SCENE 15
When Cynthia awakened early Friday evening, her first thought was that she was glad to be home. She had been here now for six hours, and she had slept for five of them. The hospital had been exhausting. All the jokes about being awakened to get a sleeping pill were true. And even though they had tried to keep news of her hospitalization quiet, people had come. Dad had to be there, of course. And Ben; she had really needed to see him. But not people like Chuck Heilman. He was such an oaf. He’d popped in on her early on Thursday evening while she was listening to a concert on PBS. He’d said he was going to see Meryl Streep in a new movie. He had stayed for almost half an hour, reciting his platitudes about persevering and centering and coming to inner peace in order to make outer healing possible.
On his way out he had asked her why she was in there.
“They’re not sure,” she had said, and later, after Ben had arrived, she had cried over how selfish Chuck Heilman had been.
“He was here to kill time before his damned movie,” she had said. “And to find out the latest gossip.”
“He’s a poltroon,” Ben had said.
“I was spiteful. I wouldn’t tell him what was wrong.”
But they knew what was wrong. The doctor had confirmed it on Thursday afternoon, and she had been the one to tell Ben when he came down on Thursday night.
Multiple sclerosis.
“The odd thing is that I feel better,” she had said. “I’m stronger, and I can walk better. My vision is clearing. I thought I was getting well.”
Ben had held her hand and had said nothing.
She was going to see a doctor in Washington next week for a second opinion, but she was already letting the news settle into her life, like a dye into cloth. Dr. Manning had been nice about explaining the disease. He had suspected it when she had reported her first episodes last summer, but the diagnosis depended largely on eliminating other possibilities. The good news was that she did not appear to have the type of MS that ran its course quickly. In these early stages, especially, she could look forward to remissions. There could be times when she felt well and could certainly go back to her work. Finish her dissertation? Absolutely. Play Desdemona? Of course, if she felt like it.
It was the later part that he had played down, that she and Ben had avoided discussing themselves. The doctor said there were all kinds of new treatments involving diet and water therapy. It was not at all a bleak prognosis, he suggested. But bleakly was how the Wardens had reacted. It could take as few as five years or as many as thirty, but eventually she was likely to become more and more debilitated, less and less able to move or to speak, and she would very slowly die.
She should not be dwelling on the future. It was 8:00 on Friday evening, and she lay in her own roomy, comfortable bed. She stared at the digits on the face of the alarm clock across the room and realized that she was seeing clearly. Her double vision was gone. She cautiously emerged from bed. Yes, the eyesight was clear. Her left ankle was still a bit shaky, but it, too, was improved. She wanted so much to believe that it had all been a mistaken diagnosis, that she was actually well, and that the aberration of the last week would not visit her again. She could not do it, though. As much as her heart wanted to pop champagne corks and toss confetti, her head stood sternly by to remind her that she was suffering from a devious, unpredictable disease. She was sick with multiple sclerosis. There was no cure.
And the facts made tonight that much more precious to her. The poisons in her system had lost their power for the moment. It was low tide. She slipped out of her cotton nightgown and into some jeans and a tee shirt. She was twenty-three years old, and she felt good. She liked the feel of the jeans against her bare skin, liked the unrestraining T-shirt. The instant after she pulled it on, she wanted to pull it off again. She was doused in desire to make love to Benjamin Warden, who sat and wrote in the study next door.
Ben was working on a poem. He had been working on it since Wednesday, and it was giving him trouble. He was struggling to fit the information into the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Cynthia had known better than to ask why it had to be a sonnet. Ben was no more free to manipulate the shape and the structure of a poem than a mapmaker was to change the contours of a landscape. Ben had told her more than once that revising his work was just a matter of listening for the finished version of a poem, the version that had existed all along.
The building was quiet. The boys were studying in their rooms. She walked out of their bedroom to peek into Ben’s study and saw him facing away from her, leaning back in his swivel chair and reading a piece of typed paper. That was good. Perhaps he was finished. If he were in the middle of a problem, he would be hunched over the keyboard or pacing.
In a moment she would interrupt him, but just for now she took in the pleasure of observing him. He was twelve years older than she, but he was still so much like a boy. She loved to look at his shoulders, at the shape of his dark hair on the back of
