Half the Kingdom (16 page)

“
Sadie misses Lilly. She looks around at the vast crowd of the dead who stand or move, as crowds will, in groups, singly, or in pairs. Such a number of children!

“
Lilly—the real Lilly, not the one who sits in the wheelchair with her mouth hanging open—Lilly would have remembered the name of the woman whom Sadie pretends not to notice. Sadie knows that she knows the woman but cannot for the death of her remember if this was a customer from their dressmaking business, or someone, maybe, from the old Chicago neighborhood? Might she be one of the Seattle aunts who has passed on?

“
Sadie recognizes that white woman—Lilly would remember her name—the woman with the velvet pincushion strapped to her left wrist. She had hired Lilly and Sadie in Lord and Taylor’s alterations department, a windowless room, dresses on hangers, dress forms, one big, one small, a treadle sewing machine, an ironing board, colored threads, stuffs—their first New York job. How old the old white woman looks! She can’t see or doesn’t remember Sadie. She would remember Lilly
.

“
Sadie could have known that neat young fellow if he’d been sitting where he belonged, behind the teller’s window at the bank in which Sadie had deposited their weekly intake. He’s out of context, in heaven, and she knows only that she knows him
.

“
Here comes a stout, laughing woman who embraces Sadie, welcomes her warmly, very kindly. Sadie cannot remember having ever laid eyes on her in all her born days and yet the woman asks after Lilly, after their brother, Clem. Says, ‘You and Lilly came to my Jackie’s wedding!’ Sadie can tell that the woman can tell that this rings no bell for Sadie. The woman laughs, which is good-natured of her. ‘Not to worry! It happens to all of us!’ she says, and here comes the old customer, neighbor, or aunt, whose name Sadie cannot remember, and whom, if she weren’t dead, she would die of embarrassment to not be able to introduce to the woman she doesn’t remember having ever met before
.

“
After this Sadie looks for a place out of the traffic. How thankful she would be for the smallest little cloud that she could sit down behind and stay hidden while she waits for Lilly to join her
.”

“Poor Sadie,” concludes Lucy. “She will wait a long, long time if Joe’s theory is right and the terrorists are driving us insane while they simultaneously cure our fatal illnesses, to stop us from dying unless, like Sadie, we take our escape into our own hands.” What Lucy is waiting for is for Jenny to say that “Sadie in Heaven” is a funny and marvelous story.

“Poor, poor, poor Sadie,” says Jenny.

Benedict has come to say that they must put off the meeting till Joe feels better. Joe’s vitals are not good. He lies on his side, his cheek in his wife’s palm, grins palely, and says, “Anatomize my Jenny. Is there any cause in nature that breeds these good hearts?”

The delay gives Phyllis time to arrange Bethy’s follow-up visit to Ida Farkasz.

Ida and the Crazy Box

Bethy is knocking on the door of apartment 3A when the downstairs neighbor’s head appears at the top of the stairs. “If you’re looking for Mrs. Farkasz, she’s gone.”

“Gone? Gone where? Where have they taken her, and why haven’t we been informed?”

“No one has taken her. She’s gone back to Santo Domingo.” Sophie Bauer introduces herself. “You want to come in and have a cup of coffee? Marta—that’s her daughter—came and helped her pack, and Poldi, the sister, was here to say good-bye. Ida’s gone back to the hotel that used to be run by a Polish couple or Czech or Hungarian—I forget—where they lived before they came to New York and you could get a girl to do for you for like eight dollars a month.”

“But does she have family over there?”

“
No!
That’s why she went! Where she won’t have to be keeping Poldi from coming around, she said, or sit on a chair in her apartment without even a window to see what’s going on in the street outside, waiting for the daughter to not visit and to not even return her phone call!”

“But you can sit and wait and not get a phone call in Santo Domingo.”

“You can, I know you can, but you know, you don’t. I don’t know why, but I’m sad—I feel terrible when my daughter, Sally, in Queens doesn’t give me a call, but I don’t expect my youngest to call me from Albuquerque. You don’t sit and wait for people to call you long distance, you just don’t.”

“That’s funny. That’s true,” says Beth. “You know what Ida Farkasz is sitting in her room in the hotel waiting for? Her daughter to not write to her.”

“That’s what she is sitting doing, you’re right!” says Sophie Bauer. “The poor thing is waiting to not get a letter. What she needs is to get her amnesia back.”

But Sophie and Bethy are mistaken. Ida has had a letter from Marta. She holds it on her lap. She sits on a chair in her rented room in what used to be the Hotel Budapest grown dingy and in need of repairs. It is sixty years since Ida, Miklos, and the baby had the room now occupied by the new owner, a Dominican who has renamed the Hotel Malecón.

Marta wrote, “If you want to see Poldi you need to invite her, and soon. You know she isn’t well, Mama, and the rest are all gone, Papa, Onkel Kari, your sister Berta. What they did or didn’t do is two wars, an emigration, and a Holocaust ago!”

Ida sits. She stares out the window. She does not see the little green-and-golden bird insert its needle beak into the hibiscus blossom’s rude red trumpet. The bird stands in midair by action of its wings, which create a phantom wheel like a plane’s propeller that has reached its full speed. The bird extracts the last drop of sweet nourishment from the red bloom outside Ida’s window and flies away. In the crazy box Ida watches Berta—Berta whose face was the loveliest always, even at near three hundred pounds when it was a project to just get her up from her chair. Berta is running. She runs left, has to turn at the shout of a uniformed boy with a gun, and runs right. The boy shouts at Berta, who cannot run, to keep running.

“Mama!” wrote Marta. “Whatever Berta did, what they all did—Poldi, Papa, Uncle Herbie, forget it, Mama! Mama, let it go!”

Let it go? Forget it? Forget the anti-Semites at Kastel Street not telling Ida—or Herbie—that there were courses they needed to take? Forget the thirty-five dollars Herbie made her pay for the bedcover that
she
had sewed for him?
One lousy postcard!
Miklos with Berta’s carpet under his arm. Poldi blocking Miss Margate’s front door to keep Ida from coming in. Poldi who had gone to Herta’s birthday. Marta who didn’t bother to put a comb to her hair when she came to help with the packing …

Ida knows that she can let it go! Ida can let everything go, all of it. She feels a chill, like a north wind blowing through the room in the Hotel Malecón. She looks out the window at an alien lifescape, and Ida grapples them to her for warmth, for company, for something to think about—the old familiars, her treasury of resentments.

Had Ida been a real witch, what power she would have drawn from the cache of her grudges—what meanness she could have done if she had somebody to be mean to.

Bethy

The meeting is scheduled for eleven o’clock, and Bethy grabs a cab to get to the cafeteria ahead of the others. This time she is going to seat herself where she won’t have Al Lesser’s shoulder in her face. Benedict, who has a way of leaning forward on his elbows, always blocks her view of what is going on at whichever end of the table her father is sitting. Now
that Joe is not going to be attending any meeting—they’ve had to move him down to the third floor—it’s for Bethy to stage-manage which end will be the head of the table and to seat herself at it. It’s already five after; she’s lucky to be the first to arrive. Bethy sets out her Farkasz notes on a table—she doesn’t know that it’s the table Lucy had bagged—of a size to accommodate the four remaining Compendium people, Lucy, Benedict, Al, and Bethy herself; the two Haddads, Dr. Miriam and Salman; and Dr. Stimson. Bethy is not sure whether she has ever met him.

11:15. After coffee and a doughnut, Bethy has another doughnut. At 11:20 she understands that nobody is coming. Is it possible that they’ve reverted to the original plan of meeting in Salman Haddad’s office and nobody has bothered to tell her? Why are people not answering their phones? And now Bethy is helplessly late, grabs up the Farkasz report which slips out of her hands, launches itself upon the air and fans across the floor, nor is there time to collate the pages. Bethy runs for the elevator, which takes her down to the atrium level. She sprints through the Sydney and Sylvia B. Holloway Building and turns right to the Seymour D. and Vivian L. Levi Pavilion. It shocks Bethy that her urgency has no effect whatever on the preordained speed at which the elevator ascends. The doors take their time to open and let out the two merciless passengers; they are not in any hurry. The orderly has to wait to wheel in the empty hospital bed that he is taking up to the next floor where it refuses to budge until he can resolve the problem with the locking mechanism.

It takes Bethy several nightmare minutes to understand that she is not going to find the door to Haddad’s office because she has come up the wrong elevators in the wrong building. Briefly she sobs. Bethy waits for the elevator that will take her back down to the atrium level, where she sprints through the Seymour D. and Vivian L. Levi Pavilion, turns left through the Sydney and Sylvia B. Holloway Building, and locates the bank of elevators that take her up to the security offices.

Secretaries hate Bethy Bernstine. The large blonde who runs Salman Haddad’s office had been short with Bethy that first time, when they’d come to get their social-worker identities and been told to find Phyllis on the second floor. Today the tone of the secretary’s voice suggests that her work contract does not include, nor is she being adequately compensated for, informing Bethy that the meeting is at this moment going forward in a room set aside for the purpose on the seventh floor of the Senior Center.

The meeting is indeed going forward but the only persons present are Benedict, Al Lesser, and an intern sent by Dr. Stimson to say that he is with a patient on the third floor, that he will be detained, and to start the meeting without him.

The intern’s name is Tola (she is one of the interns with the flapping white coats and the faces of people who have the stamina for years of study, who were laughing as they crossed the atrium in which the Compendium people waited
to meet Dr. Miriam Haddad). Tola is young, brilliant, and on a crusade against the hospital’s stultification and mismanagement. Dr. Stimson, she has been telling Al and Benedict, is of the old reverence-for-life-at-all-costs mentality. “The world outside the hospital,” says Tola in the enthusiasm of her young bitterness, “has no concept that the things we do to keep the patient alive another day, another twelve hours, meet Abu Ghraib standards.” The interns have drawn up a heroic declaration, which might be as much as their careers are worth, to challenge the old guard’s superannuated misreading of what the Hippocratic oath intends by “doing no harm.” They are collecting signatures and Tola has brought a copy with her. Benedict and Al add their signatures and e-mail addresses so they can be informed of any action in which they might join the embattled interns.

Where is everybody who is supposed to be at the meeting?

Bethy has run the several blocks up the sidewalk and is at this moment entering the Senior Center through its glass double doors. As she regains her breath going up the Sabbath Elevator, Bethy looks down the perspective of her future where she will never sit at the head, nor in the central position, at any table.

On the seventh floor, she gets out and meets Benedict and Al coming out of the room dedicated to the meeting which is not going to take place.

“Oops!” Benedict says, and he feels a little bit bad. “I guess I thought you were in the room—weren’t you in Joe’s
room when I told him that the meeting had been rescheduled on the seventh floor?”

Joe Bernstine has been transferred to a room on the third floor where he lies in a hospital bed with his right hand taped to to his side. Dr. Stimson tells the nurse, “I want him sitting up. And remove the tape.”

“He keeps fiddling with the intubation,” says the nurse.

“I’ll take care of it.”

The nurse raises the back of the bed to a sitting position and frees Joe’s hand. Joe lifts it to the tube, which chafes the sore right corner of his mouth. The doctor, who has seated himself on the edge of the bed, takes Joe’s hand. He regards the sick man who regards him from under half-closed lids.

Dr. Stimson says, “We know you can’t talk with the tube down your throat. It’s uncomfortable.”

Joe closes his lids all the way and opens them.

“You see, you can blink ‘yes.’ Tell me ‘yes’ again. Keep your eyes closed for a moment so that we both know that you mean ‘yes.’ ”

Joe shuts his eyes all the way and keeps them shut for a two-count.

“Good. That’s right. That’s good. We know you would feel a whole lot better if we could take the breathing tube out.”