A House Like A Lotus Part 5

You could not go into the sacred precincts in Epidaurus with bitterness in your soul. Inner and outer illnesses were seen as part of each other, and both patient and priest partic.i.p.ated in the healing. The Greeks understood psychosomatic, or holistic, medicine long before they were heard of in the West, where we've tended to separate and overspecialize. In Epidaurus, healing was an art, rather than a science.

Sandy and Dennys say it's an art for Daddy, too, and that's why he's had such remarkable results in his experiments on regeneration.

Ursula Heschel was fascinated by Daddy's work, and when she and Max came over for dinner, she and Daddy 57.always spent time together in the lab. Xan and I both helped in the lab, feeding the animals, cleaning the tanks, and I had to wash down the floor with a hose once a day. Max was interested and intelligent, but Ursula was the one who truly understood. She and Daddy really hit it off.

Once in January, Daddy and Ursula went to Florida to a lab there specializing in the nervous system of the octopus. In February they went together to Baltimore, where Daddy was giving a paper at Johns Hopkins. They had lots in common.

Xan said once, 'It's a good thing Ursula Heschel is much too old for Dad.'

'What are you talking about?'

'They sure like each other. Kate's noticed it. But Mother doesn't seem jealous.'

'They're just friends. There isn't any reason to be jealous.'

And indeed Mother, rather than being jealous, often suggested asking Max and Ursula to dinner.

But if Urs, as it were, belonged to Daddy, Max belonged to me. And my parents encouraged the friends.h.i.+p. Mother said, 'I expect too much of you, Polly. The oldest always gets too much responsibility foisted on her. I should know. Of course you can go over to Beau Allaire this afternoon.'

If the car wasn't free I'd go to Beau Allaire right from school, taking the bus from Cowpertown to Mulletville and walking over from there, and then later on, Mother would come for me, or Urs would drive me home.

Max had called and asked me for tea early in January. The uncles had left, Charles had gone back to Boston with Dennys and Lucy, and Kate had stayedwith us. The house was back to its normal population. School 58.had started again and was as stultifying as ever, and I was glad to be going over to Beau Allaire, but a little shy, driving over by myself. I'd got my license on my sixteenth birthday. One of the good things about Cow- pertown High was the driver's-ed course, though Mother and Daddy said that driver's ed and similar courses were one reason why the science department was nearly nonexistent, and why no languages were offered.

As I climbed the steps to the front entrance to Beau Allaire, Max flung open the door and welcomed me in. Nettie and Ovid were setting out tea in the library, I.

didn't see Ursula.

'Urs went into Charleston on a consultation,' Max explained. 'They don't have a neurological service at M. A. Horne, more's the pity. It would keep Urs busy.

Dennys introduced her to the chief of neurology at Mercy Hospital and one would have thought Dennys had given him pure gold. In a sense, he did. People flock to New York to see Ursula. They'll flock to Charleston just for a consult.

Maintenant,' She spoke to me in French. 'Did you bring your homework with you as I suggested?'

I replied in Portuguese: 'It's here, in my canvas bag.'

'Not Portuguese,' Max said. 'That was Portuguese, wasn't it?'

'Yes, and it's the language I speak best,' I answered in German.

She laughed. 'I concede. You're good at languages. Let me see some of your schoolwork.'

I pulled out my English notebook. On the bus from school to the Cowpertown dock, I'd written a sketch of the natives on Gaea, comparing them with the Indians we'd met when Daddy took Charles and me with him for a month when he was doing research in Venezuela.

'That's good, Polly,' Max said, to my surprise. 'You really give a flavor of the people you're writing about, 59.but you haven't fallen for the n.o.ble Savage trap. You look at them with a realistic eye. Where did you get your gift for writing?'

'I didn't know I had one. Daddy used to write when he was young, and Mother says he should go over his journals and have some of them published. But he's too busy.'

'If he's that good, he should make time,' Max said. She began leafing through my English notebook. 'You use imagery well. That's a good snow metaphor, soft flowers that perished before they reached the ground. Where have you seen snow?'

'Sometimes it snowed in Lisbon. And we've seen snow when we've stayed with our grandparents in New England.'

'Good. I didn't think you could have written that if you hadn't seen it. Does your English teacher appreciate you?' 'She gives me B's. She 'thinks I'm showing off when I write about Lisbon and other places we've been.'

'Are you?'

'No. When she wants a description of a place, I have to write about places I know.'

'True. But I can see that it might seem like showing off to your English teacher. What's her name?'

'Miss Zeloski.'

'Hardly a good South Carolina name. Who are your favorite poets?'

Sandy and Rhea often give me poetry for Christmas. This year it was a small volume of seventeenth-century writers. I loved it. 'There's someone called Vaughan, I think. I love the way he relishes words.'

'And Miss Zeloski?'

'If anything rhymes, Miss Zeloski says it's old-fas.h.i.+oned. She likes poetry that-that obfuscates.'

60.Max leaned back on the sofa and laughed. 'And I suppose she likes all that garbage full of genital imagery?'

'Not at Cowpertown High. The PTA has its eye out for obscenity.'

'Go and catch a jailing star' Max said. 'Get with child a mandrake root.'

'She doesn't like John Donne. I think he scares her.'

'Too real?'

'That's not what she calls it. But yes. I think she's afraid of reality. So if the poetry doesn't mean anything, she doesn't have to cope with it.'

Max climbed up on the library ladder and pulled a book off one of the top shelves and read a few lines, 'e. e. c.u.mmings.'

'I love him,' I said. 'Sandy and Rhea gave me one of his books for my birthday a few years ago.'

'Not cool enough for your Miss 7..?'

'Too cool.'

Max climbed down from the ladder, and refilled my cup. It was a special tea, smoky, and we drank it without anything in it. I liked it. I liked Max. I liked talking with her. At home, everybody (except my parents) was younger than I, and our conversations were limited. And at school I didn't have any real friends.

It wasn't that I was actively unpopular, I just didn't have anyone special to talk to. Mostly I felt I was walking through the scene, saying my lines reasonably well, but not being really in the show. At school I tried to play the role that was expected of me, as best I could. With Max, I was myself.

She laughed at me gently. 'What a sn.o.b you are, Polly.'

'Me?' I was startled.

61 /.

'Why not? It's obvious that school bores you, and that there's n.o.body to challenge you, teacher or student.'

'A lot of the kids are bright.'

She cut me off. 'Go ahead and be a sn.o.b. I'm a sn.o.b. If you didn't interest me I.

wouldn't give you the time of day. Being a sn.o.b isn't necessarily a bad thing.

It can mean being unwilling to walk blindly through life instead of living it fully. Being unwilling to lose a sense of wonder. Being alive is a marvelous, precarious mystery, and few people appreciate it. Go on being a sn.o.b, Polly, as long as it keeps your mind and heart alert. It doesn't mean that you can't appreciate people who are different from you, or have different interests.'

Max made me not only willing to be Polyhymnia O'Keefe but happy to be.

It was, oddly enough, through Max that I began seeing Renny. He called me early one evening late in January.

Xan shouted, 'Hey, Polly, it's for you. Some guy.'

I ambled to the phone. Sometimes kids in my cla.s.s call me to ask about homework.

'Is this Polly O'Keefe?'

'Yes.'

'You don't know me. I'm Queron Renier, and I'm a distant cousin of a friend of yours, Simon Renier, the one who's staying in Venezuela.'

'Well, h.e.l.lo,' I said. 'It's nice to hear from you.'

'I'm an intern at the M. A. Horne Hospital in Cowpertown, and I thought maybe we could get together.'

Interns usually move in sometime in early July. This 62.was January. 'Well, sure.' I didn't sound wildly enthusiastic.

'I haven't called before because I'm basically a shy guy. But I was talking with an outpatient who's a friend of yours. I guess she saw I was lonely, and somehow or other I mentioned that I'd heard of you through Simon but I hadn't felt free to call-'

'Who was it?' I was curious now.

'A Mrs, Toma.s.si.'

It took me a moment to remember that Max's husband's name was Toma.s.si. 'Max!'

'I guess. She lives on Benne Seed at Beau Allaire-'

'What was she doing at the hospital?'

A pause. 'She was just in for some blood tests.'

I wanted to ask what for, but Daddy has talked to us often enough about confidentiality, and I knew that Renny wouldn't tell me.

He said, 'Well, could we get together sometime? Take in a movie in Cowpertown or something?'

'Sure.' I realized I wasn't being very hospitable. 'Would you like to come to dinner? Do you have anything on, your next evening off?'

'It's tomorrow,' he said. 'It's sort of short notice, but no, I don't have anything on.'

'Well, good. Come on over. Do you have access to a motorboat?'

'Nope.'

'Well, come by the causeway, then. It's a lot longer, but if you don't have a boat it's the only way. We're the far end of the island.'

'No problem.'

'About six?' I gave him directions, hung up, and then double-checked with Mother.

'Of course it's all right,' she said. I knew she was wor- 63.ried that I didn't bring friends home the way the others did.

Renny was nice. Everybody liked him. Kate made eyes at him, but fortunately she really was too young for him. Fourteen, after all. Anyhow, Renny and I got on well. He was almost as shy as I was, and I think he was grateful to have someone he could be purely platonic with. I mean, he hardly saw me as a s.e.xpot. Buthe asked me to go out for something to eat, and see a movie, on his next free evening.

I saw Max the day after Renny came for dinner. She called me to come over after school, to do my homework at the long table in the library, and stay for an early supper.

Ursula was in the library, too, sitting in her favorite chair, deep in some medical journal.

'So how did you like my nice young intern?' Max asked.

'You described him,' I said. 'Nice.'

'Not exciting?'

'He just came over for dinner with the family. It was kind of a mob scene.

But he was able to cope with it, and that says something.'

'Hm.'

'Max, why were you having blood tests?'

Ursula looked up from her journal but said nothing.

Max replied shortly, 'When one is my age, every time one sees a doctor, one has to have a million tests.'

'Why did you need to see a doctor?'

'When one is my age, it is prudent to have regular medical checkups.'

'Renny called you Mrs. Toma.s.si.'

'It was, after all, my husband's name.'

'You never use it.'

64.'Therefore it gives me a modic.u.m of privacy, of which there is very little around here. And stop prying. It is not a quality I like,'