Roger's Version (36 page)

“My associate and I were asking ourselves, Isn’t the child a bit young to be on a playground swing?” As he softly, courteously spoke, the doctor’s hands, slender with shapely pale nails, touched Paula’s toes where they peeked out from under Blanky. Absent-mindedly he strummed them lightly.

His overworked, rubbed-looking eyes, with yellow, bloodshot whites, came to rest on Verna, and instinct told her that this was her chance to squeeze by. “Maybe so,” she said, in that plaintive little-girl voice of hers, as if pushed through a tube. “I won’t do it ever again. No more swings till she’s big enough to hang on.”

A certain sugar-daddy twinkle had lit up the doctor’s creased features. “Promise?”

An electricity had been set up, and Verna, dishevelled and drained as she was, yearned forward into it, bending back her head so her throat made a white curve and her breasts lifted within the thin cotton of the gypsy blouse. She was near tears again. “I promise.” She unexpectedly sobbed, one syllable.

“Because,” the doctor went on, in a preacher’s musical tone, “a little child like this is a precious gift placed into our hands, and we sure don’t want any harm to come to her, now do we?”

Verna shook her head, once, twice, slowly.

“No matter how much stress and exasperation we feel, now do we?”

Verna repeated the motion as if hypnotized.

The young intern and I had watched this transaction with fascination. Now the black doctor, breaking the spell, abruptly frowned and said, “Let’s get this leg prepped.”

A nurse appeared and gave Paula a sedative injection, even though the child, in sheer exhaustion, had amid the sound of our voices fallen asleep, green-stick fracture and all. Her little lulled body looked pathetically small on the gurney. The needle went in just below the edge of the paper diaper. She didn’t wake. We were allowed to follow into a bright small room where she was transferred from the gurney to an operating table; while the older doctor watched, the intern laid strips of plaster-soaked gauze around the small brown leg, swallowing it in a whiteness that wounded our eyes, beneath the cruel blue lights. Her toes, a row of round digits, seemed a fragment left over from some visual collision or subtraction.

The cast when completed went from the middle of Paula’s foot to the middle of her thigh. At some point in the process her eyes had come open again, in amazement. They scanned our faces and settled on the doctor’s. He held out one tobacco-colored forefinger, and her little plump square hand seized it. He told her, “Honey, I bet you were a really good walker. I bet you really stepped out.”

She smiled, in agreement or in simple pleasure at hearing him talk. The gap between her two round front teeth showed.

“You remember how to crawl?”

This struck her as so amusing her smile widened and she managed a laugh, a gurgle.

“ ’Cause you’re going to have to go back to crawling for a little while now.”

The intern removed his surgeon’s gloves of whitish transparent rubber, and Verna’s stubby and grubby-nailed fingers fiddled with a corkscrew curl at her temple. The clock on the wall said eleven-forty-two. It was utterly round and black-and-white and its clean numbers were swept every minute by a long red second hand. Its institutional perfection reminded me of Esther, her exactly one hundred pounds. I should call her. But such a call would plug up this vivid little pocket of freedom I had won, here in the middle of the night, where muddle seemed about to break into a whole new meaning.

Verna’s submissive daze was wearing off and in the role of mother she asked the doctor, “Are there any pills or medicine I should give her tonight?”

The answer came very soothingly, with a wry smile. “We’d like to keep little Paula with us overnight,” he said. “With her mother’s permission, of course.”

Verna blinked, not yet scenting danger. “Why is that? Isn’t she all fixed up?”

“Her leg you could say is fixed up, but there’s some few more medical attentions she might need. We would like to keep her under observation. I think she’ll have a good rest here, won’t you, honey?” His tone of voice as he shifted from Verna to Paula didn’t much change.

“You mean you think there still might be some internal injuries or something? But I’m sure she doesn’t have any of those. We’re all sure, aren’t we?” She looked from the doctor to the intern to the nurse—the nurse, I noticed for the first time, was an uncommonly tall gray-haired woman, as tall as Lillian, with that same tense, too-good, sterile air. Verna saw that she was trapped. “You’re not going to call DSS!” she blurted out.

I had to step in. I told the doctor, “I’m a professor of divinity
at the university, and I’ll personally vouch for this little girl’s safety.”

The doctor wearily smiled and said, “I don’t doubt you will, Professor, but there wasn’t much vouching going on a few hours ago.” He added, more pleasantly, “We just want to hold onto her until we can check out a few things.”

“Don’t you dare call fucking dumb DSS!” Verna said. “They don’t know
any
thing, they’re a bunch of non-persons freeloading on the taxpayers, they couldn’t get a real job if they tried!”

I said, “If the mother wants the patient released—”

“Then I think,” the doctor said, “we better get a policeman and a Department of Social Services representative over here for our own protection. In our judgment this injury may not have been inflicted as described.”

“It
was!
” Verna protested. “It was a total accident. I gave her a little tap and she threw herself against this idiotic bookcase they made me buy. It was her own stupid fault, practically.”

She had forgotten about our playground swing.

Now she remembered, and furiously pushed on. “You twerps can’t keep her here without my say-so. I know my rights. I want my baby, and my baby wants me.”

Edna, too, could do this pose, I remembered: the lady affronted, the
grande
suburban
dame
, the Chagrin Falls matron indignant over her servant problems. Edna had imitated it from her mother after Veronica, having stolen my father with Heaven knows what sluttish stunts, had put on weight and become involved in church and garden-club circles. In Edna’s eyes her mother had been to this manner born; but now the pose, passed down to yet another generation, had become quite bedraggled and hollow.

“Da bad?” an inquisitive voice said from the operating
table. Little Paula was looking up at her mother. Her dark irises were dyed blue in the hospital light, her pupils no bigger in diameter than pencil leads. Her mouth was curling downward; she was beginning to whimper in fright. I held out a forefinger and she softly, stickily grabbed hold. My fingernail, I noticed, looked dirty, and a touch lopsided.

“Let’s let her stay, Verna,” I said. “She’ll be in good hands here.”

“Only if they promise not to call DSS. I have enough trouble with those creeps.” Perhaps “creeps” was meant to soften the earlier “twerps.”

No one spoke.

I sighed and offered, “I’m sure they’ll only do what’s best for Paula.”

“I’m not signing anything,” Verna said.

The doctor spoke, weary of being seductive. “You don’t have to, young lady. You just come to the front desk around nine-thirty tomorrow morning and if everything has checked out the little girl is welcome to go home with her mommy.”

Verna thought. “Actually,” she said, “I have an art class and there’s some things with the teacher I should get straightened out. Suppose I came by around noon?”

“That would be most gracious,” he said, without smiling. “I of course will be off duty at that hour, but the E.R. chief will be informed as to the case. The cast should be checked in two weeks and can come off in three or at the most four. Our bones heal fast at that age.” Our bones if not our souls, he seemed to be implying. To me he said, “A pleasure to meet you, Professor. I’m a great admirer of those that make it possible for the rest of us to keep the faith. My daddy was a preacher.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

The nurse and the intern had transferred Paula back to the gurney. Verna went over to it, to kiss her good night. As she
bent her wide pale face down to the child’s smaller, darker one, her heavy bosom swayed in the low-cut cotton blouse. She adjusted Blanky under Paula’s chin, and bent low again to kiss lightly the toes that stuck out of the cast. From my angle, she was flashing both tits. I wondered if she knew it. “These nice people are going to put you to bed, Poopsie. Mommy will come for you in the morning. You be good.”

The child’s sharp little chin crinkled and she began to cry, with a panicked fury. The hospital staff crowded about the noise like a set of smothering white pillows. I pulled Verna from the room, and as I steered her back through the rooms and curving corridors to the entrance she too was crying. Her chin crinkled just as Paula’s had.

In the Audi, as we glided through the streets, her crying continued, now loudly, now inaudibly. Her words came out with difficulty. “When I bent over her, Nunc … I could feel all that hard plaster—in my stomach, like some kind of rock. You could see in her eyes she didn’t know what the fuck was up.”

“Well, few of us do, exactly.”

“They’re going to take her from me, aren’t they? That smooth old dude is going to call DSS even though he promised not to.”

I told her, “I didn’t hear him promise. What I heard was the silence of his not promising. As he explained, Verna, the hospital has to protect itself. Not just against being accused of breaking the law but of lawsuits.” Neon and sodium flickered in the windshield; we went around a traffic circle and up a looping ramp and then were on the bridge, with its Art Nouveau lamps and blocky old sandstone towers.

“And then the assholes are going to hassle me,” Verna was going on, “and ask me to crawl and eat fifty-seven varieties of shit, and if I don’t they’re going to … they’re going to take away my baby!” This last phrase emerged with a shriek; she
lifted the serape from underneath and pressed it against her eyes, her mouth, as if to stifle another outcry. More role-playing, I said to myself. And not especially well played. Westerners have lost whole octaves of passion. Third-world women can still make an inhuman piercing grieving noise right from the floor of the soul, as you can see and hear on television clips from Lebanon and Ethiopia.

Aloud I said, “I don’t think so. They may ask some questions, but remember it’s a hassle for them to take a child from its mother. What do they do with it then? The state isn’t that anxious to become a massive orphanage. If you listen to what Reagan and the others are saying they’re begging the family to resurrect itself, to take some of all this responsibility back out of their hands.”

She was indulging her hysterical vision: “First you all make me kill that one baby and now you’re going to take this one from me!”

It occurred to me that, like many visions, this was a wish fulfillment: she wanted little Paula to be taken from her.

I went on reasonably, “If you’d just stuck to our story—”

“It wasn’t
our
story, it was
your
story. It was a
dumb
story.”

“It was better than
no
story, and that’s what
you
seemed to be coming up with, in your fabulous brilliance.” Edna and I used to have quarrels that would go on and on, a whole stale hot Ohio afternoon,
you did, I didn’t, I know you did, I know you know I didn’t;
it was a kind of tussling, when we were too young and green to touch, and brother and sister besides.

Verna kept pressing the serape into her face, grinding its rough wool against her eyes. For the first time, by the light of loss, Paula seemed to have become real to her. “She was so … fucking brave, wasn’t she, Nunc? She hardly cried, once she saw we were doing something about her, and had produced these other people.”

“She was very impressive,” I swiftly agreed. We were not many blocks from Prospect Street. We were traversing that gorge of gaudy light Dale had seen, earlier this April, from his window on the seventh floor. I wanted to dump Verna and get swiftly home. Esther would be up, smoking and drinking and her mind browsing back and forth between anger and worry. I knew her mind, I could feel it nibbling on the possibilities. Long after love goes, there is still habit. Esther was my habit.

“She’s really so sweet,” Verna was saying, struggling for breath. “
Wants
to be so sweet. We have a lot of fun, sometimes, listening to music. You can see the poor little thing … watching me, trying to figure out … how to be a human being. I’m the only one she’s got. It’s not just that
… I’m
so alone I mind, it’s that
she’s …
so alone.”

I felt now that her sobs were being deliberately orchestrated and said irritably, “Don’t exaggerate. Paula’s no worse off than a lot of children in this city, and in many ways better.”

Her sobs haughtily dried up. “You mean because she’s connected, sort of, to swell people like you and that snooty wife of yours with your dumb kid. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that, he seemed nice, actually, that Thanksgiving; he was giving it a try, being nice to the stranger and all. He knows you both think he’s a dumbo, too.” I was hurt by this; if true, it was a distasteful truth. But it couldn’t be true. We loved Richie. Verna was burbling on, “But don’t you see, that makes it worse, for her and for me; until you showed up in all your snappy coats and gloves and your funny hat and everything, it didn’t occur to me there was something else, just my horrible parents I was so happy to get away from. God, I was happy. I used to wake up some days and start singing, me and my baby in those little rooms. The project isn’t much, I know to you it looks horrible, but it was a life, if you didn’t think there could
be any other and if other people didn’t keep coming and telling you how crummy it is.”

I stopped the Audi right there, at the project, double-parking. It occurred to me that thus dropping her off at that hideous, childless apartment was somewhat heartless, even by my modest standards. “Or would you rather,” I asked, “come home and spend the night with us? We have a spare room. There’s a whole third floor. I know Esther will be still up.”