The Bell Jar Part 23

When I held my hand up to the light streaming in from the bathroom, my fingertips looked black.

"Irwin," I said nervously, "bring me a towel."

Irwin strolled back, a bathtowel knotted around his waist, and tossed me a second, smaller towel. I pushed the towel between my legs and pulled it away almost immediately. It was half black with blood.

"I'm bleeding!" I announced; sitting up with a start.

"Oh, that often happens," Irwin rea.s.sured me. "You'll be all right."

Then the stories of blood-stained bridal sheets and capsules of red ink bestowed on already deflowered brides floated back to me. I wondered how much I would bleed, and lay down, nursing the towel. It occurred to me that the blood was my answer. I couldn't possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of a great tradition.

Surrept.i.tiously, I applied a fresh section of white towel to my wound, thinking that as soon as the bleeding stopped, I would take the late trolley back to the asylum. I wanted to brood over my new condition in perfect peace. But the towel came away black and dripping.

"I...think I better go home," I said faintly.

"Surely not so soon"

"Yes, I think I better."

I asked if I could borrow Irwin's towel and packed it between my thighs as a bandage. Then I pulled on my sweaty clothes. Irwin offered to drive me home, but I didn't see how I could let him drive me to the asylum, so I dug in my pocketbook for Joan's address. Irwin knew the street and went out to start the car. I was too worried to tell him I was still bleeding. I kept hoping every minute that it would stop.

But as Irwin drove me through the barren, snow-banked streets I felt the warm seepage let itself through the dam of the towel and my skirt and onto the car seat.

As we slowed, cruising by house after lit house, I thought how fortunate it was I had not discarded by virginity while living at college or at home, where such concealment would have been impossible.

Joan opened the door with an expression of glad surprise. Irwin kissed my hand and told Joan to take good care of me.

I shut the door and leaned back against it, feeling the blood drain from my face in one spectacular flush.

"Why, Esther," Joan said, "what on earth's the matter?"

I wondered when Joan would notice the blood trickling down my legs and oozing, stickily, into each black patent leather shoe. I thought I could be dying from a bullet wound and Joan would still stare through me with her blank eyes, expecting me to ask for a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

"Is that nurse here?"

"No, she's on night duty at Caplan...."

"Good." I made a little bitter grin as another soak of blood let itself through the drenched padding and started the tedious journey into my shoes. "I mean...bad."

"You look funny," Joan said.

"You better get a doctor."

"Why?"

"Quick."

"But..."

Still she hadn't noticed anything.

I bent down, with a brief grunt, and slipped off one of my winter-cracked black Bloomingdale shoes. I held the shoe up, before Joan's enlarged, pebbly eyes, tilted it, and watched her take in the stream of blood that cascaded onto the beige rug.

"My G.o.d! What is it?"

"I'm hemorrhaging."

Joan half led, half dragged me to the sofa and made me lie down. Then she propped some pillows under my blood-stained feet. Then she stood back and demanded, "Who was that man?"

For one crazy minute I thought Joan would refuse to call a doctor until I confessed the whole story of my evening with Irwin and that after my confession she would still refuse, as a sort of punishment. But then I realized that she honestly took my explanation at face value, that my going to bed with Irwin was utterly incomprehensible to her, and his appearance a mere p.r.i.c.k to her pleasure at my arrival.

"Oh somebody," I said, with a flabby gesture of dismissal. Another pulse of blood released itself and I contracted my stomach muscles in alarm. "Get a towel."

Joan went out and came back almost immediately with a pile of towels and sheets. Like a prompt nurse, she peeled back my blood-wet clothes, drew a quick breath as she arrived at the original royal red towel, and applied a fresh bandage. I lay, trying to slow the beating of my heart, as every beat pushed forth another gush of blood.

I remembered a worrisome course in the Victorian novel where woman after woman died, palely and n.o.bly, in torrents of blood, after a difficult childbirth. Perhaps Irwin had injured me in some awful, obscure way, and all the while I lay there on Joan's sofa I was really dying.

Joan pulled up an Indian ha.s.sock and began to dial down the long list of Cambridge doctors. The first number didn't answer. Joan began to explain my case to the second number, which did answer, but then broke off and said "I see" and hung up.

"What's the trouble?"

"He'll only come for regular customers or emergencies. It's Sunday."

I tried to lift my arm and look at my watch, but my hand was a rock at my side and wouldn't budge. Sunday--the doctor's paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors.

"For G.o.d's sake," I said, "tell them I'm an emergency."

The third number didn't answer and, at the fourth, the party hung up the minute Joan mentioned it was about a period. Joan began to cry.

"Look, Joan," I said painstakingly, "call up the local hospital. Tell them it's an emergency. They'll have to take me."

Joan brightened and dialed a fifth number. The Emergency Service promised her a staff doctor would attend to me if I could come to the ward. Then Joan called a taxi.

Joan insisted on riding with me. I clasped my fresh padding of towels with a sort of desperation as the cabby, impressed by the address Joan gave him, cut corner after corner in the dawn-pale streets and drew up with a great squeal of tires at the Emergency Ward entrance.

I left Joan to pay the driver and hurried into the empty, glaring lit room. A nurse bustled out from behind a white screen. In a few swift words, I managed to tell her the truth about my predicament before Joan came in the door, blinking and wide-eyed as a myopic owl.

The Emergency Ward doctor strolled out then, and I climbed, with the nurse's help, on to the examining table. The nurse whispered to the doctor, and the doctor nodded and began unpacking the b.l.o.o.d.y toweling. I felt his fingers start to probe, and Joan stood, rigid as a soldier, at my side, holding my hand, for my sake or hers I couldn't tell.

"Ouch!" I winced at a particularly bad jab.

The doctor whistled.

"You're one in a million."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it's one in a million it happens to like this."

The doctor spoke in a low,. curt voice to the nurse, and she hurried to a side table and brought back some rolls of gauze and silver instruments. "I can see," the doctor bent down, "exactly where the trouble is coming from."

"But can you fix it?"

The doctor laughed. "Oh, I can fix it, all right."

I was roused by a tap on my door. It was past midnight, and the asylum quiet as death. I couldn't imagine who would still be up.

"Come in!" I switched on the bedside light.

The door clicked open, and Doctor Quinn's brisk, dark head appeared in the crack. I looked at her with surprise, because although I knew who she was, and often pa.s.sed her, with a brief nod, in the asylum hall, I never spoke to her at all.

Now she said, "Miss Greenwood, may I come in a minute?"

I nodded.

Doctor Quinn stepped into the room, shutting the door quietly behind her. She was wearing one of her navy blue, immaculate suits with a plain, snow-white blouse showing in the V of the neck.

"I'm sorry to bother you, Miss Greenwood, and especially at this time of night, but I thought you might be able to help us out about Joan."

For a minute I wondered if Doctor Quinn was going to blame me for Joan's return to the asylum. I still wasn't sure how much Joan knew, after our trip to the Emergency Ward, but a few days later she had come back to live in Belsize, retaining, however, the freest of town privileges.

"I'll do what I can," I told Doctor Quinn.

Doctor Quinn sat down on the edge of my bed with a grave face. "We would like to find out where Joan is. We thought you might have an idea."

Suddenly I wanted to dissociate myself from Joan completely. "I don't know," I said coldly. "Isn't she in her room?"

It was well after the Belsize curfew hour.

"No, Joan had a permit to go to a movie in town this evening, and she's not back yet."

"Who was she with?"

"She was alone." Doctor Quinn paused. "Have you any idea where she might be likely to spend the night?"

"Surely she'll be back. Something must have held her up." But I didn't see what could have held Joan up in tame night Boston.

Doctor Quinn shook her head. "The last trolley went by an hour ago."

"Maybe she'll come back by taxi."

Doctor Quinn sighed.

"Have you tried the Kennedy girl?" I went on. "Where Joan used to live?"

Doctor Quinn nodded.

"Her family?"

"Oh, she'd never go there...but we've tried them, too."

Doctor Quinn lingered a minute, as if she could sniff out some clue in the still room. Then she said, "Well, we'll do what we can," and left.

I turned out the light and tried to drop back to sleep, but Joan's face floated before me, bodiless and smiling, like the face of the Cheshire cat. I even thought I heard her voice, rustling and hushing through the dark, but then I realized it was only the night wind in the asylum trees....

Another tap woke me in the frost-gray dawn.

This time I opened the door myself.

Facing me was Doctor Quinn. She stood at attention, like a frail drill sergeant, but her outlines seemed curiously smudged.

"I thought you should know," Doctor Quinn said. "Joan has been found."

Doctor Quinn's use of the pa.s.sive slowed my blood.

"Where?"

"In the woods, by the frozen ponds...."

I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

"One of the orderlies found her," Doctor Quinn continued, "just now, coming to work...."

"She's not..."

"Dead," said Doctor Quinn. "I'm afraid she's hanged herself."

20.

A fresh fall of snow blanketed the asylum grounds--not a Christmas sprinkle, but a man-high January deluge, the sort that snuffs out schools and offices and churches, and leaves, for a day or more, a pure, blank sheet in place of memo pads, date books and calendars. sprinkle, but a man-high January deluge, the sort that snuffs out schools and offices and churches, and leaves, for a day or more, a pure, blank sheet in place of memo pads, date books and calendars.

In a week, if I pa.s.sed my interview with the board of directors, Philomena Guinea's large black car would drive me west and deposit me at the wrought-iron gates of my college.

The heart of winter!

Ma.s.sachusetts would be sunk in a marble calm. I pictured the snowflaky, Grandma Moses villages, the reaches of swampland rattling with dried cattails, the ponds where frog and hornpout dreamed in a sheath of ice, and the shivering woods.

But under the deceptively clean and level slate the topography was the same, and instead of San Francisco or Europe or Mars I would be learning the old landscape, brook and hill and tree. In one way it seemed a small thing, starting, after a six months' lapse, where I had so vehemently left off.

Everybody would know about me, of course.

Doctor Nolan had said, quite bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a leper with a warning bell. My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.