Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “Are you ill?” Maternus asked Stephen as the latter man continued to make the peculiar smacking sound as he struggled for air. “You are not under obligation to come with me. You can go, should that be what you wish.”

  “My mother was in a place like this…” Stephen managed to say. “…I’ll wait outside. There’s a bench out there. I’ll see you later.” He retreated completely out the door, and promised himself he would never again inhale the heavy air of the medical facility.

  “Stevie will be okay,” Shen assured Maternus. “He’s been thinking a lot about death lately, now that he’s getting so old and close to it himself.”

  “I thought he was only in his late forties,” said the Roman.

  “Forty-eight,” Shen confirmed.

  “Which isn’t old,” said Maternus. “The Denver Post has proclaimed that the life expectancy of an average American man is seventy-one years. This figure takes into account the sick children who perish at a young age and men and women killed by the automobiles before they are fully mature, so Stephen has at least twenty-three years of life ahead of him, perhaps more if he follows the dietary plan outlined in Live to be One Hundred, and exercises, as suggested in Pumping Iron Forever.”

  “He’s still closer to his death than to his birth,” said Shen. “The thing has to wear on him, especially since he doesn’t have any children. Don’t worry about him — he’ll keep till we get back. He always has his thoughts to entertain him. When Stevie’s upset he thinks about the revolution to come, and he gets better in a hurry.”

  The two of them walked deeper into the illuminated hallway, in the direction of one of the glass booths and the formidable woman inside it.

  “Do you have children yourself, Shen?” asked Maternus.

  “My poems are my children.”

  “Horace says that poems are truly like children only when they are new; later they become the property of the general public,” said Maternus. “Have you any children of flesh and blood the world cannot lay claim to?”

  “Poetry is the only type of immortality I want,” said Shen. “Do you have any kids, Matt?”

  “I was always being sent somewhere new,” reflected the soldier. “There was no time. Death was ever close to me and my comrades. To take an unofficial wife, or a real one, would have been folly.”

  “I take that for a ‘no,’” said Shen, and opened the glass door to what must have been the angriest and most forbidding administrator on the floor. “Here we are. How are you today, darling?” he asked, and nonchalantly threw his lanky frame on the small sofa facing the administrator’s desk. “My man here wants to help you people out,” he explained, “become a volunteer around here.”

  The woman he was addressing weighed nearly as much as Maternus and Shen put together. She had hair the color of steel and wore a pair of jeweled spectacles attached to her neck by a long chain of electroplated bronze. This particular administrator had last laughed wholeheartedly in 1975, when she witnessed the beloved schnauzer of a high school classmate get run over by a mail truck. Among the elderly inmates of Shady Grove she was known as “the Crocodile” for the way she snapped at others. To Maternus, she appeared to need but a long, sticky tongue to become the world’s largest toad, and she was sufficiently provoked by their intrusion to have snatched up Maternus and Shen in a trice had she been granted the use of such an appendage. In this situation, the veteran soldier was not as courageous as the poet, for the dowager civil servant’s icy glare intimidated the Roman before she had spoken a single word.

  “Won’t we be blessed with your presence, as well?” she sneered at Shen, who was that day dressed in a shirt patterned after the American flag and a pair of bell-bottom jeans that could have been made in the year the administrator last laughed. “Our clients would so enjoy having you to brighten their days.”

  Shen was as oblivious to her hostility as he was to criticism of any sort.

  “I’m a busy man,” he said and flipped open a copy of AARP Today from the coffee table. “I could pop in and now and then for special events, maybe. Do you ever have public readings here?”

  “Everyone here can read on their own,” said the administrator, not understanding Shen. “We’ll have to run a background check on him,” she said and eyed Maternus. “Have you ever been in prison?”

  “No, madam,” said the soldier, and hoped she did not ask about corporal punishment, because he had once been flogged for insubordination when his entire century was beaten for killing a Parthian commander they could have taken prisoner. To his good fortune, the woman administrator was uninterested in whippings.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked. “Are you some kind of street fighter?”

  “I was in the army,” responded Maternus, hoping that revelation might soften her heart.

  “And?” she said.

  “I was injured many times, madam.”

  “You should have ducked many, many times,” she informed him and shifted some papers on her desk top to prove her authority. “We aren’t in the business of providing busy work for wounded veterans here at Shady Grove. We are professionals giving professional care for our precious senior citizens. You have to be tough to work here, or else these old bastards will run you over. You think you can hack it?”

  “I think so, madam. I must,” said Maternus.

  The formidable administrator was again disturbing her piles of papers and did not drink in the Roman’s assertion that he “must” work at the rest home. Rather than ask him why he needed to become a volunteer, she demanded of him: “Do you have any communicable diseases?”

  “No. I have had infections, many years ago, nothing recently.”

  “I’m so relieved to hear you’re doing better,” she said. “Of course, you will have to be fingerprinted and give us a blood sample. We have to have a background check on everyone. You’d be amazed at all the perverts trying to get around old people. They’re the same weirdos who rape children.”

  She squinted directly at Maternus while she mentioned the deviants she had to shield her clients from. Shen continued to thumb through his magazine, unperturbed by anything the administrator said.

  “I’m a school janitor,” said Maternus. “I have already had a background check.”

  “They don’t do thorough jobs at the schools,” said the administrator, and located some forms on her desk, several of which she pushed in Maternus’s direction. “You have to go downstairs to the nurses in room 36 and take a blood test. That’ll tell us what kind of dope you’re taking and whatever kind of sick sexual stuff you’re into. Next, you have to go to the police downtown and ask for Sergeant Meyers; he’ll get you fingerprinted and run your name through the computer.”

  “I don’t have my fingerprints on file anywhere,” commented Shen, not looking up from his magazine. “The FBI uses them to track down political dissidents.”

  “They got Che Guevara, and it’s only a matter of time until they nail you, pretty boy,” observed the administrator, and very nearly smiled at the thought of the government tracking down Shen.

  “Although I sense some hostility in your words,” said Shen, “I can see from your aura that you’re a good person. If you weren’t a caring soul, you wouldn’t be here, helping these old folks, would you?”

  “My aura?” said the administrator, whose name was Edna Pringle and, as has been said, had a face that aptly fit such an uninspired name. “Are you some kind of mystic?”

  “I’m only a poet,” said Shen and made a beatific smile at the surprisingly pleased Edna. “I’m not sensitive to mystic signs. I can only sense the connections to the eternal I share with everyone.”

  Maternus was here given another clue as to why women ardently cleaved to Shen in such prodigious numbers. Toward the Roman, Edna remained as cold as the rocks on the Baltic shoreline. For handsome Shen her face became florid, and she nervously fidgeted with the top button of her blouse with inarticulate fingers. On Edna’s plain visage appeared the same emb
arrassed-yet-lustful expression Maternus had observed on Cecilia when she had gazed upon Shen at the poetry slam. A wiser man would have learned much from what he was seeing; Maternus was too concerned about his second assignment to appreciate Shen’s methods.

  “How long will this take, madam?” asked the Roman. He hated to ask, for he felt he was interrupting something that did not involve him.

  “Will what take?” said Edna, no longer deigning to look in Maternus’s direction.

  “I refer to the process of being checked out, as you call it,” said the soldier.

  “Oh, at least four weeks, maybe five or six,” said Edna her soft eyes burning upon Shen.

  “What is you name?” asked Shen as he stared deep into the twin gateways of the administrator’s soul. “I sense I could use it as the nucleus of a poem.”

  “Edna Pringle,” confessed the administrator and gasped at the confession. “You’ll never find anything to rhyme with that.”

  “I don’t organize my poems by matching sounds,” said Shen. “I allow the spirit of my subject to call forth the words I need to say. The heart, not the ear, is what I want to please.”

  Gods in heaven, the woman is falling for this! thought Maternus as he looked upon the beaming Edna. May all of her sex be this easy to please. Then making this Maggie Lambkin happy would be easy; I would merely have Shen butter her up. Once I learn how to talk and act like him, I would have no trouble running Maria about up in heaven. (The reader will by now have observed that when Maternus had one wrongheaded idea, he soon had them in bunches.)

  “We have lunch for the clients every day at noon,” said Edna. “You could come and read to them while they eat. Start this Saturday, maybe.”

  “That would be lovely,” said Shen and leaned forward to take Edna’s hand.

  “Don’t you want to check him out, too?” asked Maternus.

  Edna Pringle turned to Maternus as a Bengal tiger might turn on a-not-very bright peasant who poked the beast with a sharp stick.

  “He is going to be a performer, a guest in our little community,” she snarled between her startlingly large teeth. “You, Mr. Big Dog, are only a volunteer, if you are going to be that.”

  She sent him on his way to the nurse’s station in the basement, while Shen lingered in Edna’s office for another hour, filling his date book for the summer weekends with scheduled readings at Shady Grove. Miss Pringle had even promised him a modest stipend for his work by the time Shen left her to rejoin Stephen and Maternus, both of whom were by then waiting for him on the concrete bench in front of the foliage-covered building.

  “Old people are cool,” said Shen to his friends, and ignored the obvious fact that neither of his companions were as ebullient as he.

  During the full six weeks the system needed to force Maternus’s papers through the system, the Roman had six different Saturdays to accompany Shen to the old folks’ home, and he took advantage of all six opportunities in the hope he might meet Margaret Lambkin before he became an official volunteer. Stephen went with his friends to the rest home, and stayed outside on the concrete bench, far from antiseptic smells and painfully bright lights. He there composed letters to local newspapers on the subject of home health care, which Stephen argued the government should pay for, thus allowing the elderly to remain free of institutions.

  Maternus spoke to several of the home’s elderly residents while they gathered in the facility’s rec room to listen to Shen’s poetry. He was pleased to discover these old people seemed to have lived their younger lives in times and places that were, odd to say, not unlike some Maternus had known in his previous life. He met an old man who spoke of herding cattle, and his simple love of the sunsets he had witnessed on his farm. A little woman in a wheelchair told him stories of some ancient conflict she simply called “the war,” a period when the young men in her village had gone to a distant land and had not returned for years, which was exactly what had transpired a score of times in Argentoratum, the frontier village of Maternus’s youth. Several of the old ones talked about gardens they used to own and children they had raised in towns they had not seen in many years. Many of these elders at the end of life spoke of the moment they first beheld their infant children, of beloved pets, and of the pains one knows when one grows old. None of them showed much interest in the larger events happening outside Shady Grove, mentioning them only to say they did not understand them. “There’s no place for us in the world anymore,” scores of them told Maternus, a proclamation that sounded strange to Maternus, for he could not imagine who had made the modern world if it was not these old people who had been so long within it. Was there some force other than people making things happen in modern times? Maternus could not tell. He could tell these people in the rest home were sympathetic to him, and warm to his ungainly company, which made him optimistic concerning Margaret Lambkin weeks before he met her. Since the other old people were so sweet, he reasoned Margaret must be cut from the same mold as the dear old woman who patted his muscular neck and promised him she would remember him in their prayers. He was a little concerned that Margaret never attended Shen’s readings, and more than a little concerned that when he asked the residents about her he often got only a pained frown in reply.

  “Maggie is a character, that’s for sure,” one lady told him.

  A little old man with a walker was a tad more direct. “Jesus Christ, son,” he told Maternus, “you don’t want to go there. We have to put up with her. You volunteers have got the right to give her some room.”

  “There’s a woman living here,” he told Shen one Saturday as they were walking back from the rest home, “who never comes to the readings. The others say she never comes to any of the group events.”

  “The world needs all kinds,” reasoned Shen. “Even poetry haters.”

  “You have a talent I do not have, Shen. Stephen does not have it either. You are what the writers of mediocre fiction would call a charming rouge, in the best sense of that hackneyed phrase.”

  “I think I approve of that,” said Shen.

  “Women especially favor you.”

  “They sense the god in me,” said Shen.

  “Do you think — after I have met this Mrs. Lambkin — you might come with me and speak to her in your charming way?” asked Maternus. “She will, I expect, be thankful to meet you.”

  “Why not?” said Shen and floated his left hand into the air with a flourish, the likes of which is sometimes seen on the stage and in costume-era movies, but is rarely displayed in real life. “I’m not against bringing a little sunshine to everyone’s life.”

  By the time the bureaucratic system had digested Maternus’s paperwork and found nothing ill-tasting (thanks to Mr. Worthy’s fictional paper trail) the calendar had advanced to the third week in September, and the final warm days of summer lay oppressively upon the Colorado Front Range. The residents at Shady Grove did not venture into the heat during that time of year; they remained behind the facility’s tinted bay windows, sipped sun tea, and complained about the dreadful weather outside.

  “We never had it this hot when I was younger,” a wrinkled gentleman told Maternus while they played “go fish” on the old man’s TV dinner tray.

  “When I was young,” said another man who had overheard the first resident’s complaint, “we wouldn’t have considered this to be hot. Hot was when your mother could cook right outside on the stoop. Didn’t need to start up the range. Saved a ton of money on fuel.”

  “That would be hot, sir,” said Maternus, who — as has been previously noted — took most everything he heard in earnest.

  “I grew up in Wyoming,” said the man playing fish. “On the ranch it never got above freezing, not even in July. We had to thaw out a bucket of snow just to take a drink.”

  “I grew up in Philadelphia,” said the second man. “It was two hundred degrees above in the summer and a hundred and fifty below around Christmas. Don’t tell me about Wyoming. Hell, we never knew where Wyoming was.
I still don’t.”

  “You’d have to have gone to school to know,” said the first man. “Name me somebody in Philadelphia who ever went to school.”

  “I never went to school,” confessed Maternus.

  “You from Philadelphia, son?” asked his card partner.

  “I am from Montana, sir,” said the Roman, and both of the old men nodded and said perhaps it was for the best that he had remained unlettered.

  On the twentieth of September, his first day as an official volunteer, Maternus brought a potted iris to the rest home and asked a nurse in the basement station where Margaret Lambkin resided.

  “Room 256, up on the second floor,” said the nurse. “Are you the nephew she wants to kill?” she added by way of introducing Maternus to Maggie’s state of mind.

  “I am but a volunteer, madam, one dedicated to bringing a little happiness to these ancient people,” Maternus explained and showed her the potted iris. (Shen had advised him that women loved flowers almost as much as they loved poetry.)

  “If you’re not her nephew, why would you want to meet Maggie?” asked the nurse. “I mean, we have to put with her; you can talk to anybody you want.”

  “Everyone I have met here is quite nice. Margaret Lambkin cannot be that different from the rest.”

  The nurse laughed in the Roman’s face, which was the most pleasant response he would evoke that day.

  He found the room, knocked on the pressed wood door, and gently pushed it open when he heard a frail voice announce, “Come in.” The apartment he entered was small and divided into three chambers: a living room immediately inside the front door, a bedroom adjacent the outside window, and a bathroom connected to the sleeping quarters. Residents at Shady Grove either ate their meals in the large cafeteria on the first floor or had them delivered to their apartment, thus eliminating the need for a kitchen, although Maggie Lambkin did have a small refrigerator sitting on an end table in her living room. The walls and the carpet were lilac, divided by the pure white trim of the baseboards. Everything was impeccably clean and as unadorned as a Spartan household. The old woman herself was seated on the end of an overly plush sofa that nearly swallowed her small person in its plump folds. She had skin the color of freshly cut white pine. Her halo of hair resembled a ball of white lint. Her small face and hands were the only portions of her not covered by a blue and white house coat that had white lace extensions on its cuffs and hemline. To Maternus she looked like the porcelain doll one of the secretaries at the school kept propped upon a wooden shelf above her desk. At five feet nothing and weighing at the most ninety pounds, Maggie was not much larger than the secretary’s curio.