The imagery of her fever was similar to the imagery of love. Her reveries were spacious, and she seemed to be promised the revelation of some truth that lay at the center of the labyrinthine and palatial structures where she wandered. The fever, as it got higher, eased the pain in her breast and made her indifferent to the heavy beating of her heart. The fever dreams seemed like a healthy employment of her imagination to distract her from the struggle that went on in her breast. She was standing at the head of a broad staircase with red walls. Many people were climbing the stairs. They had the attitudes of pilgrims. The climb was grueling and lengthy, and when she reached the summit she found herself in a grove of lemon trees and lay down on the grass to rest. When she woke from this dream, her nightgown and the bed linen were soaked with sweat. She rang for a nurse, who changed them.
She felt much better when this was done, and felt that the fever had been a crisis and that, passing safely through it, she had triumphed over her illness. At nine the nurse gave her some medicine and said good night. Some time later she felt the lassitude of fever returning. She rang, but no one came, and she could not resist the confusion in her mind as her temperature rose. The labored beating of her heart sounded like a drum. She confused it with a drum in her mind, and saw a circle of barbaric dancers. The dance was long, rising to a climax, and at the moment of the climax, when she thought her heart would burst, she woke, shaking with a fresh chill and wet with sweat. A nurse finally came and changed her clothing and her linen again. She was relieved to be dry and warm. The two attacks of fever had weakened her but left her with a feeling of childish contentment. She felt wakeful, got out of bed and by supporting herself on the furniture made her way to the window to see the night.
While she watched, clouds covered the moon. It must have been late because most of the windows were dark. Then a window in the wall at her left was lighted, and she saw a nurse introduce a young woman and her husband into a room identical to the one where she sat in the dark. The young woman was pregnant but not having labor pains. She undressed in the bathroom and got into bed, while her husband was unpacking her bag. The window, like all the others, was hung with a Venetian blind, but no one had bothered to close it. When the unpacking was done, he unfastened the front of her nightgown, knelt beside the bed and lay his head on her breasts. He remained this way for several minutes without moving. Then he got up—he must have heard the nurse approach—and covered his wife. The nurse came in and snapped the blinds shut.
Melissa heard a night bird calling, and wondered what bird it was, what it looked like, what it was up to, what its prey was. There was a deep octave of thunder, magnificent and homely, as if someone in heaven had moved a chest of drawers. Then there was some lightning, distant and discolored, and a moment later a shower of rain dressed the earth. The sound of the rain seemed to Melissa, with the cutting pain in her breast, like the repeated attentions of a lover. It fell on the flat roofs of the hospital, the lawns and the leaves in the wood. The pain in her chest seemed to spread and sharpen in proportion to her stubborn love of the night, and she felt for the first time in her life an unwillingness to leave any of this; a fear as senseless and powerful as her fear of the dark when she went down to shut the door; a horror of death.
Chapter X
Now that was the year when the squirrels were such a pest and everybody worried about cancer and homosexuality. The squirrels upset garbage pails, bit delivery men and entered houses. Cancer was a commonplace but men and women, at its mercy, were told that their pain was some trifling complication while behind their backs their brothers and their sisters, their husbands and wives, would whisper: “All we can hope is that they will go quickly.” This cruel and absolute hypocrisy was bound to backfire and in the end no one could tell or count upon being told if that pain in the middle was the knock of death or some trifling case of gas. Most maladies have their mythologies, their populations, their scenery and their grim jokes. The Black Plague had masques, street songs and dances. Tuberculosis in its heyday was like a civilization where a caste of comely, brilliant and doomed men and women fell in love, waltzed and invented privileges for their disease; but here was the grappling hand of death disinfected by a social conspiracy of all its reality. “Why, you’ll be up and around in no time at all,” says the nurse to the dying man. “You want to dance at your daughter’s wedding, don’t you? Don’t you want to see your daughter married? Well, then, we can’t expect to get better if we’re not more cheerful, can we?” She cleans his arm with alcohol and prepares the syringe. “Your wife tells me you’re a great mountain-climber but if you want to get better and climb the mountains again you’ll have to be more cheerful. You do want to climb the mountains again, don’t you?” The contents of the syringe flow into his veins. “I’ve never climbed a mountain myself,” the nurse says, “but I expect it must be very exciting when you get to the top. I don’t think I’d like the climbing part of it very much but the view from the summit must be lovely. They tell me that in the Alps roses grow in the snow banks and if you want to see all these things again you’ll have to be more cheerful.” Now he is drowsy and she raises her voice. “Oh, you’ll be up and around in no time at all,” she exclaims and softly, softly she closes the door to his room and says to his family, gathered in the corridor: “I’ve put him to sleep again and all we can do is hope and pray that he will never wake up.” Melissa was one of those unfortunate people who was to suffer from this attitude.
Moses returned from his wild-goose chase as soon as he learned of Melissa’s illness, having borrowed enough money to at least give an impression of solvency. The fact that Melissa was convalescent when he returned might have seemed to account for the fact that he did not describe to her his financial embarrassments but this was not so. He would not have been able to describe them to her under any circumstances; no more could Coverly state that he had seen the ghost of his father. Had Moses lived in Parthenia he would have felt free to put a FOR SALE sign in his living room window and another in the windshield of his convertible but to do this in Proxmire Manor would have been subversive. He expressed his worries not in irritability but in a manner that was very broad and jocular. Melissa then had this forced jocularity to cope with as well as the absurd conviction that she had cancer. She could not convince herself that she was cured nor could she trust what the doctor told her. She telephoned the hospital and asked to speak with her nurse. She asked the nurse if they could meet for a drink. “Why not?” the nurse asked. “Sure. Why not?” She went off duty at four and Melissa planned to meet her at the traffic light by the hospital at four-fifteen.
They went to a bar near there, a roadside place. The nurse ordered a double martini. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m worn out. My sister, she’s married, she called me last night and said would I take care of the baby while she and her husband go to a cocktail party. So I’d said sure, I’d take care of the baby if it was just for cocktails, an hour or two. So I went there at six and you know when they came home? Midnight! The baby didn’t shut her eyes once. She bawled all the time. Kind sister, that’s me.”
“I wanted to ask you about my x-rays,” Melissa said. “You saw them.”
“What are you afraid of,” the nurse asked, “cancer?”
“Yes.”