Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  A stout nurse listened to his heart with a stethoscope. She took his fingers in her hands and turned them over, then poked at his shoulder. “Can you feel this?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he told her through clenched teeth.

  A young Asian doctor in designer glasses appeared. He started firing orders as he spread both Kevin’s eyelids wide and looked into his pupils with a blinding penlight. “Hang a bag of Ringers… start a unit of O-packed negative cells… prepare to intubate…”

  “Open your mouth wide, Mr. Ramirez,” the nurse told him.

  “Huh?” Kevin said, as she began to probe his throat with a plastic tube that made him gag. His gurney was suddenly wrenched into motion. The young doctor, looking down at his chart, walked along beside him.

  “Okay, Mr. Ramirez, you lost some blood. We’re going to stabilize you, clean your wound, and get you into surgery to take the bullet out. No problem.”

  “What bullet?” Kevin yanked his head away. “My name’s Doyle.”

  The doctor shuffled through his charts. “Oh.”

  “Who’s Ramirez?” Kevin asked weakly.

  “Ramirez is a chest wound,” the nurse explained. “You don’t want to be Ramirez.”

  Kevin believed her. At the moment, he barely wanted to be himself.

  “Edgar,” Tucker got down to business. “Cornelia had a severe nervous breakdown tonight at the office Christmas party. I asked her psychiatrist, Dr. Bushberg, to meet us here. It seems she ran off through the blizzard without a coat and somehow got one of the Central Park carriages to drive her up Fifth Avenue. A taxi hit them before Chester’s car… arrived on the scene.”

  Chester noted the craft of Tucker’s phrasing. “Edgar, she’s taken a turn for the worse and it’s my own fault. I came within inches of hitting her with my car.” He glowered at Tucker and Bushberg. “I let you people deal with her and now we’re all to blame.”

  Dr. Bushberg backed away.

  “You,” Chester glared. “You were supposed to be treating her.”

  The psychiatrist’s face drained. Nobody spoke while Chester shook, until Edgar Chase tried to fill the silence with nostalgia.

  “I remember that night I saw Cornelia in her first party dress.”

  And now she’s ready for her first straitjacket, Chester thought.

  “She’s become a danger to herself, Edgar,” Tucker said with cool certainty. “Chester, we probably have no choice but to get her into a hospital for treatment. Dr. Bushberg?”

  When Tucker whipped his eyes at the psychiatrist, Bushberg jumped like one of Pavlov’s salivating dogs.

  “In practical terms, she’s not living in the real world,” Bushberg said quickly. “She’s delusional and self-destructive. I would recommend treatment at the Sanctuary in Westchester. It’s the best private psychiatric facility in the country. Don’t fiddle while Rome burns, Mr. Lord.”

  Chester’s shoulders jerked, but he said nothing.

  Edgar Chase nodded. “I believe I’ve heard of the Sanctuary.”

  Yes. Edgar’s wife had probably dried out there, more than once. Chester felt angry at all of them, a burning in the tips of his ears.

  “Dr. Bushberg can push some buttons,” Tucker said in his maddening business voice, wiped free of all emotion. “He can get her admitted tomorrow. What if she resists, Edgar?”

  “Well, it’s a bit more complicated,” the lawyer said. “There’s a very unwieldy legal procedure for involuntary treatment in New York state.”

  “Then get a judge on our side,” Tucker ordered, then hurried to add, “Her life is at stake, Edgar.”

  “She’ll go voluntarily,” Chester said with finality. At least she’d be well looked after. Perhaps he would talk with the new psychiatrists there himself, a fresh start, to begin behaving like a real father even at this late date.

  Then the lights went out in the conference room.

  Below the Lord Pavilion, Kevin Doyle underwent a CAT scan on his head that was pronounced normal, and X rays of his shoulder.

  Then they gave him painkillers. The side of his head still pounded, but it no longer bothered him. He felt a remarkable sense of well-being. He beamed while an intern sewed up the gash in his ear.

  The doctor with the designer glasses nodded over a series of X rays of Kevin’s shoulder that he slid onto a wall-mounted lightbox. He could see little white dots and dashes like Morse code on the X ray.

  “Those are your stitches,” the doctor explained.

  “I feel okay.”

  “For man versus limousine, you did pretty well, Mr. Doyle. Your head looks fine. Your shoulder is not dislocated. You’ll hear a noise in your ear for a few days, and we already gave you Percocets for pain.” He wrote two prescriptions on her pad. “Take the antibiotic every twelve hours, two painkillers every six hours as needed, and stay out of traffic.”

  Because Kevin had entered wrapped in the arms of VIP Cornelia Lord, formal hospital procedures had been slighted temporarily. Now he was retrofitted into normal hospital policy, told to take a chair beside a small desk, twisting his body painfully to talk to a bored clerk who stabbed away at her computer. Her nails fascinated him, little mini-murals, over two inches long with glitter and rhinestone studs.

  “How are you paying for this?”

  In his painkiller euphoria, Kevin recalled his Brotherhood of Portal Operators union health care benefits. He clumsily found the plastic card Eddie had given him in his wallet. The admissions clerk punched its code on her computer. Then her tired eyes popped open like an astronomer finding a new planet.

  She stared at him admiringly. “Your health plan gives you 100 percent coverage for everything. We never see plans like this anymore. Where do you work?”

  “Eight-forty Fifth. I’m a doorman.”

  “Honey,” she handed him his card back, “you ever get a job opening there, you call me.”

  Kevin heard a commotion.

  “We lost our light in the ER waiting room,” somebody shouted.

  He heard spurts of confusion from beyond the double doors.

  “Generator’s on,” a voice yelled. “We’ve got lights again.”

  Then he recognized a wail that could only be Philip Grace.

  “Who the fuck took my new coat?”

  Part Three

  Code Green

  Chapter Fourteen

  No comment,” Kevin told the feral-looking stalkarazzi waiting outside.

  He left the hospital glowing from the painkillers, which acted to block the nerves. Real linebackers, these pills were. His head began to congeal as if wet cement were pouring in and hardening. A ringing like a chorus of crickets began in his ears, canceling out the yowl of the photographers and a rap version of “Silver Bells” playing somewhere on a boombox.

  “Kevin, you sure you’re okay?” Marne had come to meet him. Now she pointed him toward the curb, and stuck her fingers in her mouth to whistle for a cab.

  Kevin stared out the window of the rattling taxi. New York at Christmas could be beautiful, like a fairy tale with sparkling lights. Trust welled up inside him. Everything was good. Everyone was fine. He turned to his sister, that Joan of Arc in her Fire Department Athletic League team jacket, who saved infants and old people from burning buildings. He gave Marne what he imagined was a beatific smile. Her green eyes scanned his face in the half-light, while waves of neon darted across the inside of the cab as they wormed through traffic, then reeled down Second Avenue.

  “Dad came off work and waited in the ER for you as long as he could. He had to go back, but I called him to say you’re fine. Helen, too. Kevin, what happened?”

  “I helped a girl, that’s all.”

  She sighed and looked past his face at the street. “A screwed-up deb. Kevin, she’s not somebody you ought to be doing for. She’s got serious problems.”

  “What? She’s got money, so she can’t have feelings?” He surprised himself, letting Marne push his buttons. Especially when the Peres made him feel
as charming as a game show host.

  “It’s not money,” she told him. “It’s class. Like Dad says, Old Money comes from a different planet. I’ll give you an example, you tell me if I’m wrong. I’m working a fire at the old Ivy Club, trying to get a guy out of his guest room. Sweet old man, barefoot in his bathrobe, face full of soot with the eaves falling down around him. So I’m helping him through the burning timbers and putting my coat down so he don’t burn his feet, and I yell to my partner, ‘He don’t have shoes.’ And the old guy stops and looks me in the face and says, ‘He doesn’t.’ I say, ‘sir?’ He corrects me, ‘He doesn’t have shoes.’ He was looking down his nose at me while I’m saving his life, Kevin. He doesn’t, he don’t. Two different worlds.”

  “Marne,” Kevin said. “I’m not interested in her.”

  “Yeah?” Marne chuckled without humor. “Well, good. ‘Cause if you’d gotten killed, she would have stepped over your body and gone crying home to Daddy.”

  As she spoke, he felt the sweet party of the painkillers wearing off. His ear felt like it had expanded to the size of a cantaloupe and his shoulder throbbed. They alternated, like parts of a toy man, swaying mechanically back and forth to punch him.

  Marne let him off in front of the black-streaked facade of his tenement building. All the windows were either gated or boarded up. Nobody walked on the streets here, they only darted in and out of doorways.

  “Nice,” Marne commented on Casa Kevin. “You want me to go up with you? Throw out the burglars?”

  “No, go home.” He gave her a little hug. “Thanks for picking me up.

  The cab lurched off with his sister.

  * * *

  Chester left the hospital surrounded by a small knot made up of Edgar Chase, Dr. Bushberg, Tucker, and two security guards. Their route took them through the emergency room.

  Suddenly a curtain was pulled back to his right, and he stared into the coal-like eyes of the crazy woman carriage driver. Her tattered black suit coat reminded him of Abe Lincoln, if Honest Abe had tousled black curls that fell over his shoulders. With one hand, she had yanked the curtain open, obviously seeing him pass. A young, balding doctor was still trying to stitch a cut on her other hand. The procedure looked painful, a giant needle threading in and out of her flesh.

  “Mr. Lord,” she called, as though the pain didn’t bother her. “Just a minute.”

  Edgar Chase tried to keep him moving. “Don’t say anything. She’ll want money. I’ll deal with it.”

  “Excuse me,” Roni Dubrov told the doctor working on her wrist. She stood up and reached Chester in a few sprightly steps. God, her legs were long, like a person on stilts. Her grip on his arm felt firm, but not aggressive. “I have something for you.”

  She’s going to hit me, he thought recoiling, trying to throw her arm off, but her fingers held him in place. She reached into the pocket of her black coat.

  “Mr. Lord, this belongs to your daughter. She said it was for breaking my carriage.”

  Then she pressed Cornelia’s… his Elizabeth’s… diamond engagement ring into his hand. Chester looked at the dazzling heirloom, trying to puzzle out her motive.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he told her truthfully. “Your carriage, do you have insurance? If not, call me. I can help.”

  “Help your daughter first,” she leaned in and whispered, so people around them couldn’t hear. “She’s just a child.”

  Chester could only mutter a feeble thanks before Edgar and Tucker pulled him away.

  Kevin opened the door to the filthy foyer of his building. All three locks had been forced open by sledgehammers and crowbars at various times, so he didn’t need his key.

  He checked his mailbox, which had also been pried open, then walked up the three deserted flights of grimy stairs. His ear and shoulder hammered away, an efficient factory churning out pain.

  He spotted a pattern of shadows on the wall that wasn’t usually there. He sensed somebody up on his landing. A mugger, probably. Or a robber looking out while his partner ransacked his apartment.

  “Get out of there, you pinhead junkie fuck,” Kevin screamed up the stairs.

  He waited. Nothing.

  Kevin climbed the last few stairs cautiously and peeked around the balcony.

  Cornelia Lord sat on the dirty floor of the landing outside his door. A giant gray leather coat covered her body like a tent. Philip Grace’s new coat. Underneath it, she was dressed in a green hospital outfit. On her feet were hospital sock slippers, ruined from the slush outside. Her arms locked around her knees, one hand holding her other wrist, and she swayed forward and back. She looked up at the top of his head. Her face shone, very fresh and young without makeup, the freckles showing across her nose.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He helped her to her feet.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Your address was on the list in my father’s study. I came to thank you again, Kevin.”

  He didn’t think she would have fled the hospital and braved her way to Alphabet City in flimsy hospital booties to tell him that.

  “Just doing my job,” he said and wondered how stupid it sounded.

  “May I use your bathroom?” she asked politely. She seemed to be having a hard time keeping still, moving from one foot to the other.

  He worried that she could be getting him into another jackpot, this flaky deb he had just ten minutes ago defended to his sister. She had the staying power of a flea jacked up on Tabasco, running from everything, leaving broken carriages and limos and probably people. Plenty of blood on the trail behind Cornelia Lord. But she also had that way of looking at the top of his head.

  “Sure,” Kevin said. “But keep your coat on, okay? It’s colder inside.”

  He found his keys and opened his new lock, one that had not yet been plucked out of his splintered door. He let her go in first. Before he could turn on the light, she gasped in the dark.

  “Oh, Kevin, your corona!” she squealed.

  When Kevin switched on the light, he could see that her eyes had locked on to the top of his head. Like the first night he found her passed out in the limousine.

  “What do you see up there?”

  “Sorry. Nothing.” She walked into his kitchen looking right at home, past the rusty steel bathtub, studying the battered cabinets he’d painted several coats of white, with a few lumps where he had accidentally trapped speeding roaches under the wet paint.

  He sat in his living room and didn’t move while she used his bathroom. He heard her flush the toilet. Then she came into his living room, her face poking out of the gray coat, taking in his rat hole like an explorer discovering the New World. All the furniture had been stolen from his living room except for two webbed lawn chairs with some missing strips. The only remaining light was a floor lamp from some kid’s room about thirty years before, its yellowed shade displaying pictures of spaceships.

  She stopped at his wall where he had hung a print of Giotto’s Lost Saint Sebastian.

  “Oh, you have Sebastian,” she breathed.

  She touched the gold-leaf disk Giotto created around the man’s head and Kevin’s ear and shoulder stopped thudding in his shock.

  “Do you know the story?” he asked her.

  She didn’t take her eyes off the halo. “He was an officer in the Praetorian Guard. When he became a Christian, the emperor ordered him killed.”

  Kevin’s heart skittered. “Are you Catholic?” he asked her.

  “No,” she whispered. “I saw this painting in Italy when I was a little girl.”

  Naturally. He felt a familiar stab of resentment at this rich girl, bombing around Europe checking out Giottos while he put in his time at a New York City high school that couldn’t even afford an art teacher. But, strangely, his envy felt like a useless appendage now. She looked so impressed at Giotto’s Lost Saint Sebastian. And that was just a warm-up. Her eyes moved to the Polaroid shots he had stuck on the wall with red pushpins. This was the st
ep-by-step saga of how he created his own neon Saint Sebastian, from his first sketches to pictures of the sculpture at different stages of completion.

  “Kevin, what’s this?” she asked him breathlessly, touching the blue halo on the picture.

  “I made a neon Saint Sebastian. It’s in a gallery…” Kevin hesitated. What the hell, she wasn’t doing much better in her life than he was with his art. “Was in a gallery.”

  She stared like a maniac at the Polaroid.

  “I love what you did around his head. Why did you use blue?”

  “You can’t do gold neon. I figured, he’s looking up at the sky, so maybe it’s a reflection. But I need to fix his halo. See how it’s crooked? It ruins the piece.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’ve never seen a neon saint before, Kevin, but it seems like a lovely halo.” Her voice was so hushed. “Is this a school or something?”

  Kevin exhaled. Even tonight, it seemed especially bizarre to have Chester Lord’s daughter standing with his paint-trapped roaches and used lawn furniture, giving critical commentary on his art. How could he even start explaining to a Girl Who’ll Always Have Everything what he went through to make the saint?

  “It’s no school,” Kevin told her. “Unless maybe you’re thinking about the Ashcan School. That’s the only place it’s headed right now. The subject matter, it’s kind of a personal thing with me.”

  “I don’t want to pry.” Her eyes finally moved on to the last Polaroid shot stuck up on his wall. “Oooh. What’s this?”

  “An experimental piece I did,” he told her. “I called it Open Heart. It didn’t go anywhere.”

  She studied the roughly heart-shaped squiggles and wobbles, “Why not?”

  “My teacher said it was too ephemeral or something. I made it by mixing a special set of neon gases. Krypton, argon, and xenon. Then I electroded the mix to get a plasma effect.”

  “Well, it’s nice ephemeral.”

  “Thanks.”