“There. You look beautiful, Toby. Your fans should see you now. But they’ll see you soon. They’ll fight to get in to see you. The President will be there—everybody will be there to see Toby Temple.”
Then Jill prepared Toby’s breakfast. She made oatmeal or cream of wheat or scrambled eggs, food she could spoon into his mouth. She fed him as though he were a baby, talking to him all the time, promising that he was going to get well.
“You’re Toby Temple,” she intoned. “Everybody loves you, everybody wants you back. Your fans out there are waiting for you, Toby. You’ve got to get well for them.”
And another long, punishing day would begin.
She wheeled his useless, crippled body down to the pool for his exercises. After that, she massaged him and worked on his speech therapy. Then it was time for her to prepare his lunch, and after lunch it would begin all over again. Through it all, Jill kept telling Toby how wonderful he was, how much he was loved. He was Toby Temple, and the world was waiting for him to come back to it. At night she would take out one of his scrapbooks and hold it up so he could see it.
“There we are with the Queen. Do you remember how they all cheered you that night? That’s the way it’s going to be again. You’re going to be bigger than ever, Toby, bigger than ever.”
She tucked him in at night and crawled into the cot she had put next to his bed, drained. In the middle of the night, she would be awakened by the noisome stench of Toby’s bowel movement in bed. She would drag herself from her cot and change Toby’s diaper and clean him. By then it would be time to start fixing his breakfast and begin another day.
And another. In an endless march of days.
Each day Jill pushed Toby a little harder, a little further. Her nerves were so frayed that, if she felt Toby was not trying, she would slap him across the face. “We’re going to beat them,” she said fiercely. “You’re going to get well.”
Jill’s body was exhausted from the punishing routine she was putting herself through, but when she lay down at night, sleep eluded her. There were too many visions dancing through her head, like scenes from old movies. She and Toby mobbed by reporters at the Cannes Festival…The President at their Palm Springs home, telling Jill how beautiful she was…Fans crowding around Toby and her at a premiere…The Golden Couple…Toby stepping up to receive his medal and falling…falling…Finally, she would drift off to sleep.
Sometimes, Jill would awaken with a sudden, fierce headache that would not go away. She would lie there in the loneliness of the dark, fighting the pain, until the sun would come up, and it was time to drag herself to her feet.
And it would begin all over again. It was as though she and Toby were the lone survivors of some long-forgotten holocaust. Her world had shrunk to the dimensions of this house, these rooms, this man. She drove herself relentlessly from dawn until past midnight.
And she drove Toby, her Toby imprisoned in hell, in a world where there was only Jill, whom he must blindly obey.
The weeks, dreary and painful, dragged by and turned into months. Now, Toby would begin to cry when he saw Jill coming toward him, for he knew he was going to be punished. Each day Jill became more merciless. She forced Toby’s flopping, useless limbs to move, until he was in unbearable agony. He made horrible gurgling pleas for her to stop, but Jill would say, “Not yet. Not until you’re a man again, not until we show them all.” She would go on kneading his exhausted muscles. He was a helpless, full-grown baby, a vegetable, a nothing. But when Jill looked at him, she saw him as he was going to be, and she declared, “You’re going to walk!”
She would lift him to his feet and hold him up while she forced one leg after the other, so that he was moving in a grotesque parody of motion, like a drunken, disjointed marionette.
Her headaches had become more frequent. Bright lights or a loud noise or sudden movement would set them off. I must see a doctor, she thought. Later, when Tony is well again. Now there was no time or room for herself.
Only Toby.
It was as though Jill were possessed. Her clothes hung loosely on her, but she had no idea of how much weight she had lost or how she looked. Her face was thin and drawn, her eyes hollow. Her once beautiful shiny hair was lusterless and stringy. She did not know, nor would she have cared.
One day Jill found a telegram under the door asking her to phone Dr. Kaplan. No time. The routine must be kept.
The days and nights became a Kafkaesque blur of bathing Toby and exercising him and changing him and shaving him and feeding him.
And then starting all over again.
She got a walker for Toby and fastened his fingers around it and moved his legs, holding him up, trying to show him the motions, walking him back and forth across the room until she was asleep on her feet, not knowing any longer where or who she was, or what she was doing.
Then, one day, Jill knew that it had all come to an end.
She had been up with Toby half the night and had finally gone into her own bedroom, where she had fallen into a dazed slumber just before dawn. When Jill awakened, the sun was high in the sky. She had slept long past noon. Toby had not been fed or bathed or changed. He was lying in his bed, helpless, waiting for her, probably panicky. Jill started to rise and found that she could not move. She was filled with such a bottomless, bone-deep weariness that her exhausted body would no longer obey her. She lay there, helpless, knowing that she had lost, that it had all been wasted, all the days and nights of hell, the months of agony, none of it had meant anything. Her body had betrayed her, as Toby’s had betrayed him. Jill had no strength left to give him anymore, and it made her want to weep. It was finished.