The Side of the Angels (32 page)

“We're going in,” said Kate, attempting to joke.

That evening at dinnertime, with Kate holding a large, shielding poinsettia and I engulfed in a bouquet of helium balloons printed with smiling teddy bears, we walked nonchalantly through the staff entrance like lost and unobservant visitors. We both wore mufflers well up to our chins, and Kate had covered my hair with one of the knobbly knitted caps Eileen had produced back in the old days.

I said to Kate under my breath, “If anyone asks, we're on the way to maternity. That's why I ordered the balloons with these ugly teddy bears instead of something tasteful.”

The hospital corridors seemed the length of football fields. As we passed the statue of the Blessed Mother guarding the chapel door, I thought I saw a mild rebuke in her downward-looking gaze. We turned two corners, then a third. It swallowed us up, this place that was a world unto itself.

I don't like hospitals. I don't like their smell of laundry and urine and sad waiting. I don't like how the floors never look truly mopped and the walls look pallid and sweating, like the walls of underground caves. I don't like the food or the coffee in hospital cafeterias, with their smeary silverware and entrées left over from the night shift.

Please don't let me die in a hospital, I prayed, although I knew from one of the many studies Weingould had dumped on me that most Americans
do
die in hospitals. A car accident or plane crash came way up on my list. Something quick. Johnny once told me and Louise, in a sleepy, tipsy late-night conversation, that his ideal death would be standing in the old Boston Garden as the Celtics won the championship, with the rafters shaking and the floor pounding beneath him because the crowd would be stomping so hard. As the buzzer went, he'd sink to the floor from a stroke or heart attack, and that would be it.

Louise had nothing to contribute to this discussion, as she rarely worried about death. “I figure I'll go on, in some capacity,” she said.

“Well, doesn't it matter to you in which capacity?” I said. “Do you care if you're formless ether? Or what if you're reincarnated in some terrible place like Calcutta or Boise, Idaho?”

“I'm not picky about the details. I'll think I'll still be myself in some sense.”

If you asked me, Louise's happy-go-lucky faith that she'd arrive, identity intact, in the world to come was akin to trusting an airline to get your luggage to the right place on a trip with two short connections. Her belief in the afterlife was based on various fuzzy psychic experiences of her own, and the assurances of wacko chums who were allegedly in constant touch with the departed. An AT&T operator would have better success connecting with the dead than Louise's importunate friends, who were bound to offend the spirits since they certainly got on the nerves of those still among the living.

Yet Louise's
own
contacts with the beyond did offer strange comfort. A few months after my father's passing, she related to me that she'd had a dream the night after his death in which he was standing in her living room trying to remember the third verse of “Kubla Khan.”

Louise was convinced that the dream was a message from my father on his way to the next astral plane. All well and good, but what
in this world or the next was my father trying to convey? In life, the only poetry he'd known by heart was “The Highwayman” and “Casey at the Bat.”

Kate nudged me in the ribs. There, tapping down the hall toward us, was Louanne Reilly, the director of nursing. She was dressed like a bank director, of course. The nubbly sweater and grandmotherly pearl brooch of her television interviews were nowhere in evidence. Louanne was sporting what was either an Armani suit or an expensive knockoff, and a pair of killer Ferragamos. Sadly, she had actually looked more attractive in her grandma clothes; the sharp, perfect lines of her severely tailored jacket only emphasized the grooves worn by stress and ill-temper around her mouth. She'd have done better “with a little softness around her face,” my mother would have said.

Kate buried her nose in the poinsettias as if enjoying their nonexistent scent and I allowed the balloons to rise up around me a few inches. Reilly strode past us without a blink. In the elevator, we stood shoulder to shoulder, giggling. I felt daring and triumphant, like a member of the French Resistance.

On Level Three, two floors from our destination, the ponderous doors opened and Bennett Winslow stepped in. Kate stiffened next to me and moved back. The elevator was long and cavernous, as hospital elevators are, and the acoustics were such that we could hear Winslow humming “Begin the Beguine” under his breath. He unearthed a tin of hoarhound cough drops from his pocket and unwrapped one. A fusty, molasses smell filled the elevator. Winslow seemed to take in our presence only as fellow passengers. I blessed the convention that one never makes direct eye contact in an elevator.

It seemed we should have shot up twenty floors in the time it took to reach the ICU. When we arrived, finally, Winslow stepped aside and put out a hand to ensure the door stayed open, with the rather florid chivalry that seemed to be second nature to him. We were still behind him, steeling ourselves to walk past, when he said quietly, “I hope your friend feels better, Kate. If anyone gives you any trouble, have them call me.”

Kate stopped dead in her tracks.

“Come on,” I said, pushing her forward. As the doors shut, I turned around and raised my hand discreetly to Winslow in acknowledgment. He raised his own hand in return.

I stayed in the room just long enough to see Eileen's face when she perceived Kate, the delight that shone through the immense exhaustion.

“Katie,” she said, and held out her hands.

To Kate, who remembered the lovely, rambunctious woman Eileen had been before her illness, the change in her friend after an absence of weeks must have been a shock. If Kate had had any slight hopes of an improvement before, Eileen's colorless face against the gray hospital pillows, the thinness of her shoulders visible through the chenille robe she was wearing, the translucence of her skin, all gave Kate an answer. Only her friend's eyes, huge brown eyes full of humor, resembled the face in the photos Kate had shown me.

I left them alone together and retreated to the floor lobby, where I leafed through old
Time
magazines and tried not to think about the germs lurking on the sticky Naugahyde sofa. Kate's visit would last forty-five minutes; we'd planned for her to leave with the general exodus at the end of visiting hours. Waiting for her, I hid behind my magazine and watched a few of the patients walking their families and friends to the floor lobby. One or two trundled their IVs behind them. Everyone was so cheerful. You'd have thought that they were all saying good night after a dinner party. For the first time, I thought that my father at least hadn't had to face the ravages of sickness or old age. He'd had what I'd said I would choose, that speedy exit.

When Kate came out at last, I could see she hadn't been crying. I should have known she wouldn't be crying.

“How'd it go?” I asked in the elevator, since that is what you ask in these situations.

“It went very well.”

“Nice of Winslow, huh?”

“He has his moments.”

“We can visit again. As often as you want to.”

“That might not be too many more times,” said Kate.

“She might surprise us.”

“And she might not.”

I wanted to go home and take a shower. I wanted to forget the sight of Eileen Grogan, so obviously once a vivacious, pretty woman, now lovely only to those who loved her.

Kate said, “I know you hated doing this, Nicky.”

“Who said I hated doing this?”

“I can tell you hate hospitals.”

“I love hospitals. They're fascinating. They really bustle, you know? When I get home I'm going to volunteer as a candy striper.”

“I don't think that's a good idea. But this meant a lot to me. In case you couldn't tell.”

I put my arm around her.

“You don't have to do that,” she said. I kept my arm around her anyway.

“Don't let me cry in this elevator and have mascara all over my face.”

“I'll do my Jimmy Durante impression.”

“You're a very kind person, Nicky.”

“Yeah. Just look at how I'm making every day Christmas Day for Doug.”

She laughed a little then.

“You've outdone yourself for Doug.”

“Who told you it was me?”

“No one had to. Only someone who
really
didn't like him would have bought him that corny shaving kit.”

That night, when Louise called to say that she had agreed to be a bridesmaid after all, I was very kind once again. I did not say, “What in the world are you thinking?” I did not tell her how hideous the bridesmaid's dress would be. I only said, “Louise, are you sure you know what you're doing?”

“No,” said Louise. “But I couldn't hold out against the nagging anymore.”

“Just tell Betsey to go to hell.”

“Not Betsey. Your mother.”

“I'm sorry I haven't been there to back you up, honey.”

“It doesn't matter,” said Louise. “The dress is kind of expensive, though.”

“They should pay
you
to wear it.”

“Like Johnny said, it's one day out of my life.”

“This is your busiest time, and here you are trying to find a place that sells dyeable satin pumps for next summer.”

“In a six wide, which isn't easy.”

As the year drew to a close, loneliness and family taunts pricked people harder than usual, causing them to show up at Louise's door with last-minute hopes that Louise did her best to fulfill. She even held two mixers, one for Christmas/Chanukah, another the night before New Year's Eve. (After one disastrous experiment, she had concluded that a party on New Year's Eve itself rendered the stakes too high.)

“You can still back out,” I said.

“It's Johnny's wedding. I can't let him down.”

“No matter how wrong it is? I defy you to say you like Betsey, Louise. That you even
like
her, let alone want to see Johnny stuck with her for life.”

“Even if it's a disaster in the end, I still have to be there.”

“The way you always are for him. You know, Louise, if you'd been on the
Titanic,
you'd have been the page turner for the band. I can picture you refusing a place in the lifeboats and humming along as they made their way through ‘Abide with Me.' ”

“It was ‘Nearer My God to Thee,' ” said Louise. “And you're wrong, Nicky. Don't sell me short.”

“You're selling yourself short without any help from me.”

“This is not my doing,” said Louise. “It's Johnny's.”

“It's Betsey's doing. You two are just going along for the ride.”

“Some things aren't meant to be, Nicky.”

“And some things are, if people will just help them happen.”

“You believe that, and I don't. It's the difference between us,” said Louise.

“We're not so different,” I said. “You believe it, too, only not for yourself. Believe it for yourself, Louise. We're not very different at all.”

I
T SNOWED FOUR
inches the night before the federal mediator arrived for the charade that Coventry and the boys at Finchley and Crouse had planned for us. Mediation would be purely formal, a chance for the hospital to take potshots at us in the press, a chance for them to send the message that this fiasco would last longer than the siege of Leningrad if we were waiting for them to surrender an inch.

The evening news ran a clip of Clare marching in the picket line with a scarf tied over her head and snowflakes in her hair, a nice Maryon the-way-to-Bethlehem touch. Luckily the news crew hadn't panned back enough to show our paltry numbers. The next day there were fewer nurses on the line than on any day of the strike so far, only ten or eleven. It wasn't our members' fault. A lot of them were picking up per diem work at regional hospitals to make ends meet. Those who
could
afford to go without day work were picketing in longer shifts so that we were covered around the clock.

We conferred quickly before Tony and Clare went into mediation. After that, they'd be as unreachable as a sequestered jury—if things went well. If they didn't, we'd know within hours.

Tony was businesslike with all of us. I could see him drawing in his forces, preparing for battle at the bargaining table.

“Nicky, I think we need to issue a statement from Clare that nurses remain hopeful that the hospital will realize the seriousness of the patient care issues involved. You know the sort of thing.”

“Is that the right note to sound?” said Doug. “We may need to leave ourselves some wiggle room here.”

Tony ignored him. Tony had been ignoring Doug a lot lately. He could have been simply tired of Doug skulking around like a one-man
Greek chorus, predicting a terrible end to the strike. Our resident Cassandra, Kate called him. But I thought the new rift between him and Tony was more than a natural annoyance with a grumbly and defeatist coworker on Tony's part. The usual coolness between them had deteriorated to open hostility.

“I've been talking to the head of the HMO that the Winsack teachers are signed up with, HealthStar New England. The teachers have offered to pressure HealthStar to make a public statement calling on Covenant's CEO to step in to end the strike.”

“A good percentage of St. Francis patients come to them through HealthStar,” said Kate.

“It's nice of the teachers,” said Tony. “Very nice. Although we still don't have whatever killer move we'd need to get Coventry to take us seriously. They're not gonna buckle under in Rhode Island when we can be made an example of for every other facility in their chain.”