Different Seasons (75 page)

“It was all I could think to
do,”
Miss Stansfield said, still laughing and wiping her streaming eyes with her handkerchief. “Because at that moment, I saw myself reaching out and simply sweeping those sample bottles of perfume—every one of them—off her desk and onto the floor, which was uncarpeted concrete. I didn’t just
think
it, I
saw
it! I saw them crashing to the floor and filling the room with such a Godawful mixed stench that fumigators would have to come,

“I was going to do it; nothing was going to stop me doing it. Then I began to ‘locomotive,’ and everything was all right. I was able to take the check, and the pink slip, and get up, and get out. I wasn’t able to thank her, of course—I was still being a locomotive!”

We laughed again, and then she sobered.

“It’s all passed off now, and I am even able to feel a little sorry for her—or does that sound like a terribly stiff-necked thing to say?”

“Not at all. I think it’s an admirable way to be able to feel.”

“May I show you something I bought with my severance pay, Dr. McCarron?”

“Yes, if you like.”

She opened her purse and took out a small flat box. “I bought it at a pawnshop,” she said. “For two dollars. And it’s the only time during this whole nightmare that I’ve felt ashamed and dirty. Isn’t that strange?”

She opened the box and laid it on my desk so I could look inside. I wasn’t surprised at what I saw. It was a plain gold wedding ring.

“I’ll do what’s necessary,” she said. “I am staying in what Mrs. Kelly would undoubtedly call ‘a respectable boarding house.’ My landlady has been kind and friendly ... but Mrs. Kelly was kind and friendly, too. I think she may ask me to leave at any time now, and I suspect that if I say anything about the rent-balance due me, or the damage deposit I paid when I moved in, she’ll laugh in my face.”

“My dear young woman, that would be quite illegal. There are courts and lawyers to help you answer such—”

“The courts are men’s clubs,” she said steadily, “and not apt to go out of their way to befriend a woman in my position. Perhaps I could get my money back, perhaps not. Either way, the expense and the trouble and the ... the unpleasantness ... hardly seem worth the forty-seven dollars or so. I had no business mentioning it to you in the first place. It hasn’t happened yet, and maybe it won’t. But in any case, I intend to be practical from now on.”

She raised her head, and her eyes flashed at mine.

“I’ve got my eye on a place down in the Village—just in case. It’s on the third floor, but it’s clean, and it’s five dollars a month cheaper than where I’m staying now.” She picked the ring out of the box. “I wore this when the landlady showed me the room.”

She put it on the third finger of her left hand with a small moue of disgust of which I believe she was unaware. “There. Now I’m Mrs. Stansfield. My husband was a truck-driver who was killed on the Pittsburgh-New York run. Very sad. But I am no longer a little roundheels strumpet, and my child is no longer a bastard.”

She looked up at me, and the tears were in her eyes again. As I watched, one of them overspilled and rolled down her cheek.

“Please,” I said, distressed, and reached across the desk to take her hand. It was very, very cold. “Don’t, my dear.”

She turned her hand—it was the left—over in my hand and looked at the ring. She smiled, and that smile was as bitter as gall and vinegar, gentlemen. Another tear fell—just that one.

“When I hear cynics say that the days of magic and miracles are all behind us, Dr. McCarron, I’ll know they’re deluded, won’t I? When you can buy a ring in a pawnshop for two dollars and that ring will instantly erase both bastardy and licentiousness, what else would you call that but magic? Cheap magic.”

“Miss Stansfield ... Sandra, if I may ... if you need help, if there’s anything I can do—”

She drew her hand away from me—if I had taken her right hand instead of her left, perhaps she would not have done. I did not love her, I’ve told you, but in that moment I could have loved her; I was on the verge of falling in love with her. Perhaps, if I’d taken her right hand instead of the one with that lying ring on it, and if she had allowed me to hold her hand only a little longer, until my own warmed it, perhaps then I should have.

“You’re a good, kind man, and you’ve done a great deal for me and my baby ... and your Breathing Method is a much better kind of magic than this awful ring. After all, it kept me from being jailed on charges of willful destruction, didn’t it?”

She left soon after that, and I went to the window to watch her move off down the street toward Fifth Avenue. God, I admired her just then! She looked so slight, so young, and so obviously pregnant—but there was still nothing timid or tentative about her. She did not scutter up the street; she walked as if she had every right to her place on the sidewalk.

She left my view and I turned back to my desk. As I did so, the framed photograph which hung on the wall next to my diploma caught my. eye, and a terrible shudder worked through me. My skin—all of it, even the skin on my forehead and the backs of my hands—crawled up into cold knots of gooseflesh. The most suffocating fear of my entire life fell on me like a horrible shroud, and I found myself gasping for breath. It was a precognitive interlude, gentlemen. I do not take part in arguments about whether or not such things can occur; I know they can, because it has happened to me. Just that once, on that hot early September afternoon. I pray to God I never have another.

The photograph had been taken by my mother on the day I finished medical school. It showed me standing in front of White Memorial, hands behind my back, grinning like a kid who’s just gotten a full-day pass to the rides at Palisades Park. To my left the statue of Harriet White can be seen, and although the photograph cuts her off at about mid-shin, the pedestal and that queerly heartless inscription—
There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering
—could be clearly seen. It was at the foot of the statue of my father’s first wife, directly below that inscription, that Sandra Stansfield died not quite four months later in a senseless accident that occurred just as she arrived at the hospital to deliver her child.

 

She exhibited some anxiety that fall that I would not be there to attend her during her labor—that I would be away for the Christmas holidays or not on call. She was partly afraid that she would be delivered by some doctor who would ignore her wish to use the Breathing Method and who would instead give her gas or a spinal block.

I assured her as best I could. I had no reason to leave the city, no family to visit over the holidays. My mother had died two years before, and there was no one else except a maiden aunt in California ... and the train didn’t agree with me, I told Miss Stansfield.

“Are you ever lonely?” she asked.

“Sometimes. Usually I keep too busy. Now, take this.” I jotted my home telephone number on a card and gave it to her. “If you get the answering service when your labor begins, call me here.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t—”

“Do you want to use the Breathing Method, or do you want to get some sawbones who’ll think you’re mad and give you a capful of ether as soon as you start to ‘locomotive’?”

She smiled a little. “All right. I’m convinced.”

But as the autumn progressed and the butchers on Third Avenue began advertising the per-pound price of their “young and succulent Toms,” it became clear that her mind was still not at rest. She had indeed been asked to leave the place where she had been living when I first met her, and had moved to the Village. But that, at least, had turned out quite well for her. She had even found work of a sort. A blind woman with a fairly comfortable income had hired her to do some light housework, and then to read to her from the works of Gene Stratton Porter and Pearl Buck. She lived on the first floor of Miss Stansfield’s building. She had taken on that blooming, rosy look that most healthy women come to have during the final trimester of their pregnancies. But there was a shadow on her face. I would speak to her and she would be slow to answer ... and once, when she didn’t answer at all, I looked up from the notes I was making and saw her looking at the framed photograph next to my diploma with a strange, dreamy expression in her eyes. I felt a recurrence of that chill ... and her response, which had nothing to do with my question, hardly made me feel easier.

“I have a feeling, Dr. McCarron, sometimes quite a strong feeling, that I am doomed.”

Silly, melodramatic word! And yet, gentlemen, the response that rose to my own lips was this:
Yes; I feel that, too.
I bit it off, of course; a doctor who would say such a thing should immediately put his instruments and medical books up for sale and investigate his future in the plumbing or carpentry business.

I told her that she was not the first pregnant woman to have such feelings, and would not be the last. I told her that the feeling was indeed so common that doctors knew it by the tongue-in-cheek name of The Valley of the Shadow Syndrome. I’ve already mentioned it tonight, I believe.

Miss Stansfield nodded with perfect seriousness, and I remember how young she looked that day, and how large her belly seemed. “I know about that,” she said. “I’ve felt it. But it’s quite separate from this other feeling. This other feeling is like ... like something looming up. I can’t describe it any better than that. It’s silly, but I can’t shake it.”

“You must try,” I said. “It isn’t good for the—”

But she had drifted away from me. She was looking at the photograph again.

“Who is that?”

“Emlyn McCarron,” I said, trying to make a joke. It sounded extraordinarily feeble. “Back before the Civil War, when he was quite young.”

“No, I recognized you, of course,” she said. “The woman. You can only tell it is a woman from the hem of the skirt and the shoes. Who is she?”

“Her name is Harriet White,” I said, and thought:
And hers will be the first face you see when you arrive to deliver your
child. The chill came back—that dreadful drifting formless chill.
Her stone face.

“And what does it say there at the base of the statue?” she asked, her eyes still dreamy, almost trancelike.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “My conversational Latin is not that good.”

That night I had the worst dream of my entire life—I woke up from it in utter terror, and if I had been married, I suppose I would have frightened my poor wife to death.

In the dream I opened the door to my consulting room and found Sandra Stansfield in there. She was wearing the brown pumps, the smart white linen dress with the brown edging, and the slightly out-of-date cloche hat. But the hat was between her breasts, because she was carrying her head in her arms. The white linen was stained and streaked with gore. Blood jetted from her neck and splattered the ceiling.

And then her eyes fluttered open—those wonderful hazel eyes—and they fixed on mine.

“Doomed,” the speaking head told me. “Doomed. I’m doomed. There’s no salvation without suffering. It’s cheap magic, but it’s all we have.”

That’s when I woke up screaming.

Her due date of December 10th came and went. I examined her on December 17th and suggested that, while the baby would almost certainly be born in 1935, I no longer expected the child to put in his or her appearance until after Christmas. Miss Stansfield accepted this with good grace. She seemed to have thrown off the shadow that had hung over her that fall. Mrs. Gibbs, the blind woman who had hired her to read aloud and do light housework, was impressed with her—impressed enough to tell her friends about the brave young widow who, in spite of her recent bereavement and delicate condition, was facing her own future with such determined good cheer. Several of the blind woman’s friends had expressed an interest in employing her following the birth of her child.

“I’ll take them up on it, too,” she told me. “For the baby. But only until I’m on my feet again, and able to find something steady. Sometimes I think the worst part of this—of everything that’s happened—is that it’s changed the way I look at people. Sometimes I think to myself, ‘How can you sleep at night, knowing that you’ve deceived that dear old thing?’ and then I think, ‘If she knew, she’d show you the door, just like all the others.’ Either way, it’s a lie, and I feel the weight of it on my heart sometimes.”

Before she left that day she took a small, gaily wrapped package from her purse and slid it shyly across the desk to me. “Merry Christmas, Dr. McCarron.”

“You shouldn’t have,” I said, sliding open a drawer and taking out a package of my own. “But since I did, too—”

She looked at me for a moment, surprised ... and then we laughed together. She had gotten me a silver tie-clasp with a caduceus on it. I had gotten her an album in which to keep photographs of her baby. I still have the tie-clasp; as you see, gentlemen, I am wearing it tonight. What happened to the album, I cannot say.

I saw her to the door, and as we reached it, she turned to me, put her hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were cool and firm. It was not a passionate kiss, gentlemen, but neither was it the sort of kiss you might expect from a sister or an aunt.

“Thank you again, Dr. McCarron,” she said a little breathlessly. The color was high in her cheeks and her hazel eyes glowed lustrously. “Thank you for so much.”

I laughed—a little uneasily. “You speak as if we’d never meet again, Sandra.” It was, I believe, the second and last time I ever used her Christian name.

“Oh, we’ll meet again,” she said. “I don’t doubt it a bit.” And she was right—although neither of us could have foreseen the dreadful circumstances of that last meeting.

 

Sandra Stansfield’s labor began on Christmas Eve, at just past six P.M. By that time, the snow which had fallen all that day had changed to sleet. And by the time Miss Stansfield entered mid-labor, not quite two hours later, the city streets were a dangerous glaze of ice.