A FEW MONTHS after I’ve returned, Mother sits me down at the dining room table, a letter in her hand. Papa stands behind her in the doorway. “Sam and Ramona would like for you to go back to Boston to be evaluated. The Carles know a very good doctor who—”
“Yes, she mentioned it,” I interrupt. Now that I’m home again, back to my familiar routines, Boston seems very far away. The disruption of my chores, the effort of the journey, not to mention the almost certain painfulness of the procedure and the far from certain outcome: It’s hard to imagine why I would put myself through such an ordeal. “I said I’d consider it. But honestly, I don’t think there’s any point.”
Mother reaches for my wrist and grasps it before I can pull away. She turns it over, revealing raised red strips on my arm. “Look. Just look at what you’ve done to yourself.”
I’ve started using my elbows, my wrists, my knees to lift heavy pots, balance the teakettle and fill it with water from the pump, lug it to the range. My forearms are striped with burns. Partly for this reason and partly because over the years my arms have become thinner and more sticklike, I hide them as often as I can in voluminous sleeves. I yank my arm away, slide the sleeve down to cover it. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I get along fine, Mother.”
“If it continues getting worse, you will not be able to walk. Have you thought about that?”
I busy myself brushing some crumbs on the table into a pile. Of course I’ve thought about it. I think about it every day when I navigate the fourteen-foot-long pantry by using my elbows along the walls.
“Do you think you’ll get along fine when your legs don’t work at all?” she persists.
“It’s decided,” Papa says abruptly. We both turn to look at him. “She’s going to Boston, and that’s the end of it.”
Mother nods, clearly surprised. Papa rarely asserts his opinion with such force. “You heard your father,” she says.
It seems there’s no use arguing. And who knows, maybe they’re right—maybe something can be done to reverse or at least slow my decline. I pack two equally weighted bags to help me keep my balance, and Al borrows a neighbor’s car to drive me to Portland so I won’t have to change trains by myself. When I reach Boston, Sam and Ramona pick me up in Harland’s brand-new sky-blue Cadillac sedan and drive me to City Hospital on Harrison Avenue in the South End—a stately brick building with giant columns and a turreted dome—where I’m admitted for a week’s “observation.”
A hen-breasted nurse pushes me in a wheelchair into an elevator, accompanied by Sam and Ramona, and up to a small private room on the eighth floor with an iron bed and a view of the neighboring rooftops. It smells of paint thinner.
“When are visiting hours?” Ramona asks.
The nurse consults my chart. “No visitors.”
“No visitors? Why on earth not?” Sam asks.
“The prescription is rest. Rest and solitude.”
“That hardly seems necessary,” Ramona says.
“Doctor’s orders,” the nurse says. “I’ll leave you alone with her for ten minutes. Then you need to let her settle in. You can come back to collect her in a week.” Looking over at me, she lifts her beak. “There’s a hospital gown on the bed for you to wear. The doctors will do their rounds later in the afternoon. Any questions?”
I shake my head. No questions. Except—“What is that smell?”
“Ether,” Ramona says. “Horrid. I remember it from when I had my tonsils out.”
“And overcooked peas,” Sam adds.
When the nurse leaves, Ramona pulls a book out of the bag she’s carrying and places it on the nightstand. My ántonia. “I haven’t read it, but apparently it’s all the rage. Country life in Nebraska.” She shrugs. “Not my cup of tea, but if you get bored . . .”
Looking at the book jacket, gold with bronze lettering, I realize that this must be the third in Cather’s prairie trilogy. I read the other two at Walton’s suggestion. A line from O Pioneers! pops into my mind: “People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find . . .”
“We’ll ask the nurse exactly when you’re being discharged so I can be here to pick you up,” Sam says.
“I’ll be counting the minutes,” I say.
“If you finish that book, I can bring more,” Ramona says. “Sherwood Anderson has a collection of stories everybody’s talking about.”
Once a day a gaggle of doctors, gooselike in their white coats, march into the room and gather around my bed, led by a specialist I come to think of as “Big Bug” because of his eyes, enormous behind oversized spectacles. The doctors instruct me to stand up, wave my arms, and stomp my legs, and then, muttering among themselves, troop back out again. They act as if I don’t have ears, but I hear everything they say. The first few days they speculate that perhaps electricity will help. By day four they decide that electricity would be disastrous. Nobody seems to have the slightest idea what’s wrong with me. On the seventh day, Big Bug releases me into the care of Sam and Ramona with a sanctimonious smile and a prescription.
“You should go on living as you’ve always done,” he declares, steepling his fingers at me while the other doctors scribble notes on their pads. “Eat nourishing food. Live out of doors as much as you can. A quiet country life will do you more good than any medicine or treatment.”
“I don’t suppose she needed to travel all the way to Boston to learn that,” Ramona mutters under her breath.
On the train home I squint out the window at a silver-dollar moon framed in a blue-velvet sky. I’ve done what my parents wanted me to do. They don’t have to fret about a cure we didn’t seek. This disease—whatever it is—will advance as it will. I think about the destructiveness of desire: of wanting something unrealistic, of believing in the possibility of rescue. This stint in Boston only confirms my belief that there is no cure for what ails me. No matter how long I hold a stick with fluttering rags above my head, no trawler in the distance will be coming to my rescue.
Though I am only twenty-five, I know in my bones that my one chance for a different life has come and gone.
I pull the now-dog-eared copy of My ántonia out of my satchel—I’ve read it twice—and leaf through the pages, looking for a line that comes near the end. Ah—here it is: “Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” Maybe so, I think. Maybe my memories of sweeter times are vivid enough, and present enough, to overcome the disappointments that followed. And to sustain me through the rest.