Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (25 page)

“Look,” Booth said. “I can take you to court for this. Invasion of privacy. I can go to the papers. I'll go to the
university
— expose Student Health. You've got no right to be this unethical.”

“Why not just call Margaret Brant?” Ronkers suggested.

“Call
her?”

“And apologize,” Ronkers said. “Tell her you're sorry.”

“Sorry?!”
Booth shouted.

“And then come give me some names,” Ronkers said.

“I'm going to every newspaper in the state, Doc.” “I'd love to see you do that, Booth. They would crucify you. “Doc …”

“Give yourself a real lift, Booth. Take a drive by Catherine Cascomb Dormitory for Women. …”

“Go to hell, Doc.”

“Better hurry, Booth. Tomorrow they may start the bumper sticker campaign.” “Bumper stickers?”

“‘Harlan Booth has the clap,'” Ronkers said. “That's what the bumper stickers are going to say.

Booth hung up. The way he hung up rang in Ronkers's ear for a long time. The walnuts dropping on the roof were almost soothing after the sound Booth had made.

“I think we've got him,” Ronkers told Kit.

“‘We,'
is it?” she said. “You sound like you've joined up.”

“I
have
,” Ronkers said. “I'm going to call Margaret Brant first thing in the morning and tell her about my bumper-sticker idea.”

But Margaret Brant needed no coaching. In the morning when Ronkers went out to his car, there was a freshly stuck-on bumper sticker, front and back. Dark blue lettering on a bright yellow background; it ran half the length of the bumper.

On his way to the hospital, Ronkers saw more of the adorned cars. Some drivers were parked in gas stations, working furiously to remove the stickers. But that was a hard, messy job. Most people appeared to be too busy to do anything about the stickers right away.

“I counted thirty-four, just driving across town,” Ronkers told Kit on the phone. “And it's still early in the morning.”

“Bardlong got to work early, too,” Kit told him.

“What do you mean?”

“He hired a real
tree
outfit this time. The tree surgeons came right after you left.” “Ah, real tree surgeons

“They have helmets, too, and their names are Mickey, Max, and Harv,” Kit said. “And they brought a whole tub of that black healing stuff.”

“Dr. Heart
,” said Ronkers's receptionist, cutting in.
“Dr. Heart, please, to 339?

“Raunch?”

But the receptionist was interrupting because it was so early; there just might not be another doctor around the hospital. Ronkers came in early, often hours ahead of his first appointment — to make his hospital rounds, yes, but mainly to sit in his office alone for a while.

“I've got to go,” he told Kit. “I'll call back.”

“Who's Dr. Hart?” Kit asked. “Somebody new?”

“Yup,” Ronkers said, but he was thinking: No, it's probably somebody
old.

He was out of his office, and half through the connecting tunnel which links the main hospital to several doctors' offices, when he heard the intercom call for Dr. Heart again and recognized the room number: 339. That was old Herr Kesler's room, Ronkers remembered. Nurses, seeing him coming, opened doors for him; they opened doors in all directions, down all corridors, and they always looked after him a little disappointed that he did not pass through
their
doors, that he veered left instead of right. When he got to Kesler's room, the cardiac-resuscitation cart was parked beside the bed and Dr. Heart was already there. It was Danfors — a better Dr. Heart than Ronkers could have been, Ronkers knew; Danfors was a heart specialist.

Kesler was dead. That is, technically, when your heart stops, you're dead. But Danfors was already holding the electrode plates alongside Kesler's chest; the old man was about to get a tremendous jolt. Ah, the new machines, Ronkers marveled. Ronkers had once brought a man from the dead with 500 volts from the cardioverter, lifting the body right off the bed, the limbs jangling — like pithing a frog in Introductory Biology.

“How's Kit, George?” Danfors asked.

“Just fine,” Ronkers said. Danfors was checking the IV of sodium bicarbonate running into Kesler. “You must come see what she's done to the house. And bring Lilly.”

“Right-O,” said Danfors, giving Kesler 500 volts.

Kesler's jaw was rigid on his chest and his toothless gums were clenched together fast, yet he managed to force a ghastly quarter-moon of a smile and expel a sentence of considerable volume and energy. It was German, of course, which surprised Danfors; he probably didn't know Kesler was an Austrian.

“Noch ein Bier!”
Kesler ordered.

“What'd he say?” Danfors asked Ronkers.

“One more beer,” Ronkers translated.

But the current, of course, was cut. Kesler was dead again. Five hundred volts had woken him up, but Kesler did not have enough voltage of his own to keep himself awake.

“Shit,” Danfors said. “I got three in a row with this thing when the hospital first got it, and I thought it was the best damn machine alive. But then I lost four out of the next five. So I was four-and-four with the thing; nothing is foolproof, of course. And now this one's the tie breaker.” Danfors managed to make his record with the heart machine sound like a losing season.

Now Ronkers didn't want to call Kit back; he knew Kesler's death would upset her. But she called him before he could work it out.

“Well, well,” Ronkers said.

“Raunch?” Kit asked. “Kesler didn't see the paper, did he? They put the picture right on the front page, you know. You don't think he saw it, do you?”

“For a fact, he did not see it,” Ronkers said.

“Oh, good,” she said. She seemed to want to stay on the phone, Ronkers thought, although she wasn't talking. He told her he was awfully busy and he had to go.

Ronkers was in a cynical mood when he sat down to lunch with Danfors in the hospital cafeteria. They were still on the soup course when the intercom pleasantly asked for Dr. Heart. Since he was a heart specialist, Danfors answered most of the Dr. Heart calls in the hospital whenever he was there, even if someone beat him to the elevator. He stood up and drank his milk down with a few swift guzzles.

“Noch ein Bier!”
Ronkers said.

At home, Kit — the receiver of messages, the composer of rooms — had news for him. First, Margaret Brant had left word she was dropping the Harlan Booth assault because Booth had called and begged her forgiveness. Second, Booth had called and left Kit a list of names. “Real ones,” he'd said. Third, something was up with Bardlong and the infernal tree. The tree surgeons had alarmed him about something, and Bardlong and his wife had been poking about under the tree, along their side of the slatestone wall, as if inspecting some new damage — as if plotting some new attack.

Wearily, Ronkers wandered to the yard to confront this new problem. Bardlong was down on the ground on all fours, peering deep into the caves of his slate-stone wall. Looking for squirrels?

“After the men did such a neat job,” Bardlong announced, “it came to their attention that they should really have taken the whole thing down. And they're professionals, of course. I'm afraid they're right. The whole thing's got to come down.”

“Why?” Ronkers asked. He was trying to summon resistance, but he found his resistance was stale.

“The roots,” Bardlong said. “The roots are going to topple the wall. The
roots
,” he said again, as if he were saying,
the armies! the tanks! the big guns!
“The roots are crawling their way through my wall.” He made it sound like a conspiracy, the roots engaged in strangling some stones, bribing others. They crept their way into revolutionary positions among the slate. On signal, they were ready to upheave the whole.

“That will surely take some time,” Ronkers said, thinking, with a harshness that surprised him: That wall will outlive
you
, Bardlong!

“It's already happening,” Bardlong said. “I hate to ask you to do this, of course, but the wall, if it crumbles, well

“We can build it up again,” Ronkers said. Ah, the
doctor
in him!

As illogical as cancer, Bardlong shook his head. Not far away, Ronkers saw, would be the line about hoping not to get “legal.” Ronkers felt too tired to resist
anything.

“It's simple,” said Bardlong. “I want to keep the wall, you want to keep the tree.”

“Walls can be rebuilt,” Ronkers said, utterly without conviction.

“I see,” Bardlong said. Meaning what? It was like the 500 volts administered to Kesler. There was a real effect — it was visible — but it was not effective at all. On his gloomy way back inside his house Ronkers pondered the effect of 500 volts on Bard-long. With the current on for about five minutes.

He also fantasized this bizarre scene: Bardlong suddenly in Ronkers's office, looking at the floor and saying, “I have had certain … relations, ah, with a lady who, ah, apparently was not in the best of… health.”

“If it would, Mr. Bardlong, spare you any embarrassment,” Ronkers imagined himself saying, “I could of course let the, ah, lady know that she should seek medical attention.”

“You'd do that for me?” Bardlong would cry then, overcome. “Why, I mean, I would, ah … pay you for that, anything you ask.”

And Ronkers would have him then, of course. With a hunting cat's leer, he would spring the price: “How about half a walnut tree?”

But things like that, Ronkers knew, didn't happen. Things like that were in the nature of the stories about abandoned pets limping their way from Vermont to California, finding the family months later, arriving with bleeding pads and wagging tails. The reason such stories were so popular was that they went pleasantly against what everyone knew
really
happened. The pet was squashed by a Buick in Massachusetts — or, worse, was perfectly happy to remain abandoned in Vermont.

And if Bardlong came to Ronkers's office, it would be for some perfectly respectable aspect of age finally lodging in his prostate.

“Kesler's dead, Kit,” Ronkers told her. “His heart stopped, saved him a lot of trouble, really; he would have gotten quite uncomfortable.”

He held her in the fabulous sleeping place she had invented. Outside their window the scrawny, pruned tree clicked against the rain gutter like light bones. The leaves were all gone; what few walnuts remained were small and shriveled — even the squirrels ignored them, and if one had fallen on the roof it would have gone unnoticed. Winter-bare and offering nothing but its weird shadows on their bed and its alarming sounds throughout their night, the tree seemed hardly worth their struggle. Kesler, after all, was dead. And Bardlong was so
very
retired that he had more time and energy to give to trivia than anyone who was likely to oppose him. The wall between Ronkers and Bardlong seemed frail indeed.

It was then that Ronkers realized he had not made love to his wife in a very long time, and he made the sort of love to Kit that some therapist might have called “reassuring.” And some lover, Ronkers thought later, might have called dull.

He watched her sleep. A lovely woman; her students, he suspected, cared for more than her architecture. And she, one day, might care more for them — or for
one
of them. Why was he thinking
that?
he wondered; then he pondered his own recent sensations for the X-ray technician.

But those kinds of problems, for Kit and him, seemed years away — well,
months
away, at least.

He thought of Margaret Brant's sweet taste of revenge; her mature forgiveness surprised and encouraged him. And Harlan Booth's giving in? Whether he was converted — or just trapped, and evil to the core — was quite unknowable at the moment. Whether
anyone
was … Ronkers wondered.

Danfors's season with the heart machine now stood at four-and-six. What sort of odds were those in favor of human reproduction — Ronkers's and Kit's, especially?… And even if all the high school principals and parents in the world were as liberal and humorous and completely approachable concerning venereal disease as they might be sympathetic toward a football injury, there would
still
be rampant clap in the world — and syphilis, and worse.

Kit slept.

The brittle tree clacked against the house like the bill of a parrot he remembered hearing in a zoo. Where was that?
What zoo?

In an impulse, which felt to Ronkers like resignation, he moved to the window and looked over the moonlit roofs of the suburbs — many of which he could see for the first time, now that the leaves were all gone and a winter view was possible. And to all the people under those roofs, and more, he whispered, wickedly, “Have fun!” To Ronkers, this was a kind of benediction with a hidden hook.

“Why
not
have children?” he said aloud. Kit stirred, but she had not actually heard him.

Interior Space (1980)

AUTHOR'S NOTES

“Interior Space” was first published in
Fiction
(vol. 6, no. 2, 1980). It is my second-favorite among the very few short stories I have written; I have written more novels (eight) than short stories — I believe that will always be the case. I remember that I wrote the first draft of this story sometime in 1974, probably before I began
The World According to Garp
(1978); for forgotten reasons, the story languished in a bottommost drawer for five or six years before I took it out and finished it.

I admit that a certain confusion regarding the subject of this story may lie at the heart of why the story “languished” for so long, and why I was quite surprised when it won an O. Henry Award. “Interior Space” began as a story about a false case of gonorrhea, but Mr. Kesler's cancer stole the stage. All along, it was the death of the
tree
that most interested me. In the end, it is a story about marriage, and — more important — about the necessary optimism that is required of thoughtful, observant people who decide (despite what they
know)
to have children.