Frank

by Fred Petrovsky

  “Good boy,” I said to him as I drove the few miles to the gallery and thought about how it wouldn’t be too long before he’d take his last trip. His hips grew worse daily and one day, I knew, he wouldn’t be able to get up. What would I do then? I’d have to find a way to get him in the car and take him to the veterinarian to put him down. It would be a trip from which he’d never return, but he wouldn’t know it. They’d give him a shot and he’d close his eyes. He’d stop breathing in a while and then he’d simply be gone.

  What would I do without him?

  The downtown gallery district was dark and vacant, valuables moved away from the windows, security measures all in place. There was a time when our gallery was one of only a few, but now more than a dozen lined the street. I pulled into the alley, drove around the back, and parked by the rear service entrance where a single bulb illuminated the door. I helped Matisse out of the car, and he immediately sniffed at a post and lifted his leg.

  Inside, the gallery was cold and dark. Why had I come here?

  Matisse and I walked through the rooms and looked at the paintings. I was happy to be there. The white walls were familiar and comforting. The rooms were filled with work by Howard’s regular stable of artists, Schelzhammer, Baldwin, Parker, and Morrow.

  Schelzhammer worked in multimedia and was well known for treating his canvases with fire and chemicals. He would bury his paintings underground for a time to attain a realistic earthy feel. Lots of reds and browns highlighted his work, giving them a powerful, mystical, religious effect.

  Parker offered fanciful works that were filled with humor. Her latest works, including those now in the gallery, featured city scenes populated by obese cows wearing hats and carrying briefcases in scathing parodies of businessmen and the world they inhabit.

  Morrow was an impressionist. Gardens, landscapes, and shorelines bled from his paintings. He worked in lush understated pastels that gave his creations a timeless quality.

  Baldwin drew realistic scenes of daily life but set them against the grain. I often saw my own life within his frames. Another reason I enjoyed his work was because I liked him personally. A frequent guest at our home, Earl Baldwin was a tall, gangly man with unruly red hair and a long wizened beard. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and looked at you with complete focus and concentration when you spoke with him, making you feel as if you were the most important person in the world. He was Howard’s first exclusive artist.

  I remember one time in particular when he was staying at our house one weekend. Howard had gone to bed and Earl and I stayed up drinking hot chocolate by the fire.

  “Howard’s a wonderful man,” he said to me.

  “Thank you, Earl. I know. He is.”

  “No, I really mean it,” he said. “I’m not just saying it. When others didn’t understand what I was doing he gave me a chance. He has excellent judgment. I sold my first painting off his walls.”

  “I remember,” I said. “It was the one with the old people standing in line at the grocery store.”

  “Yes!” he said. “You’re right. I’m just so grateful.”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” I said. “We’re the ones who should be thanking you.”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he nodded at me and said, “There’s at least two ways to look at that, huh?”

  “Kind of like your work,” I said.

  “Yes, very much like my work.”

  Our close friendship with Baldwin wasn’t the exception. We had intimate relationships with most of Howard’s artists. Howard spent a good deal of effort cultivating their trust, and that’s one of the reasons they chose our gallery over some of the newer and larger ones.

  Matisse nudged my leg as if to say, “Keep moving,” and I obeyed him. I walked through the room and into the front foyer, where the largest canvas in the gallery was displayed.

  It was clearly one of Schelzhammer’s paintings, but one I didn’t remember seeing before. Up close it seemed to be just another of his abstract collages, layers of gauze and canvas, some sewn together. It had clearly been weathered. I saw the black carbon left over from flames and streaks of acid and bits of charred dirt. I stepped back to the far side of the room to see the work from a distance, Matisse coming with me of course, and was shocked to see a very clear image of a man with a skeleton head. It called out to me and made me think of Howard because the image was ghastly and seemed trapped in the painting, the hands frozen in clawlike shapes. The person in the painting seemed pained, sad and, somehow, resigned to knowing that he would forever be in peril.

  I moved closer again, this time to see the white label beside the painting. It was Schelzhammer’s, as I guessed. The price was $7,500. It was titled “Howard.”

  For a moment I couldn’t think. A shiver pulled at my skin, and I kneeled down to hold Matisse.

  * * * *

  Back at home, I called Neil to ask him about the painting.

  “I wish you would have called me before you went,” he said. “I would have met you there. I wasn’t ready yet.”

  “Ready for what?”

  I heard him sigh. “For a lot of things,” he said.

  “I wanted to go by myself. I saw the Schelzhammer.”

  “Okay,” said Neil, and I heard his voice change to a warmer tone. “I commissioned it and hung it yesterday. I meant to bring you there soon and show you. I guess you beat me to it.”

  “You commissioned it?”

  “Here it is,” he said, and I heard him take a deep breath. “I’ve decided to take over the gallery. For how long, I don’t know. If it sells next week or next month or never, I’ll decide then. But for now, I think it’s where I belong. And I’m gonna make it work.”

  “I don’t think your dad would want this.”

  “This isn’t about Dad anymore. It’s about me. It’s about what I want and about what I need. You can call it therapy or a new calling or just something I need to work out. I don’t know myself. But it seems right. And Schelzhammer’s willingness to handle the subject is part of that. He did it in two days. It’s almost as if I painted it. Do you like it?”

  “It’s not like anything I’ve seen before. It’s disturbing.”

  “I’ve also ordered some works by Bill Fascotte and Kumar Kolari. I think the gallery could use a little disturbance. That’s the whole point, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but quickly added, “I suppose,” because I knew he was right.

  “Mom, let me do this. Everything will work out.”

  “I love you,” I said, and smiled as I hung up.

  I wouldn’t have bet on it, but Neil was very much like his father, especially in his capacity to make decisions. I had heard of Fascotte and Kolari. They were young artists making a splash in some galleries in Taos and La Jolla, but they hadn’t been shown here yet. Leave it to Neil to be first. Ever since he was a child, once Neil had made his mind up about something there was no changing it. He’d move ahead with a single focus and not stop until he’d gotten what he set out to attain. Howard was the same way. Headstrong.

  Decisions, I pondered. Those devilish puzzles.

  Matisse and I went outside in the backyard. I sat on a wooden bench near the pool and counted the leaves on its surface. Then I thought again about my father and his sage advice about decisions and consequences.

  In our household, Howard and I had always divided the decisions that needed to be made into categories. Our inside world, which consisted of matters pertaining to the house, shopping, and socializing, was mine to command. If it concerned the landscape or the business world, that was Howard’s sphere.

  It wasn’t a chauvinistic division of responsibilities, just a practical one. How burdensome it would have been for both of us if we had to consult with each other over everything. He trusted me to use my best judgment, and I trusted him. That’s what made our love so deep and our marriage work so well.

  With him not available to make his decisions any longer, t
hey fell upon me, and I felt as if I were drowning. Instead of counting the leaves, I was inside the pool and looking up at them, grasping for the surface. I was tired.

  Matisse barked. At what? I hadn’t heard anything. No cars or garage doors opening. Maybe it was another dog far off in the distance.

  No. He was barking in agreement, because at that precise moment I’d decided to let Howard get back into the decision-making business. If Frank’s wife was allowed to see him, that would be Howard’s choice. After all, he was best qualified to make the call, wasn’t he?

  A feathery breeze floated through the yard and I felt a heavy burden lift from my shoulders. In a way, I felt that Howard had come a little closer back into my life. It’s up to him, I thought to myself, and felt so wonderful and at peace with the decision, almost as if nothing had changed and he was living in the house again.

  Matisse barked again and I petted him, which was what he had really wanted. I looked up at the sky and the stringy stratus clouds that hung suspended above my world.

  8: Evelyn Meadows

  When the surgeons are through with them they come to me.

  After they’re finished anesthetizing and cutting and pasting and bringing patients back from one sort of hell or another, the doctors have them wheeled to one of my rooms and then only see them once or twice a day.

  Here, tucked into one of the rooms on my pod, I administer to them. This is my domain. Nothing happens here without me knowing it. No one gets a measly aspirin without my approval, no matter what some young hotshot resident says.

  I know they say I’m bossy. And I’m aware that, among some of the younger nurses at least, my nickname is “fat ass.” But that doesn’t bother me. The patients on my watch get better faster with me by their side. I don’t respect whining patients who use their call button for trivial things like problems with the TV. “I’m not an electrician,” I tell them sternly; then I smile and pat them on the arm and say, “I’ll call engineering for you. Don’t you worry.”

  Medications to patients on my pod are administered in the correct dosage and on schedule. Every bed gets a change of sheets each day even if the room isn’t occupied. When flowers start to wilt, they are tossed right away no matter how much a patient might protest. Procedures and predictability are everything in my business. With so much that can go wrong, I’ve made it my job to control as much as I can so that when the unexpected occurs we’ll have no distractions and we’ll be alert and responsive.

  My fastidiousness for detail and attentiveness to patients are, I assume, why patient Howard Lavery was placed under my personal care in the large, very exclusive angle room number C-113.

  The angle room, so named because it juts off to the side of our pod and is somewhat triangle-shaped, is one of only two VIP rooms in the hospital. It’s the size of three regular rooms and has a beautiful view of the city. But mostly the room is vacant. Recently, I have had the governor in the angle room three times after his series of cancer treatments. He set up a mini-office in the room and even had a staff person help him around the clock. I hope we don’t go through that again. I don’t like people in my way.

  But the strange circumstances surrounding Mr. Lavery’s situation had me curious from the start.

  First off, his chart was alarmingly incomplete. Not that I’m nosy or anything, but I think it’s important to understand a patient’s condition thoroughly. I’ve made it a point to have my nurses study their patients’ charts to become as familiar with their conditions as possible.

  But Mr. Lavery’s file began post-op and said only that he had undergone significant head trauma and brain surgery. It didn’t indicate how long he’d been in the ICU, which is very strange. What little details were included in the file did indeed account for his comalike condition. But for very little else, really. He was on a number of medications that were not usually prescribed for his condition. Much of what I learned about his condition was delivered orally from his surgeon, Dr. Bernstein.

  Now there was a troubled person if I ever saw one. A tall, gaunt man, Dr. Bernstein always looked in need of sleep. I never saw him without those dark rings under his eyes. And he nearly always gave the impression of having had one too many cups of coffee.

  “This is a special case,” he said to me at our first meeting. “Breakthrough surgery. You can call it that. Very delicate work. He needs complete seclusion and constant attention, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “We’ve used a new medical procedure for the first time. It’s very confidential, but you need to know. The patient suffered from a large brain aneurysm that went undetected for some time. When it burst many valuable hours went by before treatment was given.”

  “I see,” I said. “Poor fellow.”

  “Flooded the brain with blood and cut off a lot of it from blood supply. For the first time ever—well, at least at this facility—we’ve used gene washing to see if we can’t regenerate some of the tissue. And we’ve hooked him up to a unit that allows him to communicate with us.”

  “Communicate?”

  “Yes,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “He can still hear. And during the surgery we implanted a device that allows him to communicate through electrical pulses connected to a speech synthesizer. He’ll need your help learning how to use it. I’ll show you once we get him settled.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “Now here’s the part where we really need your help. You’ve been at the hospital for a long time. You have an outstanding, unblemished record.”

  “Thank you, doctor. I’ve worked very hard.”

  “We’ve chosen you personally to be his exclusive nurse. We need complete continuity in his care. You are to be the only nurse allowed into his room or to have access to his chart. When you’re not on duty we’ll make special arrangements with family members or my surgical staff to care for him.”

  “That’s very irregular,” I told him.

  “I know. And you deserve to know why, which is why I’ve told you everything. We’re being tight-lipped about this whole thing. It’s very secretive at this point due to the unique nature of the technology involved and the underwriters of the procedure.”

  “Is it experimental?”

  “You might say that,” he said. “But not really. Colleagues of mine have performed similar surgeries in New York and London. When we’re ready, this will be a major coup for the hospital. But not for a few weeks. Perhaps longer. I’m sure you can understand the importance of this.”

  “Of course I do,” I said, but felt something was wrong. As if something wasn’t being said. I believed Dr. Bernstein was being sincere, but I felt that he was telling me just enough and nothing more.

  “And that’s why we’ve chosen you. We’re counting on you to maintain complete security regarding Mr. Lavery. You’re not to discuss his condition or any details about the procedure with anyone. You’ve come highly recommended. I am sure we can count on you.”

  I felt honored to have been chosen for this effort, but very quickly things didn’t seem right. To begin, Mr. Lavery had very few visitors, mostly just his wife. That was one of the things that bothered me the most. Mrs. Lavery was easily twenty years older than her husband. And she behaved very oddly, sometimes giving the impression she was visiting a friend rather than a spouse. In almost every other situation even somewhat similar to these circumstances, I’ve always been confided in by the wife, very frequently becoming friends. I’ve given my shoulder countless times for comfort.

  But Mrs. Lavery avoided all overtures of closeness, almost as if she was purposely cutting me off. Still, I saw deep hurt in her eyes and, every once in a while, caught an expression on her face that said she yearned to be unburdened. She didn’t allow herself that freedom, though. I felt hurt by her aloofness, because I was the primary caregiver to her husband. Despite that, I must say that she was never cruel or short with me. She never lost her temper, which is very common in such crisis situat
ions. She was a kind, well-kept woman.

  Is it wrong of me to have wanted more? To have been appreciated and counted as, at least temporarily, one of the family? Was it too much for them to understand that a nurse is more than just a blood-pressure taker?

  These emotions were troubling. Not to mention that I didn’t quite accept the explanation of Mr. Lavery’s condition. His file. The secrecy. The unprecedented staffing decisions. I went along with them mostly because, I must now reveal, I grew close to Mr. Lavery. Not in a personal or sexual way, but spiritually. He was so utterly and totally dependent upon my ministrations that I felt divinely needed every time I entered his room. I did everything for him. Giving his IV and medications. Changing his position, moving him from side to side frequently to prevent bedsores. Sponge baths. Exercising his limbs to prevent atrophy. I’ve provided the same care for hundreds of patients, but Mr. Lavery was different—I sensed something special in him.

  He demanded very little in personal comforts, and what he did request I was glad to provide. He enjoyed his music a great deal, and several times a day I would be called to change the disks in his CD player. He asked that I read him a book from time to time, mostly short stories, and I was more than glad to oblige. I liked the stories as well. Lately he’s asked that I read him the newspaper, but that’s not my favorite thing to do.

  I particularly enjoyed helping Mr. Lavery refine and become proficient at using his communication device. It was an amazing piece of equipment, really. Through the modified stenographic language, his electric impulses were actually converted into audible words. We had fun finding shortcuts and abbreviations for words, like T for “the” and S for “is.” Sometimes I misinterpreted his sentences. Once I thought he asked me for a “turnip Valium,” when he really wanted me to turn up the volume.

  Mr. Lavery thanked me often. He took an interest in me, frequently asking me questions about what I did on my days off. I drew great feelings of professional accomplishment and fulfillment from him, and I felt proud to be his nurse. I grew close to him and, in a way, loved him. I missed him when I was away from the hospital.