Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge

by Pamela Morsi

  Jack had plenty of experience with hospitals. His stepfather had taken him on Saturday rounds when he was a kid. It was supposed to be a treat, a reward usually for good behavior. His stepbrothers always loved it. Jack had never been able to appreciate it that way.

  At least the majority of Ernst’s patients would be conscious, even chatty. They always made a fuss over Jack, which helped to tamp down the squeamishness he felt around sick people.

  Occasionally, Jack had seen some that were as seriously silent as this, but not often. And the thing about rounds was that his stepdad had always had things to do. He didn’t come and sit and bide his time. He was in and out. When he was in a room he was busy. When he was no longer busy, he left.

  Tonight, Jack couldn’t do that. He folded his arms. Then unfolded them. He stood on one foot, then the other. Balancing equally on both, he swayed for a few minutes, hands at his side. Finally, he began to pace.

  Claire returned from escorting out the unwelcome family members. To Jack’s surprise, she walked straight to the bed and took the old man’s hand in her own.

  “Bud,” she said, not loudly but conversationally, “it’s me, Claire. Jack and I are here with you.”

  “Do you think he can hear you?” Jack asked her.

  Claire shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “You don’t care whether you’re just talking to yourself?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care,” she answered. “Even if he can’t here me, I can hear myself and what I say to him is probably more important to me than it is to him.”

  Jack snorted and shook his head.

  “What?” Claire asked him.

  Jack didn’t answer that question. He didn’t want to fight anymore. He was tired, uncertain and out of his element. Claire, on the other hand, seemed so sure of herself. It was as if she knew exactly what to do in a room with a dying old man. She had no more experience with this than he did, but nothing in her actions suggested that. Jack found it annoying. And found himself annoyed with Claire. The argument from the trip still lingered in him just below the surface. He didn’t want to stoke those flames. Instead, he resumed his pacing.

  Claire pulled up a chair beside the bed and continued to talk to Bud and stroke his arm. She wasn’t saying anything important. It seemed to Jack that if you were talking to someone who was dying, you would only have important things to say. There was nothing of significance in his wife’s words. Yet they hardly could be described as useless chatter. She talked about the children and the weather. Surprisingly, she talked about Jack’s business and his new project. When he’d told her about it, he’d thought she was hardly paying any attention. But she spoke about it to Bud with great thoroughness and there was pride in her voice.

  Jack couldn’t listen anymore. He needed action. He needed to be doing something. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket thinking he’d call Dana and check in with the office, find out what was going on. When he realized what he was doing he shook his head at his own idiocy. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. If Dana were awake, she surely wouldn’t be in any frame of mind to discuss business. Besides, he’d come all the way to Oklahoma to take care of his grandfather. That’s what he needed to be doing.

  He walked out of the room and around the corner to the nurses’ station. The woman, Lucy, was talking on the phone. Jack waited, not very patiently, until she finished.

  “What can you tell me about my grandfather?” he asked the minute she hung up. He knew his voice was harsher, more confrontational than it needed to be. Somehow he couldn’t stop himself.

  The nurse’s back stiffened. She was a hardworking professional and longtime veteran of the night shift. She could do the niceties of interacting with patient families, but she was not about to be roughshod by anyone.

  “Mr. Crabtree has had a stroke and a head injury. Beyond the fact that he’s stable right now, I can’t really tell you much of anything,” the nurse answered. “You’ll need to speak to his doctor.”

  “Where is his doctor?”

  Lucy’s expression was incredulous, but she did manage to keep most of the sarcasm out of her voice. “At this time of night, I’d think that he’d be home in bed.”

  “So there’s nobody that I can talk to?”

  She shrugged. “I could wake up the resident, but I doubt he’ll be able to tell you more than I can.”

  Jack felt helpless, which made him angry. Deliberately he said nothing to keep from saying something he’d regret.

  “Look, you and your wife should get some rest,” the nurse told him. “His doctor makes rounds between eight-thirty and ten in the morning. You can ask all the questions you want then.”

  Jack shook his head—he didn’t even give consideration to the suggestion.

  “No, I need to stay here.” He was emphatic.

  The nurse nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Why don’t you go get some coffee for you and your wife. You’ll need it if you’re staying up all night.”

  Jack listened as she gave directions to the vending area around the corner, then headed purposefully along that route. It all felt so much easier when he had something to do.

  With an instant flash of insight he realized that was why Claire was in that hospital room talking to Bud. That made him feel better.

  The huff of the breathing machine and its continuous groan muffled all other sound in the room, engulfing Claire in a cocoon of white noise that was somehow safe and intimate. She was alone with Bud, and although she kept her voice light and chatty, he gave no appearance of consciousness. He was so helpless, so vulnerable. She felt a swelling of tenderness for the old man. She wasn’t sure if that was a universal response or something she’d gotten from her own parents, the potent outpouring of compassion for the weak. And Jack’s grandfather seemed very weak indeed. His skin color was grayish, looking almost blue around his fingernails. Unlike Jack’s, Claire’s busy, globetrotting childhood had exposed her to some of the starker realities of human existence. She didn’t need a consultation with Bud’s doctor to realize the seriousness of his condition.

  She felt sad about that. Not so much for Bud. He’d lived a really good life. The last of it undoubtedly very hard. And he missed Geri, Claire was sure about that. He still had a lot to offer to the world and Claire sent up her own silent vow. If he gets well, we’ll come and see him more often. She wished now that he knew the kids and that they knew him. But she’d failed to make that happen and it might well be too late.

  It was Jack’s fault. She would never say that aloud to him, but she knew it was true and she could hardly blame herself. Jack simply had never seemed to have a lot of interest in his grandparents, and as the years passed, he had less and less.

  Claire had always liked Bud and Geri. She’d connected with Jack’s grandparents in a way she had never been able to with Toni and Ernst. Jack’s parents were nice, but she just wasn’t close to them. As she stroked Bud’s hand, she wondered if the physical resemblance had anything to do with it. The long tapered fingers of the hand she stroked were an older, more weathered version of the ones hers had trembled within when she spoke her marriage vows.

  They had stood facing each other in the courthouse chambers. The ceremony may have been the most serious thing either of them had ever attempted, but they were both so nervous they couldn’t stop giggling. The solemn tones of the judge along with the bored expressions of his clerical staff drafted as witnesses only made it worse. Promising unity until death while laughing so hard she was afraid she might pee was not part of Claire’s childhood wedding fantasy.

  But they were sober enough the next morning. After a romantic twenty-four hours wandering the Riverwalk, dinner by candlelight and one long-stemmed red rose on the bed of their little honeymoon heaven at the Fairmont Hotel, the clear light of day meant owning up and confessing all.

  Claire remembered so distinctly how Jack had wrapped his arms around her. She felt so safe.

  “It doesn’t ma
tter what anyone says today,” he told her. “Your parents, my parents, they are all going to be mad. They’re going to say we made a mistake and that we don’t know what we’re doing. But we do know what we’re doing. We’re going after what we really want, and that’s being together.”

  Claire realized she’d quit talking when Jack stepped back in the room. He was carrying two white disposable cups, both steaming with hot liquid. He handed one to her.

  “They didn’t have the yellow stuff, only the blue,” he said, referring to her preferred sweetener.

  “It’s fine,” she told him as she took the coffee. It was slightly bitter and not that hot, but she appreciated the gesture.

  Jack took a seat across the room from her on the windowsill. Behind him she could see downtown Tulsa and the lights of the Williams Center building in the distance, a tall lonely sentinel among the squatty unimpressive office buildings and upwardly striving church steeples. More attractive was the early twentieth-century Mid-Continent Tower with its terra-cotta facade and dark green metal roof sparkling like an emerald against the night sky.

  “Did you run out of things to talk about?” he asked her.

  Claire nodded. “I guess I did. Hard to believe, huh? Truth is, when I get beyond you and the kids, I don’t really have that much to say anymore.”

  Jack nodded. “I know what you mean,” he said. “I only talk about my job.”

  “Yes, we used to be able to talk to each other about it,” Claire said. “But these days I don’t even know what’s going on.”

  “I thought you explained it pretty thoroughly to Bud,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I am paying attention,” she assured him. “I know that your work is important to you. It’s important to all of us.”

  He didn’t comment, but Claire detected a raise of his eyebrows indicating skepticism. Claire knew he was trying to avoid another fight. He was tired. She was tired. And they’d already said everything that could be said about that stupid house at least twice already. And the house was tied to his job, to his work with Dana, to his relationship to his parents, to his own vision of himself. From Jack’s perspective the house was more than a house. And rejecting it was rejecting him.

  Claire was beginning to worry that he was completely right about that. And yet giving in felt too much like giving up. None of the dreams that had brought them together could be nurtured in that house.

  She changed the subject.

  “I was just noticing how much Bud’s hand looks like yours,” she said.

  Jack was surprised.

  “Really? Mom always said that I looked like the Crabtrees. I suppose it’s true. I got my looks from my father and everything else from her.”

  Claire stroked the aged, lined hand she held in her own. “I think Bud must have looked a lot like you when he was young.”

  Jack shrugged. “I remember him from when I was small,” he said. “You know I stayed with them for a while. Probably a summer, I guess, when I was very little.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He nodded. “I don’t remember much, mostly I remember being outside with him. But my memory of when Mom showed up is very clear. It’s as vivid to me as things that happened yesterday. It was the first time I’d seen Ernst. The two of them came to Bud and Geri’s little house to get me. Mom looked so beautiful and Ernst was so tall and had a shiny blue Caddy.” Jack was smiling as he recalled it.

  “It must have been a happy time,” Claire said.

  Jack nodded, then shrugged. “You know, I always think of it that way,” he said. “But I also remember that Geri was crying. And that when I hugged Bud goodbye, he held me too long, like he didn’t want to let me go.”

  Claire was thoughtful as she stroked Bud’s hand. “Maybe he felt like he was losing his last contact with his son.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Jack said.

  Claire agreed. “That must be the worst thing that can ever happen to you,” she said. “Losing a child, even a grown one, must be the very worst.”

  “I can’t even imagine it,” Jack said.

  “How much do you know about what happened?”

  “Practically nothing,” he admitted. “My dad was killed in Vietnam before I was born. I guess he was just some grunt with a gun.”

  “What did Toni say about him?”

  “Nothing much,” he admitted. “I don’t think she really even knew him very well. They met when he was stationed in San Antonio and got married just before he shipped out.” Jack’s brow furrowed. “I don’t remember there ever even being a photo of him in our house.”

  Claire considered that and chose to give her mother-in-law the benefit of the doubt. “Maybe she was trying to move on with her life and reminders of your father made her sad.”

  Jack nodded in agreement.

  Claire gestured toward the old man in the hospital bed. “Did Bud and Geri ever talk about him?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think they really ever did. And I never asked.”

  “Why not?”

  “I knew they missed him,” Jack said. “I remember when I was ten or twelve and I was there for a weekend and totally bored. I went into Bud’s shop to find something to build a skateboard ramp. There was this pile of boards on one of the shelves in there. They’d been planed and mitered, but they were just piled up weathering. So I borrowed them.”

  His expression bore the guiltiness that Claire had seen on her own children’s faces more than once.

  “Anyway, I set it up on the blacktop road in front of the house. I propped the boards against the edge of a cinder block and it worked perfectly. I’d only launched off a few times when Bud showed up, looking horrified. He grabbed the boards off my ramp. I thought he was mad at me for skateboarding, or afraid I’d get hurt or something. I told him I was really good at it. At first he wouldn’t look at me. And he wasn’t talking. But I followed him into the workshop and saw that he was all teary-eyed. I demanded to know what I’d done wrong, and he said that the boards were for a treasure box that my father had been working on for Grandma Geri.”

  “Oh, gosh,” Claire said.

  Jack nodded in agreement. “I felt terrible, but there was nothing I could do.”

  “You were just a kid,” Claire said.

  “Even kids feel guilty when they inadvertently step on somebody’s feelings.”

  “How about your own feelings?” she asked him.

  Jack’s brow furrowed and he glanced at her with incredulity that bordered on amusement.

  “Personally, I have no feelings about my father,” he said. “I mean, how can you miss someone who died before you were even born?”

  Suddenly on one of the monitors above the bed a red light came on. A loud, intolerable buzzing commenced.

  Claire started and Jack jumped down from his perch.

  “What’s happening?” they asked each other. “What’s happening?”

  Bud

  The water was cold. It was so cold. I couldn’t feel my legs anymore. My legs were gone. No, the fact that I couldn’t feel them meant that they were there. I’d seen guys with legs ripped off. The missing legs hurt like hell. The legs were still there because I felt nothing of them at all. I had to keep swimming. I had to keep moving. My shoulders were screaming with pain, but I had to keep moving. I had to keep moving, I had to find somebody if I wanted to live.

  The if hung there in my consciousness. Did I want to live?

  Survival is a part of a man that doesn’t reason well. It was all good and well to believe that you have nothing to live for. It’s an entirely different thing to allow yourself to die. Even when you crave death, when you fear living, even then something binds you to the earth and it’s hard to shake it.

  I was willing to die. Somehow if I’d had a loaded gun I’d have willingly put it to the side of my head. That was an action, and action indicated power. But killing myself by inaction, that was unacceptable. I redoubled my efforts to cross the water. When I realized I cou
ldn’t move my arms or legs, I got scared. Deliberately, I tried to control my breathing. If I could control my breathing, I could keep panic at bay.

  Breathing was surprisingly rhythmic. I didn’t need to make effort at all. I was in the hospital. The reality of that settled around me like a warm blanket. I was dry and safe and warm. I could smell the antiseptic and hear the annoying scream of the machines, but that was okay. Being in the hospital was much better than being in the water.

  I felt myself relax. I wasn’t alone. There was a flurry of activity around me. It was like the men on the boat that day. I was aware of everything, but I wasn’t a part of it. I’d become an observer of my life, not a participant in it.

  “I guess you just know when to do and when to let others do for you,” Geri had told me laughing, when I’d relayed the story to her.

  It was one of the things that I loved about Geri. I knew that what I’d said had scared her. But even when that girl was facing the most terrifying thing in the world, she wouldn’t cower. She’d stick that little chin of hers in the air. And if she couldn’t laugh about it, she’d likely come to blows.

  Of course, I didn’t always understand that about her. I didn’t understand it in 1941 when the war started. Back then, there was so much that I didn’t understand. That year, my senior year of high school, was busy, eventful and challenging. At least I suppose that it was, what with a Halloween party and basketball games and Les and I working together on his car. But in truth, when I think back on it, the whole time seemed to boil down to that first Sunday in December in a place I’d never heard of, half a globe away from where I lived. That day the world changed. And my life changed with it.

  Roosevelt’s declaration of war affected Catawah like an electric shock. We’d been going along, scraping by, introspective, pleasantly ordinary when suddenly the outside world existed for us as it never had before.

  Several guys from my class had joined the reserves. It seemed like a good deal—five dollars a month just for what seemed little different from Boy Scouts. The only reason I hadn’t signed up was that the meetings occasionally conflicted with basketball games.