by Howard Engel
It also hit me that today must be either Tuesday or Thursday, Anna’s teaching days in Toronto. Some small things were beginning to stick in my mind again. It was a good feeling.
“Benny, are you still there?”
I cleared my throat. “Sorry, Anna. I was woolgathering. Is this long distance?”
“No, I’m still in town. Why?”
“No special reason.” I heard a sigh descend on me down the telephone line. “I went through the alley where the Dumpster is located. I nosed around, as you like to say …”
“And?”
“And I felt stupid. I’ll be honest, Benny. Too much time has gone by, and the cops have been all over that thing a dozen times. I didn’t expect to find anything and I didn’t.”
“Now that I think of it, I’m not surprised.” What really surprised me was the fact that I sent her on such a fool’s errand in the first place. The crime scene was cold by the time I came to the rehab. I could feel my energy for this conversation leaching out of me. I tried to hold on. After all, Anna had tried. I owed her for that at least.
“Benny?”
“You shouldn’t have gone there alone, Anna.”
“You think the guy who conked you and poor Flora is staked out to conk just anybody?”
“No, I just don’t want you to get hurt. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you in a dark alley while I was cooped up in here. It’s bad enough being flat on my back; putting you in the way of danger makes me …”
“Yes?”
“… want to get out of here faster and get back to work.” Anna sighed again. Right away, I was sorry I had said that. I cleared my throat and looked out the windows.
“It’s not a dark alley. You’re thinking of B movies, Benny. There’s busy traffic on two sides. Well, almost.”
“Just don’t take chances. I’m a worrywart where you’re concerned.”
“Benny, what are you trying to say?”
“There’s no coverage for you in my business insurance plan. So don’t take any more chances.”
“Any other orders?”
“You are going to be here Tuesdays and Thursdays, right?” I was showing off. But if she had asked me whether this was Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday, I wouldn’t have been able to help her. Even without a mind with holes in it, the normal hospital routine tended to make one day seem much like the last. I went on. “Could you get my office key from Frank Bushmill—he’s in the office next door to mine—and see what you can discover about my reasons for being in Toronto in the first place? I don’t think that you’ll get hit over the head on St. Andrew Street in Grantham. My desk isn’t as tidy as a pin, but I’m sure that you’ll be able to sort out my system after a minute or so. Look for the yellow legal-sized pads. Call me from the office phone. Tell Frank that I’m okay, okay? I hate to lumber you with all this, Anna, but I think getting back to work will help me get clear of this place faster.”
There were a lot of things to think about. For a minute, I thought, What am I getting so excited for? I don’t even have a client! Then I remembered that I was the client. And that brought me back to remembering that I was both an idiot and a fool. With that self-revelation stinging my eyes, I said goodbye.
TWELVE
While I was waiting for Anna and for the solution to the secret of the time I had spent in Toronto before my memory took unpaid leave, I tried to make a list of a few of those things that were on my mind. In my Memory Book, I wrote down: What brought me to Toronto?
I tried to remember my working habits; would they yield anything useful? During past investigations, I made notes in pencil on lined yellow pads. I’d been doing it that way for years. The word “years,” or something about the word, seemed to make a pass at my memory. But it was only a pass. It didn’t hold on or turn into something more substantial. Back to the libretto.
I must have made notes on a pad of paper on my desk this time, too. I would ask Anna to look into that when she went back home to Grantham. Or had I already asked her? Did I take these notes with me on my trip to Toronto? It was only rarely that I made a copy of my notes. Maybe the notes were in my car. I had to have it collected from the parking lot behind that restaurant sooner or later anyway. Anna could do that. No, damn it! That was asking too much of her! But it is less dangerous than having her climb into Dumpsters on her own. I didn’t want that girl ending up in some landfill on my account.
What was the connection, if any, with the steak house? A heavy, on the run, might pick the parking lot of a busy restaurant as a place to abandon a car. But if he did so, he’d probably pick one where he had never shown his face before. Waiters have good memories for faces, and a person who parked but didn’t pick up the car might have stuck in the memory of a waiter or dishwasher having a smoke out back. Again, I cursed my immobile state. I tried to think of another line to follow up, but couldn’t imagine one.
Sleepiness was stealing along my bones. After a brief struggle, I gave up, kicked off my slippers, and closed my eyes.
When I opened my eyes again, Jerry What’s-hisname’s son was borrowing a chair from near my bed. Jerry was entertaining a large group of people, some of whom I could see through the gaps in the curtains. Jerry’s raspy voice was quizzing his son about whether or not a ramp could be built from the driveway to the side door of his house. Dagmar told him not to worry about it, that Joel was in touch both with the builder and with Jerry’s doctor. But Jerry was a good detail man, so he continued asking his son about the nuts and bolts. The muffled drone of this conversation, brightened from time to time with sallies of Dagmar’s accented soprano, almost put me back to sleep again. I hoisted myself out of bed, covered my loins with a terry cloth kimono that I couldn’t recall ever having seen before, even though it was comfortable and old, and walked toward the dining room. A chess game was being played: the Czech diplomat against one of the gourmets from Belgium. I stood behind the diplomat and watched.
“Ha!” said the gourmet at the move of a king-side pawn. “Remember you did that ten minutes from now!”
“I hope we both remember, my friend,” said the diplomat with a suppressed smile. The smile suggested to me that I might be able to take him in a poker game. But poker was my father’s game. They didn’t call him the Hammer for nothing. I kept watching, even as some of the ambulatory crowd tired and moved to other activities or relaxations. I kept on watching. It didn’t look as if it was going to take very long:
WHITE
BLACK
Q-Q3
BxN
PxB
Q-N4ch
K-B1
N-B5!
B-B1
Q-R4
PxP
RxP!!
BxN
RxR!
Q-Q1
RxB!
Here the moment came for my gourmet friend to eat his words. White was all over Black, as even I could see. Both players continued to examine the board, as though reserve forces were available underneath the table. Even I could see that if the play had gone QxR/B1, R-KB6! Either way Black wins.
“I’ve been looking for you!” It was my special nurse. No name, no rhyme, but I did remember that hers was the first face I had seen as I came out of the black hole of my wanderings between the world of the 4:15 train and the other side. I held out my hand for the plastic cup with the pill in it. I downed the pill with one swallow. It amused me to realize that I was, in a small way, proud of my accomplishment. In hospital, I’d become simple and childish; I enjoyed praise and the successful execution of small tasks.
The cheerful laughter of two other nurses or orderlies made the smile grow. I was strangely happy about the chess game, about the nurse’s care of me, and about the peal of laughter from the West Indies. They all supported me, I thought, and this wasn’t such a bad place to be after all.
To celebrate this new feeling of optimism, I walked down the corridor, passed the elevators at the nursing station, and went to the block of elevators at th
e sunny south end of the building. The elevator door opened and I was in Grantham again. I knew the man standing inside.
“Benny?” he said.
“Bud!” It was Bud Phelan from home.
As I stepped into the elevator, we both said, “What are you doing here?” at the same time.
Bud scratched his grey hair and explained that he was in town with his barbershop quartet to perform upstairs for the patients with aphasia and had got separated from the other three. He told me he was the tenor. It was good to see that I could still recognize a familiar face, even when it popped up out of its usual context. We got out in the lobby. Here Bud found his companions. Meanwhile I strained my mind to remember that seeing Bud didn’t mean I was back in Grantham. And why, I wondered, did I recognize him out of the blue, when I couldn’t remember the name of my own nurse? This memory scar had irregular edges.
When I got to the big front door, I looked at the poor wretches out in the street, smiling to myself. While they were still caught up in the rat race, I was, for the foreseeable future, blanketed from all the crazy things going on out there. It was a good, warm feeling. My surroundings and those who peopled it were benign, friendly, and safe.
Back in the elevator, I couldn’t remember my floor. All of the numbers on the selection panel looked good to me. I picked 3 and tried that. The view through the door as it opened was dim, without sunlight; I remembered that on my floor there was a bright sunlit pattern on the wall facing the elevator. I tried again: 12. The sunlight was better on 12, but the nursing station was wrong, unfamiliar. Through the window at the end of the hall, I saw a glimpse of roof below me. It belonged to an added wing attached to the building, but not rising as high as the one I was in. This roof went only so far. I figured that my floor, whichever it was, must be the floor at the level immediately above the roof. I could remember roof-y things through the window: the bumps made by vents and air-conditioning blower units. I took a stab at the fifth floor, holding my breath as the car descended. By now I had company: two nurses and one stretcher with an accompanying supporting stand for plastic sacks of saline solution running into the unfortunate occupant of the trolley.
Fifth floor! I got it right! I stepped out of the car with what I hoped looked like authority. I sank into the bed and soon lost myself in a long nap.
My dreams, since the head injury, tended to be in black and white. I couldn’t remember much about them afterwards. Often they included bits of the nightmare of the train tipping over and the suitcase hitting me in the head. While I was still in bed with my eyes closed, I tried to remember whether there were any new elements. I thought that there was something different, but I couldn’t place it. As I rolled over, I remembered the advice a therapist had given me: let the missing thought slide out of the centre of attention. The way to winkle out a shy memory was to give it its head, pay no attention until it ran into focus.
“These flowers came for you, Mr. Cooperman.” It was a nurse with an armful of roses and other flowers. She was the quiet nurse, the one who never tried to engage me in conversation. “I’ll put them here by the window where you can see them in the light. Look at those roses! I love roses, roses of all colours, although I’m partial to pink. Some people love yellow roses. My daughter, for instance. She dotes on yellow roses. Is that supposed to mean something?” I remembered seeing a book called The Language of Flowers. I remembered not opening it, so I couldn’t help the nurse as she settled the bouquets in the light from the window. Funny nurse, I thought. I used to think of her as the silent one. But she isn’t. She chatters pleasantly.
“I can’t find a card, Mr. Cooperman. They must be from your secret admirer.”
My curiosity must have been dozing. I accepted the flowers as my due. Was I getting very grand in my hospital gown? Probably it was part of the general passivity that the hospital induces in its inmates, a phase of my recuperation.
The nurse stood back, admiring her work, arms akimbo. “Would you like a cookie, Mr. Cooperman?” She had been carrying cookies as well as flowers. That seemed funny, somehow. Accepting two cookies from her, I thought of her having to learn all of our names. Dozens of names! Part of the job, I guessed. It was people management. Make them feel like you care.
Where had the cynicism come from? A minute earlier, I’d been thinking of her carrying flowers and cookies, a modern Florence Nightingale. A few minutes ago, everything was rosy. There were no shadows on my roses. Given time and patience, everything would come up roses. Roses, roses all the way! Roses? Rose? I looked at the flowers again. The name seemed to catch in my head. Not just the flower, but the name Rose.
It was a name, of course, but where had it come from? I tried to comb through my shattered memory for any forgotten Roses. There was a much-loved aunt, but she had died many years ago. Why would her name come to mind just now? I stared at the ceiling with its tracks carrying divider curtains across the room and around the beds. Did this have something to do with my dream?
I repeated the name over and over again in my head. There were no Rosies or Roses in my life as far as I could remember. There were no Roses among the nursing staff. I couldn’t remember any of their names, but at the same time I was sure that none of them were Rose or Rosie. I tried to find a face that would go with the name. It wasn’t a new or trendy name. It was a nice Victorian name, belonging to the past, suitable for elderly aunts and cousins. At the same time I was thinking this, the face of a young woman crept into my mind. The face was indistinct, vague, incorporeal, but young. Somewhere in her twenties, or maybe in her late teens. It wasn’t much and it didn’t seem to come out of the train nightmare. She wasn’t one of the tumbling shapes in that railway car.
Then it hit me. I was an idiot. This was the Rose of Sharon Rehabilitation Hospital. My life was saved, I guess, right here. No wonder the name Rose had a special meaning for me. I was going to be forever grateful to the Rose of Sharon. No wonder the name occupied such a large place in my shattered memory.
Back to square one.
It wasn’t easy to let go of the only clue I had to how I came to be found in Toronto. What was I doing here, why did I come, in whose interest was I clobbered, and how did I lose my mind and car? I tried to get the name out of my head. I tried thinking about who the Rose of Sharon was. Why didn’t I know the Bible better than I did? Was it New Testament or Old? Was she some pious farm-girl who had visions? Was she a worker of rural miracles or the scourge of unruly kings? There seemed to be a predictable pattern in saints. In early saints, anyway. Useful saints came along later in history: nursing sisters and teachers.
When I woke from my nap—yes, another nap; I seemed to thrive on them—I found the name Rose just as fixed in my mind as it had been earlier. I went over the logic for discarding it, but in the end I came to recognize that the name had a legitimate claim on me. I resolved to quiz Mom and Dad about the name when they returned. There was someone else, too. Someone who knew Grantham’s back-stairs history as few others did. However, after trying for five minutes, going through the alphabet a dozen times, I still couldn’t remember her name. It was a woman. She had figured in one of my old cases. I’d ask her when her name came to the surface in my battered pia mater. She might be of help. If Mom didn’t know a Rose, maybe my friend, the Grantham gossip, would. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
“Benny! At last you’ve got your eyes open!” It was Mom and Dad. “Every time I look in to see you, you’re sleeping. Yesterday I sat here for twenty, twenty-five minutes. Not a blink out of you.”
“I’m sorry that I’ve slept through your visits. It’s not very polite.”
“Don’t fret the easy stuff, Benny. You can’t be punished for what happens when you are asleep,” Ma protested. “Besides, I haven’t seen you sleeping for years. It takes me back to when you were little.”
“She sat there looking at you as if you were going to melt, Benny. Tell her you’re not going to melt.”
“Not that I know of. The air conditi
oning in here helps.” I could see the worry on their faces, but I didn’t know how to get them to relax. We haven’t had a lot of illnesses in our family, so I didn’t have much to build on.
“You’d think it was a plot,” Ma said. “As soon as we walk in the door, you fall into a deep sleep. The nurse said, ‘Pull his big toe. Squeeze the end of his nose.’ But I couldn’t do that. Although I used to drag you out of bed when you slept in as a boy.”
“Next time, pull my toe. I’m getting plenty of sleep.” I had a thought that I hoped would change the subject. “Ma, do I know anyone named Rose or Rosie?”
“There was your poor Aunt Rosie, olev hasholem.”
“Besides Aunt Rosie. Someone above ground, from home. Maybe a school friend or an old girlfriend?”
“Well, I don’t know. I used to encourage you and Sam to bring your friends home. Rosie or Rose? I can’t think of anything right now. That was all so long ago.”
My father was shaking his head too. I let out the breath of hope I had been holding. I’d think of something else.
“You know, you’re lucky to have your brother and so many specialists on call, not to mention a ward full of interesting patients. I’ve been talking to some of them. I played a few hands of gin rummy with a few of them. They all paid up like the gentlemen they are.”
“Pa, you took their money?”
“That’s the game. They’d have taken mine if I’d played as badly as they did. What’s a couple of dollars?”
“When you’ve finished fleecing the patients here on the fifth floor, you can run up to the sixth. You should be able to really clean up there.”
“What’s on six?”
“Incurables.”
Pa blinked and we all sat through a lengthy silence.
Finally, I said, “Ma, did I talk to you before I came to Toronto? Did I tell you anything about why I was coming here?”
“You keep asking me that, Benny. No, you didn’t say anything this time any more than you ever do. You hardly ever talk about your work, Benny. I just hope that you’re finished with whatever trouble you’ve got into. Thank God they didn’t kill you! You brought your laundry, wouldn’t stay for a sandwich, and that was the last I saw of you. You were in a hurry about something.”
