The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  We all sat there silently and pulled apart an enormous braided rye that the Ironworkers had sent over.

  Another loss for Tony, I thought, not sure I could bear seeing that.

  Late in the afternoon, Eric returned with the nail file, three packages of disgusting beef jerky, and a bag of Pixie Sticks, a powdered candy in a paper straw that I remembered from my youth. The drugstore was out of the exploding confection he’d have preferred. He proceeded to spill sticky orange granules all over my keyboard, causing my fingers to smell like baby aspirin all day.

  It took me half an hour to painstakingly, delicately scrape his decoration from the screen, where it left a visible shadow. After six minutes of “helping” me, he hightailed it off to the office supply store with Margaret. The only thing that cheered me up was that Margaret later reported that Eric had embarrassed her by asking loudly in the check-out line, “Margaret, do you pronounce it clitoris, or clitor is?” Margaret was so mortified that she forgot paper clips and masking tape and had to make a second trip just when she was going to sit down with me about her idea for a Christmas recipe corner in the strike newsletter.

  Perhaps there was some good in the kid after all.

  20

  “THEY LIKED YOUR idea on the mammogram stuff,” said Ron. “They think they can work with it, anyway. And Wendy had an inspiration that we’d give every woman who participates in the mammo-van program a free coffee mug with a slogan on it.”

  “What sort of slogan?”

  “I think she wanted something like ‘I Got an A+ in Breast Responsibility.’ I couldn’t tell if the client went for it or not.”

  “I hope to God the client didn’t go for it. Would you want a mug that said, ‘Kiss me, I passed my prostate exam’?”

  “I’m too young to worry about my prostate,” said Ron defensively. “What was Wendy doing sitting in on that meeting anyway? It’s not her account.”

  “She has everything but the last details wrapped up for the Camp-sters banquet and she was bored. Besides, I need to have staff beside me in these meetings. We don’t want them to think we’re some rinky-dink mom-and-pop operation.”

  “No, we wouldn’t want them to think that.”

  “I hear you have your little cousin helping you out up there,” said Ron.

  Louise had picked up the phone the night before when Wendy made one of her bedtime calls.

  “Louise is pitching in, Ron. For free. Is there a problem?”

  “No,” said Ron. “I think it’s cute. I just want to warn you that I have no idea how much longer you’re going to be able to stay up there. Goreman thinks you’re an unnecessary expense.”

  “Those designer suits he wears are an unnecessary expense, with that pudgy figure of his. I don’t get paid enough to be an unnecessary expense.”

  “You don’t know how bad it’s gotten over there. Goreman and Weingould aren’t even speaking. Goreman is having his secretary communicate with Weingould on everything.”

  Even I had to feel sorry for the beleaguered Weingould. Goreman’s secretary, Beatrice, was fiercely loyal, even though it had been years since she and Goreman used to sneak off for expense-account nookie trips. Beatrice had gone to one of those old-fashioned secretarial schools where they teach you a freezing, formal business etiquette that daunts the unwelcome caller and deflates the out of favor. She still called Weingould “Mr. Weingould” after a decade, claiming that it was a mark of respect.

  “Ron, I don’t like that mammogram pitch,” I said. “It’s not my best work. It’s weak and mediocre.”

  “The client’s happy, Nicky. I’m happy. Wendy is happy. Everyone is happy. By the way, I’m thinking of promoting her.”

  So low was I that this news didn’t even depress me further, though it should have. Wendy at every key account meeting, making suggestions for upping the perkiness quotient of Alzheimer’s bike-a-thons and abortion rights rallies. Wendy in the big office right next to mine, installing tailored peach window shades for that warm but energy-efficient look. Wendy pushing for a staff retreat in some cabin complex outside Lynchburg so that we could review our personal and career goals with the help of a corporate facilitator. It was almost too much to bear, but at that moment, I didn’t take it in. There would be time later for cursing and throwing things.

  “Do whatever you want about Wendy,” I said to Ron, since he would anyway. “But keep me up here if you can.”

  “There’s such a thing as cutting your losses, Nicky. We knew what the odds were on this one.”

  Louise had stayed with me three days now, taking care of her clients in a long-distance, listless way that would probably drive scores of them into cloistered orders. This was horribly unlike Louise, a veritable Sugar Plum Fairy who normally loved fussing happily over her holiday client roster and sending recycled-paper Christmas cards to every one of the couples who, through her good agency, had tied the knot in the past year.

  Every day she spent a few hours at the strike office, typing mailing labels for Margaret or playing game after game of checkers with Eric, who always won because Louise was constitutionally unable to plot more than two moves ahead. Then she’d disappear, wandering over to the public library or taking my car to the huge Providence mall. Strange behavior.

  None of my galvanizing comments seemed to rally her at all. Louise huddles into herself in moments of despair, and all you can do is stand by.

  Without her permission, I had phoned Johnny at home, at an hour when I knew he’d be at the shop, and left a message that Louise was vacationing on her own, but had asked me to let him know she was safe. She wasn’t ready to talk with him, I said, and had given me no number where she could be reached, but she’d sworn she was fine and in good health and desired only a space for solitude at present.

  I thought this sounded like something Louise would say. There was no sense in Johnny being driven crazy with worry while Louise decided what to do. If Louise ever decided what to do. If she stayed here much longer she could apply for her own library card.

  I’d have worried that Michael or Joey would grow concerned about her whereabouts, but for the fact that they’d assume Johnny was keeping tabs on her. Sometimes men’s inability to convey crucial information to each other comes in handy.

  Clare’s deadline went by, day after day, hour after hour. Tony began by arguing with her every twenty minutes, then he gave up and sat at his desk, shooting rubber bands, one after another, in a grim, unbreach-able silence.

  I’d drafted a press release with a stalwart quote from Clare about how every one of the St. Francis nurses was going to continue to try to provide the best care possible to their patients, and how the union would persist toward the goal of a safe and well-staffed hospital. “We are giving up the battle on the picket line, but we are not giving up the fight,” I had her say, cornily.

  By two o’clock on the last day, I’d done what little I could to get us press-ready for settlement. For caving in. I knew that Clare was doing the responsible thing, but I wished she’d be less mature and composed about it. I never saw her lose her temper, slam a door, throw a paperweight. It was admirable. It was unnatural.

  She’d taken even Doug’s sudden departure with equanimity, not even blinking at Tony’s explanation about Doug’s being needed at the national to chair a committee on OSHA violations in the deep-south states. Clare had probably been on to Doug’s tricks before any of us. Right now, Doug’s defection was the least of her worries.

  I never spared a regret for our two comrades in the trenches. Without Suzanne and Doug, the office felt less crowded to me, less wearing. My cold cleared up. Tony—well, he didn’t look like he was pining away to me. Perhaps, away from Suzanne’s intoxicating presence, he was giving some belated thought to what life with her might be like in the long-term, a life filled with staged play readings, underattended gallery openings, and summer visits to writers’ colonies where he’d be reduced to taking the bird-watching course for spouses. Odds were, though, that he was
concentrating his entire being on averting the defeat that lay before all of us.

  “Come on,” I said to Kate when the press release had been typed and vetted and lay folded like a Dear John letter on Tony’s desk. Clare had already put in a call to Winslow asking for a meeting. “Let’s go over to the hospital and walk the picket line one last time.”

  “God, Nicky, you talk like we’re already beaten.”

  “I’m a pessimist by nature. It keeps me on an even keel.”

  “You’re full of baloney,” she said. “The woman who still thinks this might be the year for the Red Sox. Okay, I’m coming. At least when this is over I won’t have to go sneaking around the back elevators any longer.”

  “You were starting to get a kick out of it.”

  Louise was already over there. She’d been taking it upon herself to bring coffee out to our picketers once every shift, good coffee that she picked up at the local Starbucks, not the slop we produced in the office. Eric was there, too, seeking new frontiers in which to misbehave. Worst of all, Bennett Winslow was expected any moment for one of his “curbside chats.”

  Winslow had begun this practice a week before. He’d descend from his office periodically and attempt to make conversation for a few minutes with the picketing nurses, asking them how they and their families were doing, giving news bulletins about doings inside the hospital. The nurses met his overtures with stony silence. He’d give it the old college try, and retreat upstairs again.

  I pitied Winslow. He had never wanted to draw lines in the sand or be portrayed on the evening news as the man who was snatching the Christmas toys out of the hands of Winsack’s tots. He’d much rather be the guy who made the toast when the ribbon was cut on a new hospital wing, the guy who led the fund drive for the children’s burn unit, the guy who had the considerate thought of taking all of his secretaries to the best restaurant in Providence on Secretaries Day. Given his true druthers, he’d probably have preferred that the strike end in victory for the nurses, so that more people would smile at him when he walked down the halls.

  It was a cold day, so cold that despite my heavy cabled turtleneck, my thickest corduroys, two pairs of tights, and fleece-lined snow boots, I was beginning to be chilled, a deep chill that would still be lingering after hours inside. Soon I’d begin to shake all over with the cold, like a dog that’s just been in the water. To think I’d ever complained about winters back in D.C.

  “I can’t believe this is our last time,” I said to Kate, as we approached the line.

  “Will you and Tony stay in touch?”

  “God knows.”

  “You should.”

  “You seem to forget he’s Suzanne’s property. They’re very well suited. I’ll watch their future progress with interest.”

  Kate peered out at me from the enormous puffy hood of her down coat.

  “Pride goeth before a fall.”

  “Are you suggesting that I should be a credulous fool twice for that man?”

  “Do you have anything better to do?”

  I pushed her shoulder lightly, and she pushed mine. We were giddy with despair. Up on the line, anticipating Winslow’s entrance on the scene, Lester had begun to sing the old Woody Guthrie tune “Union Maid,” and Kate joined in, in her croaky alto.

  I loved “Union Maid.” I loved how the union maid in the song “never was afraid” of company bullies, how she’d give the men around her an example of courage, how she even stood up to the National Guard. No one messed with the Union Maid.

  “You can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,” Kate sang, and then Margaret chimed in, and then a few of the others, including Louise who had been taught the song at my mother’s knee. I was laughing, and jumping up and down a little to keep warm. None of us was paying much attention to anything but this few blessed seconds of clowning around.

  What happened next appears in my memory as a frozen tableau, everyone moving with jerky precision, like those mechanized Christmas displays in department store windows depicting elves on the assembly line. It wasn’t like that, of course. It was just a series of accidents.

  The mill tower clock chimed three. Louise was handing out her last few cups of coffee. Bill, the hospital security guard, had arrived, accompanied by the guard dog Punch. It amused all of us that Winslow always demanded the presence of Bill and Punch when making his visits, as if he feared these mild-mannered nurses would rise up in a body and attack him. The dog Judy, as usual, was getting her toenails polished or something. She had the day off, at any rate.

  Eric had been staying away from Punch, this extraordinary obedience the result of the one-day exile imposed by Kate and some solemn threats from Bill.

  But today Bill, who had a soft spot for Louise, had half turned to take a cup of coffee from her hand. His moment of distraction was long enough for Eric to seize his chance. He approached Punch with one of the sticks of beef jerky he’d gotten at the drugstore. I saw him poke the meat toward the dog, in a fruitless attempt to get Punch to jump for it. I saw Louise, a foot away with the tray of coffee, looking suddenly alarmed, and Bill catching her expression and glancing back.

  Then I saw Winslow emerging from the lobby doors, stepping toward the circle of picketers on the icy sidewalk. I saw the beef jerky jab Punch in the eye as Eric’s foot slipped a few inches on that sidewalk, saw the dog’s growl and instant snap at Eric’s jacket. Bill ran forward, but Louise beat him to it, dropping her tray and grabbing Punch’s collar. She dragged the dog away from Eric, and then Bill took over, reassuring Punch with soft words and brisk pats. Punch, thank God, was unhurt. And I saw, as one of our nurses examined the cursed child, that the nip hadn’t broken Eric’s skin.

  What I didn’t see was the stringer from the Providence Journal, catching the whole thing on camera.

  21

  OUR FAVORITE HEADLINE by unanimous vote, and the one that Winslow threatened to sue over, was, “Hospital sets canine on striker’s child.”

  It was a slow news week. The picture made the front page, over the fold, of the Eagle-Gazette. It made the front page, under the fold, of the Providence Journal. It made the national sections of three of the major East Coast papers. The Globe used it to spearhead a series about the modern hospital in a new era of public scrutiny.

  “This photo couldn’t have been better if we’d staged it,” said Tony.

  In the picture, you couldn’t see that Eric had been teasing the dog; the beef jerky wasn’t visible at all. All you could see was the dog lunging at the boy, the child’s terrified face, the security guard immobile, and golden-haired Louise throwing herself between husky and child. And, best of all, in the background, Bennett Winslow smiling smugly. Winslow was smiling smugly only because that was his normal expression in preparing for public appearances. But, through the camera’s magic, it looked as if Winslow were smiling in approval as a small child was attacked by one of the hospital’s guard dogs.

  Where we’d sat in gloomy conference the morning before Eric’s bite, we sat two days afterward, gloating over the press cuttings we’d been able to get our hands on so far.

  “It’s Bill I feel sorry for,” said Margaret, ever-thoughtful.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Kate. “Mike and I are going to find him something, maybe with one of the vets around here. We owe it to him.”

  Bill had been amazingly discreet when asked by reporters if Winslow’s story of Eric “provoking” the dog was true. He’d said that the incident was “regrettable,” implying that the hospital was guilty as sin of, at the very least, reckless endangerment. Clare, to her credit and our annoyance, tried to give the press the plain facts about Punch’s lapse into ferocity, but the photo was so damning that her explanation had little weight. Especially since even the true version indicated that Eric, angel that he was, was trying to share his beef jerky, the precious snack of a hungry little striker boy, with the dog.

  “What are the odds they’re going to try to ride this out, though?” I said.
“It’s a minor scandal. It’ll be forgotten next week.”

  “It might be enough,” said Tony.

  “We’ll wait and see, anyway,” said Clare, who looked as if she’d gotten her first good night’s sleep in three months.

  The media fuss over the biting of Eric might have proved to be a flash in the pan. It might not have affected the final outcome of the strike if it hadn’t happened that four days after the incident, the feds announced that they were launching a major investigation into alleged Medicare fraud at three of Coventry’s largest facilities, including its flagship hospital in Orlando, Florida. Shocking stories surfaced. High-level Coventry players were implicated. The Wall Street Journal ran a sinister pen-and-ink sketch of the Coventry CEO. Suddenly, the guys in suits were too busy trying to avoid prison terms to care much about a dragging labor dispute at one of smaller hospitals in the Coventry chain.

  The company had billed what appeared, from preliminary reports, to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in services to Medicare recipients, services that had not actually been provided. As unkindly as the federal government views that sort of thing, the public views it with even less tolerance. The outcry over Coventry’s defrauding of the elderly was intense, sustained, and promised to go on as long as the investigation and ensuing trials (or, more likely, plea bargains) lasted. Most of the news stories on the fraud investigation also referred to the Punch incident, with the implication that Coventry engaged in a wholesale and coordinated effort to harm the widow and the orphan, so to speak. Less than a week after Eric’s historic moment in the spotlight, we knew and they knew that it was over.

  “Back to the bargaining table,” said Tony. “And this time they’re going to deal.”

  They didn’t merely deal. They rolled over. Winslow tried to put a good face on it, telling the papers that he was pleased that nurses had “finally been willing to come to a rational agreement with the hospi-tal,” but every story that covered the strike settlement noted that the agreement reached was nearly identical to the proposal Clare had brought to the bargaining table more than a year ago. Under the new contract, St. Francis nurses could each be required to work up to three hours of overtime three times a quarter, but no nurse could be required to work more than forty hours of overtime per year. The contract further stipulated that any nurse could refuse an overtime request, at her own discretion, if she felt that fatigue or illness would prevent her from providing adequate care.