Mystery

He woke up in a white room and looked through a confusion of wires and tubes at drawn faces. His parents gazed down at him as if they did not know him. A strange acrid smell hung over him; every bit of him seemed to hurt. He fled again into unconsciousness.

The next time he woke up, the pain in the middle of his body took a moment to arrive, then hit him like a blow. Everything at the joining of his upper and lower body felt destroyed. His right leg screamed, and his right arm and shoulder uttered a shrill but softer complaint. He was looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling through a confusion of tubes and cables, thinking vaguely that he had been going somewhere—hadn’t he?—when another, deeper wave of pain struck the center of his body. He heard someone groan. He had nearly found the place, and all this pain could not be his. With a kind of passionate horror Tom realized how injured you would have to be to feel so much pain, and then with a sickening lurch of recognition knew that some horrible unknown thing had happened to him. He saw his body dismembered on the street, and blackness came rushing out at him from a deep inner cave. He tried to raise his head. Blackness surged over him for a moment; but his eyes opened to the same white ceiling and loops of plastic tubing. This time Tom lowered his eyes and looked down his body.

A long white object extended down the bed. Horror seized him again. His body had been cut away from him and replaced by this foreign object. At last he saw his own real left leg protruding from the object. Beside it lay a smooth white mound, a cast, that flowed up to the middle of his chest. He was in a hospital. A terrible premonition came to him, and he tried to touch his genitals with his right hand.

The motion caused by his panicky grab for his crotch scorched his shoulder and set the middle of his body aflame. His right hand, encased in another cast, was suspended above his chest. He began to cry. As if by itself, his left hand, which was miraculously not encased in plaster, slid up onto the cool white crust over his body and felt between his legs. He touched only a smooth hairless surface like a doll’s groin. A tube ran from a hole in the plaster, which was otherwise featureless. He had been castrated. The comfort he had felt a moment before at being in a hospital disappeared into irony—he was in a hospital because that was the only place someone like him was acceptable; he would be in the hospital forever.

Beneath the flaring pain in his hips, groin, and right leg there moved another level of pain like a shark waiting to strike. This pain would obliterate the world. When he had experienced it he would never again be the person he had been. He would be set apart from himself and everything he had known. Tom expected this deep lurking pain to move upward and seize him, but it continued to circle inside his body, as lazily powerful as a threat.

Tom turned his head to look sideways, and caused only a minor flare from his right shoulder. As he did so, he unconsciously rubbed his left hand over the smooth rounded curve of his groin where his penis should have been—something down there was peeing, he could not imagine what, could not think about it or begin to picture it. Just past his head on the far end of the sheet stood three curved tubular guard rails that marked the edge of his bed, and past the bed was a white table with a glass holding water and a funny-looking straw. His mother’s straw bag lay on a chair. A door stood open on a white corridor. Two doctors walked past. I’m here, he wanted to shout, I’m alive! His throat refused to make any sound at all. The doctors continued past the door, and Tom realized that he had seen a glass of water. His eyes came back to the glass on the bedside table. Water! He reached for the glass with his left hand. In the instant his hand touched the table Tom heard his mother’s voice coming in through the open door.

“STOP IT!” she yelled. “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!”

His hand jerked by itself and knocked the glass into a stack of books. Water sheeted out over the table and fell to the floor like a solid pane of silver.

“I TOOK IT ALL MY LIFE!” his father yelled back.

The secret pain deep in his body opened its mouth to devour him, and far too quietly to be heard Tom cried out and fainted again.

The next time he opened his eyes a jowly face peered down at him with quizzical seriousness.

“Well, young man,” said Dr. Bonaventure Milton. “I thought you were coming up for air. Some people have been waiting to talk to you.”

His great head swung back and away, and the faces of Tom’s parents crowded into the empty space.

“Hiya, kid,” his father said, and his mother said “Oh, Tommy.”

Victor Pasmore glared at his wife for a second, then turned back to his son. “How do you feel?”

“You don’t have to talk,” his mother said. “You’re going to get better now.” Her face flushed, and tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Tommy, we were so—you didn’t come home, and then we heard—but the doctors say you’re going to heal—”

“Of course he’s going to heal,” said his father. “What kind of guff is that?”

“Water,” Tom managed to say.

“You knocked that glass right off your table,” his father said. “Sounded like you threw a baseball through the window. You sure got our attention.”

“He wants a drink,” said Gloria.

“I’m the doctor, I’ll get a new glass,” the doctor said. Tom heard him walk out of the toom.

For a moment the Pasmores were silent.

“Keep breaking those glasses, you’ll cost us a fortune in glassware,” his father said.

His mother burst into outright tears.

Victor Pasmore leaned down closer to his son, bringing a dizzying mix of aftershave, tobacco, and alcohol. “You got pretty banged up, Tommy, but everything’s under control now, isn’t it?” He managed to shrug while leaning over the bed.

Tom forced words out through his throat. “Is my … am I …?”

“You got hit by a car, kiddo,” his father said.

And then he remembered the grille and the bumper advancing toward him.

“I had to go through hell and back to get a new glass,” complained Dr. Milton, coming back into the room. He stepped up alongside his father and looked down. “I think our patient could use some rest, don’t you?” He held the glass in front of Tom’s face and gently inserted the curved plastic straw between his lips.

The water, liquid silk, invaded him with the tastes of strawberries, milk, honey, air, sunshine. He drew another mouthful up from the glass, parted his lips to breathe, and the doctor slid the straw from his mouth.

“Enough for now, son,” he said.

His mother brushed his left hand with her fingers before stepping back.

Sometime after that, an hour or a day, Tom opened his eyes to a vision that seemed as unreal as a dream—at first he thought he had to be dreaming, for what he saw was the slim, fantastic figure of his cranky old neighbor on Eastern Shore Road, Lamont von Heilitz, gliding toward him from a dark corner of the room. Mr. von Heilitz was wearing one of his splendid suits, a pinstriped light grey, with a pale yellow vest that had wide lapels; in his left hand he held gloves of the same shade. Yes, it was a nightmare, for the darkness seemed to follow the old man as he approached the bed and blinking Tom, who feared that his strange neighbor would begin shaking his fist and screaming at him.

But he did not. With webs of shadowy darkness dripping from his shoulders, Mr. von Heilitz quietly patted his left arm and looked down with far more compassion than Dr. Bonaventure Milton. “I want you to get better, Tom Pasmore,” he whispered. Mr. von Heilitz leaned down over Tom’s body, and Tom saw the shadows that accompanied him spread across the fine network of lines in his white forehead. The wings of his grey hair shone. “Remember this,” he whispered, stepped back into darkness that seemed to await him, and was gone.

The small window opposite Tom’s bed was no more than a hole punched into a dingy whiteness, smudged here and there with ancient stains. Dirty-looking spiderwebs darkened the walls near the ceiling. Periodically these would mysteriously disappear, and some few days later as mysteriously reappear. Next to his bed was a table that held a glass of water and his books. A tray beneath the table swung out toward him at mealtimes. Near the door were two green plastic chairs. Behind his bedside table stood the pole to which were attached the various bags and bottles that nourished him. Through the door he could see the hospital corridor with its black and white tile floor over which moved a constant traffic of doctors, nurses, cleaners, orderlies, visitors, and his fellow patients. Even with the door closed, Tom was unaware of this traffic only when his pain was at its most ambitious.

For the hospital was as noisy as a foundry. The cleaners roamed the corridors at all hours, talking to themselves and playing their radios as they mopped with bored, angry movements of their arms. Their carts rattled and squealed, and the metal clamps of their ammoniac mops rang against their pails. Someone was always hauling laundry through the corridors, someone was always greeting a visitor with loud outcries, most often someone was groaning or screaming. During visiting hours the halls were crowded with mobs of people talking in falsely cheerful voices, and children pounded from one end of the corridor to another, clutching the strings of balloons.

His world was dominated by physical pain and the necessity of controlling that pain. Every three hours a nurse holding a small square tray marched quickly across his room and lifted a tiny white paper cup from among the other similar cups on the tray even before she reached his bedside, so that by the time she reached him she was in position to extend the cup to his waiting lips. Then there was an agonizing period in which the sweet, oily stuff in the cup temporarily failed to work. Sometimes during this period, the nurse, if she were Nancy Vetiver or Hattie Bascombe, would hold his hand or stroke his hair.

These small coins of affection soothed him.

In a minute or two the pain that had come up out of his body’s deepest places began to settle like a large animal going to sleep, and all the sharp smaller pains would turn fuzzy and slow.

One day during Tom’s third week in the hospital Dr. Milton entered his room while he was having a conversation with Nancy Vetiver, one of his two favorite nurses. She was a slim young blond woman of twenty-six with close-set brown eyes and harsh lines at the sides of her mouth. Nancy had his hand in hers and was telling him a story about her first year at Shady Mount—the raucous dormitory she had lived in, the food that had made her feel half-sick. Tom was hoping to get her to tell him something about the night nurse, Hattie Bascombe, whom he considered a wondrous and slightly fearsome character, but Nancy glanced over her shoulder as the doctor came in, squeezed his hand, and looked impassively at the doctor.

Tom saw Dr. Milton frown at their joined hands as he approached the bed. Nancy gently took her hand from his, and then stood up.

Dr. Milton tucked in his ample chin and frowned at her a moment before turning to Tom.

“Nurse Vetiver, isn’t it?” he asked.

Nancy was wearing a name tag, and Tom knew that the doctor must have encountered her many times before.

“It is,” she said.

“Aren’t there some essential aspects of your job that you ought to be seeing to?”

“This is an essential aspect of my job, Dr. Milton,” Nancy said.

“You feel—let me be sure I state this correctly—it medically beneficial to complain to this boy, who is of a good family, in fact a very good family”—here he glanced over at Tom with what was supposed to be a look of reassurance—“about the mutton served in the nurses’ residence?”

“That’s exactly what I feel, Doctor.”

For a moment the nurse and the doctor merely stared at each other. Tom saw Dr. Milton decide that it was not worth his while to debate hospital etiquette with this underling. He sighed. “I’ll want you to think about what you owe to this institution,” he said in a weary voice that suggested that he had said similar things many times before. “But we do have a patient, and an important one”—another curdled smile for Tom—“to deal with at the moment, Nurse Vetiver. This young man’s grandfather, my good friend Glen Upshaw, is still on the board of this hospital. Perhaps you might be good enough to let me conduct an examination?”

Nancy stepped back, and Dr. Milton leaned down to peer at Tom’s face.

“Feeling better, are we?”

“I guess,” Tom said.

“How’s the pain?”

“Pretty bad at times.”

“You’ll be back on your feet in no time,” the doctor said. “Nature is a great healer. I suppose we could increase your medication …?” He straightened up and turned his head to glance at Nancy. “Suppose we think about increasing his medication, shall we?”

“We’ll think about it,” she said. “Yes, sir.”

“Very good, then.” He vaguely patted Tom’s cast. “I thought it might be useful for me to pop in and have a chat with the boy, and now I see that it was. Yes, very useful. Everything going all right, nurse?”

Nancy smiled at the doctor with a face subtly changed, older, tougher, more cynical. She looked less beautiful to Tom, but more impressive. “Of course,” she said. She glanced at Tom, and when Tom met her eyes he understood: nothing said by Dr. Milton was of any importance at all.

“I’ll just add a note on his chart, then,” the doctor said, and busied himself with his pen for a moment.

He hooked the chart back on the bottom of his bed, gave Nancy a glance full of meaning Tom did not know how to interpret, and said, “I’ll tell your grandfather you’re doing splendidly, good mental attitude, all that sort of thing. He’ll be pleased.” He looked at his watch. “Well. You’re eating well, I assume? No mutton here, is there, Nurse? You must eat, you know—that’s nature’s way. Sometimes good solid food is the best medicine you can have.” Another glance at his watch. “Important appointment, I’m afraid. Glad we could get that little matter straightened out, Nurse Vetiver.”

“It’s a great relief to us all,” Nancy said.

Dr. Bonaventure Milton cast Nancy a lazy glance, nearly smiled with the same indifferent laziness, and after nodding to Tom, wandered out of the room. “Yes, sir,” Nancy said, as if to herself. So Tom understood everything he would ever have to understand about his doctor.

Later there was a “complication” with his leg, which had begun to feel as if helium were being pumped into it, making it so light that it threatened to shatter its cast and sail away into the air. Tom had ignored this feeling for as long as he could, but within a week it became a part of the pain that threatened to devour the whole of the world, and he had to confess it to someone. Nancy Vetiver said to tell Dr. Milton, really tell him; Hattie Bascombe, speaking from the darkness in the middle of the night, said, “You save up your knife from your supper, and when old Boney starts pattin’ your cast and tellin’ you that you just imaginin’ that feeling, you take that knife and stick it in his old fat fish-colored hand.” Tom thought that Hattie Bascombe was the other side of Nancy Vetiver, and then thought that every object and person must have its other, opposite side—the side that belonged to night.

As Hattie predicted, Dr. Milton scoffed at his story of a “light” pain, an “airy” pain, and even his parents did not believe in it. They did not want to believe that their doctor, the distinguished Bonaventure Milton, could be in error (nor did the surgeon, a Dr. Bostwick, an otherwise blameless man), and above all they did not want to believe that Tom would need yet another operation. Nor did Tom—he just wanted them to cut open the cast and let the air out. Of course that was no solution, the doctors would not do that. And so the abscess within his leg grew and grew, and by the time Nancy and Hattie got Dr. Bostwick to examine this “imaginary” complaint, Tom was found to need a new operation, which would not only remove the abscess but reset his leg. Which meant that first they would have to break it again—it was precisely as though he were to be propped up on Calle Burleigh and run over again.

Hattie Bascombe leaned toward him out of the night and said, “You’re a scholar, and this here is your school. Your lessons are hard—hard—but you gotta learn ’em. Most people don’t learn what you bein’ taught until they a lot older. Nothing is safe, that’s what you been learnin’. Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night. Don’t matter who your granddaddy is.”

The world is half night—that was what he knew.

Tom spent the entire summer in Shady Mount Hospital. His parents visited him with the irregularity he came to expect of them, for he knew that they saw their visits as disruptive and upsetting, in some way harmful to his recovery: they sent books and toys, and while most of the toys came to pieces in his hands or were useless to one confined to bed, the books were always perfect, every one. When his parents appeared in his room, they seemed quieter and older than he remembered them, survivors of another life, and what they spoke of was the saga of what they had endured on the day of his accident.

The one time his grandfather came to the hospital, he stood beside the bed leaning on the umbrella he used as a cane, with something tight and hard in his face that doubted Tom, wondered about him. This, Tom suddenly remembered, was overwhelmingly familiar—the sensation that his grandfather disliked him.

Had he been running away?

No, of course not, why would he run away?

He didn’t have any friends out there, did he? Had he maybe been going to Elm Cove? Two boys in his old class at Brooks-Lowood lived in Elm Cove, maybe he had taken it into his head to go all the way out there and see them?

His class was now his old class because he would miss a year of school.

Maybe, he said. I don’t remember. I just don’t remember. He could vaguely remember the day of his accident, could remember the milk cart and the NO PASSENGERS ALLOWED sign and the driver asking him about girlfriends.

Well, which one had he been going to see?

His memory turned to sludge, to pure resistance. His grandfather’s insistent questions felt like blows.

Why had his accident happened on Calle Burleigh, eight miles east of Elm Cove? Had he been hitchhiking?

“Why are you asking me all these questions?” Tom blurted, and burst into tears.

There came a muted shocked exhalation from the door, and Tom knew that some of the hospital staff were lingering there to get a look at his grandfather.

“You’d better stick to your own part of town,” his grandfather said, and the young doctors and lounging orderlies gave almost inaudible noises of approval.

At the end of August, during the last thirty minutes of visiting hours, a girl named Sarah Spence walked into his room. Tom put down his book and looked at her in astonishment. Sarah, too, seemed astonished to find herself in a hospital room, and looked around at everything in a wondering, wide-eyed way before she came across the room to his bed. For a moment Tom thought that yes, it was astonishing that he should be here, and that she should see him like this. In that moment he was the old Tom Pasmore, and when he saw how Sarah shyly inspected his massive cast with a smile of dismay, it seemed to him ridiculous that he should have been so unhappy.

Sarah Spence had been a friend of his since their earliest days at school, and when she met his eyes he felt restored to his life. He saw at once that her shyness had left her, and that unlike the boys from their class who had come to visit his room, she was not intimidated by the evidences of his injuries. By now his head wound had healed, and his right arm was out of its bandages and cast, so he looked far more like his old self than he had during most of July.

As they took each other in for a moment before speaking, Tom realized that Sarah’s face was no longer that of a little girl, but almost a woman’s, and her taller body was beginning to be a woman’s too. He saw that Sarah was very much aware of the difference in her face and body.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Would you look at that cast?”

“I look at it a lot, actually,” he said.

She smiled, and raised her eyes to meet his. “Oh, Tom,” she said, and for a moment there hovered between them the possibility that Sarah Spence would hold his hand, or touch his cheek, or kiss him, or burst into tears and do all three—Tom almost went dizzy with his desire for her touch, and Sarah herself scarcely knew what she wished to do, or how to express the wave of tenderness and grief that had passed through her with his joke. She took a step nearer to him, and was on the verge of reaching out to touch him when she saw how pale his skin was, ashy just beneath the golden surface, and that his hair looked lank and matted. For just a moment her fifth-grade friend Tom Pasmore looked like a stranger. He seemed shrunken, and his bones were prominent, and even though this familiar stranger before her was a little boy—a little boy—he had ugly dark smudges under his eyes like an old man. Then Tom’s face seemed to settle into well-known lines, and he was not a little boy with an old man’s eyes but on the verge of adolescence again, the boy she liked best in her class, the friend who had spent hours every day talking and playing with her in summers and weekends past—but by then she had unconsciously taken a half-step backwards, and was folding her hands together at her waist.

They were suddenly awkward with each other.

To say something, anything at all, lest she run out of the room, Tom said, “Do you know how long I’ve been here?” And immediately regretted it, for it sounded to him as if he was accusing her of having ignored him.

And then it seemed to him that he was trying to tell Sarah Spence in one sentence about all the changes that had taken place in him. So he said, “I’ve been here forever.”

“I heard yesterday,” Sarah said. “We just got back from up north.”

“Up north,” a phrase Tom understood as well as Sarah, did not refer to the northern end of the island, but to the northern tier of states in continental North America. Sarah’s parents, like many far east end residents (though not the Pasmores), owned property in northern Wisconsin, and spent much of June, July, and August in a pine lodge beside a freshwater lake. At the end of June the Redwing clan, Mill Walk’s most important family, moved virtually as a single organism to a separate compound on Eagle Lake. “Mom found out from Mrs. Jacobs, when she was talking to her at Ostend’s Market.” She paused. “You got hit by a car?”

Tom nodded. She, too, he could see, had questions she could not ask: How did it feel? Can you remember it? Did it hurt a lot?

“How did that happen?” she asked. “You just walked in front of a car?”

“I guess I was way out on Calle Burleigh, and it was rush hour, and …” Unable to say any more, because all he could remember now of that day was how the car had looked just before it struck him, he shrugged.

“How dumb can you get?” she said. “What are you going to do next? Dive into an empty pool?”

“I think my next death-defying act is going to be trying to get out of this bed.”

“And when do you do that? When do you get to go home?”

“I don’t know.”

Unsettlingly adult exasperation showed on her face. “Well, how are you going to go to school if you don’t go home?” When he did not answer, the exasperation was replaced by a moment of pure confusion, and then by something like disbelief. “You’re not coming back to school?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m going to be out a whole year. It’s true,” he added in the face of her growing incredulity. His depression had begun to return. “I can’t even get out of bed for another eight weeks—that’s what they told me anyhow. When I finally do get home, they’re putting me in a hospital bed in the living room. How can I go to school, Sarah? I can’t even get out of bed!” He was appalled to hear himself making terrible ragged noises as his pains began to announce themselves again. Tom thought that Sarah Spence looked as if she were sorry to have come to the hospital—and she was right, she did not belong here. In some way he had never quite realized, she had been his best and most important friend, and now a vast abyss lay between them.

Sarah did not run out of the room, but for Tom it was almost worse that she watched him dry his face and blow his nose as she uttered meaningless phrases about how everything would be all right. He saw her retreat into the world of ignorant daylight, backing away in polite horror from his fear and pain and anger. In any case, she did not know the worst thing—that he had been castrated and had nothing between his legs but a tube, a fact so terrible that Tom himself could not hold it clearly in his mind for more than a few seconds at a time. Now, without being aware of what he was doing, his left hand crept to the smooth groin of his body cast.

“You must itch a lot,” Sarah said.

He pulled his hand away as if the cast were red hot. She remained until visiting hours were over, talking to him about a new puppy named Bingo and what she had done “up north,” and how Fritz Redwing’s cousin Buddy had taken one of his family’s motorboats out into the middle of Eagle Lake and tried to dynamite the fish, and her voice went on and on, full of kindness and restraint and sympathy, as well as other feelings he could not or would not identify, until Nancy Vetiver came in to tell her that she had to leave.

“I didn’t know you had such a pretty girlfriend,” Nancy said. “I think I’m jealous.”

Sarah’s entire face turned pink, and she reached for her bag, promising to be back soon. When she left she sent no more than a glancing smile toward Tom, and did not speak or look at Nancy. She never came to the hospital again.

Two days later his door opened just before the end of visiting hours, and Tom looked up with his heart beating, expecting to see Sarah Spence. Lamont von Heilitz smiled flickeringly from the doorway, and somehow appeared to understand everything at once. “Ah, you’ve been waiting for someone else. But it’s just your cranky old neighbor, I’m afraid. Shall I leave you alone?”

“Please don’t, please come in,” Tom said, more pleased than he would have thought possible at the sight of the old man. Mr. von Heilitz was wearing a dark blue suit with a double-breasted vest, a dark red rose in his buttonhole, and gloves of the same red as the rose. He looked silly and beautiful at once, Tom thought, and was visited by what seemed the odd desire that he might look a great deal like this when he was as old as Mr. von Heilitz. Then his mind snagged and caught on a buried memory, and he goggled at the old man, who smiled back at him, as if again he had understood everything before Tom had to say a word.

“You came to see me,” Tom said. “A long time ago.”

“Yes,” the old man said.

“You said—you said to remember your visit.”

“And so you did,” said Mr. von Heilitz. “And now I have come again. I understand that you will be coming home soon, but thought that you might enjoy reading a few books I had around the place. It’s all right if you don’t. But you might give them a try, anyhow.” And from nowhere, it seemed, he produced two slim books—The Speckled Band and The Murders in the Rue Morgue—and handed them over to Tom. “I hope you will be good enough to pay me a call sometime when you are out of the hospital and fully recovered.”

Tom nodded, dumbfounded, and soon after Mr. von Heilitz glided out of the room.

“Who the hell was that?” Nancy asked him. “Dracula?”

Tom himself left the hospital on the last day of August, and was installed in the bed set up in the living room. The big cast had been replaced by one that encased him only from ankle to thigh. It seemed that he had not been castrated after all. Nancy Vetiver visited him after he had been home a few days, and at first seemed to bring into the house with her the whole noisy, well-regulated atmosphere of the hospital—for a moment it seemed that his lost world would be restored. She told him stories of the other nurses and the patients he had known, which involved him as Sarah Spence’s tales of northern Wisconsin had not, and told him that Hattie Bascombe had said that she would put a hex on him if he didn’t come visit her. But then his mother, who was having one of her good days and had left them alone to order groceries from Ostend’s, came back in and was chillingly polite to the nurse, and Tom saw Nancy become increasingly uncomfortable under Gloria Pasmore’s questions about her parents and her education. For the first time Tom noticed that Nancy’s grammar was uncertain—she said “she don’t” and “they was”—and that she sometimes laughed at things that weren’t funny. A few minutes later, Tom’s mother showed her to the door, thanking her with elaborate insincerity for all she had done.

When Gloria came back into the living room, she said, “I don’t think nurses expect to be tipped, do you? I don’t think they should.”

“Oh, Mom,” Tom said, knowing that this concealed a negative verdict.

“That young woman looked very hard to me,” said his mother. “Very hard indeed. People as hard as that frighten me.”