Half the Kingdom (14 page)

Shirley is reading Deborah an article titled “Which City Hospital Is Driving Seniors Insane?”

“Is this a joke?”

Shirley says, “Listen.”

“ ‘
Our source, whose identity we vow to face incarceration to protect, reports that elderly patients checking into the emergency room of one of our city’s major teaching facilities check out with what the hospital’s spokesperson, Dr. Miriam Haddad,…
’ ”

“Our Arab!” Deb and Shirley look hilariously at each other.

“She’s Jewish,” Samson says.

“ ‘
… what the hospital’s spokesperson, Dr. Miriam Haddad, for lack of a diagnosis, is calling “copycat Alzheimer’s.”
’ ”

“It’s a joke!” Deb says.

“ 
‘There is no emergency room,’ states Dr. Haddad, ‘that is not liable to raise the stress level to one that can cause temporary dementia, particularly in the elderly.’ When pressed to estimate the incidence of cases of dementia in percentages, she put it at a cool 100
.”

The sisters look over at Sammy, who lies on the bed and looks at the ceiling. His hands are folded on his stomach. His burbling speech—is it the monologue of dementia?

“ ‘
The hospital’s security officer, Salman Haddad …
’ ”

“Another one!” Deb says.

“
… has retained Joseph Bernstine, former CEO of the Concordance Institute, to check into this curious statistic. We reached Mr. Bernstine in the hospital’s Senior Center, where he is himself, at the time of this writing, a patient. Mr. Bernstine suggested the possibility of a terrorist connection
.”

“It’s a put-on!”

“ ‘
 “We know,” says Bernstine, “that an operative with a cell phone in Dublin, or in Dubai, can cause a bomb to detonate in Times Square just as easily as in the Old City of Jerusalem. We are beginning to look into the possibility of long-distance cyber-manipulations inside enclosed areas such as emergency facilities.”
’ ”

“Shirley, this is a joke!”

“Like 9/11 was a joke?”

“More like a Washington plot,” says Deb. “You don’t think it’s curious that the hospital’s security officer and the ER’s spokesperson are Haddads?”

Sam says it again: “She’s Jewish.”

“Okay, sweetheart. It’s okay,” they say to him. “By the way,” Deb asks Shirley, “what was he doing in Glenshore in the first place?”

“It’s where we spent that summer—Uncle Seymour came down, don’t you remember?” says Deb.

“Another summer we didn’t get to go to Israel, is what I remember,” says Shirley, and Samson, his right hand in Shirley’s, his left in Deb’s hand, watches them slide inevitably down, like two people rolling into the depression of an old mattress, into their lifelong argument.

Discussion had been constant in the Gorewitz home. Uncle Seymour might draw out of his pocket an article from the
Forward
with which their father agreed, or radically disagreed, and could have backed, alternatively challenged with a quotation, if someone had not moved the book—it was the
fat one with the green spine, which should have been on this shelf right here, or here; he had to quote the relevant passage from memory. No one waited or was expected to wait for anyone to finish speaking. If an opposing argument wanted to make itself heard, it raised its volume. The three Gorewitz children had breathed in secondary opinion. If either of the two clever little girls voiced one of her own, the grownups beamed.

When Uncle Seymour asked Samson what he was going to grow up to be, the little boy said, “A stand-up comic,” and his sisters’ groans, their calling on the Lord’s name in vain, could not stop him from performing his favorite old rabbi joke: Dave comes to the rabbi to argue that a certain field is his field. The rabbi listens and says, “You’re right. That field is yours.” On his way out, Dave passes Sid. Sid is coming to the rabbi to argue that this same field is his, and the rabbi listens and says, “You’re right. That is your field.” Sid goes home. The rebbetzin has been listening in the next room and comes in and says, “The same field can’t belong both to Dave and to Sid,” and the rabbi says, “And you’re right, too. It can’t.”

There came a season in which Samson seemed to hear the sound of escaping air, as when the human bottom came to rest on the backless leather seat in their hallway—“the pouf,” his mother called it. Sam imagined two opposing poufs on which his two sisters eventually settled, Shirley on one, on the other Deborah. The relief of knowing which truth was true; which of two histories you were choosing to imagine; whose calamities were calamities and whose the eggs you had to break to make the omelet; what, once and
for all, you were for, whose side you were on, who was the enemy! Neither Deborah nor Shirley ever, in the subsequent half-century, budged from their certainties. From here on in, Deborah believed and argued that everything
we
do is wrong, and what
they
do is right, or wrong only in response to the wrong we have done to them. Shirley argued that everything we did was right and anything they did, whatever the reason, was wrong. Each defended her argument with an arsenal of her own facts.

Samson’s function, as he saw it, had been to irritate both by always taking an opposite position.

Samson, the Drowned Man

Dr. Haddad sees the sisters come out of the room and watches them walk in the direction of the Sabbath Elevator, and now she goes into Samson Gorewitz’s room. The patient has his way of lying very still and flat on his back. His eyes are open.

The doctor cranks up the bed. “We need you to be sitting up, Mr. Gorewitz, and to sit in a chair. You have to start moving if you want to get well.”

The patient says, “That’s past praying for,” and makes a sound like laughing.

“Now why do you say that, Mr. Gorewitz?”

The patient does not reply.

“How does one run a peppermill, Mr. Gorewitz?”

“
Paper! Paper mill
. We made the grocery cardboard boxes the color of the Judean desert, stack them, line them up, I always thought they were beautiful. Nobody stops to think that there was a person who engineered the way they fold flat for storage, how cleverly they reassemble.”

“Mr. Gorewitz, you know where you are?”

“I told that boy, in heaven.”

“You are in heaven, Mr. Gorewitz?”

“ ‘If they find me not, look in the other place.’ Jews don’t worry about it so much. You’re Jewish.”

“Of course,” says Dr. Haddad. “Are you dead, Mr. Gorewitz?”

“Drowned on Glenshore beach. If you’re Jewish, why do you wear the what-do-you-call-it over your hair, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“The hijab,” Dr. Miriam says with some little irritation. “Why does that spook people? My bubbe covered her head with a beautifully coiffured shaitel. She was a doctor before her time, and a dresser. My favorite Aunt Bernice teaches philosophy. I don’t know that she even knows she wears her own hair disguised as a shaitel with a fringe across her forehead, and a hair clip. What is this
thing
we have with our hair? Some women cover it, and the men? These ones put hats on when they enter the house of their god; that lot takes their hats off. The hat!” said Dr. Miriam Haddad, and was quiet for a moment. “On my Sunday walks with Grandpa Abner,” she said, “his hat used to measure the importance of the people we passed, especially the ladies. Grandpa would touch his hand to the brim, or grasp the
brim between thumb and forefinger to just suggest lifting it; there was the little lift, and there was the grand sweep. And my uncle Shimon—my little sister and I used to imagine him in bed with his yarmulke on. So I wear the hijab like my mother- and sisters-in-law. My husband likes it.”

“Isn’t it confining?”

“So’s my white doctor’s coat. So are your pants. Nothing is tighter on you than your skin. What makes you think you’re dead, Mr. Gorewitz? Your medical report says you’re alive. We’re surprised—we’re rather puzzled in fact, by your recovery.”

“Dead or alive,” Samson says, “where’s the difference? Who knew there would be a ceiling in heaven, and a floor, windows, a bed, the TV, and Deb and Shirley arguing through eternity?”

“So, Mr. Gorewitz, if everything is the same, why do you think that you are dead?”

“Ah, that old trick! That won’t work,” Samson says. “Pinch yourself. If you don’t feel it, you’re asleep; if it hurts you must be awake? What if you pinch yourself and you’re dead and it hurts the same as it does when you’re alive; that,” says Samson in a tone of ultimate clarity, “is the gyp.”

“What is a gyp, Mr. Gorewitz?”

“Being dead.”

On her way to the Sabbath Elevator, Dr. Haddad passes the open door of Room 711 and stops, surprised to see the Gorewitz sisters sitting on the edges of the two beds. Their
profiled faces are opposed to each other, the mouths of both are in motion.

Deborah and Shirley are engaged in the conversation that resembles a never-ending pas de deux in which Deborah foreknows the move Shirley will make in response to the last move, that she, Deborah, has made, knowing the response that she will make to Shirley’s response to it. Each believes that the next thing she is going to say will so new-formulate the self-evident truth that it must expose the other’s mistaken assumptions and make an end of the dance once and for all.

Dr. Haddad returns to the nurses’ station. She asks the nurse, “What’s with the two women in seven-eleven?”

“Around the bend,” the nurse answers.

Muzac of the Sheres

Francis Rhinelander is one of the gargoyles whom Hope observed coming up in the Sabbath Elevator. The young doctor with the good head of hair had taken care of his facial cuts and abrasions and sent him to the Release Office two doors to the right of the triage window to sign himself out, but here he is back again. Phyllis has sent Al Lesser over to follow up on his earlier interview. Al sees that something has happened. There is a difference in the sag of the tall old
man’s shoulders, in his ruined smile. He sits on the edge of his bed and ducks his head. With his chin he indicates the wall-mounted TV on which a beautiful specimen of young manhood is selling a new technology not obtainable in stores or through the mails, for only four easy value-pays of $19.95 plus shipping and handling.

The old man shakes and shakes his head.

“Just some old infomercial,” Al says to him.

“I know, but
listen
,” Rhinelander says.

Al and his patient watch the specimen demonstrate the Twice-Told
^®
, a plastic headband with a built-in nano computer that translates the movements of eye and facial musculature of the person sitting across from you and tells you “You’ve told this story to this person before,”
before
you have started telling it once again.

“Where do you have your remote? You can just turn it off,” Al suggests.

“
Listen!
”

The specimen guarantees us our money back, no questions asked, if we are not completely satisfied.

“The music,” the old man says, “while the man is talking.”

It is now that Al Lesser hears what is too familiar to notice, the ongoing, anonymous, circular thrumming.

“
Why?
” Rhinelander says in his despair.

“Oh, well, because, I mean,” Al says, “you have to have music.”

“
Do
you?”

“It would be—wouldn’t it be, I don’t know—kind of bald without some music?”

“Would it?” The sad old man ducks. He nods his head. “My waiter can turn Frank Sinatra down but never
off
. Frank Sinatra doesn’t
turn
off, not even
in the john
, and I can’t go with Sinatra in the john singing ‘The Way You Look Tonight’! Frank Sinatra in my cereal. I walked to Gristedes at the corner, going to get myself something and eat it up in my hotel room, but Frank Sinatra was signing ‘My Way’ in the bread aisle and in the dairy aisle and when I got back to my room, he was singing ‘New York, New York.’ I called maintenance. It seems they won’t remove the TV out of the room but they said they could disconnect it, but then he got on my little plastic radio I have on the seat of the chair next to my bed. I pushed the Off button so hard I pushed it all the way in. I can hear it rattling around on the inside. I can’t get it out, so I went down and got in a cab to come back here. They have TV in all the cabs. The ‘off’ button turns the music
ON
.”

Francis Rhinelander and Al Lesser sit and watch the specimen. He is on a high of enthusiasm, saying, “But wait!” and guarantees
two
Twice-Tolds
^®
to everyone who calls within the next three minutes while the circling thrumming prevents the baldness of silence.

Francis Rhinelander says, “The reason the management never answered my letter is there
is
no Off option! No one can turn off the Muzak of the Spheres.” His head ducks up and down and up and down like a toy set in motion by a child’s finger.

The Ice Worm

The mistake was to have taken the advice of the woman in the cafeteria and gone home and left her mother in the ER. It is morning. Maggie goes straight to Observation, where they know nothing of any Ilka Weiss. “The doctor said you had a bed for her.”

“What doctor?”

“The doctor in the ER.”

“Better go down there, then.”

It’s a leisurely morning in the waiting area. A young mom closes the picture book she has been trying to read to her toddler. The boy, around Stevie’s age, prefers climbing over the benches.

A neat, dapper little man is talking with the nurse through the triage window. Maggie stands waiting behind him. She assumes he is an official person, and that this may be an official conversation. A harried young man comes and stands behind Maggie; she experiences his impatience uncomfortably. The probably official person folds his arms on the sill of the triage window so that now his head is inside the office; this is going to take time. Maggie leaves her place in line and walks to the door that leads into the ER and knocks on it. When nobody answers, she opens it to face a large, surprised nurse. This is not a nurse Maggie recognizes from last night. The nurse looks put-upon:
No
, Maggie can
not
come in to see if her mother is inside. There is no Ilka
Weiss in the ER. Yes, the nurse is certain, and she does
not
know where Ilka Weiss might have been transferred during the night. Who might know? Triage might know, or go to the Release Office. She points to a door on the left.