The Colonel's Wife

The Retired Marine colonel had two broken legs, both in casts from the soles of his feet to the tops of his thighs. His name was Robert Townsend; he was a tall and broad-shouldered man with black hair and a graying mustache. In the hospital in Boston, he had had five operations; neither leg was healed enough to bear his weight, he had rods in both femurs and his right tibia, and now at home he was downstairs in the living room on a hospital bed whose ends he could raise and lower to evade pain. The bed was narrow, and his golden-haired wife, Lydia, slept upstairs.

He refused to eat in bed, for this made him feel he was still in the hospital; so at mealtimes Lydia helped him into the wheelchair. He raised the bed till his back was upright, she handed him a short board with beveled ends, and he pushed one end under his rump and rested the other on the chair. Then she held his legs while he worked himself across the board and into the chair. He wore cotton gym shorts and T-shirts. Before the horse fell on him, he and Lydia had eaten breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table. He could not go there now. He could wheel through the door from the dining room to the kitchen; then his long legs, held straight out in front of him by leg rests, were blocked by a counter, and at his left the refrigerator stopped him. On his first morning at home, he tried to turn between the counter and refrigerator by lowering the leg rests; when he pressed the switch to release the rests, they dropped quickly, and he gasped at the blades of pain in his falling legs. Lydia bent down and grabbed his ankles and lifted them while he moaned and began to sweat.

His feet in their casts would not fit under the long rectangular mahogany table in the dining room, so he sat parallel to his end of it, removed the right armrest of the wheelchair and ate, as he said, sidesaddle. He looked to his right at his food and Lydia. She had brown eyes and had lately, in the evening, worn her hair in a French braid; she liked candles at dinner, and after her bath in late afternoon she wore a dress or skirt. Her face was tan and pink, her brow and cheeks creased, and lines moved outward from her eyes and lips when she smiled. Every morning after breakfast, she walked two miles east to a red country store. She did this in all weather except blizzards and lightning storms. At the store she bought The New York Times and a package of British cigarettes and sat at the counter to drink coffee and read. Then she walked home for lunch, coming in the front door each day as precisely as a clock striking noon. She had not done this since the sunlit morning of January thaw when Robert's brown mare broke his legs.

To Robert's left, while he ate, was the living room, and to his rear the kitchen. Behind Lydia was a large window, and beyond it the wide lawn ending at woods. They had four acres with many trees and could not see their neighbors' houses; even now, in winter, there were enough evergreens so all the earth they saw from the house was their own. Before dinner, Lydia drew the curtains at her back; she felt exposed through the glass. On Robert's second night at home, he asked her to open the curtains; he said he was sorry, but the covered window reminded him of the hospital. The hospital had been very difficult. He had served in two wars without being injured and had never been confined to a hospital. Now when he saw the curtains behind Lydia, he felt enclosed by something that would take away his breath.

He could wheel slowly down the carpeted hall that began where the living and dining rooms joined, but the hall was too narrow for him to turn into the rooms it led to; one of these was a bathroom. He never felt truly clean and longed for a shower. He kept a plastic urinal hooked by its handle over a railing of the bed, and Lydia emptied and cleaned it. For most of his four weeks and five days in the hospital, he had to use a bedpan, and nurses cleaned him. In his last week, the physical therapist and a nurse helped him from his wheelchair onto a hospital commode; they removed the inside arms from the chair and the commode, pushed the transfer board under him and held his legs as he moved across. Then they propped his legs on pillows on a chair and left him alone. He needed both hands to push himself up from the seat, so when the two women returned, they held his legs and tilted him and the nurse wiped him. Now he did this in the living room with Lydia. He knew Lydia did not mind wiping him; she was cheerful and told him to stop feeling humiliated because his legs were broken and he had to shit. But his stench and filth, and the intimacy of her hands and voice, slapped his soul with a wet cloth.

Five mornings a week, a home-health-aid woman helped him to wash and shave on the bed. The housekeeper came on three mornings and worked upstairs while the woman bathed him. A visiting nurse took his blood pressure and temperature and pulse. A phone was on the bedside table, and their son and two daughters called him often; they had flown to Boston to see him during his first week in the hospital. On some nights friends came; they tired him, but he needed these men and women. He felt removed from the earth as he had known it, and they brought parts of it with them: Its smell was on their coats and hats and scarves, its color was in their cheeks, its motion in their beautiful and miraculous legs.

During his first ten days at home, Lydia left the house only to buy groceries, and she did that while someone was with him. Then on a Friday night, while they were eating dinner, he said, "I'm starting to feel like a cage. I want you to walk to the store tomorrow."

"It's Saturday. You'd be alone."

"I've got the phone and a urinal."

"I don't want you to feel alone."

"I'll be fine."

Next morning, she hung a second urinal on the bed railing, put a pitcher of water and a pitcher of orange juice and two glasses on the bedside table and wrote the phone number of the store on notepaper. She was wearing jeans and boots and a dark-blue sweater. She bent over him and looked at his eyes.

"Listen: If you have to shit, you call me. I'll be through the door in twenty-eight minutes."

She kissed him and put on a blue parka and black beret, and he watched over his right shoulder as she went out the door. He lay facing the mahogany table and the dining room window and the winter light. He could not see the lawn, but he could see trunks and branches of deciduous trees and the green pines. His wheelchair was beside the bed, the transfer board resting on it, but he could not go to the stove, could not even get far enough into the kitchen to see it, and for breakfast they had eaten scrambled eggs; Lydia always turned off burners and the oven, but in his career he had learned to check everything, even when he knew it was done. He had not thought of fire till Lydia was gone, and Lydia had not thought of fire, and he saw himself in the wheelchair pushing away from flames. The back door was in the kitchen, so he could leave only through the front; outside was a deck and four steps to the concrete walk that curved to the long driveway. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply into his stomach and told himself: Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. Years ago in California a gunnery sergeant had said that to the company at morning formation; Robert was a second lieutenant, watching from the barracks porch; the gunny had fought in the Pacific, and Robert, unblooded still, looked at the man's broad, straight back and believed this was a message brought from the dread and chaos of war. I can call the fire department, then get on the wheelchair, take the blanket, go out the front door and sit on the deck and wait for the firemen; if it gets bad, I'll tuck my chin and go bass-ackward down the steps and hope the casts hold and I don't crack my head; then if I have to, I can drag myself all the way to the fucking road. He opened his eyes and looked around the room. He was still afraid, and for a while he read War and Peace. Then he slept, and he was dreaming of white-trousered soldiers on horses when Lydia opened the door. He was happy to see her, and said nothing about fire. He said nothing about it when she walked to the store Sunday morning; and when she went Monday, the home-health-aid woman and the housekeeper were with him for all but the last hour.

•

He had started reading War and Peace a week before his horse slipped and fell on his left leg, scrambled upright, then slipped again and fell on both his legs; then Robert was screaming, and finally the horse got up and watched him. Then he moaned, and breathed in quick rhythm with the pain, and called toward the stables beyond a stand of trees, called for help, and knew he had screamed under the horse because he could not move, and such helplessness felt like drowning in sunlit air near the shadows of pines. In the hospital he had morphine and now, in the bedside table Lydia had carried downstairs, he had Demerol and Percodan. When pain cut through his concentration so he could not focus on talking with Lydia, he took Percodan; when pain was all he could feel of his body, and it filled his brain and spirit so he moaned and tried not to yell, he took Demerol. Always there was pain in his legs, but if he kept them elevated and did not move his body, it was bearable for hours at a time, and he read; and resting from that, he looked out the dining room window, and at the mahogany table.

He had never had any feelings about the things of domestic life. In them, he saw Lydia's choices, and his admiration was not for the objects but for her. If all the furniture in the house were carried off by thieves, his only sorrow would be for Lydia. She had bought the mahogany table early in their marriage. She had money, and when each grandparent and parent had died, she had accumulated more. The table had traveled in moving vans back and forth across the nation. It had remained unmarked by children, and by officers and their wives from Hawaii to Virginia; it had stood amid quarrels and silence and laughter, amid boisterous drinking and storytelling and flirtations, and here it was, in this house in the country north of Boston, without a scar. He had lived with it for decades,(continued on page 190) Colonel's Wife (continued from page 112)and now, lying helpless and in pain, he began to feel affection for the table. In the morning he opened his eyes to it; at night in the dark he looked at its shape in the pale light of the window as he waited for one drug to release him from pain and another to give him sleep.

The shock of the horse crushing his bones, then anesthesia, surgery, pain and drugs had taken his vitality. He could not finish a meal, he could not remain either awake or alert from morning till night, he did not want to smoke a pipe or drink a martini, and he could not feel passion for Lydia. One night in his third week at home, when she bent to kiss him good night, he held her to his chest, his cheek pressing hers, and all his feeling for her was above his loins, filling his breast, and one or two joyful tears moistened his eyes. Then he watched her cross the room to the stairs; she wore dark shades of brown: a sweater and skirt and tights and high-heeled boots. He watched her climb to the hall and disappear into the light she turned on at the top of the stairs. He listened to her footsteps going to the bedroom, then the hall was dark again, and his bedside table lamp was the only light in the house; it warmed his cheek.

He had not climbed the stairs for two months, and now he saw that all of the second floor was Lydia's: the bedroom, the bathroom with its sweet scents of things for her body, her room where she read and wrote letters and paid bills. Always she had paid the bills, and this had nothing to do with her inheritance; it was common for officers' wives to manage all elements of the household, so the man could be rushed off to war without pausing to brief his wife on debts, automobile maintenance and so on. Upstairs were a sun porch, two guest bedrooms and a television room with a wet bar. For three years he had inhabited that floor. But Lydia had given of herself to those spaces enclosed by wood and glass, colored by paint and light, and he felt they were mysteriously alive and female.

Then he realized this was true of the first floor as well. At cocktail hour he had mixed drinks in the kitchen, and sometimes cooked there or on the patio with charcoal; but certainly the kitchen was hers. So were the dining and living rooms and, down the hall, the bedroom and study and the bathroom, where he had showered after fishing or hunting or riding, lifting weights or running. Only his den, at the end of the hall, was truly his: the pipe stands and humidor on the desk, the ashtray always emptied, the desktop clear; the rifles and shotguns, pistols and revolvers locked behind wood and glass; the barbell and weights and bench; the closet door closed and behind it tackle boxes and boots, waders and running shoes on the floor and, on hangers above them, the clothing of his passions. His fishing rods hung on pegs on one wall, his hats and caps on pegs on another, above a bookcase filled with literature of war. His rear wall was glass and through it he could see nearly all of the back lawn and watch squirrels on trees in the woods, crows, gliding hawks; sometimes a doe suddenly appeared at the edge of the woods and Robert Townsend watched it with joy.

Every other room in the house was female. If he closed his den, removed his things from the downstairs bathroom and lowered the toilet seat, there would be no sign of a man in the house. In the warmth of the bedside lamp, he smiled: Probably he never would have made this discovery if he had not lost the freedom of walking in his home. They could not have built the house without her money, but her money had never been important to him; it had come with her, like her golden hair, and if she lost it, he would love her as dearly as he would when her hair yellowed and grayed and no longer shone in the sun. The money had spared him worry about the children's education and the nuisance of worn-out cars and appliances; but it did not touch what he loved in his life; his salary was sufficient for that. Reading War and Peace drew from him a comparison of himself and Lydia with Tolstoy's officers and ladies: Lydia's money had given them the ease, the grace, of the aristocracy, but it had not spared them the rigors and the uprootings of military life, the sorrow of two wars, and the grief for dead friends and their widows and children, and for the men he had lost: men who were like sons he was given when they were 18, boys whom he loved for only months before they died. Their names and faces stayed in his heart; if you looked closely at his eyes, you could see them. Lydia knew his grief well, and tenderly; were it not part of him, she might have loved him less.

He took a sleeping pill and turned off the bedside lamp. He liked this new way of seeing the house, as if the entire structure were female, and he entered it to be at its center with Lydia; and she had made a place for him, his den, as she gave him a place in her body. A great tenderness welled in him. He regretted his rebukes of Lydia through the years and also his infidelities when he was overseas. These were with prostitutes. He had acted in privacy and had never told anyone. Afterward, he had forgiven himself in the same way that on hung-over mornings he had absolved himself for being a drunken fool: He sloughed off remorse as he shaved his whiskers, then he put on his uniform and went to work. He did not justify his adultery; he believed a better man would have been chaste, but he saw it as an occupational hazard of soldiering. He was an active man, and his need for a woman's love was nocturnal, or it seemed to be. But during months of separation from Lydia, that need moved into daylight: a tender loneliness, a sense of being unattached, of floating near the boundaries of fear. Also, Robert Townsend loved women: A woman's eyes could move his blood as the moon pulls the sea. It was neither easy nor simple for him to live for a year without the nakedness of a woman; he had done his best, and on more than a thousand nights he had prevailed.

He wished this night, drugged in the living room, that he had been perfect, that he had made love with no one since he met Lydia on a blind date in La Jolla: He was a second lieutenant wearing dress blues, the date was for the Marine Corps birthday ball, and while his friend waited in the car, he strode up the long walk to the lighted front door; she was living with her parents still, and he was unabashed by the size of the stone house, its expanse of lawn and accumulation of trees. In his left hand he held his white gloves and her corsage. He rang the doorbell, then stepped back so she would see the height and breadth of him when she swung open the door. Behind him was the ocean, and he smelled it with every breath. Then she opened the door: She was in a silver gown with a full skirt, he was smelling her perfume, and he looked at her tanned face and arms and golden hair and felt that he was looking at the sun without burning his eyes.

•

In the hospital the surgeon told Robert that his knees would not fully recover, his left one would probably never bend more than 40 degrees, and he would live more comfortably in a one-story home. The surgeon was a trim young man with gentle brown eyes; Robert liked him and told him not to worry about an old Marine climbing a flight of stairs. One afternoon when Lydia was in the room, the surgeon talked again about stairs and Robert's knees, looking at her. He said there would also be atrophy of the legs because the casts would not come off for months. Then, until Robert came home, Lydia looked at houses and land, but she did not love any of it. She spoke to the building contractor and phoned orthopedic surgeons in Arizona, near her family's ranch.

Now she talked of their going to the ranch and staying there while the contractor removed the second floor and put those rooms on the ground. Robert believed his knees would be as they had always been until they were broken, and while Lydia talked about Arizona, he was eating without hunger but to gain strength, or pushing a urinal between the casts on his thighs, or feeling pain from his feet to his crotch. Every day and night he thought of men he had seen wounded in war. He had never told Lydia about them and did not tell her now. How many times had he yelled for corpsmen, controlling his horror, and done everything he could to help, and everything correctly? He knew now that his horror had kept him separate from the torn meat and broken bones that an instant ago were a man, strong and quick; and kept him, too, from telling Lydia. Now his own pain opened him up, and pity flowed from him, washed timeless over those broken men lying on the earth.

On a Saturday morning in his fifth week at home, while they were eating breakfast, snow began to fall. When Lydia walked to the store, he watched the snow through the dining room window, then slept. He woke to the sound of Lydia's boots on the front steps. He looked to his right and behind him at the door as she opened it: She was looking down at her gloved hand on the knob, snow was quickly melting on her shoulders and beret and hair, her cheeks were flushed and her brightened eyes were seeing something that was not in the room, some image or memory, and fear rose from his stomach, he felt shackled to the bed and suddenly he was sweating. Then she looked at him and came quickly to him, took his hand and said, "What is it?"

"My legs."

"Did you take something?"

"No."

Her brown shoulder bag was damp, bulging at her side; always he had teased her about crammed purses; now this one seemed filled with secrets that could destroy him. She placed a palm on his brow.

"It's passing," he said. "It'll be all right."

"Are you hungry?"

"No."

"Try something."

"I will."

She smelled of snow and winter air. She unzipped her parka and climbed the stairs. He shut his eyes and saw nothing, but nameless fear rushed in his blood. He listened to Lydia's footsteps going to the bathroom. She was wearing her moccasins. She flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and he watched the head of the stairs, focused on the spot where her face would appear; then it was there, descending, and in her eyes and mouth he saw nothing. He had been in bed for too long, this fear must be madness, and when she helped him into the chair, he looked away from her, at the dining room window, the snow falling.

He watched it while she was in the kitchen. She brought black bean soup she had made the night before, a green salad and hot rolls. He dipped a spoon into the soup and raised it to his mouth and swallowed; he put the spoon down and ate a piece of roll, then a slice of cucumber. He kept doing this, watching her smile and talk and chew, until he had eaten everything. She helped him onto the bed and then cleared the table; he listened to her putting the dishes into the dishwasher. He closed his eyes before she came into the living room; he felt her looking at him as she walked to the stairs, then she climbed them and went down the hall to her room. He did not want to be awake, and soon he slept. When he woke, snow was still falling; it was gathering wetly on the pine branches; the house was quiet and as dark as it could be in midafternoon with so many windows. He turned on the lamp. Pain squeezed his bones, and his heart was breaking. Lydia's face when she opened the door at noon was the face that for years he had given her: that blush of her cheeks and light in her eyes. He knew she had a lover.

He listened to the house. She was in it, but where was she? She could be in her room, the door closed, talking on the phone to--he could not imagine a man. He wanted to feel rage and jealousy, but all he felt was absolute helplessness and dread and sorrow. He held the phone and slowly lifted the receiver and listened to the dial tone as he stared at the snow. He opened the table's top drawer, got the bottle of Percodan and shook one into his palm. He saw himself as he would look to Lydia: a man in pain, lying on his back with casts on his legs, reaching for the glass of water beside him; a man whose stinking shit she cleaned from the commode and wiped from his body. For nearly three hours the images had waited, perched and watching just beyond his ken, and now they gathered and assaulted him, and he breathed deeply and fast, opening and closing his hands, and saw in the snow and the pines Lydia making love.

The hall upstairs was darkened; the only sound in the house was his breathing. All his life with her he had believed he knew where she was. When he was at a desk eight miles away from her or drinking coffee from a canteen cup at dawn in Vietnam, he imagined her in their home, or within its natural boundaries. She was at a wives' luncheon or tea, or in a restaurant for lunch with one or two women; she was walking, she had always loved a long walk alone and, since their courtship, had walked more miles than Robert, an infantryman, and this was a family joke; she was sitting with a cup of tea before the fire, or iced tea on the lawn; she was buying dresses, blouses, sweaters, bracelets, necklaces with the endearing pleasure he saw in his daughters, too, before they could spell what they wore; she was making peanut butter sandwiches for the children home from school; she was talking on the phone held between her shoulder and ear while she sautéed onions. In his three years of retirement, his view of her had not changed; he did not know that till now. He had been hunting and fishing with new friends, had bought the mare and boarded her, read books, written letters to friends, and waked some mornings feeling surprised, disoriented and tardy. He had worked each day with his body and mind, and at sunset had turned to Lydia's merry brown eyes and the mingled scents from her bath. He knew her face when she slept, when she woke in the morning, when she was pale and sick, when fatigue hung like weights from her eyes and cheeks. Yet when he handed her a martini and looked at her red lips and shaded eyelids and smelled her, he did not think of bottles and tubes and boxes on her dressing table. This face, these smells, were her at sunset. He called into the darkness, his voice soft and high, cresting on his fear: "Lydia?"

He could not bear the pain in his legs, not with this, and he called her name again and again and again, and the nothing he heard was so quiet, and he listened so intently to it, that he believed he could hear the snow falling. It would fall until it covered the house, until the power lines broke from their poles, and he would die here, not from cold or hunger or thirst but because he was alone and could not move. Then he was sobbing into his hands, and he heard only that and so was startled as by an angel of death when Lydia's hands gripped his wrists and strongly and gently pulled his hands from his eyes, then her voice was in his heart: "Bob," she said. "Bobby."

He held her. He pulled himself upward and groaned as the pain tightened and turned in his broken bones, he pressed his face to her breasts, and Lydia's arms came around him. Her hands moved up and down his back. He heard her tears when she said, "I fell asleep. I didn't hear you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry this happened to you. I'm so sorry about your knees."

Grief shook her body in his arms. He wanted to stand and hold her face at his chest, stroke her hair, speak softly to her. He sniffed tears and moved his head from her breasts, looked up at her wet cheeks and eyes and trembling mouth, and he lowered his arms and with a hand patted the sheet beside him.

"Here," he said. "Here. Lie down."

She lay beside him, and the first touch of her weight on the bed moved his legs, and he clenched his teeth and swallowed a groan and kept silent. Her head lay on his right bicep, and he brought that hand to her face and hair. His fingers lightly rubbed her tears. He closed his eyes and in that darkness saw snow and felt his legs; but above them he was emptied of pain, and now he did not see snow or darkness but sunlight in La Jolla, and Lydia as a small golden-haired child on that vast and shaded lawn; then he saw her gray and thin and dying in pain. In the orthopedic ward, people screamed, and many nights he had pushed the call button again and again and finally cried out for a nurse to give him morphine. He did not know whether or not there were atheists in foxholes; he believed now there must have been many in field hospitals, and in the naval hospitals afterward, and in the hospital he had come home from so long ago. In Korea and Vietnam, it was Lydia he prayed to, if turning in fear and loneliness to someone was prayer. Certainly it was hope and faith and love. He felt these now, with his eyes closed, holding Lydia, seeing her weeping above his bed, her body slowly falling toward him as he patted the sheet, seeing the lines of her face she said were from smoking and the sun, but they were time, too. She loved him; and if he had never known precisely where she was, she had finally always been here. Then her head and body jerked and she was keening, and he opened his eyes to immense sound, and the lamplight, the darkness in the dining room, the snow: "You won't be able to climb those fucking stairs. You can. But it'll be awful, it's awful, it's awful, you don't know how badly you're hurt, Bob, you don't know, because it's you, it's you--"

She stopped. He waited until she was no longer crying and her breath was slow again, then he said softly, "I know about you."

"You do?"

"I know you're having an affair."

"That's all it is. It just ended."

"Because my legs are broken?"

"I don't know. Yes. Because your legs are broken." She held her breath for a moment, then released it. "It's not my first."

"No."

"I need a cigarette for this."

His body started to sit up, to rise from the bed and climb the stairs to get her purse. Then she was gone, to her room, then the bathroom, and she came down with fresh makeup and her cigarettes, and lay beside him and looked into his eyes. She said, "I've never loved anyone else."

"I've cheated, too."

"I know."

"What do you know?"

"Japan. Okinawa. Hong Kong. Vietnam. Maybe some in the States."

"Not in the States. How did you know?"

"I'm your wife."

"Why didn't I know?"

"Because I'm your wife. How much do you want to hear?"

"I want to hear everything, and go to Arizona, and sleep in the same bed with you."

Now his heartbreak was like the pain in his legs: It was part of him, but he could breathe with it, think with it, listen and see with it. Until the light outside faded and darkness gathered around the lamp at the bed, her voice rose softly from the pillow, and snow moved outside the window. When she told him she had never had a lover while he was at war, Robert said, "In case I got killed?"

"Yes. I just didn't know I had to include riding a horse," and laughter came to them as suddenly as weeping had, it took their breath, it drew tears from them, it shook his body and hurt his bones, and he held Lydia and laughed.

•

A week later they were in Arizona, watching purple spread over a mountain range in the sunset. They were on the patio; she lighted coals on the grill and stepped back from the flames, then poured martinis from the pitcher and sat beside him. He looked at the mountain and sun and sky, then looked at her eyes and told her of maimed and dying boys, of holding them while their lives flowed out of them onto snow, grass, mud. He told her of terror that came like thunder after lightning, after the explosions and gunfire, after everything was done. He told her of his terror under the horse, and on the bed in their living room when he was alone in the house. He said, "I'm glad that damned horse fell on me. It made me lie still in one place and look at you."

"I hope you haven't seen too much."

"There's never too much. There's not enough time."

"No."

"Time makes us the same, you and me. That's all I know."

He knew this: sunlight on the twist of lemon in her glass as she lifted it by the stem and brought it to her red lips. On the day the snow fell till midnight, she had made no promises and had not asked any of him. He did not want any promises. They were words and feelings wafting about in a season he or Lydia may not live to see. He wanted only to know what had happened and what was happening now, to see that: brilliant as the sky, hot as the sun, bright as Lydia's eyes.

"He could not finish a meal, did not want to smoke or drink a martini. He could not feel passion for Lydia."