The Corrections

we had a relationship with him. I don’t think he tells us the truth about what he’s doing with his life. He said once he was working for the Wall Street Journal . Maybe I misheard him, but I think that’s what he said, but I don’t think that’s really where he’s working. I don’t know what he does for a living really. You must think it’s awful of me to complain about this, when you’ve had things so much worse.” In Sylvia’s insistence that it wasn’t awful, not at all, Enid glimpsed how she might confess an even more shameful thing or two, and how this exposure to the public elements might, while painful, offer solace. But like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance—thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets—this alluring pain proved, at closer range, to be inhuman in its scale. From Newport the Gunnar Myrdal sailed east into sapphire vapors. The ship felt stifling to Enid after an afternoon’s exposure to big skies and the tanker-size playpens of the superwealthy, and though she won sixty more dollars in the Stringbird Room she felt like a lab animal caged with other lever-yanking animals amid the mechanized blink and burble, and bedtime came early, and when Alfred began to stir she was already awake listening to the anxiety bell ringing with such force that her bed frame vibrated and her sheets were abrasive, and here was Alfred turning on lights and shouting, and a next-door neighbor banging on the wall and shouting back, and Alfred stock-still listening with his face twisted in paranoid psychosis and then whispering conspiratorially that he’d seen a t ** d run between the beds, and then the making and unmaking of said beds, the application of a diaper, the application of a second diaper to address some hallucinated exigency, and the balking of his nerve-damagedlegs, and the bleating of the word “Enid” until he nearly wore it out, and the woman with the rawly abraded name sobbing in the dark with the worst despair and anxiety she’d ever felt until finally—like an overnight traveler arriving at a train station differing from the dismal ones before it only in the morning twilight, the small miracles of restored visibility: a chalky puddle in a gravel parking lot, the steam twisting from a sheet-metal chimney—she was brought to a decision.
    On her map of the ship, at the stern end of the “D” Deck, was the universal symbol of aid for those in need. After breakfast she left her husband in conversation with the Roths and made her way to this red cross. The physical thing corresponding to the symbol was a frosted-glass door with three words lettered on in gold leaf. “Alfred” was the first word and “Infirmary” was the third; the sense of the middle word was lost in the shadows cast by “Alfred.” She studied it fruitlessly. No. Bel. Nob-Ell. No Bell.
    All three words retreated as the door was pulled open by a muscular young man with a name tag pinned to a white lapel: Mather Hibbard, M.D. He had a large, somewhat coarse-skinned face like the face of the Italian-American actor people loved, the one who once starred as an angel and another time as a disco dancer. “Hi, how are you this morning?” he said, showing pearly teeth. Enid followed him through a vestibule into the inner office, where he directed her to the chair by his desk.
    “I’m Mrs. Lambert,” she said. “Enid Lambert in B11. I was hoping you could help me.”
    “I hope so, too. What seems to be the problem?”
    “I’m having some trouble.”
    “Mental trouble? Emotional trouble?”
    “Well, it’s my husband—”
    “Excuse me. Stop? Stop?” Dr. Hibbard ducked a little and smiled impishly. “You say you’re having the trouble?”
    His smile was adorability itself. It took hostage that part of Enid that melted at the sight of seal pups and kittens, and it refused to release her until, somewhat grudgingly, she’d smiled back. “My trouble,” she said, “is my husband and my children—”
    “Sorry again, Edith. Time out?” Dr. Hibbard ducked very low, put his hands on his head, and peered up from between his arms. “We need to be clear: you are the one having trouble?”
    “No. I’m fine. But everyone else in my—”
    “Are you anxious?”
    “Yes, but—”
    “Not sleeping?”
    “Exactly. You see, my husband—”
    “Edith? You said Edith?”
    “Enid. Lambert. L-A-M-B—”
    “Enith, what’s four times seven with three taken away?”
    “What? Oh. Well,