The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [219]
They had to stop within a hundred yards of the gate while a fat white-capped nurse led a line of patients, straggling like elderly schoolchildren, across the road in front of them, Ac snaggle-toothed woman in a candy-striped dress and black wool hat shook her fist at them, and a baldheaded man waved energetically. A few threw malevolent looks as the line shuffled off across the green to another building.
After a moment the car rolled forward again, “Park in front of that center building,” Mary Elizabeth directed, “They won’t let us see him,” he mumbled.
“Not if you have anything to do with it,” she said. “Park and let me out. I’ll handle this.” Her cheek had dried and her voice was businesslike. He parked and she got out. He watched her disappear into the building, thinking with grim satisfaction hat she would soon turn into a full-grown ogre—false intellect, false emotions, maximum efficiency, all operating to produce the dominant hair-splitting Ph. D. Another line of patients passed in the road and several of them pointed at the small car. Calhoun did not look but he sensed he was being watched. “Hup up there,” he heard the nurse say. He looked again and gave a little cry A gentle face, wrapped around with a green hand towel, was in his, window, smiling toothlessly but with an agonizing tenderness.
“Get a move on, sweetie,” the nurse said and the face retreated.
The boy rolled his window up rapidly but his heart was wrenched. He saw again the agonized face in the stocks—the slightly mismatched eyes, the wide mouth parted in a stifled useless cry. The vision lasted only a moment but when it passed, he was certain that the sight of Singleton was going to effect a change in him, that after this visit, some strange tranquility he had not before conceived of would be his. He sat for ten minute with his eyes closed, knowing that a revelation was near and trying to prepare himself for it.
All at once the car door opened and the girl folded herself, panting, in beside him. Her face was pale. She held up two green permission slips and pointed to the names written on them: Calhoun Singleton on one, Mary Elizabeth Singleton on the other. For a moment they stared at the slips, then at each other. Both appeared to recognize that in their common kinship with him, a kinship with each other was unavoidable. Generously, Calhoun held out his hand. She shook it. “He’s in the fifth building to the left,” she said.
They drove to the fifth building and parked. It was a low red brick structure with barred windows, like all the others except that the outside of it was streaked with black stains. In one window two hands hung out, palms downward. Mary Elizabeth opened the paper sack she had brought and began to take out presents for Singleton. She had brought a box of candy, a carton of cigarettes and three Bookss—a Modern Library Thus Spake Zarathustra, a paperback Revolt of the Masses, and a thin decorated volume of Housman. She handed the cigarettes and the candy to Calhoun and got out of the car with the books herself. She started forward, but halfway to the door she stopped and put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t take it,” she murmured.
“Now now,” Calhoun said kindly. He put his hand on her back and gave her a slight push and she began to move forward again.
They entered a stained linoleum-covered hall where a peculiar odor met them at once like an invisible official. There was a desk facing the door, behind which sat a frail harassed-looking nurse whose eyes darted to right and left as if she expected ultimately to be hit from behind. Mary Elizabeth handed her the two green permits. The woman looked at them and groaned. “Go in yonder and wait,” she said in a weary insult-bearing voice, ‘He’ll have to be got ready. They shouldn’t have give you these over there. What do they know about what goes on over here and what do them doctors care anyhow? If it was up to me, the ones that don’t cooperate wouldn’t see nobody.”
“We’re his kin,” Calhoun said. “We have every right to see him.”
The nurse threw her head back in a soundless laugh