Unlike the Retirement Community, where guests enjoyed freedom of movement and choice, residents in the Assisted Living Community were deprived of both. There was no sign over the door to the secure unit reading Morituri Te Salutant, but there might as well have been: like all such institutions, it became no more than a holding tank for death. Those who walked through its portals left only on a gurney and, while there, had little or no say in their own lives.
Nancy had been placed in the secure wing of the centre, accessed by a door code. Doc signed the visitor’s register and followed the instructions given to him by the receptionist. ‘It’s easy to remember,’ she’d said. ‘Once you reach the door, punch in 1111 – it’s the same code to get out.’
Nancy was standing by the door dressed in a green hospital gown, randomly pushing the buttons she hoped would release her back into the world. Upon seeing Doc, she flung her arms around him.
‘Gene. Darling Gene. I thought I’d never see you again! Take me home with you, Gene. Please, Gene! Take me home with you.’
Doc stroked her hair. ‘It’s going to be fine Nancy, just fine, but let’s go someplace we can talk.’ Nancy led him to the bedroom she’d been given, and when the door closed behind them started to cry.
‘Hey, what kind of greeting is this for an old friend? You’re supposed to smile when you see me, not cry. Now dry those tears and give me a smile.’
Nancy calmed and gave Doc the biggest forced smile he’d ever seen. He couldn’t help but laugh.
‘A policeman arrested me, Gene, and I swear to God I hadn’t done anything wrong. Why have they put me in prison? I haven’t broken a law in my life!’
‘It’s not a prison, Nancy; it’s a nursing home. There’s been a big misunderstanding, but I’m going to sort it out. It might take a few days, so you’ll have to be patient.’
‘Can’t you just tell them I didn’t do anything and take me home with you? They’ll listen to you, Gene: you’re a doctor! Or at least, you said you were. You are a doctor, aren’t you, Gene?’
‘Yes, Nancy, I am, but listen to me. I can’t take you with me today; it’s just not possible. I promise you, though, the next time you see me will be the time we leave together. You’ll never have to return here again. Now, how does that sound? Do you understand?’
Nancy nodded her head, seemingly understanding his words, but then said: ‘Shall we go now, Gene?’
Doc explained the situation again, and afterwards Nancy asked him the same question. He held her to him and whispered: ‘Nancy, my dear, dear Nancy.’ In that moment, he wondered if he’d ever loved her more. He then opened the door, walked to the reception area and signed out.
Doc didn’t drive straight to the airport, but instead to Nancy’s neighbour’s house. For emergencies, she held a duplicate key for Nancy’s house and Doc borrowed it. He filled suitcases he found in the bedroom with some of Nancy’s clothes, and then went to the medicine cabinet and took out all her prescribed tablets. He unlocked the safe Nancy had shown him in the hall closet and took out a shoe box filled with dollar bills. He then returned the key to the neighbour and drove to the airport.
He arrived home late that night, a new plan formulated in his head. The next day, he phoned Bob.
‘Hey, Marsha, it’s Gene. Bob there?’
‘Sorry, Gene, I didn’t quite catch that. Were you asking me how I was?’
‘You know your welfare’s always uppermost in my mind, Marsha; it’s just that phone calls cost money.’
‘What century are you living in, Gene? Phone calls are cheap! Now tell me, what are you up to?’
‘Right now I’m trying to make a phone call to Bob, but there’s some damned woman seems to think I want to talk to her instead. It’s kind of urgent, Marsha.’
Marsha laughed and went in search of Bob. Doc looked at his watch as the minutes ticked by. Eventually, Bob’s voice sounded.
‘G-Man!
‘What the hell, Bob! I thought you’d fallen down a drain.’
‘I was on the can, man, so I guess a part o’ me’s down the drain, but I came fast as I could. Marsha tells me it’s a matter o’ some urgency. What’s ailin’ you?’
‘It’s Nancy, Bob. She’s got herself locked up in a nursing home and I need your help to get her out. How are you fixed – can Marsha spare you for a couple of weeks?’
‘Sure she can. She could spare me fo’ a coupla years, if you wan’ the honest truth!’ He laughed, and then became serious. ‘Nancy real bad, now?’
‘She’s a fair way down the hill, but not bad enough to be locked up in a secure unit. I’m going to get her out of there and take her to Mississippi.’
‘An’ you wan’ me to help spring her?’
‘No, my godson’s going to do that. What I need you to do is to source some drugs and find an unrented vehicle that can accommodate four, and then meet me in Hershey a week on Monday. Will you be able to do this? I’m presuming you still have your old contacts.’
‘Time frame’s a bit tight, Gene, but I’ll be there. Drugs is no problem, but the vehicle might be mo’ diff’cult. Let me get a pen…’
Doc read out the list of drugs, carefully spelling each one as Bob wrote them down, and then added nonchalantly: ‘Oh and I’ll need you to overnight me a handgun. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy.’
‘A gun! What you wanna gun fo’, man?’
‘I’m not planning on using it, but I have to be prepared for all exigencies: I’ve never held up a nursing home before.’
‘You ain’t never shot a gun b’fore neither, Gene. You as likely blow yo’ damn foot off loadin’ the thing. Guns ain’t fo’ foolin’ with, man.’
‘I know it, Bob, and I’ll be careful. If it makes you any happier, I’ll buy one of those Dummies books on how to load guns and shoot people. Now stop worrying, will you.’
There, they left the conversation, and agreed to meet in the parking lot of the Stoverdale United Methodist Church, a week Monday.
3
Jack
Fog
Jack Guravitch searched for a bell but couldn’t find one. He knocked on the door and waited: there was no reply. He knocked again, louder this time, and tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open and walked into the house. Voices came from the direction of the living room and he moved towards them.
A man called Lou was telling a woman called Mary that he appreciated the efforts she’d made to find him a date for that evening’s awards dinner – he really did! But why, he asked, had she fixed him up with a woman who was eighty-three years old? Jack smiled when he realised the voices were coming from the television and that he was listening to a re-run of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was like meeting up with old friends again.
Doc was asleep in an armchair snoring gently, a small rivulet of drool trickling from the left corner of his mouth. Jack decided to let him sleep, catch up on some of the rest he’d missed out on over the years. He walked quietly to the kitchen and took a beer from the fridge and a packet of Doritos from one of the cupboards. He prised the cap off with his teeth and returned to the living room just in time for the start of another episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show: Ted was having an argument with Georgette, his long-time girlfriend. Jack sat down on the couch and rested his feet on the coffee table.
‘Tell me, Jack, do you know of anyone who makes more noise eating a tortilla chip than you do?’
Part of a Doritos went down Jack’s throat the wrong way and he started to cough violently. He reached for the beer and took a deep gulp. ‘Jesus, Doc!’ he spluttered, ‘You almost killed me.’
Doc smiled at his godson. ‘A few moments ago, I was riding a unicycle through the centre of Paris on pavements smooth as silk, and all of a sudden I hit gravel and start to fall. I wake up and see you sprawled on my couch crunching your way through a packet of Doritos. Do you suppose by any chance the two events are related?’
‘The amount of drool leaking from your mouth, old man, you might just as
easily have woken up thinking your bike had gone into the Seine. Now stand up and let me hug you,’ Jack said. ‘And another thing: why don’t you have a bell on your door?’
Although Doc would have preferred to have simply shaken hands with Jack, he allowed himself to be hugged. It seemed to be the way of the world these days.
‘I don’t have a bell because bells remind me of churches, and churches remind me of death. I’m sure I’ve explained this to you before. Anyway, everyone’s got a pair of knuckles, and it’s not as if I’m deaf.’
‘Hell, Doc, you were fast asleep with the television on and your door unlocked. Anyone could have walked in and burglarised the place, strangled you to death if they’d wanted to. You’re lucky it was just me and all you’re missing is one beer and a packet of tortilla chips. And, by the way, if you had any dips in your fridge I wouldn’t have made so much noise eating them and you’d still be cycling through France.’
Doc went to the kitchen. ‘You eaten?’ he asked.
‘I stopped at a diner a couple of hours back, thanks. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner but there was a last-minute problem with the rental car – I’ll take another beer, though.’
Doc got a beer for Jack and poured himself a glass of red wine. He took a selection of cheeses from the fridge and placed them and an unopened box of crackers on a large plate. He brought them to the coffee table and sat back in his armchair. His expression turned serious. ‘So tell me, Jack: how are you doing? What’s your situation now?’
‘I’m a new man,’ Jack replied, and then after a pause, and with slightly less bravado, added: ‘Kind of.’
If Walter Guravitch hadn’t moved his family to Doc’s home town in 1948, then Doc would have never been Jack’s godfather. And if Walter had shown no interest in fog, it is doubtful that Jack would have become another city’s favourite weatherman.
If such a thing as a Guravitch family tree had existed, then Walter would have been listed as a first second-generation American. He was also the product of his grandparents’ fervent belief in the virtues of assimilation, and consequently had little knowledge of either his religion or culture. (On reaching the United States both grandparents had taken a vow never to speak of the past again, but to live only in the present. Roots, they often said, weren’t everything – unless, of course, they were vegetables.) Walter vaguely knew that Passover was celebrated in April and Yom Kippur in October, but would have struggled to explain the significance of either. He was similarly vague about the origins of his family. He thought, but wasn’t sure, that the family had originated in the Moldovan part of Russia and immigrated to the United States to escape either Czarist pogroms or a succession of failed harvests.
Walter’s father, now called George rather than Georg, had followed his own father into the family tailoring business on New York’s Lower East Side, and it was presumed that Walter would similarly follow suit. Walter’s interests, however, lay elsewhere. His real enthusiasm was art. In his spare time he would visit the city’s art museums and look through the windows of galleries he could never afford to enter. He bought books and schooled himself. In time he became proficient in oils and later photography. His favourite school of painting was Impressionism and his favourite Impressionist, Monet. In particular, Walter admired the artist’s depiction of fog. In his paintings of Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, Monet had captured the changing nature of light like no other artist before him. After seeing these paintings, Walter became as captivated by fog as, in later years, Nancy Skidmore would be imprisoned by it.
On the death of his parents Walter went in search of fog. He sold the family business and moved with his wife to the Monongahela Valley, where the river fogs, in Walter’s mind, replicated the London of Monet’s paintings. He and Hannah settled in Donora, and Walter opened the town’s first photographic portrait studio. Unlike Hannah, he never noticed the brutality of their new surroundings. He had eyes and paintbrushes only for fog.
Walter painted canvas upon canvas of Donora and its locality. For some he would use only browns, greys and blacks to portray buildings and boats emerging from, or disappearing into, the unnatural cloud. Other times he would add bright splashes of colour to characterise the bizarre nature of fog when sun shone through its haze: mauves, oranges, yellows, pinks, blues and purples. These were Walter’s favourite paintings. Occasionally one would sell, but never to a Donoran. Donorans didn’t share his enthusiasm for fog. They lived with it because they had to. For them, fog had nuisance value but no artistic value. The last thing they wanted after a hard day’s work was to return home and find a painting of fog on the wall waiting to greet them.
Walter’s romance with fog, however, came to an abrupt end after the Death Fog struck Donora in the fall of 1948.
By nature fog is an innocent: romantic, mysterious, even beautiful, and no more sinister than a cloud. If, however, it mixes with the wrong crowd, tiny particles of soot or chemicals, for instance, then its character changes: Jekyll becomes Hyde and Dr Fog turns into the unpleasant Mr Smog. The arrival of heavy industry in the Monongahela River valley accordingly changed the complexion of fogs there.
By 1948, the economy of Donora was dominated by the American Steel & Wire Company and the Donora Zinc Works. Money pumped through the town’s veins and smoke and other fumes belched into its environs. Pollution became an accepted way of life for the town’s 13,500 inhabitants and, in their minds, a necessary trade-off. Consequently, when another fog enveloped the town on October 26, no one gave it a second thought, and the Halloween parade scheduled for that Friday evening went ahead as planned.
Overnight, however, the fog built, and when the high school football team took to the field the following afternoon, players lost sight of the ball and spectators lost sight of the players. That evening the town of Donora disappeared under a blanket of thick white odorous smoke. Donorans couldn’t see to drive, couldn’t even see the hands they placed in front of their faces. They found their way by touch, like blind people reading Braille maps.
Donora’s world had been turned upside down by an unusually long temperature inversion. A mantle of warm air had trapped the cold layer beneath it and effectively placed a lid over the town. Pollution from coke plants and blast furnaces could no longer escape into the atmosphere and the town was transformed into a chemist’s sweetshop, its shelves stacked with sulphur dioxides, carbon monoxides, fluorides and the heavy dusts from lead and cadmium. Air came to a standstill, and oxygen was sucked from the town.
The fog prowled the streets like a silent killer that night, creeping into houses through windows and under doors. House plants wilted and family pets died. The fog constricted the throats of the Donorans, tried to choke them and paralyse their respiratory systems; it gave them headaches that split their skulls in two, burned their eyes and made them vomit. During the four days it lingered, twenty people coughed and gasped their last, seven thousand were hospitalised and hundreds more left seriously damaged. It was only after rain started to fall on the fifth day that the fog eventually lifted.
That same day, the fog blinding Walter to its dangers also lifted, and for the first time he was able to link the early signs of his son’s asthma to the area’s pollution. Immediately, he left Donora and moved his family to a town far away, where the air was clear and the doctor was called Chaney. There, his eight-year-old son, Sydney, became the new best friend of a ten-year-old Doc.
Weather
Although his grandfather had never once tired of describing the beauty and dangers of fog to his grandson, in truth it was cloud in its pristine form that had drawn Jack to the subject of meteorology. He became transfixed by clouds, and by the time he entered high school was not only familiar with their ten basic genera, but also their species, varieties, accessory clouds and supplementary features.
He revealed to his friends the differences between layered stratus clouds, heaped cumulus clouds and curly-haired cirrus clouds, and warned them to expect rain
whenever depressing nimbus clouds came into view. He pointed out jellyfish trails to them, twisted tousles, Father Christmas beards, comb-over hairstyle clouds, cloud fingers, dissipation trails, cigar-shaped fallstreak holes, horseshoe vortexes, sundogs and circumzenithal arcs.
It was no surprise, therefore, when Jack told his parents he intended to become a meteorologist. He took an undergraduate degree in geography and then embarked on a doctoral degree in meteorology. He acquired exemplary computational and mathematical skills and honed them to a fine point. That he was swayed from building forecasting models for a living was the consequence of the Donora Death Fog and an appearance on local television.
The city where Jack’s university was located had a low-level smog problem caused by car fumes rather than heavy industry. The year 1998, however, was the fiftieth anniversary of the Donora Death Fog, and although Donora was in a different state and completely unknown to the city’s population, the television station hoped to draw parallels with that disaster and, more importantly, fill five minutes of airtime. The researcher who contacted the university’s meteorological department was given Jack’s name as a person capable of talking about smog and its causes. When Jack let it be known that his grandfather had actually lived in Donora at the time of the Death Fog, he was immediately assigned to the project.
What impressed the television executives most when the segment aired wasn’t Jack’s knowledge of the subject under discussion, but his ease in front of the camera. They judged him a television natural, possessing all necessary attributes: he was handsome and photogenic, his teeth were white and strong, and he had a full head of hair. They offered him the position of weatherman on the evening news, and Jack accepted: the salary was more than generous, and the station’s medical and dental plans were similarly unsparing.
Last Bus to Coffeeville Page 16
