“And the money?”
I felt dirty talking about the money. By accepting it I had lowered myself to Dr. Bernstein’s level, and I didn’t even know what level he was on. I knew it was wrong when I took it. But I accepted it all the same.
I was in the middle of my normal routine with Howard when Dr. Bernstein stepped quietly into the room. He had his finger across his lips, signaling me to be silent. Then he motioned me to follow him outside.
“Evelyn,” he said, “I need a word with you.” We took the stairs up one flight up to an empty patient room. “How’s everything going?” he asked.
“Fine, doctor,” I said.
“Howard’s progressing nicely, don’t you think?”
“Yes, doctor. He’s doing very well.”
“We have to make a change, Evelyn. Now. After we finish talking here I want you to take a break. An hour would be fine.”
“But it’s not time for my break, doctor.”
“I’ve got that all arranged. Just an hour should do it. Because we’re going to move him.”
“Why? Which pod?”
“Out of the hospital. And I can’t tell you where just now. Eventually I will. You’ll get to see him again, I promise. But for now, we have to move him.”
“I mean no disrespect, but that’s highly unusual. He’s made progress, true, but he can’t care for himself. He’s still completely paralyzed. I really can’t allow you to do this.”
That’s when Dr. Bernstein reached into his pocket and withdrew the check. A ten-thousand-dollar cashier’s check made out in my name. It was bright, fresh and flat. He laid it on the bed.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Pick it up. It’s for you, Evelyn. There are a lot of people out there who will do anything to find out about Howard and the new medicines we’ve given him. I think they’d even stoop so low as to take actions that might harm him.”
“They wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know. I think they might. There are millions of dollars at stake here in rights to these new drugs. Don’t you think that one of those large pharmaceutical firms would do everything in its power to get it to market first? Of course it would. This isn’t hush money, Evelyn. It’s a reward for everything you’ve done, and for your promise not to discuss this with anyone. Ever.”
Now at that moment I can’t really say what I was feeling, because so many emotions were going through my head. Outrage. Fear. Greed. You see, ten thousand dollars is an awful lot of money to me. I’m underpaid as it is. All nurses are. The money would come in handy. I could pay off all my credit cards and put some away and I would be ahead for a change. But it didn’t seem right. I knew it was wrong. Still, some of what he said rang true. I was well aware that large pharmaceutical conglomerates were fighting tooth and nail with each other. They wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to use Howard, to make him a pawn in their attempt to get rich.
“Take the money, Evelyn. You need it. And I need you to take it. Howard knows about this. He wants you to have the money.”
I didn’t believe that for a second. Well, maybe a little. It certainly would make a difference if Howard knew about this.
“Maybe if I can talk to him,” I said. “Let me say good-bye at least.”
“That’s not possible now,” said Dr. Bernstein.
“I have to see him,” I demanded.
“I’m sorry. Not now. At some point, yes. Certainly. I give you my word. Take the check, Evelyn—your job with Howard won’t be complete until you do. Your silence might be the best medicine he ever gets.”
I looked at the check on the bed and thought about, well, I don’t know. I knew in my heart that Dr. Bernstein was sugarcoating everything. He was a good salesman. It went against everything I believed in. Everything I thought I was. Every fiber of my body. But I took the check anyway.
“Thank you, Evelyn. Now take a little break.”
I folded the check, slid it deep into my pocket, and walked out of the room. I regretted my decision immediately, but I kept walking down the hall to the elevator and down to the basement cafeteria where I stood in line to get some frozen yogurt. I took a seat at the far end of the cafeteria where there weren’t a lot of people and I sat there and thought about Howard and about what was happening to him at that very moment. I hoped they were gentle with him. That they would take care of him. I felt a supreme emptiness in my heart and already missed him.
I told all this to Dave, who listened intently, nodded and looked concerned at all the right parts. He wrote on his notepad.
“How did you find out about the money?” I asked.
“I’ve got a friend at the downtown clearinghouse bank. Just like you’re a friend. Anyway, I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Do you know where they’ve taken him?”
“No. Can I get you some coffee?”
“Thanks.”
I got up and put some coffee on for him. He joined me in the kitchen, where he leaned against the counter.
“Evelyn, I don’t know where this is headed,” he said.
“Find him,” I said. “You’ve got to find him. What they’re doing to him needs to be stopped. I know that it’s terrible, whatever it is. I know it.”
* * * *
After Dave left I finished pressing the blouse I’d been ironing when I’d heard him knock. The house was quiet except for the hissing of the steam, and I stood there, consoled by the back-and-forth motion of the iron, and thought about how my life was destroyed.
Maybe I was being too hard on myself. I hadn’t hurt anyone as far as I knew. I didn’t plot or scheme to deprive anyone of their health or livelihood. All I’d done was accept some money to keep a secret. And if you considered it a kind of payment or bonus for all my attentiveness to Howard, then what was the harm?
That’s just the point—there wasn’t any harm. But I couldn’t help feeling injured and sleazy. How could I walk back into that hospital again with my head held high?
My oldest brother, Ernest, was a very sick child. He died when he was eleven. I was only six then. I remember very vividly all the times that he was in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals. We were five children. There was always a great deal of activity. Getting ready for school. Waiting for a turn in the bathroom. Ernest’s illness wasn’t really a big deal until he died. It was just something that we dealt with. It was part of us. But what stuck with me from those early days were the caregivers who attended to Ernest. I remember visiting him in the hospital and watching the nurses walking about with their trays. Their white uniforms impressed me. They took good care of Ernest, and when he died they came to his funeral.
It was a graveside service. There were a lot of people there, Ernest’s friends from school and the neighborhood. Many of my parent’s friends. Aunts and uncles and everyone. It was a terrible black day and nobody talked very much.
In the back, all standing together, were the doctors and nurses. They stood out from everyone else there, and I think people noticed. I don’t know if they made it a habit to go to the funerals of all the patients they lost. I doubt it.
A few family members took turns talking at the service, but the only one I remember was Uncle Will. He was a very large man and he always wore a wide black hat so that nobody would see he was bald. He stepped forward when it was his turn and cleared his throat. “I remember when Ernie was born,” he said. “He was the scrunchiest little thing you ever did see. Almost didn’t make it. But he did. He was a fighter. Didn’t have to. Could have given up a long time ago. Nope. He was one tough cookie. And I know why. He was teaching his brothers and sisters something.” When he said that he looked straight at me and it seemed he was talking only to me. I know he wasn’t, but it seemed that way. “He was teaching all of you to be courageous and smart and strong. So learn that lesson. Courageous. Smart. Strong. Don’t let a minute go by without letting your brother remind you of all that. Ernie was a good boy. We’ll miss him. But let h
is passing make us all stronger.”
All of us kids were crying our eyes out by that point. I don’t even think I could see very well anymore. But what I did notice were the crumpled white tissues in every nurse’s hand. They dabbed their eyes and noses and tried to keep their composure. My brother’s death may have been harder on them than anyone because they’d worked so hard to keep him alive. Maybe they felt failure. I kept watching the tissues in their hands through my own tears, the nurses holding each other. That’s what most stays in my mind today. The funeral. Uncle Will’s words. The nurses and their white tissues.
I decided that very day that I wanted to be a nurse, too. It’s been my life. I never married or had my own children. Nursing has been everything. And I’ve been to my share of funerals, as well.
That’s why, as I unplugged the iron and set it on the counter to cool, I felt so terrible. I had, somehow, disgraced myself and the memory of those nurses, and I’d done Uncle Will and Ernest wrong.
By breaking my promise and telling Dave everything, I had at least taken a step toward redemption. But that wasn’t enough. Redemption? Yes. That’s what I yearned for.
16: Neil Lavery
Most galleries are open to the public during certain posted hours, usually etched on a window by the front door. Often, these signs also say “or by appointment,” but that rarely happens. Every now and then, I’m told, a wealthy collector or celebrity will make such an appointment for one reason or another. In all the years my father worked the gallery I can only remember a handful of times when he had to stay late or go in on a Sunday to open the store to a private viewer.
Today, though, I had two such encounters. One with an old friend of the family and one, well, not so friendly.
My one P.M. meeting was with Earl Baldwin, a longtime gallery artist and a close friend of the family. He was one of my father’s very first artists and, so I’ve come to learn, one of his best.
I drove to the gallery at noon to make sure it was clean and that his paintings were hung straight and well lit. Why was he coming? And why had he requested a private meeting? He didn’t answer either of those questions when he called.
“Is one o’clock okay?” he had asked on the phone.
“Of course, is everything all right?”
“Fine, fine,” he said. “I’ll see you then.” He hung up.
I opened the gallery and quickly began to sweep the floors and straighten up a bit. As I swept I thought about how once, many years ago, my father tried to teach me about art. He bought me a large oversized book called Art Attack and asked me to look it over. “Give it a read,” he said, “We’ll have fun discussing it.”
“I couldn’t care less,” I said, though the cover of the book was certainly eye-catching. It featured a blurry sketch of a nude woman with very large breasts lounging on a couch.
“Just read it. Give it a chance. Fine art may not be what you think it is,” he said.
A chance? That’s something I hardly gave to our father-son relationship. Sadly, as I look back on those early teen years, I didn’t give either of my parents much quarter, rarely cutting them a break. I saw them as wholly uncool, ignorant, and ancient. On what grounds I viewed them in such unflattering terms I can’t recall now. They just weren’t relevant to my youth and my friends and the places I went. I was embarrassed, I think, at their wealth and still resented them for never giving me a brother or sister. I’m not sure if my experience was different than any of my friends, who also thought their parents were out of touch and stood in the way of late-night carousing.
My situation was also clouded with my father’s incessant prodding about art and his attempt to bring me into his business. His present of Art Attack was typical of his blatant efforts to seduce me into his profession. It was a book full of nudes from a broad spectrum of centuries and art styles. I think he gave it to me in a bid to seem hip and show me that art could be interesting. I suppose he felt that girls were on my agenda. He was right. But I never read a word in the book. I studied every picture, of course, especially at night when I’d open to one of the more graphic images and masturbate. I never thought my father knew; but now, of course, I’m sure he had a pretty good idea what I was doing. Maybe he planned it that way.
Earl Baldwin came by at precisely one P.M. He stood next to his car and honked the horn instead of coming in. I went outside to greet him.
“Do you have a few minutes, Neil?” he asked. “I want to show you something. Won’t take but a half hour.”
“Sure. Give me a second to lock up,” I said, and hurried in to get my keys, wondering where he planned to take me.
Baldwin drove a large four-wheel-drive vehicle. I got in and closed the door. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“To my place,” he said, pulling away from the gallery and onto the main road. “It’s just around the corner. How are you doing, Neil?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Very sure,” I said, trying to sound as sincere as possible though that wasn’t entirely true.
“Do you know why I asked to see you?”
“Got a few ideas,” I said, but that was a gross understatement, because I’d been doing nothing but wonder why he’d set an appointment rather than just come to the gallery during normal business hours. He wanted to talk to me alone. Perhaps about my father, and why he hadn’t heard about him, and he wanted to get the straight line. Maybe about why none of his paintings had sold since I’d begun operating the gallery. But now, as we were approaching his house, I didn’t know what to think.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Anyway, here we are.”
I hadn’t really been watching, because he had turned down a street just a few blocks away and then up a narrow, barely paved road and past a low chain-link fence with a DO NOT TRESPASS sign on it. Baldwin lived on several acres of a plush landscape, with his house located directly in the center of the property. It was a large one-story ranch-style home with a pool in the back and trees around the entire perimeter that threw generous shade.
Inside, my first impression was the antiseptic smell of ammonia and cleanly washed floors. His home was spotless and very spartan. There was practically no superfluous furniture in the house. The vast living room had a small couch and one table. Cold sandstone tile was laid throughout.
“Welcome,” he said. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Nothing just now, thanks.”
“I don’t think Elly’s here but she should be home soon.”
He led me through the house and into a huge, high-ceilinged room that was clearly his studio. Unlike the rest of the house, which was immaculate, Baldwin’s studio was cluttered and disorganized. Canvases in various stages of completion lay on tables and on easels. Paint was splattered everywhere. Rags, brushes, and open tubes of paint were scattered about on the floor. The room smelled musty and damp.
“Sorry about the mess,” he said, “but I can’t seem to create in a clean studio. And I won’t let Elly touch it. You mind if I do some work?”
“Not at all,” I said.
“I’ve got a section here that I can’t let sit too long.”
He put on a paint-splashed smock, took up a brush, and started in on a canvas that seemed about half complete. It was a picture of several small boys playing marbles, and its perspective looked down on them through something like mist that shrouded the children and amplified their rite. He was concentrating on the hand of one of the boys, working with great detail and precision. He leaned in very close and lightly dabbed his brush against the surface.
“I’ve been working on this one for a long time. About four months, I think. I can’t work straight through. Can’t seem to concentrate long enough. I’ve accepted the fact that I’m unable to keep my focus on a single work from beginning to end. I get bored, I guess. Or something like that. Maybe it’s motivation. I’m not sure. I can’t stay with anything from start to finish. I have to move on. I’d be the first to admit
that I’m a very inefficient artist. I can go days, sometimes weeks without stepping into this room. It takes me a long time to finish something. I work a little on each painting then go to the next one, circling the room. Eventually, I get to one that doesn’t need any more work.”
“How do you know when one’s done?”
“It just happens. I’ll get ready to paint and I’ll walk up to whatever canvas I’ve chosen to work on next and something will tell me it’s done. I won’t be able to do anything else to it. There won’t be any section that needs a little pigment. Nothing. It’ll seem right and finished. I seem to know when something’s done and that if I touch it with any more paint it would be too much. I step back and look at it and it seems complete and whole as if someone else painted it and as if it always existed. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said, fascinated, watching him work.
After about ten minutes he put down the brush. “That’ll do for now, I think.”
“It’s a beautiful piece,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“Did you play marbles when you were a kid?” I asked.
“Absolutely. I think that for a period of six months I practically lived marbles. I must have been seven or eight years old. I had a green velvet bag that I kept my most precious marbles in.”
“I never played. But I had a crush on a girl once in fourth grade who played jacks. I tried to learn so we could play during recess.”
Baldwin took off his smock and threw it over a stool.
“Neil,” he said in a tone that meant he was about to say something serious. He was evidently done with small talk. “What would you say if I told you that, other than my wife and your father, you’re the only other person to ever stand in this room?”
“I don’t know,” I said, dumbfounded.
“Well, it’s true. This studio is my private sanctuary. Each painting is an extension of myself. So is this room. When I work, I enter strong and with purpose. But I bleed those feelings out. I leave all my energy on the canvas. I can’t help it. That’s why this room is different. It’s my own little playground. My creative lodge.”
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