Sourland

socks, we’d been visiting my grandmother earlier that afternoon and we’d dropped by the Sparta Blues Festival on the river on our way home, and after that, a detour, as my father called it, to his office on East Capitol Street, and now my clothes were rumpled and smelly for I’d slept in them sprawled on top of my bed without the energy to undress and anxious to be prepared should someone from the hospital call in the night, if my mother came to wake me Hurry! get up! they want us at the hospital, your father may be dying. This terrible call had not yet come and yet every breath I drew was a preparation for it, I was fourteen years old and found myself in one of those cruel fairy tales in which a daughter must perform certain rituals and tests without question, that her father will be allowed to live. And when we were at my father’s bedside in the chill of the ICU where your fingernails turned blue without your noticing, and you could fall asleep on your feet like a zombie, and begin to crumple to the floor without your noticing, it could not happen that the terrible call would come waking us from our exhausted sleep for already we were awake and we were at the hospital. Softly my mother spoke my father’s name: Harvey? Harvey? I love you. And in an urgent undertone I said: Daddy? Daddy? It’s Madelyn. For to say I love you was not possible. For so desperately I loved my father, to have spoken such words I love you was not possible. I could not have explained why, there were no words to explain why. Seeing me you’d have thought, A sulky girl, when she should be a good girl. My mother who was ordinarily very alert to my moods and to my “personal appearance” hadn’t seemed to notice that I’d been sleeping in my clothes and smelled of my body for having washed only my sticky hands and rubbed a washcloth over my feverish face, my red- rimmed pig eyes. (Those pig eyes in the mirror, I could not bear to see. Brimming with hot-guilt tears that spilled and burned like acid.) In the past two and a half days I hadn’t been able to sit down at any table to eat and had not been able to eat much as a consequence but I made certain that I brushed my teeth until my gums bled for I could not bear the sensation of anything between my teeth.

Who was it? they’d asked. Who did this to your father?

Try to remember if you saw. Must’ve seen.

Hospital rules for ICU differed from rules for the rest of the hospital: no more than three visitors at a time were allowed at a patient’s bedside. And so when my father’s older brother and his wife came to see my father, my mother asked me to leave. Of course this was a reasonable request. Of course I was not angry at my mother, or my relatives. Yet quickly I walked away, avoiding the friendly smiles of the ICU nurses who’d come to recognize me and my family Don’t look at me! Please don’t smile at me! You don’t know me! Leave me alone. I took the stairs down to the foyer, not the elevator. I dreaded being trapped inside an elevator with strangers, still more I dreaded encountering someone who recognized me as Harvey Fleet’s daughter who would take my hand in sympathy or hug me, and I would push rudely away, my face would break and turn ugly with tears glistening like snot.

How small the Sparta Hospital was, in 1959! Yet no one then seemed to have known.

Such silly people. It’s easy to laugh at us.

The very air exuded a spent, sepia cast as if faded by time like an old Polaroid photograph. Though the hospital was air-conditioned, cold as a refrigerator, yet there was a just-perceptible odor of stale urine, fecal matter, rot beneath the sharper odor of disinfectant. Visitors to the hospital and hospital staff appeared stiff and clumsy as mannequin figures in a painting by Edward Hopper. Voices were overly shrill and emphatic as TV voices and if there was laughter it was not convincing laughter but reminded me of canned TV laughter. Of course I was one of those figures myself, a solitary girl of fourteen in rumpled clothes sitting at a table, at the edge of the cafeteria. My eyes stung with fatigue, my head ached, and there was a sour, dark taste at the back of my mouth. Badly I did not want to be in this place but had nowhere else to go, for if I left the hospital, and went home, my father might die, and I would not be at his bedside. I’d brought a library book with me but couldn’t concentrate, how insubstantial were printed words, passages of type in a book of dog-eared pages, I could think only of my father trapped in his hospital bed in the intensive care unit, unconscious, made to breathe in anguished gasps by a machine, his ravaged head and face swathed in white gauze and a single bruised and bloodshot eye exposed…. And I thought of how I had found him lying on the floor of his office on East Capitol Street. Thinking at first that he had lost his balance somehow and fallen, struck his head on the sharp edge of the desk, for he was bleeding from a head wound, and he was bleeding from injuries to his face. He was whimpering and moaning through clenched teeth. The door to my father’s office had been left open and so I stood in the doorway for an astonished moment uncertain what it was I was seeing. Before I had time to be frightened the thought came to me Daddy would not want me to see him like this. He would not want anyone to see him like this.

I began to see how memory pools might accumulate in such places as this cafeteria and in waiting rooms through the hospital. In corners, in the shadows. Beneath tables like mine. These memory pools made the worn tile floor damp, sticky, discolored as by mildew. And maybe there were actual tears, soaked into the floor. I felt a shiver of dread: you could not walk anywhere in such a place without the anguished memories of strangers sticking to your shoes. Their dread of what was to come in their lives, what ruptures, what unspeakable losses. Early that morning my father had undergone emergency surgery to reduce pressure on his brain, into which burst blood vessels had been bleeding since he’d suffered “blunt force trauma” to the head. Yet my father was but one of how many thousands of patients who’d been hospitalized at Sparta Memorial Hospital over the years…. One day with precise scientific instruments certain of these memories might be exhumed, I thought. Like organic matter identified from the stains of long ago. And so there might be a future time when these thoughts that so tormented me now would be calmly recalled; when all this, in which I was trapped — the hospital, the visitors’ lounge, the slow-ticking afternoon in July 1959 — would be past.

He lived! He did live, he survived.

He died. “Passed away.” There was nothing to be done.

Yet at this time, I was safe from such knowledge. At this time, my father, Harvey Fleet, was still alive.

“Madelyn?”

Vaguely I had been aware of someone approaching my table, coming up behind me, as frequently individuals were making their way past in this crowded space, and I had been aware of someone pausing, looming over me. I looked up in expectation of seeing one of my male relatives but instead I saw a man whom I didn’t recognize at first, with a two days’ growth of beard on his jaws, amber-tinted sunglasses, and thick disheveled graying hair that seemed to rise like a geyser at the crown of his head. “Madelyn Fleet. It is you.” The surprise was that this man was my seventh-grade math teacher, Mr. Carmichael, whom I had not seen in more than two years and then only in our school building. The way in which Mr. Carmichael had intoned Madelyn Fleet was his teacherly teasing way, which I remembered. I had to remember too, with a quick stab of emotion, that I’d been in love with Mr. Carmichael, in secret, when I was twelve years old.

Now I was fourteen, and much changed. In my former teacher’s eyes this change was being registered.

Smiling down at me, Mr. Carmichael was smoking a cigarette for in 1959 it was not forbidden to smoke cigarettes in a hospital, even in most hospital rooms. How strange it was to see my seventh-grade math teacher unshaven as none of his students had ever seen him, and his hair that had always been trimmed short now grown long, curling languidly behind his ears, and threaded with silvery gray wires. It was a warmly humid midsummer and so Mr. Carmichael had rolled up his shirtsleeves to his elbows; the cuffs hung free, at a rakish angle. The front of Mr. Carmichael’s shirt was damp with perspiration and looked as if it hadn’t been changed in days. From such signs I understood that Mr. Carmichael too was an anxious visitor to Sparta Memorial Hospital, yet even in his state of distraction and dread he was smiling at me, and his eyes behind the tinted lenses of his glasses were alert and intense in a way I did not remember from when I’d been his student. When he inquired what I was reading I had no choice but to show him the cover of the book, which was a novel by H. G. Wells that elicited from Mr. Carmichael a remark meant to be clever and knowing, for at our school Mr. Carmichael — whose first name we giggled to see was Luther — had a reputation for being clever and knowing if also, at times, sarcastic, sardonic, and inscrutable; a teacher who graded harshly, at times; for which reason, while some girl students admired Mr. Carmichael and strove to please him, most of our classmates were uncomfortable in his classes, and disliked him. Even boys who laughed at Mr. Carmichael’s jokes did not wholly trust him, for he could turn on you, if you were not cautious. There were rumors about Mr. Carmichael being complained of by the parents of certain students and perhaps by certain of his fellow teachers and vaguely last year I’d heard that Mr. Carmichael no longer taught at the school…. As if he could hear my thoughts and wished to commandeer them, Mr. Carmichael leaned over me, saying, in a lowered