The Man Who Was Left Behind Page 3

  Perhaps he would leave something in his will for Mitsy and her child. Then he reconsidered it and decided no, she was happy, there was no need.

  If Ben had lived there would be no question about where to leave the money.

  Ben was younger, and his favourite. Not so good-looking as Jim, almost ugly, but more attractive. Brave. It was a thing you didn’t talk about and Ben never gave it a thought, but Mr. Mackenzie loved it in him. He went out to Korea with Cal Bender’s son Carl, who died in his arms. And Ben was shipped back with one leg missing and the other one off at the knee. They put him in a rehabilitation hospital. He was not ready for it, but the doctors believed it good psychology to place him where he could see other boys like himself who were making the best of their amputations and preparing to begin life again. There was some trouble about getting to see him, and Betty was down with flu, so Mr. Mackenzie went alone. And the doctor took him aside beforehand, telling him that at first Ben had been so wild that none of the staff could touch him, then he went on a laughing fit; it took five interns to hold him until the sedative had been administered. And when he woke up he refused to talk. He had not talked for three days. They had had to put him in a room by himself—the effect on the other patients had to be considered. It was a major battle to get a dose of penicillin into him, he wouldn’t eat, he threw things, he was in pain but it still needed more staff than could be expended to change his bandages. Naturally the wounds weren’t healing so quickly as they ought to. Mr. Mackenzie entered and looked at his son’s head turned away towards the window. He sat down by the bed and put his hand on the boy’s head, smoothing his hair which had grown out from being so long in the field and had not been cut again because he wouldn’t let anyone near him. “Ben?” he murmured. “Don’t say anything,” said his son. His voice was hoarse and fierce, hardly above a whisper. “Just stay like that, but don’t say anything.” Mr. Mackenzie began to cry. He blew his nose and continued to stroke his son’s head. He wanted very much to talk, to say even if they’d shipped you home so mutilated that I didn’t know you, even if all that was left was something the size of a stamp, I’d thank God, thank God you’re still alive. And he wanted to say that there are lots of things to live for, on all levels, small and big. And it could be worse, he might have been paralyzed or blind. But he would walk again and there was everything in the world still there, good friends and good talk, a spring day and coffee in the morning, music, laughter, learning, and he mustn’t let it go. And he mustn’t also because whatever he thought or wished for himself, he could not be more than he was now and always had been, his father’s heart. But Ben wouldn’t let him speak. Only at the end of the time, when the doctor came in to say he might consider ending his visit, Ben turned his head and looked at him and he was surprised because Ben’s eyes were blue-grey and usually looked grey, but on that day they looked blue. He stretched out his arm and pulled Mr. Mackenzie to him by the elbow. All the strength in him even then—he had always been strong even as a little boy. “Listen,” he said in that strange whisper, “you know me, Dad. I can stand anything. Don’t mind the pain. Don’t care about hurt, I can take it all. I can face it, anything. Anything but this. I can’t take this. You understand?”

  “I understand,” he said. “But you’re wrong. You can take this, too, Ben. I know it. It’s going to work out all right. It won’t be easy, but we’re behind you. We’ll help.”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t want it,” he whispered. “You don’t understand.”

  “I do, Ben. Believe me. And it’s going to be all right.”

  Ben turned his head away again. He said, “It’s the shame.” He let his arm fall back and rest on the blanket.

  Shame? What shame? Wounded fighting for your country? Decorated how many times—they had lost count.

  “Ben, I don’t understand. What shame can there be?”

  His son wouldn’t turn his head again and the doctor stood at the door. Mr. Mackenzie said goodbye and that he’d see him again the next day.

  He thought some more about the will and couldn’t decide. He deliberated where to go to fill up the rest of the day and found himself walking towards the library. He had hardly ever used the ticket; Betty used to get books from the library. He had all he needed, but now they were all in storage and it seemed too much trouble to get at them.

  A young girl was behind the counter, talking on the phone to her boyfriend. She looked up as he came in, gave him a cold look, and turned her back to continue talking. He held the ticket in his hand and stood there, leaning on the counter, looking at the trays of tagged cards and waiting. She let him stay there until at last she thought fit to turn, the receiver in her hand, and said, “Yes?”

  “I wonder if this ticket is still good.”

  She put down the receiver, highly vexed, and came forward, darting a look at the clock on the wall and muttering something about her lunch hour. Only quarter to twelve, it couldn’t be time for anyone’s lunchtime. She snatched the ticket from him, stared at it, and told him, incredulous and angry, “This card has expired.”

  “How do I renew it?”

  She sighed. “Just a minute,” she said, and went back to her telephone conversation, at last saying into the mouthpiece that she had to go.

  She produced a card from a drawer, began to write on it, slapped a rubber stamp over it twice, and said, “That’ll be two dollars and thirty cents.” She watched him with distaste as he got out the money; all his movements had seemed to slow down lately. Her face watching him told him how old and ugly and dirty he was and the Salvation Army should deal with people like that, not someone like her. As she put the money away in the cash drawer he looked at her—once, seeing her hair snagged up into a ball, beehive they called it, and orange makeup. You could see the seam where it stopped, as though you could take hold of the skin there and start peeling the face off. Her lipstick was a whitish orange colour too, and there was something on her eyes, the eyebrows above plucked very thin and shiny, looking as though they were made out of metal.

  And she thought she was beautiful. She must, or how could she do all that to herself? Her hands had long orange-painted nails that recoiled from him as he handed her the money and drummed on the counter afterwards while she waited for her lunch hour. He noticed that she was wearing a pin on her sweater, a wooden mouse with leather ears, a long leather tail, and red glass eyes.

  What things people did, wearing a wooden mouse, wearing a live spider. You hardly ever saw a woman wearing flowers any more. When he was courting he brought Betty flowers and she would wear them. Wear them in her hair, which was long then and done up with combs. You hardly ever saw that any more, either. When you take out the combs how it falls down like ribbons, and braiding it up for the night, he in his nightshirt and still not liking pajamas, wondering how could they say modern youth was so immoral because if they wore those things he didn’t see how they’d manage, taking them off and putting them on again all night long. He brought her flowers and chocolates and they took walks. Who took walks now? And you never thought of smoking if a lady was in the room. All the things that had changed. But it was always so, his father having to have the newspapers read to him in nineteen forty-two and saying: in my day cavalry meant just that, you were on a horse, not some new-fangled machine or other. In my day this, in my day that. The children had thought it was funny, but he understood better now.

  In Mr. Mackenzie’s day he had studied the classics. He thought he would reread some of the works he had forgotten, though he had always had a good memory. He remembered the time he had had to have the operation, it must have been five or six years after he’d passed the bar exams, and the surgeon told him that under the anaesthetic he had quoted about two thousand lines of Virgil, and he had thought it was because of cramming for exams all that time ago and imagine remembering it for so long. But now he thought: pretty damn smart of that doctor to know it was Virgil.

  He looked for a book in Greek or Latin. They were all trans
lations. The girl at the counter was craning her neck to see what he was doing, if he was stealing the books or defacing them. Suddenly he wanted to go. Unless he was drinking he did not like being inside places for very long. He grabbed a book off the shelf and took it to the counter. He saw as she marked the inside with the stamp that the book was a copy of Marcus Aurelius combined with essays on Greek and Roman Stoicism, a textbook apparently, and that there was a printed notice pasted on the opening page which cautioned all library users not to return the book in case of scarlet fever or other contagious diseases.

  In the street again, he flipped through the leaves. The book fell open to a page where the writer commented on the necessity of looking upon death with equanimity and explained the construction of the world and the process of man’s return to the seminal principles of the universe after death. No later consciousness, no personality, no afterlife. Just as he had always thought, just as he hoped. A few pages later another author said that the ideal Stoic philosopher should be able to look back upon ruin, to accept the destruction of his property, his house burned down and his family all killed, without shedding a tear.

  Mr. Mackenzie closed the book. He did not believe such a thing could ever have happened to that philosopher and he didn’t want to read any more. He put the book in his pocket and thought he would return it as soon as possible in exchange for another one.

  He started off in the direction of the park and then changed his mind. To the house. He would go look at the house just once again, just to see. He walked slowly. There was plenty of time. And when he arrived by the fence, looking over the grass and garden into the white house, it was like a face looking back at him. He had spent nearly all his life in that house, he was born in it. And his father before him. It was strange to think that he could not walk up the path and go in. What was the sense of one old man living in a large house like that, even if there hadn’t been memories? He had had to sell it, naturally. But it was quite a thing to see it again; it did something to his insides like music or books or paintings, though he couldn’t yet tell if the effect was good or bad, just that it was strong.

  Whoever had bought it had made some changes. They had put up different curtains in the dining-room and in the room he had used for a study. That used to be a library—not very sensible to keep a library in the sunniest room of the house. Good for reading, but bad for the books. After his father’s death he had moved the books into another room and taken it over as a study. All those shelves, it had taken weeks. Now the owners had changed the curtains. That upset him, he liked the old curtains. He was beginning to feel cranky about the alterations. Other changes too, a blue-painted tricycle leaning up against the toolshed in the distance. And two children were playing on the lawn, two little girls throwing a ball back and forth to each other. A song went through his mind: They play in their beautiful gardens, the children of high degree. That was all he could remember, just the first line. One of them was standing on the exact spot where Ben had stood when he and Betty and her Aunt Sophie had looked through the windows and seen Ben, aged about five then, taking aim with his bow and arrow, being egged on by Jim and Carl and Stuke Bender, to shoot the second in the series of orange cats with literary names. And he hit it, too, although the damage was slight as the arrows were tipped with rubber suction cups; they were later taken away because Ben had shot them at the ceiling and they pulled the plaster off in two places, besides making smudge marks on the wallpaper.

  He became aware of the fact that he had been standing in front of the house for a long while. The two children were edged up against the tree, peeking at him around the trunk. When he turned his head to look, they dashed out over the grass and ran into the back of the house. A few minutes later a coloured girl in a starched maid’s uniform came out from the back into the garden, looked over at him, and disappeared. He stayed where he was. Then the curtains twitched at his study window and he felt a small thrill like a twinge of toothache, to see the curtains move in the room where he used to spend so much of his time, in the house where he was born.

  He turned away and shuffled off down the street, moving slowly and looking at the flower beds as he went, not thinking anything in particular. It was summer and he remembered many summers, but for the time being no one of them stood out and spoke to him. He was three and a half blocks away from the house when the patrol car stopped at the kerb and a policeman got out of the front seat. Another remained seated behind the wheel, a third sat in the back.

  “Going someplace?” said the one who got out.

  “Just walking.”

  “We’ve had a complaint about you from some folks down the road. Want to tell me why you were hanging around those kids?”

  “What kids?” said Mr. Mackenzie.

  “At number seventeen.” He jerked his thumb backwards. “Back there. The whole family saw you, hanging around the kids.”

  “I was looking at the house.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What for?”

  “My house,” Mr. Mackenzie said.

  The policeman in the driver’s seat leaned towards them and said, “Give him a warning and let’s go, Frank. We got a call.” He began to talk into a shortwave microphone. Noises came out of the radio like the sound of frying fat.

  The other one said, “Your house, huh?”

  “Used to be.”

  “Oh sure, sure. Don’t try it again. Not in this part of town, you hear?”

  “I heard you.”

  “Okay.” He pulled out a notepad and said, “Let’s have your name.”

  “Vanderbilt,” said Mr. Mackenzie. The one behind the wheel laughed. The other, in the back seat, said, “Okay, pull him in.”

  They put him into the back of the car and drove off. He let himself be squeezed between the two of them until it struck him how hot it was and how he didn’t like being so near. He tried to stand up, and said, “Hold on a minute, I don’t want to go anywhere.” The one who had the notepad chopped him across the cheek and the other one, who had been sitting there all the time, thumped his fist hard into his ribs. Mr. Mackenzie began to cough.

  Later in jail while they decided whether to book him with just loitering and resisting arrest or with drunk and disorderly and perhaps molestation also, somebody jokingly asked him if he wanted to call his lawyer. He said what for, he was a lawyer. And while they were laughing Rick Spooner, coming around a corner in the corridor, saw him, did a double take recognizing him, and said, “Charlie, what the hell?”

  So then he was out, on the street again, with Rick asking him to have something to eat.

  “Can’t, I’ve got to go somewhere.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Fine, fine,” he said.

  He remembered to buy a pack of cigarettes and went into a store where it appeared you could buy most things you’d need in life: fruit, bread, vegetables, sandwiches, candy, papers, magazines, and cigarettes. As he put the change in his pocket he saw, through the window, a serviceman carrying a duffel bag on his shoulder. The bag hid his face, but the way he walked, it looked like Ben. Mr. Mackenzie ran through the doorway and on to the sidewalk to watch the boy move away into the distance, feeling his eye travelling hard among the crowd to latch on to the soldier. And then he saw the bag swing off, turning, and the back of a head, not Ben, because this one had red hair. He felt cheated, running out into the street to look at a stranger. Yet something remained, a kind of tingling all over him, like the time when the phone rang.

  The call came through at four in the morning, saying nothing definite except that there had been an accident, and he just had time to answer, “I’m coming right over.”

  The doctor did not understand how it could have happened. It was hard to understand how anyone could want death that much, suicide so they tell you being a negative action, not a passionate proof of will. And how he must have wanted to die! He had pretended to take the sleeping pills—a ch
ild’s trick, keeping them in your hand or in the pouch of your cheek like a squirrel. All during the evening he had been quite docile, had talked, said he felt much better, let them change his bandages and give him shots. The nurse on duty had been called to another ward during the night because there was one patient who suffered from screaming nightmares and wouldn’t go back to sleep unless she talked to him—the other nurse would not do. He must have known that. He had taken in a lot of information that no one had suspected: where the soap and sheets and towels were kept, the razor blades, the drugs. His condition was such that it precluded movement, so everyone thought, although he was not strapped to pulleys like many of the other patients who had single rooms. As for getting out of the bed, half-healed and with only half of one leg and none of the other, the pain would cause immediate blackout, so they believed. He had done it in spite of the thought and belief and professional opinion, pulled himself along the floor all the way down the corridor to the razor blades, reaching the cabinets God knew how. He made it as sure as possible by swallowing a quantity of pills, torn from the shelves by the boxful, and washing them down with a bottle of rubbing alcohol while he dug at the veins in his wrists and throat.

  Mr. Mackenzie didn’t know how to tell his wife. He asked the doctor: how can I tell her? And in fact he never did tell her everything, not because she wouldn’t have been able to take it, but because he could not bring himself to say it. Haemorrhage, relapse, he wasn’t trying to live, he wanted it that way—that was as close as he got. She saw the body, but often people do not see what they are not looking for, and most people only really see the face of their dead, so perhaps she never knew.