archery set for the children. The things he spent his money on! When they were never well off, in the best of times. He took the set on their Sunday drive to a field outside the city — nailed the canvas target to a tree trunk. Oh, he never gave a thought to danger. He was not the type to lie awake nights listing all that could go wrong. Well, anyway. She couldn’t say just how it had happened (she was arranging a bouquet of winter grasses at the time, as she no longer partook in sports), but somehow, she got hit. It was Cody who drew the bowstring, but that was incidental; Cody was not the one she had blamed, after the first little flurry. She blamed Beck, who through sheer thoughtlessness if not intention had shot her through the heart; or not the heart exactly but the fleshy part above it, between breast and shoulder. It was the queerest sensation, like being slapped — no sting whatsoever, but a jarring and then a disk of bright blood on her favorite blouse. “Oh!” she said, and she looked down, and went on holding her weeds. Then the pain began. Beck, white faced, pulled the arrow out. Jenny started crying. They drove straight home, forgetting to untack the target from the tree, but by the time they arrived the bleeding had stopped and it appeared there was no real danger. Pearl dressed the wound herself — iodine and gauze. Two days later, she noticed something amiss. The wound was not better but worse, inflamed, and she had a fever. Beck was on another trip, and she had to go to the doctor alone, rushing off breathless and hastily hatted because she wanted to get home again before the children returned from school. In those days, Dr. Vincent was just building up his practice after a tour of duty in the army. She remembered he still had a full head of hair, and he wasn’t yet wearing glasses. He gave her a shot of penicillin — a miracle drug he’d first used overseas, he said. Walking home, she felt a tremendous sense of well-being, the way you always do when a doctor has taken upon himself the burden of your illness; but that night, she collapsed. First there was a rash, then chills, then a hazy and swarming landscape. It was Cody who called the ambulance. In the hospital, once the crisis was past, everyone acted stern and reproachful, as if it had been her fault. “You almost died,” a nurse told her. But that was nonsense. Of course she wouldn’t have died; she had children. When you have children, you’re obligated to live. She closed her eyes against the nurse’s words. Then two doctors came in and pulled up chairs beside her bed and solemnly, portentously explained about penicillin. She must never, never take it again, and must keep instructions to that effect in her pocketbook at all times. Pearl wasn’t paying much heed (she was framing a request to be released, so she could get on home to her children), but she did remember they said, “Once is your limit. Twice will kill you.” That impressed her. It was like something in a fairy tale — like a magic potion you could use only once and never again. And here she’d wasted it on such a paltry occurrence: a bow-and-arrow wound. No more miracles! In later years, when penicillin was a household word and her grandchildren took it for every little thing, she would go on and on about it. “Lucky you. Poor me. I’d just better not get an infection, is all I can say, or come down with strep throat or pneumonia.”
Pneumonia.
There was a watery, roaring sound in her ears that made it hard to hear her own voice. She had to wait for it to subside before she spoke. “Dr. Vincent,” she said.
“I’m here.”
His hand was still on hers. It was no longer icy. He had warmed himself on her skin as if she were a stove. She gathered her voice and said, “Tell Ezra I’m staying.”
“But—” he said.
“I know what I’m doing.”
He was silent.
“Tell him,” she said forcefully, “that this is nothing. You understand? I don’t want any hospitals. It would kill me, just kill me to hear those loudspeakers paging doctors I have never heard of. This is just a cold. Tell him.”
“Well,” said Dr. Vincent. He cleared his throat. He removed his hand from hers. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“I’m sure.”
He seemed to be thinking. He turned away and said to Ezra, “You hear what she says?”
“Yes,” said Ezra, closer than Pearl had expected.
“I suggest we call your brother and sister, though.”
Pearl felt a stirring of interest.
“But if it’s that serious …” Ezra said.
“Let’s just see what happens,” the doctor told him. He laid a palm on Pearl’s forehead.
After that, he must have left. The roar came back to her ears and she didn’t quite hear him go. She was dwelling on thoughts of Cody and Jenny; it would be lovely to have all her children together. Then suddenly a heavy chill spread across her chest. Why, she thought. Dr. Vincent is going to allow this! Yes, he’s really going to allow it. This is it, then!
Surely not.
She’d been preoccupied with death for several years now; but one aspect had never before crossed her mind: dying, you don’t get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant by such-and- such? All these years, it emerged, she’d been expecting to run into Beck again. How odd; she hadn’t realized. She had also supposed that there would be some turning point, a flash of light in which she’d suddenly find out the secret; one day she’d wake up wiser and more contented and accepting. But it hadn’t happened. Now it never would. She’d supposed that on her deathbed … deathbed! Why, that was this everyday, ordinary Posturepedic, not the ornate brass affair that she had always envisioned. She had supposed that on her deathbed, she would have something final to tell her children when they gathered round. But nothing was final. She didn’t have anything to tell them. She felt a kind of shyness; she felt inadequate. She stirred her feet fretfully and searched for a cooler place on the pillow.
“Children,” she had said. This was just before Cody left for college, the day she’d burned Beck’s letters. She said, “Children, there’s something I want to discuss with you.”
Cody was talking about a job. He had to find one in order to help with the tuition fees. “I could work in the cafeteria,” he was saying, “or maybe off-campus. I don’t know which.” Then he heard his mother and looked over at her.
“It’s about your father,” Pearl said.
Jenny said, “I’d choose the cafeteria.”
“You know, my darlings,” Pearl told them, “how I always say your father’s away on business.”
“But off-campus they might pay more,” said Cody, “and every penny counts.”
“At the cafeteria you’d be with your classmates, though,” Ezra said.
“Yes, I thought of that.”
“All those coeds,” Jenny said. “Cheerleaders. Girls in their little white bobby sox.”
“Sweater girls,” Cody said.
“There’s something I want to explain about your father,” Pearl told them.
“Choose the cafeteria,” Ezra said.
“Children?”
“The cafeteria,” they said.
And all three gazed at her coolly, out of gray, unblinking, level eyes exactly like her own.
She dreamed it was her nineteenth birthday and that devilish John Dupree had brought her a tin of chocolates and a burnt-leather ornament for her hair. “Why, John, how cunning! Have a sweet,” she told him. In the dream, it puzzled her to know that John Dupree had been dead for sixty-one years. He was killed in the Argonne Forest by the Huns. She remembered paying a visit of condolence to his mother, who, however, was not receiving guests. “It’s all been a mistake, apparently,” Pearl told John Dupree. And she fastened up her hair with the burnt-leather ornament.
“There’s no question,” Jenny said. “We have to call an ambulance. What’s got into Dr. Vincent? Is he senile?”
“He does all right, for his age,” Ezra said. As usual, he seemed to have missed some central point; even Pearl could see that. Jenny sighed, or perhaps just made some impatient rustling sound with her clothes.
“It’s lucky you called me,” she said. “I come and find everything falling apart.”
“Nothing’s falling apart.”
