Different Seasons(185)

“I have a feeling, Dr. McCarron, sometimes quite a strong feeling, that I am doomed.”

Silly, melodramatic word! And yet, gentlemen, the response that rose to my own lips was this: Yes; I feel that, too. I bit it off, of course; a doctor who would say such a thing should immediately put his instruments and medical books up for sale and investigate his future in the plumbing or carpentry business.

I told her that she was not the first pregnant woman to have such feelings, and would not be the last. I told her that the feeling was indeed so common that doctors knew it by the tongue-in-cheek name of The Valley of the Shadow Syndrome. I’ve already mentioned it tonight, I believe.

Miss Stansfield nodded with perfect seriousness, and I remember how young she looked that day, and how large her belly seemed. “I know about that,” she said. “I’ve felt it. But it’s quite separate from this other feeling. This other feeling is like ... like something looming up. I can’t describe it any better than that. It’s silly, but I can’t shake it.”

“You must try,” I said. “It isn’t good for the—”

But she had drifted away from me. She was looking at the photograph again.

“Who is that?”

“Emlyn McCarron,” I said, trying to make a joke. It sounded extraordinarily feeble. “Back before the Civil War, when he was quite young.”

“No, I recognized you, of course,” she said. “The woman. You can only tell it is a woman from the hem of the skirt and the shoes. Who is she?”

“Her name is Harriet White,” I said, and thought: And hers will be the first face you see when you arrive to deliver your child. The chill came back—that dreadful drifting formless chill. Her stone face.

“And what does it say there at the base of the statue?” she asked, her eyes still dreamy, almost trancelike.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “My conversational Latin is not that good.”

That night I had the worst dream of my entire life—I woke up from it in utter terror, and if I had been married, I suppose I would have frightened my poor wife to death.

In the dream I opened the door to my consulting room and found Sandra Stansfield in there. She was wearing the brown pumps, the smart white linen dress with the brown edging, and the slightly out-of-date cloche hat. But the hat was between her br**sts, because she was carrying her head in her arms. The white linen was stained and streaked with gore. Blood jetted from her neck and splattered the ceiling.

And then her eyes fluttered open—those wonderful hazel eyes—and they fixed on mine.

“Doomed,” the speaking head told me. “Doomed. I’m doomed. There’s no salvation without suffering. It’s cheap magic, but it’s all we have.”

That’s when I woke up screaming.

Her due date of December 10th came and went. I examined her on December 17th and suggested that, while the baby would almost certainly be born in 1935, I no longer expected the child to put in his or her appearance until after Christmas. Miss Stansfield accepted this with good grace. She seemed to have thrown off the shadow that had hung over her that fall. Mrs. Gibbs, the blind woman who had hired her to read aloud and do light housework, was impressed with her—impressed enough to tell her friends about the brave young widow who, in spite of her recent bereavement and delicate condition, was facing her own future with such determined good cheer. Several of the blind woman’s friends had expressed an interest in employing her following the birth of her child.

“I’ll take them up on it, too,” she told me. “For the baby. But only until I’m on my feet again, and able to find something steady. Sometimes I think the worst part of this—of everything that’s happened—is that it’s changed the way I look at people. Sometimes I think to myself, ‘How can you sleep at night, knowing that you’ve deceived that dear old thing?’ and then I think, ‘If she knew, she’d show you the door, just like all the others.’ Either way, it’s a lie, and I feel the weight of it on my heart sometimes.”

Before she left that day she took a small, gaily wrapped package from her purse and slid it shyly across the desk to me. “Merry Christmas, Dr. McCarron.”

“You shouldn’t have,” I said, sliding open a drawer and taking out a package of my own. “But since I did, too—”

She looked at me for a moment, surprised ... and then we laughed together. She had gotten me a silver tie-clasp with a caduceus on it. I had gotten her an album in which to keep photographs of her baby. I still have the tie-clasp; as you see, gentlemen, I am wearing it tonight. What happened to the album, I cannot say.

I saw her to the door, and as we reached it, she turned to me, put her hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were cool and firm. It was not a passionate kiss, gentlemen, but neither was it the sort of kiss you might expect from a sister or an aunt.

“Thank you again, Dr. McCarron,” she said a little breathlessly. The color was high in her cheeks and her hazel eyes glowed lustrously. “Thank you for so much.”

I laughed—a little uneasily. “You speak as if we’d never meet again, Sandra.” It was, I believe, the second and last time I ever used her Christian name.

“Oh, we’ll meet again,” she said. “I don’t doubt it a bit.” And she was right—although neither of us could have foreseen the dreadful circumstances of that last meeting.