Half the Kingdom

by Lore Segal

  “Washington? Sure. Mom, did anything happen?”

  “Just that they won’t explain the numeric code on the green chalkboard. What does it say next to my name?”

  “Looks like today’s date and the time of your admission. Why is that man shouting?”

  “And they won’t let me see what is written on my clipboard.”

  “Let’s take a look. Blood pressure: one-thirty over seventy-five, which is good, isn’t it? Temperature ninety-eight is good. You’re breathing okay. Mom, listen: Joe says, when you check out in the morning, stay in the waiting area. He wants to debrief you before he checks himself in. He’s decided to hold the meeting with the hospital people in the cafeteria. The latest bee in his bonnet is to imagine that a public space would be harder to bug than Haddad’s office. Oh! Hello!” Benedict said to the beautiful Dr. Miriam Haddad.

  “Hello,” the doctor said. “And how are you making out?” she asked Lucy.

  “Why is that man shouting?” Benedict asked the doctor.

  Dr. Miriam Haddad was looking to the door, where more patients were entering the ER, and asked the orderly to start wheeling gurneys out into the adjoining corridors. “If you know any rich friends who would like to donate us an adequate new ER, send them right along.”

  “Where are you taking me!” screamed Ida Farkasz.

  “Miss, just right outside the door,” said the orderly.

  “Why does she get to stay?” howled the little crooked person, and she glared at Lucy.

  Anstiss Adams had been sedated and was blessedly asleep, and they asked Luba to go and sit out in the waiting area. Samson Gorewitz’s sisters were asked to leave and come back in the morning to visit their brother over in the Senior Center’s rehab.

  “Why can’t they sedate him?” Benedict scrunched up his eyes against the shouting from the cubicle at the other side of the ER; it had taken on the character of a bellow.

  Dr. Haddad said, “The head wound gone around the bend.”

  “Can’t they give him something?”

  “Not till Dr. Stimson has seen him—who, by the way, wants to attend your meeting.”

  Benedict said, “Which is going to take place in the cafeteria. That sound is unendurable …”

  “The sound,” Dr. Haddad said, “of someone enduring the unendurable. You’ll have to excuse me.” She went to join a large number of the staff collecting in the cubicle from which the bellowing must be imagined to issue for the rest of the night.

  “I can’t believe they can’t give him something!” Benedict said. Lucy told him to go home. “Go on, really. Give my love to Gretel. And I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “You have your cell?”

  “Except they won’t let me use it in the ER. Benedict, go home!”

  Luba

  In the waiting area, on his way out, Benedict passed another commotion. The triage nurse had already reported “Patient around the bend” and sent for backup. The overflow waiting-room population watched the young security guard failing to prevent the sturdy little Luba from removing the last piece of her underclothes. He held the jacket of his uniform around her, attempting to keep it closed over the breasts that hung like flattened gourds and the interesting stomach fold, simultaneously hiding the square buttocks without having himself to come in contact with any part of so much pink elderly flesh.

  Morning in the ER

  Morning in the ER, the technology becalmed, telephones and computers stilled. The man with the head wound, who had bellowed through the night, must be asleep or dead. The little crooked Ida, the young woman who had cried, the vomiting fat girl, the unusually tall old man with the sweet, smashed face, the ancient Anstiss who had gone around the bend—had they been taken care of? And the broken, black young man and his girl? Lucy would never know what became of them.

  The Mayan Nurse and the Pleasant Nurse were leaving but stopped to softly squeal with the day nurse coming on duty: Shareen had a little boy! Seven and a half pounds, twenty-two inches. The two night nurses left. The day nurse walked toward Lucy, and Lucy said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  The nurse tacked a snapshot of a newborn onto the column by Lucy’s elbow. She said, “When I get my coat off,” and walked out of sight and did not return.

  Lucy slid off the gurney to be waylaid by Trotwood with her handbag already over her shoulder. She told Lucy, “You don’t go getting off your gurney by yourself!”

  “I’m looking for a bathroom.”

  “Well, you don’t get off your gurney.”

  “I called. Nobody came.”

  “Get back on your gurney, please,” said Trotwood and she, too, went home.

  Benedict called the office. “Has my mom come in?”

  “What d’you mean? She’s in the ER,” said Al.

  “Only she isn’t. Joe and I are here, in the waiting area. I told Lucy he wanted to talk to her before he checked himself in. The nurses didn’t know that she’d checked out. The release officer hasn’t seen her. She didn’t go home, because I’ve been calling. So listen. Joe is going to check in and we won’t schedule the meeting with Dr. Stimson and the Haddads till we know when he’s likely to get out. If Lucy comes into the office or calls, tell her to call me, or, Al, you call me!”

  “Sure.”

  III

  The Cafeteria

  Lucy

  Lucy checked her mailbox downstairs and there was nothing from Maurie, and went up to her apartment, and there was nothing on the answering machine except a couple of messages from Benedict: “Hi, Mom. Did you forget Joe wanted to debrief you before he checked himself in? Why didn’t you wait for him in the waiting area? Call me.”

  Her phone rang. Lucy did not pick up. “Mom? Mom! Mom, call me when you get this message.”

  Lucy spent the morning in her study. Two shelves of published books. The file of all her unpublished work she transferred to PATIENTS PROPERTY.

  The phone was ringing. “Mom?”

  Lucy did not pick up.

  When Benedict called around noon and got a busy signal, he was relieved: His mother must be home. He called again ten minutes later and must have just missed her. He left another message on her answering machine.

  Lucy lugged PATIENTS PROPERTY up the two flights of stairs to the modest offices of The Magazine. The old broken-backed couch smelled of mold, but the girl was new. Maurie was not in and not expected. No, thanks, Lucy wouldn’t leave a message. Thank you, there was nothing Lucy was going to leave.

  She carried the bag down the stairs and took a cab to Maurie’s. His daughter, Shari, answered the door. “Dad’s in Saint Petersburg with a bunch of writers and people.”

  “Writers and people, of course. In Saint Petersburg. Your mother went with him?”

  “Mom? Good god no. Mom wouldn’t be caught dead on one of Daddy’s junkets. The darling is giving me the afternoon off. Took both kids to little George Cameron’s birthday party.” Shari pointed across the street.

  “And how old is …?”

  “Max is going on six, in kindergarten. Cassy turned three.”

  “Six! In kindergarten! Shari,” said Lucy, “do you have any memories of our summers on Shelter Island? You were six and Benedict was all of three and fell into the sixteen-foot goldfish pond?”

  “I do! I remember the baby wrapped in a big old towel and people telling me it wasn’t my fault, which had never occurred to me! You want to sit down?”

  “For just a moment.”

  “Coffee?”

  “No no no no. Thanks.”

  “How is Benedict?”

  “Fine. Good. Living with his Viennese girl. I like Gretel. Did you know Benedict and I are colleagues, working in the same office?”

  “Cool!”

  “Shari, you remember the Bernstines—Joe and Jenny? They were away for years running the Concordance Institute in Connecticut?”

  “Sure. With a daughter who was angry at everything and everybody?”

  “Still is. Poor Beth
y. Curious, isn’t it, how we used to live in each other’s pockets! How do friends get divorced?”

  Shari said, “Did you know I divorced Alex?”

  Did I know that? wondered Lucy. “That’s sad.”

  “Yes, well,” said Shari, “not really.”

  Lucy knew that a single mom with children six and three must be wanting to have her free afternoon to herself. “I remember I’d throw Benedict a ball and think, I have my head to myself for the time it takes him to run, retrieve the ball, and roll it back to me …”

  “Yes!” said Shari and laughed. “Yes, yes!”

  “What apartment number did you say the birthday party was at?”

  “The apartment number?”

  “Of the birthday party. What’s the number of the apartment?”

  “The Camerons’ apartment? It’s Eleven-B.”

  “Dear Shari, lovely to see you, really it is!” The two women, the old one and the young one, embraced.

  “Somebody at the door for you,” the birthday boy’s mother said to little Max’s grandmother.

  “Can’t be. Who knows I’m here?”

  “She’s asking for you.”

  “Who is?” Ulla followed Eileen Cameron into the foyer where the woman standing in the door with the birthday party rampaging and hallooing around her would have been Lucy Friedgold if Lucy could be imagined to be standing in the Camerons’ foyer holding a very large plastic bag. The bag had weight, judging from the angle at which her body leaned to create the counterbalance.

  “Hello, Ulla,” said Lucy. “Shari said I’d find you here.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Ulla, but didn’t.

  “Is there somewhere we might talk?”

  The birthday boy’s mother said, “The magician is about to do his thing.” It puzzled her good manners: Was it the hostess’s business to welcome the elderly newcomer with the oversize bag who was advancing into her foyer, or was she supposed to protect little Max’s grandmother from her?

  “This won’t take five minutes.” With the hand that was not holding the bag, the intruder opened a random door. It happened to lead into the dining room. The table was covered with crimson crinkle-paper, slices of ruined chocolate cake on clown-face paper plates, birthday candles with blackened wicks, blasted party favors, rags of exploded balloons. The old woman with the bag seated herself on one of the dining chairs, obliging Max’s grandmother to sit down also. “Five minutes, I promise!” The urbane smile, a certain distinction of face and dress partly reassured Eileen Cameron; she walked out but left the door open.

  Lucy and Ulla had a clear view of the magician in a purple shirt and comical green tie that hung to his knees. He said, “Is there anybody here who can count to ten?”

  “Me-e-e,” shouted the little boys and girls.

  The magician said, “Everybody, all together: One. Two. Three. Thursday. Friday. Saturday …”

  “No-o-o!” shouted the children: The magician, who was a grownup, had made a mistake! That was funny!

  “That’s the days of the week,” a girl in a frilly blue dress explained to him.

  “Oops!” The magician hit himself on the forehead.

  Lucy said, “I sent Maurie the story I wrote after Bertie died, which Maurie has neither accepted nor rejected. It’s called ‘Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency.’ ”

  “Maurie is in Saint Petersburg,” Ulla said.

  “Try again! Everybody, all together,” the magician said: “One. Two. Three. April. May. June …”

  “I sent it to him in October,” Lucy said. “This is July!”

  The children were laughing. It broke them up: The magician had made another mistake! Only the child in the blue frills frowned.

  “Those are the months of the year!” she told him. She walked toward the magician, who hit himself on the forehead.

  “Another Oops! Anybody counting the oopses? What’s your name?” he asked the little girl. Her name was Jennifer.

  “Lucy!” Ulla said, “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to give this to Maurie.” Lucy hoisted PATIENTS PROPERTY onto Ulla’s lap—surprising, always, the weight of paper.

  “Christ, Lucy! Send it to him at The Magazine!”

  “Which neither accepts, nor rejects, Ulla! Which doesn’t so much as acknowledge receipt.”

  “Would somebody come up here and hold my magic stick for me?” The magician held the instrument high out of little Jennifer’s reach. “Birthday boy, I need you to come right up here. Tell everybody your name.”

  “George,” said the blissful child.

  “George is going to hold my magic stick for me, but not like that! Hold it straight!” But that stick kept folding away from the little boy, who laughed. All the girls and boys laughed their high, happy, silver laughter and wriggled and got up and sat down and got up again, except for Jennifer who said, “You’re doing that.” She turned the giant green tie around to expose a pack of cards! A nest of little balls! A white mouse, and the fraudulent string! “You were pulling this!” Jennifer accused the magician, who whipped his tie smartly out of her hand and said, “Do we have any jugglers?”

  “Me-e-e,” shouted all the children.

  “Lucy! Who acknowledges receipt? Who has the staff? Remember Freddy Wells saying publishing The Reader is like having a retarded child that’s never going to grow up, is never going to take itself off your mind?”

  “Freddy Wells! A sweet man,” Lucy said. “Haven’t seen Freddy in—I don’t know how long! Does Freddy still say ‘Ah, well,’ as if it were a sigh?”

  “Who can keep two balls in the air at the same time?” asked the magician.

  Lucy said, “Shari and I were remembering Shelter Island. Croquet, Scrabble. What a lot of cooking everybody used to do.”

  Ulla said, “And in every room there was always somebody writing something. What was the name of the old pest—the old poet—who used to call and read Maurie her latest in the middle, always, of a dinner party—Olivia …?”

  “Liebeskind,” said Lucy. “Olivia Liebeskind!”

  “Didn’t Maurie publish the story you wrote about her …”

  “ ‘The Poet on the Telephone,’ ” said Lucy. “She wasn’t a bad poet.”

  “Maurie says it isn’t bad writing that’s the problem, it’s the perfectly good writing that never stops coming down the pike.”

  “A nightmare!” said Lucy. “What time is it? I have a meeting in the Cedars of Lebanon cafeteria.” The two old friends kissed each other good-bye. Lucy picked up PATIENTS PROPERTY, called, “Thank you so much!” to the birthday boy’s mother, and went out the door.

  The cafeteria had been done over. It had been reconfigured into a horseshoe-shaped food court with ethnic food bars since Lucy had sat here with her cup of coffee and her sandwich waiting for them to bring Bertie back from a test, from another procedure, a procedure gone wrong that had to be done over. Not to worry, said the doctor, We do two or three of these a day. Sometimes Benedict sat with her.

  Lucy tried to identify the table at which she had sat writing “Rumpelstiltskin.” Curious not to be able to figure out in which direction she had faced. She was early, was the first. None of the Compendium people had arrived, neither had the Haddads. Lucy didn’t know Salman Haddad by sight and couldn’t, for the moment, remember the Chief of Emergency’s name. She used PATIENTS PROPERTY to bag a table large enough for their number before going to find something to eat.

  Where there are so many choices, you tend to eat what you always eat. Lucy got a cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich and sat down and watched the couple standing and waiting for the short Mexican waitress—she was hardly taller than a dwarf—to wipe down the table for them. He held the tray, she carried his jacket. What was it about them that told Lucy the patient they had come to visit was close to neither—her aunt, maybe, or his elderly cousin; that they had decided, without the need for discussion, to eat before getting back into their car? Lucy was never going to cross the space betwee
n herself and them to ask, “Excuse me, but am I correct in being so certain that you are in your late fifties and you’re not Manhattanites?” Her certainties were reinforced entirely by her certainties.

  She watched them eat in silence, their eyes on their plates. What was there to see in each other’s faces, or to say that had not been seen or said long ago, and often? He lowered his head to shorten the spoon’s passage from the bowl to his mouth. Escarole and bean soup from the Italian Bar.

  “Taste?” she asked him.

  “Hm,” he said, and opened his mouth into which she guided a careful forkful of pasta in tomato.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  The apple pie, not from the Italian Bar, they ate with two forks from the same dish; she took care to leave him the larger half.

  The short Mexican—was she a Mexican?—was clearing a table for a stout black dad in a business suit and his boy dressed in his best—not, hoped Lucy, to appease a sick mom. The dad took out a cell phone and dialed. The boy dripped ketchup on a fry in the front, a fry in the back, and this fry, and that one, creating a ketchup loop before picking up his burger. The dad finished his call, helped himself to one of the boy’s fries, and dialed another number.

  Two blond young people moved the dishes from their two trays onto the table and took out their BlackBerrys.

  The father finished his second call and asked the boy if he was going to want ice cream. The boy said, no, he didn’t. The dad was looking for a number on his cell, found it and dialed, a business call this, a professional laugh. The boy changed his mind. He wanted ice cream. When he returned with—it looked like vanilla and chocolate—the dad was on an extended call. In the melted brown sauce the boy drew loops that he accompanied with soft airplane noises.

  Lucy waved to the tired young woman from the ER. The red sweater was the right side out. Maggie brought over her cup of coffee and sat looking into it. She said, “We’re back. My mom seemed okay when we got her home yesterday. She was fine.”

  Ilka Weiss

  Ilka Weiss lay on the sofa with her legs up. She asked for a blanket. Little David helped, impatiently, to tuck it around his grandmother’s legs. He said, “So, go on.”