The Secret History - Donna Tartt [62]
I was in the hospital for four nights. Henry stayed with me almost the whole time, bringing me sodas when I asked for them, and a razor and a toothbrush, and a pair of his own pajamas—silky Egyptian cotton, cream-colored and heavenly soft, with HMW (M for Marchbanks) embroidered in tiny scarlet letters on the pocket. He also brought me pencils and paper, for which I had little use but which I suppose he would have been lost without, and a great many books, half of which were in languages I couldn’t read and the other half of which might as well have been. One night—head aching from Hegel—I asked him to bring me a magazine; he looked rather startled, and when he came back it was with a trade journal (Pharmacology Update) he had found in the lounge. We talked hardly at all. Most of the time he read, with a concentration that astonished me; six hours at a stretch, scarcely glancing up. He paid me almost no attention. But he stayed up with me on the bad nights, when I had a hard time breathing and my lungs hurt so I couldn’t sleep; and once, when the nurse on duty was three hours late with my medicine, he followed her expressionless into the hall and there delivered, in his subdued monotone, such a tense and eloquent reprimand that the nurse (a contemptuous, hard-bitten woman, with dyed hair like an aging waitress, and a sour word for everyone) was somewhat mollified; and afterwards she—who ripped off the bandages around my IV with such callousness, and poked me black and blue in her desultory search for veins—was much gentler in her handling of me, and once, while taking my temperature, even called me “hon.”
The emergency room doctor told me that Henry had saved my life. This was a dramatic and gratifying thing to hear—and one which I repeated to a number of people—but secretly I thought it was an exaggeration. In subsequent years, however, I’ve come to feel that he might well have been right. When I was younger I thought that I was immortal. And though I bounced back quickly, in a short-term sense, in another I never really quite got over that winter. I’ve had problems with my lungs ever since, and my bones ache at the slightest chill, and I catch cold easily now, whereas I never used to.
I told Henry what the doctor had said. He was displeased. Frowning, he made some curt remark—actually, I’m surprised I’ve forgotten it, I was so embarrassed—and I never mentioned it again. I think he did save me, though. And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name.
But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.
On Monday morning I was able to leave at last, with a bottle of antibiotics and an arm full of pinpricks. They insisted on pushing me to Henry’s car in a wheelchair, though I was perfectly able to walk and humiliated at being rolled out like a parcel.
“Take me to the Catamount Motel,” I told him as we pulled into Hampden.
“No,” he said. “You’re coming to stay with me.”
Henry lived on the first floor of an old house on Water Street, in North Hampden, just around the block from Charles and Camilla’s and closer to the river. He didn’t like to have people over and I had been there only once, and then for a minute or two. It was much larger than Charles and Camilla’s apartment, and a good deal emptier. The rooms were big and anonymous, with wide-plank floors and no curtains on the windows and plaster walls painted white. The furniture, while obviously good, was scarred and plain and there