520
PARTISAN REVIEW
stretcher in the corridor, waiting to be taken to the x-ray room; an
interne, passing by, had paused and smiled down at her and had said,
"Your cab-driver is dead. You were lucky."
Six weeks after the accident, she woke one morning just as day–
light was showing on the windows as a murky smear. It was a minute
or two before she realized why she was so reluctant to be awake, why
her uneasiness amounted almost to alarm. Then she remembered that
her nose was to be operated on today. She lay straight and motion–
less under the seer.mcker counterpane. Her blood-red eyes in her
darned face stared through the window and saw a frozen river and
leafless elm trees and a grizzled esplanade where dogs danced on the
ends of leashes, their bundled-up owners stumbling after them, half
blind with sleepiness .and cold. Warm as the hospital room was, it
did not prevent Pansy from knowing, as keenly as though she were
one of the walkers, how very cold
it
was outside. Each twig of a
nearby tree was stark. Cold red brick buildings nudged the low-lying
sky which was pale and inert like a punctured sac.
In six weeks, the scene had varied little: there was promise in
the skies neither of sun nor of snow; no red sunsets marked these
days. The trees could neither die nor leaf out again. Pansy could not
remember another season in her life so constant, when the very
minutes themselves were suffused with the winter pallor as they
dropped from the moon-faced clock in the corridor. Likewise, her
room accomplished no alterations from day to day. On the glass–
topped bureau stood two potted plants telegraphed by faraway well–
wishers. They did not fade, and if a leaf turned brown and fell, it
soon was replaced; so did the blossoms renew themselves. The roots,
like the skies and like the bare trees, seemed zealously determined to
maintain a status quo. The bedside table, covered every day with a
clean white towel, though the one removed was always immaculate,
was furnished sparsely with a water glass, a bent drinking tube, a
sweating pitcher, and a stack of paper handkerchiefs. There were a
few letters in the drawer, a hairbrush, a pencil, and some postal cards
on which, from time to time, she wrote brief messages to relatives
and friends: "Dr. Nash says that my reflexes are shipshape
(sic)
and
Dr. Rivers says the frontal fracture has all but healed and that the
occipital is coming along nicely. Dr. Nicholas, the nose doctor, prom–
ises to operate as soon as Dr. Rivers gives him the go-ahead sign
(sic)."
The bed itself was never rumpled. Once fretful and now con–
valescent, Miss Vanneman might have been expected to toss or to
