Equal Affections (25 page)

April rubbed her nose and looked at the floor.

“Oh, and congratulations, by the by. I'm sure knowing a grandchild's
on the way is one thing that will give Louise real fighting spirit. This the first?”

“Yes,” Nat said.

“Have six myself,” Dr. Thayer said. “The oldest is seventeen. The youngest is six months.”

___________

Outside the door to the burn unit, they slipped paper sacks over their shoes and put on white gowns.

“Did she tell you?” April asked Nat when Dr. Thayer had turned away to talk with a nurse.

“What? Oh, yes,” Nat said, rather distractedly. “She told me right after you told her. I would have called, but then things started getting bad.”

“Are you happy?” April asked.

“April, it's not a good moment for you to ask me that—”

“Come on, Dad. Just answer that one simple question, and then I won't bother you about it anymore.”

“Look, we can talk about this more once your mother is out of the woods.”

“Fine. Yes. Just tell me if you're happy.”

Nat paused for a moment as he slipped his arms inside the wide sleeves of the white gown. “Yes, I suppose,” he said. “I suppose I'm happy. Do me up, will you?”

He turned around, and April tightened the gown over his tweed jacket.

___________

“Now I hope you're prepared for what you're going to see,” Dr. Thayer said as he led them along the curving corridor that surrounded
the burn unit. “She looks like shit. She looks trashed. I don't want you to be shocked.”

They pushed through a swinging door into a room full of noisy machinery. Danny smelled burning rubber. A number of nurses and doctors, all dressed, like Danny and April and Nat, in white robes, were doing a number of things—operating the machines, writing notes on big medical charts. One woman was telling another a joke about Jim and Tammy Bakker. In the background someone sang about Luckenbach, Texas.

“Welcome to command central,” Dr. Thayer said. “The patients are all around us, behind the glass partitions, so we can get to them fast.”

Like a tourist, Danny looked around at the windowed rooms, most of which had their curtains drawn. In one corner were some large stainless-steel tubs that reminded him of the tubs used in college dining halls to make soup.

Behind one of the glass partitions the curtains were not drawn. Some more figures, dressed like the rest of them but also in hats and masks, stood huddled over a bed set up in the center of the small room like the bed of a queen. It was in this direction that Dr. Thayer motioned.

“It's hot in here,” April said.

“The burn unit's kept at a high temperature and humidity level because it helps the skin to heal faster. We even have our own generator, in case of a hospital blackout. Now, put these on and we'll go in to see your mom.”

They put on rubber gloves, paper masks, and paper hats patterned with pink and purple flowers.

“These hats remind me of Aunt Eleanor's blouses,” April said.

“Okay,” Dr. Thayer said when they were all done up. He looked them over like a father about to send his kids trick-or-treating. “In we go.”

Danny thought, It's Halloween, and we're all dressed as Aunt Eleanor. They walked through a swinging door into the glassed-off queen's room, and the phalanx of masked and hatted technicians dispersed. More humming machines, connected to Louise by rubber hoses and thin plastic tubes that intertwined under and around the bed, a nest as confusing as any in the house in Gresham.

After examining the red numbers on one of the machines, Dr. Thayer said, “I'll leave you alone for a few minutes,” and headed back out the swinging door.

There was Louise. Her body was wrapped neck to toe in gauze, like a mummy's. Someone had greased her hair, and pushed it roughly back behind her head. On her face—the only part of her not covered by the white gauze—red sores and blisters had erupted. Her whole face was red, but not the red Danny thought of when he thought of sores and blisters. This was red as in roses, or fire engines.

They forced themselves not to look away, even though it was worse than they'd imagined, even though nothing, Danny thought, could have prepared them for what he was seeing. It was as if her body had undergone some magical transmutation or were in the throes of possession. The horror of it was that even like this, she was still, defiantly, herself.

April's eyes, above the mask, were wide; she was standing with her back straight and not flinching. Following her example, Danny pulled himself up tall. (Louise had often complained about his posture.) This is me, he thought, and that is her, and we are in this room. Look at her.

He looked.

Louise's eyes were swollen, bloodshot, and barely open. She started shaking, violently, spasmodically, as if an electric current were seething through her. “I forgot to tell you about that,” Nat said. “Her fever spikes every afternoon, and she gets these uncontrollable shakes. But it passes, it passes.” He moved closer.

“Hi, honey,” he said.

“Nat,” she said. “Nat. I—”

“I know, I know,” Nat said, “these shakes are rough.”

Her teeth were chattering violently. “I want—I want—don't—”

“The kids are here, Louise, April and Danny, see?”

She lifted her neck slightly, and her head bobbed like the head of the toy basset hound Aunt Eleanor used to have behind the backseat of her car.

“Hi, Mom,” Danny said.

“Hi, Mom,” April said.

She smiled vaguely. “Hi—hi—Dan—” Through all the chattering Danny could hear her striving for a certain jokey intonation she had often used when she was sick—her voice rising into the high-pitched vibrato of the guilt-inducing Jewish mother: “Oh, I'm fine. Your poor old mother is just fine.” It was funny; she could barely get out two syllables, could barely speak at all, and yet the old singsongy rhythm of
that punishing, familiar voice remained within her grasp. Even in such dire straits as these, it seemed, she was determined to try for dignity.

“How are you feeling?” Danny asked.

Louise managed to shrug a little and say something that sounded like “Eh.”

And Danny and April laughed. They laughed and laughed.

“Good old Mom, still has her sense of humor,” April said.

But she wasn't paying attention to them anymore. Again she turned to Nat and said, “I want—I want—” and pointed at the table.

“What?” Nat said. “What do you want?”

“Klee—klee—”

“Kleenex?” Nat said. “You want a box of kleenex? Here's kleenex.” He handed her the box.

“No!” she said, and her face screwed up in irritation. “No, Nat!” A familiar tone of anger. “My—my—”

“Oh!” Nat said. “I remember now! She hates the hospital kleenex,” he explained to Danny and April. “She wants her own box, from home. Right?”

Weakly Louise nodded, and her head fell back on the pillow. The shaking seemed to subside slightly.

“Danny, why don't you ask the nurse if we could bring Louise her own kleenex, okay?”

“Sure,” Danny said. He turned and pushed through the swinging door, back into the room Dr. Thayer had referred to as command central, where he pulled off the hat and mask and deposited them in the bins marked for that purpose.

“You're not going to believe this,” he said to a freckle-faced nurse who was making notes on a big chart and humming along with the Judds. “She says she doesn't like the hospital kleenex and wants the real thing.”

“I've heard stranger,” the nurse said. “But you can get them for her if that's what she really wants.”

“Thanks,” Danny said. He put on another hat, another mask, another pair of gloves. April and Nat had pulled up chairs and were sitting next to Louise's bed.

“A little more than ten weeks now,” April was saying. “I hope it's a girl so I can name her after you.”

Louise lay blessedly still, for once, giving out, with each breath, a soft wheezing.

___________

What Danny thought of, while he was standing there, standing over his mother's bed, was a photograph Nat had saved from the war, when she was working as a welder at a shipyard. She had been asked to model ladies' welding uniforms for a catalogue, and in the picture she stood proudly against a cardboard backdrop in a jumpsuit of leather and metal, holding a blowtorch to one side. The suit was cut to the shape of what in those days was called a figure—something Louise had in spades—and now, as he looked down at her body in its tight white wrapping, what was surprising to Danny was that it looked young; it was the body of a sleek, athletic girl, with strong legs, flat hips, wide shoulders. It had never occurred to him that his mother might be in such good shape, since for years she had worn only the loosest, most matronly clothes, and for a moment Danny wondered if, in the brutal light of the burn unit, she'd been somehow brought back past modesty and wifeliness to the rebellious girl who in 1944 had held up a blowtorch in the name of liberty and America.

A brown liquid flowed to her body through one tube; a yellow liquid flowed from it through another. Danny observed this flowing, and then the door opened and Dr. Thayer came in again, carrying a wet cloth in a stainless-steel pan. “Hello, Louise,” he said, leaning over her. “I brought something for you.” Cautiously he dabbed the cloth over her swollen and blistered eyes, and her face inclined toward his in pleasure. “Yes,” he said, “that feels good, doesn't it?” slowly running the cloth down her cheeks, toward her lips. It was the sort of intimate moment which, had she had been in better shape, she would have forbidden her children to witness, but now she seemed oblivious to everything but the cool cloth. “Yes,” Dr. Thayer said. “Yes. Feels good.” Her mouth opened and closed, making over and over again, in that still and humid room, the gesture of a kiss.

___________

Nat wanted to sit with her alone for a few minutes, so April and Danny took a long, last look before moving out the swinging door. They were both worried that she might be dead before they got back, but even in circumstances like that you can only look so long. Masks came off, gloves, flowered hats. Then the long corridor. The bags on their shoes came off; the robes came off. They crossed the corridor bridge to the modern, efficient, new part of the hospital. Things were almost cheerful here; women were walking up and down hallways, leading their IV poles like elderly grandmothers. All the ordinary calamities, broken legs and babies and cancers. April and Danny went down the elevator and out the sliding glass doors.

On the steps of the hospital, in bright sunlight, April heaved breath like someone who has just emerged from a fire. Danny touched her arm. She heaved. He put his arms around her. The cotton of her blouse was soaked through with sweat.

She pulled him down onto the cement steps and started to cry. Her head fell onto his chest; she was crying wildly, oblivious to the fact that strangers surrounded them. Her hair was in his mouth, the long strands soft and faintly sweet-tasting, and he was crying too.

But how long can you cry? They couldn't cry forever. They had no burns; their bodies felt good to them.

Finally April extricated herself from Danny. She wiped her nose with her left arm. Her skin was pale and freckled, and looked astonishingly innocent. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and blew her nose.

They got up from where they were sitting on the steps and stumbled back into the hospital lobby, where Danny, at a pay phone, dialed Walter's number.

“Walt,” he said.

“What? Danny, what's happened?”

“I need you to come out,” Danny said, closing his eyes. “I need you here.”

After Walter had agreed, Danny hung up and leaned against the wall. Soon April was back, her face wet and shiny.

“I suppose we should go back up,” she said.

“No, not quite yet. Let's rest a minute. Or maybe take a walk.”

“Okay,” April said.

But they didn't move.

T
here was, in the burn unit, a kind of perpetual arrhythmia, as in a fun house. Nothing ever happened when or how it would have anywhere else. Work went on in the middle of the night, dinners were eaten at dawn. The only event of any regularity was bath hour, every afternoon at one, during which the patients were maneuvered into big steel tubs, soaked in some stinging yet miraculous broth, scrubbed and debrided. The baths were unspeakably painful, and as a result bath hour was the one period each day when visitors weren't allowed in the unit, so when one o'clock came around, Danny and April and Nat usually put on their jackets and lumbered outside to have lunch. The brilliant sunshine made them squint and stumble, and seemed intended for other creatures than themselves. Whatever was fiery drew them: fierce Thai curries, Korean vegetables pickled with red peppers, sushi smeared with wasabi. When Walter arrived, he went along, but like a mute witness, an observer from the world outside. “Listen,” Danny said to him, “April wants to go to this Japanese place that has these big bowls of noodles, but I'm in the mood for Chinese. What do you think?”

“Whatever,” Walter said, “whatever,” not quite believing Danny cared so much about lunch at a time like this, but at the same time not wanting to make trouble; what did he know of it, after all?

All the rest of the day the life of the burn unit took them over. Things
were serious enough here that vague or contemplative questions took on a harsh edge of answerability. How long can you cry? Danny had wondered that first day, when he and April sat gushing on the hospital steps. Well, there was an eight-year-old boy in the room across from Louise's who had been crying for thirty-six hours. The noise he made was rageless—a low, hoarse, grieving lament that sometimes pitched and sometimes faded, but never ceased, and finally blended with the other noises of the burn unit, the humming, pumping, and churning of the various cruel and life-sustaining machines, and the country and western music from the tape deck, and the hushed joke-telling of the nurses gathered at command central. It seemed that there was nothing you could not get used to.