I said, “Where’s Winslow? Isn’t he supposed to be out here doing an interview? I want to get a look at this jerk.”
The news crews were setting up with their usual efficiency, but I didn’t see anyone who corresponded to the description I’d had of Winslow. The only person in a suit was obviously the Channel 8 reporter, Arseneault. I was truly back in the north, I realized when I heard that classic French-Canadian name. Irish, Italians, French Canadians, Poles—all brought here by the mills, once upon a time. They gave these towns what life they had, and living beside them—above them—was that dying breed still separate and distinct: the flinty, frugal Yankees whose family fortunes had been built on shipping and the slave trade. Kate, I took a guess, came from such a family, despite that Irish-sounding married name.
“You won’t believe me, but Winslow’s actually not that bad a guy,” said Kate. “He’s just in over his head. They imported him from their smallest hospital in Massachusetts, where Coventry’s already gobbled up four facilities. That hospital was tiny, and it wasn’t unionized, and it served a well-off, suburban patient population. I think Winslow was probably fine there. All he had to do was act executive.”
“Is that him now?”
“That’s him.”
Winslow had just walked out of the hospital, which was looking positively Gothic as wisps of fog rose from the sidewalk and drifted in the beating light of the TV cameras. He threw a small nod our way, and Kate gave him a cheery little wave.
It was a blow to see just how personable Bennett Winslow was. If you were casting a sympathetic, dignified hospital CEO in a medical drama, Winslow would have been on your short list. He was in his late fifties, with silver hair, a high forehead, and clean-cut, noble features that were only looking more noble as age drew a few lines that gave the appearance of wisdom earned. As he chatted with the Channel 8 reporter, I could hear that he had a voice like Ron’s: deep, self-confident, professionally modulated.
“God,” I said. “He’s right out of central casting. I was hoping for someone fat and squinty.”
“Give it a few minutes,” said Kate. “He starts out strong, but then he always adds something that screws him up.”
We drew a little closer to listen in on the interview. Winslow was clearly used to television. He gazed either at Arseneault or straight into the camera, relaxed but not too smooth, without that nervous blink that afflicts anyone who doesn’t have long practice in front of the lights. The opening questions were softballs: What was the hospital’s position on staffing, was there room for movement at the bargaining table, would there be a strike or could a solution still be reached?
Then the reporter, a likeable, handsome guy with black hair and speaking dark eyes and a trench coat obviously modeled on Peter Jennings’s circa 1990, said, “Mr. Winslow, would you comment on the recent death at St. Bernadette’s Hospital? Wasn’t that a case of inadequate staffing, just like the nurses here are talking about?”
Winslow was clearly rattled. His expression moved from comfortable benevolence to peeved surprise, then became downright cross.
“St. Bernadette’s has nothing to do with conditions at this hospital,” said Winslow, his forehead furrowing in a way that his media trainer should have warned him about. “St. Francis is not St. Bernadette’s, and it would not be appropriate for me to comment on that case. The staffing philosophy is certainly not the same.”
St. Bernadette’s, I knew from Weingould’s folder, was the Coventry hospital in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where a patient had died two weeks earlier from being given an incompatible blood type. It was a nursing assistant’s error. Coventry would give the poor things six weeks training and then shove them into critical-care units with very little supervision or help. Coventry was hoping that they could replace nurses with large numbers of these low-paid assistants, as if nursing skills were as easy to pick up as running a cash register or flipping burgers. Lots of the hospitals were doing it, and the resulting horror stories were beginning to hit the news.
The case had been getting a lot of play, especially since the victim was a fifteen-year-old girl. Coventry hadn’t come off well in the latest newshour segment, which included footage of the bereaved family laying flowers at Lisa’s grave and inviting the reporter into their living room to look at photos of the deceased teen in her marching band uniform.
“Actually, isn’t the staffing philosophy exactly the same?” said Arseneault. “Coventry is gearing up to replace nurses with unlicensed assistants here at St. Francis, aren’t they?”
“One-on-one patient care by a nurse at the bedside is overrated in terms of medical outcomes,” Winslow asserted, obviously not familiar with recent studies that showed just the opposite. “Most patients don’t need their hands held every moment of the day.”
Tsk, tsk. Guess which quote from this interview would make the evening news?
Arseneault, knowing he’d gotten his sound bite, finished up with a few harmless last questions. Winslow regained his poise, and his hand stole to the lapel of his navy suit jacket in an unconscious preening gesture. A minute later, the reporter was thanking him and turning back to the crew.
“Not as smart as he thinks he is,” I said to Kate. “Thank God.”
“The secret to Winslow is that he’s just a big kid. Do you see that fountain in the lobby, that black marble fountain?”
“It would be hard to miss it. Whose idea was the green and blue floodlighting?”
“Winslow had it put in. He had the whole fountain put in. You wouldn’t believe what it cost. He was so proud of it. The day it was installed he was just beaming, walking around asking everyone if they’d seen it yet.”
“It’s awful.”
“It was a running joke right from the beginning. Our people call it ‘the million-dollar bathtub.’ Even the doctors make fun of it. But all the ribbing really got to Winslow. He wrote an editorial defending himself in the hospital newsletter. He sounded so hurt, it was pathetic.
He gets to you, somehow.”
“That guy gets to you? How big a pushover are you?”
“You’ll see. He’s coming over.”
Surprisingly, Winslow was approaching, with the measured, almost ceremonial walk of someone who expects a lot of fanfare to surround his appearance on the scene.
“How are you, Kate?” he said, extending his hand in the way I imagine the pope does when you kiss his ring.
“I’m just fine, Bennett. This is Nicky Malone, from Washington, D.C.”
“Ah, Washington. I was there for a while after the war.”
“Korea?”
“Vietnam.” He frowned slightly. “Washington is a lovely city. My favorite place there is a courtyard behind the National Portrait Gallery. Those enormous elms.”
It was one of my favorite places, too, which was disturbing.
“Do they still have that upstairs Civil War gallery?” asked Winslow. “With the engravings of the Monitor and the Merrimac ?”
“They did last time I went. Though the whole place is being renovated, so Lord knows what it will turn out like.”
“I hope they don’t change a thing. That place has memories for me,” he said, and smiled sadly. Perhaps there had been some girl with whom he strolled in that courtyard, a girl who had died young, a girl who had married another man to whom she was already promised, a girl who had broken his heart. Suddenly World War II songs were playing in my head and I saw Winslow in officer’s khaki saying goodbye under the elms to a Merle Oberon type.
Kate gave me an amused “I told you, didn’t I?” look. I shook myself mentally. Here I was weaving a sad romance around Bennett Winslow, who was probably the type of person who visited a place once and then claimed to know it well, the type of person who said he had “friends” in cities where he’d merely made acquaintances. I had to give it to the guy, he had charm to spare. In a moment he’d gone from being a pronouncing, pompous stuffed shirt to a wistful, attractive older man, remembering days of his youth with
just the right appealing ruefulness. As he adjusted his tie I saw that he had very nicely shaped hands. Masculine, but beautifully modeled. If you were casting a bronze statue of George Washington, you’d want to borrow Bennett Winslow’s hands.
Kate said, “Nicky’s going to help us with some of our strike literature.”
Immediately his expression became pained, as if Kate had committed a terrible breach of manners.
“I hope it won’t come to that, Kate. I certainly do hope a solution can be found, even now.”
“If not you can wave to us occasionally from your office window.”
Instead of taking offense, Winslow gave her a sidelong smirk, as if she’d just said something flirtatious.
“And will you wave back?” he said.
“I might not have a free hand. Those picket signs are pretty heavy.”
He laughed as a Shakespearean actor laughs, with the sort of fake ho-ho you might hear from a duke or minor prince in one of the comedies, over some obscure joke that the audience doesn’t understand but presumably people in the sixteenth century thought was a hoot.
“You take care of yourself, Miss Kate,” he said, and nodded to me.
When he’d gone back inside I exhaled.
“Oh, boy.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it? You can’t help warming up to him. Happens every time.”
“It’s like some immobilizing ray gun in a cartoon.”
“The worst part is, you know he’s just being smarmy, but it works anyway. For some of us. He has no effect on Clare.”
“But Doug does?”
“There’s no accounting for taste. Besides, Doug is versatile. He plays to his audience. Winslow could never change his act.”
A car screeched up the drive and out jumped Tony in a tearing hurry. Hamner alighted from the passenger’s seat more slowly; he seemed to have gotten caught in the seat belt mechanism somehow. To my dismay, Tony was sporting a disreputable old brown windbreaker that I’d tried repeatedly to remove from his wardrobe in the past.
Kate said, “I can’t believe he wore that. Wait a second, I’m going to go tell him to take that off before he’s on camera.”
There was a brief disagreement, then she came back holding the windbreaker.
“Men,” she said. “You should see the shirts my husband tries to hold on to.”
Tony began by wisecracking with the crew and exchanging manly pleasantries with Peter Arseneault. He was as relaxed and affable as Bennett Winslow had been, though in a more down-to-earth, off-the-cuff way. The Tony of my day wasn’t comfortable even on the phone with a reporter. Now he was waltzing through an on-camera interview with the aplomb of an old pro.
Arseneault went easy on him to start, just as he had with Winslow. Tony got to make his points about patient safety, about the recent death at St. Bernadette’s, about the need for better staffing. At the end, though, the reporter threw in a tough one.
“How do the union nurses justify walking out on their patients?” he said. “Isn’t that the last thing a nurse is supposed to do? Firemen aren’t supposed to strike, or policemen. Why should nurses?”
Tony paused, as if to get the camera glare out of his eyes for a minute. He’d learned the trick of taped interviews: since you’re not live, you can play for time. They aren’t going to show you on the news scratching your head and thinking for twenty straight seconds.
Then he turned to Arseneault.
“Sure, our nurses are going to worry about their patients if we go out. They’re going to worry a lot. That’s why they’ve waited this long. But think about it, would you want your mother in this hospital? With what’s going on here? Good nurses can’t work in unsafe conditions without speaking up. There’s still time to avoid a strike, if the hospital will take our safety concerns seriously.”
The sound bite for Tony would be, “Would you want your mother in this hospital?” and it would make a nice counterpoint to Winslow’s “Patients don’t need their hands held.”
The reporter said, “I think that wraps it up,” and very quickly he and his crew were gone. Tony took his windbreaker back from Kate, who said, “Not bad, Boltanski.”
“It would have been better if Clare could be here.”
“Don’t be modest.”
He ignored me, so I didn’t offer him any compliments. Was he going to pretend I was invisible for as long as he could get away with it? It seemed that he was. He was heading off to his car. I blocked his path.
“Tony, we need to sit down and plan a strategy.”
“Not tonight. I’m booked.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“There’s no rush.”
“There’s every rush. What are you talking about? We’re three days away from a strike here.”
“Which means I have a lot to do.”
“Tony, perhaps you aren’t aware that I bill at seventy dollars an hour now. Is it worth it to keep me twiddling my thumbs?”
“Have it your way. Tomorrow at Yancy’s diner. Breakfast. It’s two blocks from the office. Is seven-thirty too early for you?”
He knew that I looked and felt awful in the morning. Fine. I’d take one of those valerian pills Louise had given me for traveling, and fall asleep by 10 P.M. I was going to be glowing and dewy as a new bride tomorrow morning, damn it.
“Terrific,” I said, and turned my back on him before he could turn his on me. I could sense rather than see Hamner gloating somewhere in the background. Hamner was always caught between wanting to be like the straight-shooting cowboys in the organizing department—of whom Tony was a prime example—and wanting to see them fail. With me around for a scapegoat, I bet Hamner was already picturing himself as Tony’s new buddy.
“Come on,” said Kate. “You’re hungry now, aren’t you? Doug, is that a cigarette I see you with? Don’t you have asthma?”
“It’s not that bad,” said Doug, but he dropped the cigarette hastily and stubbed it out with his shoe.
She turned back to me.
“Do you like Mexican?”
I didn’t, but I was suddenly so hungry that it sounded mouthwatering.
Kate disposed of two enchiladas and half my chilis rellenos. She ate voraciously for such a slim person. We were in a Tex-Mex theme restaurant, which grew on me after we’d polished off our first bowl of tortilla chips and I’d had a margarita.
“Don’t let Hamner get to you,” Kate said. “Or Tony, either. Tony’s actually a good guy, but I guess you know that.”
“I’ve worked with him before.”
“He told me. He told me you guys used to live together but broke up.”
“It wasn’t all my fault.”
“Hey, it probably wasn’t even half your fault. He’s a stubborn one when he doesn’t have it just his way.”
“So how come he listens to you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I remind him of his mother.”
“I don’t think so.” From his brief accounts of her, Tony’s mother seemed to have been a soft, placid woman who had delighted in her three energetic sons but never had the knack of managing them. Tony was such a troublemaker in high school that he’d have been expelled long before graduation if he hadn’t been on the football team. Of course, in his high school years his mother had been getting sicker and sicker with cancer, slowly dying in a family of men for whom John Wayne was the model of emotional communication. It was no wonder Tony had been trouble.
“So, Kate, how did you think he handled that reporter’s last question?”
Kate scooped up some of my guacamole.
“I love this stuff. I know it’s bad for me but I don’t care. Tony did great, like I told him. It’s easy for him to say all that stuff, of course. He isn’t leaving any patients.”
“But you are.”
“I’m an oncology nurse.”
“That’s tough.”
“My best friend’s in there right now, in ICU. Pancreatic cancer. It’s a bacterial infection she’s in for this time. Ch
emo makes you vulnerable to those.”
“I’m sorry. Really sorry. Will she get out soon?”
“Who knows. It’s been one infection after another. Thank God, not pneumonia yet.”
“Is the chemo working?”
“She hasn’t been one of the success stories. You should see her, though. Eileen has more life in her sick than most people do when they’re well. She does her needlework, which I have to tell you is incredibly ugly. She made this cap I wore tonight. She talks to a million people on the phone, she eats Tootsie Rolls by the bagful, she sits up and acts lively when her husband and her two boys come in every night. With me, though, I think she feels like she can let go a little.”
I nodded. I wanted to say, “How long does she have?” but thought that would be a cruel question.
I said, “So her prognosis isn’t the best, it sounds like.”
“She has maybe six months, and she’s only thirty-seven. And still she wants this strike. She’s gotten pissed off on our behalf, can you imagine that? If I were as sick as Eileen, I’d be on a nice long cruise somewhere, to hell with everyone else.”
I tried to think of what I’d do if I were terminally ill. The first thought that came to my mind was that finally I could eat whatever I wanted. The second thought was that my mother would make my last months of life feel like several years. Even if I were dying—perhaps especially if I were dying—my mother would not cease her attempts to hack my life into a shape that was pleasing to her eyes. She’d probably bundle me off to Lourdes or subject me to an experimental cure that involved a diet of Brazil nuts and sheep’s urine, all the while talking me up to the doctors as her lovely single daughter.
“I can’t imagine it, Kate. Your side of it. The stress. Worse than stress.”
“Well. What can you do? Don’t get the idea that Eileen’s some plaster saint. When we were girls we fought all the time. Real fighting, scratching and punching. She gave me a black eye once, when we were ten.”
She sighed.
The Side of the Angels Page 9
