by Warren Adler
A bedded yenta with little to do but sponge up gossip from her visitors could summon up a good head of outrage during a visit by Yetta Klugerman.
"You lived in New York?" the yenta would ask.
"Yes."
"Brooklyn?"
"No."
"The Bronx?"
"You're looking so much better, Mrs. Rabinowitz. The hip is healing?"
"I get occasionally a gnawing pain, but the doctor said it is to be expected." There would be a pause as the patient surveyed Yetta Klugerman's kindly face.
"In Manhattan?"
"Actually, we lived all over," Yetta would say and smile benignly.
They would sit for a few moments, contemplating each other, the uneven red lips poised in a half-smile.
"Your husband died?"
"I'm sure you'll be up and around in a few days, Mrs. Rabinowitz. You'll see how easy it is to use the walker."
"I'll be a walking wounded, like an old lady, ready for the home."
"You'd be surprised how many people have had your problem. They use the walker for a few weeks, then all of a sudden, they're recovered. Believe me, it's not so bad. You should see some of the cases I've visited."
The yenta would be torn between trying to discover more intimate details about Mrs. Klugerman and learning about her visitations. In the end, the stories of the other sick people won out. Nothing seemed more compelling to a bedridden patient than the ailments and mental attitude of people in the same boat.
"Mr. Schwartz lost a leg from diabetes," Mrs. Klugerman would say.
"Oh my God."
"His attitude is getting better. They'll give him an artificial leg and a cane and he'll be able to get around. Look, it's better than Mrs. Silverman."
"She has cancer?" The patient's face would tighten, revealing the impending fear of the answer.
Mrs. Klugerman would nod her head. "She has a very marvelous attitude. She said she had a full life, a lot of children and grandchildren, and her husband is alive to take care of her."
"She has pain?"
"They give her something for it. Really, it's not so bad."
"You must see a lot of people who are dying, Mrs. Klugerman."
"One way or another, we're all going to go in the same direction."
"Better tomorrow than today."
"You'll be dancing, Mrs. Rabinowitz. You'll see. I give you less than a month."
"You think I can do a cha-cha-cha with a pin in my hip?"
"You should see them."
"Next week, I'll go on the dance floor with my walker."
Because the people who got sick were older, the recovery period or the lingering with some terminal disease was longer, and Mrs. Klugerman sometimes would stretch her visits over many months. She became something of a legend. Most of the time, she learned about a sick person from the patients she visited. Other times, people would simply call her to provide her with the information and request a visit. It was one of the inevitable consequences of living in Sunset Village that if you were sick, sooner or later you would get a visit from Mrs. Klugerman.
It became somewhat of a local joke around the card tables, or the pool. Someone would complain of an ache or a pain.
"Better watch out. You'll soon be ready for the Angel of Mercy."
"Who?"
"Mrs. Klugerman."
"God forbid."
But if Mrs. Klugerman knew about these jokes, she said nothing. The initial visit always created somewhat of a stir. First, there was a shock of seeing the little bent woman at the door clutching her huge pocketbook and drawing out a little cellophane bag of candies. A son or a daughter or a sister or brother, usually someone who had flown down to act as nurse, would scurry back to the sickbed.
"You know a Mrs. Klugerman?"
"Yetta Klugerman?"
"I didn't ask her first name."
"A little old lady with piano legs?"
"The same."
"She has candy?"
"That's her."
"She's the Angel of Mercy."
"The what?"
"It's a local joke."
In the end, they let her come in, as they knew she would be persistent in her efforts. Some tried to bar her way, but her tenacity usually won out. Besides, there was a suspicion, particularly in the minds of those who had been sick, that somehow she had something to do with their recovery. Naturally, the people who had died might have had a different story.
"Laugh all you want," a former patient might tell a skeptic. "She was there maybe four, five times a week. More than my so-called friends." At this point, the patient--male or female--might glare at his or her companion, who might melt with guilt. "And I'm here to tell about it."
"You might have been here just the same."
"That's the one thing I can't be sure about."
So Yetta Klugerman became welcome wherever there was a sick person. It was well known, too, that she never went to funerals, which gave some added encouragement to those patients sufficiently uncertain about their prospects. Max Shinsky was a case in point.
He returned from the Poinsettia Beach Memorial Hospital, after his third heart attack, convinced that his faulty ticker could hardly withstand even the slightest activity. He would lie in his bed in the bedroom of his condominium, depressed and frightened that each move would be his last. Mrs. Shinsky was a woman of great courage and energy, whose loquaciousness was a legend in itself. Compulsively, every day, when she was not attending to Max, she would sit next to the telephone and call a long list of friends to whom she would outline even the most minute details of Max's illness. There seemed to be an element of salesmanship about these calls, as if she was trying to sell her friends on the proposition that her troubles far exceeded those of anyone else.
"You think you got troubles, Sadie," she would say when the innocent at the other end of the phone tried to make a cause for her own misfortunes. "I've got troubles," Mrs. Shinsky said. "What you got is aches and pains. I've got tsooris."
When Mrs. Klugerman arrived on the scene with her little cellophane candy bags, her presence was an added confirmation of Mrs. Shinsky's monumental misfortunes.
"I've got Mrs. Klugerman visiting my Max--daily," she told her friends on the phone.
"That's trouble," her friends would agree. "On a daily basis? That's trouble."
Mrs. Klugerman would arrive first thing in the morning, a sign in itself, because it had come to be assumed that the first visitation of the day was reserved for the patient who was least likely to make it to sundown, a fact that did not improve Max Shinsky's spirits.
"You had a good night, Mr. Shinsky?" Mrs. Klugerman would say, her heavily rouged mouth ludicrous in the bright morning sunlight that streamed into the room.
"Lousy," Max would say, his hands crossed and clasped over his stomach.
"That's to be expected, Mr. Shinsky," Mrs. Klugerman would reply. "It gets worse before it gets better."
"From your mouth to God's ears."
"I know what I'm talking about."
When she left, Max would shift in his bed and Mrs. Shinsky would bring him a cup of tea.
"She has to come so early?" he would ask.
"Look, I could tell her not to come," Mrs. Shinsky would reply.
"Do I have to be the first one? When she walks in the room, I begin to hear the angels singing."
"For you, it wouldn't be angels, Max," Mrs. Shinsky would say, trying to cheer him up.
He would look up at the ceiling and raise his hand. "You gave me her for fifty years. You were so good to me."
"You're making a big deal about Mrs. Klugerman," Mrs. Shinsky would say, straightening the bed. "At least she visits."
One day, Mrs. Klugerman did not arrive first thing in the morning. Max looked at the clock; it was past eleven and the sun was high in the sky, throwing different shadows in the room. Despite himself, he felt the beginnings of his own anxiety.
"How come Mrs. Klugerman didn't come?" he finally said, when t
he clock read noon.
"I can't understand it."
"You think she's sick herself?"
"Mrs. Klugerman? How can the Angel of Mercy be sick?"
"I'm worried about her."
"Worry about yourself."
Finally, just after noon, Mrs. Klugerman arrived. She moved slowly into the bedroom and sat down by the bed. Max Shinsky felt relieved.
"I'm surprised you didn't come earlier," he said, searching her wrinkled face, the features composed under the smudged and hopeless make-up.
"First I went to Mr. Haber, then Mrs. Klopman, then Mr. Katz. They all just came home from the hospital."
He was tempted to ask about their condition, but a sense of fear tightened his throat.
"You look better," Mrs. Klugerman said suddenly.
"Then I wish I felt like I looked."
"He's a real kvetch," Mrs. Shinsky volunteered.
"When people tell me I look better, it's time to worry," he said.
She stood for a while watching him, smiling thinly, benignly. He had never paid much attention to her before, except as an odd joke, something to be endured. Now she appeared differently, a puzzle. He wondered why she did this. Was she a little touched in the head, as everyone seemed to imply?
"You must be very busy, Mrs. Klugerman," he said suddenly, looking about him. "In this place ... all of us alta cockers." He knew he was leading up to something. He wanted to know why she did it. "I appreciate it," he said, wondering if that was what he really meant.
When she left, he discovered that his depression had dissipated.
"You think I should go outside and sit?" he asked his wife, who secretly marveled at his sudden change of attitude.
"Mrs. Klugerman made you better?" She felt a sudden elation within herself. Was such a thing possible? When she telephoned her friends that day, she felt the hollowness of her own insistence on the extent of her troubles. Could Max really be getting better?
The fact was that Max did, indeed, show signs of getting better and, despite his own lingering fears about his condition, he was able to take walks about the house and had begun to sit outside in the morning sun. Mrs. Klugerman's visits came toward evening now. He was no longer in bed, but instead was sitting in the living room when she arrived.
"I'm not coming tomorrow, Mr. Shinsky," Mrs. Klugerman said.
"You're not?" He felt his heart lurch, but there was no pain.
"You're not sick anymore, Mr. Shinsky." It seemed a confirmation of his new-found strength.
After a while, she got up and he walked her to the door, holding out his hand, which she grasped. He felt the parchment-like skin and the hand's strength that belied the little bent body and the piano legs. As he watched her, she seemed to walk directly into the blood-red sunset, a tiny figure disappearing.
She is more than what she says she is, he thought, wondering if it would seem childish to articulate his feelings, especially to his wife. But as he grew in physical strength, he pondered the riddle of Mrs. Klugerman. Occasionally on his daily walks, he would see her from a distance and would wave, but she did not seem to notice. Perhaps her eyes were failing, or had she forgotten who he was?
But the idea that she was somehow responsible for his recovery persisted in his mind and, although he resisted giving it expression, he could not subdue its power. He wanted to know more about Mrs. Klugerman and began to ask questions of others who had been sick and who had received her visits.
"She has no permanent friends?" he might ask, casually, hoping his curiosity would not seem blatant.
"Nobody knows."
"Has anyone ever seen her place, been inside?"
"I never heard of any."
"And you say you were very sick?"
"Like a dog."
"She came early in the morning?"
"At first. Then later and later."
"And the last time?"
"At the end of the day. Like I was being released from her custody."
"You felt that too?"
It was as if the idea of her strange power was floating through the soft tropical air, hovering near the surface of the minds of all those who had been sick and visited by Mrs. Klugerman. Not that the jokes did not continue--but only among those who had not been sick. The healthy ones actually laughed as they saw her plodding along on her daily rounds, clutching her pocketbook filled with cellophane bags full of candy.
"There goes the Angel of Mercy."
"Who?"
"Oh, the local ghoul."
But Max Shinsky continued to wonder and ask questions. Once he even rang Mrs. Klugerman's bell, but no one answered. The venetian blinds were drawn and he couldn't see inside her condominium, although he knew from the way it was situated that it was the smallest variety at Sunset Village. Finally, he began to follow Mrs. Klugerman around, always at a distance, dallying about innocently while she made her daily visits, amazed at her energy. He was convinced, after a series of confrontations, that she had forgotten who he was.
"Where do you go on those walks, Max?" his wife would ask.
At first he had ignored her questioning, but one day he responded directly: "I'm following Mrs. Klugerman around."
"You keep doing that, you'll have her visiting you again." She lifted her arm and made a circular motion with her finger at her temple.
"I wouldn't dare repeat what I'm finding out to anyone but you." He felt the chill along his spine and goose pimples pop out on his flesh. "She's not just Mrs. Klugerman."
Mrs. Shinsky squinted into her husband's eyes, sighing, convinced that her troubles were multiplying again. Heart, I can understand, she thought. But the mind--God forbid.
"It sounds crazy, right?"
"Right."
"Then how come some of the terrible sick cases she visits, people that have given up, like me, suddenly recover?"
"Not everyone she visits recovers," Mrs. Shinsky said.
"That's right," he said. "It is as if she chooses who will live and who will die."
Mrs. Shinsky stood up, her lips trembling with anger and disbelief. "Now I got a nut on my hands!" she said.
"You're not going to say anything about this?" he asked, ignoring her outburst. She was a peppery woman, and he was prepared for her reaction.
"Believe me," she cried, "I'm not as crazy as my husband."
At that point, he decided to refrain from airing his suspicions. Especially now, when they were, at least in his own mind, confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Sometimes he would make discreet inquiries about patients Mrs. Klugerman had visited.
"She was so sick I thought she would never see the light of day."
"And now?" he would ask.
"It's a miracle."
Which was a word he had refused to voice, especially to himself. Whenever he saw or heard about a new sick patient that Mrs. Klugerman was visiting, he wondered: Will she choose to make that person live? Or die?
Finally, he could not keep following her on her daily rounds. Instead, he took to hanging around the court in which her condominium was located, sitting on a bench and watching her door, waiting for her return. Occasionally, he would engage a neighbor in conversation. They were all very pleasant, very polite, even talkative, but what he learned could be put into a thimble.
"You know Mrs. Klugerman?"
"I say hello."
"She has no friends?"
"I never see anybody come to her place."
"Children?"
"I don't know."
"How old?"
"Mister, in Sunset Village that's the one question you don't ask."
"When I was sick, she visited me."
"That's her business."
"A business?"
"I don't mean a business business."
He learned nothing, but nevertheless sat watching her door and the windows with the drawn blinds to which she rarely returned, except, surely, to sleep. But by then he was long gone.
One night, he awakened with a
start and turned to his wife, who was a light sleeper and woke the minute he moved.
"How did she know I was sick?"
"Who?"
"Mrs. Klugerman."
"Mrs. Klugerman again?"
"Did you send for her?"
Mrs. Shinsky shrugged. "Why would I send for her?"
"Then how did she know?"
"How does she know anything?"
In the morning, he called the Poinsettia Beach Memorial Hospital, but no one on the staff had ever heard of her. If this was so, how then was she able to know the discharge date of each Sunset Village patient? He remembered that he himself had not known when he would go home until the morning of his discharge. And she arrived almost immediately upon his return.
He wanted to confide in his wife again, to reiterate his suspicions, but he dared not. It wasn't only fear of ridicule, he decided. She'd already rejected the idea of it. He imagined that he might hear her as she busily called her friends on the telephone, voice lowered, conspiratorial, as she was when she had something to impart about him and his illness.
"Max thinks Mrs. Klugerman is really an Angel from Heaven."
"You're kidding."
"He really believes it."
"Are you going to see a doctor?"
"I'm afraid if I mentioned it, he would have another heart attack."
As a result, he became more secretive, more inhibited about his confidences, more cunning in his subterfuges. At times, walking in the bright sunlight, breathing in the heavy tropical scents of the planted shrubbery, he mocked himself for his childish suspicions. It did not seem possible in this peaceful sunlit world, where everything was clearly defined. But at night, observing the mystery of the stars, a canopy for the universe, he felt the pull of other forces. The literal observations dissipated. There was more, much more, out there than met the eye and could be explained logically. Sometimes, sitting outside near the rear screened-in porch, looking up into the eternity of the twinkling sky, he felt a strange elation, as if someone had entrusted him with knowledge that he could not define or articulate. At these moments, too, he might argue with himself, or, more precisely, two parts of himself would debate the question.
I'm a reasonable man, one part would testify. A practical man. A shoe salesman, after all, must be particularly practical. As a boy, I went to shul. I was bar mitzvahed and, today, if I am not overly religious it doesn't mean that I don't think there is a God. I accept that--even if I don't indulge in heavy intellectual activities on the subject. I am not superstitious. I don't believe in ghosts. I don't get frightened at horror movies. And I am convinced that the supernatural is ridiculous. And yet--