try as he might, he could not stop crying, his humiliation made worse by the mundane fact that unlike anyone else in the world, he couldn’t wipe his tears away. His cumbersome attempt to do so with the bandaged stumps was at once grotesquely comic and awful to watch, his bumbling effort reflected in his sickroom mirror.
Lana knew she was caring too much but couldn’t help it, for in return for her kindness, her attention to the smallest detail, William Spence, she knew, was falling in love with her. Once before there was a brief sojourn in Boston General during her six months’ stint as a student nurse, and she had seen it many times and knew it was a common enough phenomenon — the rapidity with which young men, especially, fell for the angels of mercy. But here, far from his home, the intensity of feeling for someone tending his every need, from a sip of water to a bedpan, who touched him, held his wrist gently for a minute, taking the beat of his heart, meant more than home. And for a young man, experiencing his first time at sea, his first time away, Lana became mother and sweetheart, so loved, so passionately desired, that the very hint of her perfume filled him with life those first few days, and when the coughing began, Lana held him during the violent episodes mat would go on for minutes at a time until, the stumps of his arms throbbing with pain, he would collapse back onto the pile of pillows. Ironically, during these episodes, his face, flushed by the coughing, would take on a healthy-looking pink compared to the drained postoperative face of a few days before. And she was with him as he talked with the intimacy that only patients and airline passengers do, telling her of how different he was from his father, for whom everything had to be explained in terms of rational behavior. How they had difficulty in getting close to each other, though he clearly admired and loved his father a great deal.
“I suppose,” said William tiredly, his mouth dry, the morphine barely holding the pain at bay, “all fathers are like that. And all sons.”
“Not all,” Lana replied, struck by the fact that he had so shyly avoided calling her by her first name. No one had told him she was separated, and in his naivete, not seeing a wedding band or engagement ring, it hadn’t occurred to him that she might have been married, a belief that only made his dreams of making love to her as the untouched “she” all the more erotic and insistent. Normally in the other hospitals it was the practice to assign male nurses to assist the incapacitated male patients in bathing, shaving, and so forth, but with most eligible males being called up for what some generals were now secretly saying would be a longer war, the overwhelming bulk of the nursing jobs fell to the female nurses and the nurses’ aides.
The first morning, after they had sailed past the icebergs north of Newfoundland and were heading along the island’s western coastline, Lana bathed him. He had been too groggy to notice and had kept falling back to sleep. The second morning, however, he was as aware of his erection as she, his face turning beet-red. She simply put a warm washcloth over it, saying, “It’s what we in the trade call a ‘tent.’ Means you’re getting better.” He tried to think of anything else — cold showers, long walks— but nothing worked. The astonishing sexiness of her uniform that was not supposed to be sexy was too much for him, and he grew harder. Lana returned to the subject of his family, asking about his mother — Anne, wasn’t it? — his sisters, Rosemary and Georgina.
“I think you said Rosemary was a teacher?” she said, beginning to make the bed, giving him an excuse to turn away.
“Ah, yes,” he said, so tense, so ill at ease, he imagined that being interviewed for assistant chef at the Savoy couldn’t be more anxiety-producing. “Yes,” he answered. “Ah — Rosemary’s a teacher. English — Shakespeare.”
“Uh-huh,” replied Lana. “In London?”
“Yes, er — I mean, no — ah — she teaches in a public school. Ah, what you’d call a—”
Lana gently raised his right arm.
“A private school,” he raced on. “I don’t think you have them in America.”
“Private schools? Oh yes. I went to one before college—”
“Oh, I mean you don’t call them public schools, you call them private. We call private ‘public’ “ He was in a torture of embarrassment and lust. “It’s all very confusing, I’m afraid.”
“Not really,” she said, smiling. “You’re just all mixed-up over there.”
“Yes,” he admitted freely. “Yes, we are rather.”
There was an awkward silence as she fluffed the pillows behind him. Her perfume washed over him. Lana gently moved his arm.
“Would you like me to bring a tape recorder for you?”
Immediately he thought of a tape measure. Maybe his wasn’t as big as others she’d seen. How many had she — the filthy bastards.
“Tape?” he asked, his voice raspy, cracking as if she’d said “snake.”
“To send home to your family.” She removed the facecloth softly, swiftly, pulling up the sheet. As it touched his loins, he was terrified he’d have an orgasm right there. It would be sheer bliss. Then he realized what she was telling him, ever so nicely. No, more than nicely — wonderfully. He smelled her perfume again, drinking it in. He loved her. The thought of doing it with her — he’d never had any woman — suddenly seemed rather dirty, unbecoming of her beauty, her goodness.
She had, he now realized, really been telling him ever so gently that while he could never write again, he could and should start thinking about other people — how his parents would be sick with worry after the rather brief message that had been sent to inform the War Office of his whereabouts and condition. It was her thoughtfulness that touched him now and stoked his need for her as mother and lover. But he could see no chance of the dream materializing.
While he was waiting for the tape, William Spence’s brain raced with the things he had to tell his parents, for despite a persistent weakness, and the exhausting episodes of coughing, his spirits were buoyed by Lana’s presence.
When she brought the tape, it was as if he’d suddenly developed stage fright — couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Ever considerate, Lana had started the recorder and left, but the tape in motion only made it more difficult for him to think of something to say. Though he’d tried clumsily to push the “stop” button with his elbows, he sent the machine instead crashing to the deck. He was in such an agitated state that tears of exhaustion and rage streamed down his face and he started another bout of coughing, humiliation heaped on top of his frustration with his inability to perform such an elementary task. When she returned, Lana interpreted the signs at first as evidence of indescribable pain. But if he had such difficulty, why hadn’t he pushed the buzzer? His elbow would easily— Then she saw that the cord, with its emergency push button, had swung away down the side of the cot as he’d made a grab for the recorder, which now lay on the deck, its plastic case cracked, the tape unraveling. She eased him back on the pillows and, taking a moistened towel, wiped his face, her voice as soothing as her touch. She told him not to worry about it; she would bring another and would think of something so that he could stop and start a recorder by himself. As she leaned over him, tucking in the bed-clothes, her breasts touched his chest and he wanted to hold her, kiss her. It was an ache inside of him.
“I love you,” he said simply.
She said nothing for a moment or two, straightening up the bedclothes, then stopped. “I know,” she said softly, and bent down to collect the broken pieces of the tape recorder.
When she brought him a second recorder, the talking came easily, as now that he’d declared himself to her, all things were possible. He spoke of his older sister, Rosemary, with whom he shared a fond affection. He was not anywhere as intellectual or trained in the classics as she was, he told Lana, but Rosemary had never made him feel that not going on to university was a shame, unlike Georgina, who, as fiery as she was young and beautiful, had castigated him soundly for not having a “social conscience” and planning to do “something with your life.” Georgina was in her third year at London School of Economics and Political Science, and her social conscience had embraced the left of the political spectrum — a “born protester,” her father often lamented, claiming, not too far from the truth, that she seemed to have more causes then courses.
It was still difficult for William to speak to his father, even on the tape. He reminisced about the walks up on the chalk downs, the small, winding, tree-shaded lanes, and the holidays they had spent cruising the canals once so awfully neglected but now largely restored, like the two-barge-wide lock at Stoke Bruerne, where all the people had lined the canal to watch them squeeze through. Petrol must be rationed now.
When it came to the double amputation, he spoke quickly about the wonders of modern technology, how Nurse Brentwood had told him of the fantastic things they were doing with computer-controlled limbs these days, and how things you never realized — tape, for example — were a darn sight easier than having to write a long letter. “Never was much of a speller anyway, was I?” he asked his father. But he could not tell his father he loved
