Джеймс Кейн - Mildred Pierce

Mom turned white, and sat bolt upright, but Mr. Pierce spoke quickly, and she sank back, her lips compressed. Then Mildred, after trying to keep quiet, went on: “I was at Lake Arrowhead, if you have to know. When some friends invited me up to their cottage by the lake, I didn’t see why I was the one person on earth that had to stay home. Of course I should have. That I readily admit. But I didn’t know at the time that I had a set of in-laws that couldn’t even find a place for a sick child that had been left in their care. I’ll certainly know better next time.”

“I think Mother’s perfectly right.”

Up to now, Veda had been coldly neutral, but when she heard about the swank cottage by the lake, she knew exactly where she stood. Bert looked unhappy, and said nothing. Mr. Pierce had a solemn rebuke: “Mildred, everybody did the best they knew, and I don’t see any need for personal remarks.”

“Who started these personal remarks?”

Nobody had an answer for this, and for a time there was silence. Mildred had little appetite for the wrangle, for deep down in her heart she had a premonition that Ray was really sick. After an interminable time Dr. Gale arrived. He was a tall, stooped man who had been the family doctor ever since Veda was born. He took Mildred into the sickroom, looked at Ray, listened to the night nurse’s whisper. Then he spoke reassuringly: “We get a lot of these cases, especially at this time of year. They shoot up a temperature, start running at the nose, refuse everything you give them to eat, and you’d think they were blowing up something really bad. Then next day they’re out running around. Though I don’t mind telling you I’m glad we’ve got her here instead of home. Even in a case of grippe you can’t be too careful.”

“I’m glad you opened that pimple. I meant to, day before yesterday — and then I forgot it.”

“Well I’m glad you didn’t open it. Those things, the rule is to let them strictly alone, especially on the upper lip. I didn’t open it. I put that little strip over it to keep her fingers off it, that’s all.”

Mildred took Veda home, improvising a tale about the people who had stopped by Saturday and invited her up to the lake. She named no names, but made them quite rich and high-toned. She undressed, with the light out, before she remembered her pies. It was three o’clock before she got to bed, and she was exhausted.

All next day she had an unreasoning, hysterical sense of being deprived of something her whole nature craved: the right to sit with her child, to be near it when it needed her. And yet the best she could manage was a few minutes in the morning, an hour after supper. She had got to the hospital early, and wasn’t at all reassured by the nurse’s cheery talk. And her heart had contracted when she saw Ray, all her bubbling animation gone, her face flushed, her breathing labored. But she couldn’t stay. She had to go, to deliver pies, to pay off painters, to check on announcements, to contract for chickens, to make more pies. It was dinnertime before she got another respite, and then she couldn’t eat. She fidgeted while Letty served Veda, then loaded Veda in the car, and took her in for another vigil. Home again, she put Veda to bed, but when she went to bed herself, she couldn’t sleep.

She called the hospital at eight the next morning, and after getting a favorable report, stayed on the phone, crowding her business into the next two hours. Around ten, she loaded her pies into the car, made the rounds of delivery, and arrived at the hospital about eleven. She was surprised to find Dr. Gale already there, whispering in the corridor with a big hairy man in an undershirt, with tattoo marks on his arm. He called Mildred aside. “Now I don’t want you to get alarmed. But her temperature’s gone up. It’s a hundred and four now, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it, and I don’t like that thing on her lip.”

“You mean it could be infected?”

“I don’t know, and there’s no way to tell. I’ve taken a smear from the pimple, another from the mucus that’s coming from her nose, and a couple of CC’s of blood. They’re on their way to the laboratory now. They’ll ring me as soon as they possibly can. But Mildred, here’s the point. If we’ve got trouble there, she can’t wait for any lab report. She’s got to have a transfusion, right away. Now I’ve got this man here, he’s a professional donor, but it’s his means of livelihood, and he won’t go in the room till he gets his twenty-five dollars. It’s entirely up to you, but—”

Without a thought of what twenty-five dollars would do to her little reserve, Mildred was writing the check before he finished talking. The man demanded an indorsement. Dr. Gale signed, and Mildred, her hands sweating with fear, went into the sickroom. She had that same terrible feeling in her bowels that she had had that day on the boulevard. The child’s eyes were dull, her face hot, her whimpering a constant accompaniment to her rapid breathing. There was a new strip on her lip, a bigger one, covering a pack of gauze stained with the livid red of mercurochrome. A nurse looked up, but didn’t stop spooning ice into the fluttering little mouth. “This happened after I talked to you, Mrs. Pierce. She had a nice night, temperature constant, and we thought she’d be all right in a few hours. Then just like that it went up.”

Ray began to fret, and the nurse began talking to her, saying it was her mother, and didn’t she know her mother? Mildred spoke to her. “It’s Mamma, darling.”

“Mamma!”

Ray’s voice was a wail, and Mildred wanted to gather her into her arms, but she merely took one of the little hands and patted it. Then Dr. Gale came in, and other doctors, in white smocks, and nurses, and the donor, his sleeves rolled high this time, showing a veritable gallery of tattoo marks. He sat down, and Mildred stood like a woman of stone while a nurse swabbed his arm. Then she went out in the corridor and started walking up and down, quietly, slowly. Somehow, by a supreme effort of will, she made time pass. Then two nurses came out of the room, then one of the doctors, then the donor, and some orderlies. She went in. The same nurse, the one who had spoken to her before, was at the head of the bed, busy with thermometer and watch. Dr. Gale was bent over, peering intently at Ray. “Her temperature’s down, Doctor.”

“Good.”

“A hundred and one.”

“That’s just great. How’s the pulse?”

“Down too. To ninety-six.”

“That’s wonderful. Mildred, I’ve probably put you to a lot of expense over nothing. Just the same—”

They walked out to the corridor, came to an angle, went on. He resumed talking in a casual way: “I hated to do it, Mildred, just hated to slap that outlay on you — though I’ll see that every charge is as reasonable as they can make it. But if I had it to do over again, I’d tell you just what I told you before. You see, here’s what we’re up against. Any infection above the mouth drains into the lateral sinus, and that means the brain. Now with that little pip on her lip there was no way to tell. Every symptom she had spelled grippe, but just the same, all of those symptoms could have been caused by strep, and if we had waited until we were sure, it would have been too late. The way she’s reacting to that transfusion shows it was all a false alarm — but I’m telling you, if it had been that other, and we hadn’t moved fast, I’d never have forgiven myself, and neither would you.”

“It’s all right.”

“These things happen, they can’t be helped.”

Somewhere on the floor a buzzer sounded, then sounded again, sharply, insistently. It seemed to Mildred that Dr. Gale turned rather quickly, that their saunter was no longer a saunter. As they approached the room an orderly hurried past them, carrying hot-water bottles. He entered the room. When they went in, the nurse was jamming them under the covers, which were thick with the extra blankets she had already piled on. “She’s having a chill, doctor.”