by Lore Segal
Patrice was the orderly with the powerfully developed upper arms. He had placed fourth in last year’s NABBA USA Bodybuilding Conference and applied his educated force to maneuvering the old woman’s legs out from under the table. She gave him zero help. While he lifted the patient into the wheelchair and wheeled her, with her PATIENTS PROPERTY bag balanced on her lap, to Emergency, she was turning the page of her address book.
Lucy was, mercifully, not going to call her friend Katherine who had spent a lifetime persuading friends, acquaintances, and all the people she knew to let her be the lone writer, the writer in the attic. Who was Lucy to argue that a good novel isn’t better than the best friendship, and Katherine’s novels were good on the grand scale.
Emergency would not receive Lucy Friedgold. The ER was in the process of transferring its demented sixty-two-pluses to the new holding area. There were the necessary phone calls and the multiplying paperwork. Patrice had learned to make use of these downtimes, the frequent long waits associated with his job in the Cedars of Lebanon’s ER. He practiced pumping iron intellectually. Patrice had time to visualize the choreography of his routine from the first to the final freeze in detail, editing his mistakes before Nurse Trotwood handed him Lucy’s Intake Form for Seniors to take along to the Senior Center’s seventh floor.
Lucy found James under the M’s and read him “Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency” while Patrice wheeled her up the sidewalk and through the great doors. James said it was good.
Jack and Hope
Some days after the lunch at the Café Provence, Jeremy had to take his father to Cedars of Lebanon’s Emergency. He called Nora and Nora called her mother.
“Jack’s in the hospital. They were going to send him home but he started to cry. Mom?”
“Yes,” said her mother.
“They’ve moved him to the Senior Center. Mom! Are you there?”
“Yes,” said Hope.
“Do you want me to take you over?”
“Yes.”
Nora came to pick her mother up. “You want me to pin up your hair for you?”
“No. This is my Arbus persona.”
“Your which? Mom, what are you talking about?”
The Sabbath Elevator opens and closes its door on every floor without having its buttons pressed. Hope stepped in behind an orderly who was pushing a wheelchair. “Miss,” the orderly was saying, “it’s not going to work in here,” but the old woman in the chair continued to poke the buttons on her cell phone and hold it to her ear. Hope looked around her at a congregation of gargoyles: The huge old black woman might have been poured to overflowing into her wheelchair; her mouth stood open as if there were no room inside for the restless lolling of her purple tongue. The freakishly long, thin, banged-up old Don Quixote wore an anachronistic smile and so did the little stick-figure manikin next to him, and next to him, her waist bent at a ninety-degree angle, was the prototype of Hansel and Gretel’s witch, whose crooked nose met with her stubbled chin. And when Hope turned to Nora’s loved face, she saw it rammed down to the left into the shape of an earlier phase of the human type: Nora was watching an old peasant that we don’t see on the New York streets, who was unbuttoning the front of her dress. She reached her navel as the Sabbath Elevator opened its doors to discharge its cargo on the Senior Center’s seventh floor.
IV
The Seventh Floor
The seventh floor has been temporarily designated an annex to the ER, to hold the demented sixty-two-pluses. The Senior Center is the most recent addition, and the northmost building of the hospital complex, which covers several city blocks between the two avenues. The Center’s architect had interned with the Lincoln Square Renewal Project under Robert Moses, and had built his glass-and-iron structure to incorporate the movements of the hospital’s population of patients, staff, and doctors as an integral idea of design.
Lucy sits in the solarium facing the glass wall backed by blackest night and observes her reflected self in the wheelchair. The YTREPORP STNEITAP bag is on her lap, the cell phone at her ear. “Stephen!” she says, “This is Lucy! A voice out of your past …”
“Mom?”
“Benedict? How come? I dialed Stephen.”
“Mom, where the hell are you? What is going on?”
“Dear, I can’t talk now. I’m reading Stephen ‘Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency.’ ”
“Mom, why didn’t you wait for Joe in the waiting room like I told you?”
“I went to the cafeteria. Do you know they’ve completely redone the whole thing? I bagged a table for the meeting only nobody showed up. What time did you say the meeting was scheduled for?”
“It wasn’t. I didn’t say. We were waiting for Joe to get out of the ER. Mom, where is Joe?”
“He’s right here. We came up in the elevator together. Ben, look, I can’t talk …”
“Mom, I told you Joe wanted to debrief you. Why are you still at Cedars?”
“Ben, I’m on the phone reading a story to Stephen and I can’t talk.”
“Mom, is it your emphysema?”
Lucy has hung up.
Hope and Nora have found Room 702, where Jack sits in his wheelchair and weeps. Hope, in her day, had wept—wept for Jack—but she had covered her mouth or hidden her face in her hands. Jack weeps with his neck outstretched, exposing his throat. His chin points at the ceiling or what is missing beyond. He is in physical despair, and weeps and is too spent to remember how to stop.
Ida and the Crazy Box
The hospital reaches Marta, Ida Farkasz’s daughter, in her store and asks her to pick up her mother from the seventh floor of the Senior Center and take her home. Marta checks the time on the clock but does not take the time to check her prematurely graying hair in the mirror. Ida notices and says, “You wouldn’t go to a customer looking like that, but for mother this is okay?”
“Mama, I left the store in the middle of a working day, and I’m here.”
“Next time, I’ll know to put myself into the hospital, instead of sitting in my apartment that doesn’t even have a window so I could see what’s going on out in the street, waiting for it to occur to you to come and see me.”
Marta says, “Mama, I come to see you.”
“And get on your phone,” Ida says, “and start calling your friends, which is just as well because the only way I find out what’s going on in your life is overhearing you telling other people.”
“The person I just called was my assistant, and what’s going on is my not getting three dozen deliveries boxed and to the post office, which I’ll be having to do tomorrow, which is already over-scheduled.”
“While I sit on a chair in my apartment waiting for you to call me, and have maybe a conversation?”
“The only conversation you and I have is about my not calling and my not visiting. Mama, why don’t I phone Poldi? She’s not well, and she wants to see you.” Marta laughs and says, “Mama, you’re looking into the crazy box …”
“Looking into the crazy box,” “Ins Narrenkastl schauen,” was what Ida said her mother used to call it when the thing in front of your eyes is blotted out by a more powerful inner vision. Ida stares at the shoe she holds in her hands and is not putting on her foot. What she sees in the crazy box is herself and Poldi passing Miss Margate’s building and Poldi stepping up the first step to block the entrance with her body.
“Call Poldi,” spits Ida. “Tell her if she comes I’ll throw her out on her ear.”
“Okay, Mama. Where did they put your jacket? Did you have a jacket?”
The photo album, which has migrated from Pressburg to the Dominican Republic to New York, lies open on the table when Marta comes out of the bedroom where she has put away her mother’s clothes.
Ida says, “Your father, with his little Hitler mustache.”
“Mama, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry.”
“Summer 1935, before they closed the swim baths. Juden ist der Eintritt Verboten. We used to go every Sunday and stay all day. Linin
g up to jump in the pool, look at Kari always clowning. Poldi, best figure of anybody, but it was Berta who had the loveliest face. Here’s your father, a little man. Onkel Igo. Maxl, Terry. You see where I’ve put their names on the back. When I’m gone who will remember who they ever were?”
“Mama, I have to go and close up the store.”
“Go, close. Go and close up. Go go go go.”
Deb and Shirley
Dr. Miriam Haddad has walked over to the Senior Center. She looks into Samson Gorewitz’s room, sees the two sisters sitting with their brother, and backs away. She takes her time in the nurse’s station, reviewing the information. Glenshore has transcribed the material from Samson’s wet wallet: the Columbus, Ohio, address, and his life in numbers: SSN; born 03/08/28; phone numbers; phone number of the sister residing in New York. The doctor looks over the Intake Form: Education, OSU; Nearest Relative, a son (?) in pairs (!); Occupation, ran (?) a “peppermill” (?!). Next to Comments the intern has written: One-sided facial paralysis (?) makes patient’s speech difficult/impossible to follow. May be confused/demented (??).
Shirley is reading Deborah an article titled “Which City Hospital Is Driving Seniors Insane?”
“Is this a joke?”
Shirley says, “Listen.”
“ ‘Our source, whose identity we vow to face incarceration to protect, reports that elderly patients checking into the emergency room of one of our city’s major teaching facilities check out with what the hospital’s spokesperson, Dr. Miriam Haddad,…’ ”
“Our Arab!” Deb and Shirley look hilariously at each other.
“She’s Jewish,” Samson says.
“ ‘… what the hospital’s spokesperson, Dr. Miriam Haddad, for lack of a diagnosis, is calling “copycat Alzheimer’s.” ’ ”
“It’s a joke!” Deb says.
“ ‘There is no emergency room,’ states Dr. Haddad, ‘that is not liable to raise the stress level to one that can cause temporary dementia, particularly in the elderly.’ When pressed to estimate the incidence of cases of dementia in percentages, she put it at a cool 100.”
The sisters look over at Sammy, who lies on the bed and looks at the ceiling. His hands are folded on his stomach. His burbling speech—is it the monologue of dementia?
“ ‘The hospital’s security officer, Salman Haddad …’ ”
“Another one!” Deb says.
“… has retained Joseph Bernstine, former CEO of the Concordance Institute, to check into this curious statistic. We reached Mr. Bernstine in the hospital’s Senior Center, where he is himself, at the time of this writing, a patient. Mr. Bernstine suggested the possibility of a terrorist connection.”
“It’s a put-on!”
“ ‘ “We know,” says Bernstine, “that an operative with a cell phone in Dublin, or in Dubai, can cause a bomb to detonate in Times Square just as easily as in the Old City of Jerusalem. We are beginning to look into the possibility of long-distance cyber-manipulations inside enclosed areas such as emergency facilities.” ’ ”
“Shirley, this is a joke!”
“Like 9/11 was a joke?”
“More like a Washington plot,” says Deb. “You don’t think it’s curious that the hospital’s security officer and the ER’s spokesperson are Haddads?”
Sam says it again: “She’s Jewish.”
“Okay, sweetheart. It’s okay,” they say to him. “By the way,” Deb asks Shirley, “what was he doing in Glenshore in the first place?”
“It’s where we spent that summer—Uncle Seymour came down, don’t you remember?” says Deb.
“Another summer we didn’t get to go to Israel, is what I remember,” says Shirley, and Samson, his right hand in Shirley’s, his left in Deb’s hand, watches them slide inevitably down, like two people rolling into the depression of an old mattress, into their lifelong argument.
Discussion had been constant in the Gorewitz home. Uncle Seymour might draw out of his pocket an article from the Forward with which their father agreed, or radically disagreed, and could have backed, alternatively challenged with a quotation, if someone had not moved the book—it was the fat one with the green spine, which should have been on this shelf right here, or here; he had to quote the relevant passage from memory. No one waited or was expected to wait for anyone to finish speaking. If an opposing argument wanted to make itself heard, it raised its volume. The three Gorewitz children had breathed in secondary opinion. If either of the two clever little girls voiced one of her own, the grownups beamed.
When Uncle Seymour asked Samson what he was going to grow up to be, the little boy said, “A stand-up comic,” and his sisters’ groans, their calling on the Lord’s name in vain, could not stop him from performing his favorite old rabbi joke: Dave comes to the rabbi to argue that a certain field is his field. The rabbi listens and says, “You’re right. That field is yours.” On his way out, Dave passes Sid. Sid is coming to the rabbi to argue that this same field is his, and the rabbi listens and says, “You’re right. That is your field.” Sid goes home. The rebbetzin has been listening in the next room and comes in and says, “The same field can’t belong both to Dave and to Sid,” and the rabbi says, “And you’re right, too. It can’t.”
There came a season in which Samson seemed to hear the sound of escaping air, as when the human bottom came to rest on the backless leather seat in their hallway—“the pouf,” his mother called it. Sam imagined two opposing poufs on which his two sisters eventually settled, Shirley on one, on the other Deborah. The relief of knowing which truth was true; which of two histories you were choosing to imagine; whose calamities were calamities and whose the eggs you had to break to make the omelet; what, once and for all, you were for, whose side you were on, who was the enemy! Neither Deborah nor Shirley ever, in the subsequent half-century, budged from their certainties. From here on in, Deborah believed and argued that everything we do is wrong, and what they do is right, or wrong only in response to the wrong we have done to them. Shirley argued that everything we did was right and anything they did, whatever the reason, was wrong. Each defended her argument with an arsenal of her own facts.
Samson’s function, as he saw it, had been to irritate both by always taking an opposite position.
Samson, the Drowned Man
Dr. Haddad sees the sisters come out of the room and watches them walk in the direction of the Sabbath Elevator, and now she goes into Samson Gorewitz’s room. The patient has his way of lying very still and flat on his back. His eyes are open.
The doctor cranks up the bed. “We need you to be sitting up, Mr. Gorewitz, and to sit in a chair. You have to start moving if you want to get well.”
The patient says, “That’s past praying for,” and makes a sound like laughing.
“Now why do you say that, Mr. Gorewitz?”
The patient does not reply.
“How does one run a peppermill, Mr. Gorewitz?”
“Paper! Paper mill. We made the grocery cardboard boxes the color of the Judean desert, stack them, line them up, I always thought they were beautiful. Nobody stops to think that there was a person who engineered the way they fold flat for storage, how cleverly they reassemble.”
“Mr. Gorewitz, you know where you are?”
“I told that boy, in heaven.”
“You are in heaven, Mr. Gorewitz?”
“ ‘If they find me not, look in the other place.’ Jews don’t worry about it so much. You’re Jewish.”
“Of course,” says Dr. Haddad. “Are you dead, Mr. Gorewitz?”
“Drowned on Glenshore beach. If you’re Jewish, why do you wear the what-do-you-call-it over your hair, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“The hijab,” Dr. Miriam says with some little irritation. “Why does that spook people? My bubbe covered her head with a beautifully coiffured shaitel. She was a doctor before her time, and a dresser. My favorite Aunt Bernice teaches philosophy. I don’t know that she even knows she wears her own hair disguised as a shaitel wi
th a fringe across her forehead, and a hair clip. What is this thing we have with our hair? Some women cover it, and the men? These ones put hats on when they enter the house of their god; that lot takes their hats off. The hat!” said Dr. Miriam Haddad, and was quiet for a moment. “On my Sunday walks with Grandpa Abner,” she said, “his hat used to measure the importance of the people we passed, especially the ladies. Grandpa would touch his hand to the brim, or grasp the brim between thumb and forefinger to just suggest lifting it; there was the little lift, and there was the grand sweep. And my uncle Shimon—my little sister and I used to imagine him in bed with his yarmulke on. So I wear the hijab like my mother-and sisters-in-law. My husband likes it.”
“Isn’t it confining?”
“So’s my white doctor’s coat. So are your pants. Nothing is tighter on you than your skin. What makes you think you’re dead, Mr. Gorewitz? Your medical report says you’re alive. We’re surprised—we’re rather puzzled in fact, by your recovery.”
“Dead or alive,” Samson says, “where’s the difference? Who knew there would be a ceiling in heaven, and a floor, windows, a bed, the TV, and Deb and Shirley arguing through eternity?”
“So, Mr. Gorewitz, if everything is the same, why do you think that you are dead?”
“Ah, that old trick! That won’t work,” Samson says. “Pinch yourself. If you don’t feel it, you’re asleep; if it hurts you must be awake? What if you pinch yourself and you’re dead and it hurts the same as it does when you’re alive; that,” says Samson in a tone of ultimate clarity, “is the gyp.”
“What is a gyp, Mr. Gorewitz?”
“Being dead.”
On her way to the Sabbath Elevator, Dr. Haddad passes the open door of Room 711 and stops, surprised to see the Gorewitz sisters sitting on the edges of the two beds. Their profiled faces are opposed to each other, the mouths of both are in motion.