And so she stepped out of the room. When she returned, it was to more pleading that she take him home.
“I have asked so little of you,” he said, which was of course untrue, but who was she to protest under the circumstances? “All I desire is my cabin. My own bed.”
What he wanted was dignity, and she could not deliver it. As far as George was concerned, no one should see him compromised like this. Ezra had come to visit but George had refused him, same with Mildred.
The food was the final embarrassment. When he refused to eat, they tried to spoon-feed him porridge under the pretense that his stomach was sensitive, and yet after acceding to a bite, he spit it out upon his chin, oats sputtering onto the blankets. The attendant flinched and pulled back from the bed and Isabelle reached over to clean him.
“And now they feed me gruel! I won’t stand for it.”
“George, please.”
“No more. I would rather die here and now than submit to this torture. I will end things myself.”
She couldn’t believe he had so much anger stored away. He was no longer her husband but a man possessed, and when he pointed at the attendant—demanding that she taste the food herself, humiliating her for not knowing the proper application of salt—Isabelle could stand no more.
“Please leave us,” she said to the attendant. She was a young girl in training, who didn’t deserve such treatment, and she happily excused herself, shutting the door as she left.
“George,” Isabelle said.
He turned to her, his eyes frantic.
“I must return home.”
“George.”
“I can’t stand these people, the smell of the alcohol and the cries of the children. I’m so tired, Isabelle…”
“It’s only a hospital. We can manage this.”
“It’s hell. I will crawl if I must. I need only arms for that.”
She was utterly exhausted, pained from sitting for so long, and she had hardly eaten in days. She took his hands. Now that he’d been bathed, the softness had returned, and it brought her great comfort, even as he conducted himself so terribly, to hold them in her own.
“You’ll let them care for you?” she said. “If I was to bring in a nurse?”
“For what? You have done fine all these years on your own.”
“And if I have to change you, George? And give you medicine, and turn you in bed?”
He stared ahead defiantly.
“I will have my own food,” he said. “And my bed. When I am propped up I will see the walnut trees out the window, and at night you will fetch my books from the shelf. Won’t you?”
She put her head on his chest, knowing, now, that what he truly sought were the comforts of home, during what might prove to be his last days.
“I will,” she said. “If that’s what you desire.”
“It is,” he pleaded. “It’s all I want.”
She told him she would return the next day, and promised to bring him home then.
CHAPTER 25
Ezra’s shop had not survived the fire, but Isabelle found him at his home. He and his wife still lived in the same two-story cottage they had raised their boys in, although they were alone there, now. They met the standards of the neighborhood but there was no grandiosity to the place, and in choosing its dully brown exterior, the simplistic walkway with no place for a carriage, they had always seemed more determined to blend in than stand out.
She knocked and Ezra’s wife, Alice, answered the door. They had spoken perhaps twice in Isabelle’s whole life, yet she appeared not only to know Isabelle but to be expecting her.
“Come, come. Out of the smoke.” She waved Isabelle in and offered her tea, which Isabelle declined. “A biscuit, then?”
Isabelle was ready to refuse this as well, but her hunger got the best of her and she accepted.
“He’s in his study,” Alice said, wandering toward the kitchen.
“Is he holding up?”
“We’ve been through many trials. A fire? Nothing. Nothing.”
She returned with the tea that Isabelle had not wanted along with a biscuit besides and gestured for her to sit on the couch. The parlor was unlike her own, the cleanliness born not of upkeep but of a seeming lack of use. The cushion beneath her barely moved under her weight, and the fruit on the table looked so perfectly ripe it was fit to be painted in a still life.
“And you?” Alice asked. “I cannot imagine your pain.”
Alice had the most durable features Isabelle had ever laid eyes on. There was a rustic element to them, skin like leather, a cauldron of energy underneath, hidden but ever present.