The Magician (7 page)

The kraut was built, big tits, blonde, round face, German accent. Came over with her mother five years back. They all laughed when she said her mother was a war bride.

The kraut didn’t go to school dances because the other girls made her miserable, even the ones who did it, because the kraut would with anybody. They told her about the events of the night before.

“How bad you hurt Japhet?” she asked. The question startled them because they had been talking about the suitcases and the car.

Urek laughed. “He’ll live.”

“Someday you’re gonna kill somebody,” she said. “You nearly did me.”

“Shut up!” said Urek. Once, when Urek couldn’t get it up, he had tried an implement on her.

Urek tried to talk in a gentler voice. “You wearing pants tonight?”

“Maybe you’ll find out,” said the kraut.

“Did you take it today?”

“Take what?” she said.

“Don’t make like you don’t know. The pill.”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t give me smartass talk. I don’t want no trouble.”

“Okay,” she said. “Who’s first?”

Chapter 8

Terence Japhet watched the two nurses, the intern, and the resident come and go; and then, just after three A.M., the specialist arrived, still wearing an overcoat laced with snow. One of the nurses helped him out of it and into a clean smock. The nurse pointed Mr. Japhet out. The specialist acknowledged his presence with a nod of his head, then went into the intensive-care unit. For the longest time he didn’t emerge. Why, thought Terence Japhet, didn’t someone tell him what was going on. Was the news that bad?

He was sitting on the bench, watching the wall clock like an idiot, his muscles aching with fatigue, when the taller of the two nurses brought him a piece of paper, a hospital consent which read like an obituary.

The nurse pointed to the bottom of the page and asked him to sign.

“Why, are they operating?”

“No, no, it’s just authority if they have to.”

His mind wandered.

“Mr. Japhet, we can’t go ahead with procedures until you sign.”

“What procedures?”

“Whatever the doctors decide.”

“Will they tell me?”

“Yes, they’ll keep you informed. Please hurry.”

He signed, unaccepting and compliant, just as he had signed countless bank notes, government forms, charge-account agreements, the language of which always needed emending, and you didn’t change a word unless you were ready to be thought a crank.

Where it said “Parent or Guardian” he scratched out “or Guardian” with a stroke that penetrated the paper. Then he went to the phone booth.

He counted eleven rings before he heard Josephine’s voice, thickened by sleep.

“Terence, why aren’t you and Ed home yet?”

Lie,
he thought.

“Terence?”

“Yes, Jo.”

“I thought you’d left the phone. Are you bringing him home?”

“Can’t do that, Jo.”

“What’s wrong? You said it was minor.”

“It may be, they just don’t know yet.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“You can’t, Jo. He’s in the intensive-care unit.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“They don’t know. It’s the throat, some internal thing.”

“There’s something you’re not saying.”

“Please, Jo, I—”

“Let me talk to the doctor.”

“The doctors are all busy, Jo.”

“Are you lying to me?”

What could he say?

“Terence, is he dead? Terence!”

“No, no, Jo, he was choked.”

“Badly?”

“No, well, yes, his throat’s swollen on the inside.”

“Anything else?”

“Don’t know yet. Jo, someone else wants to use the phone.” That was a lie.

“Don’t hang up. Terence, I’m coming down.”

“It’s nearly four in the morning, Jo.”

“Maybe the Tarrytown taxi is running.”

“Jo, there’s nothing to be done here. All I’ve been able to do is pace the floor and sign a consent.”

“A what?” It took a moment for her to realize that he was crying. “Terence, if there is nothing you can do by being there, why don’t you come on home. We’ll both come back in the morning, love. You need to sleep.”

“There’s the intern, Jo, I’ll call you back.”

He hung up, blew his nose again, and caught the young man as he came down the hall. “How is he, please tell me.”

The intern looked at Mr. Japhet’s red-splotched face. “He’s had morphine twice, he’s asleep, he’s not feeling any pain. His breathing is okay, but we’re watching him carefully. The ice reduced the swelling a bit, but if the inside of the throat swells up again, we might have to give him another access to air.”

“A tracheotomy?”

This father, the intern thought, is an educated man. “Sort of,” he said, and before Terence could ask him what the specialist said, the intern excused himself and vanished down the hall. Mr. Japhet sat down to watch the clock again, to keep awake, until he remembered Josephine.

This time she answered right away.

“He’s had morphine.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Sleeping.” He didn’t say anything about the tracheotomy.

After a moment she said, “I could walk it down there.”

“No, Jo, it’s dark, you could get hit by a car on Route 9; by the time you’d get here in this weather, it’d be morning. Phone Elsie, she’ll drive you down.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I meant in the morning.”

“The morning is Sunday.”

“She wouldn’t mind, if you explained.”

“I’ll call her at seven.”

“I’ll be here,” he said. It sounded idiotic.

“Call me if there’s any change. Promise?”

“Yes.”

“I love you,” she said and hung up.

* * *

COMMENT BY MR. JAPHET

People, by and large, love their children. Seeing them grow up and taking pride in their achievements makes up for the chores and expense, but is love of a child an irreversible habit? How often does one feel love for children past the age of eight or ten? Less and less. Surely from the children’s side, they can’t feel this kind of continuing love for their parents, certainly not in their teens.

During that vigil in the hospital I felt for the first time a kind of love for Ed quite apart from what I felt for him when he was a child. I mean, at sixteen he is such a different human being from what I had known him as a child, different from me and from Josephine, not just his interests, magic and the like, but the whole cant of his life, his interest not in the mechanics of what he does but in the mystery. It may be a generational thing. That evening I felt I liked—all right, loved—Ed as a particular human being.

* * *

The quiet hours of the night had begun to be interrupted by the early-morning activity of the hospital. Mr. Japhet had just been given permission to don a white coat and go into the intensive-care unit when Josephine arrived. Elsie hung in the background. The Japhets did not hug or kiss, because the corridor now had people passing. Elsie waved good-bye to them.

“She’s just got a coat over her nightgown,” said Josephine.

Mrs. Japhet was given a white smock to put on, and they both went in. Ed was in the second bed from the right.

They were told to be very quiet. The man in the next bed to their son was expected to die within the hour.

Ed’s eyes were open. The orange tube taped to his upper lip went into his right nostril and then presumably down into his stomach. It was connected to a jar with a small amount of brackish liquid in the bottom.

Not only was his throat swollen, but the puffiness extended upward to his face.

Josephine remembered when she had been a religious woman, finding occasional peace in prayer.

Terence stole a look at the chart to see if it would tell him anything. He was about to touch it when he saw the nurse approaching, and his hand fell.

Ed moved his eyes as if to make up for his inability to speak. Then the nurse said to them both in a whisper, “The swelling hasn’t increased. There’s no sign of internal hemorrhage now.”

Josephine started to take Ed’s hand.

“No,” said the nurse. “Sepsis. Wait till he’s out of this room.”

“Oh,” said Terence, “when is that likely?” His heart bounded.

“If all goes well, maybe tonight.”

Later that morning Lila came with both her parents, but they were not allowed to see Ed. The Hursts, who did not really know the Japhets except by sight, chatted with them for a minute and then took Lila home.

Josephine persuaded Terence to go down with her to the hospital cafeteria for some food. The feeling had left that if he quit his vigil Ed would die. But when he returned from the cafeteria, the nurse had to reassure him that there had been no adverse change.

Frank Tennent came by in the afternoon. He thought Mr. Japhet looked like he was in a trance. He spoke to Mrs. Japhet, expressing his sympathy. When he left, she kind of waved stupidly to him. He hurried out to his car where his date was waiting.

It was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Japhet was trying to read the Sunday paper Josephine had brought, that he realized he was rereading the same paragraph over and over without catching its sense. He looked up at his wife and knew that unless he went to bed he might pass out. He had had no sleep since Friday night.

He didn’t want to leave the car with the smashed windshield near the entrance to the emergency room; so Josephine drove it home. The snow had stopped, and with the heater going full blast, it was bearable despite the open windshield. Though he usually sat near the right window when she drove, this time he sat very close.

From the garage she took him to the kitchen, but he wanted no food. He undressed by himself, his limbs moving slowly. He slipped on a pair of flannel pajamas, crawled into bed, and was asleep almost instantly. Josephine watched him for a while, then went downstairs. Nothing on television held her attention. She called the hospital to check, distrusting the cheerful nurse, then went to bed, taking care to keep her distance from Terence so as not to disturb his sleep.

* * *

COMMENT BY DR. GUNTHER KOCH,

PSYCHIATRIST

On Saturdays there is much to do that cannot be taken care of in the week, some shopping for breakfast things and for the evenings when I do not want to go to a restaurant, picking up light bulbs and whatnot at the hardware store, then home, skimming through professional magazines I am too tired to read on a weekday evening, and finally, when I can no longer take all this nothing, a walk in Central Park if the weather permits, and perhaps a film.

I find myself going to older films at the Symphony or the Thalia, things I have seen with Marta, because when I see a new film that is really good, I find I want to nudge Marta in the ribs or talk to her about it, so I keep with things we saw together. The film world is for me finite, finished, no more that is new. Karl, whom I share an office with, teases me I should marry again and recounts always the possibilities among the widows we both know. But it would be a housekeeping thing, not a marriage full of the interchange of emotions I had with Marta for thirty-four years. It could not be fair to the woman I married, Marta’s shadows everywhere, the constant mental comparisons. If I married a widow, she would have shadows, too. And who would want to marry a widow whose marriage had not been good?

Our big loss, of course, was grandchildren. Our one son, Kurt, married—was it in spite?—a young woman who had already had a needless hysterectomy. Was Kurt’s childlessness a willful attack on us?

I am quite convinced, after all these years of tiring practice, that the societies which enabled generations to live together and the children to be tutored by their grandparents were the best of all systems, avoiding the oedipal clash. I was too young when Kurt was a boy to raise him with the understanding that came to me, as it does to all of us, too late in life really to be of use. And so the hope was for grandchildren, even for a solitary grandchild, with whom I would now have my principal relationship and for which I would reserve, at the very least, all of my Sundays.

For what is there to do on a Sunday except read the enormous paper, or nap, or ask at a restaurant for a table for one, which elicits always a look of pity. I cannot interfere in the Sundays of my friends who have families full of grandchildren. I remember when Kolvick was taking his training analysis with me, and against my better judgment I went to his house for Sunday dinner, how swept up I was with his little boy, becoming in one afternoon an artificial grandfather full of feeling. But this could only be a nuisance interference in Kolvick’s analysis. I couldn’t get involved with his son without unsettling something.

That Sunday evening, as usual, I went for a long walk, directing myself toward the newsstand on Broadway that gets the first edition of the Monday papers early. Over a cup of cocoa at home I flipped through its pages when my eye first caught the story about the Japhet boy. I read it six times. Was I making another mistake by becoming interested in something like this? Sixteen is not a child. And why do I find the fact that he is a magician so compelling? I really should do nothing until I understand this better myself, but my hand sweats to pick up the telephone.