by Lore Segal
“What did she do?” asked Bethy.
“How old was she?” asked Lucy.
“Ninety-plus,” said the doctor.
Lucy did the arithmetic. At seventy-five, Lucy was at least fifteen years younger than Anstiss, who had gone off the deep end. Lucy experienced relief.
Joe asked, “And when did you become aware of the unusual number of patients becoming demented? We’re talking of the sixty-two pluses?”
“Yes,” Dr. Haddad said. “Dr. Stimson began keeping his log—it happened to be the day you yourself checked in the last time around.”
“And what do these patients do?” asked Bethy.
Al said, “Don’t old people just naturally get demented?” Al had a grandmother.
“All the time, but never this many of them.”
“How many is this many?”
“Well, every one of the sixty-two-pluses,” said the doctor. And Bethy thought, If nobody is going to pay attention to my question, I’m not going to say another word.
Dr. Haddad said, “One came in this morning, wheelchair, the son brought him in, eighty-five-year-old male with diabetes and associated problems. He started to cry and he cries and cries and cannot seem to stop.”
Eighty-five minus seventy-five: The diabetes with associated problems was ten years older than Lucy.
“And your friends, Mr. Bernstine, Lilly Cobbler and Sadie Woodway. It’s the happenstance of Mr. Bernstine’s acquaintance with the suicide and his input in the ongoing investigation that has suggested some sort of cooperation between your organization and the ER.”
This was news to the Compendium people—it gave them a turn to think that the dead woman in the courtyard had been alive and walking in the spaces in which they walked, in which they sat at their computers.
Dr. Haddad told them how Lilly Cobbler had brought in her sister, “One of those Saturday nights from hell. What we need is an adequate ER.”
“Why don’t you take over the underpopulated atrium?” proposed Benedict. He had been trying to connect with the doctor’s eye. She was young, had a flower face, and wore retro glasses with light-blue frames, and that interesting scarf that entirely covered her hair; its two ends hung to her waist. Her speech was crisp and quick with the hint of a lisp.
“All we were likely to do,” she said, “was add god-knows-what infection on top of her heart failure, so we gave her a referral to come back on Monday to see our cardiologist, but the two sisters were the first patients in the waiting area Sunday morning—one catatonic, the other, as it turned out, suicidal.”
“Sisters,” suggested Benedict. “Mightn’t they have the same dementia gene?”
“They might, but what’s the statistical likelihood of it coming to full bloom in both in the same twelve hours?”
Lucy suggested, “Stress! Sadie was sick, Lilly was scared, and you sent them home?”
“But Sadie’s vitals were normal! I sent my head nurse to check her out, and her vitals were normal! Nurse Gomez diagnosed sudden-onset white hair.”
Al said, “My nana suffered sudden-onset red hair.”
“But what is suddenly driving every one of our older patients around the bend?”
Benedict asked, “And where exactly do we come in?”
“Mr. Bernstine has advanced the possibility that there might be entities that have an interest in manipulating—let’s call it Alzheimer’s—into an epidemic.”
“Joe!” cried Benedict, “An Alzheimer’s epidemic! Better than the common cold!” Now, Benedict knew better than to air an office joke in public, but it irked him that the pretty doctor continued to keep her intelligent eye on Uncle Joe Bernstine.
“Ordinarily, as Mr. Bernstine says, all you would do is wonder, but now you think, what if in twelve months, we’re sitting in a congressional hearing and someone asks ‘How come you didn’t connect the dots?’ ”
Benedict said, “What if they ask why you didn’t report an epidemic to the Centers for Disease Control?”
“Because,” Joe said, “at the moment there isn’t anything to report. You,” he said to Benedict, “will research types of dementia and the known causes of each.”
“About these entities,” Benedict asked Joe. “How are they understood to be manipulating what happens inside the confines of the ER?”
“That’s what we are going to find out,” Joe said. “Legionnaires’ disease was spread through the air conditioning. Water can be contaminated. There are rats, mosquitoes; bio-and radiological hazards. There are odorless gases. The person who, some years back, tampered with pill bottles is at large. So is the sender of anthrax through the mail. Lucy, we’ve arranged for you to spend the night in the ER to look around.”
“What am I looking around for?” Lucy was worried.
“Dots and entities,” said Benedict.
Joe said, “Lucy, I remember our Venice trip. It got to be a joke, your telling us what the rest of us had been looking at and never noticed? You’ll check in as a regular patient and observe what you observe.”
“And I’ll be on night duty,” Dr. Haddad said.
Joe said, “I’ll check myself in in the morning and cover the next twelve day hours. Lucy, Benedict will show you how your new cell phone works, in case we need to contact you. Benedict, Beth, Al, you’ll see Dr. Haddad’s husband, Salman Haddad, in security. He will infiltrate you into the Social Service department. You’ll interview the incoming sixty-two-pluses. Dr. Haddad, might there be a holding area where we could isolate the patients who have, and who may, become demented? Meanwhile, if you see Lucy in the ER, you don’t know her,” Joe said. “For the moment we will keep what’s going on under wraps. No use alarming the hospital population till we have something to report. Rumor and speculation would be counterproductive. But I would like to set up a meeting with the the principals.”
“In my husband’s office on the fourth floor of the Seymour D. and Vivian L. Levi Pavilion,” proposed Dr. Haddad.
Lucy said, “Just show me how to answer a cell phone. When would I ever need to make a call?”
“Mom!”
“Okay, so how to make and answer calls. I don’t want to know about voice mails and menus and things.”
The two generations had a bad time of it. Lucy could not imagine what it was that Benedict understood, and Benedict couldn’t imagine anybody not understanding it. He sat beside her and pressed buttons. Lucy said, “What did you just do? I don’t know what you did. Benedict, you need to let me do it.”
“So press Code Entry.”
“Which is that?”
“Mom! Where it says ‘Code Entry.’ Press.”
“Press where? I don’t see where it says ‘Press.’ ”
“ ‘Select.’ Mom! SELECT. Press it!”
“Oh! I see! I’ve pressed ‘Select.’ Now it says ‘Code Entry’ again. Should I press it?”
“MOM!”
“I think I got it,” said Lucy after a while. “Benedict, go home. No need for you to hang around all night.”
“Okay, Mom. After I see Haddad’s husband. We have to go to his office and get ourselves tricked out like social workers. Mom will you be okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Salman Haddad, the hospital’s chief security officer, was a good ten or more years older than his wife. He was an elegant little brown man with a scholarly look, or was it the rimless glasses? His assistant was a large unsmiling woman groomed in some formal, corseted fashion. She was probably overqualified for her job and did not think it ought to be her business to be obliged to explain to yet another lot of interns that it was Phyllis on the second floor they needed to talk to.
Phyllis on the second floor was a cheerful, plump, competent woman who looked at home on her chair behind her desk. She set Bethy, Benedict, and Al Lesser up with identification tags, clipboards, and batches of Intake Forms for Seniors. Mostly they’d be seeing patients in the ER or on the floors, but Phyllis walked them down the corridor and unlocked the door to a windowle
ss cubby.
Benedict said, “Bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a broom closet.”
“Used to be a broom closet,” said Phyllis. “Two desks, two chairs, and a chair for the patient. You,” she said to Bethy, “can use one of the desks in my office.” Bethy, instead of thinking Sexism!, thought, Because it’s me, and her heart was sore and angry to have been assigned no desk in the broom closet, and with a free-floating soreness reinforced by the intuition that her father and mother’s hearts were sore for her.
“You’ll do Rhinelander, Francis,” Phyllis said to Al. “Blacked out in his hotel.”
“What if I don’t know the medical terms?” Al asked her.
“Don’t have to. They take the medical histories, you do their lives. You ask them do they know where they are, and then you go down the questions on the Intake Form, write the answers on the appropriate line, bring the form back to us, and we file it.”
To Benedict, she said, “Your first is Gorewitz, Samson, on his way over from Glenshore General Hospital. Cerebral accident. Possible sunstroke. Possible hypothermia.”
And Bethy thought, What about me!
II
The ER
The waiting area was a familiar third world where Lucy, or Lucy and Benedict, had sat with Bertie. There was nothing for the dozen or so patients to do but sit and wait, reread the Out of Order notice attached to the candy machine, and wish they were next. Today, of course, Lucy was here as an observer. How could she have left home without a book!
The door opened and here came two new people to look at, a woman in a blue buttoned blouse who was leading a crooked old body by the elbow. The old person looked all nose and chin; the woman in the blouse, neither old nor fat, had abandoned the search for a shape. Her bare legs were mapped with varicose veins. She led the old person to the bench next to Lucy and said, “Sit. You sit here, okay?” and then she went and waited behind an unusually tall old man with a smashed face, who had to bend his head to talk with the nurse through the triage window. When he had finished and gone to sit down, the woman in the blouse talked with the nurse. “She’s my neighbor. Name is Ida Farkasz, except she doesn’t remember. She doesn’t remember which is her apartment or anything, and I got to get home, I have my own things I have to do. My name? Sophie Bauer,” and Sophie Bauer mentioned that she was no spring chicken herself.
“Well, none of us are,” said the triage nurse.
Ida Farkasz
Poor Sophie Bauer. The Good Samaritan, having accomplished his storied deed of compassion, returned, we suppose, to Samaria, but Sophie Bauer lived on the same staircase as old Ida Farkasz.
“It’s a wonder they leave her live by herself,” Sophie had made the mistake of saying to her married daughter, Sally, who was visiting from Queens, because Sally got exercised and gave her mother a hard time.
“I don’t see why you have to even get involved!” Sally shouted. “What is she, Polish or what? If something happens, you want to be responsible?”
“So what do you want me, to leave her walking up and down the lobby downstairs?” Sophie had found the old woman muttering, snorting, aborting an occasional note like a howl. Sophie Bauer understood that she, Sophie, was not the object of the old woman’s passion of spite; that Ida Farkasz did not recognize—wasn’t conscious, perhaps—of the person of the neighbor who was walking her up the stairs to her apartment.
“You want, I’ll unlock it for you,” said Sophie, and Ida Farkasz had walked in without turning around, and shut the door.
“Why don’t her people take care of her!” shouted Sally.
“Marta, the daughter, visits her, and there’s a sister, Poldi, but she doesn’t come around anymore.”
Sophie, on the floor right below, couldn’t help hearing, if she just cracked her front door, when they were carrying on up there. She’d peek and she’d see Poldi coming down the stairs. Poldi was quite the opposite of Ida. The brim of Poldi’s hat slanted across her left eye in the fashion, in Sophie’s imagination, of entre-guerras Vienna. Sophie would have liked to try on Poldi’s hat.
“I don’t see why you have to be everybody’s caretaker,” Sally had said to her mother. “I mean, you’re no spring chicken yourself. Don’t you have your own things you have to do?”
Then, today, when Sophie came in from marketing, Ida Farkasz was trying to open the door of Mrs. Finley’s apartment on the second floor. Sophie had called to her. “Mrs. Farkasz! Mrs. Farkasz, you’re one floor up! You’re Three-A, don’t you remember?”
“Remember,” said Ida Farkasz and went on poking her key into the keyhole it was never going to fit. Sophie needed to put her bags down and get her shoes off, so she brought the old woman into her own kitchen.
“A cup of coffee, and you’ll be right as rain. You sit down now. Sit down, okay?”
Ida Farkasz seemed not to remember how one goes about sitting until Sophie pulled out the chair for her and pressed down on her shoulder. She did not look right. She touched her forefinger to her lip, her chin, and back to her lip while the other hand allowed the key to slip to the floor. Sophie picked up the key and put it in Mrs. Farkasz’s hand but the fingers did not close around it and the key slipped to the floor. Sophie had looked into Ida Farkasz’s eyes and seen raw terror. Couldn’t remember how she even got her into a cab to bring her to Cedars of Lebanon’s Emergency.
Sophie Bauer walked back to where old Ida sat on the bench and said, “You wait here. You’ll be okay, okay? They’ll take care of you. Okay?” and she went home and wasn’t going to even tell Sally.
Lucy smiled at the crooked old woman who glared at her over the top of her glasses that must have been fitted when the face was better fleshed, because they were on a slide down the nose for a rendezvous with the hairy chin.
The nurse called the tall old man with the banged-up face into the little triage office. His name was Francis Rhinelander and he had reached his full height in his teens, a mild-mannered boy who smiled at people when they asked him what the weather was like up there. An early habit of ducking his head grew into a permanent little bow of politeness, or was it apology? His look was patient; his smile had a sweetness. The nurse made him sit and asked him if he knew where he was, but held up her hand because she was taking his pulse. She took his pressure and his temperature.
“They did my blood at Godford Memorial in Connecticut this morning,” the old man said. “I have the number.”
“We do our own tests. What brings you here?”
“I passed out in the lobby of my hotel. I didn’t have any breakfast.”
The triage nurse fastened a bracelet with his name around his wrist and pointed to the door into the ER.
After the enforced patience on the benches and the brown light of the waiting area, Emergency looked to be lit by klieg lights, no corners or shaded places. Bertie had said, “Abandon hope of hiding out from what’s going to happen. What are they going to do to me?”
The good-looking young woman on the gurney near the door had been crying for a while, and her nose and eyes were swollen red. A nurse with Mayan or it might be Asian facial structure told Lucy to go sit down where several patients waited on two rows of chairs. Here was the unusually tall man with the bruised face. Another old man holding a bloody napkin to the side of his head asked the nurse, “How long am I going to sit here?”
The nurse said, “Till it’s your turn.”
Lucy took a chair. In the row behind her an obese girl vomited into a kidney-shaped pan that her obese mother held under her chin. It grossed out a teenage boy—her brother? He said, “Tell her to stop already! She’s not that sick!”
“She’s sick,” the mother said.
Please, said Lucy to the hole in the world where god would have been a good thing to have in this situation, don’t let me be going to throw up. Bertie, on the last day, had kept vomiting.
A world in motion—doctors in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks, nurses and nurse’s aides in a perpetual exchange
of place. An orderly with bare, powerfully developed upper arms trundled a gurney somebody must have just gotten, or been taken, down from. Action without plot or theme and no protagonist unless it was the crying young woman. She could have been the daughter of one of Lucy’s women friends. Might she be wanting somebody to talk to, or would she prefer to be left alone? What, in any case, was there to be said? Time, dear … a year from now, whatever it is will be this thing that happened. You’re young, nice-looking, and middle-class.
Lucy searched through her bag for the book she knew was not there. She found her pen, the reading glasses in their case, but no paper, so she opened her address book to the empty Z page, and wrote,
Dear Maurie, If, on some rainy day, I lent you my umbrella you would feel obliged to return it. Why is it okay for you to hold a story of mine indefinitely, perhaps never to return it to me?
There was a pearl-gray umbrella—Lucy knew who had left it behind—that she had been going to return one of these years.
How is it that you feel no obligation to respond with a “yes,” a “no,” or the acknowledgment, simply, of receipt?
Here’s where the old man with the bloody napkin to his head said, “Screw it,” and got up and went and stood behind two white coats, to wait for them to finish their conversation. Was Lucy allowed—was she maybe supposed to walk around to observe and hear everything? Lucy got up and could think of nothing better to do than to go and stand behind the old man with the bloody head. What if the two doctors were discussing the very thing that Lucy was supposed to find out? She leaned in to hear what the doctors were saying but they were talking after the fashion of the new realist actors who turn their faces toward each other and away from the audience, who cannot, consequently, hear the words they are speaking.
“I’m bleeding from my head!” the old man said out loud, at which both doctors turned and looked at him. One had a gorgeous head of young hair—he looked the type who worked out. He said, “If you’ll sit down, someone will take care of you.”
“A head wound?” the old man said. “Ain’t I an emergency?”