The Love of a Good Woman

she could work with her right arm, but my father told her it was a complicated fracture and he wanted her to rest for a month. He asked me if I would mind postponing my departure. Those were his words—”postponing my departure.” He hasn’t asked where I’m planning to go; he just knows about the car.
    I don’t know where I’m planning to go, either.
    I said all right, I’d stay while I could be useful. So we’re on decent speaking terms; in fact it’s fairly comfortable. I try to do just about what Mrs. B. would do, in the house. No tries now at reorganization, no discussion of repairs. (The eaves have been done—when the Mrs. B. relation came I was astonished and grateful.) I hold the oven door shut the way Mrs. B. did with a coupleof heavy medical textbooks set on a stool pushed up against it. I cook the meat and the vegetables in her way and never think about bringing home an avocado or bottle of artichoke hearts or a garlic bulb, though I see all those things are now for sale in the supermarket. I make the coffee from the powder in the jar. I tried drinking that myself to see if I could get used to it and of course I could. I clean up the office at the end of every day and look after the laundry. The laundryman likes me because I don’t accuse him of anything.
    I’m allowed to answer the phone, but if it’s a woman asking for my father and not volunteering details I’m supposed to take the number and say that the doctor will phone back. So I do, and sometimes the woman just hangs up. When I tell my father this he says, “She’ll likely call again.”
    There aren’t many of those patients—the ones he calls the specials. I don’t know—maybe one a month. Mostly he’s dealing with sore throats and cramped colons and bealing ears and so on. Jumpy hearts, kidney stones, sour digestions.
    R. Tonight he knocked on my door. He knocked though it wasn’t all the way closed. I was reading. He asked—not in a supplicating way of course, but I would say with a reasonable respect—if I could give him a hand in the office.
    The first special since Mrs. B. has been away.
    I asked what he wanted me to do.
    “Just more or less to keep her steady,” he said. “She’s young and she’s not used to it yet. Give your hands a good scrub too, use the soap in the bottle in the toilet downstairs.”
    The patient was lying flat on the examining table with a sheet over her from the waist down. The top part of her was fully dressed in a dark-blue buttoned-up cardigan and a white blousewith a lace-trimmed collar. These clothes lay loosely over her sharp collarbone and nearly flat chest. Her hair was black, pulled tightly back from her face and braided and pinned on top of her head. This prim and severe style made her neck look long and emphasized the regal bone structure of her white face, so that from a distance she could be taken for a woman of forty-five. Close up you could see that she was quite young, probably around twenty. Her pleated skirt was hung up on the back of the door. The rim of white panties showed, that she had thoughtfully hung underneath it.
    She was shivering hard though the office wasn’t cold.
    “Now Madeleine,” my father said. “The first thing is we’ve got to get your knees up.”
    I wondered if he knew her. Or did he just ask for a name and use whatever the woman gave him?
    “Easy,” he said. “Easy. Easy.” He got the stirrups in place and her feet into them. Her legs were bare and looked as if they’d never known a suntan. She was still wearing her loafers.
    Her knees shook so much in this new position that they clapped together.
    “You’ll have to hold steadier than that,” my father said. “You know, now, I can’t do my job unless you do yours. Do you want a blanket over you?”
    He said to me, “Get her a blanket. Off the bottom shelf there.”
    I arranged the blanket to cover the top part of Madeleine’s body. She didn’t look at me. Her teeth rattled against one another. She clenched her mouth shut.
    “Now just slide down this way a bit,” my father said. And to me. “Hold her knees. Get them apart. Just hold her easy.”
    I put my hands on the knobs of the girl’s knees and moved them apart as gently as I could. My father’s breathing filled the room with its busy unintelligible comments. I had to hold Madeleine’s knees quite firmly to keep them from jerking together.
    “Where’s that old woman?” she said.
    I said, “She’s at home. She had a