Bullet Park   ::   Cheever John

Sitting at their breakfast table Nailles and Nellie seemed to have less dimension than a comic strip, but why was this? They had erotic depths, origins, memories, dreams and seizures of melancholy and enthusiasm. Nailles sighed. He was thinking of his mother. She had suffered a stroke four months ago and had never quite regained consciousness. She was a patient in a nursing home in the west end of the village. Nailles visited her every Sunday and remembered uneasily his visit of a week ago.

The nursing home was one of those large places, the favorite of undertakers, that had been made obsolete by the disappearance of a servant class. There was a crystal chandelier and a marble floor in the vestibule but the furniture seemed to have been gathered from some ancient porch and the flowers on the table were made of wax. The director was a Swede and must have been a prosperous Swede since his rates began at one hundred and fifty dollars a week; but he did not spend his money on clothes. His trousers shone and he wore a shapeless brown jacket of cotton. He spoke without an accent but in the pleasant, singing way of Scandinavians. "Dr. Powers was here yesterday," he sang, "but he had nothing to report. Her blood pressure is a hundred and seventy-two. Her heart is damaged but still very strong. She is getting twenty-two cc.'s of PLM six times a day and the usual anticoagulants." The director had received no medical education but he displayed the medical information that had rubbed onto him with the same flair with which a green soldier will display his military nomenclature. "The hairdresser came on Wednesday but I didn't have her hair touched up. You asked me not to."

"My mother never dyed her hair," Nailles said.

"Yes, I know," the director said, "but most of my clients like to see their parents looking well. I call them my dolls," he said, speaking with genuine tenderness. "They look like people and yet they're really not." Nailles wondered darkly if the director had played with dolls. How else could he have hit on this comparison. "We dress them. We undress them. We have their hair arranged. We talk with them but of course they can't answer. I think of them as my dolls."

"Could I see her," Nailles asked.

"Certainly."

The director led him up the marble stairs and opened the door to his mother's room. It was a small bedroom with a single window. It would have been a child's bedroom when the house contained a family. "She spoke last Thursday," the director said. "The nurse was feeding her. She said, 'I'm living in a foxhole.' Of course her speech was blurred. Now I'll leave you alone.