View From a Kite Read online

  Evvie stands there, meekly happy, holding her hands out from her body, determined not to touch anything in case her hands are sweaty. Denise is picky, picky, picky—she wants her dress taken in a half inch at the waist and let out a quarter inch at the hips and the hem raised a sixteenth of an inch and the zipper shifted a smidgen and some padding to enhance her boobs. Elaine just beams to see the interest Denise takes. Elaine supervises the fittings of course, although we don’t get to see her being fitted into her dress. She kicks us all out, crafty people included, lowers the blinds, and locks the door. Then she and her dressmaker go into creative overdrive. The bag her dress arrives in is opaque so we can’t see even a hint of colour or fabric texture. Elaine lives in fear someone will catch a glimpse and spoil Bernard’s surprise and ruin her luck.

  CHAPTER 50

  “If a lot of cures are suggested for a disease it means the disease is incurable.”

  —Anton Chekhov

  Chekhov knew perfectly well what was wrong with him and what was coming. But he also loathed inactivity, so he ignored his disease as long as he could. He practiced medicine, wrote short stories and plays, organized and oversaw the restoration and development of a run-down estate he bought in the country (and treated half the peasants in the surrounding countryside for free). He avoided being stuck in a hospital until he was so sick he had no other choice. He’d begun having attacks as far back as 1884, coughing for hours at night, spitting blood a couple of times a year. He kept the blood-spitting from his family, but told his publisher, Suvorin, there was something ominous about blood coming from the mouth like fire.

  A couple of years later they were having dinner at the Hermitage in Moscow when Chekhov opened his mouth to speak and blood came gushing out. He tried sucking on ice, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop. He was moved to his hotel and Suvorin called a doctor who had him transferred to a clinic that specialized in lung diseases, particularly tuberculosis.

  Chekhov was making jokes, until Suvorin mentioned that the ice was breaking up in the Moscow River. Russian peasants believed that consumptives died in the spring when the rivers began to break up and run free again. At this point, he’d had tuberculosis for about a dozen years and one of his brothers had already died of it.

  He still doesn’t seem to have done much in the way of looking after himself, despite this dramatic scare: a little self-medication; a half-hearted attempt to slow down his schedule of activities; more time in the country, less in the city. In May of 1901 he was examined by an expert in Moscow and ordered to a sanatorium in the province of Ufa to take the koumiss cure. Koumiss, the fermented milk of mares, was widely prescribed at that time as a treatment. He went to Ufa and drank the stuff by the quart. He gained weight, but was bored out of his mind. There was nothing to do and nobody interesting to talk to. Halfway through the cure he left and went to his house in Yalta with his new wife Olga, an actress he’d met during the production of one of his plays.

  His tuberculosis had spread to his stomach and he lay in bed, unable to eat, in great pain. His doctor ordered him to the German spa of Badenweiler. Chekhov and Olga travelled first to Berlin, perhaps hoping for a better diagnosis. The specialist they saw threw his hands up in despair and left the room without a word.

  They went on to Badenweiler, where they stayed in a guest house while Chekhov was examined and treated at the spa nearby. He was fed cocoa, oatmeal, and an enormous amount of butter, which he swallowed in hopes of being allowed to go out for walks. He gained a little weight, but then the owners of the guest house (shades of Chopin in Majorca) asked him to leave. They expected him to die soon and thought a death on the premises would be bad for business. Olga and Chekhov moved into the best hotel in the spa, where he sat on a balcony and watched people walking about on the street.

  In June, Badenweiler was hit by a heat wave. Chekhov’s clothes were too hot and his lungs were barely functioning. He felt like he was being strangled. The tuberculosis had spread to every organ, including his heart. He had a heart attack on June 29 and was given oxygen and morphine. The next day he survived a second attack.

  Just past midnight on July 2, 1904, he had his third and final attack.

  The doctor gave him an injection of camphor to stimulate his heart, but it had no effect. He wanted to send for oxygen, but Chekhov vetoed the idea, saying he’d be a corpse before it arrived.

  The doctor picked up the house phone and ordered a bottle of champagne and three glasses. He told them to hurry.

  When the champagne arrived the doctor eased the cork out, poured three glasses, and put the cork back in the bottle.

  “It’s a long time since I’ve had champagne,” Chekhov said, and drank it. Then he lay down and stopped breathing.

  It was three in the morning.

  The doctor left. The cork exploded from the bottle of champagne and foam poured down onto the table. Olga sat quietly, holding Chekhov’s hand, touching his face, until the sun rose and the thrushes began to sing in the garden below.

  If I wrote this stuff, people would accuse me of being melodramatic and manipulative. And they’d accuse me of cheap farce if I wrote a funeral scene like his.

  Chekhov’s body was sent by rail to Moscow, but somebody screwed things up and sent it to St. Petersburg in a goods wagon labeled Fresh Oysters. When his body finally arrived in Moscow the mourners on the platform were perplexed to hear a military band blatting away. It wasn’t until later that they discovered there had been two bodies on the train—and some of Chekhov’s mourners had followed the funeral procession of a General Keller, killed in Manchuria, to his final resting place, and missed Chekhov’s burial altogether.

  “This is how we treat our great writers,” Gorky fumed.

  Chekhov could have written his funeral though, made you believe it, and made you laugh.

  CHAPTER 51

  IF A PATIENT WILLFULLY VIOLATES THE SANITORIUM REGULATIONS OR LEAVES WITHOUT CONSENT, HE MAY BE CHARGED WITH DISORDERLY CONDUCT.

  Remember, night air is beneficial; get all of it you can.

  The bootlegger has been apprehended and Patrick is inconsolable. Denise and I were both wrong; it was one of the kitchen helpers, a certain D. M. Goldring, a name neither of us can put a face to. I have explained to Patrick how kites were used to smuggle alcohol into Paris in 1870 when the city was besieged by the Prussians, but he says this piece of information is of no use to him whatsoever. He doesn’t have a kite and more importantly, doesn’t have a contact on the outside who could fly a bottle of whiskey in on a kite if he did have one. Also, it’s not Prussians he’s concerned about, it’s MacConnell, who might catch and torture him. He is struggling with a great moral dilemma; he is thinking about asking his beloved Annie, Lance’s wife, to smuggle him in a pint or two. There are a number of points to consider, he says. First, will she do it? Second, will she keep it a secret from Lance? Third, will this sully the purity of his passion for her? Fourth, is he big enough to get beyond that? The crucial question is, of course, will she do it?

  I’ve done all I can for him, and I go looking for Denise.

  She’s staring out the sunroom windows. Heavy grey walls of rain are pounding the dead brown flowerbeds and the crumbling concrete walk below. It’s almost winter, but we haven’t had any snow and the temperature is cool and damp and miserable. If this keeps up, we’ll have a green Christmas. Nothing worse, if you’re a little kid—standing in the wet with your brand new sled, your mittens trailing off their strings into a puddle.

  “It’ll be cold, so wear a warm jacket. Too bad there’s so much mud. We’ll have to keep to the edge of the lawn so we don’t leave tracks.”

  “What?” What is she talking about?

  “Music, Gwennie baby. Dancing. Guys with slathers of aftershave and tight pants wheeling you around the dance floor. Rye and seven. If I don’t get some fun soon, this weather’ll turn me suicidal.”

  “You’re sneaking out to a dance?”

  “Not me. We.”

  “O
h no. Oh, shit no. We’ll get caught. Grass will have us arrested. Where is it? I don’t have any decent clothes to wear. We’ll get into so much trouble—she’ll make us stay here over Christmas, eating gruel. Scrubbing floors in the basement. With big hungry rats.”

  “I’ll lend you some clothes. It’s in Reardon, we’ll probably have to hitch.”

  “We can’t. We’ll get caught when they do rounds.”

  “We’ll put blanket rolls in the bed. Morissette’s on tonight, it’ll be too easy.”

  Blanket rolls. Morissette never checks, just glances in the door if she bothers at all. Her feet are bad, she likes to sit at the desk with them propped up on a stool while she reads murder mysteries—preferably involving cannibalism and necrophilia. Denise is right, it’s too easy. I’d done it a hundred times at home—wait until everyone is asleep, then out the bedroom window. I could do it with my eyes shut. I could do it in the dark.

  A veranda had once wrapped around two sides of our house. Rows of newer shingles with not-quite-matching brown paint drew the shape of its absence on the front and east walls. My bedroom, on the southeast corner, had a narrow, glass-paned door that had once given access to the upper veranda. The room had been a sewing room, so designated because the large windows on the south wall provided the light necessary to thread needles and do fine embroidery. Ladies in mutton-sleeved dresses and outlandish petticoats had squeezed through that narrow door on the east wall to sit on white wicker chairs in the shade of thirty-foot maples and elms, when sewing in the sun had made them too hot and sweaty under their corsets. Fans whispered, and ice tinkled in their rhubarb punch as they rested their thimbles, gossiped, and spied on their neighbours. I’m named for one of them, my great-grandmother Gwendolyn with the severe bun, no eyebrows, and two hundred tiny jet buttons down the massive cliff of her bombazine dress. I begged for the photograph and then hung it on my wall beside the door. I thought of her as a sort of a private guardian spirit, watching over my escape route and covering for me if anyone stuck their head in my room while I was away. I counted on her glare to freeze them out if they got too nosy. I don’t look a bit like her, or her sisters.

  The great trees were all gone by the time I inherited the room, even the stumps had rotted. All that remained was the door, locked to prevent visiting small cousins from tumbling out and smashing their skulls on the driveway below. I learned to pick the lock when I was twelve, then later I found a skeleton key hanging on a nail behind the attic stairs. It worked—once I’d WD40’d the bejesus out of the lock and hinges.

  Mama had smothered me like warm glue. Car accidents, drug pushers, rapists, seducers, mad dogs, germs, dirt, heat, improperly cooked meat, wet socks, bad influences—the world was just not a fit place for her only daughter. The door was my way out into that world. The east side of the house was hidden from the street, and it was a long sock-foot stretch over onto the garage roof. I pulled the narrow door shut behind me with a loop of my belt, then climbed down the trellis with its stunted and unproductive grape vines. He’d nailed the trellis onto the garage wall with spikes because, for some unaccountable reason, it kept coming loose.

  Of course I couldn’t get back in the same way. When I returned I’d check in the darkened windows for possible lurking parents, then stop by the garage to collect my previously stashed nightgown and slippers. It was just a precaution, but I slipped them on and left my sneakers and clothes in a bag to be picked up later, leaving the bag behind a collection of half-empty paint cans that my parents were too Scottish to ever throw out, but never used because the colours no longer pleased them. I let myself in the back door with another key (I kept the back door hinges well-lubricated, too). Re-locked the door behind me.

  To tell the truth, most times I just went out walking the dark streets by myself, and hid in the bushes every time I thought I heard footsteps. I just wanted to be able to come and go as I pleased, to walk in warm rain in August after midnight or sneak down to the small shingle beach just outside town and worship the full moon riding in on the wavelets.

  “Hungry,” I said, the night he appeared in the darkened dining room arch and asked me what I was doing up in the middle of the night.

  “I got hungry. I went to the garage for some of those Gravenstein apples.” Blood flooded so fast my arteries ached. I thought my heart might explode. I was terrified he was on to me. “I couldn’t find any. You scared me to death,” I accused him.

  He stared past me to the back door. Finally he said, “The apples went bad weeks ago. Your mother threw them out.”

  “Well, I’m going to bed.” I snatched a banana from the fruit bowl on the washing machine and stepped past him. Almost safe. Just roll the blankets out of the bed and take their place. Halfway up the stairs I bent and looked through the spindles, down the hall and into the kitchen. He stood in the black arch where I’d left him, his gaze still fixed on the back door.

  I thought maybe he’d been drinking. He’d been drinking a bit, then. He’d had some kind of disagreement with his principal at the start of the year because she didn’t like his teaching style—he wasn’t giving enough tests or something. He’d started to talk about giving it all up and trying to write plays like he’d wanted to in teachers’ college, and Mama’d had panic attacks thinking we’d starve to death and not be able to pay the taxes and end up out on the street. So he stopped talking about it. After a few weekends of locking himself in the dining room, scribbling and throwing books against the wall, he tossed his pile of writing in the burning barrel, set it on fire, and that was that. He gave up just like that. Took to drinking and pretty much quit talking to us. If Mama weren’t around, I suddenly realized, I probably could have waltzed out the front door dressed as a belly dancer and he wouldn’t have noticed or cared.

  “Eleven-thirty,” says Denise, “after Morissette’s though sticking her little flashlight through the keyholes to see if anyone’s moving. Rogers is on duty with her, so by eleven-fifteen they’ll be in the staff room with the orderlies, playing poker, drinking up the good coffee and eating butter tarts. Don’t make the blanket too lumpy; long and lean looks more realistic.”

  “I know how to do it. It’s a particular talent of mine. I just don’t know if I want to go.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you do.”

  A hand slaps over my mouth and holds tight, mashing my lips against my teeth. I yank it down.

  “Stop that.”

  “Shut up,” she hisses. “Holy God, you’re noisy. I heard you coming all the way down the hall.” She catches the door handle behind me and eases it quietly shut.

  “You didn’t have to do that.” I am cross. “You scared me silly. What if I’d screamed?”

  “Come on.” She picks up a bag and creeps down the stairs. “Don’t thump. Pick up your big feet.”

  “I never thump.”

  “Shhh.”

  On the second floor she leads the way to the laundry room, unlocks the window and pushes it open. A fire escape runs down the side of the building, past the window, and ends a few feet farther down. She drops the bag off the last step, sits on the edge, and jumps down into the dark. I can’t see a thing. Serve her right if I land on her.

  “Ouch! You cow!” she says. “Get off me.”

  The half-dead grass is wet and cold through my slippers. The grounds are lit here and there with fake Edwardian lampposts—wrought iron painted the same black enamel as the stair railings inside. It’s warmer than it was this afternoon, really too mild for December, and the air is misty in the yellow light of the lamps. Pools of shadow offer shelter along the walls and under trees. We slither and slink until we reach the parking lot. Crouching behind the dumpster we put on shoes and lipstick, whip off our bathrobes and stuff them into the bag. Denise jams the bag between the brick wall and the back of the dumpster. The smell of orange peels, coffee grounds, and spoiled meat wafts forward, making me want to puke. That, or shriek. Déjà vu, déjà vu, I whisper. Oh, I feel sick; my heart is boiling
and my blood is careening around in my veins.

  “Get a hold of yourself,” she says. “Now, we make like we’ve just gone off duty.”

  “And what? Steal a car? Are you crazy?”

  “Poor working girls like us? With a car? Do you have any idea what they pay kitchen staff in this place? We’re in plenty of time to catch the bus.” She links her arm in mine and hauls me into the light.

  “Why are we kitchen staff?” I ask. “They wear ugly hairnets all day long. Why can’t we be student nurses or something?”

  “How much nursing have you done?”

  “I’ve been observing them since last spring.”

  “How many dishes have you washed?”

  “Kazillions.”

  “Exactly. Now stroll,” she says.

  “You are crazy.”

  But no sirens begin to wail, no spotlights pin us to a wall, no one opens a window and threatens to shoot us, no platoon of guards comes running out to throw us to the ground and arrest us. At the gates Denise stops and checks her watch. I want to shake her and run, I’m so nervous.

  “We’re early,” she yawns. “Let’s walk a bit, to get the kinks out. I thought the shift would never end.”

  I look around to see who she is performing for. Not a soul. How well do I know Denise? Maybe she’s been put in the wrong kind of hospital. She ambles down the street, away from the gates. I hurry to catch up.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m getting into character. I’m Barb, you’re Lindy. We work in the kitchen. Don’t, for God’s sake, let on you’re a patient here, or they’ll treat you like a leper. And we don’t want it getting back to the hospital that we skipped out either, or they’ll bolt the doors and windows from the outside and no one will be able to go anywhere for months.”