Half the Kingdom (6 page)

“They did my blood at Godford Memorial in Connecticut this morning,” the old man said. “I have the number.”

“We do our own tests. What brings you here?”

“I passed out in the lobby of my hotel. I didn’t have any breakfast.”

The triage nurse fastened a bracelet with his name around his wrist and pointed to the door into the ER.

After the enforced patience on the benches and the brown light of the waiting area, Emergency looked to be lit by klieg lights, no corners or shaded places. Bertie had said, “Abandon hope of hiding out from what’s going to happen. What are they going to do to me?”

The good-looking young woman on the gurney near the door had been crying for a while, and her nose and eyes were swollen red. A nurse with Mayan or it might be Asian facial structure told Lucy to go sit down where several patients waited on two rows of chairs. Here was the unusually tall man with the bruised face. Another old man holding a bloody napkin to the side of his head asked the nurse, “How long am I going to sit here?”

The nurse said, “Till it’s your turn.”

Lucy took a chair. In the row behind her an obese girl vomited into a kidney-shaped pan that her obese mother held under her chin. It grossed out a teenage boy—her brother? He said, “Tell her to stop already! She’s not that sick!”

“She’s sick,” the mother said.

Please, said Lucy to the hole in the world where god would have been a good thing to have in this situation, don’t let
me
be going to throw up. Bertie, on the last day, had kept vomiting.

A world in motion—doctors in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks, nurses and nurse’s aides in a perpetual exchange of place. An orderly with bare, powerfully developed upper arms trundled a gurney somebody must have just gotten, or been taken, down from. Action without plot or theme and no protagonist unless it was the crying young woman. She could have been the daughter of one of Lucy’s women friends. Might she be wanting somebody to talk to, or would she prefer to be left alone? What, in any case, was there to be said? Time, dear … a year from now, whatever it is will be this thing that happened. You’re young, nice-looking, and middle-class.

Lucy searched through her bag for the book she knew was not there. She found her pen, the reading glasses in their case, but no paper, so she opened her address book to the empty Z page, and wrote,

Dear Maurie, If, on some rainy day, I lent you my umbrella you would feel obliged to return it. Why is it okay for you to hold a story of mine indefinitely, perhaps never to return it to me?

There was a pearl-gray umbrella—Lucy knew who had left it behind—that she had been going to return one of these years.

How is it that you feel no obligation to respond with a “yes,” a “no,” or the acknowledgment, simply, of receipt?

Here’s where the old man with the bloody napkin to his head said, “Screw it,” and got up and went and stood behind two white coats, to wait for them to finish their conversation. Was Lucy allowed—was she maybe
supposed
to walk around to observe and hear everything? Lucy got up and could think of nothing better to do than to go and stand behind the old man with the bloody head. What if the two doctors were discussing the very thing that Lucy was supposed to find out? She leaned in to hear what the doctors were saying but they were talking after the fashion of the new realist actors who turn their faces toward each other and away from the audience, who cannot, consequently, hear the words they are speaking.

“I’m bleeding from my head!” the old man said out loud, at which both doctors turned and looked at him. One had a gorgeous head of young hair—he looked the type who worked out. He said, “If you’ll sit down, someone will take care of you.”

“A head wound?” the old man said. “Ain’t I an emergency?”

“To you, you’re an emergency,” said the doctor who worked out. “To us you’re the next case.”

The old man cursed under his breath and went back to his chair. Lucy smiled the smile she would have given had she found herself sitting next to either of the doctors at a dinner party. “I think he’s scared,” she said to them.
“And everybody wants some idea of how long it’s going to be.”

“Everybody will just have to wait, won’t they?” said the older doctor. He reminded Lucy of her accountant, who had been doing her taxes for the past quarter of a century. “Why,” he said to Lucy, “don’t you go and sit down?”

They don’t know who I am, thought Lucy, offended. “I’m supposed to connect with Dr. Miriam Haddad,” she said, but the doctors had returned to their conversation.

Lucy went and sat down, opened her handbag, and there, in the compartment dedicated to it, was the cell phone! Lucy found her reading glasses, took them out of their case, and had identified the “talk” button on the phone when a nurse, who looked like Betsy Trotwood, descended on her crying, “No phones in Emergency.”

Lucy said, “I’m supposed to connect with Dr. Miriam Haddad.”

“No phones!” said Nurse Trotwood.

The crying young woman lay still. The fat girl had another bout of vomiting. The brother said he was going to get a Coke, and the mother looked for coins in her purse.

“Hope the machine is working,” Lucy said to the boy, who drew his head back and away from the old woman who was talking to him.

A young woman came and sat down next to Lucy. Her tired face was narrow and pointed with anxiety. She’d got her red sweater on inside out and it had not occurred to her to
put it right. Her name was Maggie, and she was wanting to talk. She said, “They’re figuring what to do with my mom. Last time, they moved her from the ER to the cardiac floor, to rehab. The rehab nurses thought my mom was going to transfer to the eleventh floor, for residents, but I thought I could handle it. I went to the Kastel Street Social Services office,” Maggie told Lucy.

“And discovered,” said Lucy, “that Kafka wrote slice-of-life fiction?”

Ilka Weiss

“I’ve got an appointment with a Ms. Claudia Haze at Social Services,” Maggie had said to her husband, Jeff. “Will you stay with the boys and look in on my mom?”

“I have an appointment downtown,” Jeff had said.

Maggie asked Jeff what time he was leaving, and Jeff asked Maggie when she expected to be back.

Maggie said, “That’s anybody’s guess. You’ll pick the boys up?”

“If I’m back in time,” Jeff said, but there is no need to pursue a discussion of the daily logistics where both parties are married to their own priorities.

The man behind the desk at Kastel Street Social Services was not sure if Ms. Haze was in. He hadn’t seen her around.

Maggie said, “I have a two-thirty appointment. For my mother, Ilka Weiss.”

The man picked up the office intercom. He was in his fifties and had an unhealthy pallor suggesting that his skin might feel dank to the touch. He wore a dark suit and his narrow tie looked to have been knotted by a hangman’s hand. Maggie imagined a wife who had married him, who sat across from him at supper when he came home after a day behind his desk in Kastel Street, and who lay beside him in their bed. With the phone at his ear the man said, “Not at her desk. She may not be back from lunch, or have left for the day, but as I say, I haven’t seen her around.”

“It took me a week and a half to get this appointment!” wailed Maggie.

“What I can do,” the man said, “is take down your information and leave it for her on her desk in her office.”

“Oh,” said Maggie, “okay. I guess. The argument I wanted to make to Ms. Haze—could I sit down?”

“Turn one of the chairs around.”

“Great. Thanks. I wanted to argue the advantage to the city if the department makes it possible for me to keep my mother at home.”

The man behind the desk wrote Maggie’s facts on a lined yellow pad. “The visiting nurse comes Tuesdays, but we’ve maxed out on the four-hour, four-afternoons-a-week caregiver. She was no great shakes, but she came; she was okay.”

“It’s tough,” the man said. His teeth were terrible but something not unsympathetic lurked about his mouth.

“Rehab had taught my mom to put her stockings and shoes on without having to bend.”

“They’re good,” the man said. “Come a long way teaching the old people to do for themselves.”

Maggie said, “I can sleep on the couch in my mom’s room. When she wakes and starts putting on her stockings and her shoes, I get up and tell her, Mom, it’s two o’clock, middle of the night. She shakes her head. We laugh, get her back into her bed. Twenty minutes later she’s putting her stockings and her shoes on. I get up …”

“Which you can do for one night, two nights,” the man said, “but you can’t
be
up night after night.”

Maggie said, “So, if you could put in a request for me, for someone to sleep over every other night—say three nights a week, I think that I can manage.”

“Yes, well, no, I can’t do that,” the man behind the desk said. “Ms. Cloudy Haze—Cloudy is what we call her in the office—is the associate in charge of night nursing. You’ll need to make an appointment because she’s not in her office.”

“So can you make the appointment for me?”

“Well, no. Ms. Brooks is the associate that takes care of Cloudy’s calendar.”

Maggie said, “I eventually got a Mr. Warren on the phone, and he made the appointment for today.”

“That was me,” said the man behind the desk. “That was on the first of this month—which explains why your appointment didn’t register—when Kastel Street was one of seven self-administrating local offices, before they reorganized us
into a single citywide department under a new administrative czar whose mandate is to rid the department of the inefficiencies and inequalities that had crept into the system since the reorganization, in the Nineties, of the single citywide department, riddled with inequities and inefficiencies, into seven self-administrating local offices, but let me check for you if Ms. Brooks is at her desk in her office.”

“Thank you.”

The man’s smile was not unpleasant. “Nope. Not in her office. If this is Ms. Brooks’s field day seeing clients in their homes she wouldn’t be even coming in to the office. But,” the man tapped what he had written on the yellow pad, “as I said, I can put your request on Cloudy’s desk for you.”

“Mr. Warren, would you—Mr. Warren, please, let me take your notes and put them on Ms. Cloudy’s desk myself, so I’ll feel as if I’ve
been
here and got
something
accomplished?”

“What the heck, you go on and do it!” said the man behind the desk, who wasn’t a bad sort. “Around the corner, turn left. Her name is on the door.”

With Mr. Warren’s notes in her hand, Maggie stood in the door of Ms. Cloudy Haze’s office and took in the paper nightmare—paper stacks, towers of papers, wire baskets of in-papers and out-papers. The stapler gave Maggie the idea: From her wallet, between a snapshot of Jeff with David and a snapshot of baby Steven, Maggie took a photo of her mother and stapled it to Mr. Warren’s notes and walked
around to the front of Ms. Cloudy’s desk. Maggie’s idea was to place her mother’s face where Cloudy’s eyes, as she seated herself in her chair, could not help meeting Ilka’s eyes, until Maggie’s eyes met the eyes in all the faces stapled, glued, and paper-clipped to all the notes and letters, and correctly attached in the upper right corner of the applications waiting for Claudia Haze’s perusal, determination, and appropriate action.

On her way out, Maggie went to thank Mr. Warren. He urged her in the direction of the door. “You just missed her! She’s been in with a representative of the new administration. If you hurry …”

Maggie had come out into the corridor in time to catch the tall, the towering back over-topped with hair so high and so black Maggie thought it must be a wig, of what might or might not have been Ms. Claudia Haze stepping into the elevator, which had closed its door behind her.

Lucy was glad to see Dr. Haddad walking toward her, but the doctor was coming to speak to the young woman in the inside-out red sweater. The doctor said, “You can go ahead and take your mom home.” Dr. Haddad and the young woman walked away together, and Lucy saw Al Lesser hesitating in the doorway.