Barry. She sneaked off to the first-class tourist hotel, Albergo degli Stranieri, and called Dr. Archer. She had by then as much information as a hospital might have been able to gather. She had not seen Charles through a long Mayo clinic checkup for nothing, or nursed the boys through duplicate attacks of mumps and flu.

His Yankee growl floating deviously down from Rome reassured her. How many units of penicillin . . . ? And were there red streaks . . . ? And could she tell if . . . ? And was the fever constant or did it rise and fall?

She brought a thermometer and got ice from the neighborhood bar. She kept Coca-Cola in a plastic bucket, to the marvel of the landlady, who must have heard something of the sort about Americans. She watched the sea break on the sun-heated rocks. The Ionian Sea, she said to herself. A sense of reality in that place easily took part of her to itself.

She forgot about Mario, whom she passed once in the street without recognizing until he was gone. Once she wondered if he had left for Catania or Rome; again she was grateful to remember that he showed up daily. Where was he staying? She didn't know.

On the evening of the second day, the doctor in Siracusa told her that the wound had to be reopened and drained. “But surely,” she protested, “you will give an anesthetic.” The doctor smiled in a faint professional way.

“If he wishes, but you will have to help me.”

“Isn't there a hospital?”

“Why, yes, certainly. But it is scarcely necessary. And also to move him at such a time.”

Yes, thought Irene with a sigh, and they would be sure to drop him on the way downstairs. She had no faith at all.

According to the doctor's instructions, she held a sponge soaked in ether above a cloth and slowly dripped the ether from the sponge onto a cloth which was under Barry's nose. The cloth, though clean, was rust-stained. A local anesthetic would have been far preferable, she pointed out, but then could not make out entirely from the argument why it was impossible to give one. Knees were more complicated than she thought, apparently.

Barry, as soon as he began to go out, began also to fight for consciousness; he fought against being knocked out in this dizzily frigid suffocation like one fighting against death, or himself fighting for freedom not to have to see Linell McIntosh again. He flung the reeking cloth aside and would have fallen out of bed if the doctor had not been holding him. They had to start all over again. The doctor borrowed a rope from the padrona and tied him down. The padrona was in terror of everything connected with medicine—she was worse than Irene—yet she had always pleaded for them to stay until the young man recovered. Irene concluded that nothing so interesting had ever befallen her. She would never be induced to come into the room, nor could she be persuaded to now. She feared the sight of blood, she said; it made her sick. Her liver, she supposed, was at the bottom of her weakness. She would be sick for days.

The doctor and Irene secured the rope and started again. She had been unable to find Mario and the doctor had to go out
on another call, he told her. Thus they were into it again before she had known how to stop. Yet now that she had got this far, to show fear and back out would be the worst thing to do. She almost knocked herself out with the ether. “Breathe,” she kept saying, “try to lie still. Breathe, try to lie still.” He said afterward that it seemed her voice was coming to him out of the stratosphere. He saw planets race and was swept along by scarlet comets; all voices faded shrill away on that horizon which had been common once to all of life: the Ionian Sea. It was ordinary, grim, painful to look at, yet when it fled from his vision into black distance he felt a loss, a great loss. He saw a cart pass on a distant road and thought there was a box like a small coffin inside, a child's coffin, he decided, or it could be. He was trying to raise his arm to cross himself, but Irene had tied it down and he couldn't get it up because of her.

Irene was with him when he came around. He must have been sick already about fifty times. “It's all right,” she kept saying, holding his head. She reminded him that mothers had to go through this so much they didn't think anything of it. Then he looked hurt to be thought a child, but couldn't help taking anything she said. And so, with wounded pride as well as everything else, he fell asleep, toward night.

The day had been overcast and grey with a heavy chill wind and low-running clouds toward evening. Mario appeared, bringing her some minestrone from the restaurant, but she was too tired to eat it.

“It was like an operation,” she said, sighing. “Home style, the worst kind.”

“You'd be twice as worried about him in the hospital,” said Mario. “I went there to see. You can hear groaning and screaming—”

“Oh, my God,” she shuddered, and could not eat another bite.

“You are doing your best,” said Mario. “I'll stay with him. Go out and walk.”

The town was white and ghostly. The young Sicilians, slim and cheaply dressed, walked in clusters past windows, faded into bars and came out again. She passed a Greek ruin and went as far as the good hotel where at the foot of a wall there was a spring, mysterious and commonplace at once, surrounded by iron railings, flowing out among papyrus reeds. This was where a nymph had plunged in and buried herself, or so one could read on the explanatory sign. Her name had been Arethusa and she was running away from the lustful river god who was going to have her whether she wanted him or not. She was a nymph and could run like the wind, Irene guessed; running was evidently the very thing she was good at. But he was catching her anyway and down she went, into the fountain. Like all legendary things, to stand there and look at it was different from reading about it elsewhere, because on the spot it seemed it actually might have happened, like something that happened in a pasture on the outskirts of some little American town a century or so before—Indian chasing local maiden who jumped in the creek. That spring had understood Arethusa and never cared for her pursuer, and so had snatched her in and shut him out, but how did a maiden, Irene wondered, come to dislike any man as much as that? What was his name again? She read it from the tablet near the spring, once more, circling, looking down at the water which tangled darkly among the narrow stems of the plants. Two men were circling with her, not speaking; she looked up and saw them and began to move away, not turning when they spoke, and so dropped them behind.