Reuben, Reuben, page 19
“I can’t.”
Propping herself carefully on one forepaw, Mrs. Punck gingerly raised herself a little and felt her back with the other hand. Instantly a grimace of pain crossed her face and she dropped back to her former position. I became apprehensive, remembering her sacroiliac had periodically given her trouble and once caused her to be hospitalized. Slowly, carefully, she tried again to straighten, with no more luck. The effort ended in another twinge.
“Frank,” she said, “I think it’s out again.”
“Oh, Lord.”
I got down on the linoleum beside her and tried to help her up, but my ministrations only made it worse. “It’s no use,” she said. “It has to be done exactly right, by someone who knows. You’d better call the doctor.”
“Right.” I rose and started at a gallop for the kitchen telephone, automatically intending to call Dr. Kershaw, our family physician. In the doorway I turned to ask whether it was hers too. “Yes but come to think of it he’s been on vacation,” she said. “I’m not sure whether he’s back yet. They’ll tell you at the office or the answering service who’s covering for him if he isn’t. Hurry!”
I hoped the fellow covering for him wouldn’t be Northrup. Doctors and cops shouldn’t be younger than you are—it gives you that uneasy feeling. This kid looked so young I figured he might be working his way through medical school by practising—an impression the advice itself didn’t do much to offset. From the kitchen phone I could look through the open door and watch Mrs. Punck shift experimentally around on the linoleum, there on all fours, trying to ease her discomfort by slight changes in position. Without much success. But my conversation on the phone soon gave me something else to think about. There was a kind of peculiar development, though one I was in a way prepared for by a reference Mrs. Punck had made a while before, when all the confusion and misunderstanding had been at its height between us. Dr. Kershaw was still away, and the man covering him was this Dr. Rappaport she had mentioned.
“Well that’s an odd coincidence,” I said, when I came back to report to her, somewhat sobered.
“It’s a sign,” she said, watching me from the floor like a reproachful animal.
I had reached the doctor’s office direct, and since he was just finishing up with a patient and had no others waiting for him in the reception room he arrived in less than fifteen minutes, an interval I spent trying to comfort and soothe Mrs. Punck and feed her brandy, from more or less the same quadruped position as hers. Not neglecting to take a much needed nip from the bottle myself. The doctor didn’t drive but came crosslots from his house in Punch Bowl Hollow, where he had his office, scrambling over the stone wall with his black bag, so we weren’t alerted by the sound of any car turning in and were unprepared for the sight of the sharp bearded face at the window of the door and then coming in. I had told him to go straight to the salesroom, not fancying Mrs. Punck crawling up the stairs into the house like a dog. He was a short dark man in a tight seersucker suit and a big flowered tie which hung out of it in a disheveled way. He was breathing heavily. He had burning brown eyes, with which he took in the sight of Mrs. Punck only a second before getting down on his knees beside her.
He was both gentle and amazingly skilful, manipulating Mrs. Punck’s back with a competence that suggested some shady background in osteopathy rather than a standard medical one to me. Inside of five minutes he had her straightened up on her knees, in two more on her feet. He walked her around the room like an animal trainer walking some afflicted horse, and she looked at him with a kind of dumb, grateful trust. All the while he murmured words of assurance to her in a tender, almost cooing voice.
Things weren’t as good as they seemed at first blush though; the least wrong move brought on a fresh wrench, and Dr. Rappaport didn’t seem satisfied with what his probing finger felt. “We’d best take you to the hospital for an X-Ray. Then we’ll know what’s what,” he said. He looked at me with his sort of gentle glare. “Can you drive us?”
“I’m minding the salesroom now. Can’t you take her in your car?”
“I have no car,” he said. “I don’t drive.”
“How do you get to your calls?”
“Oh, people generally give me a lift along the road, and one thing and another. And I like to walk when it’s possible. I mean if you don’t wish to close up the store for our Mrs. Punck . . .”
“Of course I will.”
I put a Back in An Hour sign on the door and locked it. I knew Mare and George would be back before then. We all squeezed into the Ford, Mrs. Punck between us. Dr. Rappaport, who took up very little room, patted her arm when we went over bumps, and when not murmuring the dove-like words of encouragement was asking me to drive more carefully if at all possible. I was turning over in my own mind something else that continued to eat me with curiosity.
“You mean you hitchhike to your patients?” I said.
“That is correct. I have not driven since 1954, when I lost my wife in an automobile accident. We lived in New Haven then. I’ve come to Woodsmoke to retire. I take very few calls, and fill in for other doctors now and then. People are very kind. They’ll always pick up a doctor thumbing a ride. Sometimes my patients themselves come to fetch me, if it’s urgent.”
He stayed to read the X-rays, by which time he already had Mrs. Punck in bed, being prepared for traction. The plates only confirmed what he already suspected from what she’d told him of her history and his own preliminary diagnosis—that she had both the nerve pinch that usually constitutes your sacroiliac, and a disc out. She lay under sedation, happily tucked in the sheets with the good doctor sitting in the chair beside her. Talk about your bedside manner! He was the epitomy of it. He had nothing else to do he said, and would be glad to stay till he was sure she was comfortable. He said that doctors were beginning to eliminate traction, relying simply on a hard bedboard arrangement for a short period of complete rest, but he still held with the traction system as contributing something to the treatment. Of which the main thing was complete rest so the spinal muscles and nerves concerned could relax. Most such spasms came from tension he told us. He asked Mrs. Punck whether she had been going through a period of strain lately, and she said “Yes, I guess you could call it that,” giving me a look. But she did it with eyes already growing heavy from the sedative. Dr. Rappaport picked up a magazine when she dropped off, and began to read.
“You going to stick around?” I says.
“That is correct. I want to make sure she’s O.K. You run along if you’d like. You probably have things to do.”
I beat it home to report to Mare and George, who were pacing the floor in the stew that could well be imagined. I gave them as coherent an account as I could of what had happened in their absence. Then after a hasty supper I drove Mare to the hospital.
We were quiet the first part of the trip. I knew what was on her mind. She had been thinking over something in my story that I had tried to skim, but that I knew would have to be dealt with in detail sooner or later. Now she wanted to know more about that.
“You say my mother was under the counter,” she said. “What exactly was she doing there?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” I said. “It was where she wanted to be. You see, she was hiding there so she could listen to me and Mrs. Beauseigneur talk. It was her idea, Mare, not mine. I swear it.”
“To listen to you talk funny?”
“That is correct. She wanted to get some pointers.” I was beginning to wish I had skipped that whole can of peas and let Mrs. Punck open it if she wanted later, because it only revived Mare’s confusion and along with it her hostility. I was now completely on the defensive again if not on the run, after the slight progress I had made getting back into everybody’s graces. “Was it my fault? Was it?” She didn’t answer.
When we walked into the hospital room Dr. Rappaport was still there, or rather there again after a bite of supper downstairs in the hospital cafeteria. He was smoking a pipe in the easy chair beside the bed, whereon Mrs. Punck now slumbered dreamily among an assortment of weights and pulleys. “We’ll have her out in a week or two,” he assured Mare, who of course he sprang out of his chair to give it to. “But I think a bit of traction is indicated. These backs are very tricky. Half of us have cricks coming and going and things popping in and out it seems. Look, I wonder if I might trouble you for a lift. I’ll just wait down in the lobby while you have your visit. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Spofford.” He tiptoed out, Mrs. Punck being very deep in what she herself would of called sleepsin-bye.
Rappaport was generally there whenever I visited Mrs. Punck, which was often out of curiosity as much as conscientiousness. “He’s most nice,” she told me once when we were alone together. She directed my gaze toward a basket of flowers enormously dwarfing my own dozen carnations. “He’s the gentlest man I ever met.” She added, smoothing the bedclothes on either side away from her, “And one of the few Christians.”
Once I seen Rappaport draw a rose from a vase with deadly suavity and hold it down for her to smell, his cheeks crinkling as he smiled and his teeth, brilliant for a man in his sixties, glittering like a knife. Or he would compliment her on her bed jacket. Or he would stand with an arm outstretched along the head of the bed, the other in a pocket of his trousers where he would gather up all his loose change and let it slide in a cataract off his palm while he spoke of the years in New Haven, where he had lost his wife in that traffic mishap. When Dr. Kershaw got back from his vacation we told Mrs. Punck about it, assuming she would want him to take over. But no. She wanted to keep Dr. Rappaport. There was no mistaking developments. I went home one night to lay it on the line to Mare.
“Your mother is emotionally involved with a Jew,” I says.
“Jew A is not Jew B,” she says, turning the pages of a newspaper spread out as usual on the kitchen table. “That what it says in them magazines you been reading? That what you been preaching to us around here?”
“That isn’t the side of it I mean. I mean the religious. Your mother’s religious.”
“But he ain’t, so there’s no conflict there. He wouldn’t be trying to drag her to the temple while she tried to drag him to church. He even says he wouldn’t mind going to church with her once in a while. He’s a wonderful man without no standards getting in the way. He never misses Handel’s Messiah at Christmas time. They’ve gone into all that, so they must be serious.” Here Mare’s calm front suddenly cracked. She brought both fists down on the table and rose shouting, “They’re serious do you hear! They’re talking about getting married! Married do you hear! And all because of you! It’s all your fault. You’re to blame for the whole thing, for everything that’s come over us.”
“Now wait a minute, darling,” I said, trying to recover the old manner, that is the new one. “I mean if you’re going to stand there shrieking like Tosca.” I tried to say it in the drawl but it come out in a dry falsetto, as I found myself backing away. “Why is it my fault?” Of course it was like asking a question in a catechism to which there were fixed answers. She lost no time in opening up that can of peas again.
“Because it all started with your gallivanting around. We were eternally gratefully to you for a few days there—all too few. Now we’re back where we were, thanks to you. Everything that happened is a direct result of your shenanigans. Why shouldn’t she get married, to a member of her faith? She’s got vital years left, so have you. Why couldn’t you get fixed up? That would of solved everything. But no, you had to branch out in new ways. You had to have fresh feathers. If you hadn’t started that it wouldn’t be ending this way now. Not that the end is in sight, the way it seems.”
“What do you mean, Mare?” I asked in the falsetto, further unnerved by something in her manner.
“Geneva. All this seems to’ve taken your mind off the big party and what happened there, I see, but do you know what did happen there? Or since then? Do you know who she’s taken up with? Because I don’t know from one day to the next where she is or who she’s with or what she’s up to, now she’s become a social butterfly. Things are worse than they ever were. There’s the doorbell now again. Why don’t you go see who’s picking her up this time? Because I don’t dare look.”
The above rough sketching in of the Rappaport-Punck thing gets us a little ahead of our story, of course. Now I must go back and take up the main thread of that again where it was left off.
sixteen
SINCE MY PROMISE to Mare had barred me from the Springers in any guise, menial or otherwise, I jumped at the chance to sit for the Hackneys, who were going socially, and whose acreage stood back to back with the Springers. The Hackney children—3 girls of assorted ages but so similar in size and appearance that they seemed a litter to which Mrs. Hackney had given birth at once—had not been 10 minutes asleep before your correspondent stole across the darkening slope of lawn through a woodlot where the property ended and that of the Springers began. Strains of music floating faintly through the evening air grew louder as I approached. The instrumentalists were a trio of sinister looking men wearing gold earrings and head scarfs. Their getup helped identify as Gypsy the melodies they produced. They stood with their backs to a grove of spruce in which I hid myself to watch. They were a fiddler, an accordionist and a cellist. The last-named spun his instrument by the neck once during an especially catchy passage, to presumably inject an American touch into the Transylvanian folk rhythms.
The party was in full swing. Several couples were dancing on the pavement around the pool, one or two on the grass around that. A woman kicked off her shoes and waltzed in stocking feet to fixed smiles of appreciation from the onlookers. A few who had acted on the invitation to bring bathing suits were in the pool. One of these was a fat man who stood waist-deep in the water holding a martini, not so much it seemed because he enjoyed doing this as to give formal expression to the principle of extreme Fun. Every one on dry land had a drink of some sort or size. I see Haxby the chunky dentist from Greenwich with whose wife McGland was trying to make time, according to the conversation I had accidentally overheard, holding a Sazarac in one hand as though it was McGland’s neck. I knew it was a Sazarac from his preference at the Beauseigneurs’ party, where he had showed me how to mix one. Most of the guests sat at tables over which were strung scores of Japanese lanterns, like at the Beauseigneurs, their festive serieses intermittently varied by tongues of sulphurous flame burning furiously on standards as deterrents to mosquitoes. Haxby’s normally flushed face and bullneck were caught in a hellish light cast by one of them, giving him the look of a demon in Hades. It crossed my mind that I would hate to be the butt of his vengeance—if that was in store for the poet. He wore a white linen coat, with a Madras bowtie and a bustin’-laughin’ cummerbund of the same material. Otherwise it was a divine evening, with a full moon beginning to clear the treetops.
I altered my station among the evergreens to case the crowd for more familiar faces—with a last look at the fat guy still allegorically representing Gaity, who seemed rather sad, standing sawed in half there holding the martini in this tablow nobody paid no attention to. The first one my eye lit on was Bobsy Springer. No anxious hostess given to pretty little sorties to keep things moving she; she sat at a table chatting and smoking like a guest herself. She was in a sheer black dress, leaning back with her legs crossed. But from time to time she did dart glances about—on the lookout for the same people as me? I think we both spotted McGland at the same time. He was strolling out the house with a pretty, somewhat stooped blonde woman in a green dress—Lucille Haxby, the sister-in-law Mrs. Springer had such a cow over. Though he strained the buttons of his white coat—or one of C.B.S.’s coats—like a business man in early middle age, his face looked younger than ever. It wore its boyish, up-to-no-good smile as he said something to the woman, or more likely asked her something, because she nodded once and walked away as though some kind of agreement had been reached. There is no mistaking that kind of exchange. The movie The Fallen Idol opens with Ralph Richardson and the woman he is having an affair with engaging in that kind of whispered conversation, of whose nature we are sure though the camera is behind them and a mile off. I shot a look at Haxby and then Mrs. Springer. Their expressions left no doubt we were all thinking the same thing.
We all now followed McGland’s passage through the crowd to a small group of young people on the opposite bank of the pool. There were five or six of them, and my heart jumped at the sight of Geneva. A shift in the ranks to make room for McGland suddenly brought her into view. She was a dream in a cloud of a white dress that set off her sun-ripened arms and shoulders, as well as her face with the big incandescent eyes that gave it that kind of goofy beauty. Now occurred one of them moments when a random scene conveys something to an onlooker unbeknownst to those taking part in it; when he seems in some queer, almost mystical, way to stand outside time and reality, like God himself—something piercing and special.
McGland trained on Geneva his famous carnivorous stare while she regarded Tad Springer, who was on her left, and who was in turn talking to a girl on his left. Now get this. It was obvious Tad was speaking about Geneva, because after the remark he jerked his head toward her and she lowered her gaze. Then she decided to laugh and punched him on the arm for what must have been some kind of crack about her. Tad put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. I looked quickly back to Mrs. Springer. She was on her feet, watching the scene like a hawk like me.
What drove me crazy was that I couldn’t hear a word that was being said, but must take in the whole complex and spreading tissue of this thing by eye. The entire party including the damn pool stood between me and those I was most anxious to overhear—who most deserved the benefit of my eavesdropping too. Near the young people a large forsythia, which I had trimmed, offered itself as a handy cover from which to listen, but as I skirted the house in a wide arc designed to fetch me up just the far side of it, there was a pause in the music in which I could hear the tinkle of a distant telephone.
