“She has felt the heat, of course. The summer—I often think—”
“Her lips are blue!”
“It's probably nothing serious.”
“She says you've had Dr. Ed over to see her.”
She put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with appeal and something of terror in her face.
Thus cornered, he had to acknowledge that Anna had been out of sorts.
“I shall come home, of course. It's tragic and absurd that I should be caring for other people, when my own mother—”
She dropped her head on his arm, and he saw that she was crying. If he made a gesture to draw her to him, she never knew it. After a moment she looked up.
“I'm much braver than this in the hospital. But when it's one's own!”
K. was sorely tempted to tell her the truth and bring her back to the little house: to their old evenings together, to seeing the younger Wilson, not as the white god of the operating-room and the hospital, but as the dandy of the Street and the neighbor of her childhood—back even to Joe.