Grievances
Page 24
Delana’s words—her steadfast belief in me—meant more to me than anything else I could have heard.
Less than two hours later, we pulled into the parking deck at University Hospital. Delana freshened her lipstick and checked her makeup in the rearview mirror before we hurried toward the main entrance, her heels clicking hollowly on the concrete walk.
We passed a row of newspaper racks that huddled, along with a half dozen smokers, just outside the sliding glass doors. Out of habit, I paused to scan the front pages—not so much for news as for insight into what other editors were thinking, what headlines they imagined might cause a passerby to part with a quarter or fifty cents. A headline in The Collegian, the student-run paper, stopped me cold. “Famous Journalism Professor Nears Death,” it read. I looked at the byline: David Riley. I took a copy and stuck it in my pocket without reading it. There’s no point in getting information second-hand if you can check it out yourself.
Delana and I hurried past the receptionist. A security guard stopped us before we entered the elevators.
“We’re here to visit a patient,” she explained.
“You’ll need to wait until I can get you a pass.”
I was in no mood for delay or small-minded bureaucrats. “Not gonna happen,” I said. I took Delana by the arm and we walked on.
The elevator doors slid open and we stepped into a world where the promise and peril of humanity had been captured in a small stainless steel box. Smiling grandparents laden with balloons, teddy bears and a camera, beamed all the way to the Newborn Nursery. A woman, face pinched with tension, handkerchief twisted tightly in her hand, exited at Oncology. I pushed the button for the floor marked “Intensive Care.” From Maternity to Eternity in less than a minute.
Green-shirted orderlies pushing carts of hospital food, linens, and medication wheeled by as Delana and I stepped from the elevator into the bright glare and antiseptic odor of Intensive Care. A nurse sat low behind a semi-circular desk, her eyes occasionally scanning eight monitors that showed each patient’s pulse, temperature, and respiration.
“Your father’s stable today,” she said, glancing at one of the monitors which had started to beep. “He’s in Room 388. The doctor’ll be by later.”
I walked down the hall and knocked softly, pushed the door open, and made way for Delana, who walked in and flinched.
A tiny figure in a thin gown lay on his back in the hospital bed. Blue veins mapped his skin, which hung from his bones as transparent as parchment. His head was propped on a pillow—eyes sunk deep and unnaturally blue; flesh retreating so that his jaw and teeth protruded; bald so that he did not look so much like my father as my father’s skull. I was shocked.
Dad tried to pull himself up and get out of bed, the result of never-forgotten breeding that dictated that a gentleman stands when a lady enters the room.
“Sit down, Colonel,” Delana said.
He slumped back. I bent down and cradled his neck in my arms. He seemed so fragile he would break if I really hugged him.
“It’s good to see you,” he said flatly. “What brings you here?”
A nurse knocked and told Dad it was time for his medication. She propped him up while he swallowed some pills. A minute later his eyelids fluttered and he slumped and started to snore lightly.
I heard a page in the hallway for Dr. Heart and I knew that somewhere on the floor someone had stopped breathing. A few seconds later a crash team rushed by.
“I hope he wakes up soon,” I told Delana. “I still have things I want to talk to him about.”
“We’ll be here as long as you need.”
Night descended outside the window and the doctor arrived, a woman about our age dressed in a pantsuit, her brown hair pulled back in a bun. She took Delana and me to a room down the hallway where a small sign read, “Reserved for Grieving Families.” We sat on the edge of stuffed chairs, Delana’s and my hands intertwined, the doctor across from us.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve never seen a case like this. Nothing has worked. Multiple myeloma has no cure but generally we can keep it at bay for eight or ten years or more. In your father’s case, nothing we’ve done has had any real effect.” The doctor’s face showed genuine despair.
“What about experimental therapies like interferon?” Delana asked.
“I don’t believe he’s a candidate for that. We’re not treating him to make him better now. We’re just trying to make him comfortable with pain medication. There’s nothing we can do anymore.”
“What about a bone marrow transplant?” I asked. “I could be a donor.”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid your father’s situation doesn’t lend itself to that.”
Delana sobbed. I didn’t. I was out of tears.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“We’ll stabilize him. Then hospice is the right thing.”
“Stabilize him?” Delana asked.
“We almost lost him the other day. His red blood cell count had dropped so low.” She looked at me. “We’re bringing him back with transfusions. But it’s a short-term fix.”
“How long does he have?” I asked.
She sighed. “It’s hard to say. His heart’s strong. Could be weeks. Could be a few months. No more than that. I’m sorry.”
When we returned to his room my father looked even smaller. Delana and I sat holding hands until Dad began to stir.
“Would you mind affording me a little privacy, cutie?” he said to Delana when his eyes opened.
“Not at all, Colonel,” she smiled.
“Need to take a piss,” Dad grunted when she had gone. “Help me out of this coffin, will you?”
I reached for his arm and started to pull him up.
He shouted and fell back into the sheets. “The stuff’s in my bones,” he panted. Sweat slicked his forehead. “Here. Do it this way.”
He gritted his teeth and groaned as I lifted him to a sitting position. I held him steady while he caught his breath. “Now, hand me that,” he said, pointing to a urinal.
I turned my head until he called me to take away the bottle and help lower him into bed. When I bent over, the copy of The Chronicle fell out of my jacket pocket and onto the bed. The headline “Famous Journalism Professor Nears Death” stared us in the face. I knew Dad would be angry. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I did my best to talk him out of it.”
“I know it. He did a good job.”
“I thought you’d be pissed . . .”
“He got his facts right.”
“I haven’t read it. The headline certainly looks overblown,” I lied. “You’re looking okay to me.”
“Actually, it’s accurate. However, it happens to apply to everyone on the planet. We’re all nearing death. Therefore, it is not a very good headline.” Ever the critic, I thought. He rested for a minute then asked, “How’s your Wallace Sampson story going?”
“We got it. We’re going to write it for the weekend.”
Energized, he pulled himself up. “Tell me all about it.”
When I had finished he said, “Son, that’s a damn fine job of reporting.”
“Thanks for your help.” I knew that we were past pretending. We were almost out of time. I knew it. He knew it. Everybody knew it. Hell, it was a headline in the damn paper. In the face of such evidence, it would have been unlike a Harper to let the obvious question hang there, unasked. So I asked it. “Dad, how come it took so long? How come you never helped me before?”
“Luke,” he said simply.
“Luke? What’s Luke got to do with it?”
“Luke was going to be the next great journalist. He had the name and he had the talent. We had great dreams for him. Luke was going to be the ultimate Lucas Harper. The new and improved version. What happened was hard on us, son. Your mother never recovered.”
“Dad, do you remember in eighth grade, when I got the writing award?”
“What award?”
“Doesn’t matter. So Luke died. And you just quit. You just stayed in that study while Mom drank herself to death. You quit on her and you quit on me. I didn’t have the talent. I didn’t have the name. Hence, the vise grips and work-with-my hands thing.”
“No. That wasn’t it. What vise grips thing?”
“The vise grips I got for my birthday so I could get a job working with my hands.”
“I don’t remember that. You had all the promise that Luke ever had.”
“Then why didn’t you want for me what you wanted for him?”
“I didn’t want to screw you up,” he said, as if it was a question he’d thought about all his life. “Like what happened to Luke.”
I knew I might never get another chance, that if I never asked, a key mystery of my childhood might never be understood. “Dad, at Luke’s funeral the reporter came up to the car and told you he was running out of time. That he needed to go ahead and write the story.”
“Yes.”
“You told him to do it. You told him he had to write the truth as best as he could determine it.”
“Yes. I did.”
“Dad, I thought Luke’s dying was an accident. I thought he was in the garden killing gophers and the gun was old and it misfired. Is that what the story said?”
“It did say that could have happened. But it said police also found evidence that Luke’s shooting might not have been accidental.”
“Evidence?”
“A note in his diary that said, ‘Sometimes at night fear comes to me that I will be the first Lucas Harper not to be famous.’” He began to weep.
I knelt beside my father’s bed. I lay my head on his chest and held him as gently as I could. We lay there together just breathing for I don’t know how long until Delana came in. She bent over and wrapped us in her arms.
“I love you, Dad,” I said.
“I love you too, son.”
Chapter Nineteen
For months I had compartmentalized—Dad here, Delana there, Wallace Sampson over here, with a general worry about the direction of my life and career overlaying it all. In the midst of tumult, the Sampson story had been a refuge, a place I had been before, a place where I knew what to do.
But as I drove to work the next morning, my feelings respected no boundaries. When I thought about Delana’s love for me, I felt Mrs. Sampson’s love for her dead child. When I thought about Dad, I committed myself to the fight for the journalistic ideals he’d taught and practiced, the importance of crusading and of righting wrongs. When I thought about Luke, my anger raged over the casual murder of thirteen-year-old Wallace Sampson. I swore again there would be justice.
By the time I pushed though the swinging doors into the newsroom, I was angry, fearless and ready to write.
Bullock was already in my cubicle. Walker Burns was sprawled in my chair, his feet on my desk. He looked worried and that unnerved me until I found out he was worried for me.
“How’s your dad?”
“Bad. We need to finish the story.”
I had been thinking that Bullock and I would be writing for the upcoming Sunday edition but Walker quickly quashed that notion.
“Before it ever sees print this story’s gonna get picked at like a pan of stale cornbread in the chicken yard. Lawyers are gonna be all over it, not to mention the copy desk.”
“It’s Wednesday morning,” I argued. “We’re probably half done. We can finish by quitting time tomorrow.”
Walker shook his head. “Lawyers get paid by the hour. I ain’t countin’ on them being in a big hurry.”
“We can work Saturday,” Bullock volunteered.
“The publisher cut out the overtime budget,” Walker said. “There’s no money. Extra hours can’t be authorized.”
“How about we just retire a day early?” I said.
He laughed. “Sorry. There’s just not enough time. You’ll be lucky if the thing’s ready next week.”
Walker was right. I’d forgotten about meetings, bureaucracy, and the schedules of people other than myself. For weeks we’d been able to concentrate solely on reporting and writing. I’d been living on Windrow time too long.
Just as I organized my notes, we were subjected to an hour-long meeting where the publisher and personnel director explained why reductions were required in the company benefits plan. Later, every employee cycled through the company auditorium to watch a movie about the importance of a local charity campaign sponsored by the newspaper.
By the end of the day, we hadn’t made much progress.
“We need to head back to Windrow,” Bullock said. “We can’t write here.”
In self-defense, we went with what had worked before. I sat at the computer while Bullock guarded the perimeter of my cubicle growling at would-be intruders. Word had spread that we’d nailed a big story and the interruptions were coming in increasing numbers—from the proud, from the jealous, from the genuinely helpful, and, because it is a newsroom, from the simply curious. Occasionally, someone had real business.
Bob DeCaprio, the perpetually gray-suited assistant managing editor, came by to ask how much space the story might take. But first he had to tell us about the latest glitch with the newsroom hyphenation system. “Every time we wrote about the Super Bowl in last Sunday’s paper,” he grumbled, “the damn computer changed it to Superb Owl.” We howled.
A meeting with Walker and the photo editor took another hour. The photo department wanted to reshoot Bullock’s pictures for reasons that had nothing to do with quality and everything to do with turf.
“With the exception of bothering Mrs. Sampson, be my guest,” Walker told the photo editor. “But Ronnie’s pictures are the ones we’ll be publishing.”
After another meeting, Walker gave the art department permission to go to Hirtsboro so artists could produce a diagram of the shooting scene.
“The Charlotte Times is about to publish a blockbuster. Everybody wants a piece of it,” Bullock griped.
We spent an hour briefing Elaine Heitman so she could prepare an editorial on the Wallace Sampson case.
Carmela Cruz came by, her voice dripping with false helpfulness, to assure us that the national desk would be prepared with an excellent newsworthy package should a similar shortcoming befall our efforts this time as it had the last.
“Oh, yeah? What’s the package this time?” Bullock snorted. “Discrimination against Puerto Rican lesbians? Spic chicks who wish they had dicks?”
“Ronnie!” I gasped. “I’m sorry, Carmela.”
“Hardly his worst. What I find endearing about Ronald is that he is so consistently inappropriate.” Then, with a flip of her hair she said, “Bandage your knuckles, Bullock. You’ve been dragging them again.”
It was a measure of our current standing that Bullock’s comments weren’t immediately reported to the Discipline Committee even though the eyes of the newsroom were on us. News was about to break out. In terms of time and freedom, we’d been given much. Now, much was expected. Glory for everyone awaited.
I knew the word had really gotten around when the garden writer slithered up to me one morning.
“I hear you’ve got a big one,” she said. “Story.”
From time to time, I’d emerge from the cubicle to walk around, think, and check in with the outside world. At the hospital, transfusions were making Dad stronger, if only temporarily. Despite Walker’s instructions, we worked through the weekend, each of us driven by our own demons and the need to find justice for a long-dead thirteen-year-old.
Sunday night, Henry Garrows, the sports writer, dropped by with an offer to lend us the shroud and noise-canceling headphones he used to shut out the outside world when he was writing. I declined, but sympathized wi
th him about the need.
Late Monday afternoon we finished. I read our story through one more time and pushed myself away from the computer.
“That’s it,” I said to Bullock. “Tell Walker it’s ready for the first read.”
Bullock paced and I tweaked until after first-edition deadline when Walker finally moseyed over to the cubicle, commandeered my chair, put his feet on my file cabinet and settled in.
“Pardner, you look as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs,” he grinned. “Relax. This won’t hurt a bit.”
But it was hard to relax. Bullock and I both knew that of all the hoops we would have to jump through over the next four days—Walker, the lawyers, the copy desk—Walker would be the toughest. I hovered as he read, wondering why he paused so long on this paragraph, why he grunted when he read that.
When he got to the end of a sidebar I had written about Wallace Sampson, he just stared at the screen.
“Goddam son of a bitches,” he said finally. “This really pisses me off.”
“Holy Shit, Mabel?” Bullock asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “At least that.”
Bullock and I slapped each other on the back. But Walker was far from done. He ordered up a timeline, plus a sidebar on Brad Hall. Over the next day and a half, he continued to pick at our copy, challenging our reporting and asking the same question six different ways.
“How do you know?” was his most frequent question.
The only answers that ever satisfied him were “because we saw it” or “because he told us.”
Wednesday, we decided to send Columbia bureau chief Henry Ashley back to Hirtsboro for one final piece of reporting.
“It won’t do any good,” I told Walker.
“Yeah, but we have to do it anyway.”
I yowled at Walker’s rewrites, his moving and even cutting of whole paragraphs—what he called “just polishing.” But when he was done Bullock and I agreed that, as usual, Walker had improved the story.
Friday, we held our breaths while the Times lawyers reviewed the story in detail. Just to show they were paying attention they asked one or two questions that weren’t half as difficult to answer as Walker’s. And just because everyone thinks he’s an editor, they also suggested a few changes in wording.