The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  “How’s your friend Eileen?” I asked her as we came in from our picketing shift and huddled over coffee on a particularly bleak afternoon in early December. We were soaked and shivering from a driving cold rain that turned to ice at intervals. For the past hour, it had been blown straight into our faces by a fierce northeast wind. A nor’easter, they called such storms up here.

  It had been too many days since I’d thought to ask Kate about her friend. She never mentioned Eileen.

  “Not so good,” said Kate. “She went home for a week, but now she’s coughing and rasping and they put her back in the hospital, in case of pneumonia. The pain meds make her pretty woozy. Sometimes I’m not sure she knows who I am when I call.”

  “God, Kate.”

  “Those nurses up there. I don’t know how they can even call themselves nurses. Barry, her husband, tells me that he’ll go there after he gives the kids dinner and ask her when a nurse was last in and she’ll say, two hours ago. You and I know how low that damn census is now. They have the time to check on her. ICU is a ghost town compared to what it was. And Eileen’s no introvert. She doesn’t want to lie in that hospital bed reviewing her life. She needs human contact.”

  “Do her other friends visit?”

  “Oh, sure. But everyone has lives. Children to pick up from school, and work deadlines, and family holidays. If I could be there, it would make a difference. I’m sorry to complain, Nicky. I get down about it all.”

  “Kate, go see her. Everyone on this side would understand.”

  “Even if they did, the hospital would probably kick me out in ten minutes.”

  “Is your face that well known?”

  “Not by most of the managers, but my own charge nurse knows me, of course, and Winslow, and Louanne Reilly, the director of nursing.”

  “You have to chance it.”

  “And risk a scene with my being escorted out of Eileen’s room by security guards? She’s been through enough.”

  “You’re the last one I thought would patronize her just because she’s sick. She sounds like she’d get a kick out of it. And they can’t arrest you. Even if they did, Clare would understand. We’d hold a candlelight vigil outside your cell window. Talk about great press.”

  I squeezed her forearm tentatively, uneasy with the gesture since she never invited reassurance or sympathy. Kate looked out the window. We could hear the icy rain hissing and spattering, and a rumble of winter thunder.

  “We could go in the middle of evening visiting hours,” she said. “Less conspicuous.”

  “We?”

  “Come with me, Nicky. Please. I can’t ask Mike. He’d do it, but he’s a doctor and this is a small town. I don’t want any grudges held against him when this is over.”

  “Kate, Winslow’s met me in person. And Reilly’s seen me outside, talking to the press, several times now.”

  “Winslow’s never around that late. He goes home for cocktails at six P.M. sharp. It’s legendary. And Reilly’s hardly ever on the floor. She prefers paperwork and management meetings.”

  “Kate … I have no credentials in this situation. She’s not my friend. If I’m caught with you, it will look weird.”

  “We can sneak in through the staff entrance, the one at the side, not the one Winslow uses.”

  In the end, I said I’d do it. I had never crossed a picket line in my life. It was worse, in my family’s book, than eating meat on a Friday during Lent or leaving your chewing gum in your mouth when you went up to take Communion. But this was an undercover mission, not a white-flag-waving surrender. We’d be going in behind enemy lines, for the best of reasons.

  It is almost impossible to refuse a request, wrung from awful circumstances, of someone who rarely asks for help. If Kate was asking me—our flippant, self-reliant Kate—it was because she had no other choice.

  “And Nicky,” she said, “can you do it at a moment’s notice?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because it might have to be soon.”

  The same day, Margaret announced her latest plan to raise our spirits.

  “We’re going to do Secret Santas,” she said, appearing before me with an ancient fedora in which scraps of folded typing paper were jumbled. “We regulars.”

  “Margaret, do they say Secret Santa anymore?”

  “Oh, I’m publicly calling it Holiday Elves.”

  “I really don’t have time for this, no offense. Give me a pass, could you?”

  Margaret shook the hat.

  “Everyone else is participating,” she said. “You know how it works, right? Pick a name, then for the next two weeks before Christmas you do little nice things for that person. It really lifts morale. We’re putting on a thirty-dollar limit. Me, you, Clare, Tony, Lester, Kate, Doug, Mary Grunewald, and Marjorie.”

  “Who’s Marjorie?”

  “The UPS gal. She’s here every day, I can’t believe you don’t know her name. Most of us are friendly with her so we thought we’d include her.”

  I had seen Marjorie, and fervently prayed I didn’t draw her name. She was a solid, beefy marine reserve captain with a tattoo on her left bicep that read, “Death before dishonor.” She had no line of chaffing camaraderie, as the overnight mail people usually did, and no matter how lovely or exciting the seasonal gifts she’d begun to bring, she was unflappable and silent. I was, frankly, afraid of her.

  “Come on,” said Margaret. “And don’t try to see the names, Nicky.” She shuffled the hat again.

  “Close your eyes and pick,” she commanded.

  The scrap read “Doug,” in Margaret’s schoolgirl handwriting.

  “Doug! Let me pick again, Margaret. You know we can’t stand each other. Let me have Marjorie.”

  “If you can’t stand each other, this will break the ice.”

  “I don’t want the ice broken.”

  “Sorry, no do-overs,” said Margaret.

  It was not motivating, being Doug’s Holiday Elf. Over the next week, I showered all varieties of small gifts and good deeds on him, gritting my teeth. I sneaked out and cleaned his car after a light snow, and he complained to Margaret the next morning that his Elf had maimed one of his windshield wipers. I left a milk chocolate Saint Nick on his desk and he ate the head and picked out the sugar eyes and belt buckle, leaving the headless corpse lying there for days until Eric consumed it. The travel mini-shaving kit I bought him from the local drugstore was dismissed under his breath as “cheesy,” though I’d intended it as a delicate compliment on his new clean-shaven look. Other tokens met with similar disdain. Doug had clearly had great hopes of his Holiday Elf. Ridiculously, I began to dread his childlike disappointment in my offerings.

  I had no idea what I’d buy him for the big finale.

  “Your problem is that you’re not having enough fun with it,” said Margaret.

  “Fun is the last thing I want to have with Doug, Margaret. He’s hardly been gracious. I heard him tell Kate that he wished he had her Elf.”

  Margaret beamed. We all knew she was Kate’s Elf, actually. The homemade orange-and-clove pomanders had tipped us off, along with the découpaged pencil holder.

  “I can’t help it if I don’t have a flair for this sort of thing,” I whined.

  “Here, take a half hour tonight and go shopping with me. I’ll show you.”

  Margaret dragged me to Beach’s Emporium, a novelty-and-sundry store out on the old two-lane business route that held every wish of the human imagination. It had an aisle of ribbons, thread, and skeins of yarn, another of plastic tablecloths and machine-crocheted place mats, and still another of children’s toys and coloring books, some of which appeared to have been gathering dust since the previous generation stopped believing in Santa Claus. Margaret led me down a short flight of stairs into a stifling back room marked “Gifts.”

  “How much money do you have left in your Elf budget?” she inquired.

  “Twenty dollars or so.”

  “You’re lying.”

&nbs
p; “Okay, about fifteen dollars.”

  “You can absolutely go to town in this place for fifteen dollars.”

  Ten minutes later she had filled my basket with the following surprises for the unsuspecting Doug:

  A hundred-page crossword puzzle book. (“I’ve seen him do them, Nicky. Crossword addicts are always running out.”) A pair of Groucho glasses and mustache. (“He has a playful side, Nicky…. No, everyone does.”) A paddle with a rubber ball attached to it with an elastic string. A game that consisted of a pocket-size frame in which square plastic numbers had to be moved around until they were put in their proper sequence. A bag of Tootsie Pops. (“He’s quitting smoking, Nicky, he’ll love them.”) A snow globe depicting a miniature castle surrounded by a blue enamel moat. Red wool socks with individual toe holes. And, to top it all off, a pair of singing lobsters mounted on a fake sand dune (the sand was depicted by glued-on sawdust). The lobsters wore name tags that read “Clawrence” and “Shelley.” The Shelley lobster wore two pink bows on her feelers.

  “Clawrence and Shelley, get it?” said Margaret. The Shelley lobster was the girl, she explained, in case I didn’t catch the significance of the bows.

  Clawrence sang “By the Beautiful Sea,” and Shelley sang “Under the Boardwalk,” in tinny, Martian voices. They set me back three dollars. In total, my purchases came to nine dollars, and the owner threw in a bunch of plastic mistletoe for free.

  “You still have about six left over for your final present,” said Margaret. “I’ll put my thinking cap on.”

  “Thank you, Margaret. Will he like these? He’s kind of picky.”

  “Anyone would like these,” said Margaret confidently.

  Humiliatingly, Margaret was right. Doug had turned up his nose at my tin of Almond Rocha, but he was soon never seen without a Tootsie Pop hanging out the side of his mouth.

  “This is more like it,” he exclaimed when he opened the Groucho glasses. He even wore them to a staff meeting. He became expert at the paddleball game, annoying all of us with the thuck-thuck-thuck sound of the ball against the wood. And he took to Clawrence and Shelley from the moment he saw them, setting them in the place of honor at the front of his desk and pulling their singing strings every ten minutes.

  “You see?” said Margaret. “He just wanted to be a kid again. Pretty cute.”

  I was taken aback by Doug’s childish delight in his presents. When I thought about it, I realized that all he’d wanted was to be treated as one of the gang, a likable guy whom coworkers referred to with the words “good old” in front of his name. Margaret had seen this, but I had not. Margaret, whom I liked to make fun of because she was so mercilessly bustling and practical, had turned out to be a better student of human nature than I was. More than any other event of the strike, this shook my faith in myself. Doug’s glee was a constant reproach. I began to pray, after the fiftieth rendition of “Under the Boardwalk,” that a sad accident would befall Clawrence and Shelley.

  Our days dragged on, full of chores and events but empty of real progress toward ending the strike. Eileen took a brief turn for the better. Over the phone, she told Kate she’d be home in the next day or two. Twelve hours later, she was too ill to take telephone calls and the doctors were shaking their heads. They weren’t even promising that Eileen would make it much past New Year’s.

  “We’re going in,” said Kate, attempting to joke.

  That evening at dinnertime, with Kate holding a large, shielding poinsettia and I engulfed in a bouquet of helium balloons printed with smiling teddy bears, we walked nonchalantly through the staff entrance like lost and unobservant visitors. We both wore mufflers well up to our chins, and Kate had covered my hair with one of the knobbly knitted caps Eileen had produced back in the old days.

  I said to Kate under my breath, “If anyone asks, we’re on the way to maternity. That’s why I ordered the balloons with these ugly teddy bears instead of something tasteful.”

  The hospital corridors seemed the length of football fields. As we passed the statue of the Blessed Mother guarding the chapel door, I thought I saw a mild rebuke in her downward-looking gaze. We turned two corners, then a third. It swallowed us up, this place that was a world unto itself.

  I don’t like hospitals. I don’t like their smell of laundry and urine and sad waiting. I don’t like how the floors never look truly mopped and the walls look pallid and sweating, like the walls of underground caves. I don’t like the food or the coffee in hospital cafeterias, with their smeary silverware and entrées left over from the night shift.

  Please don’t let me die in a hospital, I prayed, although I knew from one of the many studies Weingould had dumped on me that most Americans do die in hospitals. A car accident or plane crash came way up on my list. Something quick. Johnny once told me and Louise, in a sleepy, tipsy late-night conversation, that his ideal death would be standing in the old Boston Garden as the Celtics won the championship, with the rafters shaking and the floor pounding beneath him because the crowd would be stomping so hard. As the buzzer went, he’d sink to the floor from a stroke or heart attack, and that would be it.

  Louise had nothing to contribute to this discussion, as she rarely worried about death. “I figure I’ll go on, in some capacity,” she said.

  “Well, doesn’t it matter to you in which capacity?” I said. “Do you care if you’re formless ether? Or what if you’re reincarnated in some terrible place like Calcutta or Boise, Idaho?”

  “I’m not picky about the details. I’ll think I’ll still be myself in some sense.”

  If you asked me, Louise’s happy-go-lucky faith that she’d arrive, identity intact, in the world to come was akin to trusting an airline to get your luggage to the right place on a trip with two short connections. Her belief in the afterlife was based on various fuzzy psychic experiences of her own, and the assurances of wacko chums who were allegedly in constant touch with the departed. An AT&T operator would have better success connecting with the dead than Louise’s importunate friends, who were bound to offend the spirits since they certainly got on the nerves of those still among the living.

  Yet Louise’s own contacts with the beyond did offer strange comfort. A few months after my father’s passing, she related to me that she’d had a dream the night after his death in which he was standing in her living room trying to remember the third verse of “Kubla Khan.”

  Louise was convinced that the dream was a message from my father on his way to the next astral plane. All well and good, but what in this world or the next was my father trying to convey? In life, the only poetry he’d known by heart was “The Highwayman” and “Casey at the Bat.”

  Kate nudged me in the ribs. There, tapping down the hall toward us, was Louanne Reilly, the director of nursing. She was dressed like a bank director, of course. The nubbly sweater and grandmotherly pearl brooch of her television interviews were nowhere in evidence. Louanne was sporting what was either an Armani suit or an expensive knockoff, and a pair of killer Ferragamos. Sadly, she had actually looked more attractive in her grandma clothes; the sharp, perfect lines of her severely tailored jacket only emphasized the grooves worn by stress and ill-temper around her mouth. She’d have done better “with a little softness around her face,” my mother would have said.

  Kate buried her nose in the poinsettias as if enjoying their nonexistent scent and I allowed the balloons to rise up around me a few inches. Reilly strode past us without a blink. In the elevator, we stood shoulder to shoulder, giggling. I felt daring and triumphant, like a member of the French Resistance.

  On Level Three, two floors from our destination, the ponderous doors opened and Bennett Winslow stepped in. Kate stiffened next to me and moved back. The elevator was long and cavernous, as hospital elevators are, and the acoustics were such that we could hear Winslow humming “Begin the Beguine” under his breath. He unearthed a tin of hoarhound cough drops from his pocket and unwrapped one. A fusty, molasses smell filled the elevator. Winslow seemed to ta
ke in our presence only as fellow passengers. I blessed the convention that one never makes direct eye contact in an elevator.

  It seemed we should have shot up twenty floors in the time it took to reach the ICU. When we arrived, finally, Winslow stepped aside and put out a hand to ensure the door stayed open, with the rather florid chivalry that seemed to be second nature to him. We were still behind him, steeling ourselves to walk past, when he said quietly, “I hope your friend feels better, Kate. If anyone gives you any trouble, have them call me.”

  Kate stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Come on,” I said, pushing her forward. As the doors shut, I turned around and raised my hand discreetly to Winslow in acknowledgment. He raised his own hand in return.

  I stayed in the room just long enough to see Eileen’s face when she perceived Kate, the delight that shone through the immense exhaustion.

  “Katie,” she said, and held out her hands.

  To Kate, who remembered the lovely, rambunctious woman Eileen had been before her illness, the change in her friend after an absence of weeks must have been a shock. If Kate had had any slight hopes of an improvement before, Eileen’s colorless face against the gray hospital pillows, the thinness of her shoulders visible through the chenille robe she was wearing, the translucence of her skin, all gave Kate an answer. Only her friend’s eyes, huge brown eyes full of humor, resembled the face in the photos Kate had shown me.

  I left them alone together and retreated to the floor lobby, where I leafed through old Time magazines and tried not to think about the germs lurking on the sticky Naugahyde sofa. Kate’s visit would last forty-five minutes; we’d planned for her to leave with the general exodus at the end of visiting hours. Waiting for her, I hid behind my magazine and watched a few of the patients walking their families and friends to the floor lobby. One or two trundled their IVs behind them. Everyone was so cheerful. You’d have thought that they were all saying good night after a dinner party. For the first time, I thought that my father at least hadn’t had to face the ravages of sickness or old age. He’d had what I’d said I would choose, that speedy exit.