“U eye oy” were her parting syllables.
He didn’t feel like a nice boy. In two days, when he made his post-op visit, she wouldn’t be able to manage even those vowels, and if therapy could help this half-tongued woman it would be a miracle. But he hadn’t lied.
He looked at the next patient’s chart. An unsingular history. White female; thirty-six years old; unmarried; healthy; one pregnancy, terminated. No immediate family. Complaint: back pain lasting several months, recent inability to walk without severe pain. X-rays and an MRI of the vertebrae showed a mass obscuring L4 and L5 but revealed nothing more about this secret. A needle biopsy had told more. Stage 4.
Her name was Catherine Adrian. Faint lines fanned from the corners of her eyes. Shallow vertical grooves, one on each cheek, enclosed her sculpted mouth in loving parentheses. Her jaw was long and slender. He could make these observations freely because she was asleep and he could comfortably look at her face.
He glanced at his clipboard. He had three more patients to visit, to reassure about tomorrow, to convince that they were in good hands, or at least that their pain from the knife would be managed to their satisfaction. He’d come back to Ms. Adrian later.
As if on cue, she opened her eyes. They were blue, almost as dark as the ones he avoided in his mirror.
“Hello, Ms. Adrian. I’m Zephyr Finn, your anesthesiologist.”
“How nice.”
In Ms. Adrian’s room there was both a chair and a stool. Zeph chose to sit on the side of her bed. “Are you worried about tomorrow?” he asked.
“Say that I’m curious.”
“About…?”
“I want to see what it looks like, this alien that’s wrapped itself around my spine. I’d like to watch on a screen while they disappear it.”
“Some back operations are done with regional anesthetic,” he said as if reading from a script. “Patients on the table can watch a monitor. Most close their eyes. But we don’t know the depth of your growth and we can’t risk touching an organ while you’re awake.”
“Can you preserve the thing in alcohol?”
“I can ask the surgeon.”
She sighed. “Whatever they find, there will be an end to my pain.”
She would soon be paralyzed, he guessed. “Yes,” he said with assurance.
And then — as if she were under his care already, as if he had administered a nerve block and a sedative and was keeping her lightly awake — he talked. The volumes by the side of the bed were children’s books—The House at Pooh Corner, the novels of Peter Dickinson, the Grimms. “I read those too,” he said. “My only genre. That small amount of magic.”
“Chaste pleasures.”
“Endings never final…”
She taught mathematics at a local junior college, not a very good one. “I do mainly remediation, I try to make things interesting; some of them fall asleep anyway. I’m a soporific — perhaps I’m really in your game.”
Game took them to chess and Scrabble and the Red Sox — he avoided mentioning participatory sports; she probably had played tennis, poor thing. An hour went by. More time would have passed had the surgeon not entered the room to find his best anesthesiologist sitting on a patient’s bed.
Robotic again, Zeph got to his feet. “Good afternoon, Dr. Schapiro.”
Dr. Schapiro nodded and took Ms. Adrian’s hand in his. “How are you feeling today?” he began.
Zeph walked toward the door, turned, flashed his eyes at hers. She flashed back.
The mass, as she was about to learn, had wangled its way inward from its claw hold on L4. A frozen section done in the OR confirmed that the tumor was a ferocious beast; it had already eaten bone; bits of it must be all over the place.
Hector Bahande and Victoria Tarnapol gradually exchanged life stories. Hector spoke of his hopes when he’d come to this country and of the things that had bedeviled him one after another — his child’s affliction, his wife’s death, rest her soul, the necessity of finding a job near home. Victoria told him that she had been a youngest daughter persuaded by her sisters to quit art school and take care of their ailing mother. Mama kept ordering her to find a husband who could install all three in a better flat. Maybe if you cooked better…
“She won’t last forever,” Victoria’s sisters had falsely assured her. Well, Mama was dead at last. Victoria was not sure she would ask God to rest her soul. “How does your older daughter occupy her time?” she said to Hector.
His face shone. He was short, he had a little paunch (helped along by his recent indulgences), a lumpy nose, not much of a neck, a noticeable mole on one cheek. “She carves,” he said, his homely face continuing to beam. “She carves animals and small human figures.”
Oh Lord, sweet little lambs, darling odalisques. She was sorry she’d asked.
“Shall I show you?” His hand was already in his pocket. “Most are bigger; this is a mini.”
It was the figure of a dog — a puppy, really — peeking in solemn distress, with no cuteness at all, from the jacket of a man. You knew it was a man because the buttons were on the right side and he was wearing a tie, its stripes delicately incised. He had no head and his torso ended just below the frayed jacket.
“Are there more of these?” she asked sharply.
“Many, many, but bigger.”
“Does she sell them?”
He shrugged. “There’s a man comes to look, takes one or two, comes back with a little money.”
A pimp, she thought…“Perhaps I could do the same, and give you a bigger percentage.”
He carefully wiped his mouth. “Miss Tarnapol—”
“Victoria.”
“Hector is my given name. Victoria, forgive me, who buys a carving here? People want tissue boxes decorated with shells.”
“Yes, of course…but I still have friends in the art world. I was also a sought-after window dresser for a time. Hector…may I come and see the others?”
“I will bring you two tomorrow.”
He brought a unicorn and a round figure that looked at first like an unpainted Russian doll. The unicorn was smiling. The Russian doll’s carved face was not smiling, and her arms in relief, pressing themselves to her stomach, suggested that this would not be an easy labor, that she would perish from it, that the nine or ten dolls nested within her bulk would crumble there.
“Your dealer probably gives you ten percent of what he actually gets for these. Let me try to sell them, and I will retain the ten percent and give the rest to you. I’ll peddle the unicorn first and put the doll in the gift-shop window as advertisement. ‘Not for Sale,’ the card will read…intriguing.”
“Nobody will be intrigued by a woman about to die in childbirth.”
“We’ll see.”
She placed the unicorn in a gallery about to open in her own town of Godolphin, just over the Boston line. Then she persuaded the owner of a flourishing dress shop in fashionable downtown to display the next piece Hector brought her, a mynah bird with a stocking cap, each stitch visible. An environmentalist bought it, perhaps making sense of its ambiguous message. Victoria split her own commission with the dress-shop proprietor and from then on one of Camilla’s pieces always occupied a place of honor there. Some people began to come in not for the clothing, primarily, but to see what was on display, though everyone usually bought at least a skirt and sometimes a whole outfit.
As the weather grew colder and school began, Joe and Acelle abandoned the woods for Joe’s house. They had to be quiet during this one shared afternoon hour. Neither of their families would approve of their blameless activity: reading Zeph’s anatomy book in Zeph’s monkish bedroom. They called the room Castle 3.