Youngblood hawke, p.105
Youngblood Hawke, page 105
Jeanne was concerned about what his reaction would be when he woke and found himself in a hospital. Dr. Eversill assured her that it was no problem; and the staff brain specialist Dr. Rivkin, told her the same. "He'll be too dull and weak to care at first," said Dr. Rivkin, a short lively man with grizzled hair and very bright and humorous brown eyes, "and then when the drugs wear off he'll be too glad he's alive to think of much else."
Still Jeanne worried. She sat by the bedside of the inert author all night.
Mrs. Hawke arrived early in the morning on the day following Hawke's collapse. Dr. Eversill had explained the gravity of the case to her on the telephone, and she had hied herself forthwith to Lexington in time to catch the night plane to New York. When she first walked into the hospital room and saw her famous son lying still, his body bulking large under a sheet, his yellow-gray face turned to one side on a pile of pillows, his tumbled hair black and clotted with perspiration, she halted and her countenance was tragic. But then she went to his bedside, put her hand to his head, felt his pulse, and turned to Eversill with a brave little smile, and with dry eyes only a bit brighter and wider than usual. "Why pshaw, Henry, he's cool and he's breathing all right. His pulse is good."
Eversill said, "He's doing well. Right now he's just sleeping off the heavy sedation. He's always been a strong boy."
Mrs. Hawke said, "I reckon this is the only thing that would ever make him take a vacation. You'll see, it'll all be for the best."
She tried to get Jeanne to go home and sleep, but Jeanne said she wasn't at all tired; she would leave a little later. The two women chatted there, in armchairs near the window, about Mrs. Hawke's plane trip and the weather, until the nurse walked out. Then the mother began asking questions. She was stupefied by the story of his dash to Peru. "Lord have mercy!" she said. "And him so worn he was ready to drop before he even left Hovey! And then all that horrible Broadway business on top of it, and then a trip to Peru! Why, you know, Jeanne, I reckon they drove this boy a little out of his head."
Jeanne explained Hawke's financial emergency, and told her that Hawke had obtained a promise of a loan from Mrs. Hauptmann, so that the trip was not a mere aberration. Mrs. Hawke shook her head. "Plumb foolish," she said. "Why, John would have loaned him twice that much. He offered to. I tell you, Jeanne, I'll be glad when you two are married because Art never is going to have any sense, and you'll have to supply the sense for two, just as I did. Where is this woman now, this Mrs. What's-her-name from Peru? She been here in the hospital at all?"
Jeanne told her of a telephone conversation she had had with Honor Hauptmann the night before. Honor had sounded terrified at the thought that somebody might expect her to put in an appearance at Hawke's bedside. She had an uncontrollable fear of these things, she had explained, but if money was needed Jeanne could call on her. She was sick over what had happened and would probably go back to Peru in a day or so. Jeanne said the woman had talked hysterically.
Mrs. Hawke wrinkled her nose. "Humph! Her hysterical! What's she got to be hysterical about? Who is she? Sounds like another Mrs. Winter. Art won't need her money, I'll darn well see he doesn't, and she can just go on back to Peru! Peru! Plain out of his head!"
As they talked on Jeanne gave voice to a thought that had been gnawing at her. The whole calamity was her fault, she said. She had failed Arthur by running off to California at the time of his financial crack-up. She should have stayed with him, taken care of him, seen him through the writing of Boone County. Mrs. Hawke said, "Why pshaw, Jeanne, you had just lost your husband! You can't go from one man to another like you're changing your dress, at least a woman who's worth anything can't. I'm not talking about your Mrs. Winters, I reckon they can go to four different men in one night if it suits their pleasure. There are only two kinds of women. You're the kind that had to go away for a while, it was altogether the decent and proper thing to do."
Jeanne said, "He seemed all right whenever I talked to him, and anyway I figured you were there. Still I meant to come twice. I was all set, and each time—"
Mrs. Hawke said, "Now look, you can tear yourself to pieces with that kind of nonsense and it's silly, there's Art resting comfortably, he's going to be fine, and this time next year you'll be married and this will all be just a bad dream. Art's had a breakdown from overwork, that's all, and if he weren't strong as an elephant he'd have had it long ago, and it had to happen to convince him he's made of flesh and blood."
Hawke began to move and murmur. The two women went and stood beside him. It was a little past eleven in the morning. His eyes opened. He looked at Jeanne and blinked, then his glance shifted to his mother, and he smiled. "Hello, mama." His voice was clear but feeble.
"Hi there, son."
"How's Nancy, ma?"
"Why, she's fine. How are you, Art?"
"Not so hot."
"Well, you'll be okay."
"All right, ma. I'll have another bowl of soup."
Mrs. Hawke smiled uncertainly, and glanced at Jeanne, whose face was taut. "What's that, Art?"
Hawke said distinctly, and with petulance, "I said I'll have another bowl of soup."
The mother stammered, "I see. Well, let me see what I can do about that—" but even as she spoke Hawke's eyes drooped shut and his chest rose and fell regularly as before.
They called the nurse, who brought an interne to the room. The young man was not particularly interested in the news, but said he would report it to Dr. Rivkin. Hawke might do this several times before really coming to, he said. There was nothing alarming about it, he had been talking in his sleep.
Hawke slept on and on, and after a while Jeanne dozed in her chair, determined not to leave until some definite change took place. She was awakened by Hawke's voice. "Hello, Jeanne darling." He was sitting up a little and looking at her. He was fearfully pale but the expression on his face was alert and sadly smiling. Both doctors were in the room, and Mrs. Hawke stood by the bed.
"Gosh, hello. You're awake."
"A lot more than you, I'd say." He glanced around at the massed bouquets. "Who sent all the flowers?"
Dr. Rivkin said, "We've given some to your neighbors, otherwise we'd have had to move you out."
A nurse brought a tray of toast and tea, and Hawke ate and drank. Jeanne saw that the doctors looked at each other with satisfaction. Rivkin said, "Well, he's swallowing nicely. We'll go to oral medication."
Hawke said to Eversill with a mouthful of toast, "I'm in a hospital, after all, hey?"
"Damn right, Art," said the doctor. "You're sick as a dog. Now you listen to me, I'm a suspicious hillbilly like you. So you take my word for this, hear? Dr. Rivkin is one of the best brain men in the United States, and he's the man who's giving the orders."
Hawke frowned. "You're going home?"
"Shucks, no, I'll be here as long as you want me."
The author nodded and looked at Dr. Rivkin. "What's the matter with me?"
Rivkin gave him a straightforward account of what had occurred, of the perils following such a seizure and the brain damage it implied. He said Hawke must consider himself in danger, though he had started making a good recovery; that he must reconcile himself to a course of medication and a stay in the hospital, the length depending on the character of his improvement. After a while would come the tests to evaluate more precisely what his condition was. The seizure had undoubtedly been caused, he said, by the old injury, the depressed skull fracture he had sustained at nineteen, when he had been unconscious for a day and a half. Hawke's irregular life and the various pressures on him had caused a flare-up in the irritability of the brain surrounding the scar tissue. The week-long lapse in taking dilantin sodium had come at the worst possible time. Hawke had had plenty of warnings, and now he had sustained a full-fledged multiple epileptic attack of the severest kind, which went by the name of status epilepticus. His recovery chances were good, but the brain damage he had received would require that he live more carefully for the rest of his days. Hawke's piercing expressive eyes never left the little doctor's face.
He said, "Will I ever be able to write again?"
"Not at the breakneck pace Dr. Eversill has told me about."
"Will I be able to write, though? Will my mind work? Will I be able to start writing my next book some day, even on an easygoing schedule?"
"I see no reason why not," said the doctor, "but that is a long way off."
Hawke said, "Because if I can't write again I don't especially want to leave this room alive, you see."
"Oh, shut up, Art," his mother said.
Dr. Rivkin said firmly, "You know that Dostoevsky was an epileptic. Our knowledge of how these things affect creativity is nil. My job is to get you well and to tell you what you must do to stay well. Then your life is all yours again."
"My right arm and leg feel weak. I can hardly move them."
"Yes. That's a result of your attack, it has a fancy name but all you have to know is that it'll clear up as your general condition improves."
Hawke said to Eversill, "I like this doctor."
Eversill said, "That's good. This is no job for an old G.P. from Hovey, Kentucky."
Rivkin's eyes sparkled at Eversill. "You're the important fellows." He turned to Hawke and his face was serious and kind. "Do we understand each other? It's a question of your life. Your chances now are good, but any temperamental conduct is out of the question."
Hawke managed one of his old boyish grins. "I'm not really a crazy artist, Doctor. I've just been in the damnedest hole somehow, ever since I struck it rich."
The nurse gave Hawke a capsule and a glass of water. "You'll be taking a lot of that for a while," Rivkin said as Hawke gulped the medicine, "and mostly you'll sleep for the next few days."
"Sounds great."
Mrs. Hawke said, "How about company?"
"No visitors." Dr. Rivkin gave the mother an appraising look. "Do you cheer him up or aggravate him?"
"Aggravate him when he's going strong, cheer him up when he's flat on his back," Mrs. Hawke said. Hawke laughed and nodded, yawning.
"Standard mother," said Rivkin. "Well, stay around, but keep talking to a minimum." His glance rested on Jeanne.
Hawke said, "I'm going to marry her if I ever get out of here, if she'll still have me. She can stay, can't she?"
Rivkin said, "By all means."
The author's eyes were growing heavy. He reached out and took Mrs. Hawke's hand. "Sorry, mom," he said. "I've been a trouble to you right along."
"Well, that may be," she said, "but I'm Youngblood Hawke's mother."
2
The doctors said he was improving. His appetite began to return. They tapered off the sedation, and four days after the seizure they said he could receive visitors. Ross Hodge was the first. He and Gus Adam had been telephoning several times a day, and the publisher was at Hawke's bedside a half hour after Jeanne called him, spruce and brisk as ever, the taut skin glowing with a reddish tan on his round face, the lapels of his London-cut gray suit flaring handsomely. "I just want to tell you a couple of things and then I'll get out of here, Arthur," he said. "The first is that I've read the hundred twenty-five pages of Boone that Jeanne's gotten to the typist so far. It'll probably annoy you if I pass judgment on the basis of such a fragment, but I think it's not only your best book, it's your first great one."
Hawke was sitting propped on pillows in a gray hospital gown. He held out his hand to Hodge. "Even if you're saying that to cheer up your ailing prize bull, you've said the right thing. Thank you, Ross."
The publisher shook his hand, noting with surprise—which he did not allow to show in his face—the clammy weakness of Hawke's grip. "The next thing is about money and I'll be brief. Jeanne's been telling me your financial problems are more or less clearing up. Still, on the basis of what I've now read of Boone you can draw another fifty-thousand advance on it if you want to. I'll also give you just about any contract you ask for on the next book, here and now, short of handing over the firm to you."
"I tried publishing," Hawke said. "It's not my game. I'm grateful, Ross, and to show I am, I'll instruct my lawyer to hold you up for every last nickel you've got."
Hodge reached into his pocket. "Now at the latest count about four or five hundred get-well letters, wires, and cables have piled up for you at the office. I've never seen such an outpouring. They're from celebrities and from people you never heard of, and they've come from everywhere. There's one from Australia and another from Pakistan, to give you an idea. We'll acknowledge them with a card, if that's all right with you. I thought you'd like to see a few."
He handed Hawke a sheaf of letters and telegraph forms clipped together. The author read several, and Jeanne noticed that his hand began to tremble and his big lower lip to quiver. She came to him nonchalantly and took the sheaf. "Let me look too, dear."
Hawke said to the publisher in a shaky voice, "It's the greatest privilege in the world, the power to give people pleasure with stories. I never did anything to acquire it. I just discovered I had it. All I can claim is I've tried to use it diligently. And I tell you, Ross, what I've done is nothing compared to what I will do."
"I know that," said the publisher. "Just get well, now."
When he was gone Hawke sat looking straight ahead, his eyes far away, his expression drawn and melancholy. Jeanne pretended to read the letters, but she was watching him anxiously.
Hawke said after a while, "Where would you like to live, Jeanne, after-after all this?"
"Most anywhere, darling."
"I'm thinking of a university town in the Southwest—New Mexico, Arizona, some place like that. You see, Jeanne, first of all I want sunshine. I want it to pour sunshine where I live, all the year round. And I pretty well have to have a good library at hand for the Comedy."
"Sounds grand," she said. "I'm from Southern California, you know. I'll just be going home."
He said, "Maybe that's what we'll do on our honeymoon, eh? Drive around, real easy, through the Southwest, looking at the college and university towns. When we find one we like, why, we'll just rent or buy a little house and set up shop. You'll cook and I'll scribble." He grinned. "'We'll build our own little nest, out there in the West'—right? How many kids?"
She laughed. "To begin with, four. Then we'll see." He seemed to be getting drowsy. She wanted to break off the conversation without irritating him.
He said, "You won't feel cheated if we don't go to Europe? I never want to leave the soil of this country again. Not for years and years, anyhow. Foreign soil drains something out of me, as though it had the wrong kind of electricity in it. You know? You get a little charge with every step you take on your own land, and you lose a little charge into foreign soil with every step. That's just a silly fancy, I suppose. But it's very vivid to me just now."
"Did Ross's visit tire you, Arthur?"
"A little. You see, I'll need a library because so far I've just been writing from my own experience, spending my capital, but Boone County cleaned me out. I've got to start faking and inventing, like Balzac and Dumas and all the rest who did a large volume of work. Research is the tool." He lifted a languid hand to look at his wrist watch. "This arm's getting better, just as Rivkin said it would. Give me my red pill and I'll take a snooze."
He settled down and closed his eyes. Then he opened them. "It's amazing how tired I am, now that I've given way to it. Did you ever overwind a watch and then all at once it wound as easy as you please but you weren't winding anything any more? That's the way I feel. Not bad, but loose, you know, and stopped."
Jeanne said, "You wrote five books in seven years, and four of them were about as long as Anna Karenina. You'll never have to work like that again, thank God."
"I'll tell you something," murmured Hawke, his eyes closing again, "I was never truly happy except when I was doing that."
He woke in the late afternoon, demanding a rare steak, a big baked potato, a dish of scallions, and a bottle of beer. Mrs. Hawke and Jeanne were both there when he woke, and they delightedly sent for Dr. Rivkin. Hawke was more nearly himself than at any time since the attack. He teased his mother about the weight she was putting on, and told Jeanne he wanted paper and a pen, to start writing immediately after his meal.
The doctor came and looked him over with obvious pleasure. He vetoed the beer, but allowed the rest of the meal, and laughed when Jeanne mentioned the request for pen and paper. "He's welcome to try, but nothing'll come of it." He agreed that Hawke could have another visitor. Gus Adam had been telephoning all afternoon saying he had news that would improve Hawke's spirits. "Just throw the man out after ten minutes or so," Rivkin said to Mrs. Hawke.
Hawke began to tear into his steak with something of his old gusto, while Mrs. Hawke stood over him, wrinkling her nose in delight at every mouthful he took. "All this boy needs is some nourishment that'll stick to his ribs. I wish they'd let me into that kitchen to make some soup for him."
It was a big slab of meat and he soon slowed down. "I don't know," he said, looking at the big red chunk, "if he'd have allowed me that beer I'd have made it. You can't eat steak without beer."
"Never you mind, you've had plenty and he's one smart doctor," said Mrs. Hawke. "And a right nice fellow, too, for a Jew." She glanced at Jeanne. "Meaning no offense, dear."
Jeanne shrugged. She was quite reconciled to being an Israelite to her mother-in-law forever.
Adam came in like a gust of mountain air, red-faced and tousled and unusually gay of mien. It was half-past five. Thick bars of yellow sunshine lay across Hawke's bed. "Well, young fellow," he said, grasping Hawke's hand, "what seems to be the trouble?"
Hawke said, "One hell of a hangover."
The lawyer burst out laughing, and looked around at the two women. "Some especially potent native brew in Peru, no doubt." Hawke grinned sheepishly. Adam said, "Speaking of which, I had a call from Mrs. Honor Hauptmann's lawyer a little while ago. The lady left for Peru at noon. She sent her fondest regards and best wishes for a rapid recovery, and the lawyer would be willing to meet with me to discuss a certain loan. I told him to forget it."
