Molly stood up suddenly. “I’ll show you,” she said. “In my room.”
They walked back to the hospital side by side, not touching, and Ben thought: of course, the Miriam sisters were all beautiful, most of the sisters were. Just as most of the brothers were handsome. It was a given. And it was meaningless.
She pulled a blind down on the window in her little room and threw her cloak on the chair behind her worktable. Then she pulled out drawings, sorting through them. Finally she handed one to him.
It was a woman, no one he knew, but vaguely familiar. Sara, he realized; changed, but Sara. Beside her, mirrors reached into infinity, and in each mirror was another woman, each Sara, but none exactly like her. Here a scowl tightened the mouth, there a wide smile, another was laughing, another had graying hair, wrinkles . . . He looked at Molly in bewilderment.
She handed him another drawing. There was a tree, nothing more. A tree rising out of a solid rock. An impossible thing and he felt unsettled by it.
Another drawing. She thrust it at him. A tiny boat on a vast sea that filled the paper from margin to margin. There was a solitary figure in the boat, so small it was insignificant, impossible to identify.
He felt upset by the drawings. He looked at Molly on the other side of the drawing table; she was staring at him intently. She looked feverish, her cheeks flushed, her eyes too bright.
“I need help, Ben,” she said, her voice low and compelling. “You have to help me.”
“What?”
“Ben, I have to do those things in paints. I don’t know why, but I have to. And others. It won’t work with pencil, or pen and ink. I need color and light! Please!”
She was weeping. Ben stared at her in surprise. This was her secret then? She wanted to paint? He suppressed an urge to smile at her, as if she were a child pleading for what was already hers.
She read his expression and sat down and put her head back against the cloak. She closed her eyes. “Miriam understands, and so do my sisters,” she said tiredly, and now the high color in her cheeks faded and she looked very young and weary. “They won’t let me do it.”
“Why not? What’s wrong with painting?”
“I . . . they don’t like the way the pictures make them feel. They think it’s dangerous. Miriam thinks so. The others will too.”
Ben looked at the tiny boat in the endless ocean. “But you don’t have to paint this one, do you? Can’t you do something else?”
She shook her head. Her eyes were still closed. “If someone had a bad heart, would you treat his ear because it was easier?” Now she looked at him, and there was no mockery at all in her face.
“Have you talked to Miriam?”
“She took some drawings I did of the brothers on the trip. She didn’t like them. She kept them. I don’t have to talk to her, or the others. I know what they will say. I bring them only pain anymore.” She thought of them with the Clark brothers on the mat, laughing, sipping the amber wine, caressing the smooth boy/man bodies. It wasn’t group sex, she thought suddenly. It was male and female broken up into parts, just as the moon broke on the smooth river. The sisters made one organism, female; the Clark brothers made up one organism, male, and when they embraced, the female organism would not be completely satisfied because it was not whole that night. One part of its body was missing, had been missing for a long time. And the missing part, like an amputated limb, caused phantom pain.
“Molly.” Ben’s voice was gentle. He touched her arm and she started. “Come to my room with me. It is very late. Soon it will be dawn.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I thought I wouldn’t tell you, that’s why I turned around before I got to your office today. Then tonight, I thought I had to tell you because I needed help. You don’t have to.”
Almost reluctantly Ben said, “Come with me, Molly. To my room. I want you to.”
Chapter 16
Snow fell lazily, silently; no wind blew, and the sky seemed low enough to touch. The snow built up on level surfaces, on tree branches, on the needles of the pines and spruces. It sifted down through a crack between a gutter and the roof of the hospital and built a short wall of snow that soon would topple of its own weight. Snow covered the land, unsullied, pure, layer on layer so that in protected spots where no intermittent sun melted it and no wind disturbed it, the snow depth had grown to six, seven, even eight feet. Against the whiteness, shadowed into grays and blues, the river gleamed black. The clouds were so thick the light that lay over the land seemed to come upward from the snow. The light was very dim, and in the distance the snow and sky and air merged and there were no boundaries.
No boundaries, Molly thought. It was all one. She stood at her window. Behind her an easel waited with a painting on it, but she couldn’t think of it now. The snow, the strange light that came from below, the wholeness of the scene outside held her.
“Molly!”
She turned sharply. Miriam stood in the doorway, still wearing her outdoor clothing, snow clinging to her shoulders, her hood.
“I said, Meg’s been hurt! Didn’t you hear me?”
“Hurt? How? What happened?”
Miriam stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. “You didn’t know, did you?”
Molly felt disoriented, as if she were a stranger who had wandered in and understood nothing. The painting looked garish, ugly, meaningless to her. Now she could sense Meg’s pain and fear, and the sisters’ presence easing it. They needed her, she thought clearly, and didn’t understand why, and Meg faded from her thoughts. “Where is she?” she asked. “What happened? I’ll come with you.”
Miriam looked at her and shook her head. “Don’t come,” she said. “Stay here.” She went away.
When Molly learned where Meg was and went to the hospital room to be with her sisters, they would not let her in.
Ben looked at his brothers and shrugged at the question: What were they to do about Molly? Exile her, as they had exiled David? Isolate her in a hospital room? Quarter her with the breeders — the mothers? Ignore the problem? They had discussed every alternative and were satisfied with none.
“There’s nothing to indicate she is making progress,” Barry said. “Nothing to indicate she even wants to resume a normal life.”
“Since there’s no precedent for anything like this, whatever we decide will have to be the right thing,” Bruce said soberly. His thick eyebrows drew together, separated. “Ben, she’s your patient. You haven’t said a thing. You were certain that allowing her to paint would be therapeutic, but it wasn’t. Have you any other suggestions?”
“When I asked permission to withdraw from my work in the lab and study psychology instead, it was refused. The rest of us who went to Washington have made a complete recovery, a functional recovery,” he added drily. “Except Molly. We don’t know enough to know why, how to treat her, if she’ll ever recover. I say, give it time. She isn’t needed in the classrooms, let her paint. Give her a room of her own and leave her alone.”
Barry was shaking his head. “Psychology is a dead end for us,” he said. “It revives the cult of the individual. When a unit is functioning, the members are self-curing. As for letting her remain in the hospital . . . She is a constant source of pain and confusion to her sisters. Meg will be all right, but Molly didn’t even know her sister had fallen, had a broken arm. The sisters needed her and she didn’t answer. We all know and agree it is our duty to safeguard the well-being of the unit, not the various individuals within it. If there is a conflict between those two choices, we must abandon the individual. That is a given. The only question is how.”