Half the Kingdom (13 page)

Over the top of the page that she was reading, Lucy could see the undersized waitress walking toward her. Where was the blond couple and their BlackBerrys? Lucy had not seen them go, nor had she noticed the staff upturning chairs onto the tables; one pulled the head of an enormous mop between two rollers that squeezed an overload of water into a bucket the size of a young bathtub. Lucy recognized the bite, inside her nostrils, of industrial-strength disinfectant. Lucy read:

“
The ambulance has come to a stop below the overhang outside Emergency. The ambulance attendant folds the report into an outside pocket of the black bag that he slings over his shoulder. He jumps out and walks around the ambulance to open the back door. ‘Wants a
Roget’s Thesaurus
,’ the ambulance attendant says to the uniformed attendant who has come to assist him. They have to readjust the straps, which the patient’s writhings have loosened, before they pull the stretcher out and snap it onto its wheels on the tarmac. ‘Wants a what?’ The uniformed attendant receives the patient’s report from the ambulance attendant in exchange for the address of the next patient to be picked up. The ambulance attendant hops back into the ambulance
.”

Lucy knew that the waitress was standing to talk to her. “Miss, the cafeteria is closing.”

“One more page!” Lucy promised the waitress, who continued to stand another moment before she walked away.

“ 
‘One two three.’ They shunt him over onto a gurney that the uniformed attendant wheels through the self-opening doors into Emergency. ‘
Roget’s Thesaurus
!’ moans the man in pain to a passing nurse whose shift is over; she is on her way home
.”

The waitress returned with the manager. “The cafeteria is closed, miss,” the manager told Lucy, who held up a hand. While the manager phoned down to Emergency saying, “Got one in the cafeteria. Around the bend, looks like. You better send a chair,” Lucy finished the story:

“
The Emergency doctor asks the patient how long he has been experiencing the pain. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? When did you first have this pain? A week, two weeks ago? You don’t know! Where do you feel it? You don’t know where you feel the pain?’ The doctor palpates the patient, who screams. The doctor knows where the pain is! This doctor is old and bald. He looks like a doctor. The man in pain asks him, ‘What is wrong with me?’ The doctor says, ‘We’ll know more when we’ve done a couple of tests.’ There are many patients in Emergency and the doctor has to get this one to release the sleeve of his white coat. ‘What’ cries the patient, ‘is its name?’ ‘Rumpelstiltskin!’ the doctor says. The man in pain is throwing up again
.”

Patrice was the orderly with the powerfully developed upper arms. He had placed fourth in last year’s NABBA USA Bodybuilding Conference and applied his educated force to maneuvering the old woman’s legs out from under the table. She gave him zero help. While he lifted the patient into the wheelchair and wheeled her, with her
PATIENTS PROPERTY
bag balanced on her lap, to Emergency, she was turning the page of her address book.

Lucy was, mercifully, not going to call her friend Katherine who had spent a lifetime persuading friends, acquaintances, and all the people she knew to let her be the lone writer, the writer in the attic. Who was Lucy to argue that a good novel isn’t better than the best friendship, and Katherine’s novels were good on the grand scale.

Emergency would not receive Lucy Friedgold. The ER was in the process of transferring its demented sixty-two-pluses to the new holding area. There were the necessary phone calls and the multiplying paperwork. Patrice had learned to make use of these downtimes, the frequent long waits associated with his job in the Cedars of Lebanon’s ER. He practiced pumping iron intellectually. Patrice had time to visualize the choreography of his routine from the first to the final freeze in detail, editing his mistakes before Nurse Trotwood handed him Lucy’s Intake Form for Seniors to take along to the Senior Center’s seventh floor.

Lucy found James under the M’s and read him
“Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency” while Patrice wheeled her up the sidewalk and through the great doors. James said it was good.

Jack and Hope

Some days after the lunch at the Café Provence, Jeremy had to take his father to Cedars of Lebanon’s Emergency. He called Nora and Nora called her mother.

“Jack’s in the hospital. They were going to send him home but he started to cry. Mom?”

“Yes,” said her mother.

“They’ve moved him to the Senior Center. Mom! Are you there?”

“Yes,” said Hope.

“Do you want me to take you over?”

“Yes.”

Nora came to pick her mother up. “You want me to pin up your hair for you?”

“No. This is my Arbus persona.”

“Your which? Mom, what are you talking
about
?”

The Sabbath Elevator opens and closes its door on every floor without having its buttons pressed. Hope stepped in behind an orderly who was pushing a wheelchair. “Miss,” the orderly was saying, “it’s not going to work in here,” but the
old woman in the chair continued to poke the buttons on her cell phone and hold it to her ear. Hope looked around her at a congregation of gargoyles: The huge old black woman might have been poured to overflowing into her wheelchair; her mouth stood open as if there were no room inside for the restless lolling of her purple tongue. The freakishly long, thin, banged-up old Don Quixote wore an anachronistic smile and so did the little stick-figure manikin next to him, and next to
him
, her waist bent at a ninety-degree angle, was the prototype of Hansel and Gretel’s witch, whose crooked nose met with her stubbled chin. And when Hope turned to Nora’s loved face, she saw it rammed down to the left into the shape of an earlier phase of the human type: Nora was watching an old peasant that we don’t see on the New York streets, who was unbuttoning the front of her dress. She reached her navel as the Sabbath Elevator opened its doors to discharge its cargo on the Senior Center’s seventh floor.

IV
The Seventh Floor

The seventh floor has been temporarily designated an annex to the ER, to hold the demented sixty-two-pluses. The Senior Center is the most recent addition, and the northmost building of the hospital complex, which covers several city blocks between the two avenues. The Center’s architect had interned with the Lincoln Square Renewal Project under Robert Moses, and had built his glass-and-iron structure to incorporate the movements of the hospital’s population of patients, staff, and doctors as an integral idea of design.

Lucy sits in the solarium facing the glass wall backed by blackest night and observes her reflected self in the wheelchair. The
YTREPORP STNEITAP
bag is on her lap, the cell phone at her ear. “Stephen!” she says, “This is Lucy! A voice out of your past …”

“Mom?”

“Benedict? How come? I dialed Stephen.”

“Mom, where the hell are you? What is going on?”

“Dear, I can’t talk now. I’m reading Stephen ‘Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency.’ ”

“Mom, why didn’t you wait for Joe in the waiting room like I told you?”

“I went to the cafeteria. Do you know they’ve completely redone the whole thing? I bagged a table for the meeting only nobody showed up. What time did you say the meeting was scheduled for?”

“It wasn’t. I didn’t say. We were waiting for Joe to get out of the ER. Mom, where
is
Joe?”

“He’s right here. We came up in the elevator together. Ben, look, I can’t talk …”

“Mom, I told you Joe wanted to debrief you. Why are you still at Cedars?”

“Ben, I’m on the phone reading a story to Stephen and I can’t talk.”

“Mom, is it your emphysema?”

Lucy has hung up.

Hope and Nora have found Room 702, where Jack sits in his wheelchair and weeps. Hope, in her day, had wept—wept for Jack—but she had covered her mouth or hidden her face in her hands. Jack weeps with his neck outstretched, exposing his throat. His chin points at the ceiling or what is missing beyond. He is in physical despair, and weeps and is too spent to remember how to stop.

Ida and the Crazy Box

The hospital reaches Marta, Ida Farkasz’s daughter, in her store and asks her to pick up her mother from the seventh floor of the Senior Center and take her home. Marta checks the time on the clock but does not take the time to check her prematurely graying hair in the mirror. Ida notices and says, “You wouldn’t go to a customer looking like that, but for mother this is okay?”

“Mama, I left the store in the middle of a working day, and I’m here.”

“Next time, I’ll know to put myself into the hospital, instead of sitting in my apartment that doesn’t even have a window so I could see what’s going on out in the street, waiting for it to occur to you to come and see me.”

Marta says, “Mama, I come to see you.”

“And get on your phone,” Ida says, “and start calling your friends, which is just as well because the only way I find out what’s going on in your life is overhearing you telling other people.”

“The person I just called was my assistant, and what’s going on is my not getting three dozen deliveries boxed and to the post office, which I’ll be having to do tomorrow, which is already over-scheduled.”

“While I sit on a chair in my apartment waiting for you to call me, and have maybe a conversation?”

“The only conversation you and I have is about my not calling and my not visiting. Mama, why don’t I phone Poldi? She’s not well, and she wants to see you.” Marta laughs
and says, “Mama, you’re looking into the crazy box …”

“Looking into the crazy box,” “
Ins Narrenkastl schauen
,” was what Ida said
her
mother used to call it when the thing in front of your eyes is blotted out by a more powerful inner vision. Ida stares at the shoe she holds in her hands and is not putting on her foot. What she sees in the crazy box is herself and Poldi passing Miss Margate’s building and Poldi stepping up the first step to block the entrance with her body.

“Call Poldi,” spits Ida. “Tell her if she comes I’ll throw her out on her ear.”

“Okay, Mama. Where did they put your jacket? Did you have a jacket?”

The photo album, which has migrated from Pressburg to the Dominican Republic to New York, lies open on the table when Marta comes out of the bedroom where she has put away her mother’s clothes.

Ida says, “Your father, with his little Hitler mustache.”

“Mama, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry.”

“Summer 1935, before they closed the swim baths.
Juden ist der Eintritt Verboten
. We used to go every Sunday and stay all day. Lining up to jump in the pool, look at Kari always clowning. Poldi, best figure of anybody, but it was Berta who had the loveliest face. Here’s your father, a little man. Onkel Igo. Maxl, Terry. You see where I’ve put their names on the back. When I’m gone who will remember who they ever were?”

“Mama, I have to go and close up the store.”

“Go, close. Go and close up. Go go go go.”

Deb and Shirley

Dr. Miriam Haddad has walked over to the Senior Center. She looks into Samson Gorewitz’s room, sees the two sisters sitting with their brother, and backs away. She takes her time in the nurse’s station, reviewing the information. Glenshore has transcribed the material from Samson’s wet wallet: the Columbus, Ohio, address, and his life in numbers: SSN; born 03/08/28; phone numbers; phone number of the sister residing in New York. The doctor looks over the Intake Form: Education, OSU; Nearest Relative, a son (?) in pairs (!); Occupation, ran (?) a “peppermill” (?!). Next to Comments the intern has written: One-sided facial paralysis (?) makes patient’s speech difficult/impossible to follow. May be confused/demented (??).