The Dick Gibson Show (10 page)

“Miriam, who knew my real condition, labored to make my assumed one come true. She made tight hospital corners on the very sheets we made love on and kept a bedpan for me within easy reach of the bed, and there was always a full glass of ice water on the nightstand. She sometimes gave me bed baths, first outlining one side of my body with towels and pushing the towels against it tightly like one beginning a sand construction, then pulling my pajama bottoms down—‘Can you raise your hips a moment?’—the length of the bed, producing them from beneath the sheet at the foot like a minor trick of magic. ‘Turn on your side, please,’ she’d say. ‘Can you turn on your side?’ Then, arranging the sheet so that just my back and the upper part of my buttocks were exposed—I felt prepared, lovingly set up, set off, appetizing as vegetable-ringed meat on a plank—she would begin to rub my back with the warm, soaped cloth. She spoke as she worked, peaceful, passive monologues, her voice more distant than her hands which turned and rubbed and stroked, telling me not the jokes now—she had run out of jokes, though she was always careful to tell me the new ones her patients told her—but about her life before she met me.

“‘I have to help people,’ Miriam said. ‘I thought I’d be a schoolteacher. In Iowa you don’t have to be a college graduate. You can get a temporary certificate so long as you’re enrolled in college and earn at least six credits a year. A lot of teachers never graduate. They just sign up for summer school year after year, but I’ve known some who manage to save enough so they can take off every third year or so and maybe get their degrees in eight or nine years. Of course, those who get positions in Ames or Iowa City have an advantage: they can teach and go to the university at the same time. Those are the plum jobs, though. They’re very rare.’

“‘Mnn.’

“‘When I graduated high school I
did
teach for a year. Fourth grade. I liked it very well. It was very interesting and I enjoyed being around the children, but you know—when it comes right down to it that’s not really helping people, teaching school. I mean, kids aren’t in trouble, not even if they’re poor, not even if they don’t always get enough to eat. I mean, they’re
kids,
you know? Kids can play. I guess really the only kind of trouble people can get into is to be sick.

“‘I mean, their bodies can be in trouble. That’s really all that can happen to a person. I’ve always been strong. I’m very thankful for that. I love being strong. I mean, if we were to wrestle I’d probably win. I wouldn’t try to hurt you but I’d win. Here.’ She handed me the washcloth. ‘Do your private property.’ She giggled. ‘That’s what we call it. Or “family jewels.” Isn’t that silly? Sometimes we say that to the men.’

“‘You do my private property, Miriam.’

“‘Don’t be wicked, Marshall.’

“‘Miriam, you do my family jewels.’

“‘Now I’ve already spoken to you, young man.’

“‘Do my cock, Miriam. You do my prick. Please, Miriam, do my wang wang.’

“‘Marshall!’

“‘You said you liked to help people.’

“‘People in trouble. You’re not in trouble.’

“I turned on my back. ‘There’s trouble and there’s trouble.’

“‘No,’ Miriam said firmly. ‘Whenever I wash you down there you just come all over the sheets and there’s nothing left for me.’ She looked down at me and laughed. ‘Look at you. You’re just like one of the old men around here with their big old things.’

“‘Do the old men get hard?’ I was interested; I hadn’t known this.

“‘Of course they do. It’s a reflex, silly. There are some men around here who get an erection when I feed them.’

“‘Who? Who does?’

“‘Never mind. That’s a nurse’s confidence.’

“‘Who does? Who gets an erection when you feed him?’

“‘Never mind. You’ll never get me to violate my professional ethics.’

“‘What about enemas? Do they ever get one when you give them an enema?’

“‘Enemas too,’ Miriam said.

“‘Jesus.’

“‘Turn around. I’ll do you back there.’

“Gently she reamed me. When Miriam had finished one of these baths you could eat off me. Then we made love. Me and Nurse. Calmly, not like on the bus, but languidly and with long graceful glidings like paddling canoes in dreams. Afterward I lay back with my hands behind my head, and soon it was me talking. I told her about being on the radio.

“‘Mnn,’ Miriam said, for neither of us were much at discussion. There was give and take but it was of a certain kind, like the rules of service in a ping-pong game. I’d serve five times, then Miriam would. It’s the way people who will grow closer speak while they still don’t know each other very well.

“Miriam talked only when she was doing something—I suspect it was a habit she picked up from her rounds, a compulsion to fill up the silence imposed on patients whose blood pressures or temperatures are being taken. There was something curiously polite, not to say efficient, about this habit, as though language were one more service she rendered. For my part I seemed to speak only when spent, as after lovemaking.

“Miriam was making us some bouillon on the hotplate. She was naked despite the fact that there was no lock on our door; this, together with the domestic tour she made about the room—fetching the kettle and bouillon cubes, going to the bathroom sink for water— seemed very erotic to me, like the establishing of the story line in a stag film.

“‘My father was an unhealthy man,’ Miriam said. ‘I mean, he was without health. His heart was bad—he’d had three heart attacks, two of them massive—but there were other things: his liver, migraine— more than that even. He’d had operations. But even before he was sick physically, there was something delicate about him mentally. He was very tender-hearted. I mean, he couldn’t take bad news. It didn’t just make him unhappy as it would others; it affected him physically. That’s what his illness
was
—bad news, bad news chipping away at his health. It was a sort of erosion.

“‘We’re a large family—from Cedar Rapids originally. We moved across the state to Simms, Iowa, because it was easier to shield Daddy from bad news there. We were away from the family, my father’s and mother’s brothers and sisters, all of them getting along in years, and all their old friends too, whose illnesses and deaths could be managed better than if we were still with them right there in Cedar Rapids. Now that the news could come through the mail instead of over the telephone, we could plan how best to shield it from Father.

“‘But not only physical things affected Daddy. Bad news could come in all sorts of ways—like if my sister or I got a bad grade in a subject, or if business was bad. Father had a little money and was a silent partner in a few small businesses—a grocery store, a barbershop, a drycleaner, that sort of thing—so that except in boom times there was always some bad news coming in from one business or the other. But even political things could upset him, current events from all over the world. My God, how that man had sympathies! Mother tells about the time she had to keep the news of the Lindbergh kidnapping from Father. She just cut it out of the paper—the big front-page headlines and stories and pictures, everything. “Here, what’s this?” my father asked her when he saw his paper all cut up. “Oh, that,” Mother told him, “that’s just a recipe I cut out of the paper.”
“From the front page?”
Father asked. “Well, the second,” Mother said. “The second?” “It’s a very newsworthy recipe,” Mother said, “it’s a big sensation all over the country. It’s for a good cheap eggless cake.” “Eggs are high?” Father said. “Yes,” said Mother, “very expensive.” “Oh, that’s terrible,” Father said, clutching his chest. “But we’re saved by the new recipe,” Mother tried to reassure him, but Father still held his chest and had grown very pale. “What’s wrong?” asked Mother. “I’m not thinking about the cakes,” groaned Father, “I’m worried about the omelets.”

“‘Well, you can see how it was, how we had to shield him. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that he was an unrelenting questioner. He knew the harm it did him but he couldn’t help himself. He was like someone flirting with a bad tooth, teasing and maneuvering it until it hurts.

“‘We had a little dog, the cutest little thing. Well, it was my dog but everyone in the family loved it. We were always petting it and making up to it, even Father. Maybe we loved Roger
too
much because he never really enjoyed being outdoors. Why should he? He had everything he wanted in the house. Well, of course a dog has to go out sometime, if only to make number one or number two, so we would send Roger out once in the morning and once again at night. That was one of the good things—if it was ever too cold or rainy to walk him, why we could send him out by himself without being afraid he’d run away. He’d do his duty and come right back, whining to be let in. But one time when we let him go out he didn’t come right back. Mother and my sister Rose and I were concerned but we didn’t want to alarm Father so we arranged it that two of us would go to bed and the other would keep a vigil for Roger. Of course we couldn’t go outside and yell for him because Father might hear that and then where would we be?

“‘My sister was the one who stayed up, for Roger was
my
dog, remember, and Father might get suspicious if he came down at night and saw me. Also, we weren’t sure I could fool Father; I might not be able to hide my concern. Well, he
did
get up and come down that night. He saw the light and came into the kitchen where Rose was drinking from the glass of milk which Mother had cleverly thought to pour out for her so she’d have something to do in case Father came down. “I just can’t seem to sleep tonight, Father,” Rose told him, “I thought this milk might relax me.” “Is something wrong. Rose? Why can’t you sleep?” Father asked her. “No, nothing’s wrong, Daddy,” Rose said. “You know how you get sometimes, you just start thinking about things and you can’t seem to fall asleep.”

“‘That was exactly the wrong thing to tell Daddy, of course; right away he wanted to know
what
things. Rose made up some stuff about the school elections to tell him. She was in charge of publicity for the candidate put up by her home room and she didn’t know where she was going to get the paints and cardboard for the posters. Well, that troubled Father and he had a little angina pain even though both knew the elections were a good two months off, but as Rose pointed out it wasn’t the end of the world, and that seemed to calm him some. But then he started to ask where everybody was: were Mother and I in bed, and where was Roger? Well, she had just let him out, Rose said. This satisfied Father for it was a natural thing to do, and so he went back to bed.

“‘Roger still wasn’t back in the morning, but fortunately Mother, who rarely was up before Father, this time
was,
and she told him she’d just let Roger out. That started something in our house, I can tell you. From that time on poor Mother and Rose and I had to take turns rising before Father just so’s one of us could say we’d just let Roger out. The trouble was, Father usually got up at dawn. We were always tired now because we had to take turns staying up late too. This hurt us in the alertness department. I mean, it was self-defeating, for without sleep we just weren’t sharp enough to withstand Father’s assaults on us for information. It was wintertime—a cold one in Iowa that year—and suddenly it seemed as if all our relatives and friends were coming down with everything all at once. The three of us were always so tired now that we didn’t know what we were saying and would spill the beans to Father accidentally.

“‘It wasn’t our fault, but the bad news would just tumble out all over the place and there didn’t seem to be anything we could do about it. It was just awful that we couldn’t shield him any more, and believe me it took its toll on that dear man. He lost weight and had pain all the time and his parameters—pressure, pulse, eye track—just went from bad to worse. About all we could manage was to keep Roger’s disappearance from him, and this at a time when we’d given up hope of the dog’s ever returning. For that matter, Father was so generally dispirited and debilitated by now that he rarely ever asked after him. We wondered if it might not be better just to find some way of breaking the news to Father, have done with it altogether, and then maybe manage to get enough control of ourselves to try to deal with the routine day-to-day shielding of Father that the situation demanded. But of course we were too far into it now. We couldn’t just say we’d lied, and we certainly couldn’t tell him one morning that the dog had just gone off. Father had too much sense for that; he’d have seen that Roger had been missing for weeks.

“‘Well, the way it turned out we didn’t have to choose any of these alternatives, but frankly I thought it was all over with us when Father himself brought up the subject. “I don’t know, Miriam,” he said, “I just never
see
Roger any more. The dog is
always
out. He never used to be like that before this damned winter. Oh, these are hard times, Mim. I’m hearing so much bad news lately I’m worried that there might be something wrong with Roger’s bladder”—and then he clutched with both hands at the small of his back as though he’d just felt a fierce jolt in his own bladder.

“‘I told Mother and Rose what Father had said and we agreed that we had to do something fast. Well, the very next night Mother went up to Father and said, “You know, Earl, Mim and Rosie have given what you said about Roger yesterday quite a lot of thought, and Mim agreed that maybe it’s just too cold for Roger here. We did get him as a pup from that nice man that time we went down to Florida, remember. Anyway, Mim’s decided that Roger might be better off if he lived with her Cousin Ernestine down in Birmingham, where the climate’s not so harsh. We know how tender-hearted you are, Earl, and we didn’t want to burden you unnecessarily with a sad leavetaking, so we’ve already been down to the depot and shipped Roger off.” Well, it caused Father some pain to realize that I’d given up my dog, but after a while, when he saw the thing in perspective, his spirits began to brighten, and the rest of us felt better too because now we could get more sleep. In no time at all we were able to cope and shield Father again from the bad news that seemed to come from everywhere that winter.