The Gorgon Festival (3 page)

Across the garden, by the western gate in the picket fence, he saw Ruth bent over her Scarlet Churchills, gloved, with pruning shears and a demijohn of liquid fertilizer on the ground beside the bush. He called a greeting and she waved him out to see the buds. Through a prize-winning array of varicolored roses, he walked to inspect her latest species.

For a moment they spoke of roses, hangovers, and car batteries as she completed her pruning and slowly straightened. He returned the gear to the tool box beside the western gate and she commented on the liquid fertilizer as they made their way to the house.

“The stuff seems to stimulate the quanta in photosynthesis, makes them want to jump.”

Ward plucked a leaf from the underside of a bush as they passed and looked at it. “There’s a substantial phytil radical, here,” he agreed. “How’s the arthritis?”

“Bothersome. My right index finger’s so frozen I have to prune with both hands.”

From long association he knew there was a tragedy behind her casual remark. She loved to play the piano. Once she had regaled the boys of Ethan Allen Military Prep with recitals of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach to the point where an unofficial school song had been written, “Up the Bees.”

Swinging stiffly up the back steps, she asked, “Ester in Frisco?”

“All night.”

“Could you use some vitamin C?”

“Yes. Have you eaten?”

“No. At my age, chocolate and cookies suffice for my evening meal. My own cookies. Union scale for bakers is twelve-fifty an hour.”

They entered the kitchen and Ruth gave him instructions as she prepared vodka and orange juice. “Get the bottle of absorbent from beneath the sink, put half a pint in a gallon of water with a half-teaspoonful of your sugar phosphate in the solution. But don’t plug in the vat.”

His tasks took longer than hers, and she had his drink poured and waiting on the kitchen table. He sat across from her.

“You mentioned one hamster, Ruth. Don’t you think we need at least two? If the experimental animal dies, we’ll not be sure it’s a natural death.”

“That’s the point of my experiment. I’m having to put Papa to sleep, anyway. At our age, the hamster’s and mine, timidity is a vanity.”

Ward weighed her remark, wondering if she was making a philosophical observation or if she were including herself in the experiment. Surely not the latter, he decided. As a biologist, Ruth was cognizant of the delicacy of human cellular structure, unless she was senile. Then her safety would be his responsibility.

“I’ve allotted five minutes for amenities,” she said, “so take your drink to the lab and bring me the hamster in the corner, the grizzled one that won’t huddle.”

Ward walked down the hall to the rear room and went over to her pen of hamsters. Five were huddled together in one corner, but the sixth, gray with age, stood alone in a separate corner, its head against the wire netting.

Ward brought it back to the kitchen where Ruth waited. “Take the rubber gloves from the cupboard and plug in the vat.”

As Ward obeyed, Ruth cuddled the little animal to her cheek and said, “Good luck, Papa.”

She handed it to Ward and said, “Dip him in the solution.”

Ward obeyed. The little animal was too feeble to wriggle but lay docile in his hands as he submerged it. He held it under, all but its nose, for three minutes, and Ruth said, “That should be enough. There’s a towel under the sink. Dry him carefully and return him to his pen. Watch him for a moment and tell me what he does.”

When he took the hamster back and placed it in the pen, it waddled over to the group, sniffing among them.

“Congratulate me again,” he said to Ruth when he returned. “My solution eliminates antisocial tendencies.”

“That’s just the beginning of the beginning, Alex. Now, I want to cure the arthritis in my right index finger.”

“I don’t know if it’s advisable, Ruth.”

“Nonsense. I use the absorbent constantly. We know the sugar phosphate’s harmless, and there’s only one volt of current in the vat.”

She wasn’t senile, so her finger was not his responsibility. He said, “Be my guest.”

He stood beside her as she dipped her index finger in the solution. She held it there as he watched.

“Any pain?”

“There was, but it’s going away.”

She held the finger in the solution for three minutes, took it out, wiped it on a paper towel, and flexed it in front of his eyes. She could touch the heel of her palm with a finger she had not been able to bend for fear of breaking it.

“Congratulations, Alex. You’ve found a cure for arthritis, but you won’t get the Nobel Prize without explaining the process.”

She turned and faced him.

“The finger was a test run, Alex, and only the beginning. I want to take a sitz bath.”

“Oh no, Ruth.” His voice was jocular but adamant. “I don’t mind you losing your finger but we can’t risk your pelvic area. It might affect your genitourinary tract.”

“I foresaw your objections,” she said. “On my writing table in the living room is a signed, unconditional release relieving you of all responsibility in the experiment.”

“Ruth, you couldn’t clear me, morally or legally, if the side effects are fatal.”

She took his arm and the eyes looking up into his were not those of the woman who had warned and commanded him for the whole of his adult life. They had lost their authoritativeness and in them was a plea, profound and pathetic.

“Alex, I’ve had too much pride to burden you with complaints, but arthritis isn’t fun and games. Have you ever wondered why a woman with my mind stays stewed during her waking hours? Pain! One year of life as a functioning, pain-free woman is worth more than a decade of this.”

Though smiling, Ward shook his head. “It might make you pregnant.”

“I’m twenty years past menopause.”

“Nevertheless, I can’t risk you. You’re half of everyone I love.”

“If you really loved me, Alex, you would grant my request. Look at this hand…” She flexed it before him. “Once more I can play the third movement from Bach’s
Passion
. After that, if my arm fell off, I would still consider myself rewarded… I’m a condemned prisoner awaiting a slow and painful death, and you have the keys to my prison. Set me free, Alex.”

Her fervor and her logic touched him, and he smiled to hide his pity. “You give the orders.”

“Spoken like a true son of Ethan Allen Prep. Get in there, boy, with your electrodes, and draw my bath, half a tub of water, one pint of absorbent, and one teaspoonful of the solution.”

While Ruth went to the bedroom to undress, Ward set up the anode and cathode at opposite ends of the bathtub and drew her bath. He had no fear of electrocution—the transformer permitted only a four-volt flow of direct current—but he did fear side effects from an experiment on a human being. Ruth was his coequal in biological science, but her judgment could be warped by pain.

It occurred to him that he should stand by while she bathed, but there was a question of objectivity involved. In his youth when Ruth was beautiful, Ward had indulged in tea-and-sympathy imaginings about her that went several furlongs beyond sympathy.

Ruth solved the problem by entering in her bathrobe saying, “Out, boy. Out.”

He stood for a moment outside the door waiting to hear a thump, a gasp, a cry for help. All he heard was a splash and gurgle.

“If you need me,” he called, “I’m right outside.”

“Nonsense, Alex. Put a pan of water on for chocolate… If the sun is down, you can turn on the light in the kitchen.”

As a widow on a professorial pension, Ruth was sparing of electricity, and the forty-watt bulb in the kitchen added little to the twilight as Ward set water to boil.

Within ten minutes, she skipped into the kitchen, toweled and robed. At first glance, it looked as if nothing had happened, until she bent before him, touched her toes with her fingertips, straightened quickly and swung from side to side, moving freely on all joints. Her face was so radiant with joy and freedom from pain that he spontaneously reached out and embraced her, holding her fragile, once-tortured frame with gentleness.

“Ruth, when you came out of there, all radiant and unshadowed by distress, I knew that if I should live to be one hundred this was my finest hour.”

“Pshaw, Alex,” she hugged him gently. “This was a joint effort. Your sugar phosphate would have been worthless without my absorbent. Now, let me get the chocolate started. This is just the beginning, Alex.”

As a schoolboy studying geometry Ward had always tensed when reading in Euclid the phrase, “It is, therefore, self-evident…” Whatever followed was usually incomprehensible. Now he was becoming likewise leery of Ruth’s “This is only the beginning.” As she turned to the stove to prepare the chocolate, he sat down at the table feeling some trepidation.

At the stove, she spoke in trivialities to dull the poignancy of the moment.

“The way to make chocolate properly is to prepare a thick mixture, almost a wet fudge, of hot water, sugar, and chocolate and let it set awhile on a low flame before you add the warm milk. Mix the ingredients carefully, stirring all the time, back and forth, back and forth, with a swishing circular movement, smoothly, gently, never breaking the rhythm. You’ve got to have rhythm.”

Out of respect and habit he paid attention, but Ward could not have cared less how to make hot chocolate. Besides, she seemed hung up on the phrase “back and forth,” which she kept repeating as she stirred.

Finally, she adjusted the burner to very low and turned back to the table to join him. She took a sudden quick sip, looked over at him, and said, with obvious effort, “Alex, you know I’m on your side.”

“My side?”

“Your side. I’ve never intruded on your personal life, but Ester’s too much woman for you to handle, boy. She steps out on you.”

Ruth was intruding, but he feigned polite surprise.

“I suppose the husband’s always last to know.”

“Never trust a woman under fifty. Ester’s a high-stepping strutter. Did you ever wonder why she doesn’t have children?”

“She goes along with me,” he said. “I haven’t time for children and we both are concerned about the population explosion.”

“That’s not your reason, either.”

Suddenly he was interested. He had read about subconscious psychological motivations, but he had never tried to apply the theories to himself.

“What’s my reason, Ruth?”

“Psychologically you’re fixated on a breast level, and you don’t want to share her breasts with a child.”

Ruth was wrong. He was quite willing to share Ester at any time other than every other Tuesday.

“What’s Ester’s reason, if not ecological?”

“Sex! Oh, there are other reasons, engineering problems, perhaps, but basically she can’t take time out from her hanky-panky.”

“Engineering problems?”

“If Ester had children, her breasts would fall. Then she’d need a block and tackle to get into her brassiere, unless she was willing to push those things around in a wheelbarrow.”

“I follow your reasoning, Ruth, but I’m not quite clear how the reasoning got started.”

“Your happiness, Alex. I told you I’m on your side.”

“I’m happy. Sex is Ester’s problem.”

“You can solve it for her.”

“How?”

“Get in there and take a sitz bath. No sense letting it go to waste.”

“I have no arthritis. You volunteered as guinea pig, and I…”

“I’m neither a guinea nor a pig, and you can check that with Ester when she gets back from San Francisco.”

Intuition had pointed Ruth to Ester’s current lover, and Ward veered from the subject. “I haven’t observed you long enough to determine side effects.”

“If you’re waiting for me to die, Alex, I can tell you now that death is not a side effect… You’re happy, but I want you to be happier. So get in there and take your sitz bath. It won’t hurt you. All it does is correct the random error process, which I’ll explain how after you’ve taken your bath.”

He did as he was told, partly from habit and partly from curiosity about the theory of random error. He felt sheepish in the bathroom as he stripped and dipped into the tub. It was a waste of electricity, and sitting in used bath water made him feel squeamish.

After five minutes, his squeamishness passed. Ruth had honored him by permitting him to use her bath water. If he had been a true friend, he would have watched over her as she bathed. She would have understood if he had felt a residual kickback from his childhood fantasizing. Even now he could feel impulses from his memory, so he focused his attention on another slight mystery.

He had to ask her why she had called a cure for cancer “bush league.”

After ten minutes, she called him. He got out, dried, and dressed. Back in the kitchen, he found the table set with a dish of his favorite home-baked macaroons placed in the center of the table, not six or seven, but at least a dozen.

“Feel any different?” she asked.

“Not particularly,” he answered honestly. “But I’m anxious to hear about this random error theory.”

She seated him and brought the chocolate, sitting across from him.

“Random error is an accumulation of defective DNA in non-dividing cells which impairs performance of the cell—the aging process. Your solution plus my absorbent plus an electric current adds enough missing rungs to our broken ladders to repair the damage from this process, almost instantaneously.”

“How does this affect Ester?”

“Alex, you theorist! Don’t you realize that bathtub in there is the Fountain of Youth? You now have the genitourinary tract of a sixteen-year-old boy.”

His first thought was that she had gone dotty, but fear for himself and loyalty to her canceled the thought. In her desperation and pain, she had become vulnerable to nostrums and was practicing faith healing on herself.

Then he thought of Ester’s problem, Ruth’s really, since it had never bothered Ester.

“How will this help Ester?”

“Biologically the ideal mate of a thirty-two-year-old woman is a sixteen-year-old boy. Ester’s three years over the hump, and you’re back in prime.”

Ward munched a macaroon and thought.