By late afternoon I was wearing a pirate patch and Tom was leading me to the admitting office of a hospital in Manhattan. Of course, churches should have been the touchstone places of our lives, a pair of Catholics such as we were. But in truth it was the tiled corridors of these old urban hospitals that marked the real occasions of our life together. The births of our four children, my mother’s death, the kids’ tonsillectomies and appendectomies over the years, his hernia, Gabe’s breakdown, and now this surgery, tomorrow, to repair my left eye. And wasn’t it a corridor much like this that would provide the backdrop for our last parting?
But Tom had his hand on my elbow now, and in the other he carried the kit bag that my ophthalmologist had told me to pack but that the admitting nurse contended I wouldn’t need. Tom finagled a private room and, once I was settled in, a dinner tray for himself, although I was only to sip water. There was the strange domesticity of the evening, the smell of food, the sound of the evening news on TV, the scrape of cutlery, and our back-and-forth conversation about ordinary things while the hospital went about its noisy business of paging doctors and delivering medicines, and nurses came in now and again to offer this pre-op information or that.
In the morning—a brown city dawn at the room’s narrow, deep-set window—Tom was there again, but he had only touched my hand and kissed my scalp by way of greeting before they came to wheel me down to surgery. They took me in the same bed I’d slept in, so that when they maneuvered it out the door and swung it around to head toward the elevator, I looked over my shoulder and waved goodbye to him as if I were a woman on a passing train. He stood alone in the now strangely empty room, not a bit of concern in his bright smile or his jaunty wave, but unabashed fear and sorrow in his eyes and across his high forehead.
What followed was ten days of blindness. They had bandaged both my eyes so that the healthy one would not go darting about, dragging along, all inadvertently, the one that had been repaired. It seemed a bit much, I told the doctor, but he assured me it was for the best—a little inconvenience now for a better outcome later. I recognized the wheedling phrase from my first labor, when, at the height of the pain, the ether was withheld. A little patience now, the eye surgeon said—after he had been reduced by my blindness to a pair of dry fingertips and the odor of whatever he had on his breath, coffee or bacon in the morning, ketchup or onion if he came in after lunch—for a well-healed eye in the future.
“My eyes,” I told him, the blindness making me raise my chin as I spoke, a bold piece, “have never been well-heeled.” But he was some kind of Eastern European and didn’t get the play on words, only touched his puffy fingertips to my chin. “Patience,” he said.
I said, “A patient patient,” and still he didn’t respond, although somewhere in the room Tom and Gabe were laughing. Tom said, “My wife, Doctor, will always have the last word.”
Somewhere in the room during those long days of bandaged darkness, my children sat, talking mostly to one another, mostly about where they had managed to park their cars and what time they had left home, what time they should head out again to avoid the traffic: tunnel or bridge, the Southern State or the L.I.E. I heard the bustle of their winter clothes, zip and unzip, buckle and snap. There was the jingle of car keys and the odor of exhaust. I listened to their familiar voices with a vague indifference. Rattle and clink. It was my first sense of their lives going on without me.
When I woke I was sitting up in the bed. I had no way to tell the hour. I listened, neither the clatter of meal trays nor the smell of the outdoors on visitors’ clothes. Perhaps the quiet of a shift change, or the still of late night or of very early morning. The sound of city traffic was hushed and sporadic enough to mean it was either late night or very early morning. The pillows were propped behind me, and my hands lay limply at my sides, outside the thermal blanket whose texture I had begun to know as a sighted person might know a familiar face. I searched for my voice, and even the tentative way I sought it reminded me of how a blind person might scuttle her hands toward something that had fallen just out of reach.
“Hello,” I said finally, weakly enough, feeling foolish to be speaking to an empty room in the middle of the night, or a good hour or two before they brought in breakfast, but adding, nevertheless, “Is anyone here?” Giving in to foolishness in order to avoid being overtaken by fear.
I had a terrible, lonely image of myself in the white bed, my nose in the air, the gauze wrapped around my eyes. I pictured the lightless hospital room, but since it had been so long since I’d seen this particular one—and had seen it only briefly, even so—I could not be sure if the details were real or imagined, the actual place or a compilation of all the hospital rooms I had ever been in. I imagined the building around me, the dull pulse of all the sleeping bodies it contained, room after room, floor upon floor, above and below. Something of Calvary Cemetery, of Gate of Heaven, about the rows of pale beds and all those strangers with their own troublesome eyes and ears unconscious now, heads thrown back, mouths open, breathing softly into this gray light between night and day.
I heard the sound of movement, some distance from the bed, it seemed—a breath and feather sound of soft movement from an unseen part of the unseen room.
“Me,” a voice said hoarsely. And then, after a shy clearing of the throat, “I’m here.”
I hesitated. I’ll admit I was afraid. I felt my useless eyes moving behind the gauze. “Who is?” I said. The days of blindness had made my voice impatient and wary.
I knew him, of course, by his laughter. “Tom,” he said. “Who else?”
Because Walter Hartnett had said, “You don’t want to go into New York City”—and hadn’t poor Pegeen Chehab called it a filthy place?—I studied the want ads in the paper every morning while my mother and Gabe got ready for work and then told them, “Nothing for me,” in the evening when they returned.
I might still be in my pajamas or a housecoat. I would be sleepy and bored, and the apartment would smell of nail polish or bath salts or the cigarettes I had taken up in my last year at Manual, hoping to look glamorous.
“There was nothing for me,” I would tell them.
My mother lifted the paper, which was always disheveled and thoroughly read, or fetched it from the garbage if I had remembered to throw it away. “Here.” She pointed to a notice for typists or switchboard operators. “And here,” holding the paper under my nose. “What about this?”
I would glance down disdainfully. “Yes, but that’s midtown.” Or, pretending to be surprised at my mother’s foolishness, “But that’s Wall Street. I’m not going there.”
Gabe was working for IT&T on Park Avenue. He would emerge from the kitchen with his single after-work drink in his hand, his collar unbuttoned beneath the loosened tie. “There will be no getting her out of Brooklyn,” he would say. Or, “She’s just a small-town Brooklyn girl.” Tempering my mother’s anger with a wink and a nod and a gentle hand to her shoulder, which was really just a plea for peace.
All that Gabe desired in those days, he said, was the peace and quiet in which a fellow might read.
Twice since I’d graduated he’d set up an interview for me in the typing pool at his office, and twice I refused to go. Even my mother, who had found work as a seamstress at Best and Company, had given up pestering me about a sales job there. Every evening that summer and fall we faced one another in the small living room as it caught the fading light. “Our Marie,” Gabe would pronounce, his collar open and the day’s one drink in his hand, “will not leave this sceptered isle, Momma, this Brooklyn,” charming my mother into some kind of peace, the peace in which a fellow might read. “You’d better face the fact.”