“I’m afraid I’m not cut out for all that,” I said.
“Well, who cut you out?” she said. “Cut yourself out again.”
“Easy to make it sound so easy,” I said. “But it isn’t.”
“A girl needs a husband, Peggy,” she said.
“Well,” I said. “I’ve always been a terrible failure at being a girl.”
Caroline did not understand me. She was as beautiful as her sister-in-law but never seemed to put much effort into it; every attractive thing about her, from the way her clothes fit to the red lipstick that flattered her skin exactly, seemed like great good luck. She was a dry person, not in an unpleasant way: like a flower that had been pressed in a dictionary for years, lovely and saved but liable to fall to dust. Like a pressed flower, she was messy but steady, captured at some moment for good. Even her clothing was like that, thin pretty cotton that showed the faint tint of her skin beneath it. For all her messiness, her clothes never seemed dirty, as if they came away from meetings with her unimpressed.
Caroline pulled a cobwebbed chair out from a corner and lowered herself into it. “I don’t know,” she said.
“What don’t you know?”
She stretched an arm, thinking. “I wish my family were here. I mean, Mrs. Sweatt is gone, poor Jim’s in Boston. I even miss my brother, and I haven’t missed my brother in years, not since he left Mrs. Sweatt. It’s like I’m about to have even more family”—she put a hand on her stomach—“and all I can think is it isn’t enough, I want more. Don’t you ever get greedy for relatives?”
“You forget,” I told her. “I’m a librarian. All I’m greedy for is peace and quiet.”
Caroline wanted to find me a romance. Perhaps it was the action of a friend who was worried about me, of a soon-to-be mother who suddenly planned to take care of the world. Perhaps without Mrs. Sweatt, she needed a new person to take in hand. Perhaps she wanted to get me out of her hair.
I did think of love sometimes, for months at a time, to the exclusion of everything else. If I had love, I could concentrate on other things. If I had love, then my entire life would open up. Late at night I wouldn’t have to dream of who would love me, and how; nor while shelving books; nor moments when I found myself not paying attention to what people were saying to me. Ordinary people, I thought — loved people — could devote themselves to good works, or other sins, or benign undemanding hobbies.
And then the feeling would pass. I would realize that I hadn’t thought of such things for ages, that such hopeless dreams of romance were like a language I had made up to communicate with a childhood friend and, losing that friend, the verbs and nouns curdled to gobbledygook, evidence of a passion and belief I could not believe I’d ever taken seriously.
I had not had that feeling since I’d met James, and perhaps I was now, for the first time in my life, in love. If that were so, I was wrong: my thoughts were not freer, my life not more efficient. Not even more pleasant — like Caroline, I hated suspense, and suddenly it seemed suspense was the fabric of my life. What will happen next, what will I say next, what will be said to me?
James looked trussed as a turkey in his hospital bed. Actually, it was two beds, laid end to end, at a funny angle to the wall so they would fit. His broken leg was suspended from the ceiling.
“James,” I said. I couldn’t tell whether he was awake, and all of a sudden I realized I hadn’t brought him anything. Not even library books, which would have cost me nothing.
“Yes?” He reached over to a chair by his head, found his glasses, and put them on. He’d outgrown even these; the wire earpieces stretched out from the edges of the lenses to embrace his ears.
“Oh,” he said. “Miss Cort. How did you get here?”
“By bus,” I said.
“That must have been nice. I thought you were a nurse.” He gestured at me. “You’re dressed in light colors. That’s all I can see without—” He tapped one lens of his glasses; it flashed with the overhead light.
“How’s the old leg?” I asked.
He said, “Broken.” He was wearing a strange sort of hospital gown. Looking a little closer, I saw that it was two or more regular gowns sewn together.
The wall above his bed was feathered with get-well cards. I was about to walk closer to see — I’d been standing just inside the room — when someone knocked on my shoulder as if I were a door.
I stepped aside. The man who’d knocked was fat, with a moustache that covered his mouth.
“Hello, hello,” he said. The moustache bobbed up and down.
“I have a visitor,” James told the man.
“Yes, I know. Very nice. The aunt?” he said to me.
“No. A friend.”
“Nice,” he said. “Jim’s told me all about you.”
“You don’t even know who she is yet!” James said.
The man bowed to me politely. “You are—” He tried to look as if he were racking his brain for my name, but I knew the look. Library patrons who pretended to know the title of a book so as not to seem stupid wore the same expression.
“Peggy Cort,” I said.
“Of course!” He nodded. “I’m Dr. Bosley.”
“We’re busy,” said James.
“Of course you are,” said the doctor. He sat down in the only chair in the room, right by James’s head. “I’m just here to see how you’re feeling.”
“Fine,” said James. “Go away.”
The man nodded, still sitting.
“Dr. Bosley is a psychologist,” said James. “He always wants to know how I’m feeling. He never believes me.”
Dr. Bosley laughed in a way he probably thought was jovial. “I believe you,” he said. “Of course I believe you. Okay, okay. I’ll see you later, Jim—” He stood up from the chair with a great effort. “And it was nice to meet you, friend.”
“That man,” I said when he’d left, “does not have enough friends.” I went over and sat in the chair.
“I have to talk to him every day,” said James. “I mean, I like visitors, but he drives me crazy.”
James’s lack of affection for the doctor pleased me; I liked to think, sometimes, that I was his only friend, though this wasn’t true. I turned in the chair and looked at the cards. Most of them were from teenagers, kids in his classes.
“Who’s come to see you?” I asked. Until that moment I seemed to have forgotten the enormous fact that Mrs. Sweatt was dead. I felt dread drop down through my body, from my forehead to my stomach.
“Uncle Oscar. A teacher drove up some kids from school. If I’m here long enough, Uncle Oscar says they’ll bring the baby after it’s born.”
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Lousy,” he said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I shouldn’t complain, but I feel lousy.”
“Leg hurt?”
“No.” He rubbed his hand on the metal at the side of the first bed. “That’s the problem. I don’t feel anything in my legs at all. I didn’t even know I broke it at first, I tried to walk on it.”
He was moving out of that body in steps.
Then suddenly he looked at me, directly in the eyes. This was new. Usually, like his mother, he concentrated on some other part of a face, perhaps because faces were frequently so far downhill.
“I hate it here,” he said.
“I know you do.” I tried to keep his gaze, and for a moment I thought I couldn’t possibly, that looking straight into his eyes was a weight I could carry only for seconds without resting. Then I realized all I had to do was do it, and it was easy. “How long will you be here?” I asked.
“I don’t know, they won’t tell me. They’re going to give me braces,” he said. “They’re going to give me a cane.”