The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (14 page)

“We have chickens in the freezer. I'll make some.”

“You're an amazing creature, Humdinger. Blowtorches and chicken soup. Well, off you go. Let me know as things unfold. I'm sure it's nothing. People are always getting terrible fevers that turn out to be nothing. But how in the world could she have caught something on the island? No one lives here. Of course, Mendelbaum managed it. Very resourceful of her.”

Humdinger moved swiftly and in no time a doctor was dropped off in the dark. Humdinger ran outside from where she dangled from the helicopter ladder.

“You put me down,” the doctor yelled to Sam, shaking her fist, but Humdinger grabbed the ladder and held it steady for her so she could get off.

“Well, this is certainly nuts,” she said. “Where's the sick girl?”

“Come on inside,” Humdinger said and swept her into the house and out of the rain and up immediately to Meline's room.

 

MELINE

I
HEARD PEOPLE COME IN
, and when I opened my eyes and saw a woman's face suddenly looming kindly over me, I thought it was my mother's and said, “ARSHK!” in that moment thinking all my hopes had materialized and my parents had never been dead after all. When the woman startled I saw it wasn't my mother at all and thought how lucky I was to be on the island where I had fewer opportunities to see my mother's face in every kind stranger that came my way. Then I realized “arshk” didn't mean anything, and although I was thinking a little more clearly since my nap, I was still hot and cold and mixed up.

“I'm Dr. Houseman, Meline,” she said. I closed my eyes for the rest of the exam and she began methodically poking me and pressing her stethoscope on me and I tried not to mind. They thought I was weak with illness, but I was trying to figure out how to put together the nose of one plane with an aileron from another. But I kept seeing it like a cartoon movie, the parts of airplanes rearranging themselves and forming new and strange machines.

“Meline, can you hear me?” asked Dr. Houseman more loudly than necessary and yet, oddly, it did sound as if her voice was coming from down a tunnel, a long way away. I nodded. “I don't know for sure and I can't be sure without a chest X-ray, but it sounds as if you have pneumonia.”

I opened my eyes and just looked at her. I wondered if you could get it from being constantly warned about it. When I didn't say anything Dr. Houseman turned to Humdinger and said, “I'd feel better if you'd let me take her back to the hospital.”

At this I sat bolt upright and said, “NO. NO hospital. NO.”

“Now, now,” said the doctor and then turned to Humdinger again. “So her parents are?”

“Dead,” said Jocelyn, who was lurking in the doorway. “She lost them both a few months ago.”

“I'm sorry,” said Dr. Houseman.

“Mine died, too,” said Jocelyn, which seemed to me to be extraneous attention-seeking information, and if it occurred to the doctor she only repeated “I'm sorry,” and then turned to Humdinger yet again.

“Well, I've heard worse chests but I've heard better. If she won't go to a hospital I want you to watch her, don't let her leave the bed, lots of fluids, make sure she takes the full course of antibiotics I'm going to leave for her, and if the fever spikes I don't care what she says, you bring her in.”

“Right,” said Humdinger. “Anything else?”

“This is a very strange place to live,” said Dr. Houseman, seemingly taking note of her surroundings for the first time and looking around my massive bedroom with its four-poster bed and high arched wood-carved ceiling. I could see her point. “You know the air force used to crash planes here? There was some kind of a scandal—some captain or something gone mad who was sending all these young men to their deaths for no reason.”

“Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane,” I said.

“She's not delirious, that's what they called it,” said Jocelyn.

“Huh!” said Dr. Houseman, considering. There was a pause, and I wondered if she'd left, so I opened my eyes and there she still stood. She had a large beaklike nose and a careworn face, dark eyes with deep crinkles at the corners, probably from squinting when she tried to see deeply into wounds, and an air of resolute calm, the air of someone who has learned to be this way after a lifetime of being exasperated with the type of things she had to see. Her hair was streaked randomly with gray as if a child had done it with a paintbrush. She wasn't pretty. I'm not sure if she was even handsome, but she did have likable features. She looked like someone you'd never have to save. She was thin and looked strong, as if she was used to doing all her own lifting. I had the feeling doctoring had been her whole lonely life. You could tell she was one of those earnest people with a purpose that makes them kind of weary and tired in middle age from being always the only serious one in a roomful of people who took life a little easier. As if she knew this made her different and strange and loneliness went with it and it might not have been what she'd have chosen.

“It would be so much easier if before we were born we could pick our temperaments. So we didn't get stuck with one that made us unhappy,” I said, completing my long reverie aloud.

Everyone looked down at me with worried expressions and I began to get a sense of what it must be like to be Uncle Marten.

“Don't you think?” I asked and then fell asleep again.

I lay bedridden, in the worst of my illness, beyond reading or chatting or directing traffic. Unable to do anything but take a few spoonfuls of the soup Humdinger kept bringing me, with Mrs. Mendelbaum on his heels snapping away, “I told you, stop making soup behind my back, ahzes ponim. A tall, goyishe cadaver cannot, can
not
a proper chicken soup make. I never heard of such a thing. Oy vey, get me a chicken, get me some shmaltz, get me an onion, get out of my way, all of you,” she would say, running into my bedroom after him in her housecoat, her hair flying in six directions at once, her stockinged feet slipping on the floor, a knife in one hand and a chicken in the other. But Humdinger would just calmly take the knife and chicken back and suggest she go to bed. Suggesting people go to bed was becoming his little specialty. She was still very ill herself, said Jocelyn, and Dr. Houseman had prescribed bedrest and Tylenol. Then he'd settle down and make a perfectly reasonable chicken soup with the muttered outraged oaths of Mrs. Mendelbaum drifting down from the second floor.

Once she came downstairs and looked into the soup pot and yelled “WHAT? NO DILL? What kind of farkuckt soup is this? You cannot have chicken soup without dill.” Mrs. Mendelbaum rolled up her sleeves and began to take the soup over to the sink to throw it out preparatory to starting over, but it was too heavy for her in her weakened state and she dropped the soup pot. I was downstairs getting a water bottle and watched in horror as the greasy soup flew all over the kitchen, flooding the floor and splashing the walls. Mrs. Mendelbaum screamed, and Humdinger pulled her swiftly out of the stream of hot liquid and, after determining that she hadn't been burned, escorted her back to bed with promises that he would make the soup to her exacting specifications. All of this I watched with some fascination, remembering how Humdinger had just finishing cleaning the kitchen before Mrs. Mendelbaum's arrival in it. He hadn't said any of the things I would have been tempted to. When he came back downstairs and began mopping up soup I said, “Do you really think you can't have chicken soup without dill? Who would notice?” I was trying to be sympathetic and apologetic for Mrs. Mendelbaum's behavior, since I figured someone in the household should come to his defense, but he said, “It doesn't matter. Mrs. Mendelbaum isn't happy and we're going to make it right for her.”

 

MARTEN KNOCKERS

Y
OU WOULDN'T THINK
it would be so difficult to keep sick people in their rooms, I thought as I watched Mrs. Mendelbaum yelling chicken soup directions over the banister. While Mrs. Mendelbaum and Meline lay ill, I was spending an inordinate amount of time online with my credit card, going from site to site, searching for deep plum and gold Christmas ephemera, napkins and pillows and tree skirts and tablecloths. Especially tablecloths, because Humdinger, who always had well-thought-out timely advice, had suggested a spare might be a good idea in case someone spilled something and rendered the new velvet one unusable. This would not occur to someone like me who never did laundry. In the old days, before Mrs. Mendelbaum, I would just wear my shirts until even I could smell them, and then throw them out. I always bought cheap ones because I did not want to be accused of conspicuous consumption. Even though it was my own money, to do with as I liked, and at that time there was no one to accuse me of anything.

Because Humdinger encouraged me to buy another tablecloth I ordered three more. On the same site, I ordered large golden angels with flowing blond hair and wreaths of gold filigree to hang on all the doors. These angels gave me more pleasure than anything; they represented something if only I could put my finger on it, some softness associated with virtue, not fire and brim-stone but nurturing. I hadn't had any religious background or study myself, but the Catholics seemed to have captured something, and all those Italians with their Renaissance Madonnas. I liked the idea of some womanly figure hanging on the walls blessing the house for the holiday season. And then at the end of Christmas packing her into a box again and putting her in the attic. It seemed to me that women were better at this type of thing, this house-blessing thing, than men. But perhaps not. That Humdinger was good at making things run smoothly. Certainly better than Mrs. Mendelbaum. What you wanted was an air of calm confidence and a certain serenity. It was hard for me to believe than anyone was serene a good portion of the time, let alone all the time. I found it a most elusive state myself. I bought shiny golden prisms to hang from the already rococo chandeliers and Victorian lamps. The whole house was beginning to glow with the golden light I was purchasing for it. I filled the inside with the deep plums and the dark piney greens of the woods. The light sank into the velvets and bounced off the glittering sparkling decorations. And every night I saw Jocelyn leave the house, flashlight in hand. Leaving all this light I was creating and going into the dark pouring rain. It was really very odd behavior.

One night at dinner she wanted to know about animals on the island. “Well,” I said, racking my brain because this wasn't something I paid much attention to. “Deer and raccoons, of course. Hmmm, what else? Ah!” I said, cutting into the perfectly grilled steaks that Humdinger had put before us, “Bulls! Or rather, a bull!” I remembered Humdinger had mentioned saving a Christmas box from a bull. And now that I thought of it, this was a very surprising thing for Humdinger to have said. “Am I remembering right? Did Humdinger say we had a
bull?
He must have been mistaken. He must have seen a largish squirrel.”

The truth was that I was spending far more time these days buying Christmas things than I was working on negative density even though I pretended to myself otherwise. The way the Internet had a hold on me was that I would ponder infinite space for a few seconds and then put a call in to some company selling crystal icicles to hang on trees and then try to keep both things in my mind while I talked to the clerk, which made ordering things by phone take much longer, as the clerk had to separate the physics that crept into the ordering information. I very seldom found a clerk who could talk physics worth a darn. If I had just admitted to myself that it was more fun to order Christmas ornaments than it was to study negative density, the clerks and I might have been spared all this. But no, I kept revisiting the Internet every ten minutes. And I was having more and more trouble with negative density; I did not understand it, so it was becoming something of a bore. The problem, I finally decided, was not that I didn't understand negative density, it was that I didn't understand what
other
people had written about it. Then I had the pivotal revelation that everyone else was just absolutely wrong and I was just absolutely right. That, it turned out, was a principle that stood me in good stead. Oooo, but speaking of negative density, I said to myself, as I proceeded ahead with my own hypothesis, I wonder if Neiman Marcus has any plum or gold accessories in its online Christmas catalog? And the problem with negative density took a backseat again. My mind now went from the bull Humdinger said he saw to a set of very cute plum floor cushions and a hassock that I could use to replace my current leather one. The plum-colored one was tufted. “And I do so love tufts,” I said.

“I wish I could have a dog,” said Jocelyn. “Aren't bulls supposed to be afraid of dogs?”

“No,
tufts,
not dogs, tufted hassocks,” I said.

“No, a
dog,
” insisted Jocelyn. “You know, a greyhound or a basset hound or a bloodhound.”

“Don't get stuck on hounds,” I advised her.

Apparently Jocelyn told Humdinger that I said she could have a dog and Humdinger had Sam pick up a puppy from the SPCA. When the dog crate was lowered in a harness from Sam's helicopter a few days later, I, who was looking out my window and didn't remember anything about the conversation from dinner a few nights before, thought, Is that a dog coming onto the island?
Another
creature? My God, why don't they just put up condominiums! It's too crowded here already. I swear to God I'm going to have to move myself if this keeps up. And I put my dresser in front of my door and forgot all about them until I got hungry and then couldn't find a way to get out of my room because I couldn't find the door and had forgotten that the dresser now stood in front of it. At the time, I thought my door had simply, inexplicably disappeared.

“What,” I moaned plaintively, “is happening to all the doors in this house?” and I sat on my bed eating soda crackers in bewilderment all night from a box next to my bed. It's a good thing I keep crackers by my bed, I said to myself comfortingly. And then I couldn't remember for the life of me
why
I kept soda crackers there and, in fact, couldn't remember having put them there at all, and all I could think to offer to myself as explanation was that things around here were getting very strange in general. Very strange. I wished I had the cat to curl up with, but she had detected that her usual means of egress was no longer open to her and had gone out the window some time before. A full moon was shining in the sky, illuminating the fields, and I gazed out idly, searching for the rumored bull I kept forgetting to ask Humdinger about.