Twilight Sleep (Wharton)/Chapter 26
XXVI
WHEN Nona told her mother that she wanted to go to town the next day to see Mrs. Bruss and Maisie, Mrs. Manford said: "It's only what I expected of you, darling," and added after a moment: "Do you think I ought—?"
"No, of course not. It would simply worry Maisie."
Nona knew it was the answer that her mother awaited. She knew that nothing frightened and disorganized Pauline as much as direct contact with physical or moral suffering—especially physical. Her whole life (if one chose to look at it from a certain angle) had been a long uninterrupted struggle against the encroachment of every form of pain. The first step, always, was to conjure it, bribe it away, by every possible expenditure—except of one's self. Cheques, surgeons, nurses, private rooms in hospitals, X-rays, radium, whatever was most costly and up-to-date in the dreadful art of healing—that was her first and strongest line of protection; behind it came such lesser works as rest-cures, change of air, a seaside holiday, a whole new set of teeth, pink silk bedspreads, lace cushions, stacks of picture papers, and hot-house grapes and long-stemmed roses from Cedarledge. Behind these again were the final, the verbal defenses, made of such phrases as: "If I thought I could do the least good"— "If I didn't feel it might simply upset her"— "Some doctors still consider it contagious"—with the inevitable summing-up: "The fewer people she sees the better. . ."
Nona knew that this attitude was not caused by lack of physical courage. Had Pauline been a pioneer's wife, and seen her family stricken down by disease in the wilderness, she would have nursed them fearlessly; but all her life she had been used to buying off suffering with money, or denying its existence with words, and her moral muscles had become so atrophied that only some great shock would restore their natural strength. . .
"Great shock! People like mother never have great shocks," Nona mused, looking at the dauntless profile, the crisply waving hair, reflected in the toilet-mirror. "Unless I were to give her one . . ." she added with an inward smile.
Mrs. Manford restored her powder-puff to its crystal box. "Do you know, darling, I believe I'll go to town with you tomorrow. It was very brave of Maisie to make the effort of coming here the other day, but of course, I didn't like to burden her with too many details at such a time (when's the operation-tomorrow?), and there are things I could perfectly well attend to myself, without bothering her; without her even knowing. Yes; I'll motor up with you early."
"She'll always delegate her anxieties," Nona mused, not unenviously, as Cécile slipped Mrs. Manford's spangled teagown over her firm white shoulders. Pauline turned a tender smile on her daughter. "It's so like you, Nona, to want to be with Maisie for the operation—so fine, dear."
Voice and smile were full of praise; yet behind the praise (Nona also knew) lurked the unformulated apprehension: "All this running after sick people and unhappy people—is it going to turn into a vocation?" Nothing could have been more distasteful to Mrs. Manford than the idea that her only daughter should be not only good, but merely good: like poor Aggie Heuston, say. . . Nona could hear her mother murmuring: "I can't imagine where on earth she got it from," as if alluding to some physical defect unaccountable in the off-spring of two superbly sound progenitors.
They started early, for forty-eight hours of accumulated leisure had reinforced Pauline's natural activity. Amalasuntha, mysteriously smiling and head-shaking over the incommunicable figures of Klawhammer's offer, had bustled back to town early on Monday, leaving the family to themselves—and a certain feeling of flatness had ensued. Dexter, his wife thought, seemed secretly irritated, but determined to conceal his irritation from her. It was about Michelangelo, no doubt. Lita was silent and sleepy. No one seemed to have anything particular to do. Even in town Mondays were always insipid. But in the afternoon Manford "took Lita off their hands," as his wife put it, by carrying her away for the long-deferred spin in the Buick; and Pauline plunged back restfully into visiting-lists and other domestic preoccupations. She certainly had nothing to worry about, and much to rejoice in, yet she felt languid and vaguely apprehensive. She began to wonder if Alvah Loft's treatment were of the lasting sort, or if it lost its efficacy, like an uncorked drug. Perhaps the Scientific Initiate she had been told about would have a new panacea for the mind as well as for the epiderm. She would telephone and make an appointment; it always stimulated her to look forward to seeing a new healer. As Mrs. Swoffer said, one ought never to neglect a spiritual opportunity; and one never knew on whom the Spirit might have alighted. Mrs. Swoffer's conversation was always soothing and yet invigorating, and Pauline determined to see her too. And there was Arthur—poor Exhibit A!—on Jim's account it would be kind to look him up if there were time; unless Nona could manage that too, in the intervals of solacing Maisie. It was so depressing—and so useless—to sit in a hospital parlour, looking at old numbers of picture papers, while those awful white-sleeved rites went on in the secret sanctuary of tiles and nickel-plating. It would do Nona good to have an excuse for slipping away.
Pauline's list of things-to-be-done had risen like a spring tide as soon as she decided to go to town for the day. There was hair-waving, manicuring, dressmaking—her dress for the Cardinal's reception. How was she ever to get through half the engagements on her list? And of course she must call at the hospital with a big basket of grapes and flowers. . .
On the steps of the hospital Nona paused and looked about her. The operation was over—everything had "gone beautifully," as beautifully as it almost always does on these occasions. Maisie had been immensely grateful for her coming, and as surprised as if an angel from the seventh heaven had alighted to help her through. The two girls had sat together, making jerky attempts at talk, till the nurse came and said: "All right—she's back in bed again"; and then Maisie, after a burst of relieving tears, had tiptoed off to sit in a corner of her mother's darkened room and await the first sign of returning consciousness. There was nothing more for Nona to do, and she went out into the April freshness with the sense of relief that the healthy feel when they escape back to life after a glimpse of death.
On the hospital steps she ran into Arthur Wyant.
"Exhibit, dear! What are you doing here?"
"Coming to inquire for poor Mrs. Bruss. I heard from Amalasuntha. . ."
"That's kind of you. Maisie'll be so pleased."
She gave him the surgeon's report, saw that his card was entrusted to the right hands, and turned back into the street with him. He looked better than when he had left for the south; his leg was less stiff, and he carried his tall carefully dressed figure with a rigid jauntiness. But his face seemed sharper yet higher in colour. Fever or cocktails? She wondered. It was lucky that their meeting would save her going to the other end of the town to see him.
"Just like you, Exhibit, to remember poor Maisie. . ."
He raised ironic eyebrows. "Is inquiring about ill people obsolete? I see you still keep up the tradition."
"Oh, I've been seeing it through with Maisie. Some one had to."
"Exactly. And your mother held aloof, but financed the whole business?"
"Splendidly. She always does."
He frowned, and stood hesitating, and tapping his long boot-tip with his stick. "I rather want to have a talk with your mother."
"With mother?" Nona was on the point of saying: "She's in town today—" then, remembering Pauline's crowded list, she checked the impulse.
"Won't I do as a proxy? I was going to suggest your carrying me off to lunch."
"No, my dear, you won't—as a proxy. But I'll carry you off to lunch."
The choice of a restaurant would have been laborious—for Wyant, when taken out of his rut, became a mass of manias, prejudices and inhibitions—but Nona luckily remembered a new Bachelor Girls' Club ("The Singleton") which she had lately joined, and packed him into a taxi still protesting.
They found a quiet corner in a sociable low-studded dining-room, and she leaned back, listening to his disconnected monologue and smoking one cigarette after another in the nervous inability to eat.
The ten days on the island? Oh, glorious, of course—hot sunshine—a good baking for his old joints. Awfully kind of her father to invite him . . . he'd appreciated it immensely . . . was going to write a line of thanks. . . Jim, too, had appreciated his father's being included. . . Only, no, really; he couldn't stay; in the circumstances he couldn't. . .
"What circumstances, Exhibit? Getting the morning papers twenty-four hours late?"
Wyant frowned, looked at her sharply, and then laughed an uneasy wrinkled laugh. "Impertinent chit !"
"Own up, now; you were bored stiff. Communion with Nature was too much for you. You couldn't stick it. Few can."
"I don't say I'm as passive as Jim."
"Jim's just loving it down there, isn't he? I'm so glad you persuaded him to stay."
Wyant frowned again, and stared past her at some invisible antagonist. "It was about the only thing I could persuade him to do."
Nona's hand hung back from the lighting of another cigarette. "What else did you try to?"
"What else? Why to act, damn it . . . take a line. . . . face things . . . face the music." He stopped in a splutter of metaphors, and dipped his bristling moustache toward his coffee.
"What things?"
"Why: is he going to keep his wife, or isn't he?"
"He thinks that's for Lita to decide."
"For Lita to decide! A pretext for his damned sentimental inertness. A man—my son! God, what's happened to the young men? Sit by and see . . . see. . . Nona, couldn't I manage to have a talk with your mother?"
"You're having one with me. Isn't that enough for the moment?"
He gave another vague laugh, and took a light from her extended cigarette. She knew that, though he found her mother's visits oppressive, he kept a careful record of their number, and dimly resented any appearance of being "crowded out" by Pauline's other engagements. "I suppose she comes up to town sometimes, doesn't she?"
"Sometimes—but in such a rush! And we'll be back soon now. She's got to get ready for the Cardinal's reception."
"Great doings, I hear. Amalasuntha dropped in on me yesterday. She says Lita's all agog again since that rotten Michelangelo's got a film contract, and your father's in an awful state about it. Is he?"
"The family are not used yet to figuring on the posters. Of course it's only a question of time."
"I don't mean in a state about Michelangelo, but about Lita."
"Father's been a perfect brick about Lita."
"Oh, he has, has he? Very magnanimous.—Thanks; no—no cigar. . . Of course, if anybody's got to be a brick about Lita, I don't see why it's not her husband's job; but then I suppose you'll tell me. . ."
"Yes; I shall; please consider yourself told, won't you? Because I've got to get back to the hospital."
"The modern husband's job is a purely passive one, eh? That's your idea too? If you go to him and say: 'How about that damned scoundrel and your wife'—"
"What damned scoundrel?"
"Oh, I don't say . . . anybody in particular . . . and he answers: 'Well, what am I going to do about it?' and you say: 'Well, and your honour, man; what about your honour?' and he says: 'What's my honour got to do with it if my wife's sick of me?' and you say: 'God! But the other man . . . aren't you going to break his bones for him?' and he sits and looks at you and says: 'Get up a prize-fight for her?'. . . God! I give it up. My own son! We don't speak the same language, that's all."
He leaned back, his long legs stretched under the table, his tall shambling body disjointed with the effort at a military tautness, a kind of muscular demonstration of what his son's moral attitude ought to be.
"Damn it—there was a good deal to be said for duelling."
"And to whom do you want Jim to send his seconds? Michelangelo or Klawhammer?"
He stared, and echoed her laugh. "Ha! Ha! That's good. Klawhammer! Dirty Jew . . . the kind we used to horsewhip. . . Well, I don't understand the new code."
"Why do you want to, Exhibit? Come along. You've got me to look after in the meantime. If you want to be chivalrous, tuck me under your arm and see me back to the hospital."
"A prize-fight—get up a prize-fight for her! God—I should understand even that better than lying on the beach smoking a pipe and saying: 'What can a fellow do about it?' Do!"
Act—act—act! How funny it was, Nona reflected, as she remounted the hospital steps: the people who talked most of acting seldom did more than talk. Her father, for instance, so resolute and purposeful, never discoursed about action, but quietly went about what had to be done. Whereas poor Exhibit, perpetually inconsequent and hesitating, was never tired of formulating the most truculent plans of action for others. "Poor Exhibit indeed—incorrigible amateur!" she thought, understanding how such wordy dilettantism must have bewildered and irritated the young and energetic Pauline, fresh from the buzzing motor works at Exploit.
Nona felt a sudden exasperation against Wyant for trying to poison Jim's holiday by absurd insinuations and silly swagger. It was lucky that he had got bored and come back, leaving the poor boy to bask on the sands with his pipe and his philosophy. After all, it was to be supposed that Jim knew what he wanted, and how to take care of it, now he had it.
"At all events," Nona concluded, "I'm glad he didn't get hold of mother and bother her with his foolish talk." She shot up in the lift to the white carbolic-breathing passage where, with a heavy whiff of ether, Mrs. Bruss's door opened to receive her.