Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 25, No. 7, July, 1980

The Mechanical Heart by Pauline C. Smith

Theirs was a Victorian lifestyle in almost modern dress...

When Mother phoned to tell me Father was to have heart surgery, my immediate thought was: I didn’t know he had a heart — a set of principles, a book of rules, a list of laws perhaps — but a heart? Mother’s calm and proper voice explained in dignified and impersonal terms the reason for the operation and the function of the pacemaker that was to be implanted.

“I’ll get the first plane out,” I promised in a voice as serenely composed as hers. My parents still did this to me, even after ten years of marriage. The minute I made contact, I was their ladylike daughter, with rigid back, fixed smile, feelings nicely buttoned up.

Father’s heart surgery was carried out with Mother’s and my hands folded suitably on our laps; no wailing, no weeping, not even a single heavy sigh to break the proper decorum.

His recovery was handled just as punctiliously with our twice-daily visits to the hospital, Mother at one side of his bed, I at the other, each speaking softly — not about the operation, but about the weather and other insignificant subjects.

Those weeks at home were for me a time of exceeding boredom to which my conditioned reflexes responded so that when sitting I sat straight, with ankles primly crossed, and when standing my legs were puritanically close together.

Mother whiled away the hours writing gracious little thank-you notes for the flowers and cards she’d received. I whiled mine away in my old room, browsing through the artifacts I’d left there.

The most significant of the memorabilia I’d left there seemed to me to be the gloves — short white dancing-school gloves, elbow-length formal gloves. Gloves had been very important when I was young. Cover up, mitten up, don’t let your fingers show — your skin, your pores, your feelings. Don still teases me about leaving my gloves on the first night we spent in a motel, when we were college seniors and left the prom for less formal and more intimate pleasures — which is not true, of course.

But if the gloves were a symbol of my slavishly correct upbringing, the hair dryer marked the emancipation begun the last spring I was home. I found the electric dryer, a hand-blower type, on the upper shelf of my closet and took it down, remembering that spring vacation as a time of frequent shampoos, of brushing my hair into sleek simplicity, rolling it into curly piquancy, teasing it into bouffant sophistication — all in order to snare Don in the tangle of my imaginative tresses once I returned to campus.

“My old hair dryer,” I showed my mother.

Smiling remotely and without comment, she returned to her thank-you notes.

We both returned to the hospital each day to sit beside Father while the little box inside his chest mechanically regulated his mechanical heart.

He didn’t look sick. He looked as he always had, important and imperious. His very few strands of steel-grey hair, the steel-grey glint of his eyes, and the steely firm set of his jaws had decided me long ago that God had sent him to earth for the sole purpose of keeping the Oakview citizenry lawfully upright in his role as judge and the Presbyterian congregation morally virtuous in his role as church elder.

I did not know a blessed thing about him except that he was now sixty-eight, hooked up to a device that would enable him to continue his ordained work and married to my equally humorless mother who was fifty-six and imperturbable in her “little black nothing-dress with the strand of ‘good’ pearls.” She was my father’s appendage — a rib, that is — fashioned to be a follower, theirs a Victorian lifestyle in almost modern dress.

I observed them during a time of ordeal that should have brought us all together with understanding but did not.

On the last day of his hospitalization I discovered the grotesque inability of my father as well as my mother to face any kind of truth. But it was also that day, as I now look back, that I think Mother caught a glimmer of understanding of herself and her life with my father.

He sat straight and stern in the wheelchair as the doctor explained the life-giving pacemaker that engendered 100,000 impulses daily to keep the heart functioning. He cautioned Father to be careful and Mother watchful. He warned them against microwave ovens, whose rays could trigger leaks in the tiny batteries. He told Father never to approach a car whose hood was raised with the motor running. “Don’t ever let your barber use electric hair clippers,” he said. That was when Mother asked her ludicrous question and Father accepted its absurdity. She asked politely, with passive concern, if a dentist’s drill might be dangerous. She asked it knowing that Father didn’t have a tooth in his head. And Father waited for the doctor’s reply as if he too believed all the thirty-two porcelains he never revealed in a smile were firmly implanted in his gums and not falsely inserted.

I knew then that my parents lived such a lie of procedural propriety that they didn’t, couldn’t know the truth they had hidden from themselves for so long.

The doctor rallied after a moment and explained with exaggerated seriousness that the length of cord leading from the electric motor to activate a dental drill not only minimized but nullified any danger of upsetting the rhythm of the pacer. He further expounded on the difference between a safely distant motor and an unsafe nearby one, such as an electric hair clipper.

“Or hair dryer?” asked Mother, and I looked from her to Father, who was not surprised since they both remembered and still lived with his once bountiful shock of hair, regarding it, like his teeth, as reality.

“Or hair dryer,” agreed the doctor.

So Father came home with the knowledge that the slightest shock could kill him, but with the prognostication that by following a few simple rules he could and probably would continue to judge the Oakview lawbreakers and elder the Presbyterians for many years to come.

After a decent interval of time, during which I observed my parents slip back into the lifestyle they had not essentially left, I made ready to leave.

My mother surprised me as I was packing. She tapped on my door, walked into my room, sat on the edge of the bed, and watched while I emptied drawers, folded garments, and set them in the suitcase.

Then I shut the drawers, closed the closet doors, and picked up the hair dryer from the top of the dresser. Mother leaned forward. “Are you taking that with you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve got one at home.” I reached up, opened the door of the top closet shelf, and put the dryer away.

At the door I brushed my father’s cheek with mine, then my mother s. In the cab, slouched down on my spine, one knee perched on the other, I relaxed at last. At the airport, I took my seat on the plane, stripped off my gloves, stuffed them under the seat, and anticipated my homecoming and letting it all hang out with a husband who’s as loose as a mobile in the breeze and a couple of kids as stylized as frisbees.

After six months of Father court-judging and church-eldering at a regular seventy pacemaker beats a minute and Mother penning little notes about his health and the weather in Oakview, I received a phone call from her — this one informing me in her precise and unemotional voice that my father was dead.

By the time I arrived, Mother had every thing under control — the death certificate was signed, the funeral arrangements completed — and flowers were already arriving. There was nothing left for me to do but select a pair of black gloves from the drawers in my old room and accompany my mother to the services — which were, of course, conducted with estimable taste.

Afterward, I asked her what had happened.

“Why, Margaret, your father died.”

“Yes, but how? And where?”

“It was an attack. His heart.”

“But where, Mother? And how?”

“He died in his sleep, Margaret. In his bed.”

When the soft-voiced mourners came to offer their sympathy, I left Mother to accept their haloed tributes and escaped to the room she had shared with my father for thirty-eight years.

There I opened the closet doors, and lifted down the ultra-conservative suits he had left behind, and folded them on his bed. I would call the Presbyterian Church and donate them to the needy. Mother would sit in this house forever, these suits in the closet, not in memoriam but because to hand them down to be worn by heaven-knew-who would be unseemly. I lifted Father’s shoes from the shoe rack, each pair identical except for color — and there I found my hair dryer, wedged between the metal loops of the rack.

I pulled it free and held it in my hands. The murmurs from downstairs diminished and then I heard the click of the closing front door.

I laid the hair dryer on the bed along with my father’s suits and waited for Mother to come up and ask why I hadn’t been at her side to thank the departing guests.

When she entered the room, a ladylike frown of displeasure crossed her face. “What are you doing, Margaret?”

“I’m getting Father’s things together to give to charity.”

“No.” She settled herself sedately on the slipper chair and crossed her ankles. “It’s far too soon.”

I stared at her, this little woman in her little black nothing-dress with her little pink-and-white nothing-face, and wondered what she really felt about Father’s death, if she felt anything at all. “You want them to hang in the closet with him dead and gone? You want them just to hang there?”

“For a decent interval.”

“I found this.” I picked up the hair dryer and held it out.

She smiled remotely.

“I found it here in this room, my old hair dryer.”

“It must be,” she said. “Yours is the only hair dryer in the house.”

“But it was here,” I persisted, “in this room.”

“Well, take it back, Margaret. Put it where it belongs.”

“When the doctor explained the dangers of a pacemaker, you asked about a hair dryer—”

“I suppose I did.”

“Why?”

“It was necessary that I know all the precautionary procedures in order to take care of your father adequately.”

“Oh, you took care of him, Mother. You took care of him very adequately.” She smiled and inclined her head as if she were receiving due homage for a fulfilled obligation. “Mother,” I said too loudly, and dropped my voice, “I left the hair dryer in my closet. Up on the shelf.”

“Yes,” she said. “I remember you found it there when your father was sick. Now why don’t you put it back there where it belongs?” She rose and smoothed her hair. “And after that you may return your father’s suits to his closet. Hang them carefully, with a space between each hanger, the way he always insisted they be hung.” The doorbell rang and she started from the room. Over her shoulder, she added, “And rack the shoes neatly, browns at the left, blacks on the right.”

I returned the hair dryer to my closet. Then back in my parents’ room I hung my father’s suits, with equal air spaces between each, and returned his shoes to his shoe rack — browns to the left, blacks to the right.

The voices from the front of the house were rising in a crescendo of leavetaking. I closed the closet door and went downstairs.

Mother was seated on the Victorian sofa, her ankles crossed. “What will you do now?” I asked.

“Now?”

“Now that Father is gone. What are your plans?”

“I will make no plans. Not for a year.”

“A year?”

“A year of mourning, Margaret.” She stroked each of her fingers from tip to base with careful precision and, as I watched, I resolved to put the facts of my father’s death out of my mind as completely as my mother had.

But if I can blank out my suspicions, I cannot blank out the sure knowledge that, if she did it, she did it with glove-fingered Victorian elegance.