She was a lonely woman who answered a personal advertisement in a city paper, a woman who had traveled miles and miles on somebody else’s money. She was neither sweet nor sentimental, neither simple nor honest. She was both desperate and hopeful. She was like all those women whose foolish dreams made her and her friends howl with hopeless derision, except that now she was looking into the face of such a woman and it didn’t seem funny at all.
She turned out the overhead light, so that the room danced in the light from a single candle on the nightstand. She drew the heavy curtains against the storm, and slipped into the comfort of the ladylike bed.
As she leaned forward to blow out the candle, there was a sharp knock. She stepped quickly across the cold floor in the pitch-black darkness, and opened the door to find the pale, haggard face of Mrs. Larsen.
“He’s very hot,” she said.
CHAPTER FIVE
In his fever, the women came to him. They lifted his trembling body from the twisted sheets and lowered him into a tepid bath, still in his nightshirt. His eyes rolled wildly; his breaths came in gulping bursts. Then the chills came, and their strong hands held him.
After a long time, they raised him again, the cooling water running in thick rivers from the nightshirt that pressed on his flesh like a second skin. Then they stripped him, roughly toweled his naked body and dressed him again, and helped him to freshly laid sheets in his father’s bed. They had seen his body, which no woman had seen for almost twenty years.
He was never alone, never without a woman’s hand on his arm or his forehead or his shivering chest. They held his hand. They made poultices of snow and laid them on his head, waiting for the fever to break.
They held his head and chin as they tried to spoon dark broth into his slack mouth, and he could hear their quiet voices, but as though from far away. He was ill. He was not young, his flesh no longer sweet. The women touched him. They saw his body. They came and went, quietly, far away, except they never left together. There was always a woman by his side, a woman’s hand on his flesh.
He had not thought. Not true. He had never not thought of it, not one minute in all those years, but the weight and intensity of his thinking had stripped from the idea all possibility of its ever being a reality, this touch, and this faraway sibilance of the women’s voices. They were real, one known to him, one unknown, and they were there at every minute. In the dark. In the dim daylight. Every minute.
Mrs. Larsen prayed over him. The other one did not.
Their fingers touched him. Their fingers lifted the hair back from his eyes, held his waist when he coughed into the handkerchief they held gently against his mouth. They heard his groans.
They held packs of ice against his head, against the back of his neck. They wrapped his long legs tightly in heavy wool blankets, wrapped his whole body until he could not move a muscle.
So long in this house, and in the fever, so many lives around him. His mother and his father. His brother. His wife-although she had hated the house so much that even her ghost would not walk the floors. His children, gone into a void deeper than the blizzard.
It had been a dark house when he was a child, when he and his dead brother had played in the attic. He was twelve years old before he realized that his father was rich, sixteen before he realized the immeasurable breadth and depth of the wealth, how far it stretched, how many lives were held in the grip of his father’s money.
Yet still they lived on at the farm they began in, never changing one thing for a more luxurious thing, never painting the place, never planting a rose. They lived like poor people. It was immigrant country, and they lived like immigrants.
Inside the house, there was no mention or show of wealth. There was only God, the stern and terrible God his mother spoke of day and night, the God who burned, the God who blamed, the God who filled his mother’s brilliantly focused mind even while she slept beside the husband she considered no better than a demon, his mind on sex, on touching her, on getting inside her and wallowing there like a boat in shallow water, his mind on money and how to make more and more of it.
They went to meetings, one in the morning, one in the evening. Different churches on different Sundays. The services lasted for hours. His father dozed. His mother lit up like a fire. She said her husband’s soul was a lost cause.
They prayed at breakfast and every other meal. They prayed at odd times, when the children had been reckless or rude or prideful, prayed as though hell were right next door instead of far beneath the earth.
His father did not believe. His father winked. He was damned, although he didn’t seem to know it, or at least it didn’t seem to matter. His mother worked on him in public, and worked harder in secret, sure from the first breath he ever took that he was lost.
His mother was sewing at the kitchen table. “What is hell like?” Ralph asked her, and she paused and said to him, “Hold out your hand,” and he did. He could feel the heat from the kitchen stove; he could see the deep gouges in the kitchen table from which his mother scrubbed away, every day, every trace of human hunger. His hand was steady and his trust was infinite. He was six years old.
“What is hell like?” His mother’s hand flew through the stifling air of the kitchen as her son stared into her piercing eyes. She stabbed her needle deep into the soft part of his hand, at the base of his thumb, and the pain tore through his arm and into his brain, but he did not move, just watched his mother’s fierce and steady eyes.
She twisted the needle. He could feel it scrape against bone. It sent a pain like nettles in his bloodstream, through every vein of his body, straight to his heart.
Her voice was patient and loving and sad, without anger. “That’s what hell is like, son. But it’s like that all the time. Forever.”
And she took the needle out of his hand without ever taking her eyes from his and wiped it on the apron she always wore except to church. She calmly resumed her sewing. He did not cry, and they never spoke of it again. He never told his father or his brother or anybody. And he never for one moment ever forgot or forgave what she had done.
“The pain of hell never heals. It never stops burning for one second. It never goes away.”
He never forgot it because he knew she was right. Whatever happened or did not happen to his faith after that night, whatever happened as his hand got infected and swelled until yellow pus oozed from the wound and then got better, whatever happened as the scar rusted over from deep purple to a faint and tiny dot that only he could see, he knew she was right. And he never, for one moment, from that night on, he never breathed a breath without hating her.
Later, years later, when he was leaving the house to go to college, she said to him, “You were born a wicked child, so wicked I wouldn’t pick you up for a year. And you’ll grow into a wicked adult. Born wicked. Die wicked.” Then she turned and slammed the door, leaving him alone on the wide porch with his new leather valise, and he wondered how she knew, for he knew she was right.
He saw women on the street, and they were not like his mother. Their graceful necks rose from their high-collared dresses like fountains of cream; their skirts smelled of iron and naphtha and talc. When he walked downtown with his father, they would sometimes take his hand or touch his chin, and an electric current would pass through him, so exactly like, yet so different from, the pain of his mother’s needle. There was a luxuriousness in this other pain, and though he was only seven or eight, he suddenly felt languid and hot and helpless before any woman, and he didn’t know where the feeling came from and he didn’t know what to do with it, but he knew it was all he ever wanted.