by Lore Segal
Maggie said, “Let Grandmother rest,” but Ilka said, “So the next time King David went down to fight those Philistines …” and Maggie said, “Mom, Jeff and I stay away from the fighting.”
“Mommy,” said little David, “you can go. And take Stevie. Stevie, stop it.” Baby Steven’s newest skill was turning pages and he was practicing on the King James Bible on Grandmother’s lap.
“Not to worry. I know the story in my head. But let’s let Mommy and Stevie stay, because we’re coming to the baaaad stuff.”
“Go on,” the little boy said.
“King David,” went on Ilka, “was a great soldier, the soldier of soldiers, only he was growing old. King David was tired. His spear was an encumbrance.” Grandmother Ilka demonstrated the difficulty with which the aging king raised his weapon. “His armor was too heavy for him. Climbing the hill, he had to reach for one little low bush after another because his balance wasn’t what it used to be. He watched with a thrill of envy—with a thrill and with envy—how his young soldiers ran ahead while he stood and just breathed. Couldn’t tell if it was his hiatus hernia, his heart, or an attack of anxiety because they all three felt the same.”
“And,” little David prompted.
“And Ishbi-benob, a Philistine of the race of giants, was wearing his new armor. His spear weighed three hundred shekels.” Grandmother lightly swung the idea of its superhuman weight above her head, “and he was going to strike King David down when—Stevie, if you don’t leave King James alone, Grandmother can’t check the name of the fellow—here he is in verse 17: Abishai. He came and struck Ishbi-benob to death.”
“Mom!”
“Sorry,” Ilka said. “And King David’s men said to King David, ‘You’re becoming a liability. Next war, you’re staying home.’ And there was another war …” Ilka looked apologetically at her daughter, “and there was another giant. He had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—which is how many digits, quick!”
“Twenty-four.”
“Very good. And this giant with his twenty-four digits just laughed at King David, and mocked him.”
“Why?” asked little David in a tone of strong disapproval.
“Why? Why indeed!” said his grandmother. “Because King David was old? Because he was a Hebrew? Just because he was on the other team? But King David’s nephew—his name was Jonathan—came running, and Jonathan knocked that mocking, laughing giant down just a little bit. Knocked the wind out of him.”
Little David suggested, “They should have tried talking it out,” in which he was going to remember being reinforced by a hug from his mother, and his grandmother’s kiss on the top of his head, for both women were against striking people dead, and the younger believed there was something one could be doing about it.
“They should have talked,” Grandmother Ilka agreed, “without precondition. And now,” she went on, “King David got really, really old and stricken in years and they brought him a blanket and another and more blankets but he could not and could not get warm.”
“How come?” asked little David.
“Because he was old,” Grandmother Ilka said. “And King David’s men said to him, “Let us go out and find you a beautiful young girl to lie with you.”
“What for?” asked little David.
“To make him warm. The blankets hadn’t done any good. So they sent out throughout all the land and found a beautiful young girl. Her name was Abishag the Shunammite and they brought her to the king.”
“Did she want to come?” asked David.
“A very troubling question,” said his grandmother.
“I always thought it was horrible,” said his mother.
“Yes, it was! Well, hold on, now. You know,” she said to David, “how your mommy had to rush me to Emergency, and then I was in the hospital, and had to go for rehab, and your mommy brought me back, and last night I had to go to Emergency again, and your daddy is coming in half an hour to take you and Stevie home, and Mommy is going to stay and take care of me? Maybe Abishag was one of those people who stay and take care of people, like your mommy, because she is good, which is a great mystery to the rest of us.”
“Mom, don’t,” said Maggie irritably. “I do it because I want to.”
“Which,” said Ilka, continuing to address the child, “is another mystery: Good people don’t think they are being good when they like doing a good thing. If they did it with gritted teeth, then they would think that it was good! Isn’t that funny of them?”
The little boy was listening to the old woman with an alert, bemused look.
“And Abishag,” continued his grandmother, “was young and beautiful and she cared for King David.”
“And made him warm.”
“No.”
“By three in the morning we had to call the ambulance,” Maggie told Lucy. “They say they’ve found her a bed in Observation and my mom’s turfed me out. She wants me to go home.”
“That’s right! I told my son to go home,” Lucy said.
“A hot bath!” the young woman said. “A couple of hours’ sleep if my husband can drop my little boy off at school and take the baby to the sitter …”
“Of course he can!” said Lucy. “And you’ll come back at visiting hours tomorrow.”
“That’s what I’m going to do,” the young woman said, but she went on sitting.
Lucy was about to tell her about Maurie not calling, and not accepting, not rejecting “Rumpelstiltskin,” but the young woman took out her cell. She put through a call to the visiting nurse to tell her not to come, and one to the baby’s sitter to change her hours. She tried in vain to get through to Kastel Street and was unable to reach her husband to give him the address of David’s after-school playdate, and she tried Kastel Street again. “I’ll call them from home.”
Lucy wished her good luck.
The stout black dad and his too-well-behaved boy had left.
The couple, the man and the woman, were done eating. They rose. He stood while she bused the tray. Lucy said to him, “Excuse me, do you know what day this is?”
The man, like the teenage brother in the ER, drew his head backward. He frowned. “What?”
Lucy said, “I’m supposed to meet some people and I’m wondering if this is the wrong day?”
“Tuesday,” said the man and turned in the direction from which he was relieved to see his wife returning. Lucy watched them, he two steps ahead of her, walking together, toward the exit.
The blond couple were talking to their BlackBerrys. And Lucy remembered her cell phone. She opened her handbag and there it was; here were her reading glasses. Here was her address book. She found and she dialed Freddy Wells’s number.
“This is Lucy!”
Dear Freddy! She could tell that he was pleased. “Lucy! A long time! That’s New York for you!” Freddy said he was well—well, he was well enough. Lisa was well enough. How was Lucy?
“Pretty well. Can you imagine my son Benedict and I are colleagues in the same office?” The first items of information, which old acquaintances who have not talked in a while exchange with each other, tend to be the kind that are of no interest to the other or indeed to anyone. Lucy knew that Freddy would just as soon not hear the dates and details of Maurie’s neither accepting, rejecting, nor so much as acknowledging receipt of a story she had originally called “Emergency!” and changed to “Ambulance,” changed to “Nine One One.” “Till I realized,” Lucy told Freddy, “that it spells ‘Nine Eleven,’ which isn’t what this story is about. It is—and of course isn’t—about Bertie’s last illness. I call it ‘Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency,’ a short-short. I can read it to you,” Lucy said, and she started reading.
“ ‘Don’t don’t don’t call the doctor!’ ” read Lucy. “ ‘What does the doctor know?’ murmurs the man who is in pain. He tosses himself onto his side, his other side. ‘Call the doctor!’ shrieks his whisper. ‘NOW!’ ”
Freddy said, “Lucy, I want to hear your
story, but Lisa is—Lisa is about to get dinner on the table.”
Lucy’s capacity for observation did not depend on her five senses. She was able to envisage the clever Lisa Wells—a bit of a pill but Lucy rather liked her—drawing a question mark in the air of her Philadelphia living room where Lucy had been an occasional dinner guest. Lucy imagined Freddy shrugging and, using the hand not holding the telephone, making the motion that signifies, What the hell do you want me to do?
Lucy said, “It’s a short-short, a few pages,” and continued reading:
“A three-count. The driver and the ambulance attendant shunt the man in pain onto the stretcher. From inside the ambulance, its wail is muted and can be ignored. The man in pain pushes and pulls at the restraints that hold him down on his back when he needs to turn onto his side. He needs to sit up and double over.”
Fred’s voice in Lucy’s ear said, “Lisa reminds me we have people coming—people are coming over.”
“The ambulance attendant is young and tall. ‘Where do you experience the pain?’ he asks the patient, who is trying to locate the sensation that tells him he is going to throw up again.”
Fred Wells said, “Lucy, this is harrowing and deserves a better hearing than I can give it with these people coming right over,” and indeed, Lucy could hear them—the people, in Philadelphia, ringing the Wells’ front-door bell, unless Lisa had slipped out and was ringing it. Freddy said, “If Maurie doesn’t publish, send it to me at The Reader.”
“Nope. Never no more no more no more!” said Lucy. “Sending your work out is like sending your kid to school when you won’t know if he ever even arrived! ‘The ambulance attendant asks the patient how long he has had this pain, another question to which he does not have the answer: “Hours! Hours and hours, months, off and on for maybe a year,” ’ ” read Lucy into a silence like no other—the empty line of a phone that has been hung up.
At a point in the afternoon, Benedict ran up to his mother’s apartment from where he called Al: “She’s picked up her mail.”
“Who?” said Al.
“My mom. I called at noon and she was on her landline. She must just have gone out again. When I call her on her cell, it’s engaged! I know she’s not going to return my messages, because she wouldn’t let me show her how to do voice mail.”
Al said, “When my dad got my nana her first dishwasher she soaped every dish before she put it in the machine—knew she didn’t have to, said it made her guilty, but she couldn’t help herself.”
Benedict felt lonely. Al was a good kid but he couldn’t join Benedict in his growing anxiety about Lucy. Benedict called Gretel but her cell was off. He tried Lucy again. Who would she be talking to and where was she?
Benedict was on his way home when he decided to go back to Cedars, where he bungled into a lecture in progress. The students wore nurses’ uniforms. The lecturer was a gray-haired nurse. She pointed to a diagram on a computer screen. “You will be expected to be able to review, one, the prevalence and variety of types of dementia; two, the interrelationship between the various types of dementia and medical comorbidities; three, the role of depression as a prodrome, risk factor, and manifestation of dementia; four …” Benedict backed out and closed the door, and the student in the last row, who had turned to see who was coming in, turned back to peek at her neighbor’s notes and copy what she had missed.
Salman Haddad’s secretary wanted to know how she was expected to know the whereabouts of Benedict’s mother. Mr. Haddad, she imagined, had gone home after he and Mr. Bernstine went over to check out the seventh floor.
“Which seventh floor is this?”
“The seventh floor! In the Senior Center!” as any fool would know, implied Haddad’s assistant’s tone, “that they’re turning into a holding area for the sixty-two-pluses from the ER.” No sense his going over there till they opened it in the morning, and the assistant tossed things into her handbag, making it plain that wherever other people might or might not be going, she was going to go home.
Benedict, too, went home, annoyed that it bothered him to have gotten on some snarky secretary’s nerves. He was unreasonably irritated to find Gretel’s message that she was going to be late after his long day’s low-grade panic about Lucy. Gretel’s cell was still off, his mother’s was still busy, and Benedict found himself ambushed by his own rage. If Joe had committed Lucy to another night of “observation” on this seventh floor that nobody had told anybody anything about … And what was Joe’s Wide-Open Eye bunch doing in the service of Cedars of Lebanon, anyway? Lebanon! Who were these Haddads and what was wrong with them that they had chosen Joe and his computer whiz kids and an elderly poet with emphysema to investigate—WHAT?
Benedict left messages for Joe, one on his cell and one on his landline: “Where are you? What the hell have you done with my mother?”
Lucy’s address book fell open at the S’s. Snodgrass, De, dead a year and more. Lucy read “Rumpelstiltskin” to Barry S., an old student of Lucy’s who had acute, smart, and friendly things to say about her story. So did Matt, another old student, terrific writer.
Lucy turned back, and starting properly with the A’s, went alphabetically down the list of her friends, acquaintances, and the people one knew from a long life in the writing world—some famous, the near-famous, the midlist, the still-unknowns, those who were going to remain unknown. She called Jeffery. He was not home. Lucy suspected presences barricaded behind every outgoing message. The D’s. Sally had died in 2008. John G. had been dead these twenty years. Lucy hadn’t the heart to remove their addresses.
If someone was home and picked up, she said “Hi! This is Lucy,” and whether they said, “Lucy! For goodness’ sake! Telepathy! You won’t believe that I was this minute thinking of calling you!” or “Lucy! Good to hear your voice! Can I call you back? I had one foot out the door,” or, “We are just sitting down to dinner!” or “Lucy, my dear! I’m in the middle of this silly thing I’ve been following on the TV,” Lucy said, “This’ll take all of three minutes, a short-short. I call it ‘Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency,’ ” and would start reading. Alan on the West Coast said he’d taken early retirement from teaching creative writing so he would never again have to correct syntactic infelicities, two of which he pointed out in Lucy’s short-short, and he was right. He was good. Tom, Stanley, and Victoria respectively liked, really loved, thought it was the best thing she had ever done. Norman said it was interesting, and then he read Lucy a story of his called “The Pepper Tree” which, he said, had him tied in knots. Vivian said, “You know that this is not my cup of tea,” and Jeffery was still out. Sophie called Jordan to pick up the extension and they listened to Lucy read her story.
“ ‘Is the pain constant or only when you move?’ the ambulance attendant asks the man whose pain has become a component of his person while, with certain, sudden movements, it knocks a sound out of him between a yelp and a cough. ‘Both,’ he answers. The ambulance attendant is new at the job. He suspends his pen over the report, which he will hand in when they arrive at the hospital. He is supposed to check either ‘constant’ or ‘when you move.’ Next question: ‘Would you call this a dull or a stabbing pain?’ ‘Dull! Hell hell hell! No, I would not call this pain a dull pain! God. And I would not call it “stabbing.” ’ The man in pain focuses on the pain, the exact location of which, and its origin in time, he is unable to pinpoint: He compares what he feels with what he understands the word ‘stabbing’ to connote and stabbing is not what this is, nor is it ‘biting,’ ‘shooting,’ ‘burning,’ ‘searing,’ ‘throbbing,’ ‘grinding,’ or ‘gnawing.’ He searches the language and does not find in its vocabulary the word that names this peculiar excruciation. ‘Get me Roget’s Thesaurus!’ shrieks the man in pain.”
Over the top of the page that she was reading, Lucy could see the undersized waitress walking toward her. Where was the blond couple and their BlackBerrys? Lucy had not seen them go, nor had she noticed the staff upturning chairs onto the tables
; one pulled the head of an enormous mop between two rollers that squeezed an overload of water into a bucket the size of a young bathtub. Lucy recognized the bite, inside her nostrils, of industrial-strength disinfectant. Lucy read:
“The ambulance has come to a stop below the overhang outside Emergency. The ambulance attendant folds the report into an outside pocket of the black bag that he slings over his shoulder. He jumps out and walks around the ambulance to open the back door. ‘Wants a Roget’s Thesaurus,’ the ambulance attendant says to the uniformed attendant who has come to assist him. They have to readjust the straps, which the patient’s writhings have loosened, before they pull the stretcher out and snap it onto its wheels on the tarmac. ‘Wants a what?’ The uniformed attendant receives the patient’s report from the ambulance attendant in exchange for the address of the next patient to be picked up. The ambulance attendant hops back into the ambulance.”
Lucy knew that the waitress was standing to talk to her. “Miss, the cafeteria is closing.”
“One more page!” Lucy promised the waitress, who continued to stand another moment before she walked away.
“ ‘One two three.’ They shunt him over onto a gurney that the uniformed attendant wheels through the self-opening doors into Emergency. ‘Roget’s Thesaurus!’ moans the man in pain to a passing nurse whose shift is over; she is on her way home.”
The waitress returned with the manager. “The cafeteria is closed, miss,” the manager told Lucy, who held up a hand. While the manager phoned down to Emergency saying, “Got one in the cafeteria. Around the bend, looks like. You better send a chair,” Lucy finished the story:
“The Emergency doctor asks the patient how long he has been experiencing the pain. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? When did you first have this pain? A week, two weeks ago? You don’t know! Where do you feel it? You don’t know where you feel the pain?’ The doctor palpates the patient, who screams. The doctor knows where the pain is! This doctor is old and bald. He looks like a doctor. The man in pain asks him, ‘What is wrong with me?’ The doctor says, ‘We’ll know more when we’ve done a couple of tests.’ There are many patients in Emergency and the doctor has to get this one to release the sleeve of his white coat. ‘What’ cries the patient, ‘is its name?’ ‘Rumpelstiltskin!’ the doctor says. The man in pain is throwing up again.”