Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [93]
“What will we do about Grover?”
“Please postpone it. I want to be with you then.”
“I want to get it over with,” says Jack impatiently. “I hate to put Robert through another day of this.”
“Robert will be glad of the extra time,” Nancy insists. “So will I.”
“I just want to face things,” Jack says. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want to cling to the past like you’re doing.”
“Please wait for us,” Nancy says, her voice calm and controlled.
On the telephone, Nancy is authoritative, a quick decision-maker. The problem at work is a reprieve. She feels free, on her own. During the afternoon, she works rapidly and efficiently, filing reports, consulting health authorities, notifying parents. She talks with the disease-control center in Atlanta, inquiring about guidelines. She checks on supplies of gamma globulin. She is so preoccupied that in the middle of the afternoon, when Robert suddenly appears in her office, she is startled, for a fleeting instant not recognizing him.
He says, “Kevin has a sore throat. Is that hepatitis?”
“It’s probably just a cold. I’ll talk to his mother.” Nancy is holding Robert’s arm, partly to keep him still, partly to steady herself.
“When do I have to get a shot?” Robert asks.
“Tomorrow.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes. It won’t hurt, though.”
“I guess it’s a good thing this happened,” Robert says bravely. “Now we get to have Grover another day.” Robert spills his books on the floor and bends to pick them up. When he looks up, he says, “Daddy doesn’t care about him. He just wants to get rid of him. He wants to kill him.”
“Oh, Robert, that’s not true,” says Nancy. “He just doesn’t want Grover to suffer.”
“But Grover still has half a bottle of Pet-Tabs,” Robert says. “What will we do with them?”
“I don’t know,” Nancy says. She hands Robert his numbers workbook. Like a tape loop, the face of her child as a stranger replays in her mind. Robert has her plain brown hair, her coloring, but his eyes are Jack’s—demanding and eerily penetrating, eyes that could pin her to the wall.
After Robert leaves, Nancy lowers the venetian blinds. Her office is brilliantly lighted by the sun, through south-facing windows. The design was accidental, nothing to do with solar energy. It is an old building. Bars of light slant across her desk, like a formidable scene in a forties movie. Nancy’s secretary goes home, but Nancy works on, contacting all the parents she couldn’t get during working hours. One parent anxiously reports that her child has a swollen lymph node on his neck.
“No,” Nancy says firmly. “That is not a symptom of hepatitis. But you should ask the doctor about that when you go in for the gamma globulin.”
Gamma globulin. The phrase rolls off her tongue. She tries to remember an odd title of a movie about gamma rays. It comes to her as she is dialing the telephone: The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. She has never known what that title meant.
The office grows dim, and Nancy turns on the lights. The school is quiet, as though the threat of an infectious disease has emptied the corridors, leaving her in charge. She recalls another movie, The Andromeda Strain. Her work is like the thrill of watching drama, a threat held safely at a distance. Historians have to be detached, Nancy once said, defensively, to Jack, when he accused her of being unfriendly to shopkeepers and waiters. Where was all that Southern hospitality he had heard so much about? he wanted to know. It hits her now that historians are detached about the past, not the present. Jack has learned some of this detachment: he wants to let Grover go. Nancy thinks of the stark images in his recent photographs—snow, icicles, fences, the long shot of Grover on the hill like a stray wolf. Nancy had always liked Jack’s pictures simply for what they were, but Jack didn’t see the people or the objects in them. He saw illusions. The vulnerability of the image, he once said, was what he was after. The image was meant to evoke its own death, he told her.
By the time Nancy finishes the scheduling,