Change of Heart

by Sally Mandel

  “Hello, Margaret,” he said. He put his hand on her arm and, without slowing, propelled her toward Room 1108. “First day on the job, the kid at the desk.”

  “Uh, Walter … she’s asleep, I think. Let’s let her rest and come back in a little while.”

  Walter said, “Hmm,” which meant that he hadn’t heard her. “MacDonald around? Where the hell is everybody?”

  Margaret stopped walking and plucked at his elbow. “I really need a cup of coffee.”

  “Go ahead, then,” he said. “Take your time. I’ll wait here for you.”

  And he barged right in with Margaret following, trying to avoid Sharlie’s accusing stare. Sharlie rarely complained and absolutely never lost her temper. But her eyes—sometimes it seemed as if they would burn up the world with their blazing fury.

  Walter sat down next to the bed and took Sharlie’s hand.

  “Hi, Chuck. You hanging in there?”

  Sharlie nodded.

  “I’m getting Diller up here, and we’ll take care of this thing, okay?”

  Sharlie closed her eyes wearily. “Oh, Daddy …”

  Walter inspected the room as he spoke. “Now, let’s not have a discouraging word around here. We have not yet begun to fight.” He rose and walked to the window, closing the curtain with an emphatic whoosh. Margaret held out her hand in mute protest, but Walter sat down again, and neither Margaret nor Sharlie felt inclined to listen to his discourse on the evils of sunlight in the sickroom—all part of the Unstimulating Environment Theory, straight from the mouth of Walter’s mother into his collection of proven scientific facts.

  Two weeks ago Sharlie had dreamed that under all of that steely hair her father’s head secreted a rectangular slot into which he could insert cassette tapes. The image pleased Sharlie, and she entertained herself by composing the tape library Walter would compile for himself—selections from such luminaries as John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Bryant, Billy Graham, but most often contributions from the wisdom of Christine Converse.

  In her father’s face Sharlie saw the old woman’s jaw, the straight line of her mouth, disapproving as always. Sharlie and her mother had always dreaded grandmother Converse’s visits; though, despite her anxiety, Sharlie had secretly enjoyed watching Walter snap to attention, trembling with eagerness to please the old harridan and never quite succeeding.

  Christine Converse died when Sharlie was about ten years old. Walter had been crushed with a silent, black grief that lasted for nearly a year. Once, to her astonishment, Sharlie had heard her father’s muffled sobs through the heavy mahogany door of his study.

  After that Walter’s devotion to his dead mother’s doctrines became family ritual, until Sharlie could recite them word for word—and often did, for Margaret’s amusement Sharlie’s grandmother had been tyrannical, bigoted, misinformed, but worst of all, terribly, excruciatingly boring. Sharlie found the resemblance between Christine and her only son a profoundly compelling argument against heredity.

  Now Walter was gripping her hand, squeezing hard for emphasis. For a devotee of the Unstimulating Environment Theory, Sharlie agonized, this man could be ferociously stimulating.

  “… and no more screwing around with this chemical horseshit,” he was saying. (Not the Billy Graham tape, Sharlie thought gratefully.) “We’re going to whip you into surgery and finish this up once and for all.”

  “I don’t want those tests again.”

  “Look, Chuck, nobody likes tests, but if you have to do it, you have to do it. It’ll be worth it, because this time you’re going to get well. And you do want to get well more than anything.”

  Margaret glanced at Sharlie’s face and read the question there. More than anything?

  Walter squeezed his daughter’s hand again.

  “If you’re determined to get better, you will get better.”

  Norman Vincent Peale, Sharlie decided, trying to keep her face averted. Walter reached out, hooked his big square finger around her chin, and turned her face to his. Taking note of the damp eyelashes, he shook his head.

  “You can do it, Chuck. We’re all counting on that fighting spirit.”

  Margaret said softly, “She needs to rest, dear. There’s been a lot of pain today.”

  Walter patted Sharlie’s hand and rose.

  “Okay. I’ll just see if I can track Diller down, and we’ll get the old team into action.”

  He and Margaret left the room, and Sharlie murmured bitterly to herself, “Rah rah rah. Sis boom bah.” But the final “bah” was more of a sob than anything else. With her parents’ departure, another familiar visitor had entered. Sharlie called him Agony Jones. Unlike the occasional uncle or aunt, he remained a faithful companion and seemed unimpressed by hospital visiting schedules. His powerful presence filled the room now like a malevolent fog, pressing down on her chest until she felt she must be forced right through the mattress onto the floor and mashed like one of those ephemeral silverfish that disintegrate into dust at the touch of a careless toe. The cold sweat prickled the space above her lip, but her arms throbbed so acutely that she couldn’t raise them to wipe her face. Pain, pain, go away, come again some other day.

  She lay very still, concentrating on blue sky, trying not to cry out like some animal in a trap, knowing that once she got started, the howling would never end.

  Chapter 3

  Walter Converse prowled the hallway outside the staff lounge. If there was one thing he despised, it was waiting, but he knew that Diller stopped in here a few times a day for a cup of coffee and an appreciative look at the nurses. So Walter stalked back and forth, always keeping one gloomy eye on the lounge doorway, and as he paced, he thought about his daughter.

  It was the greatest disappointment of his life that Sharlie had been born malformed. Well, not malformed exactly, but defective, even if the defect was someplace where nobody could see it. If she’d emerged from Margaret’s cold body missing an arm or a leg or with her face all twisted and grotesque like some of the children Walter had seen, well, he was a strong man, but he didn’t know if he could have put up with that.

  He’d been grateful she was a girl. Any child of his would end up extraordinary, he’d see to that, and an extraordinary woman was far more interesting than an extraordinary man. Look at his mother, for instance.

  But when they told him about Sharlie’s heart just an hour after the elation of her birth, Walter had been crushed. Then furious: furious with God—for which he’d later asked and been granted forgiveness—furious with the medical profession, furious with the poor frail infant herself, and particularly furious with Margaret. Could she never do anything right? The incredible incompetence of the woman. She had looked up at him from her hospital bed with such guilt, asking him with her eyes to forgive her for producing such a poor specimen of a baby. She had wanted to please him, he knew that. So he forced the anger back down inside, patted her hand, and pounded his rage out on the squash court and in his conferences with specialists in New York and Minnesota and Houston and just about every place in between.

  Sure enough, in Walter’s obsession to learn all there was to know about his baby’s condition, he tracked down a genetic disorder in Margaret’s family that no one had ever spoken about because no one in that tight-ass, hot-shot bunch ever talked about things that happened in the, God forbid, body. But what, he wanted to know, was the point of blue blood if it pumped in and out of a fucked-up heart?

  So while Margaret languished, grief-stricken and guilty, Walter set about to cure his daughter, lavishing time and money on the project as if there were no Converse & Mackin and no stock market to occupy his active days.

  Maybe she wasn’t as lively as the other babies in the nursery, and maybe her skin had a slightly bluish tinge, but when he held the baby Charlotte, she seemed so beautiful to him, so soft and so perfect on the outside that you’d never know. When he held her like that, he made himself a fierce promise to give her the life he’
d dreamed about during all those years of waiting for Margaret to produce.

  His eyes snapped to the lounge doorway as someone in surgical gear went inside. But no, it wasn’t Diller. Walter began his pacing again, but more slowly now. Suddenly he realized that he was beginning to get discouraged. Here was Sharlie, twenty-six years old and basically an invalid. There had been so many disappointments, so many failed techniques, some so esoteric they were probably illegal, like the one where they blew carbon dioxide gas into the heart chamber through a tube. But each new test confirmed what the last one had indicated: Corrective surgery might repair Sharlie’s heart, but the risks were prohibitive.

  After each new hope dissolved, Walter had always managed to replenish his superhuman store of energy and confidence. But today he felt the supply dwindling. As he looked toward the future, there was a kernel of dread mixed with the faith he’d kept alive all these years, and kept alive in his wife and daughter, too.

  In the early days he’d pushed hard for surgery but couldn’t find anybody courageous enough to try a triple valve replacement on Sharlie. Goddammit, he wanted to cut her open and perform the frigging operation himself. And now, with each day of increased suffering, he became more convinced that a heart transplant was the only possible solution. What were the alternatives? Watch Sharlie disintegrate week by week, her spirit shattered like her shattered heart? Wait like Sharlie for the injection that came every now and then to ease the merciless, unremitting pain? Pretty soon the ever-narrowing slice of bearable time would disappear altogether, and that left only the choice of prolonging a tortured life or tossing out the pill bottles and letting her go.

  He came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the sterile hall. God forgive me, he thought. Walter Converse considering the willful destruction of his own child. Mother, where are all your answers now?

  Chapter 4

  Margaret tried to keep the querulous tone out of her voice, knowing it was unattractive. One had to make allowances for sick people, but considering Sharlie’s upbringing, it amazed her that sometimes she had to be pressed to do the correct thing.

  “But he picked you up off the street, dear,” she said. “After all, we’ve read about people who’ve been left bleeding on the pavement to die because nobody wanted to get involved.”

  Sharlie, propped up in bed today, hair combed, if not exactly clean, closed her eyes.

  “All right. Ask them to put a phone in here, and I’ll do it this afternoon.”

  Margaret nodded, restraining herself from thanking Sharlie when she was only doing what was right.

  “I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear from you. Such a thoughtful young man, calling so often to inquire how you are.”

  Sharlie didn’t respond. After a moment Margaret rose.

  “Well … I think I’ll go see about that telephone.”

  She went out, and both women felt relieved to have some time apart. Sharlie was accustomed to abbreviated hospital visits and had often noticed callers, her own, back when she’d had some, and other people’s, sneaking looks at their watches after twenty minutes in hopes that they’d stayed a respectable amount of time. Except for Agony Jones, of course, who hung around hour after hour, sitting on the beds and making a nuisance of himself.

  She picked up a magazine from the bedside table. Cosmopolitan. Her mother had brought it as a kind of joke, since Sharlie would sometimes entertain them both by reading the advice columns out loud. “How to catch a man on the crosstown bus, by the water cooler, in Paley Park, in the coronary care unit, on the operating table.…

  Don’t lose this made-in-heaven opportunity, girls. Those green hospital gowns can be so appealing, and all those doctors—hovering around for the sole purpose of taking care of poor frail delicate you. We suggest a little Poor-Circulation Blue eye shadow and Near-Death makeup base. Looks so compelling under the operating-room lights. And by all means, don’t neglect your body. Here’s your perfect chance to show off what you’ve got without a hint of exhibitionism (subtle is sexy), particularly if you’re fortunate enough to undergo open-heart surgery. Do your own preop prep by toning those pectoral muscles (see exercises on page fifty-four), or, in the event of hysterectomy, we recommend Clairol’s new Pubic Down to make that forbidden fur shiny and kitten soft.…”

  Sharlie wondered if it were possible to donate one’s body to Madison Avenue instead of to some stuffy medical research center. She thought she might enjoy modeling for the full-page ad on the back of The New York Times—lying flat on a shiny aluminum table, draped with a sheet, her cold, dead face impeccably groomed. If you want to reach me, you’ll find me in the morgue. I guess you could say I’m that Cosmopolitan girl.…

  Sharlie shook her head and tried to free it of the macabre image.

  “Hey, I got you a phone. A Princess for a princess.” Nurse Ramón Rodriguez stood in the doorway. Sharlie smiled at him as he brought the telephone over to the bedside table and bent to plug it in. He glanced at the magazine on Sharlie’s lap. The page was open to a picture of Martina Schiller, this year’s notion of ideal beauty—a blinding array of white teeth and carefully tousled thick blond mane. Nurse Rodriguez looked at Sharlie’s limp hair.

  “Hey, Charlie, you wan’ I give you a shampoo today?”

  Sharlie smoothed a strand behind her ear, grimacing at the lank texture.

  “I guess you’d better before the mice move in. Thanks.”

  Nurse Rodriguez picked up the receiver, listened for the dial tone, then nodded.

  “It’s okay. I be back later with my rollin’ beauty store.”

  Sharlie glanced wistfully at Martina Schiller.

  “Ahh,” Ramón said, catching her at it. “You don’ wanna look like that chick, man. She’s ice. You got more woman in you any day.”

  Sharlie watched him walk to the door, his small body jaunty, and, dressed in the sterile white uniform, impertinent somehow. He waved at her, and she shut her eyes, exhausted from the conversation and from the meanderings of her own imagination. Agony Jones had spread himself all over the room like a thick layer of foul smoke. If only somebody would rearrange the schedule so that for one day all six hours of drugged relief came at a stretch. She’d gladly suffer the despised company of Agony Jones for the eighteen searing hours that would follow.

  Nurse Rodriguez had washed her hair, and it fell all shiny and soft to her shoulders. She’d had her injection and wouldn’t be this comfortable again for another four hours. She glanced at the phone squatting reproachfully on her bedside table. The time had come.

  She’d gotten so far as to put her hand on the receiver, even dialed a few digits. But then she panicked and hung up. What was he like anyway, this Brian Morgan? She had vague memories of a quiet voice and a long, lean arm, but there was no face. He’d disappeared by the time her parents got to the hospital that evening. Her mother said that over the phone he sounded like “a fine young man.” How does one talk to a fine young man these days? It’d been a long time since she’d talked with anyone other than her parents and the staff at Saint Joe’s except to say, “Good morning,” or “Rain again,” to the occasional cab driver. Maybe she’d better take a closer look at Cosmo before she dialed.

  Coward, coward. She grabbed the phone, dialed fiercely, and listened to the ring, gripping the receiver until her hand ached.

  A voice answered, the words rushing together in a barely coherent stream. “Barbara—Kaye’s—office—good—afternoon.”

  Sharlie gave her name and asked for Mr. Morgan in her best imitation of a nonterrified person. The voice sang again, “What is this in regard to, please?”

  With regard to, thought Sharlie, her face reddening and a menacing thump sounding in her chest. Oh Lord, this is not good for me.

  “It’s … uh … a personal matter,” she stammered. The guy saved my life. Is that personal enough for you, madam?

  “Hello.”

  That was the voice. Sharlie remembered it now.
/>   “Is this the actual Charlotte Converse in person?”

  “Yes,” Sharlie answered. “I … uh …” Oh, damn, she thought, pull yourself together. “I called to thank you for saving my life.”

  Her voice sounded prissy even in her own ears, and she heard Brian Morgan laugh.

  “Think nothing of it,” he said. “When can I come see you?”

  “What?” she said. Oh, clever.

  “I’ve got something of yours. At least I think they fell out of your shopping bag. A pair of binoculars?”

  “Oh, you mean the opera glasses,” she said.

  “That’s what happens when you make snap judgments,” he went on, and she could hear the amusement in his voice. “You passed out there on the sidewalk with these glasses by your hand, and I figured, ‘Of course, a pregnant birdwatcher.’”

  This time Sharlie laughed, an unfamiliar sensation, like bubbles in her throat.

  “It’s a damn good thing I saw your cardiac alert bracelet,” he said, and then Sharlie heard an intercom buzzer sound in the background. Brian’s voice changed tempo, speeding up.

  “Listen, my appointment’s here. What’re your visiting hours?”

  “Noon until eight, but …”

  “Fine, I’ll stop by around six. ’Bye.”

  The phone clicked, and he was gone.

  But, thought Sharlie. But …

  She felt a familiar sense of powerlessness in the presence of a personality stronger than her own. I’d make a great candidate for torture, she thought. Some guy in a leather jacket would stand over her and say (firmly, of course), “All right, lady, you know the names of all the spies in the Upper East Side network. I want this information, and I’ll get it from you one way or the other,” and she’d just give him a little trembly smile and say, “Oh, well sure … if it means that much to you.…”