Half the Kingdom (10 page)

The jogger ran way down the beach along the wavelets that looked to have been drawn by a lovingly sharpened pencil. Serene and limpid, they magnified a string of seaweed,
the convolutions of a shell whose inhabitant had moved on. The horizon was beginning to spray needles of light into the chilly air, which was a funny time for the fat old codger with the shirt rolled under his neck, wide-legged old-codger swim trunks, to be napping like something the high tide had deposited. The jogger wondered, as he did every morning, with no intention of researching the explanation, why the morning’s first light is so purely white and what chemistry introduces the golden adulteration of the later hours. He ran on but kept turning to look where the fat man lay on his back in the sand with a stillness not of inanimate objects and not of sleep. The jogger reversed direction.

But the fat old man’s eyes were open in intelligent terror. The right side of his mouth bubbled saliva. “I can’t move!” Samson Gorewitz thought he said to the sudden human leaning out of the blare of white light.

One two three. He felt himself lifted, he lay on a white bed that moved him swiftly, moved him smoothly away. White figures, male and female, surrounded, bending to him. Samson could not contain the broad smile he knew himself to be helplessly smiling in the bliss of being warm, of being dry.

Glenshore General stabilized the patient. From the information found in the wet wallet in the breast pocket of his wet shirt, they notified a sister living in the city. They transferred the patient to the better facilities of Cedars of Lebanon.

Lucy

Had Dr. Haddad given the order for Lucy to be wheeled back into the general area to continue her observation, or was it to make room for the gurney, its sides up, in which a broken young black man lay with closed eyes? His girl walked alongside carrying his brown bomber jacket over her arm.

“Don’t even try to undress him,” Dr. Haddad told the Pleasant Nurse before the curtains closed around them.

“What happened to him?” Lucy asked the nurse, when she came out a few minutes later.

“You don’t want to know,” the Pleasant Nurse said, and hurried on her way.

Here there were things to read that somebody, at a point in time, had tacked up on the weight-bearing column by Lucy’s left elbow, and which it had never been anybody’s business to take down. Lucy read every word of every notice, including the printer’s miniature identification on the lower left: Lists, memoranda, warnings. She took her time studying the picture postcard of a blue, blue ocean. Lucy and Bertie had honeymooned in the Bahamas, where the water was this postcard-ocean blue. Christmas kittens with poinsettias; a snapshot of someone’s actual cat; a toddler in a Bo Peep bonnet who might by now be entering kindergarten, or graduating high school. A group photo of blue-striped nurse’s aides smiling in unison. They’d taken Benedict to
Washington for his graduation and the corridor behind the Supreme Court was lined with the annual group photos of the robed justices, front row seated, back row standing. Bertie had identified the first year the photographer told the Supreme Court to say cheese. Funny man, Bertie.

Lucy looked left, for the young woman who had been crying. Had she fallen asleep?

Lucy looked for things to observe. The wall had shelves with files. The tabs made a color pattern. Might these files contain whatever it was that she was meant to be finding out? Lucy understood that she was not going to climb down from her gurney with the gown opening down her back; that she was not going to take the several steps to those shelves, was not going to take down or read any one of all these files.

Lucy could imagine Maurie not reading any of the manuscripts accumulated on the shelf in his office.

What was the Mayan Nurse writing on the green chalkboard?

“What do the numbers after the names mean?” Lucy asked her.

The Mayan Nurse stopped writing, turned to look for the source of the voice, looked at Lucy: “What do you mean, ‘numbers’?” she said, turned back to add a comma, more numbers, and then she hurried toward Dr. Stimson who looked like Lucy’s tax man. He was calling her.

Lucy picked up the clipboard that lay on the sheet over her legs but Trotwood, happening by, swiped it out of her grasp and attached it to the foot of Lucy’s gurney, out of
Lucy’s reach. “Why can’t I read what it says on my clipboard?” Lucy asked, but Trotwood went on her way.

The relief of something happening, even if it was only the resistance of the wheels of Lucy’s gurney to being shifted sideways to make barely enough room for the gurney with the crooked old person. Without her glasses she glared at Lucy out of marvelous black eyes. She said, “Somebody must have said something to Herta because she said I could come if I wanted. I said, ‘No, thank you,’ and she said, ‘Come on, I’m asking you, aren’t I?’ I said, ‘Maybe I don’t want to even go to your party?’ I thought, If she asks me, properly, I’ll go, and she said, ‘You can come, if you want,’ which was not asking properly, so I said, ‘I told you, I don’t even want to,’ and she said, ‘Please yourself,’ and she didn’t ask me again. Poldi went to the party and she wasn’t even
in
the same class as Herta. Poldi never took me up to Miss Margate’s apartment.”

Lucy wanted her to stop talking so she could make out what the excitable little square woman was saying in a language so congested with consonants that Lucy did not immediately recognize it as English. The ancient woman she pushed in the wheelchair wore an admirably tailored suit, had the true white hair, major nose. The retreat of flesh had exposed a fine jaw.

“Anstiss Adams!” The doctor with the good young hair was coming to take her hand. “You’re becoming a habit! Luba, what happened?”

“She hit again the head!”

“Do not do not do not tell me what I hit.”

“She hit on the stairs!”

“Get me that gurney over there,” the doctor said, “and we’ll take a look at the head.”

“She has hidden my shoes.”

Lucy climbed out of the pit, in which somebody was shouting. She opened her eyes and here was Benedict, and somebody was shouting.

“I just closed my eyes.” Lucy didn’t want him to feel that he had woken her up.

“I just walked in!” Benedict didn’t want her to feel that she had kept him standing. “Did you find out anything?
Is
there anything
to
find out?”

“Are you supposed to know me?”

“My god! A son visits his mother in the ER. Have you met up with the Haddad?”

“Benedict, do you remember when Dad and I took you to Washington, and we went to the Supreme Court?”

“Washington? Sure. Mom, did anything happen?”

“Just that they won’t explain the numeric code on the green chalkboard. What does it say next to my name?”

“Looks like today’s date and the time of your admission. Why is that man shouting?”

“And they won’t let me see what is written on my clipboard.”

“Let’s take a look. Blood pressure: one-thirty over seventy-five, which is good, isn’t it? Temperature ninety-eight
is good. You’re breathing okay. Mom, listen: Joe says, when you check out in the morning, stay in the waiting area. He wants to debrief you before he checks himself in. He’s decided to hold the meeting with the hospital people in the cafeteria. The latest bee in his bonnet is to imagine that a public space would be harder to bug than Haddad’s office. Oh! Hello!” Benedict said to the beautiful Dr. Miriam Haddad.

“Hello,” the doctor said. “And how are you making out?” she asked Lucy.

“Why is that man shouting?” Benedict asked the doctor.

Dr. Miriam Haddad was looking to the door, where more patients were entering the ER, and asked the orderly to start wheeling gurneys out into the adjoining corridors. “If you know any rich friends who would like to donate us an adequate new ER, send them right along.”

“Where are you taking me!” screamed Ida Farkasz.

“Miss, just right outside the door,” said the orderly.

“Why does she get to stay?” howled the little crooked person, and she glared at Lucy.

Anstiss Adams had been sedated and was blessedly asleep, and they asked Luba to go and sit out in the waiting area. Samson Gorewitz’s sisters were asked to leave and come back in the morning to visit their brother over in the Senior Center’s rehab.

“Why can’t they sedate him?” Benedict scrunched up his eyes against the shouting from the cubicle at the other side of the ER; it had taken on the character of a bellow.

Dr. Haddad said, “The head wound gone around the bend.”

“Can’t they give him something?”

“Not till Dr. Stimson has seen him—who, by the way, wants to attend your meeting.”

Benedict said, “Which is going to take place in the cafeteria. That sound is unendurable …”

“The sound,” Dr. Haddad said, “of someone enduring the unendurable. You’ll have to excuse me.” She went to join a large number of the staff collecting in the cubicle from which the bellowing must be imagined to issue for the rest of the night.

“I can’t believe they can’t give him
something
!” Benedict said. Lucy told him to go home. “Go on, really. Give my love to Gretel. And I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You have your cell?”

“Except they won’t let me use it in the ER. Benedict, go
home
!”

Luba

In the waiting area, on his way out, Benedict passed another commotion. The triage nurse had already reported “Patient around the bend” and sent for backup. The overflow waiting-room population watched the young security guard failing to prevent the sturdy little Luba from removing the last piece of her underclothes. He held the jacket of his uniform
around her, attempting to keep it closed over the breasts that hung like flattened gourds and the interesting stomach fold, simultaneously hiding the square buttocks without having himself to come in contact with any part of so much pink elderly flesh.

Morning in the ER

Morning in the ER, the technology becalmed, telephones and computers stilled. The man with the head wound, who had bellowed through the night, must be asleep or dead. The little crooked Ida, the young woman who had cried, the vomiting fat girl, the unusually tall old man with the sweet, smashed face, the ancient Anstiss who had gone around the bend—had they been taken care of? And the broken, black young man and his girl? Lucy would never know what became of them.

The Mayan Nurse and the Pleasant Nurse were leaving but stopped to softly squeal with the day nurse coming on duty: Shareen had a little boy! Seven and a half pounds, twenty-two inches. The two night nurses left. The day nurse walked toward Lucy, and Lucy said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

The nurse tacked a snapshot of a newborn onto the column by Lucy’s elbow. She said, “When I get my coat off,” and walked out of sight and did not return.

Lucy slid off the gurney to be waylaid by Trotwood
with her handbag already over her shoulder. She told Lucy, “You don’t go getting off your gurney by yourself!”

“I’m looking for a bathroom.”

“Well, you don’t get off your gurney.”

“I called. Nobody came.”

“Get back on your gurney, please,” said Trotwood and she, too, went home.

Benedict called the office. “Has my mom come in?”

“What d’you mean? She’s in the ER,” said Al.

“Only she
isn’t
. Joe and I are here, in the waiting area. I
told
Lucy he wanted to talk to her before he checked himself in. The nurses didn’t know that she’d checked out. The release officer hasn’t seen her. She didn’t go home, because I’ve been calling. So listen. Joe is going to check in and we won’t schedule the meeting with Dr. Stimson and the Haddads till we know when he’s likely to get out. If Lucy comes into the office or calls, tell her to call me, or, Al,
you
call me!”

“Sure.”

III
The Cafeteria

Lucy

Lucy checked her mailbox downstairs and there was nothing from Maurie, and went up to her apartment, and there was nothing on the answering machine except a couple of messages from Benedict: “Hi, Mom. Did you forget Joe wanted to debrief you before he checked himself in? Why didn’t you wait for him in the waiting area? Call me.”

Her phone rang. Lucy did not pick up. “Mom? Mom! Mom, call me when you get this message.”

Lucy spent the morning in her study. Two shelves of published books. The file of all her unpublished work she transferred to
PATIENTS PROPERTY
.

The phone was ringing. “Mom?”

Lucy did not pick up.

When Benedict called around noon and got a busy signal, he was relieved: His mother must be home. He called again ten
minutes later and must have just missed her. He left another message on her answering machine.

Lucy lugged
PATIENTS PROPERTY
up the two flights of stairs to the modest offices of
The Magazine
. The old broken-backed couch smelled of mold, but the girl was new. Maurie was not in and not expected. No, thanks, Lucy wouldn’t leave a message. Thank you, there was nothing Lucy was going to leave.