I couldn’t tell, not right away. He was asleep on his stomach when I got to him, and when I touched his shoulder and told him it was mail time, he shooed me away. He actually said, “Shoo!” His card had also stated that he was ambulatory. He wasn’t supposed to be sleeping during the hours reserved for welfare and recreation activities. Dr. Nutter was very strict about patients’ participating in recreational therapy to fend off depression. If a patient was confined to bed, he was to be awake, and those not confined were to be up and about, occupying their minds in the dayroom, playing cards for matchsticks, painting-by-number, reading magazines, things like that. When I asked why several of the beds had no mattresses, I was told that orderlies sometimes removed the ambulatory patients, along with their mattresses, from the beds for the activity hour and put them both back afterward. I leaned down toward the patient’s ear and told him I had been assigned to him and intended to stay as long as it took. There was no response, so I pulled a chair by his bed and sat there, waiting for him to wake up or for my grandmother to finish her lunch with Dr. Nutter, whichever came first.
I sat there twenty minutes or so and finally asked a nurse what I should do. She told me he was an especially difficult case, and she was eager to tell me exactly why. The subject of Tom Hawkings III exercised her so much that her eyes bugged and her nostrils flared when she spoke. She started with how the staff had threatened to dump him out of bed, but they had backed down when they realized he’d just crawl up on the springs and go back to sleep. That’s how stubborn he was. She told me he’d sleep on nails if that was all the mattress he had. The other patients were treated by residents and interns, but he was treated by Dr. Nutter himself. The nurse said, “That was his mother’s doing.” Dr. Nutter had just taken him off codeine, but the patient swore he still hurt like crazy and the only relief he had was sleep. “So,” she said, “there he is, twenty-four hours a day. Waking up when he pleases and doing as he pleases.” The other fellows who had had the same surgery on the same day didn’t hurt anymore, so why should he? She suggested I skip him. I should boycott him, the way the rest of the staff did, and save myself a ton of frustration. Then she added, “Well, everybody but these colored orderlies ignores him. He bribes them to bring him milk shakes from the hamburger stand downtown and ham biscuits from their mamas’ houses. They line up to fetch for him. Yesterday he paid one of them a dollar to leave work and go buy him a cheese-burger. You could smell it all over this ward, and when the other fellows whined about it, you know what he did? He sent the colored guy back out for twenty more. I’ll be glad when he’s out of here.”
I didn’t boycott him. I couldn’t leave the side of someone described to me in terms I’d always applied to my grandmother. I wanted to know more about him, and so I sat there and scrutinized him, noting the moles on the top of his shoulders and the way his thigh muscles flinched underneath the sheet every now and then. He was exposed to his waist. His head was turned to the side, and his arms were raised up and crossed underneath his pillow. He was a supremely good-looking individual of the caliber one rarely encounters. His hair was black, though already salted at the temples with gray. There was nothing about him that wasn’t a pleasure to behold. He had truly excellent features, perfect skin, a perfect nose. His mouth was open just a little, and I know that had my grandmother been by my side, she would’ve goaded me into lifting his lip to check his teeth. I guessed they were white and straight. Thick black hair was starting to grow again on his back. With all that hair, it must’ve taken somebody an hour to shave him, and he was still covered in razor nicks. The tracks of stitches all over him caused me to imagine a crazy person standing over him, scribbling wildly on him with purple and black ink. He was still bruised around the incisions. I understood why he hurt.
I wanted to touch him. I remember feeling suddenly conscious of my arms. My muscles tightened and prepared to move without my consent, automatically—a response of the sort mothers have when they put on brakes and reach over to hold their children back even after the children are grown and gone. The urge to move toward him spread all over me, head to toe. I think it had a great deal to do with the way the sheet lay across the small of his back.
My grandmother appeared beside me. She said, “What’s wrong with him? Charles doesn’t like it when these boys sleep all day.”
I let her read his card. She handed it back to me, saying, “He needs to get up.”
I defended him on the basis of what I knew of him from his naked back and the side of his face. “Let’s leave him alone,” I said. “If he’s this tired, he must have a reason.”
She ignored me and shouted into his ear, “Son! Wake up! Stay up all night and sleep all day! How do you ever expect to get well?”
Tom Hawkings III woke up, lifted his head of unruly hair, and asked my grandmother what time it was and also would she get him some orange juice and dry toast. He murmured, “That’d be swell of you.” I wondered whether he was just waking from a dream that had him back in Anderson Heights on a Saturday morning. The maid was staying late on her day off to fix his breakfast exactly the way he wanted it, and his father was out in the yard, killing time, waiting for him to wake up so he could ask him how he’d put so many miles on the Buick the night before. Nothing in Tom’s calm voice said he realized he was on a ward with twenty other young men and that his back was a mess from having been sprayed with shrapnel four weeks before.
My grandmother said, “I didn’t come here to be
swell.
” He twisted his head around and looked at me, saying with his eyes, Then will
you
do it for me?
My grandmother said, “She didn’t come to be
swell,
either. Wake up and write a letter to your mother. That’s what would be
swell.
” (I must tell how a short time before this, while listening to a radio essay about Mr. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, later trivialized by Mr. Rockwell and The Saturday Evening Post, my grandmother shouted, “They forgot about the Fifth Freedom!” My mother asked what that could be. My grandmother said, “Freedom from hearing the word ‘swell.’ You can’t go to the toilet without somebody telling you something’s
swell. ”)
Tom pushed himself up on his elbows, grimacing as he did, and asked my grandmother if she’d like to write his mother.
My grandmother said, “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll write her and say her son’s lazing off at the Veterans Hospital when he ought to be up trying to exercise.”
He laid his head back down and said, “Go on and do it. Tell her Tom’s assing off again. Send it to Anna Hawkings, care of the News
and
Observer.”
My grandmother said, “Okay. That’s what we’ll do.”
She left the bedside. He asked me what she was up to.
I took a box of stationery out of his nightstand drawer and told him she had probably gone to find an extra chair to drag over so she could be more comfortable while he dictated a letter to me. I said, “She tends to do what she says she’ll do. If I were you I’d be careful.” I noticed a German edition of
The Magic Mountain
on his table, and I asked him if all these patients with their hacking, tubercular-sounding coughs put him in mind of Hans Castorp.
He smiled and asked me if I’d read it. I told him I had, in translation.
I was afraid he’d say something snide about reading a translation, but he didn’t. He asked, “Who
are
you two?”
I told him my name and my grandmother’s, and when he heard hers, he sighed and flattened himself out on his stomach and said, “That’s just swell. Mom’s hero’s here to torture me.”
My grandmother arrived with a chair while I was asking him to explain himself. He craned his neck around to speak to her. He said she had scored all sorts of points with his mother for putting their neighbor out of business.
My grandmother asked how his parents knew this secret. He replied, “Mom knows everything.” Then he said that if he wrote a letter saying he’d met my grandmother, his mother might loosen up on him a bit. She’d been nagging him about not assisting in his recovery. “The Nutters squealed on me,” he said.
My grandmother told him to start talking. She told him not to worry about my ability to keep up; I’d get the gist of what he said and then fix it later if I needed to. She winked at me.
This was his letter:
Dear Mom,
I’m doing just swell, except for the fact that my back still hurts like the devil. I intend to stay right here on my stomach until I feel like doing otherwise. Mrs. Nutter checked in this morning and I told her the same. But why tell you? I know you’ve heard by now, and visiting hours Sunday afternoon will find you or Dad here with the usual lecture. Since so much seems to be going on behind, pardon me, my back, why don’t you slip word to Dr. Nutter to give me something for the pain? Every time I move, I feel like the stitches are ripping out.
Now for some big news. Guess who’s writing this letter for me? Charlie Kate Birch’s granddaughter. And Dr. Birch herself is sitting right here. She seems to be very mean. You two would really get along swell. Her granddaughter doesn’t appear to be that mean, though she did sit here and stare a hole through me when I had my eyes closed. You know how you can tell somebody’s looking at you when your eyes are closed.
I’ll sign off now. Don’t forget when Dr. Nutter and you have your little daily chat to tell him I’m dying of pain. Nobody’s listening to me. I truly feel like I’m in one of those nightmares where you think you’re talking and you’re only moving your mouth. There’d be nothing better than a little morphine right now. And some oatmeal cookies. If Esther’s back from her honeymoon, how about asking her to make some and send them by you or Dad on Sunday?
Oh, you did a swell job beating up on the do-nothing legislature in this morning’s column. Pretty soon you’ll have to hire armed guards to take you to the grocery store.
Your son, Tom
My grandmother told him this was satisfactory. Then she stood up and checked his back. She ran her finger along the stitches, and when he asked what she thought about his souvenir from the Pacific, she said, “By God, they certainly mangled you.”
He said the Japanese had given him just a small dose, but it did evermore hurt.
She said, “I meant the surgeon. I could’ve done a better job with a Singer sewing needle and knitting yarn. And furthermore, they let a blind person shave you. You don’t need morphine, but I’ll have somebody bring you codeine. Then I want you up. You won’t have an excuse to luxuriate.”
He thanked her, and then asked if he could speak with me privately.
I believed he wanted to say something about her, maybe arrange a surprise meeting for his mother. My grandmother told him she wasn’t a fan of privacy. She said, “I despise not knowing what people say.”
He pushed himself up on his elbows again and said, “Well, I was going to ask your granddaughter if I could call her sometime.”
I managed to say that would be fine, and my grandmother added, “Anytime before ten o’clock. Anybody calls our house after ten, I think somebody’s dead in a ditch. We’re in the phone book.” She took my hand and tugged at me to leave, excusing us more graciously than I had expected. My cheeks were burning, and his were pulled back in a grin.
As we were leaving the ward, my grandmother stopped at the nurses’ station and told someone to give the Hawkings boy some dry toast and orange juice and to call Dr. Nutter and request an order for codeine. Then she swung open the big metal door and held it for me. We walked to the Welfare and Recreation Office to sign out, and all the way down the hall she gave me instructions: “When you go on a date with that boy, mind your manners and tell him right up front you intend to go to college and
then
raise a family. And I’d also harp a bit on how expensive medical school is, and how much it costs to have somebody looking after the house and children, and things of that nature. Dwell on the high price of cooks. Don’t nag him. Just line everything out.”
After we signed out, she noticed a volunteer sheet for the hospital’s holiday party, to be held the next evening. Without asking me, she wrote both our names in the punch table column. She told me I should take every chance that came along to see the young man. And then, on the way home, she spoke of him as if she knew everything about him. She said he had more assets than liabilities, and we’d have to stop him from saying “swell” so much, otherwise he’d drive her crazy. He was enormously intelligent, and he loved tussling with his mother. He wasn’t impressed by his own good looks, and he was probably tired of giddy girls from the country club set. She continued, “Knowing what he does about me, he showed an admirable measure of audacity in asking in my presence to phone you, almost as much as it takes to read Thomas Mann in a military hospital. If any of these fellows caught on, they’d poison him. He thinks you have audacity to match. He was highly impressed with you sitting there staring at him.”
Her reaction was so different from what it had been when my mother introduced Mr. Baines to her that I asked her why she hadn’t yanked me away as she had my mother. She said, “That day I didn’t know a thing about Mr. Baines other than that Sophia was slobbering over him, and you know what I’ve always thought of her judgment. But this Hawkings boy, I found out all I need to know about him, and I happen to think a little more highly of your judgment. He’s not going to leave you alone. Not since Satan tackled Eve has somebody gone after a person as hard as he’ll go after you. Am I correct?”
I told her I hoped she was, and because believing her was such a part of my training, I spent the rest of the day thrilled at the news that I’d marry this boy I’d just met, and go to medical school, and have a maid and children. I felt rushed to get all this under way, almost panicky. And then there was another thought: I felt sorry for all the people in the world who didn’t have somebody around to predict their lives for them, all the girls who had no forewarning of what would become of them as women.