Half the Kingdom (9 page)

Lucy saw she was going to run out of space and reduced her writing to the size of the letters in a miniature book in a dollhouse library.

 … She slides me to the corner of her desk for another read the next day but Tuesday you give her two essays and a batch of poems and Wednesday another story until your regular girl returns. Before Bennington leaves she piles the manuscripts, with “Rumpelstiltskin” at the bottom, on the shelf in your office
.

Francis Rhinelander

In the cubicle to Lucy’s right, Francis Rhinelander never stopped tugging at the too-short hospital gown. Al looked down the Intake Form. “Precipitating Factor?”

“Blacked out in the lobby of my hotel,” said the old man. “My brother made me go for a checkup this morning, before I got on the train. And I guess I forgot to have breakfast?”

Francis had carried his overnighter across Godford Memorial Hospital’s half-empty parking lot and the thought of something being found to be a little bit the matter with him and getting put to bed in one of Memorial’s quiet rooms was not unpleasant. The front desk stood in a square of sun that outlined Angie Biddle, the receptionist, with a faintly furred halo of light. Angie had gone to school with the Rhinelander boys. “George called in,” she told Francis. “He wants us to take a look at you before you head back to town.”

“Am I going to make the eleven twenty-five?”

Angie thought he surely would. “The nurse practitioner gets in at ten. Take a load off.” She pointed to the chair beside her.

Francis said, “George was telling me Margaret West died?
You
took piano with her.”

Angie said, “Margaret sang at my wedding. Remember the plaque they gave her for the song they got her to write for the Godford Two-Hundredth Independence parade? I think it embarrassed her. She didn’t think it was that good of a song.”

“It was okay,” remembered Francis. “I was the drum down Main Street.”

The Godford marching band had followed behind the fire engine driven at a walking pace by Fred Willis, the chief of the volunteer fire department, with the mayor sitting beside him. They halted across from the cannon with the seven black cannonballs stacked in a pyramid on the grass triangle where Main met High Street. The public, which barely outnumbered the marchers, stood or sat. Babies crawled on the grass and dogs sniffed for treats while the town notables spelled each other in the reading of the Declaration of Independence. “I used to wait for the wicked king and the vicious Indians,” Francis told Angie. “And did you wonder what a sacred honor was exactly, and if you had one?”

Angie didn’t remember wondering anything.

“Margaret West!” mused Francis. “When I was fifteen she’d pass on her younger students for me to teach.”

“Up and died,” Angie said.

The nurse practitioner walked in and Angie Biddle
told him, “This is Mr. Rhinelander. Francis, you go along with him.”

“You think I can make the eleven twenty-five?” Francis asked the nurse, who said, “No problem.” He was a stout, youngish man with a ponytail and a mustache so orange that Francis had to take another look and kept looking. He said, “My brother worries about me?” and the nurse, though it was not clear in reference to what, said that it was no problem and asked if Mr. Rhinelander had remembered not to have breakfast. Rhinelander had eaten no breakfast. The nurse took enough of Francis’s blood to fill several glass vials, each one stoppered with a different-colored rubber stopper and labeled with Francis’s name. The nurse asked Francis how he was feeling. Francis said he had felt funny at dinner last night, but did not tell this stranger with the orange mustache that he’d sat next to his sister-in-law, Sybil, whose perfume-like candied roses had got into the chowder on his plate and Francis had had to rise in a hurry and said would anybody mind if he went and just lay down. He went and lay down on the sofa in the living room where George’s boys’ music played day in day out.

When the nurse said, “You’re good to go,” Francis continued to sit. Standing up seemed an improbability.

“You want Angie to phone Willis Cabs for you?”

“Oh, no. No, thank you.” Rhinelander rose.

“Now you make sure you eat something. You have your doctor in New York? He can call us for the results.”

It was past two in the afternoon by the time Francis Rhinelander became part of the crowd on the move under Grand Central Terminal’s midnight sky where the spheres are outlined into figures, properly labeled, of the zodiac. The music came from a brass band ranged in rows before the marble stairs. A little boy sat on a chair next to the trombonist’s chair. The trombonist blew into his trombone; the boy blew into his straw, which made the milk bubble in his glass.

How was it that Rhinelander’s urgent, his repeated finger on the
Off
button of the taxi’s little TV screen kept turning the music
on
? He considered appealing to the driver, the back of whose flattened head attached without the mediation of a neck to his hulking back; he looked like something by Charles Addams. Francis sat with his right hand holding on to his left.

Francis Rhinelander’s letter to the residence hotel’s management arguing for a lobby minus music had gone unanswered and those merry violins messed with his disordered stomach. “I didn’t have any breakfast,” Francis had told the desk clerk, a man of his own age, who advised Mr. Rhinelander to leave his bag and see if the Café’s kitchen wouldn’t rustle him up a bite of something.

“Frank Sinatra was singing ‘New York New York,’ ” Rhinelander complained to Al Lesser.

Al said, “My nana once
met
Frank Sinatra,” and blushed.

“I’m always asking them to turn it off,” Francis said, “and they say the patrons like the music.”

But this had been after lunch and before dinner. There was nobody except the wait staff sitting down to their own meal in the back. Rhinelander’s waiter was that little man, elderly, with an accent, who had to put his knee up on a chair to reach the button. Rhinelander told Al, “They’ll turn Frank Sinatra down—but never off and afterward the volume always goes back up a little and a little. I think it’s they can’t be without music?”

Young Al mentally patted the iPod in his pocket. On it, he had his Norah Jones, his Black Keys, Jay-Z, Manu Chao, Adele, and Lady Gaga. He said, “But you’re a composer! You taught piano. You don’t like music?”

“Not in my mushroom omelet!” cried Francis. “I left the tip and I walked out.” It had seemed cruelly unfair to Francis that Frank Sinatra and the whole band pursued him into the john. But it was the violins, when he went to pick up his overnighter, that finally floored him. The old clerk must have been on his break. The chunky woman in a navy outfit like a uniform was saying, “Sir? Sir, are you okay, sir?” as Francis reached for the edge of the desk, which moved away at a fantastically increasing speed down a perspective like the small end of a telescope.

“Sir?”

Francis took one step and another before that last little hop after which nothing was going to keep the floor from slapping him in the face.

“Do you need medical attention?” asked the woman in the uniform, and the two men who stepped out of the elevator and saw the always-surprising length of a body facedown
on the floor, skipped in the direction of the door, which revolved them out into the avenue.

The woman in the uniform had phoned 911 for the ambulance, which brought Francis Rhinelander to the Cedars of Lebanon’s ER.

In the other cubicle sat Deb and Shirley holding their brother’s hands. Deborah said, “Sweetheart, you’ll be in rehab for just a bit, okay? You’ll be fine! You’ll come out and I’ll put a bed in the den, nice and private for you, okay?”

“Thegravesafineandprivateplace,” Samson said.

“What does he want?” Deb and Shirley asked each other.

Samson Gorewitz

On the late afternoon beach, the sun had not been a factor, no longer burning directly down on Samson’s upturned face and exposed chest and legs.

They were packing up, collecting their things. Stacey and Joey, who were supposed to fold the big towel, kept yanking the corners out of each other’s hands, and laughing.

“Kids, kids! Come on!”

They collapsed the umbrella. Who was going to carry it?

“I’m not carrying the umbrella!”

“
I
will carry the umbrella.” The dad’s voice.

Who said, “I didn’t bring the ball so no way am I going to carry it.”

“Who brought the ball?”

“You said to bring the ball. You carry the ball.” They were moving away. Stacey was back for whatever it was that Charley had been supposed to carry. Charley was crying.

Samson listened. They were gone? The rolled-up shirt under his neck barely tilted his head so that Samson’s view was empty sky.

Little Stewy had asked his dad, “How do you do the sky?” The boy was drawing a seascape—ocean with waves, boat with sail, and a sun with rays in the white paper gap between the blue of the ocean and the blue sky he had crayoned along the top edge of the paper: Stewy knew that wasn’t right and he asked, “How far down does the sky come?” His father said, “Why sweet boy, you know heaven is everywhere around you.” But it wasn’t. Stewy put out his hand and it did not meet any blue, and there was no white paper.

That evening Samson lay on the beach, on his back, looked upward into the golden blue air, and thought about Stewy’s question.

He knew there were people behind him and that they were passing from left to right. The air cooled unpleasantly on his heated flesh.

A little boy jumped over Samson’s legs. He wore navy swim trunks with tiny white whales. The boy ran back and jumped
again. The father and mother looked back and told him to “Stop it and say sorry to the gentleman.”

“I can’t move,” Sam said to the child, who saw saliva bubble out of the grown man’s mouth and ran after his parents and pulled on their hands to make them keep walking.

There was a star to look at. Sam looked at it. There was a second star, a number of stars.

“I can’t move,” he meant to shout up the bare young legs like slim young trees that multiplied into a running forest past his right side. All night Sam was going to feel the ghost of the spray of sand he couldn’t lift his hand to brush from the corner near his eye. The girl had looked down, hesitated—would have stopped if the man’s hand, interlocked with hers, had not drawn her onward into the waves, which were suddenly right here. Samson thought, I’m going to drown. It was the first but not the only time in the night on the empty beach that his upturned face crumpled, and the tears, having nowhere to flow off, collected in his eye and fractured his vision like the rain on a windshield.

He resented the chill, and having nothing to cover him.

Samson was going to cheat boredom, going to chart the blue air’s incremental darkening and graying. Samson meant to watch change happen, but he kept forgetting to watch, and the gray was blacker, was already black, nor did Sam, lying on his back on the empty beach, ever once catch change in the act.

His piece of heaven was peppered with the stars which he had never cared to know by name and they did nothing,
now, to entertain him. The first wave licked his foot to the ankles and retired. He waited for the next assault, waited, waited, waited. The shock of the wet cold on sun-cooked flesh had been unpleasant. For the second time he wept. The next wave shocked him by lapping his knee, retreated and immediately returned. Help me! Had he been able to turn his head he could have looked for the girl with the running legs and the man. In which direction had they gone? Disappeared? Was he alone on the expanse of the night beach to his right and left?

Help me!

It never got so black that the small clouds didn’t show a deeper black. The cold wet slapped and kept slapping his groin. You cannot, it turns out, panic for hours on end. Later he thought nothing and must have slept because he woke drowning, swallowing, coughing water, opened his mouth to shout and swallowed more water and drowned again and again.

Samson Gorewitz lay in exquisite discomfort, radically chilled, exhausted, without expectations on the empty beach. Off and on he wept and did not care to know how the sky lightened incrementally to gray to silver.