Machine Dreams

broken streak, and we could see them, see them all. A Pierce Arrow coupe was high off the ground, with windows all around like you were in a cockpit.
    Aunt Bess liked Reb and felt sorry for him. She would lecture him about getting good grades and getting into a medical school out of state, where they wouldn’t pass him through because his father paid. Reb would slump in his chair, dejected, and say maybe he’d just join the army. You’re joking, Bess would say, all serious. Reb could get her going, pretending to want to do right.
    She did dislike Doc Jonas and was only civil to him.
We got a few of those girls down here. How many times did I walk across the alley in the dead of night … then had to give them my own skirt because their clothes were ruined.
Jonas and Clayton were in a hunting club that rented a lodge at Blackwater every winter. The whole week Clayton was getting ready to go, Bess made noises. Clayton said her own thoughts had gone to her head and anyway, the whole business was complicated.
Of course he never gave them any anesthetic but a shot of whiskey, or they couldn’t have gotten up and walked out fast enough. We had one who walked from the Jonas house to the hospital, two o’clock in the morning.
Clayton cleaned his deer rifle and she mended by the light. Would she rather have those girls jump through the ice, like the one over at Milltown? They talked so low they were almost hissing. It was night.
There’s going to be a judgment on him, a trail of blood straight down the hill for everyone to see. And you know where that trail ends? Right here across the alley. He’s not so good at it that he doesn’t make a mistake about once a year, or let one beg him into it when she’s too far along.
    Doc Jonas had a lot of stories told on him, and some of them were lies. He was not an addict of any kind, I’m sure. And he was the only surgeon at the hospital in all those years who never lost a patient on the operating table. His wife had to be taken care oflike a child; that was why the sister lived in. Mrs. Jonas had hair like a young girl’s, long and done up. Her sister, Caroline, brushed it in the evenings.
That woman doesn’t know who she is half the time. Neurasthenia. Now, it’s not neurasthenia. Never seen out unless it’s in the car with Jonas, and then she looks at you like we’re all afloat on suds. How could her own sister allow it, for years
… Reb and me sat in the living room. Mrs. Jonas played the Victrola and drifted like a feather.
I’ll tell you how.…
Mrs. Jonas was thin and her sister baked burnt-sugar cakes to tempt her into eating.
    She was a beautiful girl and came here with a whole trousseau from New York City. Such dresses as you’ve never seen.
Reb’s mother really was like a child, wandering around in the house. She was wakeful at night and stayed in her room, then slept all morning while the sister, Caroline, worked in the office with Doc Jonas. Then Caroline took her breakfast in, and I suppose gave her a shot. I don’t know, none of that was ever mentioned. By late afternoon, when Reb and I were there after last classes, she was up and dressed and happy in her vacant way. She wore clothes that women wouldn’t wear on the street, evening clothes—kind of lavish, like the clothes of a rich young girl. She used to remind me of the farm in Randolph County, because her dresses looked like what the women wore there on Sundays.
    The widow sister, Caroline, looked like Mrs. Jonas in the face, but she was different. Like a thin dark rock, moving through the hall in her brown dresses. She did all the work around there but seemed to do it invisibly; I ate dinner with Reb and the Doc pretty often, and she never sat at table with us. Reb’s mother was nervous about eating and took her meals in her room. Maybe Caroline sat with her. Doc would leave for the hospital on evening rounds, and Reb and me would go to the parlor to steal ourselves a glass of brandy.
    I remember Reb dancing with his mother once, on a winter night.
    She came into the room very animated and turned up the radio, and was dancing by herself until she noticed we were there. Reb stood up and made a deep bow, then danced her all around the room. Made a big show of her, turning and dipping and liftingher all past the big windows, with the chandelier lit up and throwing shadows across the walls. You could see by how Reb moved how light Mrs. Jonas was; they were both laughing. It was a nice picture,