One afternoon early in May, Helen met McGuire upon the street. He had just driven in behind Wood’s Pharmacy on Academy Street, and was preparing to go in to the prescription counter when she approached him. He got out of his big dusty-looking roadster with a painful grunt, slammed the door, and began to fumble slowly in the pockets of his baggy coat for a cigarette. He turned slowly as she spoke, grunted, “Hello, Helen,” stuck the cigarette on his fat under-lip and lighted it, and then, looking at her with his brutal, almost stupid, but somehow kindly glance, he barked coarsely:
“What’s on your mind?”
“It’s about Papa,” she began in a low, hoarse and almost morbid tone —“Now I want to know if this last attack means that the end has come. You’ve got to tell me — we’ve got the right to know about it —”
The look of strain and hysteria on her big-boned face, her dull eyes fixed on him in a morbid stare, the sore on her large cleft chin, above all, the brooding insistence of her tone as she repeated phrases he had heard ten thousand times before suddenly rasped upon his frayed nerves, stretched them to the breaking-point; he lost his air of hard professionalism and exploded in a flare of brutal anger:
“You want to know what? You’ve got a right to be told what? For God’s sake,”— his tone was brutal, rasping, jeering —“pull yourself together and stop acting like a child.” And then, a little more quietly, but brusquely, he demanded:
“All right. What do you want to know?”
“I want to know how long he’s going to last,” she said with morbid insistence. “Now, you’re a doctor,” she wagged her large face at him with an air of challenge that infuriated him, “and you ought to tell us. We’ve got to know!”
“Tell you! Got to know!” he shouted. “What the hell are you talking about? What do you expect to be told?”
“How long Papa has to live,” she said with the same morbid insistence as before.
“You’ve asked me that a thousand times,” he said harshly. “I’ve told you that I didn’t know. He may live another month, he may be here a year from now — how can we tell about these things,” he said in an exasperated tone, “particularly where your father is concerned. Helen, three or four years ago I might have made a prediction. I did make them — I didn’t see how W. O. could go on six months longer. But he’s fooled us all — you, me, the doctors at Johns Hopkins, everyone who’s had anything to do with the case. The man is dying from malignant carcinoma — he has been dying for years — his life is hanging by a thread and the thread may break at any time — but when it is going to break I have no way of telling you.”
“Ah-hah,” she said reflectively. Her eyes had taken on a dull appeased look as he talked to her, and now she had begun to pluck at her large cleft chin. “Then you think —” she began.
“I think nothing,” he shouted. “And for God’s sake stop picking at your chin!”
For a moment he felt the sudden brutal anger that one sometimes feels toward a contrary child. He felt like taking her by the shoulders and shaking her. Instead, he took it out in words and, scowling at her, said with brutal directness:
“Look here! . . . You’ve got to pull yourself together. You’re becoming a mental case — do you hear me? You wander around like a person in a dream, you ask questions no one can answer, you demand answers no one can give — you work yourself up into hysterical frenzies and then you collapse and soak yourself with drugs, patent medicines, corn-licker — anything that has alcohol in it — for days at a time. When you go to bed at night you think you hear voices talking to you, someone coming up the steps, the telephone. And really you hear nothing: there is nothing there. Do you know what that is?” he demanded brutally. “Those are symptoms of insanity — you’re becoming unbalanced; if it keeps on they may have to send you to the crazy-house to take the cure.”
“Ah-hah! Uh-huh!” she kept plucking at her big chin with an air of abstracted reflection and with a curious look of dull appeasement in her eyes as if his brutal words had really given her some comfort. Then she suddenly came to herself, looked at him with clear eyes, and her generous mouth touched at the corners with the big lewd tracery of her earthy humour, she sniggered hoarsely, and prodding him in his fat ribs with a big bony finger, she said:
“You think I’ve got ’em, do you? Well —” she nodded seriously in agreement, frowning a little as she spoke, but with the faint grin still legible around the corners of her mouth — “I’ve often thought the same thing. You may be right,” she nodded seriously again. “There are times when I do feel off — you know? — QUEER— looney — crazy — like there was a screw loose somewhere — Brrr!” and with the strange lewd mixture of frown and grin, she made a whirling movement with her finger towards her head. “What do you think it is?” she went on with an air of seriousness. “Now, I’d just like to know. What is it that makes me act like that? . . . Is it woman-business?” she said with a lewd and comic look upon her face. “Am I getting funny like the rest of them — now I’ve often thought the same — that maybe I’m going through a change of life — is that it? Maybe —”
“Oh, change of life be damned!” he said in a disgusted tone. “Here you are a young woman thirty-two years old and you talk to me about a change of life! That has about as much sense to it as a lot of other things you say! The only thing you change is your mind — and you do that every five minutes!” He was silent for a moment, breathing heavily and staring at her coarsely with his bloated and unshaven face, his veined and weary-looking eyes. When he spoke again his voice was gruff and quiet, touched with a burly, almost paternal tenderness:
“Helen,” he said, “I’m worried about you — and not about your father. Your father is an old man now with a malignant cancer and with no hope of ever getting well again. He is tired of life, he wants to die — for God’s sake why do you want to prolong his suffering, to try to keep him here in a state of agony, when death would be a merciful release for him? . . . I know there is no hope left for your father: he has been doomed for years, the sooner the end comes the better —”
She tried to speak but he interrupted her brusquely, saying:
“Just a minute. There’s something that I want to say to you — for God’s sake try to use it, if you can. The death of this old man seems strange and horrible to you because he is your father. It is as hard for you to think about his death as it is to think about the death of God Almighty; you think that if your father dies there will be floods and earthquakes and convulsions throughout nature. I assure you that this is not true. Old men are dying every second of the day, and nothing happens except they die —”
“Oh, but Papa was a wonderful man,” she said. “I KNOW! I KNOW! Everybody who ever knew him said the same.”
“Yes,” McGuire agreed, “he was — he was one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. And that is what makes it all the harder now.”
She looked at him eagerly, and said:
“You mean — his dying?”
“No, Helen,” McGuire spoke quietly and with a weary patience. “There’s nothing very bad about his dying. Death seems so terrible to you because you know so little about it. But I have seen so much of death, I have seen so many people die — and I know there is really nothing very terrible about it, and about the death of an old man ravaged by disease there is nothing terrible at all. It seems terrible to those looking on — there are,” he shrugged his fat shoulders, “there are sometimes — physical details that are unpleasant. But the old man knows little of all that: an old man dies as a clock runs down — he is worn out, has lost the will to live, he wants to die, and he just stops. That is all. And that will happen to your father.”
“Oh, but it will be so strange now — so hard to understand!” she muttered with a bewildered look in her eyes. “We have expected him to die so many times — we have been fooled so often — and now I can’t believe that it will ever happen. I thought that he would die in 1916, I never expected him to live another year; in 1918, the year that Ben died, none of us could see how he’d get through the winter — and then Ben died! No one had even thought of Ben —” her voice grew cracked and hoarse and her eyes glistened with tears. “We had forgotten Ben — everyone was thinking about Papa — and then when Ben died I turned against Papa for a time. For a while I was bitter against him — it seemed that I had done everything for this old man, that I had given him everything I had — my life, my strength, my energy — all because I thought that he was going to die — and then Ben, who had never been given anything — who had had nothing out of life — who had been neglected and forgotten by us all and who was the best one — the most decent of the whole crowd — Ben was the one who had to go. For a time after his death I didn’t care what happened — to Papa or to any one else. I was so bitter about Ben’s death — it seemed so cruel, so rotten and unjust — that it had to be Ben of all the people in the world — only twenty-six years old and without a thing to show for his life — no love, no children, no happiness, cheated out of everything, when Papa had had so much — I couldn’t stand the thought of it, even now I hate to go to Mama’s house, it almost kills me to go near Ben’s room, I’ve never been in it since the night he died — and somehow I was bitter against Papa! It seemed to me that he had cheated me, tricked me — at times I got so bitter that I thought that he was responsible in some way for Ben’s death. I said I was through with him, that I would do nothing else for him, that I had done all that I intended to do, and that somebody else would have to take care of him. . . . But it all came back; he had another bad spell and I was afraid that he was going to die, and I couldn’t stand the thought of it. . . . And it has gone on now so long, YEAR after year, and YEAR after ye............