Дэймон Найт: Orbit 5

No one argues with him, or urges him to linger, and when he is gone I help Norma with the dishes and Dr. Warren sits in the kitchen having black coffee, and we talk about the Harvard doctor.

“I plain don’t like him,” Norma says with conviction. “Slimy man.”

I think of his pink face and pink hairless hands, and his cheeks that shake when he walks, and I know what she means.

“I guess his project isn’t altogether bad, or a complete waste of time,” Dr. Warren says. “Just got the wrong place, wrong time, wrong people.”

“I want to find out exactly what he expects to prove,” Isay. “I wonder what sort of contrast he expects between students and our people. That might even be interesting.” I wonder if the research is really his, or the idea of one of his graduate students. I try not to draw conclusions yet. I can wait until the next night when I’ll meet them all. Isay, “Doctor Warren, Father keeps begging me to bring him home. Do you think it would help him?”

Dr. Warren puts down his cup and studies me hard. “Bedridden still?”

“Yes, and always will be, but I could manage him in the dining room downstairs. He’s so unhappy in the nursing home. I’m sure the house, the noises there would bring back other days to him, make him more cheerful.”

“It’s been four years now, hasn’t it?” Dr.‘ Warren knows that. I wonder why he is playing for time, what thoughts he has that he doesn’t want to express. “Honey,” he says, in the gentle voice that used to go with the announcement of the need for a needle, or a few stitches. I remember that he never promised that it wouldn’t hurt if it would. “I think you’d be making a mistake. Is he really unhappy? Or does he just have moments when he wants the past given back to him?”

I feel angry with him suddenly for not understanding that when Father is lucid he wants to be home. I can only shrug.

“Think on it, Janet. Just don’t decide too fast.” His face is old suddenly, and I realize that everyone in Somerset is aged. It’s like walking among the pyramids, at a distance forever changeless, but on closer inspection constant reminders of aging, of senescence, of usefulness past and nearly forgotten. I turn to stare at Norma and see her as she is, not as she was when I was a child waiting for a cookie fresh and still warm, with the middle soft and the top crackly with sugar. I feel bewildered by both of them, outraged that they should reveal themselves so to me. There is a nearby crack of thunder, sharp-edged and explosive, not the rolling kind that starts and ends with an echo of itself, but a rifle blast. I stare out the window at lightning, jagged and brilliant, as sharply delineated as the thunder.

“I should go before the downpour,” I say.

“I’ll drive you,” Dr. Warren says, but I won’t let him.

“I’ll make it before the rain. Maybe it’s cooler now.”

Inconsequential that fill the days and nights of our lives, non-sequiturs that pass for conversation and thought, pleasantries, promises, we rattle them off comfortingly and I am walking down the street toward my house, not on the sidewalk, but in the street, where walking is easier.

The wind starts to blow when I am halfway between Magnolia and Rose Streets. I can see the Sagamore House ahead and I decide to stop there and wait for the rain to come and go. Probably I have planned this in a dark comer of my mind, but I have not consciously decided to visit the students so soon. I hurry, and the wind now has the town astir, filled with the same rustles that fill my house; scurrying ghosts, what have they to worry about if the rain should come before they settle in for the night?

Along First Street most of the buildings are closed forever. The ten-cent store, a diner, fabric shop, all sharing a common front, all locked, with large soaped loops linking the wide windows one to one. The rain starts, enormous drops that are wind-driven and hard. I can hear them against the tin roof of Mr. Larson’s store and they sound like hailstones, but then the wind drowns all noise but its own. Thunder and lightning now, and the mad wind. I run the rest of the way to Sagamore House and arrive there almost dry, but completely breathless.

“Honey, for heaven’s sake, come in and get some coffee!” Dorothea starts to lead me to the kitchen, but Ishake my head and incline it toward the parlor off to the left of the entrance.

“I’ll go in there and wait out the storm, if you don’t mind.” I can hear voices from the big room with its Victorian furniture and the grandfather clock that always stutters on the second tick. I hear it now: tick—t . . . t o . . tick.

“I’ll bring you a pot of coffee there, Janet,” Dorothea says with a nod. When she comes back with the tray and the china cup and the silver pot, she will call me Miss Matthews.

I try to pat my hair down as Igo into the parlor, and Iknow that I still present a picture of a girl caught in a sudden storm. I brush my arms, as if they are still wet, although they are not, and I shake my head, and at that moment there is another very close, very loud thunder crash, as if to justify my actions. The boys stop talking when I enter. They are what I have known most of my life since college: young, fresh-looking, indistinguishable from seniors and graduate students the world over.

I smile generally at them and sit down on one of the red velour couches with a coffee table before it that has a bowl of white roses, a dish of peppermints, magazines, three ashtrays, each carved and enameled and spotless. The whole room is like that: chairs and chairs, all carved, waxed, gleaming, footstools, end tables, console tables, Tiffany lampshades on cut glass lamps . . . The boys are at the other end of the room, five of them, two on the floor, the others in chairs, smoking, sipping beer or tall drinks. Dr. Staunton isn’t there.

Dorothea brings my tray and does call me Miss Matthews and asks if I’d like anything else. I shake my head and she leaves me alone with the boys. There is a whispered conversation at the other end of the room, and one of the boys rises and comes to stand near me.

“Hi, I’m Roger Philpott. Are you Janet Matthews? I think you invited us all to dinner at your house tomorrow.” Tall, thin, blond, very young-looking.

I grin back and nod. I look toward the others and say, “Maybe by meeting just a few of you now, I’ll be able to keep your names straight.”

Roger introduces the others, and I remember that there is a Johnny, a Victor, Doug, Sid, and Mickey. No one is grotesque, or even memorable. They regroup around me. Outside we can hear the hail, undeniably hail now, and the wind shrieking in the gables and eaves, all dwarfed by the intermittent explosions of the thunder. Several times the lights flicker, and Dorothea returns with hurricane lamps that she places in strategic places, after a glance to see if I have accomplished my goal of becoming part of the group of students.

Roger switches to coffee, but the other students reorder beer and gin and bitter lemon, and Dorothea leaves us again. Roger says, “I don’t know how long some of us will be able to take life in the country. What do you do around here?”

I laugh and say, “I come here to rest each summer. I live in New York the rest of the year.”

His interest quickens. “Oh, you work in the city then?”

“Yes, Columbia Medical Center. I’m an anesthesiologist.”

“Dr. Staunton didn’t mention that. He seems to think that all the people here are locals.”

“I didn’t tell him,” I say. He nods and I know that he realizes that I have played the part of a local yokel with his superior. I ask, “Is this his research, or is it the thesis of one of the boys?”