The Night of Trees Read online

  “My son…” No. “Murray Grimald, G.R.I.M.A.L.D.—a hunting accident, they told me. They called me….”

  “Grimald? G.R.I.M.A.L.D.?” she efficiently asked him, her cool eyebrows raised professionally. Then she inserted a plug in one of many holes, and pushed it home. “Emergency rooms?” she asked. “Grimald, G.R.I.M.A.L.D., Murray. His father is here. Oh.” and her eyes sneaked up at him. “Yes, Nurse,” she said, calling her eyes home again.

  I know it’s bad, he thought. Don’t pamper me. I can take it. I’m a man, aren’t I?

  She was careful of him. “The doctor will see you. Will you go down the corridor to the right, please? The first double door at the end of the hall on the left?”

  Now she should have smiled, but she did not. He began. Walls grew and corners appeared; he strode in his gross health past wraiths in gray gowns and unnaturally pink faces. He would bring to his injured son strength. His boots tended to catch their thick toes on the smooth floor, and he had to lift his feet high, to stride down toward the double doors. If it were very serious he would have to say to the doctors that Murray must have the very best, and that meant New York, probably. Beth Israel, or Mount Sinai, or Presbyterian. He would find out who was best with bones and muscle repair. That first, but Murray, Murray, you will see how these animals can also give their love.

  The hall, as he strode down it, became less and less the neighborhood of patients; it grew more businesslike. There were the portholes and gauges of autoclaves—he had bought equipment from the same company. Folded stretchers, the marks of rubber tires on the now blue-painted cement floor. The first double doors on the left were also painted blue, and he pushed through them and stood in a short hallway with three doors leading from it. A middle-aged nurse with gray in her hair got halfway up from her desk, and a young doctor in a short-sleeved green smock turned toward him.

  He took three or four steps, and the doctor did too. They met next to a rubber-wheeled table filled with rolled towels and pans and rolls of bandages.

  “Are you Mr. Grimald?” The young doctor was blond, and had muscular pink arms, and bad news on his young face.

  “Yes. My son…”

  “Yes, the boy. We’re sorry, sir….” The doctor’s young eyes faded.

  “You must tell him,” the nurse said, and came quickly up to them. She put one of her large clean hands on Richard’s arm, and her other hand on the doctor’s bare arm above the elbow. “You must tell him right away.” Her cheeks moved as she nodded; she had fine little hairs on her temples.

  “I know it’s bad,” Richard said. “Don’t spare me. Tell me what’s wrong with him.”

  “The boy died on the way here, before we could help him. There was no heartbeat. He was dead on arrival.” Each of the doctor’s phrases was a breath.

  No.

  “His arm?”

  “There was nothing we could do for him,” the nurse said. Her hand was strong on his arm, and her black eyes searched his for understanding.

  No.

  “You say he’s not alive? Murray?”

  “We couldn’t help him.”

  “My son.”

  Yes.

  They grew above him, their kind but distant faces. Their arms took him, a chair scraped, a live voice grunted. All this distantly, for he had understood, and believed them. That was not hard; neither was the wave that took his breath out of his lungs, and the blood out of his veins. Murray, Murray. Fainter, fainter; if, if there was a man here, inside him, inside the red jacket, it was a man made of a vacuum. Now die, you. For Christ’s sake stop living. Right now. Give it the last twist. Will it.

  It almost worked, but the body’s will was not his, and the traitor heart still pumped lustily. The cruel eyes still saw the room in which he had learned. They read for the imprisoned brain a typed list taped to the wall:

  Jar with dry sterile cotton balls

  Flask of alcohol 70 per cent

  Peroxide of hydrogen

  Collodion

  Bandage, 1″, 2″, 3″

  Adhesive, ½″, 1″, 2″

  Sterile dressings

  Sterile sponges

  Sterile applicator sticks

  Sterile safety pins

  “Are you all right?” the voices called, and his ears still heard. “Let him sit there for a moment,” a voice said. “It’s hard, it’s terrible hard.” That was the nurse.

  “I thought he was going into shock,” the young doctor said. “He’s not listening to us.”

  “He’s listening. He can’t help it, poor man.”

  “He’s sitting up all right.”

  “He’s all right. You’ll find out. You keep right on living.”

  “I don’t ever want to find that out,” the young doctor said.

  Murray was dead. He knew death well; what a strange, lumpish statue it made of a man. But not Murray, who had so much precious life.

  “Where is he?” he said, hearing his voice command them.

  “Are you all right now?”

  “Yes, I’m all right.” (Again that stranger’s voice.) “Let me see him.” He got up, and his knees supported him.

  “There,” the nurse said, “you’ve got your color back.”

  Color of blood.

  They led him to the middle door, and all the time it seemed that he did not go into the room at all, was not there, and it was only the traitorous metabolism that would not let him stop breathing and seeing.

  It was Murray: he had believed them, hadn’t he? On the high examining table, his eyes insisted, a young man lay on a long piece of butcher’s paper they bad ingeniously pulled from a roll at the head of the hard table. No blood moved here; the sheet was unspotted green that held his arms to his sides, that was wrapped in a band over the red clothes he hadn’t wanted to wear. Crumpling the white paper were his new boots, their good tread still crisp. His shirts were unbuttoned, but had been pulled together over his chest.

  Murray.

  The strong throat was unlined and white; his morning’s beard delicately shaded the square chin, which was now a little slumped; and a white tooth appeared between bloodless smooth lips.

  It was Murray, a lifetime of young manhood without the slightest pulse of his nervous strength. No more smiles. Eyebrows of miraculous design. Lashes over the dark hollows below the lumps that were his closed eyes. The face was not sad. The dear face did not express anything at all: a frown that was not anger; upon the barely open lips a sigh that contained no breath.

  “His arm?”

  “Yes. He bled to death,” the doctor said eagerly. “Sometimes it happens. Cold. Shock. The man who brought him out of the woods did just the right things—it wasn’t his fault. He applied the best tourniquet he could, under the circumstances. The arm…”

  Murray’s dark hair was creased where his cap had been. On his temple was a little scar; where had he got that scar? Richard didn’t know, and suddenly with that deficiency of knowledge came the wave again. He stood through it, welcoming the knife that twisted in his throat. Had Murray cried when he received that cut? Called for his father to help him? How old had he been? What year was it? How many had he then lived of his twenty?

  The wave, the knife in the throat.

  They turned him around and led him out again. Into the gray hallway, and then—all things now seen through air pellucid yet cracked as ice—the nurse went forward with her hand raised, her stocky legs marching, and she commanded someone, “Wait!”

  There were three men: Shim was in green, a bundle of clothes under one arm, his sick face saying, Kill me, but it was a freak accident; a state policeman, righteous and big, vengeance in his face; a game warden, whose face did not want to look upon hospitals.

  “Give him a little time, will you?” the nurse said angrily.

  “Mr. Grimald,” Shim cried, stepping forward. “Believe me I’d rather shot myself! It was a freak! You’ll see it. The deer’s still there. The tracks! Christ, I tried to git him out!”

  “He di
d, you got to give him credit, there,” the game warden said shyly. A familiar face—where had he seen it before?”

  “In-vestigation,” said the state policeman.

  “Can’t you give the poor man some time?” the nurse asked. “Can’t you let him get used to it?”

  He heard them all perfectly well, saw them all—those cracks across the air were only fissures in the pure, smooth bell of his life.

  Voices: “We can’t go up tonight, anyways. It’s four o’clock—be dark in an hour.” The game warden—young Spooner, whom he had last seen white and stupid under burning magnesium.

  “Question is, was it gross carelessness?” the state policeman said.

  “You’ll see!” Shim said. “It was a freak!”

  A freak, a freak. Shim was no freak. Shim was far from being a freak. Richard tried to get a breath. “No, it was an accident, of course,” he said. Ah, you reasonable murderer, he thought. Be cool, now. Don’t tell anyone who is guilty of a son’s despair.

  He had things he had to do: murder his son’s mother with the news. The world kept on going—was that what the nurse had said? The living kept on murdering each other. He held up his hands, and around each cuticle, as if drawn by the tiniest brush, was a delicate cilia of dried blood. Spots, dark washes of blood were all over his clothes. A yellow bead of lung had dried upon an eyelet of his boot.

  He turned toward the nurse, and was vaguely surprised that she still held his arm. “I must make a call…” and that strange and ineffectual wave came again. He resented it because it could not complete its work, but traveled past, and only took his breath away.

  “Maybe that’s best,” she said. “You must share your grief. It’s easier that way.” Her worn face claimed understanding. She still held his arm, and turned to the others. “Now, will you leave him be? He won’t be needed! What can he tell you? All he knows is that his boy…” She stopped, and stared at them in embarrassment and anger.

  It was the thin, weathered, country face of young Spooner that he watched without being able not to, for on the young and unself-protected face came, just for the smallest instant, an expression of softness and compassion that reminded him of Murray.

  22

  THE NURSE had shooed them all away. She offered him a sedative, but in spite of his indifference to life he had a shiver of terror at the idea of sleep. Death might be all right, but not the terrible consciousness of sleep. She cashed a traveler’s check for him, took him to a phone—poor innocent, he vaguely thought, who accepted life as a kind of ability to survive. She admired him for his lack of tears and his steady voice. Her son, she told him, had died in the war. What war? He didn’t ask; how could there have been any other war?

  She left him alone while he called. How well the efficient memory kept working—he dialed the long-distance code number, then the number that had once been his own. He didn’t have a word ready for her, but there was the ring—and again. The phone in New York came off its receiver, and there was half a breath.

  “Hello?” It was the voice of a strange woman. All at once he realized that he might have spoken to Rachel, and have heard her voice close to his ear.

  “Hello?” He spoke to the stranger in a stranger’s voice.

  Mrs. Grimald was out. Who had called? Oh. Was there a message? She didn’t know when (hesitation) Mrs. Grimald would return.

  Message: Dear Rachel, my dear wife who hates me; you were right all the time, and to prove it I have taken your baby, your sweet, gentle baby, into the dark woods and lost him there.

  “No, I’ll call back,” he said.

  If he had to wait too long he might not be able to call her. Even in shock he could predict that all this would get worse, that only momentum kept him at his duty. The metabolism protected itself in spite of its host—at least until the truth, without pity, rendered justice. And he did not deserve justice; he would lynch himself. The coldest justice in the world could not suffice, and that was why, even though the paternal figure waited in his mind to be called upon, he tried not to think of Saul Weitzner. There should have been no such mountain for him to see; in his world there should have been no friend. But there was—just the one. No one else but his son, and long ago perhaps his wife, had ever claimed love from him, and given it without demanding proof. But he did not deserve comfort or forgiveness. Saul should rise before him like Jehovah and blast him with anger.

  No, Saul would give him justice, but the justice in this case would be the sight of an old man bereaved, an old man six million times bereaved. Now, with his beloved grandson—six million and one times. Would Saul try to give comfort?

  “I don’t want pity,” Richard whispered to the black instrument he held in his hand. But he did want it. Not believing in pity, he wanted it. Not believing in mercy, he wanted it.

  If he could just see the man again in all his bludgeoned, lovely ugliness, see the kind smile once more, whether he deserved it or not. Maybe then he could confess, before the terrible bell of emptiness descended fully upon him, and for a moment believe what he could not believe.

  As he got up from the phone the nurse appeared. He told her again that he was all right, to tell them that he would be back tomorrow to see about—what he had to see about. Then he went out into the winter twilight to his car. He could not return to the lodge—he’d never make it back up the unplowed road, but that was not the only reason. Even to get his clothes and run, could he face Opal, who would remind him of his cruelty, Shim who would cry to him that it was a freak, Zach with his possible knowledge, the cooling body of the handsome buck that was to have been the cause for his and Murray’s comradeship and celebration? It would take him five hours to reach the city, and he would have the duty of driving, the blows of oncoming headlights in his eyes to keep him occupied.

  On the turnpikes he drove on ice, it seemed, and the danger was that he should slue in his mind into terrible memories of his wife and son. He stopped once for gas, and crouched in the little cockpit away from the light, seeing only a dark hand reach in for its money.

  It was 10:45 by the time he found a parking place on Seventy-ninth Street, a block from Central Park West, and walked, his big boots awkward on the cement sidewalks, the two blocks to Saul’s apartment building.

  His boot caught on the step, and he almost fell. He would have crawled, a child stumbling and crawling in exhaustion toward a loving parent, needing a strong hand even if it were to punish him. “Saul,” he whispered. The lobby was too long, the rug shifting like snow beneath his heavy legs. The colored elevator man knew him, and said, “Good evening, Mr. Grimald.”

  “Yes,” Richard said. He tripped again as he entered the elevator, and his shoulder jarred the collapsible gate. “Good evening,” he said, but in the rising cubicle his voice died on his lips. They rose slowly to the tenth floor, and the gate and door opened. As he stepped into the high, empty hall, the elevator man closed the elevator upon his back, deserted him there and began his return. Alone, Richard walked on carpet so thick it made him deaf, and stopped before Saul’s heavy door. He pushed the mother-of-pearl button, and because he heard no sound, no tolling bell, he had to trust and wait. If Saul weren’t there he would have to sit with himself in the ornate little chair at the end of the hall. He would have to sit still in that limbo, surrounded by Murray’s death.

  The door opened. “Saul,” he said, but he looked and it was Orson Gelb—fat, white little Orson Gelb, whose mouth fell open, who looked up at him with aggressive fright.

  “Oh! We thought it was…” Orson Gelb said accusingly, yet in a hushed, solemn voice. For a moment, unbelievably, it looked as if Orson might try to keep him from coming inside.

  “Saul,” Richard said again, and pushed by Orson into the wide foyer with its gilt-framed mirror and Saul’s paintings, the entrance to a place that had always meant to him wisdom and serenity. There was Sophie Gelb, the girl who had been in trouble two years before; a big homely girl, she had been crying, by the look in her eyes.
/>   “Here’s Murray’s father,” she said, turning back, and there came a harsh sound from the living room.

  “Him!” The voice of Ruth Weitzner, full of hate and sharp edges.

  He came on, each step an effort because the toes of his boots were awkward as snowshoes, and he could barely lift his legs in order to clear the deep carpeting. Ruth Weitzner appeared before him, then turned like a startled animal and lumbered hippily back into the room. She turned, then, and stood scowling, humming, her arms dramatically akimbo to protect—Rachel. He melted when she was there, really, looking at him. There were her large gray eyes. Worlds, lives, books to him; he saw his whole life in her eyes, the beautiful pale face, her black hair, the body of his wife.

  “Rachel,” he said, but he could not vocalize. He was dumb in the tones he must use for her name; he had no tender voice. She turned away from him, her shoulders turning, and he couldn’t touch her.

  Ruth was still shouting—all he heard was the hatred. Saul would shut her up, but where was Saul?

  “Saul?”

  Mae Gelb came hurrying in from the direction of the bedroom. “Ruth, be quiet! You’re making too much noise!” Mae said, and then she saw Richard, and stopped still. “But how did you know?”

  she asked him. “We were going to call you.”

  “Saul?” he said, and started toward her.

  “You can’t go in. The doctor’s with him.”

  “I can’t see Saul?”

  “No one can see him,” Mae said, and then her disorganized face broke up even more, and she began to cry. “Oh, it’s very bad,” she said, and took several hard breaths. “He’s paralyzed on one side.” She cried through a whole breath, like a baby, and then said, “He can’t even talk.”