THE SENTENCE
By Charles
Deemer
When faced with two explanations for the
same event, common sense prefers the least surprising and
upsetting alternative -- this, Nurse Bradshaw’s maxim, let her dismiss the
notion that Mr. Parker had spoken. Her ears had betrayed her. She was
leaving the room with the patient's lunch tray, food fussed at
but little consumed, when she I heard, or rather she thought she
heard, the patient say, "I don't think I-- …" He stopped, or
rather her thinking she heard his voice stopped, and Nurse Bradshaw turned
to the bed to find Mr. Parker lying still, eyes closed,
arms folded over his chest. Nurse
Bradshaw was disturbed to think that she had imagined a voice but
she would have been more upset to learn that Mr. Parker had spoken because
the patient had not spoken a word to anyone in six weeks, not since
his stroke and resulting brain damage. She herself had seen the
stoppages on the X-rays and small wonder he was unable to speak, he was lucky
to be alive with so little blood reaching the brain. The evidence on the
negatives was precise and concrete, and Nurse Bradshaw trusted this
more than her ears. Yet no sooner had she convinced herself that the
patient was asleep than her eyes joined the conspiracy of ears, and she
was watching the patient’s lips move as once again she heard the voice,
soft and remarkably gentle: "I don’t think I’ve done anything
worthwhile with my life."
"Mr. Parker?"
The patient’s eyes remained closed; he
might be sleeping after all. Talking in his sleep then? Nurse Bradshaw
trusted her senses now; this or she was a basket case. She rushed out of
the room to find the doctor.
Mrs. Parker received a phone call as
she was doing her nails prior to visiting hours at the hospital. When
the phone began to ring, Helen permitted herself the slightest
gesture of annoyance, a barely audible sigh; then she put down the nail
brush and, her wet fingers extended like the prongs of a rake, walked
across the room to the telephone. She expected it to be one of the
neighbors, whose concern and attention had been her strength in the
beginning but lately had become debilitating. But it was the doctor, who
told her that George could talk, that he had spoken. Only a single
sentence, mind you, but he had spoken nonetheless.
"What did he say?" Helen
asked. There was a pause, and she wondered if perhaps this had been a
silly thing to ask and went on to something else. "Then I’ll be able
to talk to him tonight."
“Well, no. I don’t know. He only
spoke once."
"I don't understand,"
She pictured the black obstacle on the
X-rays, plugging a vessel that led to George’s brain. The operation
was supposed to have cleared the blockage but George came out of
surgery worse than ever. He could at least talk before the operation; talk to
gripe and complain about something, from the care he was getting to the
weather outside, but at least he talked.
"Frankly, I don't understand
either," said the doctor. "But the fact that he said
anything at all leads me to believe the problem isn’t just a blood clot.
The clot exists, I think, and this would impede blood flow to the brain
and probably affect his speech once we get him talking again, giving
talking a try."
"Are you telling me he isn’t
trying?"
"Perhaps. I think there may be
psychological components to the problem."
The doctor went on to tell her that she
should not bring high hopes to the hospital, likely she would notice no
change in her husband’s condition. But the fact that he
had spoken at al1, even just a sentence, was encouraging. The doctor
did feel that this was progress.
After hanging up, Helen finished her
nails. It didn't make sense to her that George would speak no more
than a sentence. She’d never known him to do this in his life. On the
contrary, once talking, he was impossible to shut up.
Before leaving for the hospital, Helen
phoned her oldest son in Minneapolis. She told him the news,
"Hey, that's great!" Donald
said. He was thirty-eight, an engineer. Helen had never been sure exactly
what Donald did as an engineer; she probably wouldn’t understand, which
was why her son had never told her.
"The doctor sounded optimistic,"
she said.
"Well, I should think so."
"I’ll know more after I see George
myself tonight."
They compared the weather in Minneapolis
and Oregon, and Helen asked about her grandchildren. Donald told her
to keep him up to date on new developments.
Nothing had changed. Helen sat in a
chair next to the bed, reading the evening newspaper to him. George's eyes
were closed, his arms outside the blankets and stretched parallel to his
body. She had told him she knew the good news that he had talked. It
was true, wasn't it? Usually George answered her questions by shaking his
head one way or the other, but to this question he closed his eyes and he
kept them closed, perhaps falling asleep. Still Helen kept reading the
newspaper aloud, just in case he was awake and listening.
Later she spoke to the doctor. He
made a startling suggestion: that George be moved out of his private room
and into a ward. He said the other patients would be good for him and
would provide an environment conducive to speech.
Helen found this suggestion startling for
two reasons: the doctor would be helping the hospital lose money, which
she thought was unusual since George had often explained to her how
civilian hospitals depend on large profits; and George, could he speak,
would refuse to be put in a common ward. He had instructed her many times
in the past that if he ever had to go to the hospital, for Christ’s sake
make sure he got a private room. Since there were no military
hospitals in the area, this was the best that could be done. They could
afford the best.
Helen told the doctor that she wanted
George kept right where he was. They would wait a little longer and see
what developed. George would be speaking paragraphs soon.
At home she wept. Anything could set her
off, as long as it was something,
something concrete and definite. Once she had bawled because she found a
picture on the wall slightly askew; because Abigail decided not to marry
Hubert on an afternoon television serial; because the neighbors phoned or
dropped by too often, inquiring about George; or because they didn’t call
often enough; because the mailman brought no letter from Allen, her other
son.
She had written Allen three times since
George’s stroke but could never be sure that she had his current address.
At thirty-two Allen was unemployed and perpetually on the move. He wrote
poetry and lived with one woman after another, each of whom must have
supported him because Allen had never held a steady job that Helen ever
learned about. Not that she thought her son wasn't a talented poet; she
always enjoyed whatever manuscript or publication he might send along. But
she also thought it was only proper that, as an adult, he support himself
until a big publisher discovered him. And it was far from proper to
change women every year or two, always on the move, to St. Louis or Los
Angeles or Chicago or New York or Dallas or New Orleans or San Francisco
-- how was his own mother to keep track of him? Allen had not been home to
Oregon in four years, and then he had arrived with a beard and hair to his
shoulders. He had not written in six months. Not even to send a
poem.
After finding George the same, Helen
returned home to weep, crying because Allen had not written. Had he even
received her letters? Did he know how close his father had come to
dying?
She picked up the telephone and dialed
Donald’s number in Minneapolis but hung up after one ring and began to cry
again.
For the first time in a decade, all
responsibilities were hers. The rent, the bills, the Naval health
insurance, the car maintenance, the leaky faucet, the lawn, the quality of
the television picture -- George had taken care of everything. A month
before the stroke, he had bought a new Mazda, and now she had to learn the
gears, learn how to use the clutch, just to get to the supermarket for groceries.
She began to accept offers to shop with neighbors. The Mazda stayed
in the garage, as shiny and virginal as it had been on the lot.
George had made the Navy his career, and
in the past she had been used to relying on herself, a certain
independence part of being a Navy wife. Now the checkbook wouldn’t
balance. She paid Standard Oil twice and was given a credit notice that
confused her -- did she have to go out and purchase gasoline before some
deadline, which would mean having to drive the Mazda? She wrote another
letter to Allen, this time to his next-to-last address, printing PLEASE
FORWARD in large capitals across the bottom of the envelope. She
expected Donald to phone but he didn't.
Two weeks after George had spoken, the
doctor again suggested that he be moved into a ward. “We might as well
have him in solitary confinement in prison as in a private room,"
Helen was told. "Physically he’s holding his own but we have to
get his social adrenalin flowing, get him sociable again."
She went along as they wheeled him into a
ward. There were five other patients in the room, and several greeted
George, whose eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. George said
nothing. Nurse Bradshaw explained to the other patients that their new
roommate had suffered slight brain damage and couldn't always talk. This
wasn’t true, Helen noted, and she wondered why the nurse would lie.
What kind of care was her husband getting? Couldn't always talk?
– couldn’t ever talk, except
for a single sentence, once, and Helen began to doubt that this had even
happened. They had only a nurse's word.
She began to cry as soon as Donald picked
up the phone.
"Mother? Is something the
matter?”
She sobbed two thousand miles to
Minneapolis.
“Is Dad okay? What happened?”
Helen brought herself under
control. She told Donald that George had been moved into a ward with
five other patients.
“Being with the enlisted men will be good
for him," said Donald. He sounded relieved. "Was there anything
else?”
She hung up. Suddenly, without conscious
forethought, she dropped the receiver, killing the voice of her own son.
She stared curiously at the dead telephone, as if the instrument had had
its own will and had killed itself. When the phone began to ring, she did
not answer it but went to bed. Donald tried again and then she fell
asleep.
She did not like visiting George in a
public ward. The other patients inhibited her and she caught herself
talking to him less, reading to him less. But George had improved enough
to read for himself, or at least she came one evening to find a stack of
magazines and paperbacks on the table beside the bed. George's eyes were
closed and he did not respond to her few questions. She sensed that
the others in the ward were watching her, listening, snooping. For
the first time she left the hospital before visiting hours ended.
A few days later she ran into one of the
snoopers in the hallway. He was hobbling on crutches and grinned as soon
as he recognized her. He told Helen that her husband was improving remarkably,
why he and George had had almost a five-minute conversation that afternoon.
Helen had just left George, who was napping, and she wondered if the man were
telling the truth. She decided to ask the doctor.
“Didn’t one of the nurses tell you? I
assumed they had. The situation has definitely improved. He’ll play pinochle
with the others, and now and then, in short spurts, talk up a storm. He gets
words mixed up but we expected that. Be has slight aphasia.”
At home Helen looked up aphasia in the
dictionary. For once she did not cry. Instead she became angry, furious, and
threw a coffee cup against the kitchen wall, immediately surprised and shocked
that she had done something this rash. She began to tremble, ashamed that she
had lost control of herself. She quickly swept up the pieces and scrubbed the
wall where the cup had struck.
Donald phoned her. He said he was flying
out. Helen told him this wasn’t necessary because George was much better and
was talking again. Not talking to her, of course, only to the cute nurses. She
had tried to make this sound like a joke.
“I’m coming just the same. I’ll fly in
Saturday and rent a car.” After a pause, Donald said, “You told Allen, of
course.”
“Of course.”
“What’s he up to these days anyway? He
working yet?”
“He still writes poetry.”
She said this sternly, reprimanding him
for the critical tone of voice.
Donald said, “I’ll see you Saturday.”
She worried a great deal about George’s
speaking with the other patients and the nurses but not to her. She came up with
a medical explanation that eased her mind: the blood clot was like something
plugging up a pipe, the blockage moving around so that sometimes the water
flowed smoothly and sometimes it didn’t. Similarly, sometimes George could talk
and sometimes he couldn’t. It was coincidental that whenever she visited, the
pipes to his brain were clogged, making him silent. Her time would come, if
only she were patient.
The morning’s mail brought a poem by
Allen:
TO MY FATHER
I don’t know you
but I remember a photograph
you stand beside a motorcycle
cigarette in mouth
leather jacket
it must be 1931
you must be young
in a faded photograph
not yet a sailor, an officer
you even look reckless
I try to imagine you drunk
not yet so upset
at how I took out the garbage
at how I mowed the lawn
at how I wanted a motorcycle
at how I abandoned college
at how I escaped the Navy
not yet a critic
not yet a perfectionist
you must be young
not yet so proper
why I had to flee you
to say I love you
but I am not yet born
you stand beside a motorcycle
looking like Errol Flynn
you look reckless
you look content
before the wars
before the Navy, the career
you must be young
though it is to you, old
an old man dying
I say I love you
over a distance, again
the common distance
across the close blood
--Allen Parker
Helen did not understand. She wished
Donald were here to explain the poem to her. Were parts of it as cruel as she
thought?
Later the same day, George had a stroke. She received the news by phone after lunch and immediately took a taxi to the hospital.
George was in surgery. Helen sat in the
waiting room, thumbing through magazines, smoking, moving out into the ball for
a drink at the fountain, then into the waiting room to work on a jigsaw puzzle
someone else had started. She was alone, for which she was thankful.
They let her see him in the intensive care
unit. When the doctor had told her that he was optimistic, she had broken
down. She did not go into intensive care until she had regained her
composure. George had never liked to see her cry.
He looked very pale. Black stitches held
together an incision at the loose skin of his neck. His false teeth were
out. He was still drugged, only half-awake. Nurses hovered
everywhere, making Helen feel like an intruder.
His eyes seemed to be out of focus,
searching the space in front of him for something. Then their eyes met,
and Helen saw and heard George make a clear effort to speak, “Ahhh—“ Nurse
Bradshaw quickly intervened and told the patient not to try to talk, and
another nurse took Helen's arm and led her away.
What kind of marriage had they had? The
question was asked over a straight shot of Scotch. Purchasing the pint
bottle was something else Helen had not done herself since George's
retirement. Hs selected the liquor.
Soon they would celebrate their fortieth
wedding anniversary. For the first thirty of those years, George had been
in the Navy, working his way up through the ranks to Commander. He had
gone off to two wars. Even during times of peace he had gone to sea,
leaving her for months at a stretch. Yet those years in the Navy had been
the happiest of her life, despite his absences. She raised two sons, and
when they left home she took up crocheting and upholstering to keep
herself occupied while George was at sea.
George retired but quickly was bored at
home and looked for civilian work. Nothing seemed to interest him. He went
from one job to another: he sold cars; he sold brushes door to door;
he supervised children who peddled Sunday papers; he ran a drill press
on the graveyard shift. As he went from job to job, a new
turbulence entered their lives, and Helen worked harder than ever to keep
a neat ship at home. She began to understand that their marriage had
depended on those periods of living apart. Long ago, after a fight, they
had discussed the possibility of a divorce, discussing this from
the rational distance George took from everything, and they agreed to stay together
at least until the boys were grown. George went back to sea, and when he
came home again, talk of divorce was forgotten. By the time he retired,
the boys had grown into young men.
She wasn't losing her husband to another
woman but to another world. Each night George would read the newspaper
aloud and complain by asking questions. What was happening to America?
What had happened to common logic and sense? Why fight a war unless you do
everything necessary to win? Who had suddenly decided that kids knew more
than their parents? Donald, whom Helen had raised, mailed George some
brochures opposing the war in Vietnam. Politics became a forbidden
topic on holidays. Allen, whom
Helen had raised, left home for college in California and two months later
wrote from New York. He mentioned a woman he was living with but did not
mention having married her. What had happened to patriotism? What had
happened to morality? To respect for elders and the police? George yelled
at teenagers who crossed the street against the light. What had happened
to obeying the law? What had the country fought its wars for? What was
happening? Once, joking, he told Helen that he felt as if he had been
sentenced to live out his remaining years on Mars.
Helen let better minds than hers fret
about the world; she missed only the sound and presence of children in the
house. She knew this: George had too many questions and too few answers
and often was unhappy. But at least it was clear to her that the changing
world troubled him, not their marriage, and she never brought up the
subject of divorce again, nor did he. What kind of marriage had they
had? As good as either could hope for, and one which had lasted, one
better than most. A little drunk, Helen took this consolation to
bed.
Donald arrived and together they drove to
the hospital. Earlier, when she had shown him the poem, Donald commented
that it wasn't exactly cruel but without a doubt it was
indiscreet. Allen was not mentioned again.
Nurse Bradshaw saw them in the elevator
and told Helen that her husband had been talking a blue streak all
morning. Stuttering and sometimes talking gibberish, but talking all the
same. He was still in intensive care.
They reported to the nurse at the desk,
who buzzed into the unit to clear their visit. George was asleep, and
the nurse told them to come back later. Helen said they would wait until
he woke up.
In the waiting room they sat together in
front of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. The front portion of a pirate ship
on a raging sea had been completed; for an hour, silent, they worked on
the puzzle and filled in the ship up to its skull-and-bones flag. A nurse
entered to tell them they could visit the patient now, but only one at a
time. Helen insisted that Donald go in first.
He was back in the waiting room in five
minutes.
“He looks better than I expected. He
gets his words mixed up but he can talk."
Helen hurried into the intensive care
unit. Nurse Bradshaw was cranking George’s bed, adjusting the sitting
position. Helen approached her husband.
"George?"
“He’s very tired," said Nurse
Bradshaw. “Only stay a few minutes.” She left them alone.
"Can you talk?" Helen asked, her
voice choked.
George nodded, yes.
"Then would you say something?"
She took his hand. It was very
cold.
George closed his eyes.
"George, would you speak to me,
please?”
He weakly tried to pull his hand away but
Helen would not release it.
"Say something,” she said. She
began to sob, embarrassed that she was making a spectacle of herself.
George's eyes were closed but she knew he could hear her. She began
to hate him for listening.
Without warning George gasped, eyes
suddenly wide and fearful, and the free hand went to his heart and
clutched it. He was groaning, clearly in great pain, and Helen released
his hand and watched it go to his heart. Then, with no more warning
than the seizure, she was leaning forward over him, her fists hitting the
hands over his heart, and she was crying openly and blindly striking his
chest and arms and face with all the force she could gather, pummeling
her husband until a nurse pulled her away and out of the unit.
Afterwards Nurse Bradshaw, who had been
the second to get to the patient, disagreed with those nurses who thought
Mrs. Parker’s attack had been vicious and may even have contributed to the
patient's death. This, argued Nurse Bradshaw, would be very strange
indeed and it was much more likely that when the patient had the stroke,
Mrs. Parker attempted to massage the heart but, failing, suffered to watch her
husband die before her eyes, in which case it was no wonder that the woman
was upset.
/end
Charles Deemer
cdeemer@yahoo.com