A little past eleven o’clock he took the score and walked over to St. Timothy’s to continue working at the organ. He was just coming up the walk to the parish house when the door opened and one of the curates hurried down the steps.
“Ah, here you are, Holt,” he said. “That’s good. There is someone asking for you on the telephone in the office.”
“The telephone!” Randall stopped, almost gaping. He had scarcely ever used a telephone and could not imagine being called to it. Unless something should be wrong with Seymour? Grew and Minturn had a telephone, he knew, so did most business offices; but he was bewildered. He hurried into the Secretary’s office and picked up the receiver hanging by its wire from the brown box on the wall.
“Yes?” he said nervously. “Yes?”
“Hello? Is that Mr. Randall Holt?” A man was speaking.
“Yes. I am Randall Holt.” He wondered if the man could hear him. He heard clearly, to his amazement. The man said, “This is the Ansonia Hotel, Mr. Holt. The manager’s office.”
Randall’s pulse began to pound; he felt as if it must drown out his hearing and he strained to listen.
“Yes,” he said again. “Yes, what is it?”
“It’s about Miss Renata Tosi, Mr. Holt. She is very ill here.”
“But she sailed for Italy yesterday,” said Randall stupidly.
“She was to have sailed. She could not leave. She was able to give us your name when we—ah—asked for—”
“Is she dead?” Randall had no idea what he was saying.
“No, no, I’m sorry if I alarmed you. But she is very ill, as I said. We were going to notify someone at the opera house but she insisted we send for you.”
“I’ll be right there. I’m coming at once.” Randall dropped the telephone receiver and turned away in a daze. He went out to the street and ran to the nearest cab stand, leaped into a cab and shouted at the man to hurry. All the way uptown he sat on the edge of the seat twisting his hands together and trying to make sense of what he had heard. Was she all alone? Had she had no care? What was the matter with her? Where was Baldini?
When he entered her room with the hotel manager, it was dimmed by drawn blinds, but he saw the disorder of last-minute packing, the open trunks and valises which he had imagined on Sunday. He walked quickly round the screen in the corner and stood rigid, terrified at the change in Renata. He saw that she had been hideously sick, and he would have quailed at the vile odor around her but for his greater concern at seeing how she looked. She lay on her right side, absolutely still. Her face was ghastly, very pale, her cheekbones jutting sharply, her eyes wide open but sunken. Her legs appeared to be drawn up beneath the bedclothes, and her hands, usually so firm and smooth, looked like white claws picking spasmodically at the soiled sheet. Randall bent and touched her forehead timidly. It was dry and burning. He heard her breathing queerly, as if she dared not use her lungs. He kept his hand lightly on her forehead, amazed that in spite of her condition she was not unconscious; she recognized him. Her lips moved a little and he thought she spoke his name, but he shook his head, trying to give her a reassuring smile. He knew nothing of illness, but it took no knowledge to see that she should not try to speak. But she fixed him with her brown, staring eyes and said faintly, “Paura. Ho tanta paura.” Her mouth went down in a grimace of terror; then she stiffened in a spasm of pain.
“Don’t be frightened, Renata,” he whispered. “Just try to be quiet. I’m so glad you sent for me, everything will be all right.” Even while he spoke he felt swamped with helplessness; how could he know what to do about all this! “I have the frighten,” she muttered stiffly. “Frighten. No ospedale.”
“Just be still,” he whispered. “Please, Renata, dear. I’m going to take care of you.” He must get to that wonderful telephone. “Will you just lie perfectly still and try not to worry for a minute? Please!” He smiled at her and gently pushed the tangled mass of her hair back over the pillow. “Just five minutes.”
“Oh! i dolori,” she moaned. “I will die.”
“No, no.” He shook his head gently and put his finger on his lips. “I’m just going to telephone,” he said. “Only a minute.”
There was no time now to ask the hotel people questions. He slipped from the room and stood for a moment in the corridor trying to decide what to do. He had never dealt with illness, but Seymour had. He could ask Seymour what to do. Then he realized that Seymour would get hold of Doctor Slade, and he could save time by doing that himself. He had once sworn never to speak to Doctor Slade again, but that was nonsense. The manager took him to a telephone in a little cupboard down the hall, and in an instant somebody told him, “We have Doctor Kenneth Slade on the wire.”
Slade listened to Randall’s description of Renata’s condition and said, “I’ll send John Whitby up immediately. This isn’t my sort of thing, you know, and somebody must get there at once. Don’t let anybody touch her and above all, don’t move her.”
“Oh, thank you.” Randall tried to get his breath. But he was so upset that he blurted, “Couldn’t you come too, Doctor? I’m so—I don’t know anything about this. I’m—” he was almost in tears.
“Very well. We’ll both come. But do nothing meanwhile.”
In the hall Randall asked the manager how long he had known about Renata.
“Only an hour ago, that was the first we knew about it. I had our house physician up here then. Yesterday morning we were told she wasn’t well and had put off her sailing for a week. We heard nothing more from her room and of course we thought she was resting. This morning the maid found her like this and when I brought up the doctor, he said she must be taken to a hospital at once. But she was terrified. I’ve never seen such fear. That was when she asked for you.”
The two doctors arrived almost immediately. While Doctor Whitby was examining Renata, Randall tried to explain to Doctor Slade who she was.
“Just a professional acquaintance. I see.”
“Well—yes.” Randall tried to bear that out. “But she hasn’t got anybody in this country and she’s terribly frightened, Doctor. I said—well, I mean, I want to take care of her.”
Whitby came from the patient. He looked very dubious.
“Peritonitis, of course,” he said. He glanced meaningly at Slade. “No time to lose. I’ll go and telephone.”
“You will take her to the hospital?” asked Randall.
“If we don’t!—where’s the telephone?” Randall showed him and came back to Doctor Slade who was standing looking down at Renata. She lay as before, even more ghastly pale, and from time to time she whispered, “I have the frighten. Very frighten to die in ospedale.”
Randall tried to quiet her. Slade beckoned him outside the screen. He started to take his leave, since there was nothing for him to do. But Randall said, “Oh, please, Doctor. What really is the matter? What are they going to do?” They moved away out of earshot of the bed. Slade explained. “She has a burst appendix. It may even be too late to operate, but that’s the only thing they can do.”
“Then will you tell them at the hospital that I want her to have—” Randall took a deep breath. “You know, what you’d do for us. Don’t let them put her in a ward or anything like that.”
“You can have what you ask for, Randall. But if you put her in a private room, with all the special nursing she will need, it’s going to cost you a lot of money.”
“I don’t care. I can pay it.”
“Very well.” Slade smiled kindly. “I’ll see to it.” Probably, he thought, it will not cost so much because I’ll be surprised if the woman is alive tomorrow.
“She’s so terribly frightened,” said Randall again. “About the hospital.”
“All foreigners are like that,” said Slade. “They think any hospital is the pest-house where they are just sent to die.”
“Then I’ll try to explain to her that it’s different here.”
Whitby came back to the room, saying, “They’re on the way. I’
ll go straight over now and start getting ready. You realize,” he said to Randall, “her condition is grave. Very doubtful, I can’t promise anything.”
Randall nodded slowly, his eyes wide and strained. Whitby said, leaving the room with Slade, “Keep her exactly as she is until they get here. It will only be a few minutes.”
“Shall I go along in the ambulance?”
“Better not. There won’t be room, there’s an extra nurse coming.” He nodded quickly at Randall and hurried away.
Renata had not moved when Randall went back to her. She was still muttering her terror and repeating in Italian, “I don’t want to die in a hospital. Don’t let them send me to a hospital.”
Randall bent close to her and gently took her burning hands, their fingers still picking weakly at the sheet.
“Let me try to explain, Renata,” he said softly. “Our hospitals here are not dreadful places. Please believe me—please.” He touched her forehead carefully. “We are never afraid of a hospital, everybody goes to them in America. Truly.”
She stared in pitiful apprehension. Her lips moved again, but he said, “Don’t try to speak. I just want you to believe me. You’ll be safe and comfortable there. They’ll take the most wonderful care of you.” He had a sudden gruesome vision of a place to fit Doctor Slade’s word, ‘pest-house’, and he said, “This isn’t a big horrible public place, Renata, dear. American hospitals are entirely different. You’ll have a nice quiet room by yourself and you’ll see, the nurses will take such good care of you. You couldn’t have such care anywhere else, do you understand?”
He could not tell whether he had relieved her mind at all. But he tried to smile encouragement and keep her soothed for the few moments until the door opened and the ambulance staff arrived, noiseless and swift and efficient. When Renata saw them Randall realized that his reassurance had done some good; nobody could be afraid of the calm, smiling young white-clad doctor and the nurses in their starched uniforms and smart blue-and-scarlet capes. Renata was wrapped in blankets and on her way down the hall on a stretcher in less than five minutes, and as they carried her into the elevator Randall stood nearby and said, “I’ll be there in a little while, Renata. You’ll see, everything I told you is true.”
He went back to her room, dazed and bewildered. Mechanically he looked at his watch. It was a little past one o’clock, a bare two hours since he had been called to that telephone in the parish house. He sat down slowly on the edge of a chair and looked at the mess around him and tried to make himself believe that he had not dreamed all this. The last feeling that he remembered was a mixture of sadness and relief because Renata had sailed for Italy; and now he had become the one person in the United States who was responsible for her. He could not believe it and he sat there shaking his head. Presently the hotel manager came in, and once again Randall was faced with details and decisions that he had no idea how to resolve. But something had to be done about Renata’s possessions, and with the help of a maid he did it. They rounded up all the things which remained unpacked and strewn about the room, and the maid packed them. When she had nearly finished, Randall stepped into the bathroom to see whether she had overlooked anything. On the shelf above the basin he saw an empty medicine bottle labelled Castor Oil, and the mashed halves of a sucked lemon. Poor girl, he thought, I’d hate to have taken all that castor oil, but he was so ignorant of illness that he had no idea that this had precipitated the disaster.
He went down to the office to pay Renata’s account, but he was told that it had been paid on Monday morning and for a week in advance besides. Well, he thought, Baldini didn’t go off without doing what he could for her; he expected her to come along on the next ship. He accepted the refund due from the hotel and then, when the clerk asked what was to be done with Miss Tosi’s luggage, he had no idea what to answer.
“Knabe’s will come anyway to take back their piano,” said the clerk, “but where are the trunks to be sent?”
Randall could think of no other place, so he gave his own address. Then he tipped the hotel staff who had helped him and went out and got into a cab and hurried off to the hospital.
CHAPTER 12
He had refused to listen to the doctors and nurses who told him to go home and get some rest, and long past eleven o’clock that night he was still sitting in the visitors’ room, his head in his hands. He heard someone come in and felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up. The surgeon, Doctor Whitby, was standing there, pale and exhausted. Randall got slowly to his feet and murmured, “Is it—she—?” He was afraid of words.
Whitby shook his head, but not reassuringly. “She is still alive,” he said. “But it’s going badly. I can’t deceive you, Mr. Holt. I don’t have to tell you we’re doing our utmost. These cases, most of them—”
“Doctor Slade warned me too.”
“Well, it’s better that you understand. Frankly, I think you ought to go home and try to get some sleep. I’m spending the night in the hospital and if there’s any change either way I’ll telephone you.”
“We haven’t a telephone, Doctor. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather wait here. I’m all right, really I am.”
“Well, do as you choose. If you want to lie down on the sofa there, I’ll have someone bring you a blanket. I wish I could give you some hope.”
“Oh, you’ve been wonderful. I just—” Randall stopped speaking, overcome by shyness. He should not bother this man with his own feelings. But the surgeon smiled in spite of his fatigue and said, “What? Say it.”
Randall swallowed. He said, “It’s just that—if she can’t pull through I wouldn’t want her to be all alone. She was so afraid of that.” He felt that he sounded silly and added quickly, “Of course, I suppose she is unconscious, she wouldn’t really know …”
“Not unconscious. But somnolent and extremely weak. You try to rest for a while now. There may not be any change for a long time.” He thought better of saying that a change would almost surely come before dawn; and for the worst. He smiled wearily and went away.
Randall dozed brokenly on the hard horsehair sofa. But much of the night he prowled round and round the stiffly impersonal room, dark except for one heavily-shaded electric light bulb. Sometimes he heard the muffled footsteps of nurses up and down the corridor; then he went and stood at the open door waiting for someone to come and tell him that Renata was dead. But nobody came near him. He knew which door was Renata’s, he could see it down the hall, and the silent nurses and internes who went in and out carrying things swathed in white covers. By three o’clock he was wide awake and standing most of the time in the doorway, watching down the hall. As long as they were still doing something, he told himself, she could not yet have died.
He left the door and threw himself into a chair and sat staring at the dun-colored wall, trying to relate this experience to the Renata of the laughter and teasing and mischief, the funny English, the flippancy, the maddening refusal to be serious. He tried to summon up the emotions which had kept him in a turmoil about her for a fortnight past, but he could feel nothing at all. That Renata could just as well have sailed away to Italy. All he knew now was a crushing degree of concern that the woman dying in the room down the hall somehow not be allowed to die. Every idea apart from that had been swept from his mind as if a hand had dragged a cloth from a laden table, leaving it bare. Once tonight he had had a passing thought for Seymour, who might have wondered where he was, but that too had vanished into unreality.
He fell at last into another sleep, which he did not know until he found himself on his feet, rubbing his eyes. Doctor Whitby was standing before him and the sky was light behind the roof of the clinic across the street. Randall said nothing, he waited for the doctor. Whitby said soberly, “No change. But I am really surprised.” He took out his watch and said, “It’s nearly seven o’clock, you see. I wouldn’t have dared believe it.”
“Do you think—”
“Let’s not think anything, Mr. Holt. She’s still hanging
on. That’s enough for the moment. I must say, those Italians have iron constitutions.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” said Randall. “That’s wonderful.”
“You really should go home now and get some rest,” said the doctor. “You can’t stay here twenty-four hours a day, you know.”
“Very well.” Randall looked at him with such pleading, plainly not daring to ask, that the doctor said, “You wanted to ask if you could see her?”
“Not unless you think so, Doctor.”
“Well, I don’t see why not. Only for a moment, of course. Just let her see you’re here.”
They walked down the hall to the closed door. The doctor opened it and motioned Randall into the room. The nurse moved from her chair beside the bed and Randall walked over on tiptoe and looked at Renata. She looked much as she had yesterday, but her eyes were closed. Her hands were hidden by the bed-covers drawn up to her chin, and her face against the white sheet was a dreadful yellowish grey. Randall could not see that she was breathing. He looked round at the doctor, and was surprised that he stepped forward and said, “Miss Tosi. Miss Tosi.” He was not afraid to rouse her! Randall watched and saw her eyelids tremble and roll heavily open in their sunken sockets. Her eyes were dull and stunned. Randall leaned forward and looked at her, hoping to make sure she could see him. Her eyelids fluttered again. Her lips were grey and dry. He saw her nostrils flatten in a difficult breath. He managed to smile, and he said softly, “It’s all right, Renata. You see, I told you it would be all right here. You’re going to be all right.”
My Brother's Keeper Page 25