A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“You will never again take a single step for all the rest of your life. You are hopelessly, irreparably paralyzed from the waist down. Surgery, everything, has been tried. Accept this... Now you know — and so now be brave.”

“I am. I will be,” she said trustfully. “I’ll learn a craft of some kind, that will occupy my days and earn me a living. Perhaps you can find a nursing home for me at the start until I get adjusted, and then maybe later I can find a little place all to myself and manage there on my own. There are such places, with ramps instead of stairs—”

He smiled deprecatingly at her oversight.

“All that won’t be necessary. You’re forgetting. There is someone who will look after you. Look after you well. You’ll be in good capable hands. Your husband is coming to take you home with him today.”

Her scream was like the death cry of a wounded animal. So strident, so unbelievable, that in the stillness of its aftermath could be heard the slithering and rustling of people looking out the other ward-room doors along the corridor, nurses and ambulatory patients, asking one another what that terrified cry had been and where it had come from.

“Two cc’s of M, and hurry,” the doctor instructed the nurse tautly. “It’s just the reaction from what she’s been through. This sometimes happens — going-home happiness becomes hysteria.”

The wet kiss of alcohol on her arm. Then the needle again — the needle meant to be kind.

One of them patted her on the head and said, “You’ll be all right now.”

A tear came to the corner of her eyes, and just lay there, unable to retreat, unable to fall...

Myopically she watched them dress her and put her in her chair. Her mind remained awake, but everything was downgraded in intensity — the will to struggle had become reluctance, fear had become unease. She still knew there was cause to scream, but the distance had become too great, the message had too far to travel.

Through lazy, contracting pupils she looked over and saw Mark standing in the doorway, talking to the doctor, shaking the nurse’s hand and leaving something behind in it for which she smiled her thanks. Then he went around in back of her wheel chair, with a phantom breath for a kiss to the top of her head, and started to sidle it toward the door that was being held open for the two of them. He tipped the front of the chair ever so slightly, careful to avoid the least jar or impact or roughness, as if determined that she reach her destination with him in impeccable condition, unmarked and unmarred.

And as she craned her neck and looked up overhead, and then around and into his face, backward, the unspoken message was so plain, in his shining eyes and in the grim grin he showed his teeth in, that though he didn’t say it aloud, there was no need to; it reached from his mind into hers without sound or the need of sound just as surely as though he had said it aloud.

Now I’ve got you.

Now he had her — for the rest of her life.

New York Blues

It’s six o’clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark — three-quarters down, not three-quarters up — and the night begins.

Across the way from me sits a little transistor radio, up on end, simmering away like a teakettle on a stove. It’s been going steadily ever since I first came in here, two days, three nights ago; it chisels away the stony silence, takes the edge off the being alone. It came with the room, not with me.

Now there’s a punctuation of three lush chords, and it goes into a traffic report. “Good evening. The New York Municipal Communications Service presents the 6:00 p.m. Traffic Advisory. Traffic through the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and over the George Washington Bridge, heavy westbound, light eastbound. Traffic on the crosscut between the George Washington and Queens-Whitestone bridges, heavy in both directions. Traffic through the Battery Tunnel, heavy outbound, very light inbound. Traffic on the West Side Highway, bumper to bumper all the way. Radar units in operation there. Traffic over the Long Island Expressway is beginning to build, due to tonight’s game at Shea Stadium. West 70th Street between Amsterdam and West End avenues is closed due to a water-main break. A power failure on the East Side I.R.T. line between Grand Central and 125th Street is causing delays of up to forty-five minutes. Otherwise all subways and buses, the Staten Island Ferry, the Jersey Central, the Delaware and Lackawanna, and the Pennsylvania railroads, and all other commuter services, are operating normally. At the three airports, planes are arriving and departing on time. The next regularly scheduled traffic advisory will be given one-half hour from now—”

The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out — everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We’re going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.