The Third Generation (33 page)

“I’m afraid not.”

“I know your husband will be glad to get away from here.”

The patient looked up. “You can say that again.” Afterward he was restless, anxious for the night to pass.

Charles loaned him one of his western story magazines. The cover held a lurid picture of gunfighting, and the stories were equally gory.

Later Charles heard a weird, inhuman gasp and turned his head. The patient, sitting half upright, sucked desperately for breath. His neck was stretched, elongated, the thin neck muscles taut as cables; his hands clawed at his throat.

“Nurse!” Charles screamed. “Doctor!”

The other patients yelled. For a moment there was bedlam. The nurses came running and drew a screen about the patient. Then the resident doctor and his assistants arrived. Charles heard the low urgency of their voices, the rustle of swift movement. An oxygen tent was ordered. But before it arrived, the doctor came slowly from behind the screen.

“Sometimes it happens like that,” he said to his assistants. “Undue excitement. The heart can’t take it.”

The nurses retired. A few minutes later two orderlies removed the screen and wheeled the cot, on which the covered body rested, from the ward. Now in the empty space beside Charles’s bed, where a few short minutes before there’d been a man going home next day, was death. A frightened silence fell upon the ward. After a time the patients talked intermittently in whispers. Shortly the lights were turned off for the night. Charles lay in the darkness contemplating death. It seemed to him then, in the wake of shock, as if death negated all life. All the splendid glory that life offered and people dreamed came to nothing in death. All the talk of good and bad he’d endured throughout his life, everything that he’d been taught, chemistry, Latin, religion, good manners, were senseless, he concluded. There was nothing in the end but nothing anyway.

Finally he slept and dreamed that he was falling. Three nights in a row he dreamed that he was falling. The death had softened his emotions, left them in a state of flux torn between fear and protest. He didn’t want to die himself; he didn’t want to see anyone die; he didn’t want to think about it.

But the patient with the gangrenous arm died, and death came again into his thoughts. During the day a blood clot had become dislodged and moved slowly up a vein toward his heart. The doctors gathered about his bed and worked desperately to dissolve it.

Early in the evening, when the patient became aware that he was dying, he began reciting the Lord’s Prayer, over and over and over, and after the lights were turned off, only the night lamp left above his bed, the voice went on and on in the strained, rigid darkness. Doctors and nurses tiptoed through the ward, sibilant whispers came from behind the screen, but the praying voice continued, indifferent to the fuss and bother, growing weaker as the night wore on. A shroud of horror descended on the ward. No one slept. When one dies prayerfully it is always infinitely more despairing to those who have to listen.

Slowly, inexorably, Charles’s mind hardened toward the voice; some defense had been erected; his anger and resentment crystallized. After that he thought only of getting well, getting out, getting what he could and enjoying it while he still lived. He fought bitterly, desperately, against acceptance of infirmity. Inside he cried continuously.

But outwardly he was cheerful. He learned to smile to hide his inner feelings. When the panic came and fear rose like bile from a ruptured bladder, he spread his lips so the dimples showed and widened his senseless eyes. He smoked incessantly to combat the driving irritation of his confinement. He laughed in quick, staccato bursts. He was so brave, they said.

“And how’s our cheerful young patient this morning?” the nurses greeted him, bringing the monotonous trays of juices and milk toast.

“As ever,” he smiled.

Only his mother could kill the smile. Slowly his heart turned against her. Now when she called he hated the sight of the grief that lived in her face; he was repulsed by her bickering and denouncements. ?

“Mother, will you please-please-please shut up,” he’d say whenever she launched into a tirade against the hotel. “You’re as much to blame as anyone.”

These outbursts cut to her heart. “Mother’s doing the best she can, son,” she’d plead, tears brimming in her reddened eyes.

She had tried to sue the hotel, but the day after the accident the hotel had filed for bankruptcy and declared itself insolvent. She meddled with the hotel employees, seeking those who might testify to the hotel’s solvency. The tiny woman with rouged and powdered face, strange deep-set gray-green eyes glinting behind nose glasses, dressed in the old brown fur coat, the brown felt hat pulled low across her forehead, became a familiar sight, incongruous and pathetic, somehow frightening too, at the back entrance where the colored waiters came and went. They knew her as Charles’s mother and greeted her courteously with furtive sidewise glances as they passed. She’d become such a nuisance that Mr. Small had requested Professor Taylor to keep her away.

“You’re just making a fool of yourself,” he charged.

She flew into a rage. “You’re just as bad as they are. You’d see your own son a cripple, broken and penniless for life.”

“What you’re doing isn’t helping any. Do you think you’re helping him to walk?”

“At least I’m not just sitting down and letting everyone run over me.”

“No, you’re just antagonizing everyone who might help us.”

They began shouting at each other. The neighbors came to the windows to listen. One stepped out on the porch, debating whether to interfere. William sat in his room, engulfed in shame. Finally he went down to the kitchen.

“Dad! Mother! Please. That isn’t doing any good.”

The sight of him standing there, blind and helpless, his face shadowed in humiliation, quieted them for the time.

But she couldn’t rest. She had to do something. She couldn’t bear the waiting, the praying, the hoping. She felt compelled to exculpate herself of blame. It was as if she believed that by some self-sacrificial act she could at once restore her son, free herself of guilt and win him back to her.

She called upon the district attorney to prosecute the hotel for negligence.

“Do you wish to swear out a warrant, Mrs. Taylor?”

“They’re so full of tricks I don’t know who to charge. It’s your duty, anyway; it’s not mine. You’re required to prosecute lawbreakers.”

“Our office has no evidence to act on, Mrs. Taylor.”

She was enraged. All evening she fumed. ‘They’re not going to get away with it,” she informed her husband.

“They’re not trying to get away with anything,” he defended them. “The Industrial Commission takes care of these cases. That’s the law. The hotel is paying the boy his salary.” But even as he said it he felt himself a traitor.

Both suffered in their own individual manner. It robbed their efforts of all purpose, turned all the long years of struggle into bitter waste. They had no direction for their anger, no outlet for their hurt; their emotions turned against themselves.

Mrs. Taylor’s long and bitter fight was to save herself as much as anything. She didn’t realize this. She thought of herself as doing what a mother should. And yet, in the end, she lost herself. Both lost themselves. She became mean and petty. And although Professor Taylor had been without a teaching post for four long years, he had still felt he belonged. Deep down he had still considered himself a teacher. Now he didn’t. It broke him inside where it counted. He gave up. He lost his will to try. In many ways, the effect on this little black man born in a Georgia cabin, who’d tried so hard to be someone of consequence in this world, to live a respectable life, rear his children to be good, and teach his backward people, was the greatest tragedy of all. Mrs. Taylor never gave up as he did. But she had to feel the world was turned against her to justify herself.

In turn Charles was affected by the change in them. The essence of their defeat was insidiously transmitted to his consciousness. His confidence was shaken. The fact of having parents was no longer reassuring. He became frightened of the world. He dreaded their visits and wished they’d never come.

His mother’s eyes were always red-rimmed and something had happened to her face; something was missing, some quality that had given it distinction. Two red spots of rouge stood out on her high cheekbones in startling fashion.

“They ought to be made to pay for what they’ve done to you,” she’d say piteously.

“Let it alone!” he’d shout. “For God’s sake let it alone!”

22

A
FTER SIX WEEKS SLIGHT
articulation had returned to his fingers.

“Keep kneading them,” his doctor instructed. “Pretty soon we’ll have those splints off and see how it looks.”

One morning he discovered he could move his feet. He was afraid to mention it. For two days he kept his secret, wiggling his toes and finally moving his legs.

“Look,” he showed the doctor.

The doctor was amazed. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed. He tapped the knees for reflexes. “Wonderful! Wonderful!”

From then on Charles knew that he would walk again.

Several weeks following, the splints were removed. His arm was slightly bent, terribly emaciated; it was attached to a brown, atrophied hand. On the inside of the forearm, where a bruise had festered, was a large dark area of rotted flesh, and below the red serrated ridge of the scar where the bones had protruded. At first sight he was frightened, but the doctors seemed well pleased. They gave him cocoa butter for massaging and a ball of putty to knead. He followed their instructions zealously. For long hours while reading, holding the book with his right hand, he kneaded the putty with his left, unthinkingly. The strength came back without his realizing it.

One day he looked outside and noticed it was summer. Three months had passed. He decided he would walk. Waiting until the ward was unattended, he threw aside the covers, inched his body to the edge and stood. He was exceedingly weak, his knees buckled and his legs felt numb, half-asleep. The cast cut into his flesh. But his back did not hurt at all.

The nurse returned and caught him standing. Her face whitened. “What are you doing out of bed?”

He grinned at her. “I’m just trying out my legs.”

Several of the other patients laughed. She flushed with anger.

“Help him, Clyde. Don’t let him fall,” she called to one of the convalescents while she ran for help.

Clyde came over and grasped him about the cast. “Steady, boy, steady.”

“I wasn’t going to fall,” he protested, but by then he could barely stand.

The nurse returned with the resident doctor, several internes and the orderly.

“The army,” Clyde murmured.

They lifted him back to bed. He felt a high, lightheaded exhilaration. Laughter bubbled from his lips.

“How does the back feel?” the doctor asked.

“It doesn’t hurt a bit.” Excitement slurred his voice; his face was flushed and his eyes were bright as fire.

His own doctors were incredulous. They ordered X-rays and warned him not to move. But several mornings later they came in grinning.

“We’re going to let you walk a bit, Charles. See how you like it.”

With their help he walked across the ward and back. They looked at one another.

“I fooled you, didn’t I?” Charles laughed.

On the third of July, four months to a day, he was discharged. The cast had been removed. He now wore a strong back-brace with two steel bars flanking the spinal column and straps about his shoulders and thighs.

His perceptions had sharpened. He felt things more strongly. Situations that had been commonplace were now stark and ugly. He was more easily irritated. His reactions had become hard, abrupt and violent. His world had filled with blacks and whites, harsh purples, vivid greens, blinding yellows. There were no shades, no tints, no grays, no in-betweens. His emotions were either intense or non-existent.

He’d thought how wonderful it would be back in the world of healthy people. But everything seemed strangely different, as if the world had gone out of focus while he’d been away.

He was struck by the atmosphere of animosity that existed in the house. His parents’ incessant quarreling became insufferable. Before his accident those bitter family scenes had filled him with anguish. He’d shared their suffering, longed for their happiness. But now he felt only a harsh rejection, devoid of any tenderness or concern. He didn’t care whether they were happy or not. They were alive, and that was enough. Everybody was hurt. William was hurt—

terribly, irrevocably hurt. He, himself, was hurt. Goddammit, one didn’t have to cry and fight about it all the time, he thought. One didn’t have to make a goddamned spectacle out of every emotion. It seemed as if he floated in emotion. He wanted to get away from them, so he wouldn’t have to hear them, share in their bitterness and defeat, or even think about it.

He still had only partial use of his hand and required his mother’s help in dressing. And the doctors had instructed him to sit for an hour each morning in a tub of hot water. But once these chores were done he left the house only to return for dinner.

He was self-conscious about the brace and wore a jacket even on the hottest days. It held him abnormally erect. His face was tight from the discomfort and frustration. His posture was mistaken for a sign of arrogance, his expression for disdain and condescension. He shrank from the antipathy in people’s eyes. He avoided going places where he was known. He never went to visit any of his former friends.

When he began visiting the dentist he found temporary escape. He was a garrulous old man with a great curiosity concerning Charles’s background. He was fascinated by the stories of the southern Negro colleges. Sometimes they talked for hours.

Most afternoons Charles went to the movies, sitting alone in the obscurity of the loges, smoking an endless chain of cigarettes, absorbing the organ music, watching the fantasies unfold on the screen. And for a time he felt safe from the prying eyes. Nothing mattered then but the emotion which engulfed him. He could dream away his infirmity for an hour or two.