Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“How many quarts of blood did they have to give me?” she kept asking.

I seem to remember five, six, eight different transfusions. Daylight, electric light…” She tried to smile, but she couldn’t make a pleasant face as yet. “How am I going to pay?” she said. “At twenty-five bucks a quart. My little bit of money is just about wiped out.”

Blood became her constant topic, her preoccupation. She told everyone who came to see her, “—have to replace all that blood. They poured gallons into me. Gallons. I hope it was all good.” And, though very weak, she began to grin and laugh again. There was more hissing in her laughter than formerly; the illness had affected her chest.

“No cigarettes, no booze,” the doctor told Helen. “Doctor,” Helen asked him, “do you expect her to change?”

“All the same, I am obliged to say it.”

“Life sober may not be much of a temptation to her,” said Helen. Her husband laughed. When Rolfe’s laughter was intense it blinded one of his eyes. His short Irish face turned red; on the bridge of his small, sharp nose the skin whitened. “Hattie’s like me,” he said. “She’ll be in business till she’s cleaned out. And if Sego Lake turned to whisky she’d use her last strength to knock her old yellow house down to build a raft of it. She’d float away on whisky. So why talk temperance?”

Hattie recognized the similarity between them. When he came to see her she said, “Jerry, you’re the only one I can really talk to about my troubles. What am I going to do for money? I have Hotchkiss Insurance. I paid eight dollars a month.”

“That won’t do you much good, Hat. No Blue Cross?”

“I let it drop ten years ago. Maybe I could sell some of my valuables.”

“What valuables have you got?” he said. His eye began to droop with laughter. “Why,” she said defiantly, “there’s plenty. First there’s the beautiful, precious Persian rug that India left me.”

“Coals from the fireplace have been burning it for years, Hat!”

“The rug is in perfect condition,” she said with an angry sway of the shoulders. “A beautiful object like that never loses its value. And the oak table from the Spanish monastery is three hundred years old.”

“With luck you could get twenty bucks for it. It would cost fifty to haul it out of here. It’s the house you ought to sell.”

“The house?” she said. Yes, that had been in her mind. “I’d have to get twenty thousand for it.”

“Eight is a fair price.”

“Fifteen….” She was offended, and her voice recovered its strength. “India put eight into it in two years. And don’t forget that Sego Lake is one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

“But where is it? Five hundred and some miles to San Francisco and two hundred to Salt Lake City. Who wants to live way out here but a few eccentrics like you and India? And me?”

“There are things you can’t put a price tag on. Beautiful things.”

“Oh, bull, Hattie! You don’t know squat about beautiful things. Any more than I do. I live here because it figures for me, and you because India left you the house. And just in the nick of time, too. Without it you wouldn’t have had a pot of your own.”

His words offended Hattie; more than that, they frightened her. She was silent and then grew thoughtful, for she was fond of Jerry Rolfe and he of her. He had good sense and, moreover, he only expressed her own thoughts. He spoke no more than the truth about India’s death and the house. But she told herself, He doesn’t know everything. You’d have to pay a San Francisco architect ten thousand just to think of such a house. Before he drew a line.

“Jerry,” the old woman said, “what am I going to do about replacing the blood in the blood bank?”

“Do you want a quart from me, Hat?” His eye began to fall shut.

“You won’t do. You had that tumor, two years ago. I think Darly ought to give some.”

“The old man?” Rolfe laughed at her. “You want to kill him?”

“Why!” said Hattie with anger, lifting up her massive face. Fever and perspiration had frayed the fringe of curls; at the back of the head the hair had knotted and matted so that it had to be shaved. “Darly almost killed me. It’s his fault that I’m in this condition. He must have some blood in him. He runs after all the chicks—all of them—young and old.”

“Come, you were drunk, too,” said Rolfe.

“I’ve driven drunk for forty years. It was the sneeze. Oh, Jerry, I feel wrung out,” said Hattie, haggard, sitting forward in bed. But her face was cleft by her nonsensically happy grin. She was not one to be miserable for long; she had the expression of a perennial survivor.

Every other day she went to the therapist. The young woman worked her arm for her; it was a pleasure and a comfort to Hattie, who would have been glad to leave the whole cure to her. However, she was given other exercises to do, and these were not so easy. They rigged a pulley for her and Hattie had to hold both ends of a rope and saw it back and forth through the scraping little wheel. She bent heavily from the hips and coughed over her cigarette. But the most important exercise of all she shirked. This required her to put the flat of her hand to the wall at the level of her hips and, by working her finger tips slowly, to make the hand ascend to the height of her shoulder. That was painful; she often forgot to do it, although the doctor warned her, “Hattie, you don’t want adhesions, do you?”

A light of despair crossed Hattie’s eyes. Then she said, “Oh, Dr. Stroud, buy my house from me.”

“I’m a bachelor. What would I do with a house?”

“I know just the girl for you—my cousin’s daughter. Perfectly charming and very brainy. Just about got her Ph. D.”

“You must get quite a few proposals yourself,” said the doctor. “From crazy desert rats. They chase me. But,” she said, “after I pay my bills I’ll be in pretty punk shape. If at least I could replace that blood in the blood bank I’d feel easier.”

“If you don’t do as the therapist tells you, Hattie, you’ll need another operation. Do you know what adhesions are?”

She knew. But Hattie thought, How long must I go on taking care of myself? It made her angry to hear him speak of another operation. She had a moment of panic, but she covered it up. With him, this young man whose skin was already as thick as buttermilk and whose chestnut hair was as dry as death, she always assumed the part of a child. In a small voice she said, “Yes, doctor.” But her heart was in a fury.

Night and day, however, she repeated, “I was in the Valley of the Shadow. But I’m alive.” She was weak, she was old, she couldn’t follow a train of thought very easily, she felt faint in the head. But she was still here; here was her body, it filled space, a great body. And though she had worries and perplexities, and once in a while her arm felt as though it was about to give her the last stab of all; and though her hair was scrappy and old, like onion roots, and scattered like nothing under the comb, yet she sat and amused herself with visitors; her great grin split her face; her heart warmed with every kind word.

And she thought, People will help me out. It never did me any good to worry. At the last minute something turned up, when I wasn’t looking for it. Marian loves me. Helen and Jerry love me. Half Pint loves me. They would never let me go to the ground. And I love them. If it were the other way around, I’d never let them go down.

Above the horizon, in a baggy vastness which Hattie by herself occasionally visited, the features of India, her shade, sometimes rose. India was indignant and scolding. Not mean. Not really mean. Few people had ever been really mean to Hattie. But India was annoyed with her. “The garden is going to hell, Hattie,” she said. “Those lilac bushes are all shriveled.”