by Ellen Cooney
“I do, thank you.”
“Please don’t suppose I expect you to keep confidential what I told you. I only ask to have my name kept out, should you wish to ever share it.”
We exchanged another smile, and bade each other good-night.
I felt that I’d listened to his story as the telling of a dream. I have heard many, many dreams. It’s common for someone in a bed to talk to a chaplain as one would to talk to a therapist.
The lawyer was not being monitored. His room was as empty of medical equipment as a hotel room; he was counting down the hours to his release. Obviously no one was worried about after-effcts of a very recent experience that involved near death.
I spoke again with the nurse of the auto shop, this time about his condition. What he had was more of a procedure than a surgery, she told me. But if anything was bothering me after talking to him, I should see the attending.
I tracked down the resident assigned to him, a woman I’d run into before on days. She was only here filling in for a night shifter. She was frazzled and tired and her mood was not a good one.
“Oh, him,” she said when I mentioned the lawyer.
She was hurrying to a room, but I learned that while he was under whatever anesthesia he was given, he had partly awakened. Back under he went, followed by a little scare, a glitch in the proceedings, during which his heart rate was somewhat compromised. It was all just a moment: a slight irregularity, an adjustment. Just one small moment. The lawyer spent a few hours afterward in intensive care, so as not to take any chances. He was as strong as a healthy, middle-aged horse.
I didn’t feel I was wasting time asking questions. I had Plummy in my thoughts. What to say to him?
I always knew what time it was where he was: Germany. The new baby PhD had been offered a position in a research institute he hardly dared hope to be recruited for. In grad school he had slacked off for a while—he fell in love with someone who then met someone else.
We didn’t give each other those sorts of details. What he called slacking off, and what most people mean when they say it, are not the same things. When he said, “I am shattered,” because of that girlfriend, I knew he meant it literally, as many people do not. All the same, his grad school experience worked out for him; he had rocketed through his degree.
When he phoned me with the Germany news, I pointed out that he didn’t know the language.
“It’s on my laptop for the plane ride,” he said.
Sometimes, now, the six years since we were together seemed a long time ago, so that Plummy was part of the everything of my life in a past that was closed, and done with.
Sometimes it seemed only yesterday I was nudging him out of my apartment so he wouldn’t miss his plane into his future.
The last time we texted, about a week before this night, he reminded me how much I’d admire the great hospitals of Germany, which he was in and out of due to the neurologists he was collaborating with.
As usual I reminded him of how I viewed him and me.
“Let me tell you again how much I look forward to being the minister at your wedding with a bride your own age,” I had typed.
He sent me an emoji of a scowling face with a sticking-out tongue. It wasn’t easy to remember that when I met him that day in the chapel and he thought I was praying, I felt he was someone a nurse would call an old soul.
Which he didn’t even believe in. So why did I keep up the thing I had with him, whatever it was—back-and-forths, ex-lover to ex-lover, maybe sometimes not so ex? Why did it seem that whatever was between us could not be broken, like the other thing of my childhood?
I didn’t know. And I didn’t know why I decided, as I was leaving that unit, headed for the room of the librarian, that what the lawyer told me was not a story of an oob. That it didn’t qualify. I thought it over and it came to me that his story was really a story of a man who didn’t grow up to be what he dreamed as a boy he’d become. Like I was a psychotherapist, very intelligently and very correctly putting my finger on the root of a really good story.
It was all psychological. It was all about the brain of the lawyer.
And that was that. I had reached a solid, sensible explanation. The lawyer had figured out pi for himself. Plain and simple.
Anyway, I also decided, I needed to let go of the thing with Plummy. He needed to be more away from me than just living in another country. Of that I was completely, absolutely sure.
Eight
It was easy to imagine the librarian in her younger days glaring: glaring and frowning and staring you down if you talked too loud or committed some other library crime. She was a soft-spoken person whose words came out of her mouth with a backbone, an aliveness, an edge that was not always smooth.
I loved our talks, one-sided as they were. I knew that she’d always counted on making bonds with single ladies. Oh, but don’t we have our secrets, men-wise? Oh, she was especially blessed in her life because her dream came true to have boyfriends and never a husband.
Lonely when you’re with someone is different from lonely alone, she had told me.
It was five to midnight. She was two elevators and quite a few hallways away from the lawyer. I was a little breathless from walking fast.
I didn’t first meet her as an inpatient. In my first week of the night shift, I sat with the parents of a young man brought in from the scene of a crash. Due to the location and the condition of his car, it was suspected he was trying to take his own life. There was a previous attempt, several years before, but he’d been holding down a job and seeing a therapist, and had seemed to be comfortable with himself, and hopeful and confident. The emergency surgery he underwent was not successful. I was with his parents when they were delivered that news.
Later, I walked with them to the taxi that would bring them home, although their own car was in the parking lot.
Back inside, by the ER entrance, I could not push my body forward in the normal motions of taking a step and then another, and I leaned against the wall, my head bowed. It was three in the morning. An ambulance had pulled in. The librarian was on a gurney, passing me. She commanded the two ambulance guys to stop. They did.
“Minister Girl,” she said to me, a stranger. “I never saw anyone more weary. You go find an empty bed and lie down. I might need attention to my soul in here, and I want you rested. You go shut your eyes.”
I followed the gurney, stayed with her.
She lived in assisted living and she had taken a fall some weeks earlier, which she had not sought treatment for, and didn’t complain about, until a new night aide took a look at her and called 911. It wasn’t that negligence had taken place, the librarian insisted. She liked where she lived—it was clean and bright; she had friends; books were always available. And no one was up anyone’s back about who was brown or white or whatever, because by now they were all too damn old.
She could hide pain. She could hold on hard to her basic rule of never letting pessimism take over her soul like a force of corrosion, and then she’d end up in a state of pure rust.
An aide had taken her out for a walk in a wheelchair, on a day in still-winter that was unusually balmy. The librarian had petitioned for control. She could walk, although she needed a cane or a walker, and she was no good anymore at distances. She was still at the positive end of being frail. But she had arm strength. She took hold of the grab wheels, happy she’d thought to put on her gloves with leather palms.
All went well until she had to negotiate a curb cut. She had built up some speed while the aide behind her had a lapse in paying attention. A small front wheel struck the concrete curb, and the force of the impact threw her out of the chair to the pavement. The knee she landed on hardest was badly injured, but she was otherwise all right, or so she had thought. It seemed a problem for ice packs and ibuprofen and staying off her feet.
In the ER she was treated for swelling and bruising. She was X-rayed and given a prescription for a mild painkiller a few levels up from
what she was taking. The general feeling was that she hadn’t needed to come in.
Almost a week ago, she was admitted, and hooked to a drip of blood thinner. The clot that had formed in her leg was a large one, with every possibility of traveling to her lungs, to her heart. She was hospitalized for a dissolving, and why with all the tech and all the marvels of modern medicine was it taking so long and trapping her?
I had learned that at the age of twenty-two, she was the third Black person to have a position on her city’s payroll that was not about cleaning, janitorial, trash collecting, kitchen work where you were never out in front serving meals, bus driving on certain routes only, and groundskeeping including the digging of graves. A Black first-grade teacher had been hired for a school of few white kids, a file clerk for a basement office of city hall.
She had not finished high school. She didn’t go into the details of why she had to go to work at sixteen, in the warehouse of a mail-order company, where most of the clerks were Black. She did well there. The wife of her boss was a library trustee; she was often around, an anomaly of blondness and paleness. She made friends with the librarian, and said to her, “I think I can help you get out of here and integrate somewhere, if you’re interested.”
The librarian’s first batch of years were in a back room, where it would have been excellent, in the minds of some other employees, and some other trustees too, if she’d stayed until her retirement. If she’d kept that place made for her. She unpacked new books, she sorted, she did repairs, she glued in envelope slots to hold due-date cards, and she ran a mimeograph machine for the monthly newsletter of new titles.
She plotted. She was acquiring skills. She ate, drank, and slept the library. She was proud of herself for never once going through with the desire to hurl a thick book in her hand at the head of someone looking at her a certain way, saying certain things—but leaving the back room needed not to mean jail. All the while she tended to her soul, as if she’d covered it with the same clear, tough, protective coating as the covers she placed on high-circulation books.
She moved herself out to shelve books one day when a cart of returns was overloaded and no one else was getting around to it. She just took a deep breath and did it. Later, she went on to the front desk, then scored a seat in Reference. At the time of her retirement she had an office. She had long ago put out the word that when you went to the library to apply for a job, a person interviewing you would be her, with some actual clout.
As a hospital patient she received cards and gifts and phone calls from her family, scattered and far off. She had visits from friends in her assisted living place, and a few women she had known in the library. But those were in the daytime. Nights were tough.
When I stepped into her room, she was sitting up, wide awake, her bed inclined. A book and her high-magnified reading glasses were on her tray table. As usual, the television in the room wasn’t on. She wore a new nightgown, silk, bright yellow, ruffled, expensive—a wholly different garment from her usual plain cottons, which she called “old-fashioned nightshirts for ladies.”
You would think from her expression I had done something criminal enough to consider calling the police. Or I had betrayed her by picking another patient for my first stop.
But I saw that under her glaring, she was feeling something else. A fragility was all over her, new to me.
And there was fear. She was scared, and I knew it, and it was coming from somewhere deep.
“Hi,” I said. “I was paged for kind of an emergency. I love the new nightgown. Who bought it for you?”
Well. She let go of whatever she’d planned to greet me with. Her eyes opened wider; she was seizing the moment. She hated this nightgown! She only put it on because a niece of hers, the one who sent it, wanted a photo, which a nurse had taken on her phone, and the fuss was all too much! She wasn’t one for frou-frous! What was the point of spending money on something real silk, when you can’t wear it, in an assisted living place, anywhere outside your own room? The color was awful! It made her feel like a human daffodil! All her life she’d been allergic to that flower!
Yet I felt sure she loved wearing it. I sat down in the bedside chair, waiting for the ice between us to finish being broken. I looked at the deep dark brown of her skin, the cap of her closely trimmed old-woman hair, gray and silver, sparse here and there, dotted with tiny fuzzy clusters of black, like peppercorns. I looked at the hand taped and needled to her drip. I looked at her immobility. I knew how much she minded being stuck like this.
I waited a long minute once she made herself calm, and another, another, another. In the silence, it seemed the two of us were listening for the sounds of her clot breaking up, being vanquished.
Then she was ready to talk. And out it came about the broken submarine.
She will show me her soul as if holding it up in the hand unattached to her drug. I will see it’s broken too.
And I will be sitting there, bowing my head, with nothing to say.
Nine
This was when the librarian worked in Reference.
One afternoon, the author of a book about sea vessels for spying and war came to the library to give a talk. He was a military historian. Ordinarily such events were not well attended, but the audience was large, with retired people who were mostly men, mostly ex-military, and mostly Black too. There were all sorts of college kids as well, having been ordered to come for some class, and a group of Black ladies who were top-level patrons and frequently lunched together.
Those ladies had seen his publicity photos. They could not believe he had not gone to Hollywood to be a star. That’s how good-looking he was, and he was broad in the shoulders and tight in his middle, and as dignified in his bearing as if he wore the uniform of an admiral, not jeans and a tweed jacket.
The librarian was not supposed to leave the desk unattended, but she thought she might as well step into the lecture hall to find out if he could talk as well as he could walk and be handsome. Which he could. His voice was so potent, he didn’t need the microphone.
She found the audience enraptured. He was nearing the end of his talk; then he invited questions. Someone asked him about a chapter in his book that described training manuals for living and working on a submarine. According to his bio, he earned money in graduate school by becoming a part-time civilian employee of the navy.
Not in the bio was a piece of information he shared with that audience.
Why he even brought it up, the librarian didn’t know. The book was his first. He might not have been experienced at being such a center of attention, all of it quite radiant. He might not have stopped to consider the effect his words would have on people who were never in armed services. Or people who had never given much thought to the subject of submarines, as one didn’t think of astronauts in way-outer space being possibly marooned, when the only vehicle capable of rescuing them was the one they were in. Or if, during the famous moon landing, say, all the fuel they needed to come home leaked out onto rocks and gray dust.
One of the author’s navy projects was putting together information about how to escape a new type of submarine, reaching depths that had not been reached before. In a particular scenario he had to describe for the manual, the submarine had lost the ability to communicate its position. It had gone off the radar, and very quickly became no longer operable. All its systems were shutting down, when it was very much closer to the bottom of the ocean than the top.
“Now that,” said the author, as the librarian stood alone at the rear, pressing herself against the wall, for she suddenly felt weak in the legs, “now that was something to give me some nightmares.”
He described his paragraphs about emergency protocols, escape hatches, diving gear. One of the ladies, in the front row, put up her hand. She was not the type of person who speaks up, but she was obviously feeling the need to, perhaps for the first time ever.
“Oh, come on now,” she said to the author. “Are you telling us the navy has air tanks big
enough for someone to go from the bottom of the sea to the top? And like the pressure wouldn’t do a thing to them, swimming their way up?”
The librarian felt suddenly chilled. She had no idea of the normal temperature inside a submarine, but she knew to be thinking, cold.
And she knew to be thinking, dark.
And silent.
The afraidness that began to take her over was something bigger and stronger than any bad feeling she’d ever felt. She was feeling it in her soul. What if everything everyone ever said about the everlasting life of a soul was the same as information in a training manual about escaping somewhere that cannot be escaped from?
“I think I know what he’s talking about,” said a man in the middle of the audience, to the patron who spoke up. This man was possibly a minister, perhaps a former military chaplain. He might have been wearing a collar that could only be seen from the front.
“I think he’s talking about the necessity of giving hope,” the maybe minister declared.
That emboldened a college boy. His voice sounded full of disappointment.
“I think he’s talking about written-down delusions,” he said, like the author wasn’t even there anymore, and the librarian pulled herself away from the wall. She rushed away on wobbly legs and went outside for a cigarette, as she smoked then. She had three in a row, lighting off ends of two, which she had never done before.
Then she had to deal with a line of complainers in Reference because no one was in her seat. Somehow, she became absorbed again in working.
Many, many years went by. She thought about the author and his talk no more, until the evening she was sitting with a small crowd in the main parlor of her assisted living place, watching a movie. She usually didn’t go to such events. She could not understand how her fellow residents enjoyed what the movie committee kept selecting, all that gore and fast action and guns and explosions, or otherwise the men would not show up. But in the parlor was a new wide-screen television. She was promised no violence and nothing disgusting.
