by Lore Segal
“Yours is Samson Gorewitz,” the nurse was saying, “the transfer from Glenshore General.” The old man lay flat on his back and looked at the ceiling. Benedict had to lean over the gurney to place himself in the patient’s field of vision, and he said,
“Hi! Hello. I’m your interviewer.” Benedict asked the patient if he knew where he was and thought the old man said, “In heaven.” He spoke out of the right corner of his mouth, which was raised and might be smiling. He said,
“Iftheyfindmenotlookintheotherplace.”
Benedict experienced a powerful sense of ill usage: this was not what he had signed on for. He looked around for that pleasant nurse but she had her back to him, standing on tiptoe to write on the green chalkboard mounted high on the wall. Benedict looked to his mother, whose head was lowered over something she was writing on her lap. He wished himself back in the office, wanted his computer, but followed the orderly who had come to wheel his patient into one of the cubicles. It was like the cubicle where they had sat with his father; Benedict had stood because there was always only one chair. His mother had worried about it.
Benedict was alone with the old man the right side of whose face might be laughing.
“Name?” the Intake Form prompted Benedict to ask him.
The patient must be saying “Samson Gorewitz.” It was typed in on the form.
“Social Security?”
The patient palpated the chest of the hospital gown, which had no pocket, but the number, his birth information, and a Columbus, Ohio, street address were also typed on the appropriate lines.
“Nearest relative?” asked the Intake Form.
“Mysn Stewrt.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mysn inpairs.”
A son, was it, in pairs! Let that go for the moment.
“Marital status?”
Benedict made out that the patient was widowed.
“Education?”
“Hiostate.”
“Ohio State? Is that right?”
“Ratrat!”
“Occupation?” Benedict was unable, first and last, to make out what the patient had done with, to, or about a “peppermill.”
Next to “Comments,” Benedict noted, One-sided facial paralysis (?) makes patient’s speech difficult/impossible to follow. May be confused/demented (?)
Lucy saw Dr. Haddad approaching and raised her hand, and then lowered it to adjust her hair at the back when the doctor passed without stopping. It’s what we do to keep the world from witnessing that we have been left standing on the sidewalk by an empty cab—the anti-Semite! Well, but hold on now: Haddad might be preserving the fiction that Lucy was like any regular patient, waiting to be attended to. Lucy watched the doctor walk into the cubicle into which Benedict had followed the patient on the gurney, and out of which, in another moment, he emerged calling to the Pleasant Nurse: “The doctor wants you to get him a proper pillow.” Lucy’s eyes followed Benedict, who moved in the direction of the exit, where he passed the two old women hovering in the doorway.
Deborah and Shirley
Joe had praised Lucy’s powers of observation. It had her wondering about the things she thought she knew about those two women. They were sisters; their four black eyes peered in with identical anxiety. They were expecting to learn certain hideous news. This cruel anxiety of theirs, however, was momentarily displaced by the little acute malaise of not knowing if they were allowed to just walk into the ER. Lucy beckoned to them: Come on! You can come on in. They stepped into the foreign space in which they did not know whether they were meant to move forward, to the left or right: They suspected themselves of being the wrong people in the wrong place, about to be found out. Lucy liked the one with the gray hair. The other had home-dyed her hair a black color that does not exist in nature; some sales lady had instructed her to tie the scarf like that. She didn’t look like New York. The two women found the cubicle Benedict had come out of and went in.
Deborah and Shirley came through the curtains, which the young person with the—what do they call the thing they wear over their head?—parted for them. “You have visitors,” she said to Sammy on the gurney.
They had to arrange their faces before they came and kissed the smiling half of his face, the half that looked like Sammy. The other, the left half, had suffered a slippage. Shirley covered her mouth with her hand.
Deb said, “Sammy, sweetheart! I’m furious with you! What made you go down that beach alone at five o’clock in the a.m.!”
“I didn’t go by myself.”
“What, sweetheart?” They did not understand what he said.
“I did not go by myself!”
They understood his shaking his head, “No.”
“You did, too,” Deb said, “because I spoke to the people at the Glenshore hospital and they picked you up all the way down on the beach and you were all alone.”
Samson said, “I know, but that first morning, when I came down to breakfast, I sat in an empty seat. It turned out they were a family. The dad …” Sam had to laugh. “He had on, it must have been the mom’s hat with a big, floppy white brim, and he said, ‘On your feet, everybody.’ He didn’t mean me, of course, but I tagged along behind the little boy, Charley. He didn’t want to go and he was crying.”
The two women listened with horror to what kept bubbling out of their brother’s one-sided mouth. Samson said, “They go down for the day—towels, umbrella, big ball, sandwiches. I’d forgotten my sun lotion. When we were kids, didn’t I always get burned? I knew I should turn over, I kept thinking I was going to turn over onto my stomach …”
“Is his speech going to come back?” Deborah asked the woman with the—the hijab is what they called it.
“We’re surprised at the degree of language he has already recovered. Understanding him is a sort of trick, like finding the angle from which you can make out the figures in a holograph.”
Sammy said, “When we were kids, did everybody squeal when they hit the water? I liked Joey and Stacey. They said ‘Sorry!’ for dripping on me when they came running out. They dripped on Charley purposely and made him cry.”
“Can you find a vase for these?” Shirley thrust her bunch of multicolored flowers at the hijab, who would not take them from her.
“Sorry, we can’t do flowers in the ER. I’m sorry.”
“How do you mean you can’t ‘do’ flowers?”
“Shirley, godsake,” Deb said, “She’s the doctor!”
Here’s where Shirley registered the stethoscope around the neck of the white coat, but was not about to admit that she was embarrassed. “So?” she said, “Can’t she just hand them to a nurse?”
“Since when do you ask doctors to do your flowers?” Deb pressed on. There are times when we go on talking as if certain other persons in the room with us will oblige us by not hearing or not understanding that we’re arguing about them.
“Whatever,” Shirley had learned from her grandchildren to say.
Samson said, “When Joey and Stacey went up the beach for ice cream they didn’t wait for Charley and he cried and ran after them. Remember Stewy’s little legs running? I meant to turn my head to watch Charley, but it didn’t turn.”
The hijab, so unpleasantly associated in Shirley’s mind with her faux pas about the flowers, seemed not to be going to leave. She stood at the foot of Sammy’s gurney. She was writing on his chart. She said, “His vitals are good.”
“So are you his doctor?” Shirley asked her.
“I’m his doctor in the ER. We’re finding Mr. Gorewitz a bed in our Senior Center, for rehab.”
“Rehab? Oh, yes, I see. How long is he going to be in rehab?”
“Several weeks for sure. His vitals, as I say, are good but he may need to relearn to walk, and some personal skills. He’ll get speech therapy.” To the patient she said, “I’ll be looking in on you. Enjoy your visitors.”
When she was gone, Shirley said to Deb, “What do you hope to gain by being rude to Samson’s
doctors?”
“Doctors? How many doctors have I been rude to?”
“You would never ask a regular doctor to do your flowers.”
Samson said, “She’s Jewish,” and they said, “Okay! It’s okay, sweetheart!” and each took a hand and held it.
“What are you reading?” Phyllis from the second floor asked her granddaughter, who had been dropped off to spend the afternoon.
“A story,” said the little girl.
Phyllis told her to take her book and sit at Bethy’s desk. Bethy had gone down to the ER to interview Ida Farkasz. “What’s the story all about?”
The granddaughter was reading a story about a girl who is so beautiful that the sun, which has seen everything, is amazed every time it shines into her face. The stepmother of the girl in the story is a witch who is mean and cruel to the girl. And where is the girl’s father? He is gone away on business; he is gone hunting; he is, at any rate, away, and the girl runs away. She comes to a great, dark forest. When night falls she curls up in a hollow tree and goes to sleep, and Phyllis’s granddaughter and Phyllis and Bethy Bernstine know, and Ida Farkasz used to know, and even people who have not read, and never been told the story, know that the girl will marry the prince with the kind eyes. They will inherit half the kingdom, and if they haven’t died they are living to this hour.
Ida Farkasz
When Bethy walked into the ER, she saw Lucy and she saw the fat girl and the fat mother, who was telling the brother to quit already, and throw the bottle in the trash. That was when the legs of the old man with the blood dried on his forehead shot suddenly upward as if a puppeteer had decided the moment had come to pull all his strings at once.
“Is he okay?” Bethy asked.
“He’s fine,” the Mayan Nurse said.
“Which is Ida Farkasz?”
The nurse pointed to a sleeping hunchback and said, “Doesn’t know who she is, where she lives, or anything. I’ll see if there’s a free cubicle. Going to be one of those nights.”
Bethy said, “Ida Farkasz? I’m supposed to interview you.”
The old person was not a hunchback. You see subway drunks, sometimes, who have descended into a sleep so deep it cancels the human instinct to remain sitting up in a public place. The old woman had slipped way down the seat of her chair. Her gray head with its pinkish patches of scalp was curled forward onto her diminished, child-sized breast. There are things—and may we forgive ourselves that there are people—we would rather not touch. Bethy Bernstine placed her right forefinger on this old person’s sleeve. “Mrs. Farkasz?” she said, and Ida opened her eyes and turned the corners of her mouth so radically downward that Bethy thought, She doesn’t like me.
Bethy sat across from the dreadful old person and asked her did she know where she was.
“The Emergency Room, Cedars of Lebanon.”
“Name?”
“Ida Farkasz.”
“Do you know where you live?”
Ida Farkasz named her New York address and the date and place of her birth: “Pojorny before World War One, when it was still Hungary. The Slovaks call it Bratislava. In German it’s Pressburg.”
The Intake Form for Seniors had no rubric for the twentieth-century history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “Nearest relative?”
“Marta, my daughter. My sister Poldi and I don’t talk.”
“You remember your daughter’s phone number?”
“And a lot of good it does me. I call and have my little chat with the answering machine and then I sit on a chair in my apartment and wait for it to occur to my daughter to call me back.”
“Marital status?”
“Some status,” said Ida Farkasz, “when your new husband takes you home from the wedding on the bus with a carpet rolled under his arm.”
“A carpet? How do you mean ‘carpet’?”
“Carpet! A carpet. Crappy thing that Mama had by her bed and Berta thought I might use in my foyer. Who had a foyer? Berta was the oldest so she got the apartment at Twelve Judengasse. In the end, of course, the Nazis got it. Poldi and Kari, and Miklos and I were the only ones that got out. Who brings a carpet to a wedding?”
“Occupation?”
“The Nazis marched into Bratislava in March of 1939 …?”
“I think they mean your occupation—what work did you do?”
“Miklos was dead by the time the child and I got to New York. Poldi had a job as companion to her ‘Miss Margate.’ Never introduced me, never took me to Miss Margate’s ‘evenings.’ Didn’t take me with her to Herta Frankel’s birthday, and it wasn’t even Poldi, it was me that was in Herta’s class, even if we weren’t best friends.”
“What work did you do?”
“Poldi’s Kari used to import wine in Bratislava, with a branch in Vienna. In New York, the men got jobs as mail clerks. Packerl Schupfer, we used to call them. ‘Little-parcel-tossers.’ After he died—that was Fifty-three—Marta and I moved in with Poldi and I got my social work certificate and worked at the Kastel House Social Security office where no one told me and no one told Herbie Dukazs what courses you were meant to take for promotion.”
“Social worker,” wrote Bethy on the line on the Intake Form for Seniors.
“In the end, Herbie decided to move back to Budapest. He made me pay him thirty-five dollars for his bed—never mind that it was I had sewed the bedcover for him! I borrowed Poldi’s Miss Margate’s Singer sewing machine. He said that’s what the fabric alone cost him, which maybe it did. One lousy postcard that he sent me from his vacation on Balatonlelle.”
“Education?” asked the Intake Form.
“Poldi’s Kari had something on the ball,” said Ida Farkasz. “He got them to New York, illegally, via Canada, while Miklos and the child and I sat in the Hotel Budapest in Santo Domingo, waiting for our ‘quota.’ He had a little Hitler mustache, Miklos. Listen,” Ida Farkasz told Bethy Bernstine, “a woman remembers her husband taking her home from her wedding on the bus.”
Lucy
Nurse Trotwood brought Lucy a gown and said, “It ties at the back.”
Lucy said, “I think I’m supposed to wait for Dr. Haddad.”
Trotwood said, “You’ll put your clothes in this bag.” The bag was large and said PATIENTS PROPERTY in black capitals on the outside, and the missing possessive apostrophe is to be understood to remain a subliminal irritation in Lucy’s mind for the rest of this novel. Lucy remembered that she was meant to act like a regular patient, and followed the nurse.
Each cubicle had a single wall and three sides formed by a blue curtain attached to a circular rail set into the ceiling. This one looked like—it might be the cubicle in which they had sat and watched Bertie die. There’d been no chair for Benedict to sit on. Benedict had been irritable with her.
There had to have been a designer, a person, who designed the curtain to be blue. Lucy thought this person had meant well, meant blue because it’s a pleasant color, but this blue was stained by pain, the fear of pain, of watching pain.
Lucy put on the cotton gown, its blue pinstripes leached out by institutional laundering. She folded her own clothes into the bag. The chair was hard, so Lucy climbed onto the gurney and sat there till the nurse came to take her blood pressure. It was the Pleasant Nurse with a nice face and the low voice that people like King Lear thought to be a good thing in a woman. “Your hands are the same temperature as my arm,” Lucy said to her. The Pleasant Nurse was not a chatterer nor a smiler. The patience in her face, Lucy thought, came not of suffering but of natural goodness. Her cheek, at close quarters, was like Lucy’s mother’s cheek, which had received the impression of Lucy’s kiss, returning, when her lips lifted away, to its soft convexity. Were my cheeks soft for Benedict? For Bertie? “Toward the end we had to keep rushing my husband here to Emergency,” Lucy said to the nurse, who was winding the blood-pressure sleeve into an efficient roll. She said, “The doctor will be in to see you,” and went softly away.
Lucy sat on the gurney.
From inside here she could observe nothing. Would Dr. Haddad know where she was? Lucy wanted a book the way a drunk wants his liquor. Lucy proposed to herself to eyeball every object within her view: One chair. Industrial-size garbage can, khaki. Sink with knee handle. Purity Hand Sanitizer. Two gadgets plugged into outlets with black plastic nozzles of different designs for insertion, was it, into differently shaped orifices? Cartoon chart to identify pain by degrees from smiley face to face with down-turned mouth and falling teardrops. On the white-painted metal cabinet was tacked a paper listing contents. Words to read: Alcohol pads, Culturettes gc/Chlamydia, Probes pink/blue, Hemoccult cards, Developer, Surgilube Towelettes, Chuxs. (!?) Chuxs sterile 2×2’s sterile 4×4’s Gloves 6 size 6½ NS (500cc) with IV. FOLD GOWNS NEATLY.
Lucy lay down on the gurney. Lucy sat up. Lucy got off the gurney and hunted through PATIENTS PROPERTY for her handbag, found her pen, took her reading glasses out of their case, turned her address book to the empty Y page, and wrote,
I was wrong: I’m not posting outward into the expanding universe. I’m lying on a shelf. On a Monday, last October, you walk into your office and I’m on your desk. You call the intern—Bennington literature major on work program, smart as they come. You tell her, “Read this and do me a one-paragraph critique.” Intern carries me out to the reception desk, reads “Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency” which may be the greatest thing she has read in her “entire” life, except that she doesn’t “really” know—i.e., hasn’t an idea—what it’s supposed to be about …
Lucy saw she was going to run out of space and reduced her writing to the size of the letters in a miniature book in a dollhouse library.
… She slides me to the corner of her desk for another read the next day but Tuesday you give her two essays and a batch of poems and Wednesday another story until your regular girl returns. Before Bennington leaves she piles the manuscripts, with “Rumpelstiltskin” at the bottom, on the shelf in your office.
Francis Rhinelander
In the cubicle to Lucy’s right, Francis Rhinelander never stopped tugging at the too-short hospital gown. Al looked down the Intake Form. “Precipitating Factor?”