Three Women (7 page)

Now Madeline finally came to the door, opening it an inch on its chain. “Beverly, what are you doing on the floor? Did you hit her? What's going on?”

“She's been mugged in her apartment, I bet. Look, she's in her nightgown. We have to call the police. It's like that poor woman on 108th.”

Beverly tried to tell them that she was having a stroke. Madeline bent close to her. “Look at her face. It's all twisted.”

Mrs. Kim called 911. Mao came creeping out, but Madeline saw him and shut him in her own apartment. Madeline and Mrs. Kim ventured into Beverly's apartment, Madeline holding her cane and Mrs. Kim brandishing a kitchen knife. “There's nobody in here. No windows open.”

It was as if she were already dead and a ghost. She could hear them, she could understand them, she could think clearly what she wanted to say, but she could not make her tongue speak the words. She had become far more mute than Mao, who was pretty good at making his needs known. She was a piece of furniture, a sack of flesh lying on the floor. She began to weep quietly with frustration. The tears ran over her face and onto the floor.

The police figured out she was having a stroke and called an ambu
lance. She was only half conscious, but she was relieved when finally she was carried into the rickety elevator to be taken downstairs. She was terrified, but at last she was off the floor. Doctors dealt with strokes all the time. Lots of people her age had strokes. They would fix her up at the hospital.

Suzanne

Suzanne had been in court all day. Her client's suit against the Dedham Police Department was in its second week, while colleagues were covering her classes. She was planning to wind up today. When the secretary from the law school appeared in the courtroom, Suzanne was startled. The woman passed a note to the court officer, who glanced at it and passed it to Suzanne.

She stared at the note. “Are you sure?” she mouthed.

The secretary nodded. Suzanne asked to approach the bench. She showed the judge the note. He frowned. “How old is your mother?”

“She's seventy…two.”

“Can anyone take over for you?”

“Yes, Your Honor.” She motioned to the defense table, where Marta was sitting. “I'm finishing in perhaps half an hour. Let me do that and then I can try to find out what's happened.”

“It sounds as if what has happened is perfectly clear.”

“If we could adjourn until Monday, I would be able to fly down and see my mother.”

The judge motioned the police department's counsel forward. “I don't have any objection to the delay. Do you, Counsel?”

She called the hospital from her car phone. “Mrs. Blume is in intensive care. Are you a family member?”

“I'm her daughter.”

“I thought her daughter was in today…. No, I see that was her granddaughter. She has had a stroke, but she's conscious now.”

She packed in fifteen minutes, left instructions with Elena, and ran upstairs. Jim was sitting at his computer. He saw clients three days a week and the rest of the time he worked on his book
Shafted and Beyond: A Manual for Those Rendered Superfluous in Middle Age
. He had a book contract with a small publisher of self-help books and had been working on the manuscript for two years. She told him the situation and asked him to keep an eye on things downstairs. “But don't you think Elena will manage?” He swung around in his swivel chair and faced her, leaning back, every bit of his posture indicating a willingness to be interrupted, to talk about her situation.

“Just in case.” She did not take the seat he beckoned her to. Her time was tight.

Jim was a tall, rangy man with an intense smile and the capacity to brood for weeks. His hair was light brown and his eyes such a pale blue they looked silver. She liked him, although she considered him vain, but her real relationship was with Marta. Jim was an appendage. They rarely had a private conversation. They got on, but they did not truly know each other in spite of having lived in the same house for twelve years. It was amazing, Suzanne thought, how much time you could spend with someone and never actually get personal with them. “You and Beverly have a rather fraught relationship, as I recall.”

Recall? He had visited Beverly last week. He was getting into therapist mode. She began to feel a time panic. “Listen, Jim, I really have to get out of here.” She was never comfortable when Jim switched into his therapist role, and right now she could not deal with it.

“I care about Beverly,” he said, leaning forward to indicate a change of focus. “She's a strong, vibrant woman. Let us know how she is, please. If you need help down there, I could juggle my schedule and drive down.”

She thanked him and tore downstairs. Her supper consisted of a yogurt eaten standing and a tangerine she peeled while waiting for the shuttle. Her stomach was clenched on itself, sore, knotted. All those
years of smoking. How many times had she begged Beverly to quit? How many articles had she sent her? Books on the tobacco conspiracy, hoping that politics might succeed where health facts failed. Beverly ate fatty foods, fast foods, processed meats, fruit, yes, but almost no vegetables.

Yet Beverly was such a vital woman, opinionated, energetic, stubborn, independent, and feisty, an elegant woman, still attractive. She caught colds every winter that sometimes went into her lungs, but she had never had a serious illness. Beverly always said, “I'm too busy to get sick.” Suzanne could not imagine what she would find. Was her mother dying? She knew nothing about strokes, imagining lightning striking the brain. A charred smell. Fire and devastation within.

She went straight from La Guardia to the hospital. At first they would not let her see Beverly. She did find out that the stroke had occurred the night before and that a neighbor had called the ambulance. She sat in the small lounge with its air of general tackiness and anxiety soaked into the worn upholstery and the wan carpeting, crowded with other individuals and family groups waiting for word, for a little time with their people in intensive care. It was as if each person or little group was inside a glass box of their own fear, unable to see each other or speak a word across the room.

Rachel walked in. They hugged each other fiercely. Suzanne kept herself from crying by making faces into Rachel's shoulder. Rachel too was taller than Suzanne, but not as tall as Elena, with a mane of curly light brown hair. Rachel drew away to call her attention to a young man. “Mother, this is Michael.”

Shifting gears abruptly, Suzanne looked him over. A slight, almost wispy man, he had a firm handshake. Probably worked on that. “Do you know each other from school?”

Rachel nodded. “We've been seeing each other since late September.”

So why didn't you mention him? Usually Rachel told her more details of her life than Suzanne could absorb, so why had Rachel held back? Michael seemed to be Jewish, he seemed intact and functional, so what did her silence mean? Suzanne filed away that query for later. “You've seen Beverly?”

Rachel nodded. “It's awful. She can't talk. Her right side is partly paralyzed.”

Rachel knew exactly what had happened, including the names of the two neighbors who had found and helped Beverly. Finally the nurse told Suzanne that she might go in to see her mother for fifteen minutes. She felt like shouting a protest that she had not come all the way from Boston to see her mother for fifteen minutes.

In the hospital bed, Beverly looked like a broken doll. Her right arm lay on top of the covers as if discarded there. Her face drooped. Her mouth twitched but no words came out. Yet Suzanne could tell that her mother recognized her. Beverly attempted to speak but produced only muddy gurgles. Suzanne felt her chest tearing open with grief and pity. She took Beverly's limp right hand. The left hand moved over to stroke her arm. Suzanne fought back tears, bit down on her cheeks to keep from losing control. She was terrified for Beverly, who looked half dead. Were the doctors doing enough? She was just lying there with tubes in her. She must ask them if there wasn't some sort of operation, something that could be done.

Her mother was definitely there, conscious. She could feel the intellect behind her mother's green eyes. “Mother,” Suzanne said. “If I could only find out if there's anything you need me to do for you.”

Her mother was stroking her arm. No, not stroking. Suzanne looked at the finger.
M
. Beverly was sketching an
M
. Suzanne scrabbled in her bag for a pen and a bit of paper and put them in her mother's still functioning left hand. However, Beverly was right-handed. Still Beverly dug at the piece of paper with the pen.
M
again.

“
M
, Mother? What's
M
?”

A jagged A. A crooked
O
. “Mao. Your cat. You want me to find out what's happened to your cat?”

Beverly nodded.

“Ah, you can move your head yes and no. That's great.” She felt an enormous flood of relief. At least there was some communication possible. “You can understand what I say?”

There was familiar irritation in that vehement nod.

“When they kick me out, I'll go to your apartment. How will I get in? Will the super let me in?”

Beverly traced a
P
on her arm.

“
P?
Postman? Pills?”

Beverly groaned. She traced a
U
, then an
R
.

“Purse? Your purse?” Suzanne felt absurd. They were playing twenty questions, a children's game she had played with Aunt Karla many times. She could see from Beverly's furious expression on the side of her face still expressive that her mother was aware of the absurdity and hated it. Beverly had always been a formidable presence to Suzanne, judgmental, opinionated, and always in her own way, elegant. A small woman like Suzanne, but not a woman who felt small in her manner, her impact, her bearing. Suzanne had always felt she was a disappointment to her mother, who combined militancy with style. Even at seventy-two, Beverly remained a flirt, a charmer. Nobody in their right mind would ever call Suzanne flirtatious or charming. She was capable. She was organized. Her intellect was far more honed than her mother's. She was successful. But in her mother's presence, she felt awkward, lumpy, unadorned. Plain but serviceable. The woman in the bed was a parody of her mother, but Beverly was present, trapped behind that ghastly grimace, that twisted face and limp body. Suzanne felt guilty she had not returned her mother's call. When Elena had told her that Beverly needed a check for some tenants' strike, Suzanne had been miffed. She had plenty of expenses and causes without needing her mother to put the bite on her. She should have called back anyhow.

She searched the room and the purse turned up. Indeed, the keys to Beverly's apartment were inside. “I'll stay in your apartment tonight.”

Beverly nodded.

“Is there anything else you need?”

Beverly threw up her left hand in a helpless gesture. A tear rolled down her cheek from her left eye. The nurse appeared. “Now, time for our little patient to get some rest.”

Suzanne could not endure hearing Beverly referred to in such a condescending way. “Please. My mother is a very able, highly intelligent woman. I want her to have the best care. I want her to have intensive rehabilitation.”

“I'm sure Dr. Weinstein is doing everything that can be done.” The nurse ushered her firmly out.

She had supper in the hospital cafeteria with Rachel and Michael, who were returning to Philadelphia that night. “But I'll come back. It's easy. We can even study on the train.” Rachel fussed over Michael as
he ate. She did everything but cut his meat for him, and she probably would have done that if he had eaten any. They both seemed to subsist on salads and juice. Of course, the food here wasn't kosher. Michael seemed to take being fussed over for granted. He liked it, obviously. She would never approve of the way her daughters behaved with men. Rachel had been involved with a few boyfriends previously, but this seemed different. She could not remember Rachel acting so possessive. In some ways they behaved more like an old married couple than like people who were just falling in love. She wondered sharply if they were living together, for they had a strikingly domestic air. Maybe that's why she'd had so much trouble getting Rachel on the phone in the last few months.

“Rachel, I didn't mean to offend you with Elena using your room. She's been evicted. She won't use the room off the kitchen. But her old room has been my law office for six years now. I can't move my stuff out. It's set up with the office equipment I need, my law library, my files. You know she isn't going to stay long. She doesn't like living with me one bit.”

“It's just so like her to take my room. What's wrong with the room off the kitchen? It even has its own bathroom.”

“She says I make too much noise in the mornings.”

“Ah, the princess Elena sleeps till noon….” Rachel grinned suddenly. “It's fine, Mother, really. I overreacted. Michael said I was being a baby. It isn't as if it's really my room any longer.” Rachel had the habit of suddenly breaking her own pouts and snapping to with a luminous smile. She had done that since she was eight or nine. It was a charming habit that always melted Suzanne. It was an enormous relief to focus on Rachel and her boyfriend for a few moments, to block out the condition of her mother's battered mind and body.

“It's your room whenever you want it, Rachel.”

“I mean, next year I won't even be in the country.” Rachel turned to beam at Michael.

Suzanne clenched her hands in her lap. She found the notion of her daughter in Israel a little too dangerous to enjoy contemplating. “The college is still planning to send you to Israel, in the middle of this crisis?”

“Mother, Israel is always in the middle of some crisis.”

Both future rabbis laughed. Suzanne did not.

After Rachel had left with Michael, Suzanne went back upstairs. She was permitted another fifteen minutes with her mother. It was even more frightening than before, for Beverly kept sinking into unconsciousness.

Then Suzanne took a taxi to the apartment where she had spent a night on the couch maybe fifty times over the past ten years. Mao greeted her hysterically. She supposed he remembered her and she also supposed he was frightened and lonely. The apartment smelled musty. She threw her overnight bag on the table and went to investigate. She took the trash and garbage to the incinerator and began to deal with dirty dishes in the sink. Someone had been feeding Mao but had not bothered washing his saucers.

She fed him again, fussed him up, and then went to talk to the neighbors. “You've got to do something about that cat,” Madeline, the neighbor who had been feeding him, said. “I'll call Animal Rescue for you.”

“Are you tired of feeding him?”

“He cries all the time. And he can't stay in that apartment alone. I'm not going to empty his shit, believe me. Just call the Animal Rescue people and they'll take care of him.”

“Execute him, you mean. I'll take him until she gets out of the hospital.”

Madeline shook her head. “She had a stroke, honey. Don't you get it? She'll never be herself. She can't even talk. She can't work anymore. How's she going to pay the rent?”