Pneumonia

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2004 by Keith, Julie

In late afternoon our house grew dark. Shadows gathered in the corners of my room and in the upper hall, while outside my window the sky turned from winter silver to deep blue. I'd been playing tea party with my doll Lucy and a fuzzy, yellow and tan teddy bear named Boom. We three played together a good deal, not always tea party, but sometimes orphanage or store or train trip. Lucy had fat, feverish cheeks and platinum hair. Boom was just a teddy bear, a little worn around the ears, soft and agreeable to hold. In the growing gloom, Lucy's curls and Boom's blond tummy were becoming harder and harder to see. Finally I said to them, "Excuse me, please,"and leaving them on the floor with the doll teacups and doll teapot, I got to my feet and went over to the light switch.

By reaching up and pushing hard with both forefingers, I was able to punch in the button. My room flashed into brightness. For a moment I stood blinking and squinting and glancing around. The fan of light from my doorway reached out into the hall as far as the stairs. Normally this light would be met by more light from the hall and stairwell and by rattles and clunks from the kitchen to tell me my mother had finished her nap and gone down to start supper. But this afternoon there was nothing beyond my own light-only silence and darkness.

Earlier, when I'd come in from school, I'd sat awhile on the stairs, overcome with lethargy. The house had been silent then too, as it often was. My mother rested most afternoons, stretched out on her bed, sometimes dozing. All mothers did this, I assumed. Their children made them tired.

Eventually, I'd hauled off my boots and snowsuit and headed upstairs to report in. My mother had been an actress in plays before she married my father, and her voice, though often weary, had a carrying lilt. Today though, as I arrived in her doorway, her whispered, "Hello, darling," barely reached me. Flopped on her flowered bedspread, her blond head sunk into the pillow, she'd waved me away with a flutter of her hand-none of her usual admonitions to change out of my school dress and to have a glass of milk. After a moment, when it seemed unlikely she would say or do anything more, I'd gone to my room. I did not mind this. In our quiet house I was used to spending my afternoons with Lucy and Boom.

The house was not really ours. We rented it from a gaunt, dingy man named Mr. Meese, and some of his furniture was stored, covered in dust sheets, on the large, unheated sleeping porch that stretched like an afterthought across the back of the house. The door to it from the upstairs hall was kept locked, but I had gone out there a few times when my father was changing storm windows or screens and wanted me to stand beside him and hold the screws and washers and sometimes his big screwdriver. Depending on the season, the place was either hotter or colder than the rest of the house, and either way my father usually got very angry at the ill-fitting windows and screens. Neither he nor my mother cared much for the house or for Mr. Meese, and their distaste seemed to culminate in this porch. Perhaps that was why being out there made me uneasy. Nonetheless, we were lucky, as my parents often said, to have a house to live in. There was a war on, after all. Places to live were hard to find.

When the windows of my room had turned into mirrors of the purest black, my father came home. Light burst up the stairs and then so did he, his footsteps smacking hard on the wooden steps. He appeared in my doorway, his dark hair slicked back from his pale face, the whole of him smelling of smoke and train and downtown. The other men in the laboratory at the university smoked a great deal, especially the scientists. He had told me this once when the smell of his coat had made me sneeze. Now he said, "What's going on here?"

"There's no supper, Daddy," I told him. "Mommy's still resting."

He looked down at me for another second; then he turned and left the room. I heard his voice, sharp and alarmed, "Helen? Helen?" and the sound of their bedroom door shutting.

After a moment I put Boom back on my bed where he usually sat and placed Lucy in her cradle, making sure her eyelids had closed as they were supposed to whenever she was laid flat. "Hush," I told her. "Be good, darling," and I covered her to her hard little chin with a shawl from my dress-up trunk.

When my father did not immediately reappear, I went downstairs and got myself graham crackers and jam. I was not allowed snacks near suppertime, but for now it seemed all bets were off. While I was eating, my father came downstairs too. Our phone was in the hall, and I could hear him telling the operator what number he wanted and, a moment later, saying something in a quick, angry voice about the doctor coming at once. He made another call to our next-door neighbor, whom I called Uncle Fitz though he wasn't an uncle, just my father's friend. They sometimes played badminton together on Saturday afternoons. I could tell from what my father was saying that Uncle Fitz wasn't in but only the old lady whose second floor he rented as a separate apartment. "No, never mind," my father was saying. "Thought he might be there. I needed a hand just now, but never mind."