'But she was watching that damned...
'News, yes. She was ecstatic, she was thrilled ... then she was on the floor, her poor old mouth opening and closing like she was a fish out of water.' Herb leaned closer to his son. 'The doctor won't come right out and tell me, but he asked me about "heroic measures". I told him none of that stuff. She committed her own kind of sin, Johnny. She presumed to know the mind of God. So don't you ever blame yourself for her mistake.' Fresh tears glinted in his eyes. His voice roughened. 'God knows I spent my life loving her and it got hard in the late going. Maybe this is just the best thing.'
'Can I see her?'
'Yes, she's at the end of the hall, Room ~ They're expecting you, and so is she. Just one thing, Johnny. Agree with anything and everything she might say. Don't... let her die thinking it was all for nothing.'
'No.' He paused. 'Are you coming with me?'
'Not now. Maybe later.'
Johnny nodded and walked up the hall. The lights were turned down low for the nighttime. The brief moment in the soft, kind summer night seemed far away now, but his nightmare in the car seemed very close.
Room 35. VERA HELEN SMITH, the little card on the door read. Had he known her middle name was Helen? It seemed he must have, although he couldn't remember. But he could remember other things: her bringing him an ice-cream bar wrapped in her handkerchief one bright summer day at Old Orchard Beach, smiling and g*y. He and his mother and father playing rummy for matches - later, after the religion business began to deepen its hold on her, she wouldn't have cards in the house, not even to play cribbage with. He remembered the day the bee had stung him and he ran to her, bawling his head off, and she had kissed the swelling and pulled out the stinger with tweezers and then had wrapped the wound in a strip of cloth that had been dipped in baking soda.
He pushed the door open and went in. She was a vague hump in the bed and Johnny thought, That's what I looked like. A nurse was taking her pulse; she turned when the door opened and the dim hall lights flashed on her spectacles.
'Are you Mrs. Smith's son?'
'Yes.'
'Johnny?' The voice rose from the hump in the bed, dry and hollow, rattling with death as a few pebbles will rattle in an empty gourd. The voice - God help him -made his skin crawl. He moved closer. Her face was twisted into a snarling mask on the left-hand side. The hand on the counterpane was a claw. Stroke, he thought. What the old people call a shock. Yes. That's better. That's what she looks like. Like she's had a bad shock.
'Is that you, John?'
'It's me, Ma.'
'Johnny? Is that you?'
'Yes, Ma.'
He came closer yet, and forced himself to take the bony claw.
'I want my Johnny,' she said querulously.
The nurse shot him a pitying look, and he found him-self wanting to smash his fist through it.
'Would you leave us alone?' he asked.
'I really shouldn't while...'
'Come on, she's my mother and I want some time alone with her,' Johnny said. 'What about it?'
'Well...'
'Bring me my juice, Dad!' his mother cried hoarsely. 'Feel like I could drink a quart!'
'Would you get out of here?' he cried at the nurse. He was filled with a terrible sorrow of which he could not even find the focus. It seemed like a whirlpool going down into darkness.
The nurse left.
'Ma,' he said, sitting beside her. That weird feeling of doubled time, of reversal, would not leave him. How many times had she sat over his bed like this, perhaps holding his dry hand and talking to him? He recalled the timeless period when the room had seemed so close to him - seen through a gauzy placental membrane, his mother's face bending over him, thundering senseless sounds slowly into his upturned face.
'Ma,' he said again, and kissed the hook that had replaced her hand.
'Gimme those nails, I can do that,' she said. Her left eye seemed frozen in its orbit; the other rolled wildly. It was the eye of a gutshot horse. 'I want Johnny.'
'Ma, I'm here.'
'John-ny! John-ny! JOHN-NY!'
'Ma,' he said, afraid the nurse would come back.
'You ...' She broke off and her head turned toward him a little. 'Bend over here where I can see,' she whispered.
He did as she asked.
'You came,' she said. 'Thank you. Thank you.' Tears began to ooze from the good eye. The bad one, the one on the side of her face that had been frozen by the shock, stared indifferently upward.
'Sure I came.'
'I saw you,' she whispered. 'What a power God has given you, Johnny! Didn't I tell you? Didn't I say it was so?'
'Yes, you did.'
'He has a job for you,' she said. 'Don't run from him, Johnny. Don't hide away in a cave like Elijah or make him send a big fish to swallow you up. Don't do that, John.'
'No. I won't.' He held her claw-hand. His head throbbed.
'Not the potter but the potter's clay, John. Remember.'