He could talk to Celia about Mrs. Ellwell, and always receive a sympathetic response. (“I could tell she was a lovely woman.”) It was a small sacrifice to go very early to bed perhaps once in two weeks, and although he loathed the smell of cigar smoke, it did not linger so much now that it was late May, and the windows could be open in the evening.
On the afternoon of the thirty-first, when Mr. Tomlinson was alternately reading and bird watching on his balcony, Celia heard her name cried dimly and urgently. She had been putting away a delivery of groceries, and cans scattered and fell as she ran up the stairs and into Mr. Tomlinson’s bedroom. He was there, braced against the edge of the outer doorway, his face candle-colored, his breath coming in great, slow, deliberate swells. Out of one of these he managed, “Dizzy . . . help me . . . bed.”
Celia supported him strongly to his bed, instinctively hooking one arm about her own broad shoulder. He lay there for a few minutes with his head back and his fragile eyelids closed and trembling; his breath still came in that effortful way, and Celia was too frightened to speak and perhaps interrupt it. Only when his lids lifted and he said with surprising strength, “Thank you, Celia,” did she dare to move, to say, “Will you be all right for a minute? I’ll call Dr. Fowler.”
“No need. A moment’s dizziness, that’s all,” said Mr. Tomlinson, but of course he had not seen himself and Celia, backing toward the door, tried frantically to recall what she had heard or read about such seizures. “Can I get you some water? Or brandy?”
Mr. Tomlinson, eyes closed again, nodded slightly to one or the other, and Celia fled down the stairs and telephoned Dr. Fowler.
At the doctor’s proposal of removal to the hospital, a cardiograph and a period of observation, Mr. Tomlinson, by now sitting up in a chair with his normal pinkness restored, was courteously immovable. He was convinced that he would not emerge from a hospital alive, and although Dr. Fowler said nonsense, he was privately inclined to agree. He had often seen it happen with very elderly people: somehow the public admission that there was something seriously wrong, and the mere fact of being clinically watched, had all the inevitability of a balloon and a pin. It was entirely possible that if he were taken away from his birds and his beloved manuscript Mr. Tomlinson would quietly give up.
“Well, at least do something about the stairs,” said Fowler when the patient further refused to have his first-floor study converted into a bedroom. “I don’t say you’ll have another of these attacks—there’s a good chance you may not—but there ought to be a handrail along the wall just in case. And I’d stay away from that balcony if I were you.”
Mr. Tomlinson was in heartfelt agreement, as it was on the balcony that the vertigo had seized him. The next day the handrail was installed against the inner wall of the stairway; the sight of it made Celia apprehensive, but it was apparently to be the only reminder of Mr. Tomlinson’s frightening attack.
She called Mrs. Cannon to report this event, not from any sense of duty but out of a strong suspicion that Dr. Fowler would and it might be just as well to be ahead of him. “He ought to be in a hospital,” said Mrs. Cannon at once; her voice seemed to hold an anticipatory note. But then a fast calculation of hospital expenses evidently seized her, because she added hastily, “Or whatever Dr. Fowler thinks.”
As this was not in Celia’s domain, she only said, “I was sure you’d want to know,” and was thanked crisply. The entire conversation had not lasted for more than three minutes, but it was one on which Celia would look back gratefully.
On a June day thundery with heat, with Dr. Fowler expected, Celia went to the study to get her employers library list as usual. Her pocketbook was already on the hall table. She started to tuck the list into the side compartment, remembered the tear in the lining down which it had vanished the week before, and laid it down on the table; it would be far more accessible in a dress pocket than in the jumble of the bag’s main interior.
She waited as always to let the doctor in, smiled and said that Mr. Tomlinson seemed almost his old self, and went upstairs to change her dress; she never, now, went into town in even semiuniform. She had gone three of the six blocks to the library before she stopped short, thrust a hand into her pocket, turned resignedly.
She had left the list on the hall table, and had not even glanced at its contents. Not just anything would do for Mr. Tomlinson; he had what Celia considered a strange taste for nonfiction, with perhaps a mystery novel or two for mitigation. She would have to go back.
She let herself into the house with great care. She had no idea of what Dr. Fowler did on these occasions, but had a dim and almost superstitious feeling that they were somehow sacred. She tiptoed to the hall table, picked up the list, heard the voices from the study, heard her own name.
“—to Celia. Hester would only sell it, and she and her husband certainly don’t need the money. Celia’s been very good to me, you know. I could never have gotten my book done without her. In fact, I’d never have thought of it—
