February

February came with two fevers. The daughter and the grandson were down with a cold and running a temperature. The wife routinely gave the girl paracetamol and fruit juices and insisted on her staying in bed.  (And she called on the grandson, who lived with his mother in another part of town.) Fevers, body aches, catarrhs—they remind me of childhood. They came as regularly as the seasons, in fact they arrived with the seasons, particularly those that had with them a bonus of rain?

In a way, I welcomed them. Fever had its privileges. It meant no school and exclusion from chores, and special food—pullet grilled on a skewer, or til-ogon, fish traditionally considered conducive to convalescence and, more often than not, possessed of sweet, succulent meat. But beware, that if the poultices and simples and antipyretics failed, a hypodermic had to be given and the town doctor would have to be brought in with his needle, sterilized above the blue flame of an alcohol-soaked absorbent cotton and then attached to a syringe half-filled with water-dissolved penicillin to be thrust and emptied into the tender backside.

Somehow, Peter’s mother-in-law got off lightly. Mark writes that, after they left the synagogue, Jesus and companions went to the home of the brothers Peter and Andrew, ostensibly to eat. But Peter’s mother-in-law had a fever. It is not clear how debilitating the fever was, but it weakened the good woman enough to seek the refuge of the bed and momentarily to refrain from attending to the guests. For me, what was at stake was Jesus’ reputation as a healer and miracle worker, which was far-reaching—and Mark tells us that in fact that very evening “the whole town gathered at the door.” Besides, what was a fever compared to the loss of limb, speech or vision, or life itself, all of which Jesus reversed? And so “he went to her, took her hand and helped her up,” and “the fever left her and she began to wait on them.”

Talking of fever, I recall O. Henry’s short story about Joanna or Johnsy, a young woman and a painter, whose ambition was to paint the Bay of Naples. She was stricken with pneumonia. Sue, likewise an artist and her friend and roommate, was concerned that Johnsy should spend the time looking out the window and counting the leaves of an ivy vine on the brick wall of a house across from them. The autumn winds had reduced the number of leaves at a brisk clip until only four remained. “When the last one falls I must go, too,” Johnsy said.

Sue, who was doing a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story, told Johnsy to go to sleep while she worked.  She got Behrman, a crusty, old painter, who lived on the ground floor below them.  Behrman was “always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it.”  When told about Johnsy’s morbid thoughts, Behrman dismissed them as idiotic.

In another room, Behrman posed for Sue, who drew him as an Idaho cowboy. They peered fearfully at the ivy vine and quietly looked at each other when they saw that the rain and snow were falling.

The next morning, Johnsy asked Sue to pull up the window shade, and to their surprise—despite the rainstorm the night before—there was still one leaf on the ivy vine, and the leaf remained throughout the day and into the night with its gusts. And for yet another morning, the leaf stayed.

Johnsy became pensive and realized that it was a sin for her to want to die and asked for broth and milk “with a little port in it.” She told Sue that someday she hoped to paint the Bay of Naples.

When he came in the afternoon, the doctor told Sue that Johnsy was recovering, but that he had to rush to the ground floor to attend to Behrman, who had an acute attack of pneumonia. The next day, the doctor declared Johnsy out of danger. But Behrman had died. Sue gathered from the janitor that just two days before he found Behrman’s shoes and clothing wet and icy cold, and “a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it.”

Sue told Johnsy that the last ivy leaf on the wall was Behrman’s masterpiece, which he painted on the night the last leaf fell.

Leaf for leaf. Life for life.