A week later when Kate became ill, she went right on with her supervision of the house, and no one would have known if she hadn’t been found standing rigid in the hall with agony printed on her face. She begged the girls not to tell Faye, but they were outraged, and it was Faye who forced her to bed and called Dr. Wilde.
He was a nice man and a pretty good doctor. He looked at her tongue, felt her pulse, asked her a few intimate questions, and then tapped his lower lip.
“Right here?” he asked and exerted a little pressure on the small of her back. “No? Here? Does this hurt? So. Well, I think you just need a kidney flushing.” He left yellow, green, and red pills to be taken in sequence. The pills did good work.
She did have one little flare up. She told Faye, “I’ll go to the doctor’s office.”
“I’ll ask him to come here.”
“To bring me some more pills? Nonsense. I’ll go in the morning.”
2
Dr. Wilde was a good man and an honest man. He was accustomed to say of his profession that all he was sure of was that sulphur would cure the itch. He was not casual about his practice. Like so many country doctors, he was a combination doctor, priest, psychiatrist to his town. He knew most of the secrets, weaknesses, and the braveries of Salinas. He never learned to take death easily. Indeed the death of a patient always gave him a sense of failure and hopeless ignorance. He was not a bold man, and he used surgery only as a last and fearful resort. The drugstore was coming in to help the doctors, but Dr. Wilde was one of the few to maintain his own dispensary and to compound his own prescriptions. Many years of overwork and interrupted sleep had made him a little vague and preoccupied.
At eight-thirty on a Wednesday morning Kate walked up Main Street, climbed the stairs of the Monterey County Bank Building, and walked along the corridor until she found the door which said, “Dr. Wilde—Office Hours 11-2.”
At nine-thirty Dr. Wilde put his buggy in the livery stable and wearily lifted out his black bag. He had been out in the Alisal presiding at the disintegration of old, old lady German. She had not been able to terminate her life neatly. There were codicils. Even now Dr. Wilde wondered whether the tough, dry, stringy life was completely gone out of her. She was ninety-seven and a death certificate meant nothing to her. Why, she had corrected the priest who prepared her. The mystery of death was on him. It often was. Yesterday, Allen Day, thirty-seven, six feet one inch, strong as a bull and valuable to four hundred acres and a large family, had meekly surrendered his life to pneumonia after a little exposure and three days of fever. Dr. Wilde knew it was a mystery. His eyelids felt grainy. He thought he would take a sponge bath and have a drink before his first office patients arrived with their stomach aches.
He climbed the stairs and put his worn key in the lock of his office door. The key would not turn. He set his bag on the floor and exerted pressure. The key refused to budge. He grabbed the doorknob and pulled outward and rattled the key. The door was opened from within. Kate stood in front of him.
“Oh, good morning. Lock was stuck. How did you get in?”
“It wasn’t locked. I was early and came in to wait.”
“Wasn’t locked?” He turned the key the other way and saw that, sure enough, the little bar slipped out easily.
“I’m getting old, I guess,” he said. “I’m forgetful.” He sighed. “I don’t know why I lock it anyway. You could get in with a piece of baling wire. And who’d want to get in anyway?” He seemed to see her for the first time. “I don’t have office hours until eleven.”
Kate said, “I needed some more of those pills and I couldn’t come later.”
“Pills? Oh, yes. You’re the girl from down at Faye’s.”
“That’s right.”
“Feeling better?”
“Yes, the pills help.”
“Well, they can’t hurt,” he said. “Did I leave the door to the dispensary open too?”
“What’s a dispensary?”
“Over there—that door.”
“I guess you must have.”
“Getting old. How is Faye?”
“Well, I’m worried about her. She was real sick a while ago. Had cramps and went a little out of her head.”
“She’s had a stomach disorder before,” Dr. Wilde said. “You can’t live like that and eat at all hours and be very well. I can’t anyway. We just call it stomach trouble. Comes from eating too much and staying up all night. Now—the pills. Do you remember what color?”
“There were three kinds, yellow, red, and green.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I remember.”
While he poured pills into a round cardboard box she stood in the door.
“What a lot of medicines!”
Dr. Wilde said, “Yes—and the older I get, the fewer I use. I got some of those when I started to practice. Never used them. That’s a beginner’s stock. I was going to experiment—alchemy.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Here you are. Tell Faye to get some sleep and eat some vegetables. I’ve been up all night. Let yourself out, will you?” He went wavering back into the surgery.
Kate glanced after him and then her eyes flicked over the lines of bottles and containers. She closed the dispensary door and looked around the outer office. One book in the case was out of line. She pushed it back until it was shoulder to shoulder with its brothers.
She picked up her big handbag from the leather sofa and left.
In her own room Kate took five small bottles and a strip of scribbled paper from her handbag. She put the whole works in the toe of a stocking, pushed the wad into a rubber overshoe, and stood it with its fellow in the back of her closet.
3
During the following months a gradual change came over Faye’s house. The girls were sloppy and touchy. If they had been told to clean themselves and their rooms a deep resentment would have set in and the house would have reeked of ill temper. But it didn’t work that way.
Kate said at table one evening that she had just happened to look in Ethel’s room and it was so neat and pretty she couldn’t help buying her a present. When Ethel unwrapped the package right at the table it was a big bottle of Hoyt’s German, enough to keep her smelling sweet for a long time. Ethel was pleased, and she hoped Kate hadn’t seen the dirty clothes under the bed. After supper she not only got the clothes out but brushed the floors and swept the cobwebs out of the corners.
Then Grace looked so pretty one afternoon that Kate couldn’t help giving her the rhinestone butterfly pin she was wearing. And Grace had to rush up and put on a clean shirtwaist to set it off.
Alex in the kitchen, who, if he had believed what was usually said of him would have considered himself a murderer, found that he had a magic hand with biscuits. He discovered that cooking was something you couldn’t learn. You had to feel it.
Cotton Eye learned that nobody hated him. His tub-thumping piano playing changed imperceptibly.
He told Kate, “It’s funny what you remember when you think back.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Well, like this,” and he played for her.
“That’s lovely,” she said. “What is it?”
“Well, I don’t know. I think it’s Chopin. If I could just see the music!”
He told her how he had lost his sight, and he had never told anyone else. It was a bad story. That Saturday night he took the chain off the piano strings and played something he had been remembering and practicing in the morning, something called “Moonlight,” a piece by Beethoven, Cotton Eye thought.
Ethel said it sounded like moonlight and did he know the words.
“It don’t have words,” said Cotton Eye.
Oscar Trip, up from Gonzales for Saturday night, said, “Well, it ought to have. It’s pretty.”
One night there were presents for everyone because Faye’s was the best house, the cleanest, and nicest in the whole county—and who was responsible for that? Why, the girls—who else? And did they ever taste seasoning like in that stew?
Alex retired into the kitchen and shyly wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. He bet he could make a plum pudding would knock their eyes out.
Georgia was getting up at ten every morning and taking piano lessons from Cotton Eye and her nails were clean.
Coming back from eleven o’clock mass on a Sunday morning, Grace said to Trixie, “And I was about ready to get married and give up whoring. Can you imagine?”