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I unpacked the whole box of books before I was through. It was like looking at relics from a bygone age. I looked through them till the patient was gone and my father had taken Mrs. B. home and had come upstairs and used the bathroom and gone to bed. I read here and there till I was so groggy I almost fell asleep on the floor.
At lunch today, then, my father finally said, “Who cares about the Turks anyway? Ancient history.”
And I had to say, “I think I know what’s going on here.”
His head reared up and he snorted. He really did, like an old horse.
“You do, do you? You think you know what?” I said, “I’m not accusing you. I don’t disapprove.” “Is that so?”
“I believe in abortion,” I said. “I believe it should be legal.” “I don’t want you to use that word again in this house,” my father said. “Why not?”
“Because I am the one who says what words are used in this house.”
“You don’t understand what I’m saying.”
“I understand that you’ve got too loose a tongue. You’ve got too loose a tongue and not enough sense. Too much education and not enough ordinary brains.”
I still did not shut up. I said, “People must know.”
“Must they? There’s a difference between knowing and yapping. Get that through your head once and for all.”
We have not spoken for the rest of the day. I cooked the usual roast for di
The young man last night told me that when he felt relaxed his stammer practically disappeared. Like when I’m talking to you, he said. I could probably make him fall in love with me, to a certain extent. I could do that just for recreation. That is the sort of life I could get into here.
Dear R. I haven’t gone, the Mini wasn’t fit for it. I took it in to be overhauled. Also the weather has changed, the wind has got into an autumn rampage scooping up the lake and battering the beach. It caught Mrs. Barrie on her own front steps-the wind did-and knocked her sideways and shattered her elbow. It’s her left elbow and she said she could work with her right arm, but my father told her it was a complicated fracture and he wanted her to rest for a month. He asked me if I would mind postponing my departure. Those were his words-“postponing my departure.” He hasn’t asked where I’m pla
I don’t know where I’m pla
I said all right, I’d stay while I could be useful. So we’re on decent speaking terms; in fact it’s fairly comfortable. I try to do just about what Mrs. B. would do, in the house. No tries now at reorganization, no discussion of repairs. (The eaves have been done-when the Mrs. B. relation came I was astonished and grateful.) I hold the oven door shut the way Mrs. B. did with a couple of heavy medical textbooks set on a stool pushed up against it. I cook the meat and the vegetables in her way and never think about bringing home an avocado or bottle of artichoke hearts or a garlic bulb, though I see all those things are now for sale in the supermarket. I make the coffee from the powder in the jar. I tried drinking that myself to see if I could get used to it and of course I could. I clean up the office at the end of every day and look after the laundry. The laundryman likes me because I don’t accuse him of anything.
I’m allowed to answer the phone, but if it’s a woman asking for my father and not volunteering details I’m supposed to take the number and say that the doctor will phone back. So I do, and sometimes the woman just hangs up. When I tell my father this he says, “She’ll likely call again.”
There aren’t many of those patients-the ones he calls the specials. I don’t know-maybe one a month. Mostly he’s dealing with sore throats and cramped colons and bealing ears and so on. Jumpy hearts, kidney stones, sour digestions.
R. Tonight he knocked on my door. He knocked though it wasn’t all the way closed. I was reading. He asked-not in a supplicating way of course, but I would say with a reasonable respect-if I could give him a hand in the office. The first special since Mrs. B. has been away.
I asked what he wanted me to do.
“Just more or less to keep her steady,” he said. “She’s young and she’s not used to it yet. Give your hands a good scrub too, use the soap in the bottle in the toilet downstairs.”
The patient was lying flat on the examining table with a sheet over her from the waist down. The top part of her was fully dressed in a dark-blue buttoned-up cardigan and a white blouse with a lace-trimmed collar. These clothes lay loosely over her sharp collarbone and nearly flat chest. Her hair was black, pulled tightly back from her face and braided and pi
She was shivering hard though the office wasn’t cold.
“Now Madeleine,” my father said. “The first thing is we’ve got to get your knees up.”
I wondered if he knew her. Or did he just ask for a name and use whatever the woman gave him?
“Easy,” he said. “Easy. Easy.” He got the stirrups in place and her feet into them. Her legs were bare and looked as if they’d never known a suntan. She was still wearing her loafers.
Her knees shook so much in this new position that they clapped together.
“You’ll have to hold steadier than that,” my father said. “You know, now, I can’t do my job unless you do yours. Do you want a blanket over you?”
He said to me, “Get her a blanket. Off the bottom shelf there.”
I arranged the blanket to cover the top part of Madeleine’s body. She didn’t look at me. Her teeth rattled against one another. She clenched her mouth shut.
“Now just slide down this way a bit,” my father said. And to me. “Hold her knees. Get them apart. Just hold her easy.”
I put my hands on the knobs of the girl’s knees and moved them apart as gently as I could. My father’s breathing filled the room with its busy unintelligible comments. I had to hold Madeleine’s knees quite firmly to keep them from jerking together.
“Where’s that old woman?” she said.
I said, “She’s at home. She had a fall. I’m here instead.”
So she had been here before.
“She’s rough,” she said.
Her voice was matter-of-fact, almost a growl, not so nervous as I would have expected from the agitation of her body. “I hope I’m not that rough,” I said.
She didn’t answer. My father had picked up a thin rod like a knitting needle.
“Now. This is the hard part,” he said. He spoke in a conversational tone, milder I think than any I have ever heard from him. “And the more you tighten up the harder it will be. So just-easy. There. Easy. Good girl. Good girl.”
I was trying to think of something to say that would ease her or distract her. I could see now what my father was doing. Laid out on a white cloth on the table beside him, he had a series of rods, all of the same length but of a graduated thickness. These were what he would use, one after the other, to open and stretch the cervix. From my station behind the sheeted barrier beyond the girl’s knees, I could not see the actual, intimate progress of these instruments. But I could feel it, from the arriving waves of pain in her body that beat down the spasms of apprehension and actually made her quieter.