by Larry Hill
“Hey Dad. You’re looking good – a whole lot better than I thought you’d look.” Jason extended his hand to shake his father’s. Only then did he notice that his father’s arms were restrained.
“Your father has been pulling out his IVs and tugging at his urine catheter. We had to restrain him. We were afraid he’d go after his pacemaker wire and take it out too. As you can tell, he’s still a bit confused.”
“A bit? He thought I was his first wife. She’s been dead for years.”
“Let me get the doctor in here.” Seconds later, a very young, very serious looking South Asian man in scrubs entered the room and offered his hand in welcome to both visitors. He didn’t offer his name; his tag showed that both his first and last names were too long to pronounce, let alone remember. The well-traveled Jason rightly guessed that he was from Sri Lanka.
“Let’s step out of the room for a minute.” They moved in the direction of the nurses’ station. “I don’t like talking close to a patient when he’s confused. Your husband is doing well – probably better than most people his age after suffering both a heart attack and bleeding around the brain. But he’s not a young man. Elderly people, when they are hospitalized, especially after big surgeries or trauma, or in his case, both, get confused. It’s almost surely something that will get better. But for the present time, keep your visits short and don’t expect to have any meaningful discussions with him. He’s not going to remember any of this. But come by as often as you can. The more people that he sees that he knows, the faster the confusion will clear up.”
“How long will he be here?” asked Jason. He had to get back to LA as soon as possible. He had to prepare for the closing on the finances of a blockbuster movie but didn’t want to look like he didn’t care about his father.
“It’s impossible to say. Usually, the confusion clears up in a day or two and shouldn’t leave him with any long term mental problems. But he’ll need to get a permanent pacemaker. Because of the heart attack, his heart can’t beat often enough on its own. That’s really nothing big. Millions of people have pacemakers.”
“Thank you Doctor,” Jason said. “Perhaps you know that my father has some, shall we say, legal problems.”
“Yes, everybody here in the ICU knows about that.”
“What does this mean for him in the future? Will he be able to tolerate a trial? Will he be able to be taken care of if he has to go to jail?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I cannot answer those questions. You’ll need to talk to somebody who knows a lot more about such things. I’m only an intensive care resident. We don’t deal with what happens after our patients leave the unit. Incidentally, a few hours before you came in, somebody who says he was your father’s friend asked to come in to see him, but wasn’t allowed because he wasn’t a member of your family. We asked for his name but he left without telling us who he was. If you know who it was, please offer our apologies. We only let in immediate family.”
“My father has lots of friends. Probably one of the guys he plays poker with. I’m sure we’ll find out who it was when we get home.”
As Jason exited the unit, Jennifer returned to the bedside. “I love you Fred. Get better fast, OK?” The patient had fallen asleep and showed no sign of having heard what she said.
The twins were allowed in and heard the similar though medically-specific description of his condition from the nurse and prognosis from the doctor. They were impressed by the quality of the care in the public hospital. They had expected worse.
When the four arrived back at the big house in the Heights, there was, among many others, a recorded message from Maggie, telling them to look at SFGate, the Chronicle’s on-line service.
FRED KLEIN HOSPITALIZED FOR HEART ATTACK
AND HEAD INJURY
PHILANTHROPIST, ALLEGED FELON, ON CRITICAL LIST
Noted San Francisco philanthropist Fred Klein, out on bail for allegedly having driven the hit and run vehicle that killed Teresa Spencer, two-year-old, is in critical condition in the intensive care unit of San Francisco General Hospital. Unconfirmed reports have it that he was in a Tenderloin bar and fell to the ground, injuring his skull. There were reports of a verbal conflict between Klein and four young men before the fall, but no evidence of a physical fight. He was operated on by the hospital’s nationally famous neurosurgical trauma team. He was also discovered to have had a heart attack, but the association of the fall and the heart attack are not known at this time. His condition is critical, but according to a hospital spokesman, he is expected to survive.
Klein is well known as the one-time owner of television station KLAT in Los Angeles and is presently active in a host of cultural and Jewish charities in the Bay Area where he has lived for 15 years. In 2003, he was an unsuccessful candidate for County Supervisor in the district that includes his mansion in Pacific Heights.
Ms. Spencer was 28 years old and married to wealthy venture capitalist, Mark Spencer of Cow Hollow in San Francisco, who was reportedly on a business trip in West Africa when his wife died. The Spencer’s two-year-old daughter Meagan was in the car with her mother at the time of the accident, but was not injured.
Between paragraphs, there were two pictures, one of Fred and Jennifer as seen at the recent Black and White Ball, a fund raiser for the SF Symphony, and one of Teresa, probably a wedding photo. Teresa was beautiful; Fred was not particularly handsome.
“Wouldn’t you know that they’d bring up the fact that Dad’s Jewish?” snarled Jason. “That’s not going to make him any more popular in Pacific Heights. Just like with the blacks, any time a Jew is involved in something terrible, shit comes down on all of us.”
“Come on, Jason, lighten up. This is San Francisco, not Houston or Atlanta,” responded Robert, with an approving nod from Phillip. Internecine verbal battles in the Klein household almost invariably found the twins on one side and the eldest son on the other.
Frequently, Jennifer took a mediator role, as had her predecessor, Barbara. “Come on guys; let’s not worry about this stuff. We’ve got bigger things to figure out than whether your father’s Jewishness is going to cause him and us trouble.”
Mark Spencer also had big things to figure out. He’d need to work out child care, including someone to be in the house when he took work trips. They’d have to decrease in frequency and duration, probably to almost zero, but no way could he not travel at all. He made his reputation by finding jewels in shitholes. Who else could they send to the Ivory Coast or Uzbekistan or Cambodia to find the product, and then corner the market on ores, lumber, fruits, and berries? He’d need to find a lawyer to sue the bastard that made him a widower. He’d need to learn something about how to run the house. He knew that he couldn’t tell the difference between the washer and the dryer – he knew only that what Teresa had called the laundry room had two large white boxes that disturbed his TV watching when they were running. But first he had to bury his wife.
The autopsy, required by law in such a case, had shown nothing abnormal except the skull fracture and massive brain contusion resulting from the collision with the concrete curb. Her arteries were clear, her liver shiny and her heart strong and fat-free. Her body was picked up by whichever mortuary was on call that night as neither Jack nor Maggie had any reason to pick one over another. Mark and Teresa had never discussed what the other should do if one died unexpectedly. They were young, prime of life, why talk about such depressing things?
So, Mark had to make decisions without any guidelines from the deceased. Catholic or non-sectarian? Burial or cremation? Open or closed? Who’d come? When? Where? Why? Why? Why?
Both Mark and Teresa had been brought up Catholic, she more Catholic than he. She went through the catechism; he, as a child, attended mass at Easter and Christmas and when grandparents were in town. Both, upon leaving home for college, a non-Catholic one, severed any meaningful relationship with their Church. They were married by a priest, at the insistence of Teresa’s parents, but didn’t see the inside
of a house of the Lord again until Meagan’s baptism. They grew no closer to the church afterwards, although they planned to give their daughter a Catholic education. Mark, after deliberation and discussions with his in-laws, his lawyer and his accountant, opted against a funeral in the neighborhood church. He didn’t want a full-fledged funeral with a mortician. Instead, he chose cremation and a memorial service. He had never heard his wife utter the word cremation and assumed therefore that she would not object. Plus, these choices spared him the grief of a visitation and a religious ceremony with prayers with which most of his friends and business associates, Protestants, Jews, and Atheists, would not be familiar. The date and place for the service were published in the short obituary in the Chronicle, written by Maggie with the approval of the widower. Neither noticed a brief report in the local news section of the same day’s paper describing the slow but steady improvement of alleged felon Fred Klein.
The event occurred three days after Mark’s return to California. He expected a handful of acquaintances and associates, plus a few relatives from both sides. Her parents weren’t coming as her mother had advanced Alzheimer’s and was housed in a skilled nursing facility and her father had died, ironically, in an auto accident during a South Dakota ice storm ten years ago. His parents, in their eighties, begged off due to the difficulties of getting to San Francisco from the family farmhouse in Nebraska where they did everything possible to keep one another out of a nursing home. Two of Mark’s five siblings came. Some of the others sent flowers. Four of the five had never moved out of central Nebraska; the fifth had taken his wife and military pension and moved to Acapulco. Mark had no real friends. He knew most everybody and most everybody knew him; some liked him, a few disliked him; most had no opinion – such is the plight of the nouveau riche.
In spite of the lack of relatives and friends, the mortuary’s great room was jammed. The memorial service for Teresa Jane Spencer had become a political event of importance. The event was noted on the front page of the Bay Area section of the Chronicle. Mothers Against Drunk Driving mentioned it in a brochure although there was no public evidence that Klein had been drinking. The Mayor was touring Mongolia, whose capital Ulan Bator is a sister city of San Francisco, but he sent the Vice Mayor and three of his young, politically aspiring staff. Four members of the Board of Supervisors attended as did the CEOs of more than a dozen non-profits and profit-making corporations. The Chronicle and the Examiner, the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News all sent reporters and photographers. Among the attendees were several who knew both Mr. Klein and Mr. Spencer. Present were two of the poker players who had, five evenings earlier, noted the strange behavior of their buddy Fred. They were investors with the financially astute but emotionally distant Mark.
Teresa’s body had been cremated earlier in the day. Her ashes were deposited in an expensive yellow ceramic urn on a Victorian table directly in front of the podium from which Maggie delivered a moving, tear jerking, laugh provoking, and lengthy eulogy. Her sister’s life had been all too short and, frankly, uneventful for a long eulogy, but Maggie made the most of their early sisterhood and Teri’s (called that only by first degree relatives) hi-jinx in high school and community college. She praised Mark to the skies, telling the assembled what a wonderful father he had been and would surely continue to be. A line of photos showing the deceased from her birth to the birth of her only child proved to all that she had been a staggeringly handsome woman. Mark still hadn’t cried.
ON THE MEND
As reported in the short Chronicle blurb, Fred was on the mend. A permanent pacemaker had replaced the temporary one; there was no expectation that his rhythm would revert to normal on its own. The pressure in the brain cavity had remained low for two days so the drainage tube could be removed. He was able to transfer, with helpers, to a lounger at the side of the bed and even took steps around the room. His bladder catheter made frequent trips to the toilet unnecessary; a bowel movement was greeted by the caregivers like a present from Santa. On the negative side of the ledger, his brain, though bathed in low pressure uninfected fluid, wasn’t working so well. He could talk and all the words were enunciated in his usual educated manner, but strung together they didn’t make much sense. He had gotten over thinking wife two was wife one and recognized each of his sons. The twins came in at least daily, never at the same time for fear that their identicality would confuse their father; first-born Jason had returned to LA for his signings. The wives of Robert and Phillip brought cookies and magazines; Jason’s Emily did not set foot in the hospital. Fred had never before been an avid TV watcher, in spite of his fortune having been made in the industry. In his private room on the neurosurgical ward, he was usually found by his family, glued to sitcoms, cop shows or baseball. But he was not capable of discussing present day reality. He had no recollection of the events of the days leading up to his hospitalization. Why am I here? Who is Irv Greenberg? Who is Teresa Spencer? Jail. Me. Never. His ultra-short term memory was fine. He could name the killer and victim in the thriller he had just seen. After a Giants game, he could talk garbledly of the relative merits of the present center fielder and Willy Mays. His long term memory was fine; he remembered well his middle school teachers from the Lower East Side. His recent term memory was anything but fine.
The Iranian neurologist who had followed Klein’s case after the evacuation of the hematoma told the family that it could take up to six months for full recovery and, even then, he may not be the intellect that he had been before the trauma. The Vietnamese psychologist who oversaw a battery of tests identified the temporal lobe as the area of damage – something that was diagnosable as soon as he had his CT scan in the emergency room. The Latvian physiotherapist prescribed a series of exercises to help him with mobility and marched with him through the vast halls of the General Hospital, while the Argentine occupational therapist sat with him as he attempted to assemble a thousand piece puzzle of the Grand Canyon.
Medicare pays hospitals a flat sum for a patient’s stay based on that patient’s diagnosis. In other words, the facility usually gets the same amount of money from a patient who comes in with a heart attack plus a subdural hematoma if that patient remains in the hospital for three weeks or dies on day one. The doctors and the ancillary therapists are paid by the visit, but the vast amounts of nursing care, the X-rays, the lab tests and the social worker are all part of the global fee offered by the US Government for the specific diagnosis. Given this system, Klein was not a great patient for the General Hospital’s bottom line. He was utilizing a massive amount of resources. Ideally, he’d have been discharged within a week, but the combination of his substantial wealth and his fame and infamy made it difficult to go against the wishes of the family, especially Jennifer, to keep him in. Furthermore, there was nobody who identified him- or herself as “his doctor.” He had the neurologist, the neurosurgeon, the cardiologist, the internist and the urologist, but not the doctor. Klein’s generalist, Allison Jamison, had not visited. Nobody called her, so unless she read the papers and listened to the radio, she might not know anything about it. No one was willing to force the issue and say, “He’s gotten all he can out of being an in-patient.” The social worker offered the suggestion of a skilled nursing facility for rehabilitation. Jennifer approved and the sons didn’t object. But to Fred, a SNF meant a rest home and he vividly remembered the disgusting odor of the repulsive edifice that housed his mother during the last four years of her life. “No.” An attempt to have him distinguish a place for rehab from a place for death preparation was unsuccessful; success would have required better cognitive function.
Some two weeks into his hospitalization, three lawyers, all in dark suits, entered his hospital room simultaneously. Fred recognized his friend, Art Schofield and his son, Jason, who had come up from LA for the meeting. The third man, he’d swear that he’d never laid eyes on, was his criminal attorney, Irving Greenberg.
“Jason, great to see you, finally. How’d you know I was
in this place?”
“I was here when you had your surgery. I was staying with the twins at your house when the police didn’t know where you were. Then, Dad, I had to go home to LA – I’m involved in a new film project.”
“What the hell do you mean I didn’t know where I was? I knew damn well where I was. I was playing poker with this SOB,” he mumbled, pointing at Schofield. “Who’s your friend with the expensive suit?”
“I’m Irv Greenberg, your criminal attorney. Don’t you remember meeting me when you were bailed out of jail?”
“Nope, don’t remember a thing about that. Jennifer – she’s my wife – she told me that I had been arrested for killing somebody with my car. I’ve got no memory – none at all – about such a thing. Am I going to prison?”
“That’s what I’m here for, Fred,” said Greenberg. “The DA has a pretty good case against you. You know that you admitted hitting somebody and leaving the scene of the accident.”
“Huh. I did? And he died?”
“She, not he. She was a young mother who was married to a very wealthy man – Spencer by name. There’s a lot going on in the media and they’re yelling for your scalp. There was a big funeral last week with lots of politicos and reporters there. Even the mayor said something about making sure you spent a long time in jail – and he wasn’t even in town.”
“Yeah, the mayor. He’s a good friend of mine. He put me on that committee – you know I was president of the board. I gave him a lot of money when he ran.”
“Yes, you did, Dad.
“So, why does he want me in jail?”
“It’s all politics, Dad. You don’t make any friends when you take the sides of an old rich guy who has accidentally killed the mother of a two-year-old and then left the scene. There’s talk that you might have had too much to drink.”