BACK TOMORROW, LOVE, CHURCH—and pinned it to the cushion on the bottom of the cat bed. Then he went into his bedroom, looking for Rachel. Rachel was there. They made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Church returned home on the Friday of Louis’s first full week of work; Ellie made much of him, used part of her allowance to buy him a box of cat treats, and nearly slapped Gage once for trying to touch him. This made Cage cry in a way mere parental discipline could never have done. Receiving a rebuke from Ellie was like receiving a rebuke from Cod.
Looking at Church made Louis feel sad. It was ridiculous, but that didn’t change the emotion. There was no sign of Church’s former feistiness. No more did he walk like a gunslinger; now his walk was the slow, careful walk of the convalescent. He allowed Ellie to hand-feed him. He showed no sign of wanting to go outside, not even to the garage. He had changed. Perhaps it was ultimately for the better that he had changed.
Neither Rachel nor Ellie seemed to notice.
20
Indian summer came and went. Brazen color came into the trees, rioted briefly, and then faded. After one cold, driving rain in mid-October, the leaves started to fall. Ellie began to arrive home laden
with Halloween decorations she had made at school and entertained Gage with the story of the Headless Horseman. Gage spent that evening babbling happily about somebody named Itchybod Brain. Rachel got giggling and couldn’t stop. It was a good time for them, that early autumn.
Louis’s work at the university had settled into a demanding but pleasant routine. He saw patients, he attended meetings of the Council of Colleges, he wrote the obligatory letters to the student newspaper, advising the university’s co-ed population of the confidentiality of the infirmary’s treatment for VD and exhorting the student population to get flu boosters, as the A-type was apt to be prevalent again that winter. He sat on panels. He chaired panels.
During the second week in October, he went to the New England Conference on College and University Medicine in Providence and presented a paper on the legal ramifications of student treatment.
Victor Pascow was mentioned in his paper under the fictitious name of “Henry Montez.” The paper was well received. He began working up the infirmary budget for the next academic year.
His evenings fell into a routine: kids after supper, a beer or two with Jud Crandall later. Sometimes Rachel came over with him if Missy was available to sit for an hour, and sometimes Norma joined them, but mostly it was just Louis and Jud. Louis found the old man as comfortable as an old slipper, and he would talk about Ludlow history going back three hundred years almost as though he had lived all of it. He talked but never rambled. He never bored Louis, although he had seen Rachel yawning under her hand on more than one occasion.
He would cross the road to his house again before ten on most evenings, and, like as not, he and Rachel would make love. Never since the first year of their marriage had they made love so often, and never so successfully and pleasurably. Rachel said she believed it was something in the artesian well water; Louis opted for the Maine air.
The nasty death of Victor Pascow on the first day of the fall semester began to fade in the memory of the student body and in Louis’s own; Pascow’s family no doubt still grieved. Louis had spoken to the tearful, mercifully faceless voice of Pascow’s father on the telephone; the father had only wanted assurance that Louis had done everything he could, and Louis had assured him that everyone involved had. He did not tell him of the confusion, the spreading stain on the carpet, and how his son had been dead almost from the instant he was brought in, although these were things that Louis thought he himself would never forget. But for those to whom Pascow was only a casualty, he had already dimmed.
Louis still remembered the dream and the sleepwalking incident that had accompanied it, but it now seemed almost as if it had happened to someone else, or on a television show he had once watched. His one visit to a whore in Chicago six years ago seemed like that flow; they were equally unimportant, side trips which held a false resonance, like sounds produced in an echo chamber.
He did not think at all about what the dying Pascow had or had not said.
There was a hard frost on Halloween night. Louis and Ellie began at the Crandalls’. Ellie cackled satisfyingly, pretended to ride her broom around Norma’s kitchen, and was duly pronounced “Just the cutest thing I ever saw. . . isn’t she, Jud?”
Jud agreed that she was and lit a cigarette. “Where’s Gage, Louis?
Thought you’d have him dressed up too.”
They had indeed planned on taking Gage around—Rachel in particular had been looking forward to it because she and Missy Dandridge had whomped together a sort of bug costume with twisted coat hangers wrapped in crepe paper for feelers—but Gage had come down with a troublesome, bronchial cold, and after listening to his lungs, which sounded a bit ratfly, and consulting
the thermometer outside the window, which read only forty degrees at six o’clock, Louis had nixed it. Rachel, although disappointed, had agreed.
Ellie had promised to give Gage some of her candy, but the exaggerated quality of her sorrow made Louis wonder if she wasn’t just a bit glad that Gage wouldn’t be along to slow her down.
or steal part of the limelight.
“Poor Gage,” she had said in tones usually reserved for those suffering terminal illness. Gage, unaware of what he was missing, sat on the sofa watching “Zoom” with Church snoozing beside him.
“Ellie-witch,” Gage had replied without a great deal of interest and went back to the TV.
“Poor Gage,” Ellie had said again, fetching another sigh. Louis thought of crocodile tears and grinned. Ellie grabbed his hand and started pulling him. “Let’s go, Daddy. Let’s go—let’s go—let’s go.
“Gage has got a touch of the croup,” Louis said to Jud now.
“Well, that’s a real shame,” Norma said, “but it will mean more to him next year. Hold out your bag, Ellie . . . whoops!”
She had taken an apple and a bite-sized Snickers bar out of the treat bowl on the table, but both of them had fallen out of her hand.
Louis was a little shocked at how clawlike that hand looked. He bent over and picked up the apple as it rolled across the floor. Jud got the Snickers and dropped it into Ellie’s bag.
“Oh, let me get you another apple, honey,” Norma said. “That one will bruise.”
“It’s fine,” Louis said, trying to drop it into Ellie’s bag, but Ellie stepped away, holding her bag protectively shut.
“I don’t want a bruised apple, Daddy,” she said, looking at her father as if he might have gone mad. “Brown spots . . . yuck!”
“Ellie, that’s damned impolite!”
“Don’t scold her for telling the truth, Louis,” Norma said.
“Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That’s what makes them children. The brown spots are yucky.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Crandall,” Ellie said, casting a vindicated eye on her father.
“You’re very welcome, honey,” Norma said.
Jud escorted them out to the porch. Two little ghosts were coming up the walk, and Ellie recognized them both as friends from school. She took them back to the kitchen, and for a moment Jud and Louis were alone on the porch.
“Her arthritis has gotten worse,” Louis said.
Jud nodded and pinched out his cigarette over an ashtray. “Yeah.
It’s come down harder on her every fall and winter, but this is the worst it’s ever been.”
“What does her doctor say?”
“Nothing. He can’t say nothing because Norma hasn’t been back to see him.”
“What? Why not?”
Jud looked at Louis, and in the light cast by the headlamps of the station wagon waiting for the ghosts, he looked oddly defenseless.
“I’d meant to ask you this at a better time, Louis, but I guess there isn’t no good time to impose on a friendship. Would you examine her?”
From the kitchen, Louis could hear the two ghosts booo-ing and Ellie going into her cackles—which she had been practicing all week—again. It all sounded very fine and Halloweenish.
“What else is wrong with Norma?” he asked. “Is she afraid of something else, Jud?”
“She’s been having pains in her chest,” Jud said in a low voice.
“She won’t go see Dr. Weybridge anymore. I’m a little worried.”
“Is Norma worried?”
Jud hesitated and then said, “I think she’s scared. I think that’s why she doesn’t want to go to the doctor. One of her oldest friends, Betty Coslaw, died in the EMMC just last month. Cancer. She and Norma were of an age. She’s scared.”