Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (41 page)

“Sounds good to me,” he responded happily, “to have a little less gravity.”

His fingers were feathery on her cheeks and her lips, and hers caressed his neck. With care he moved his touch up under her sweater, stroking her breasts through her bra so that the nipples rose, as he did too. The leaves prickled their patches of naked skin like love bites.

She felt his hand move down toward her belly—she grabbed it, stopped him.

“What's wrong?” Orville asked, jolted by the suddenness, the roughness of it.

For a second she rethought it—but just for a second. “I can't do this.”

“Why not?”

She said nothing. It was too dangerous.

“Why not?” he asked again.

“I . . . I'm not sure we can talk about it right now.”

“Now or never.”

“That's not helpful.”

“And your stopping this is?” he asked. No answer. “You did come down in here with me. I didn't force you.”

“I just wanted a cuddle.”

“We cuddled.”

“And it was nice. Great, even.”

“And then?”

“It turned into more, and I can't do more now.”

“If I were staying?”

“No, no,” she said, drawing away. “No. I will not get into the ‘if' part again.”

“Not into the possible?”

“Not much is possible, Orvy, with you going back to her.”

“You're the one who left!” he said, angrily.

“And I came back. I'm
here.
I'm staying; you're not!”

“You just can't seem to imagine that
you
can hurt somebody, that
you
have power! Jesus!” With an exasperated sigh, he fell back down into the pile. She, too, lay back down. They lay there on the cooling earth, still mostly covered up by the leaves, the lowering sun drawing away the warmth.

“Hey, guys, what's going on?”

Voices, from above. The leaves parted. Cray's face was expectant. Amy's too.

“It's all right, Cray,” Miranda said, “we're just in a little leaf hollow, here.”

“Can we make hot chocolate?” Amy asked. “The first cold day and all?”

“Sure,” Miranda said. “You go start it. We'll be right there.”

“Race you into the house!” Cray shouted and took off, Amy following.

Orville got up first, reached back for her, helped her to her feet, to solid footing on the sloped lawn.

In a stretch of low sunlight, two fatally tardy monarch butterflies fluttered in, played around flashing their orange and black, and fluttered out. Someone once, somewhere in the world, had told Orville that butterflies are trapped souls. Should he share it with her? He looked at her. In that lovely face her eyes had a look of yearning, a wistful look. He did tell her, an offering. She took his hand tenderly, and they walked slowly around the house toward the kitchen, the hot chocolate, and the kids.

A few hours later Orville was sitting with the lovebird, morosely wondering to whom to will it, when he heard horrific screams outside. Schoonerland.

He grabbed his bag and ran out across the square to the house. The Filipino woman was standing on the porch, hopping up and down crying and shrieking, holding her arms out to him. As he approached, his pager went off and he heard the first wail of the ambulance. He ran into the foyer and then turned left into the family room.

Henry and the Filipino man were grunting and cursing, hoisting the old wooden breakfront up from where it had fallen. Nelda Jo was kneeling, eyes wide with shock, ashen faced, above little Maxie. He was lying amid the broken glass and smashed crockery, face down, crumpled up. The breakfront had fallen on him.

Orville's focus went laser onto the boy. He knelt down next to Nelda Jo and pushed her aside, and, pushing Henry's hand away, shouted, “Don't move him!” He put his cheek down on the carpet to check the boy's face. Breathing. Eyes open. Stunned, in pain.

“Wiggle your toes,” Orville said to the boy as he took his pulse, praying he hadn't broken his neck. His toes didn't wiggle. “Maxie. This is
important.
Wiggle your toes.” Maxie wiggled his toes. Thank God, the spine is intact. The ambulance arrived. He and the
EMT
s carefully turned the boy over on his back. A shaft of bone protruded through the bloodied dungarees—a spiral fracture—the worst kind. “Call the medicopter,” Orville said. “We've got to get him up to the orthopedic surgeons at Albany Med. I know the best guy there.” He looked at Henry and Nelda Jo. “Okay?” Nelda Jo was too shocked to speak.

“Absolutely, Doc,” Henry said. “Call in the 'copter. I'll ride shotgun.”

It wasn't the moment to ask how it had happened. With disgust, Orville realized he didn't have to.

· 33 ·

“Aww crap! Aww crap! Aww crap!”

Bill Starbuck had been crying out intermittently for almost a week. Occasionally he would sob.

Before the crying and sobs had started, Bill had been deteriorating rapidly. At first Orville and Babette and the nurses thought that these words were signs he might be coming out of his coma. But as the minutes and then hours and days wore on, there was no other sign that he was improving. His vital signs, in fact, were heading in the other direction, showing a deterioration of all organ systems. Orville's only conclusion was that somehow Bill, the savvy doctor until the last, was sensing his imminent death and was feeling a lot of pain, in body and soul.

For a while everybody tried harder. Orville increased his attentiveness. Babette intensified her vigil. The nurses worked around the clock to make Bill comfortable. They even tried squirting hefty doses of Starbusol down the feeding tube and, at Babette's suggestion, puree of scallions. Nothing made Bill better. He continued his decline.

By now, the ninth of October, the curses and sobs had become fairly continuous. People were avoiding going into his room. Bill was getting more isolated. Even Orville began dreading his nightly checkup.

Tonight Orville stared at Bill, sunk down on the pillow, burrowed under the covers as if wanting to go to ground. Only his Humpty Dumpty face was visible. No longer jowly and without those thick glasses, he seemed younger. His head had edged closer to being a skull. The skin seemed to have thinned. Veiny and translucent like a baby's, each hill and valley of the bony terrain beneath seemed to shine through as if lit dimly from within. His thin black hair was mussed, falling forward across his bald top, reminding Orville of the comic actor Zero Mostel. His lips were still purled in that girlish way, but more cyanotic. A sign that his heart was less a beat than a whisk, a riff around death.

“Aww crap! Aww crap!”

Bill's eyes were shut. One lowered lid glistened with tears, the other, on the paralyzed side of his face, was dry. Orville heard his mother's voice—“I hate crying out of only one eye.”

He noticed that Bill needed a shave. The nurses had been too broken up lately to do it. When Orville sat down on the bed, Bill started sobbing again. As Orville searched out his carotid for a pulse, Bill barked out:

“Aww crap! Aww crap! Aww—”

“Stop it, Bill, damnit!” Orville shot back.

Immediately ashamed, he rose and walked to the west-facing window. Terrific. Is that what you've learned this year? To yell at people in pain?

He stared out the window. It was dusk. The sun was just down behind the mountains, leaving a fiery red afterglow, cut sharply by the rise and fall of the frozen pulse of the rock. The river reflected the red as purple, and the purple of the bare-branched orchards and forests as black, and the scattered lights of the hamlet of Athens across Middle Ground Flats as yellow and red flickers, more like in oil than in water. Closer below him, Columbia was lighting up against the early autumn night. Its checkerboard—the five long straight streets from the river to the cemetery and the eight cross streets from swamp to swamp, all rotated forty-five degrees off sensible—was pegged by those bold argon streetlamps, as if in declaration that any down-and-dirty nightlife would be under the strict illumination of the most high-minded utopians. A wedge of geese flew past, right to left, heading downriver toward Rhinecliff, Poughkeepsie, West Point, honking through Yonkers to Manhattan and Staten Island, to winter maybe at Kill Devil Hill or even, like other snowbirds, in Boca Raton.

When Orville turned back to Bill, there was a strong sense that something had changed. It was not definite and not spooky, yet it called to him clearly. What was it? For some reason he thought of Mrs. Tarr.

Several months ago, after Mrs. Tarr had kicked out the magician and recovered from the pigeons, her dry cough worsened. Orville found lung cancer. She'd never smoked, but sitting in the smoke of the Columbians for forty years in the
DAR
Library had finally gotten her. Since diagnosis and treatment, she had gotten rapidly worse. Lately, to him, she became an example of the classic Columbian whose blood values and physical state were pretty much incompatible with life. Yet there she was, walking around alive. Bald from the chemotherapy, sporting a red turban, toting her mobile oxygen tank to and fro on a leash, much as she had toted her cat Randolph, sitting in her seat at the borrowing desk at the
DAR
under the arch of the whale jawbone, checking books in, checking books out. Sometimes, even, with Miranda and Amy and Cray and her tank on Sundays, she still walked the walk in front of the Worth.

What surprised Orville was the generosity of the Columbians toward Mrs. Tarr. People mostly had been kind. In tough times, Columbians mostly tried. Helping each other through to the desk at the library, to the checkout counter at the supermarket, to the parking lot and even beyond. Walking the walk, with each other and some oxygen. Coming in the
IN
, going out the
OUT
.

At that moment, turning back to Bill, he saw that his old mentor, here in the best private room in the hospital, had gotten pushed aside, isolated. No one was really with him. He understood, then, what Bill had shown him all those years ago when Orville had come to him as a bewildered, Selma-and-Sol'd adolescent, looking for somebody with some sense—no, more—with some
expanse.
Bill hadn't told him, no—he'd shown him. Through his being with patients and laying a hand on a shoulder and saying “Heh heh” and taking a crate of scallions for a tonsillectomy or a chicken for colitis, Bill had shown him that what healed people had less to do with diagnosing and treating and more to do with connecting.

For the first time Orville understood the force of isolation. Even in the face of cancer or coma. Understood, too, that the moments of healing had been when he, often inadvertently, had been present with people. Bill had shown him that, that this is what good doctors do. We're present at the crucial moments, and at the ordinary moments. We bring someone who is out on the edge of the so-called sick into the current of the human. We take what seems foreign in a person, and see it as native. This is healing. This is what good doctors do. Isolation is deadly. Connection heals. Even in dying.

What Orville then understood was that if he were to stay in this room with this dear old doctor, he had to be
with
him.

Yeah, Mr. Bigshot Doctor, he said to himself, and how do you do that, eh?

Mundanely. Down to earth. Nothing heroic. Do something small.

So Dr. Rose decided to give Dr. Starbuck a shave. After all, the first doctors, the surgeons, had evolved from barbers, had they not?

Orville's constant transitions from finishing his day or night as a doctor and starting his night or day as a person had taught him to carry, in his black bag, a shaving kit. He took out his wooden shaving mug and a safety razor and screwed together the chrome-plated Crabtree and Evelyn Genuine Badger Bristle shaving brush. He wet the brush with steaming hot water and worked it into a lather. As he propped Bill up higher, the slippage of the sheets down from his neck was like an exhumation. The scent was that terrible mix of stale sweat and residual excrement and urine and baby powder—all too familiar to doctors and nurses, signifying bodily decay and hospital neglect.

He began to lather Bill's face. It wasn't easy to shave someone else. The brush felt awkward on Bill's skin. Try to feel his face from
his
side, Orville thought. What if you could do that anytime you chose? Shift from “I” to “you,” take on the other as yourself. Better yet, take on all of it—“I” and “you” and “we.” What if you could go through a whole day without using the word “I”?

As he worked the brush, trying to feel it working from Bill's side, chin-to-sideburn, cheek-to-fallen-lip-corner, it started to feel different, as if he were working it on his own face, in that unconscious way you get into, so habitually that—like tying a necktie—if you
try
to do it you can't do it at all. Bill continued to curse and weep. When Orville started moving the razor through the lather, he had to time his strokes carefully. He set to work.

“Oh, you shouldn't have to do that, Dr. Rose,” said a nurse from the doorway.

“No, that's okay,” he said, “I'll finish him up.”

“But it's not your job. I'll call a candy striper.”

“I want to do it.”

“Doctor,” she said firmly, with a hint of anger, “it is against hospital policy.” They looked at each other. “There's a candy striper at the nursing station.”

Orville started to see red. All of his frustration seemed to gather just behind his eyes, and he felt his face get hard—he felt himself about to lash out at her.

But then he saw her not only as she was just then, but as her story, her life. He knew it well, for she had been a classmate of his in high school and a patient of Bill's and his. He saw her, then, as the dairy farmer's daughter who'd gotten involved with one of the high school brutes who'd impregnated her in her junior year. She dropped out in disgrace and married him and had twin girls, and the brute, when the twins were about a year old, finished bathing one girl and came out of the bathroom with her while the other girl fell into the diaper pail and drowned. Things went to hell. The brute left. Single motherhood. Somehow she pulled herself up and became a nurse known in the hospital as a stickler for protocol and for her insane dedication—it had become her life, now that the surviving daughter was out of the house and living in Tucson—but she was a good nurse. You don't recover from that, Orville said to himself now, from that baby head-down in the diaper pail, you don't recover, you change. And she had.

“I'm sorry, Cindy,” he said softly, meaning he was sorry for her suffering and appreciating her making it back, to here with him and Bill, to now. “You see, I feel so bad for Bill and I want to do something for him, some last thing, before he dies.”

His softening softened her. Tears came to her eyes. “Sorry, Orvy,” she said. “You go ahead. Call when . . . if you need us.”

“Thanks, Cindy. I will.”

She left. He resumed shaving.

With Bill's sobbing and cursing it wasn't a neat job. Nicks oozed poorly oxygenated blood the color of a sluggish stream reflecting a dark red sunset. He stopped the oozing with a styptic pencil. As Orville got into it, feeling, as a guide through the lather under his fingertips, Bill's bristly skin, it was as if he were feeling his own stubble and the razor cutting through his own lather. And then, under his attention it transformed again, so it wasn't even that he was shaving Bill or shaving himself but that shaving was happening. So, he thought, either there is attention, or there is “me”—take your pick. The shaving became a suturing up, across a mirror, across a fleshy gap.

He wiped the last flecks of lather away and took out his bottle of Aloe Vera With Swiss Herbs hand cream he used to keep the skin of his too-often-washed hands from cracking and splitting. He massaged it into Bill's papery skin, softening it.

“Okay, Bill,” he said, “now you get the extra-special super-duper treatment, for only our best customers. Miranda gave me this.” He took out a spritzer of Caswell-Massey Cologne Spray Number 6, which Miranda had told him was the one made by the same firm two hundred years ago for the Father of Our Country, George Washington. It wasn't until he'd George Washington'd Bill up that he realized the old guy had fallen silent.

Something else is happening, he thought. In him, in me, in us, beyond us. I'm his mother now. He's my son. Help him go.

He pumped the bottle of lotion and took Bill's hand and stroked it firmly, drawing the skin over the bones so that he was making deep contact, the knuckles like marbles in a child's velvet bag, the bones like long stones. He bent to Bill's ear.

“You can go now, Bill.”

Orville's only clue to his getting through to Bill as he moved on to his chest, the ribbed box above his thrumming bird's heart, was his own feeling inside his own chest, an answering thrum, a chill, a sense of excitement and sadness all at once at a leaving and also an arrival. Bill is leaving and arriving, he thought, and I'm arriving and leaving and it's the same trip, really.

Bill was still. Breathing lightly but still. Announcing that he was now dying.

His dying is forcing me to announce that I'm still living, Orville thought, right here, right now with this old man. It isn't his heart or my heart, it's the human heart, the human journey, common and ordinary and a big deal and a small deal both and the only deal really and available to us all at no extra cost if we can face it, bear it, share it.

The moment wasn't mystical or sad or scary or corny, it was just a moment. It shone.

Having forgotten to spray Bill's thorax with cologne, he went back and did it, whispering in Bill's ear, “Hey, old friend, you can go now, y'see?”

And so on down his body, patting his still-fat tummy, this little boy's universal tummy that a mother had once patted with such delight, playfully, patty-cake, patty-cake.

“You're going out a little under your fighting weight, Bill, but it's okay.”

And even Bill's groin, the purple-crowned penis that had had its share of adventures in repayment for his tending the whores on Diamond Street.

“Two dollars a house call, Bill, and you never came away empty-handed.”

He took out his comb and combed Bill's thin hair, gray lines on a shiny dome.

“You can go now, Bill.”

Orville arranged Bill's flaccid gleaming limbs in as dignified a position as possible and drew the sheet back up, leaving the arms and hands outside, palms up. Sitting there still for a moment, in silence, Orville knew that he was talking not just to Bill, but to his own mother as well. She was still dead and had stopped flying. He felt a rush, a yearning, rocking him back in his chair. He tried to get his arms around what he yearned for. It was the same heartrending yearning he'd felt for the woman he loved when he lost her, and for the boy. Maybe the yearning is feeling seen by death, a boy gone.