View From a Kite (12 page)

An Italian doctor called Fracastoro, in the sixteenth century, taught that phthisis—tuberculosis to you and me—was highly contagious, and the first regulations to protect the general public were in place in Italy by 1699. In 1783 in Naples, if you didn't report consumptive patients they fined you three hundred ducats, and if you did it again they threw you in jail for ten years. If you were a consumptive all your belongings were examined and sorted into two piles—cleanables were cleaned and the rest of your stuff was burned. Nobody wanted to rent to consumptives because after they died or moved out the law required expensive and extensive cleaning procedures. The place had to be completely replastered and all the wooden interiors had to be removed and burned and new ones put back in. After replastering, the house had to stand empty for six months as an extra precaution. Interfere in any way or try to skimp on the requirements and they nailed you with a big fine.

Keats, sent off to Rome by his doctor for his health, died a miserable, painful death in a small room on the Piazza di Spagna on March 6, 1821. The Italians commenced their anti-contagion procedures and Keats' friend and companion, Joseph Severn—who didn't believe in this sort of foreign nonsense— bitched about it to everyone. They had, he said, burned all the furniture, scraped and replastered the walls, and were making new windows, doors, and even a new floor. He called the whole business monstrous and the Italians brutal.

BODY COUNT, 2

Writers dead or damaged by tuberculosis:

-John Keats. Dead at age twenty-six.

-Franz Kafka. Ditto at forty-one or so.

-The Brontës. Emily, some of the older sisters, the father. They seem to have passed it around like a plate of biscuits.

-Alexander Pope. Had Pott's disease, tuberculosis of the spine, in childhood, but he lived, twisted and sickly, into his fifties. Apparently it wasn't much of a life and he didn't enjoy it.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson. Had it, but lived to a reasonable old age.

-Henry David Thoreau. Made it to middle age. Living the simple life by the pond, breathing all that fresh air, must have been good for him.

-Katherine Mansfield. Diagnosed at about age thirty after her first serious hemorrhage. Spent the next four years dragging around Europe trying to find a cure: to Cornwall for the sea air; to Ospedelatti on the Italian Riviera for the sunshine; to Switzerland and the mountains for purer oxygen; to the Gurdjieff Institute in the Fontainbleau forest for a round of faith healing by a Russian mystic.

-She died after four years of misery, of a violent hemorrhage.

-Anton Chekhov, in his forties. A doctor as well as a writer, he knew what he was in for the first time he coughed up blood.

CHAPTER 22

Chekhov's stories aren't really about anything, but they're about everything. They stick in your head forever. I want to be as good as Chekhov, to stick in people's heads forever. But too much lying around and brooding about the Royal Alex turns me into Katherine Mansfield, who wrote about wanting to scream, losing her puff, and feeling her blood getting black.

Black blood and wanting to scream at people—I manage to keep that buried most of the time, but I suspect it's the cause of this bad habit I've developed of throwing things. I wonder if Katherine ever threw things, or if she was too well-behaved to fling crockery and flower pots and coal scuttles about. Fortunately I've got George and Elizabeth to distract me, to haul me back into this century.

Elizabeth carries in four big Tupperware containers, two with sandwiches and two with sweets. George has got a cake in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. Edith's having a good day and she's not too drugged, so she knows it's a party. She smiles and brings out all her best cups and platters. My birthday isn't until September seventh, two days before the Festival of Ascending on High, but I won't be here for either so we're celebrating early. I leave the day after tomorrow for the Royal Alexandra. Since it's not officially the Festival of Ascending on High we don't have to launch a kite, but I'm hoping George will let me launch myself with a little of what's in the bottle.

“I always make too much,” says Elizabeth, arranging things on platters, “but any sweets we don't eat you can pack up and take with you. They'll keep a while in these containers. I made an extra batch of date squares for you, Gwennie, I know how much you like them.”

Elizabeth makes date squares with a wonderful tang that cuts the cloying sweetness of the dates and the brown sugar. She uses real butter, and the big rolled oats, the kind Scotsmen eat to keep their snarbles warm under their kilts. Everybody asks her for her recipe, but she just points out the one in the Five Roses cookbook and says that's it. It's not, of course, she's done something extra and nobody can figure out what it is. More lemon zest? Pineapple juice? Cider vinegar? Pureed mango? Nobody's been able to duplicate it. She won't tell her two daughters-in-law, her sons have to come to her house to get the real thing. Even Edith doesn't know.

“Where's the ice?” says George. “Let me mix you ladies a couple of drinks.”

I follow George into the pantry with the ice cube tray.

“It's okay, honey,” he says to me, mistaking the look of concern on my face. “The doctor says a little drink once in a while won't hurt her. I make it real weak, and after the first one it's just straight orange juice. She gets upset if she thinks she's being left out.”

He splashes a bit of vodka into a glass, adds a whole lot of orange juice to it, and some ice cubes. Then he mixes a regular one for Elizabeth. “You take these out and don't forget who gets which.”

“George,” I say, “I'll feel real left out if you don't put a little vodka in my drink, too.”

“Well,” he says, “it is your birthday party. But only one, and then you're on to the straight orange juice with Edith.”

I give him a hug, slop the drinks a bit, deliver them. I wonder if they still make guys like George, in a younger version, of course. Where would you find one, where would you even start to look? His sons, my second cousins, are boring and their wives are boring. It's a safe bet they don't giggle in their kitchens, either.

The four of us play 45s. Edith holds her own; Elizabeth's cautious. All those card parties Mary dragged me to in Ward C have paid off, I've finally figured out the reneging thing so I don't lose my best cards by mistake. George and I clean up. At a nickel a game, I almost have bus fare by the time we stop to eat. By then we've all had a second drink. I'd gone to help, again. George put ice and orange juice into Edith's.

“After the first one she don't know the difference,” he reassured me.

“I know the difference,” I said, and he gave in and poured me a splash, a little one.

“Don't tell,” he said and hauled a mickey of rum out of his pocket and put a slug in his drink. “I'm not much of a drinker, but if I'm going to I like to know I'm drinking something. Can't stand that vodka. Tastes like it came from a clinic, no decent flavour to it.”

We eat ourselves silly, and then Elizabeth lights candles on the cake and I make a foolish wish and blow them out. Elizabeth helps, in case I don't have enough wind. Then we eat cake until we are really, really uncomfortable. I unwrap my present, two brand new journals, hardcover, and six pens with black ink because I don't like blue. I quote Kafka, substituting the word “journal” where he wrote “desk”:

“The existence of the writer is truly dependent on his journal. If he wants to escape madness, he really should never leave his journal. He must cling to it by his teeth.”

Nobody minds. George proposes a toast to that there Kafka fella, and I don't spoil the mood by mentioning that he's dead.

Elizabeth puts Edith to bed and George checks the fire and the locks on the downstairs windows. I clean up, emptying the last of everybody's drinks into mine and stashing it in the pantry for later.

“I'll come over in the morning and do up these few things,” says Elizabeth, waving at the dishes in the sink, and giving me a hug. “Don't you touch them, Gwennie.”

But I wash the dishes once they have pulled out of the yard. I'm still sucking up to the Cleaning Gods, I guess. I stand by the pantry window watching the lights of George's truck as he putters down the road and pulls into their yard. He's driven all of twenty miles an hour, careful, really careful, with two drinks of rum under his belt and his Elizabeth seatbelted in beside him.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 23

The Royal Alexandra is brick, brick, brick. Not red brick, either. It's made of a dark, dank, brownish sort of sandstone brick—over
-
sized slabs of it. It looms and glooms up against the sky, blocking out the sun, and there are bars on the windows of the two lower floors. It's raining when I arrive, and one look and my heart flops into my boots. It makes me think: Oliver Twist; Bedlam; Debtor's Prison. It's much older than the San. The floors are ancient hard
-
wood, the high ceilings are lost in oppressive murk, the radiators hulk and clank and spit. It's much bigger, too. At the San I was in a village; now I'm stuck in a Victorian town. Charles Dickens took notes in this place.

The nurses wear different uniforms, very regimented uniforms. At the San, OFN and Fat Lily and even the picky Witch wore whatever was clean, white, and comfortable. Here they wear starched hats with stiff little ruffles winging out over their necks. None of the nurses seem to have any hair, it's all scraped back and pinned down and hidden under their ugly hats. They wear starched white aprons over starched white dresses that feel like cardboard, crackle when they bend over, and hiss when they walk along the corridors. They wear white pantyhose that make their legs look as if they've been fished out of a stagnant pond after a couple of weeks of thorough soaking. They wear white nurse shoes with blocky heels and I bet their feet are killing them. OFN says it's the feet that go first, their feet give up long before their nerves or compassion wear out. OFN wears white, flat-heeled Tender Tootsies. The Witch, come to think of it, wears those block-heeled, professional-nurse things. Maybe that's why she's such a crank. That, and no sense of humour.

There are no patients ambling about the halls of the Royal Alex, but there are plenty of rules posted on all the walls:

PATIENTS MAY NOT…

PATIENTS ARE NOT PERMITTED TO…

PATIENTS MUST AT ALL TIMES…

PATIENTS ARE REQUIRED TO…

My upper lip is so stiff it's clacking against my front teeth. Much more of this and I'm going to chip a tooth. By the time I'm unpacked and in my pyjamas I want to go to bed and stick my head under the pillow for a week, but it's suppertime and only bed patients get served trays. You aren't allowed to skip a meal.

ALL AMBULATORIES MUST TAKE MEALS IN THE DINING ROOM.

I'm an ambulatory. Also a Ward B, 3rd Floor, Bed 2, Table 16. Perhaps they'll brand me so I'll remember.

Some nice ladies try to chat with me at the supper table, but I'm too miserable to answer. This won't do. After supper I crawl into bed and eat a few chocolate bars from my emergency rations. Chocolate is a vitamin, one of your basic food groups. I don't brush my teeth. I can't work up any great concern about developing cavities in my teeth—not when I've got the Great Crater Lake sprawled behind my ribs.

IDIOTS AND FOOLS, 2

1.Charles Dickens described tuberculosis as a dread disease, and then went on to say:
   “The struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightening load.”
   At nights, in the wards, one can hear patients quietly and solemnly coughing up particles of lung. Sanguine as hell.

2. Henry David Thoreau also seems to have bought into the Romantic Idea that tuberculosis was a refining experience, noble and painless. He gave up taking walks and lay on his aunt's sofa, writing: “Death and disease are often beautiful, like…the hectic glow of consumption.” Presumably his aunt was dosing him with Hembold's Buchu Extract.

3 & 4. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt were social commentators and critics who wrote a great deal about tuberculosis. Or perhaps they are merely quoted frequently. According to them, one can't write anything worthwhile unless one is racked and tortured by consumption. Then, and only then, is one able to: “render the delicacies, the exquisite melancholies, the rare and delicious phantasies, of the vibrant cord of the heart and soul.”
   They told Victor Hugo he was too healthy to be a great poet.

5. Alexandre Dumas wasn't sick, but he pretended to be frail and on the verge of expiring because “it was the fashion to suffer from the lungs…to spit blood after each emotion that was at all sensational.”
   Privately, he seems to have thought the whole thing nonsense, but nevertheless adopted a tubercular persona as a career move.

CHAPTER 24

Eat once for yourself, once for the germs, and once to gain
weight; never discuss disease or symptoms during meals; di
gestion is aided by a pleasant atmosphere.

Someone embroidered that in red and black floss on white linen, and then hung it on the east wall of the dining room, just above the light switch. It really doesn't matter whether it's typed on cheap office paper or hand-crafted on linen, that bossy official tone comes across just the same.

Not only must I sit nowhere else but Table 16, I must sit on the end chair against the north wall. The seat is grey plastic, heavily scratched, and the chair wobbles because one chrome leg is slightly bent. It was the only chair left unclaimed at Table 16 and now it's mine because there is a hierarchy here, based on time served, and I am the rookie so I get the bum chair. The wall behind me is eggshell enamel, quietly yellowing, and the trim is some kind of wood buried under so many decades of dark varnish that it's no longer recognizable. The varnish is slightly sticky to the touch. There are so many layers it never completely dries out and if you accidentally brush it with your housecoat you will stick and leave fluffy bits behind when you pull yourself free. Maintenance does not like you to leave fluffy bits.