Authors: Hortense Calisher
Both men smiled briefly—it was always such an absurd thing to say to a doctor.
“Well…why don’t you come upstairs and see your patient. She’s in wonderful shape, you know; it all turned out fine. A bronchitis.” He was rather proud of the turn of phrase, the “a,” at the same time ashamed of it, the sort of lingo with which amateurs of the camera tried to chum up with him. “Seems to have broken the spell. Of that recurrent infection.” He knew he was talking too much and too fast, and could not stop himself. “You know?”
Boda nodded, his head depressed. Perhaps his vanity was hurt, at the ease with which, in his absence—Raising his head, he gave David a square look.
“Good stable weather,” said Boda. “Dry.”
They were an uncanny set, the medical, able to chill with the slightest—remark. The weather. Probably it was as much of a bore to them, to have their every cliché—examined. It must be what made them the more stolid, like the man here.
To his relief, Liz called from upstairs, asking who. “It’s Dr. Boda, dear.” His voice wavered up, artificial—when in his life, public or private, had he ever called her “dear”? “He just—” he flicked a side-glance—“stopped by.”
There was no answer from above, or at his side. “My wife will be delighted to see you,” he said. From Boda’s lack of reply, he was sure, yes, now quite sure, that Boda knew how Liz disliked him, even how she put him up against Dowlin—relief washed over him. Of course, of course. They were as petty as any other set of men. Of course—Dowlin.
“I did stop by, partly, to see this place,” Boda said. “Partly. I’ve often passed it. Tell me about it. Old woodworking factory, isn’t it? And what’s in there?” He pointed toward the Ivans’ quarters.
“Oh, there’re not many like this. We love it. We built our place more or less from scratch—my wife did. She’s a sculptor. It suits us down to the ground.” He recalled suddenly how Boda, on his visit before, had strode up without a glance, eager to get to his patient. Too late—he himself had already warmed to his subject, in words so well-worn by now, so facile, that they might have been prepared for him by someone else.
“Yes,” said Boda to everything, “yes, yes.” It took quite a time to tell him all he asked. He queried and answered himself, turning here, there, like a technician. “Gravestones. Power tools, hmm, and probably carborundum. Away these past few weeks, eh. No thanks, I won’t bother to see the place.” He turned thoughtfully on his heel. “Yes.”
On the way upstairs, this time at a pilgrim’s pace, he touched the ropes one after the other and when he arrived at the landing shook the final one, leaned forward to follow the path by which he had ascended, examined his palm, and said it again—“Yes.”
When Liz opened the door, she looked angry, which meant that she too was afraid. The child stood at her side, dressed in its outdoor clothes—smart gray coatee and leggings, miniature riding-hat and red strap-sandals, all sent by her grandmother—dressed by Liz at top speed, to whisk her past them. She stood there like a testimonial pushed forward by her mother, not a child to be examined, an outdoor child. Behind them, the loft shone, meal cleared, all in fast order for leaving, except the peeping vacuum cleaner for which there had not been time—the room too stood prepared. Even the dog quivered in tableau—we’re just going out. At the sight of them, pride—it must be—choked him, and after all the talk, he could only gesture to Boda—my home, my brood.
“We’re just—” said Liz.
“Going out,” said Dr. Boda. “Yes. I won’t take but a minute.” He was unreal; he couldn’t possibly be here. His face was stern, sad with its own unreality, but with the ease of a man who wasn’t really there, he slipped inside.
Liz stepped back; the dog sniffed and circled. Only the child stood her ground.
“Well, here you are, eh. Little May.” He dropped on his knees before her. Didn’t he know how children were scared by that, the close confrontation of adult eyes, how they hated it—the pure nostril shrinking back from the cleanest adult, his skin, his breath? “Going out for a pony-ride, hmm?” He dared to tip the doubtful, tremoring chin on his long forefinger. “Long time no see, eh?” He was willing to make himself insufferable to convince them that he was flesh-and-blood. “You remember me, eh May, old Dr. Boda?”
“Bo-da,” said the child.
He cocked his head to one side. “Ah, I’m luckily named, my old man changed it, short for Svoboda—Czech. My German patients think it’s Boder—bee oh dee ee are; my Jewish ones know better—think I’m trying to pass; the Spanish call me Bodair…and the kids…” He rattled on, to the parents, and never took his eyes from the child, even drew down her eyelids as he singsonged “Pretty eyes,” and then stood up. “And the kids—” He smiled down at her, courtly. “Can say Boda. Those are pretty mittens,” he said. “My—little girl, has some like them. Could I see for sure? I’ll give it right back.” She allowed him to draw it off, even to hold the magnetized, not quite brave hand. It was not the mitten that interested him. “No nail-polish yet, I see.” The nails, their color—at some length, he admired them. “Thanks.” He patted them, drew the mitten on, gave the hand back. “Thanks” was all he said, in the gentlest way, and it was then that the child, clenching her face like an anguished clairvoyant, began to wail.
He turned red at that, almost as if he had been slapped, and oddly enough, this made him seem, for all his patter, for the first time false to himself—to be stolid was his role. And to listen to the breathing of a crying child, not its sorrow, to listen unmoved, unmoving. When she had quieted, he told them.
He was most thorough. “You must keep in mind,” he said, summing up, “asthma isn’t so much one disease—as a whole set of conditions that vary from patient to patient. That’s why it’s often not spotted right away—especially in a very young one. I did have it in the back of my mind, of course. So did Dowlin. But until she came to the hospital, she’d never been seen in attack.”
“But he let us leave there, thinking—” said David. “Bronchitis.”
The doctor stared at his own knee. “That’s what she did—end up with more or less. Names aren’t as accurate medically as people think—and often cause trouble prematurely, unless the family understands. Anyway—I happened to get back just then, and remember, I live in the neighborhood, I’d already had a vague idea, about this building. So, when Dowlin called me—”
“Why didn’t he call us, tell us himself?” said Liz, staring. He, Boda, was not to get off free either. But if she could only divide the blame into words, hand it piece by piece around—
“Oh, he would have, I’m sure, if—but we’d already agreed, on the man you ought to see.” He tapped the paper he had given them. “And as for the—we-ell, I was the referring doctor—” He looked at his knee, his shoe, his watch. He stood up. “And I was interested,” he said, low. “It was kind of my bailiwick.”
Oh. They thought they understood him. Dowlin was on the bright side. And May—May was no longer a Dowlin child.
“It was very good of
you
,” said David.
“Oh…all in the day’s…” Boda bustled in his pocket and brought out an envelope. “And while I’m at it—” Glancing about, he spied the vacuum cleaner. Very carefully, shielding it, he opened the dust-bag, transferred a sample of its contents to the envelope, and pocketed it. “Might I—?” Standing again, he was holding his hands in front of him with a certain fastidious gesture that went through Liz with a great pang. That was how they had done in the old days, and her mother had always been ready with the towel for them, with her quick nod, as from a colleague—in there, Doctor, to wash your hands.
When he had finished, he was genial in the way of doctors at end of interview, as if they basked in some jollity the patient himself had been kind enough to lend them. He was himself again, or rather, all of them. “When you go see him, take a sample if you like, but I’ll be getting a lab report on it. Meanwhile follow whatever regimen—he does wonders that way, even with severe cases. I’d say it’s a foregone conclusion though—what I told you. She’s been lucky in the weather lately, the machines being idle below, and so forth. But you really ought move as soon as possible. You’re just courting trouble, otherwise. She shouldn’t go on living here. Or in any place where there’s that much stone and wood dust.”
Perhaps he misunderstood their faces.
“It’s not the worst disease a child might have,” he said. “We’ve drugs now, more coming. On the psychological side, we don’t have too much—we know it’s there, of course. I won’t say she’s a light case. But sometimes even those outgrow it, depending. If she were my child, I’d get her out of New York altogether. Hell on respiratories.”
They sat close together, not stirring, as birds do, in a nest crept up upon. When they breathed the question, together, it came faintly, barely stirred them, in the tone of questions which already know the answer. “Where?”
“Oh, you’ll have to ask him, he’s the expert. I don’t know too much on it. Generally drier, warmer perhaps. But relatively low fluctuation would be the main—I shouldn’t think it would have to be Arizona. It’s this so-called temperate zone that’s such hell on—” He coughed. “I really must go now.” After all, he had been so thorough. Carefully, not to frighten again, he stepped around the little respiratory in her corner.
It was Liz who barred the way, eyes narrow, arms dragging like wings. “Do you!” she said, between her teeth. Each word fell heavy, a missile too blunt to wound. “So you have children too, Dr. Boda!”
“Oh, Liz,” said David. “Don’t, Liz.” He bled for her. She had no place to put her hate. For how could one wound them, these stolid men who gave forth, from dugs more impartial than Tiresias’s, such a general milk? They knew and saw too much—as of yesterday. How get round such as Boda, mild man-in-a-brown-suit going on to his next appointment, who perhaps dared not get round himself? But he was answering.
“One,” said Boda. “That is—” Hand out, he leaned forward to her, as if debating whether or not to give her something he held. “We lost him—Christmas.”
She put her hand to her mouth, but the raw sound escaped. “Not—”
“No.” His eyes keen on her, he hesitated, weighed. And finally, for what use it might be to her, he offered it—gave—the name of the disease which was the worst.
When he left, he was—for the moment their own misery could allow him—quite real.
In it, their child came up to them, looking into each face. She knew nothing, or everything. A memory perhaps struck her, of another day also mixed in its colors, but also begun well. “The zoo,” she said, almost piteously. “I want to go to the zoo.”
They sat looking into the room’s center, entwined. Once the mother muttered to a child somewhere behind her to unbutton its coat, they would go soon. The child began painfully to do so; she had just recently learned how and the coat had a great many, in a double line. After she had come to the end of them, she began, in concentration, to rebutton them. From behind, her figure, seated in the tight corolla of its own clothes, seemed that of a doll learning its own mechanism, but they did not notice her. They were looking at their concern for her. She was their whole concern now. They had their eye on that.
When the mother asked the time, it was hard to believe that only an hour ago—but they were more accustomed now to the hairlines that bar one from Eden, to looking back. I was sorry though, to hurt him though, she said—Boda. But one never expects to, one never gets through to them, really. I know, he answered, it’s because they can’t get through to people, daren’t, they know too much about them. Oh-h, I can’t stand the breed though, she said in a long shuddering sigh, it’s what I can’t stand in them, and you, why do you have to be so understanding of
them
, so saintly—why do you always have to be such a saint?
He continued to hold her as gently as if he were, but after a while he said: Well, perhaps so, if compromises made you one—perhaps he was. Sometimes he felt he had compromised himself out of any existence on his own altogether, nothing but a grease-spot left of him, on his own. You, she said, and he answered
Yes me, why not me
—and then they left off, ashamed at this bitterness at such a time, for were they not talking, as people do, to mark time until what must be is taken in as being so?—and in all that low exchange of honesties, only this last had been heard.
And after a while, putting her head on his chest, not wishing to startle the child with wails of her own, she said his name over and over, Dave, Dave, oh Dave, and since he could not cry in any case, he rocked her, letting her say it for him. Behind them, the child murmured a song of her own; she thought they were singing. Then she was still.
Minutes passed. Then one spoke; it was only a matter of time, which. “The tenants in her apartment are giving up their lease soon. Next month, she wrote. We could live there.” The voice paused. “You wouldn’t hate it any more than I.”
After a suitable interval, the second voice intervened. It began to describe the climate of a certain part of California, where the low-keyed days were so remarkably stable. Mornings, the sun arrived obliquely—out of a mist that fooled only foreigners—and always at the same hour. Evenings were as infallible—sunsets and subtropical sweaters. A land of health, where no one went pale, day after paragon day.
Then that voice paused also. It did not matter which had said which, or what would be made of it. The two voices were the same—the voice of the snake-swallower whose sibilance comes from his own mouth, but is not his own.
Luckily—for what mad refusals, failed jumps might occur, if people had time to stare at the depth of a crossing—the phone just then began to ring. “Oh Christ,” he said. “Barney’s been waiting an hour there, the Botanical Gardens, and our permit expires tomorrow. I’m afraid I won’t get home to dinner.” He was half out the door before he turned back to give her the look she knew so well—that pleaded not to blame him for having to leave her on the hook with it, not to hate him for always being the one to leave.
When he was gone, she stood in the center of the long room, her chest physically heavy with this new image of her life—the hook. It was no angler’s thin wire, from which one hung suspended at lip or roof-of-mouth, but a heavy mass that pushed up from below and protruded like a deformed sternum, around which the body reshaped itself like a grasshopper’s tailcoat, and was still able to walk. People hung in rows from them, yet like herself were still ambulatory. Glancing over at her work-table, she imagined rows of them there, even foresaw them replacing her wax women and babies in an exhibition whose theme was anyone’s eternal, for which the medium must be plaster, then bronze, its title a phrase often said of older people, said, not too long ago in a letter, of Mr. Pagani, but a phrase that might be said of anyone: He Still Gets Around Very Well. Hung there on hers almost humbly, at the same time she felt the angry balm, the upsurge of her powers—what it might mean to be an artist. She stretched up her arms—ah, she was healthy enough!—and saw the room. Both lurid and deflated, it was watching her in the way of the room that is going to be left. But there was something more presently wrong with it. May was gone.