The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (18 page)

    CHAPTER TEN

   
The hospital’s
sprawling lawn and long circular driver reminded him of the retreat
house on Staten Island. But the building itself was white rather
than the dark English stone the former novitiate was made of. He
parked his car in the neatly-lined lot (pay-as-you-leave) and
entered the lobby through revolving doors that responded to the
lightest touch.

   
It was not quite
visiting hours, but when they saw his roman collar the nurses made
no objection to his being on the floor. One of them even
accompanied him down the hall, reminding him by her accent of the
distance he had covered that afternoon. When he reached the room,
he thought at first she must have made a mistake, because the
elderly figure asleep in there was clearly not his mother. Then he
saw that the room was divided by a gray curtain. When he stepped
cautiously around it he found a luxuriantly white-haired stranger
seated on the other side. The woman lying there was indeed his
mother, however pale, the lines of her face radically
rearranged—from illness, he thought at first, then realized that he
was just not used to seeing her on her back.

   “
Hello,
Mother.”

   
He started to
approach her from the curtain side of the bed, but that proved
awkward, so he had to squeeze past her elderly visitor whose chair
was nearly flush against the wall. When he reached the head of the
bed he kissed her. She didn’t move.

   “
How are you
feeling?”

   
Her mouth
inclined upward. The white hospital gown lay flat against her chest
where the bed sheet had been neatly turned down. Her eyes moved
toward the man beside her. When she finally spoke her voice was
weak and hoarse. The rasp was startling, but not as much as the
fact that her hand was securely in the grasp of her white-haired
visitor.

   
Up close, the
man’s face seemed less ancient than it had when Father Walther
first entered the room. There were plenty of lines on it, but the
skin was weathered and tanned in a way that he realized must seem
handsome to a woman his mother’s age.

   “
Sidney, this is
my son.”

   “
We spoke on the
phone,” Small replied, offering his left, free hand. “I’ve heard a
great deal about you, Father.”

   
It was hard to
believe this was the same confused and frightened old man who had
summoned him earlier that afternoon. He did his best to return the
man’s smile, but refused to let him give up his chair, although the
offer was clearly made for form’s sake because the dark, heavily
creased hand did not for a second let go of his
mother’s.

   “
I’m glad to
meet you, Mr. Small.”

   “
Sid,” the man
replied with a glance at Mrs. Walther, “please.”

   
For the second
time Father Walther asked his mother how she felt. Small pointed to
his own throat and volunteered that earlier she had had some tubes
in her.

   “
Have the
doctors made a diagnosis?”

   “
They think it
may have been some sort of transitory phenomenon.” The man’s
carefully modulated voice might have belonged to someone decades
younger. “Perhaps a temporary lack of blood to the brain,” he added
as if such an event were of no great moment.

   “
Did they say
how long they want to keep her?”

   
Father Walther
wanted to remind the old fellow of the wild panic he had
communicated earlier that day. Did the man think he would have
interrupted an already much-delayed vacation and drive three
hundred miles non-stop if he thought his mother had merely
experienced a bit of lightheadedness?

   “
A couple days,”
Small replied, toning down his grin when he noticed the priest’s
severe expression. “I think they want to run some tests. Just to
make sure.”

   
His mother was
wearing a sheepish grin entirely inappropriate to her age. Her
short hair had an unaccustomed tint. It had never occurred to him
that she might dye her hair. He knew plenty of older women did, as
was evident at any meeting of the Rosary Society. He found nothing
shocking about the practice there, although some of the shades they
came up with—gunmetal blue, sunset pink—seemed a bit much. But
somehow the idea that his mother had altered the dusty white he had
assumed to be her natural color seemed tantamount to his learning
that she wore artificial breasts.

   “
Will you be
staying at my place, Richard?” she said with difficulty.

   “
Unless that
would be awkward, Mother.”

   
He didn’t know
what policy the housing project’s management had about guests
sleeping over in the absence of the legal tenant. But under the
circumstances he couldn’t imagine anyone objecting.

   
Small abruptly
rose from his seat.

   “
I think you
should rest now, Katherine.”

   
She swallowed
with difficulty, then nodded up at his bronze face. Father Walther
could not recall her ever responding to a suggestion of his
father’s with such equanimity.

   “
Perhaps we
should leave her, Father.”

   
But he was not
about to be dismissed from his mother’s bedside by someone he had
never laid eyes on until that afternoon. When Small realized that
the priest intended to stay, he reached for a white Panama hat on
the window sill. Then he took the patient’s hand and squeezed
it.

   
After he had
gone Father Walther said, “I just wanted to ask if there was
anything you wanted me to take care of—at the
apartment.”

   
His mother
smiled, not the tired but contented smile she had managed for
Sidney Small, but a fatigued, impatient grimace.

   “
No.
Nothing.”

   “
Well,” he said,
reaching for her hand as if he were on a routine sick call,
“perhaps you should rest.”

   
He waited a few
moments for a response that never came, then he kissed her forehead
again. Her eyes were half closed. Partway to the door he turned and
saw that she was already asleep.

   
He made a mental
note to call her doctor. But despite the absence of a diagnosis, he
was less concerned than he had been when he first arrived at the
hospital. All he had had to go on then was Sidney Small’s nervous
account of her collapse and hospitalization, plus the nursing
staff’s cryptic assurances on the phone. The presence of a man at
her bedside, holding her hand, was another matter entirely. He had
assumed that Small was a neighbor, one of the couple hundred old
people who shared the senior citizen’s project. But he had never
come upon anyone like Sidney Small in the corridors of that
building. The men he had seen there—what few males there were in
contrast to the abundance of elderly females—were decrepit by
comparison. The healthier ones hung out in the lobby. His mother
had never shown anything but contempt for them. She said they were
just a bunch of old geezers and if she were looking for male
companionship, which she was not, she would hardly do so among
their like.

   
He considered
his mother to be still an attractive woman, but he had not sensed
the need for a man in her life. Indeed, she had seemed remarkably
self-sufficient. Once she got over the loss of his father she
seemed to adjust well to the role of single older woman, devoting
herself to her fellow tenants and to the activities of her parish.
But it was neither a proudly independent woman nor a woman
disinterested in the attentions of the opposite sex that he had
just visited. The person in that hospital room was not, in fact,
one he totally recognized. He could not help but wonder how much of
her transformation was due to illness and how much to her richly
tanned friend.

   
As he exited the
hospital elevator he was still mulling over Sidney Small’s presence
when, like the thought made flesh, the man suddenly
materialized.

   “
Hello, Father,”
he said, rising from a clutch of beige chairs near a bank of
artificial ferns in the hospital lobby. He looked almost theatrical
in his cream-colored suit and brown-and-white shoes. His dark tan
and thick mane of white hair completed the illusion of the Southern
country gentleman.

   
He shifted his
Panama hat from one hand to the other and took a tentative step
forward.

   “
I thought we
might have a little chat,” he said. “About your mother.”

   
His perfect
teeth gleamed appealingly, but the priest sensed a flaw in the
confidence he had exhibited earlier.

   “
Of course,”
Father Walther replied, eyeing the beige furniture.

   “
I know a nice
restaurant not far from here. I don’t know if you’ve had supper
yet...”

   “
I’d love to eat
something.”

   “
Shall we take
my car? Your own will be quite safe here for an hour or
two.”

   “
You know, I
wasn’t quite sure what to expect—how you would react to my being
there with your mother.”

   
Small had been
steadily winding down since their encounter in the hospital lobby.
Now, behind the wheel of his own car— a yellow Cadillac with an
interior the same shade as his suit—he was becoming expansive. “Of
course, Catherine speaks of you a great deal,” he went on, showing
his store-bought teeth. “I don’t suppose she mentioned me,
though.”

   
Father Walther
admitted she hadn’t, suggesting that perhaps their friendship was
so recent that she hadn’t had the chance.

   “
Actually, we
met in June. We were both attending the same concert in Symphony
Woods.”    

   “
You live in
Columbia?”    

   “
Just outside.
Near Ellicott City. Do you know where that is?”

   
Father Walther
did indeed. His mother liked to attend Sunday Mass in Ellicott
City. The liturgy in her own parish was too contemporary to suit
her. There was also a bakery in Ellicott City that made the same
kind of rolls and crumb cake they used to buy in their old parish
in New Jersey. Loading up on white-mountain rolls when he visited
had become almost as much of a ritual as attending Mass.

   “
I think your
mother was a little concerned about how you might react to her
having a...well, gentleman friend.”

   “
Why should I
object?” Father Walther replied, realizing that if it had not been
for his mother’s sudden illness, there was no telling how long she
might have kept Sidney Small a secret.

   “
Well, I suppose
she might have worried how you would react to her taking an
interest in a man who was...well, not your father.”

   “
My mother has a
right to lead her own life, Mr. Small.”

   “’
Sid’,
please.”

   “
Naturally, I’m
concerned about her. But I can’t dictate who she chooses for her
friends. I can only hope they have her best interests at
heart.”

   “
That’s just
what I hoped you would say, Father. And let me tell you, you can
rest assured,” he said, removing one hand from the steering wheel
and extending it toward the priest’s knee before thinking better of
the gesture, “I have nothing but your mother’s best interests at
heart.”

   
The restaurant
Small had in mind was one of those baroque eateries Father Walther
was already familiar with from Bergen County: dark interior, heavy
furniture and a salad bar loaded with everything from chick peas to
shrimp.

   “
Will this be
alright?” Small asked as he opened a menu with a wing span the
width of the table. “I actually prefer the ethnic restaurants in
Baltimore, as does you mother. But I figured if you didn’t have any
supper yet you wouldn’t want to travel that far.”

   
Father Walther
ordered chopped steak. Small ordered fish. “Have to watch my
cholesterol.”

   
The priest
declined to order a cocktail and, even though he encouraged his
dinner partner to go ahead and have one, Small also declined. But
when his fish arrived he asked the waitress to bring him a glass of
white wine. “For the digestion.”

   
Sidney Small was
not a type familiar to the social circles Father Walther moved in.
He could not imagine any of his parishioners going around in a
cream-colored linen suit or a Panama hat. The men of the K of C
were strictly Banlon types. His own father had never worn a tie
unless he was going to work or to church and did not, to the best
of his son’s knowledge, own a single colored shirt. Father Walther
also assumed that Small was Jewish. He didn’t know what to make of
that. The only Jews he knew were tradesmen. There had been no Jews
in the town where he grew up.

   “
Are you...busy
in the summer?” his dinner companion asked.

   “
It lets up.
School’s out. People go on vacation.”

   “
I almost
forgot, you’re on vacation yourself. Do you usually spend it in the
Catskills?”

   “
Usually. This
year things were...disrupted.”

   
Small frowned,
perhaps regretting the phone call that had summoned the priest down
to Maryland in the first place. But then his brow
relaxed.