Ghost Country (25 page)

Harriet, very aware of her water-soaked shoes and uncombed hair, tried to smile in a friendly way: she knew how bad it would look for her clients if she, their lawyer, appeared surly on television. “We won’t know anything until we get some structural engineers down here to determine the cause of the leak. We’ll organize that as
soon as I can return to my orfice. And I don’t know anything about this woman Madeleine Carter, or her condition. I was just about to get that information from the paramedics when you converged on me.”

She turned to the medical crew. The cameras hovered nearby for a minute or so longer, out suddenly all left at the same time. They’d been underground for forty minutes; except for the lawyer showing up—a good tidbit, as she’d look attractive on tape—they weren’t going to get anything new. They already knew what had happened to Madeleine Carter—that she’d stuck her face into the spouting water and almost drowned, that the paramedics wanted her hospitalized but couldn’t find a bed. Like a flock of pigeons suddenly taking flight together, the camera crews rushed to the next disaster, a tencar pileup on the Kennedy.

Another gush of watei coursed over Harriet’s feet. Three-hundred-dollar kidskin, ruined. The water was up to her ankles now. In the lights from the ambulance it looked like blood. She shuddered and backed away, trying to escape the growing torrent. Whatever the city workers were doing was causing more, not less, flooding: the whole wall seemed to be spewing water.

Damn Mara, anyway, for drawing her into this chaotic scene. Let the cops, the hotel, the doctors, and all the other men sort this out on their own. She was going to bed, in her own home.

Her first impulse, to find a cab, was useless. She saw a set of stairs leading away from the chaos and tried to get to them, but her way was blocked partly by the mass of spectators, and partly by the barricades that the police had erected. With the disappearance of the camera crews, the crowds pushed in closer.

Harriet turned back to the ambulance, and asked the driver if she could climb in next to him out of the water.

“Against regulations, ma’am, but you can perch on the tailgate, as long as that’s open, and no one will bother you while we wait for word on what to do with our patient.”

The paramedics shifted to make room for her. They were
drinking coffee from a thermos and taking turns staying next to the stretcher on the sidewalk, monitoring their patient, trying to protect her face from the water swirling around the stretcher wheels.

Harriet looked at the homeless women. They stood on the far side of the gurney like cattle, stolid in a rainstorm. The diva, thinking the flood a very good joke, started singing what she could remember of Britten’s operetta based on the story of Noah. Her voice was so out of shape that the sound was hardly recognizable as music.

Harriet accepted coffee from one of the medics. When she looked up again, a fourth woman had joined the diva and the other two by the stretcher. Where had she come from? The police were letting no one through, and anyway, Harriet hadn’t noticed her approach. At first, seeing only an outline of wild hair, Harriet thought it was her sister. She jumped from the tailgate into the water and splashed to the curb, torn between relief and anger.

When she reached the stretcher she recoiled in disgust at her mistake. The woman was a horrible specimen. Her hair was piled in a massive pompadour that looked like snakes, but Harriet was more revolted by her breasts. The newcomer was naked from the waist up, and her breasts looked so enormous, Harriet had the fantasy that they were reaching across the sidewalk to suffocate her.

The crackling from the walkie-talkies grew more excited as one group after another noticed the woman. Men poked each other, made obscene jokes. Their faces glowed purple in the blue strobes.

The diva caught sight of the newcomer and stopped singing. “Queen Vashti?” she croaked, touching one naked arm uncertainly.

On the stretcher next to her Madeleine Carter struggled to sit up. “Holy Mother,” she choked. “You’ve come to save me.”

A hand tugged on Harriet’s sleeve. She shuddered, still feeling the weight of those breasts, and was astonished to find Mara at her side.

“Harriet, did you come to find me? Harriet, look at her hair. It’s like mine. Harriet, it’s Mother!”

Every time he tried to write about the fourth woman with Madeleine his skin curled, like a sea anemone poked with a stick. He tried to calm his mind, to force himself to confront what it was that so repelled him—was it the woman, or the excitement she created in him—but it was too painful. He couldn’t think about it.

“Dr. Tammuz, what in hell were you up to last night? How did a simple patient consultation deteriorate into a brawl that put Millie Regier’s neck into a brace, landed us with work comp claims for her and one of the security guards, and all, I might add, for three unfunded patients?” Hanaper was swelling with fury, his face a round red ball that might explode at any second, brains, blood all over the room.

Hector, thankful to turn his attention to the purely practical, murmured, “We may be able to get the city or the Hotel Pleiades to pay for Madeleine Carter, sir.”

“Oh, well, if you got it down to
two
unfunded patients, that would make a difference, Dr. Tammuz, an enormous difference. The cost containment committee will be glad to know of your thoughtfulness.”

Hanaper, bowing across his vast walnut desk (where has the hospital come up with funds for this antique monster, when it cannot afford patients without insurance?), at his most insufferable in irony. Hector imagined him in restraints, tied to his black captain’s chair with the Harvard University seal. Perhaps when he bought his diplomas, framed like Old Masters behind his head, the school threw in a captain’s chair as a bonus.

Like the Red Sea under Moses’ hands, the waves of psychotics would flee at Hanaper’s approach—Hector saw them flinging themselves from the casements in hordes, rather than endure Hanaper’s brusque contempt.

“For someone who believes in the talking cure you don’t seem to have much to say, Tamrmu. Will it help if I tell you that Millie Regier says you were on the verge of improper contact with one of the women, an aphasiac patient?”

“Millie was rattled last night, sir. She doesn’t usually slap patients, or rush them into restraints. But we were both exhausted. One of the women was the opera singer, Luisa Montcrief, whom we saw here a few months ago. She was so drunk I don’t know how she stayed upright, let alone spoke. The paramedics thought she belonged in a detox unit, which is why they brought her. And the other one—”

“Arrived naked. Yes, I heard about that from three different people before Millie came to see me this morning.”

Naked from the waist up until one of the orderlies found an old T-shirt for her. Her breasts were large and golden, like ripe gourds, the nipples glowing cherries. Even after Millie Regier, the psychiatric charge nurse, managed to cover them—a struggle, since the woman’s hair was piled high with heavily waxed curls that looked like horns; she was tall, too, so that Millie, panting and heaving, maneuvering long bronze arms into sleeves, stretching to pull over curls and braids, the woman not resisting, but not helping, staring around at the attendants, the machinery, Tammuz himself—even after those dugs, which looked as though they might suckle the whole world, were covered, Tammuz found his gaze returning to the woman’s bosom, looking past the red cotton, with its gaudy pictures of athletes, basketballs, trophies, seeing those ruby nipples.

Millie coughed warningly. Hector flushed. With an effort—a man pulling his legs from a tar pit—he withdrew his gaze, looked at the woman’s face. Hawk’s eyes, under brows like overhanging cliffs, he had the uneasy fancy that they stared with merciless amusement into his soul.

Angry at the notion—the result of exhaustion merely—he lost his carefully constructed professional demeanor (detached compassion, to impose trust without attachment), and snapped, “What were you doing with Madeleine, Ms. Montcrief?”

To his fury, the diva clapped her hands ecstatically. “My dear boy, how wonderful that you know me. You saw my Aida? Or was it Leonora?”

“I met you here, in Dr. Hanaper’s office, two months ago. I’m one of his residents. I’ve never seen you perform.”

Her face crunched up like a disappointed child’s. “I was—I
am
—the greatest interpreter of Verdi of this century.
Die Zeit
wrote that. In German, of course. You have, I presume, heard of Verdi, Doctor? You know what opera is? You should take the time to listen to music: it will expand your mind, turn you into a more rounded polished person than your Dr. Hanaper—a vulgar ignoramus, I’m sorry if he’s a friend of yours. And Verdi in particular is the richest of all composers.”

Taking a breath she began to bellow “Sempre libera.” Hector, whose mind it’s true had never been expanded by Verdi, couldn’t believe such noise had ever won international acclaim.

Millie Regier leaned across the Amazon and slapped Luisa’s mouth. “A dozen people are waiting for a chance to see the doctor. We don’t have time for playacting.”

Luisa drew herself haughtily up. “I am not playacting, my good woman. Nor am I trying to steal the doctor’s affections from you—yes, I see you’re in love with him. Twenty-five years in professional opera, with all the loves and hates and jealousies, I know it when I see it—”

“Ms. Montcrief—can you spell your name?” Hector interrupted, before Millie snapped completely. “One J thank you. We’ll
try to find a bed for you in detox—Millie, call up there, will you?—but in the meantime—”

Color surged into the veins around the drunk’s nose. “I am not an alcoholic! Who has been spreading lies to you? Was it my ultra-pious sister-in-law? I’ve seen her knock back her share of martinis, whey-faced butter-won’t-melt-in-my-mouth bitch! Or was it Cesarini, always angry because—”

In the midst of that outburst the Amazon grunted, seemed to grunt in some purposeful way, at least the drunken diva interpreted it so, for she pulled herself up midsentence. “It’s not worth wasting breath on,” she finished regaily. “Suffice it to say I do not go into any detox unit—what an ugly word, conjures up rows and rows of bureaucrats all thinking of ways to demean one, start with the language, turn it into harsh insulting sounds, and everyone lines up obediently to take orders. The Nazis were like, that, you know, Doctor: I presume you have heard of the Nazis?”

“If you cannot be quiet and pay attention to the doctor’s questions we will have to put you in restraints.” Millie couldn’t contain herself; still furious at the secret of her heart being blasted out loud by this woman, smelling of stale vomit and Scotch, her yellow silk blouse so stained it looked like dried mustard.

“Millie, thank you, but let’s try to get through this interview without that, so that we can move on to some of our other customers.” Hector trying to smile, through lips wobbly with the effort of holding himself upright. “Can we start with Madeleine Carter? Do you know what happened to her?”

Luisa leaned forward and spoke to him behind a cupped hand. “She’s a poor, sad creature, Doctor: mad, delusional. She thinks the Virgin Mary is speaking to her through some crack in the wall. The Virgin Mary haunts my life, you know. I made a career out of singing her praises, and then—then—”

She clutched her head, as if in a spasm of pain, and Jacqui spoke from the doorway. “Something went wrong down there, Doctor. Maybe Maddy is right, and that wall is haunted. Because Nanette here saw the rust, you know, that Maddy thinks is blood, was still
oozing out around that cement the hotel put on her crack. So I dug at it a little with my knife, and the whole wall started pouring out water. It was like the rock that Moses struck. Then poor Maddy stuck her head in it, I don’t know why, maybe she was trying to drink the blood or something. But she almost drowned. That Brian Cassidy from the hotel, he was going to just let her die right there, but a Good Samaritan in the garage, he sometimes feeds her on the sly when Mr. Cassidy isn’t watching, he called for an ambulance.”

“The storm was terrible,” Nanette ventured—she rarely spoke, seemed to shelter herself behind Jacqui’s stronger personality. “It was thundering the whole time, and we was wondering what to do with Maddy, on account of they’d gone and chopped up our little house, our Westinghouse box. Then, this woman came”—she gestured toward the terrifying stranger without looking at her—“and Maddy, well, Maddy thought—”