Read Online The Inverted Forest by John Dalton - Free Book Online Page A

afterthought. “They’ll do Salisbury steak and potatoes for dinner,” he said. “And I wanted to drop by and make it clear that you and James are welcome to join us at the director’s table.” He waited.
    “Thank you.”
    “But I’ll let you get back to your business,” he said. He took a few carefully measured steps and was out the infirmary door.
    He had not, during the entirety of his visit, looked her in the eye. She’d never sensed in Schuller the bashful unease some white people had in her presence. Nor did she think he’d been made shy by having seen her naked a few nights earlier in the swimming pool shower room. He hadn’t indulged in the sight of her. He wasn’t interested in her that way.
    Hard, if not impossible, to imagine what he was interested in. He was an odd man, Mr. Kindermann. He almost certainly wasn’t a good camp director. He might even be a fool.
    And yet, in the three days since she’d been discovered at the pool, she found it difficult, even painful, not to address Schuller Kindermann directly, to seek his pardon by saying, “Look here, Mr. Kindermann.I’d like to explain myself . . .” But what could she say? None of her reasons were noble.

    Look here, Mr. Kindermann.
    Best to start at the Meadowmont Gardens Nursing Home. (That was how Harriet had come to work at Kindermann Forest; Schuller had approached her one day and asked if she and her son might like to spend the summer at camp.) In the very back of Meadowmont Gardens, in the oldest and longest wing of the building, was a corridor called Special Unit C, where the patients—mindless or insensible or, better yet, cataleptic—thrashed away or trembled or simply weighed down the mattresses with their comatose bodies.
    The human body, in its last phases, could fall apart in such dreadful and astonishing ways. To be a nurse was to see it up close and, over time, grow accustomed to the dread and wonder.
    But all this was just a potent reminder, not the lesson itself.
    For the lesson Harriet had to spend time caring for an entirely different class of Meadowmont Gardens patient—different corridor, different world altogether. They called themselves the Garden Ladies because their rooms were private, with little parlors and kitchenettes and French doors leading to the Meadowmont flower gardens. They were all ladies of a certain type: elderly, white, meticulous dressers, absorbed in books and crossword puzzles, particular about tablecloths and butter pads and hairdressing appointments. They could be trusted to operate a toaster oven but not to self-administer medication. Each evening they brought their own silverware to the dining hall and, after the meal, returned to their rooms and scrubbed the tines of the forks and the dull blades of the knives in their kitchenette sinks.
    No surprise that the Garden Ladies were great traffickers of gossip. Certain details—book titles, recipe ingredients—eluded them.But how keenly they remembered stories of a personal nature: the ill-timed remark, the cheap gift, the wrong dress, or Mrs. Perrault on Hall 1B, who drank too much wine and slept through her stepson’s wedding reception, or Mrs. Decker, who, during a twelve-city bus tour of Europe, developed an unseemly crush on her Swiss tour guide (while her husband dozed in the bus seat beside her). Even now, Mrs. Decker still wrote the tour guide effusive notes and made her dull husband carry them to the front desk for mailing.
    As for the Garden Ladies themselves, their lives had been much tidier: one marriage (inevitably a portrait of a dead husband, a mild-looking man, propped on a dresser top), one career (a homemaker, a grade school teacher, a city clerk), a small family (a child or two so carefully reared and independent they were now fulfilling important career duties three states away).
    You learned these details over time if you were their nurse. And eventually you watched the Garden Ladies falter. They fell or stroked out or