by Bina Bernard
“What are you doing?”
“Packing. You can leave me at the station.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“This is your weekend with Christy. I shouldn’t be here.” Hannah saw herself as an uninvited guest. She felt she had to leave. “I’ll take the next train back to New York.”
“You’re not going anywhere! Christy will be very glad you’re here. She’s always telling me how boring I am,” Robert said. Determined to make her stay, he playfully tried to force Hannah’s lips into a smile with one hand, as he emptied the contents of her bag back onto the bed with the other.
“I know you’re disappointed. I’d rather we had the entire weekend to ourselves. But the three of us will have a great time. We’ll have other weekends, just the two of us,” he assured her.
Finally, after admitting to herself she didn’t want to leave, Hannah said, “Okay. I’ll stay. It won’t be the same. But I have to admit I’ve missed Christy.”
Robert kissed the top of her head, and they both rushed to the car.
Christy was the only person at the deserted Amagansett train station. When she saw Hannah, she ran toward her.
“My teacher was very impressed,” she whispered in Hannah’s ear.
“What are you two females plotting?” Robert feigned displeasure.
“Nothing.” Christy sported her best Cheshire grin as she let herself be hugged by her father. She enjoyed sharing a secret with Hannah.
Later, back at the house, just as Robert started to unpack the groceries for their planned barbecue, the phone rang.
“Can you get that?” Robert yelled to Hannah. “Whoever it is, I’m not available.”
But the call was not for Robert.
“You have to come back right away!” Molly said, as soon as she heard Hannah’s voice. “I can’t take care of your father alone.” By her tone Hannah assumed Harry had taken a turn for the worse.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said.
Robert could see the tears in her eyes. “Who was that?”
“My mother. I have to go.”
“What’s going on?”
“Mother didn’t say. She just said I had to come back right away.”
“Hannah, you’re not a doctor. If Harry’s really sick, only a doctor can help him. Call her back and tell her you’ll be there tomorrow.”
“He’s his own doctor. He won’t let her call anyone.”
“But he let her call you.”
“I have to go. You didn’t hear the desperation in her voice,” Hannah said.
A cheerful Molly let Hannah into the apartment. It was not what she had expected. She was further startled to see her father at the piano picking out tunes and looking better than he had on Friday morning before she had left for the beach.
Harry was obviously surprised to see her.
“Weren’t you going away for the weekend?”
Hannah nodded. “Something came up,” she told her father, and glared at her mother who refused to make eye contact.
“How are you feeling?” Hannah asked her father as she walked into the living room.
“Good. Not great but better.”
“You’re looking better, too,” Hannah said. While she smiled at Harry, Hannah was seething. She suppressed the urge to scream at Molly. Hannah didn’t want to make a scene. Her mother was counting on that.
“I’m in need of a cup of tea,” she said, when she saw her mother going into the kitchen.
“Where’s the medical emergency you got me back here for?” Hannah demanded.
“Quiet. I don’t want your father to know I called you. I never said there was a medical emergency. I said I couldn’t take care of your father alone.”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Be here to spell me. That’s what a good daughter does.”
“What about what a good mother does?” Hannah shot back. Out of frustration, her anger had turned to tears. “You called me away from a wonderful weekend with my husband for no reason at all.”
“No reason! I had a whole winter of reasons you didn’t want to hear about. All you ever think about is your own life. Think about me for a change. I’m the one who’s been in prison,” Molly complained.
CHAPTER
10
ON MONDAY MORNING the Stone family arrived twenty-five minutes early for their appointment with Dr. Martin, a trademark move for Harry and Molly.
As they sat in the empty waiting room, Molly tried to show her motherly concern. “Hannah, I hope you had a good breakfast,” she said.
Still furious about her ruined weekend, Hannah ignored her mother. She shielded her face with the morning paper, pretending to be reading, until the nurse announced, “Dr. Martin will see you now.”
Inside the doctor’s office, Molly pulled her chair closer to Harry’s. Hannah sat off to the side, a spectator to the ensuing drama. She watched Dr. Martin take notes as he listened to her father’s meticulous description of his symptoms. When he finished, Harry and Dr. Martin went into the examining room across the hall. Hannah went back to pretending to read the paper.
“Dr. Martin doesn’t seem a bit worried about your father. He’ll know what to do,” Molly said confidently. Hannah said nothing. She hoped her mother was right.
A pale and drawn Harry came back into the room after the examination. Hannah held her breath as she waited to hear what the doctor had to say.
“There’s a limit to what I can do here. More tests would be helpful,” Dr. Martin said, adding, “The best place for that is the hospital.”
Molly stiffened in her chair.
“No! Absolutely not! I’m not going into the hospital,” Harry said forcefully. “I have congestive heart failure. I need to have my medication changed. I don’t need to be in a hospital for that!” Harry’s strong response demonstrated a vitality not supported by his wan appearance.
Dr. Martin didn’t argue. “As you know, Dr. Stone, the trick with congestive heart failure is finding the cause. Best place for doing that is in the hospital,” he repeated.
Harry continued to shake his head.
“What I have in mind is not the usual hospital stay. It’s part of the Medical Center, but feels more like a three-star hotel. All the tests are done at the hospital, but you and your wife stay in a private room. You’ll take your meals in a pleasant dining room. Think of it as a vacation,” Dr. Martin said and leaned back in his chair. “It’s up to you, Dr. Stone. You could stay at home and come in to the hospital for the tests. Your call!”
Harry deliberated. He weighed the doctor’s reassuring words against his own almost pathological fear of becoming a helpless patient, at the mercy of attending physicians. In the end what Dr. Martin described sounded manageable. Harry agreed.
“I’m in your hands,” he said. By the time he reached out to shake Dr. Martin’s hand to seal their bargain, the color had come back into Harry’s face.
“Are there doctors around . . . in case we need them?” Molly asked, nervously.
“Of course,” Dr. Martin assured Molly.
Sounds okay, Hannah reassured herself as they left the doctor’s office. But the possibility that something could go wrong stayed with her. No Mistakes Allowed. I’ll will him back to health the way I willed him back to life during the war. Hannah thought about that day when a tearful Aunt Emma announced, “Pan Bronisław nie żyje!” All the men in his building were executed, she said.
“No. No, he can’t be dead!” Hannah had insisted. That night she knelt in front of the framed image of the Black Madonna on the table next to her bed and begged her patron saint for a miracle. The next morning when she awoke she was sure Bronisław Bieliński was still alive. “I know he is alive. I feel it,” she told Aunt Emma, who had dismissed Hannah’s feelings as wishful thinking. But the child turned out to be right.
On that particular day a waiting room full of patients kept him working later than usual at his office across town. By the time he re
turned to his apartment, he’d missed the mass execution.
Nobody ever found out why the men were executed. It was rumored they were rounding up members of the Polish Underground. Worried he might be suspected of being a collaborator as he was the only man not killed, Harry immediately found another place to live. While he added that narrow escape to his running tally of all the times dumb luck had saved him, Hannah childishly believed she and the Black Madonna had kept Harry alive.
Still relying on Harry’s luck, and her power to will him back to health, instead of the Black Madonna, Hannah now put her faith in Dr. Martin.
By the following Thursday, her anger toward her mother finally dissipated. Hannah went along with Harry and Molly as they checked into the Co-op Care unit of the N.Y.U. Medical Center on First Avenue. Although Hannah wheeled him into their private room, Harry didn’t feel like a patient being admitted into a hospital. With a view of the New York skyline, a well-appointed sitting area, complete with a comfortable sofa, coffee table, an easy chair and a huge TV set, their spacious room could pass for a tastefully decorated hotel suite. But what made Harry particularly happy was that Molly would be staying with him.
“You were trying to get me to go for a vacation to Miami Beach this winter. Pretend this is Miami. We’re on vacation,” Harry said. “The only thing missing is a wet bar,” he joked.
Molly squeezed her husband’s hand. It looked good to her, too. “I’m going to check out the dining room and see if we need to make a reservation,” Molly said, rushing off.
“Hurry back,” Harry yelled after her. In that moment, Hannah saw how dependent her father was on her mother. She had always assumed it was the reverse.
Hannah returned the next morning. She had taken the day off from work to be with her parents before going to the beach, this time for an uninterrupted weekend.
While Molly remained in the room, Hannah wheeled Harry to the hospital for a series of tests. The last test, an echocardiogram, which was a simple non-invasive procedure, inexplicably had to be redone several times.
“I’m sorry it’s taking so long,” the technician apologized when Hannah cornered him as he came out of the room without Harry. “We’re having a problem with the equipment. Been getting a strange noise. We’ve called for the supervisor,” he explained.
When Harry was finally wheeled out, he was so weak, he looked as if he was about to slide off the chair. Uncharacteristically docile, he didn’t say a word about being inconvenienced for three hours.
A glum Hannah wheeled her exhausted father back to his room.
“What’s happened? He looks terrible,” Molly said.
Hannah shot a stern look at her mother who immediately softened her assessment.
“What you need, Harry, is something to eat. You must be starving,” Molly said.
Seeing Robert sitting on the sofa, Hannah’s mood brightened.
“When did you get here?” she asked.
“I finished my errands about an hour ago,” he said and rushed over to help get Harry out of the wheelchair.
Molly checked her watch. “The dining room is open. I’ll get some food.” Preparing food was how Molly made things better. The best she could do now was to bring it from the dining room.
“Yes. Yes. You go,” Harry whispered. Going anywhere was not an option for him. Leaning on Robert, Harry pulled himself up and almost threw himself onto the bed. His face drained of all color, Harry stretched his skeletal frame out on the bed, and closed his eyes.
Robert put his arms around Hannah to steady her.
With Molly out of the room, and Harry seemingly asleep, Hannah whispered to Robert, “This is not working the way I thought.” Besides the problem with the echocardiogram, Hannah didn’t like the churning in her stomach. That usually foreshadowed something bad was about to happen.
“I hope I didn’t make a mistake pushing Harry to see a specialist. He seemed better when he was his own doctor.”
“Hannah, cut it out. You’re not responsible for your father’s condition. Harry’s a grown man, and a doctor. He realized he needed help.”
“But what if this doctor I forced on him doesn’t help him?” Hannah said, and continued to berate herself. “Maybe I didn’t look hard enough? He counted on me to find the right person.”
“Give it a chance. It’s only been a day,” Robert said.
Molly returned with more food than anyone wanted. Harry barely tasted the broth she tried to feed him before he fell asleep. Hannah and Robert drank their coffee and picked at their sandwiches.
As Harry slept, Molly watched TV, nervously changing channels. Robert and Hannah leafed through magazines. When Harry woke up and asked for tea and toast, everyone was relieved, especially Molly. By the time Robert and Hannah were ready to say goodbye, Harry was able to sit up to watch the evening news.
“Remember if you need the nurse during the night, you can call her,” Hannah told her mother as she kissed her goodbye.
“I know what to do,” Molly assured her daughter.
“Have a good weekend, you two,” Harry said and insisted on hugging both of them. The fact that being hugged by her father felt normal cheered Hannah.
When she called her mother on Saturday morning, Molly picked up the phone on the first ring. Hannah detected strain in her mother’s “Hello.”
“How is everything?” Hannah asked.
“Your father is still very weak. And his ankles are swollen worse than yesterday. I don’t know why he’s not getting any medication,” she said. “They won’t tell me anything.”
“I’ll call the nurse,” Hannah offered.
When Hannah finally got through, the harried nurse on duty was not helpful.
“Your father is getting the treatment his doctor prescribed. If you have questions, talk to him,” she said, and hung up.
Hannah called Dr. Martin, but he was away for the weekend. The doctor on call did not answer his page.
“They probably stopped Dad’s medication as a way to determine what works and what doesn’t,” she told her mother, trying to reassure her. “They know what they’re doing,” she added, but that was not how she felt.
Molly called on Sunday at the crack of dawn. The panic in her mother’s voice roused Hannah quicker than a piercing alarm clock.
“You have to come right now,” Molly pleaded. “The nurse says she can’t do anything and I can’t find a doctor to talk to. Maybe you can make them help him.”
Hannah started getting dressed even before she hung up the phone. She checked the train schedule. When she was packed and ready to go, Hannah woke Robert to take her to the station.
“Why are you going back? He’s in a hospital, for chrissake!”
Hannah shook her head. “I put him there.”
Hannah gasped when she walked into the room and saw Harry lying motionless on the bed. She could hear her heart pounding as she tiptoed to his bedside. Hannah held her breath as she put her hand in front of his nose to see if he was breathing. When he slowly opened his eyes, she exhaled. He stared at her, but she wasn’t sure her father recognized her. With his bony hand on his chest he whispered, “The pain, the pain. I can’t stand the pain.”
Hearing Harry’s voice, Molly, who was asleep in the next bed, shot up.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said, and grabbed her daughter’s hand.
Hannah pulled it away and reached for the phone.
“My father, Harry Stone, is in great pain,” she heard herself say in an unfamiliar shrill voice, when a nurse finally picked up. “You’ve got to give him something for the pain!”
“I can’t. I told your mother. I can’t even give him a Tylenol without a doctor’s okay. I’m really sorry,” she said.
It shocked Hannah that the nurse on duty was just as helpless as she was.
“Please. Please, get him a doctor then,” Hannah begged. “He has to be seen by a doctor.”
“Believe me, I’ve been trying,” she said, “but we’re short-st
affed because it’s a weekend, and they are dealing with several emergencies.”
Hannah called Robert.
“If he was at home, I could call 911 and somebody would come. Here I can’t get a doctor and the nurse can’t do anything. He’s in pain and I can’t do anything to help him. Should I go to a drugstore and buy some aspirin?”
“Don’t! Don’t do anything that could make things worse,” Robert counseled.
For the rest of the day, while Molly slept, Hannah sat beside Harry’s bed and stroked his cold hand, as he went in and out of a restless sleep. Stoically, she pleaded with God. “I can’t lose him now! I can’t lose him now!”
Early Monday morning Dr. Martin appeared.
“Let me examine him and then we’ll see what to do,” Dr. Martin said, calmly. When he finished, he ordered the nurse to give Harry pain medication. Within minutes, Harry drifted into a more restful sleep, and Dr. Martin motioned Molly and Hannah out of the room.
“The pain is not angina. The sac around Dr. Stone’s heart is filling up with water. That water is now pressing on his heart. All we have to do is puncture the sac and get the water out,” Dr. Martin said.
“That sounds like an operation,” Molly said. “Harry won’t agree to an operation.”
“It’s not major surgery, more like a procedure. Once that’s done Dr. Stone should be fine,” he said.
This time Dr. Martin’s assurances did not convince Hannah or Molly.
“Why did the water fill up around his heart?” Hannah demanded. “He never had that problem before!”
“We don’t know what’s causing your father’s congestive heart failure. That’s what we were hoping to find out,” Dr. Martin said, his voice marked with irritation.
As soon as the doctor left, two attendants moved a sleeping Harry to a semi-private hospital room. When he awoke, Harry Stone knew his worst fears were now realized.
I managed my congestive heart failure better on my own, Harry thought, although he was grateful they had lessened his pain.
When an unfamiliar doctor in a lab coat appeared holding a clipboard and pen, Harry looked disdainfully at him.
“Dr. Stone, I’ve come to get your signature for the procedure,” he said.