by Lore Segal
“She’s a reddish blonde, like San Giuliano.”
Beautiful, and which this color, believes the saleslady, would particularly complement.
“I think you’re right,” agrees the customer, “except that tea-colored silk would radically disagree with my daughter’s politics.”
The smile goes out and reveals the look, on the Madison Avenue saleslady’s face, of a terminal discouragement. She’s no youngster; her salary makes for a sorry living without commissions from the sales to the customers traveling abroad or away in their houses by summer ponds, or near the ocean beaches. Her look of defeat accompanies Jenny on the escalator to the upscale floors. It hangs like an odor about the collections with designer names known to those in the know about the human genius that expresses itself in winged cotton blouses partnered with nine-inch see-through skirts and coats of many colors that it wouldn’t occur to you and me to put next to each other—embroidered cloths Enwrought with golden and silver light The blue and the dim and the dark, and the speckled, stippled, freckled, dappled stuffs which—the sales lady was right the first time—Jenny is not going to buy, and Bethy will never wear the tea-colored gown to Cinderella’s ball.
Bethy
Bethy had tried to reach her mother, but nobody knew where Lucy had taken Jenny to lunch. Neither of them had a cell phone, so it was not till she got home, in the late afternoon, that Jenny learned Joe had stopped breathing and the ambulance had taken him to Emergency at Cedars of Lebanon.
By the time Jenny, her face wizened and diminished by terror, forged through the curtains of his cubicle, Joe was grinning at her from his gurney, and Bethy, having survived her own hell of fright, was letting him have it.
“He knew something was wrong at lunchtime when you came up to the office,” she shouted, “but he went right ahead unpacking his apocalypses!”
Joe said, “You tell yourself, ‘If I am doing what I do when I’m all right, I must be all right.’ ”
“What are you smiling about?” screamed Bethy, beside herself.
“Bethy!” said Jenny.
“Not being dead yet,” Joe said.
“You know what Al calls you behind your back? Smiley-face!”
“Beth. Please!”
“Benedict says it’s your antique grin in the bone.”
“That’s rather good,” her father said.
The young and pretty Dr. Miriam Haddad walked in. She had Joe Bernstine’s record and said, “Your vitals are good, but Dr. Stimson, our head of Emergency, would like to keep you in Observation over the weekend. Just to see what is going on.”
“Darling,” Jenny says to Bethy the next day, “There’s no need really for you to sit around here.”
“If there’s no need, really, why are you sitting around?” Bethy says. “If you are sitting, why wouldn’t I sit?”
So they both sit with Joe.
“Why is he even lying in bed?” says Bethy. “He’s not that sick.” Bethy gets up, walks to the TV, and puts it on. Joe turns on his side to watch the vintage movie. The hero’s evening dress shows that he has a waist. He has shoulders and a flat stomach. This is the hero, in evening dress, who climbs out of a window.
Joe says, “Turn it off.”
Bethy says, “Why?”
The man in evening dress has stood up so that the points of his evening shoes jut over the narrow ledge.
“Turn it off,” says Joe.
Jenny says, “Bethy, please, turn the TV off.”
“I’m not turning it off.”
Joe has turned his face to the wall but looks around to check on the man on the ledge, who has spread his hands seeking contact with the wall behind him and inches himself along the ledge looking down at the pygmy traffic on the move so many stories below. Joe sits up, struggling to untangle his legs from the sheet to find the ground under his feet.
“Where are you going?” Bethy asks her father.
“The bathroom.”
“Bethy!” pleads Jenny.
“What is his problem?”
“He’s not well.”
“He is too, well. The doctor says his vitals are good!”
Jenny and Bethy watch the movie. They hear Joe moving around inside the little bathroom.
“Dad! You can come out! He’s found a window and is climbing back in!”
“Bethy, don’t.”
“Bethy don’t what?”
Joe comes out of the bathroom and gets into bed. They watch the movie. In the room the man in evening dress has climbed into stands a desk. The man in evening dress opens the right top drawer, lifts out a first item, drops it back, lifts out a second item. No audience would sit still for the real time a real search would take, so he opens the lower drawer. His back is to the door through which the man with the gun may at any moment enter.
“Turn it off,” begs Joe. “Please.”
“What is your problem!” shouts Bethy.
Jenny rises and turns the TV off and says, “Darling, go find me a cup of coffee.”
“The Wide-Open Eye that can’t watch a stupid guy on a ledge in a stupid movie!” screams Bethy.
“Bethy. Please, now.”
“The Definitive Apocalypse Collector!” Bethy tosses back from the doorway.
On the way home, Bethy suffered her mother’s hand to cover her fist. In the bliss of her reprieve, Jenny yearned toward her child. The intuition that Bethy would refuse to be amused by smiling mothers and their babies and taxi drivers with imaginative hearts made Jenny herself doubt their important little charms so that she told her story badly. “You know the new neighbor on the sixth floor,” she asked Bethy, “who moved in a month ago?”
“So?” Bethy said.
“She put a quarter in the meter to stop somebody’s car from getting ticketed—a person she didn’t even know.”
Bethy stared at her mother as if she were an alien from a developing planet.
Jenny thought, She is an unpleasant woman, my poor darling, and wondered how long it would take her to forget having thought this.
Lilly and Sadie
Jenny had brought Joe his own bathrobe, and he was wandering around the Observation Area when he thought he recognized the old, queen-size black woman with the arthritis-deformed hands. She was the elder of the two sisters whose defunct sewing business had been converted into the Wide-Open Eye offices. Lilly Cobbler in a wheelchair? Joe went over to claim acquaintance, but the old woman was asleep with her mouth hanging open as if it were unhinged, and Joe kept walking. He returned once, and again, and when he saw that her eyes were open, he went over and said, “It’s Mrs. Cobbler, isn’t it? Joe Bernstine from Fifty-seventh Street. What are you and I doing here!”
Lilly Cobbler’s face suffered no alteration; the eyes evinced none of the signs of recognition nor, for that matter, of sight. The tongue worked restlessly inside the open mouth.
One day, when he was a boy, Joe had spotted a tabby cat slinking along the base of a hedge of privet. The hand he put out to pet the silken fur had encountered rigor mortis. The child leapt backward from the animal’s body vacated by life with the same horror with which the man backed off from Lilly Cobbler’s body vacated by mind. He turned and Dr. Haddad was walking toward him. “What’s happened to Lilly Cobbler?”
“You know her?”
“Yes. What’s the matter with her?”
“And did you happen to know her sister?”
“Sadie Woodway, the younger one, yes.” Joe gave a brief account of his business dealings with the two dressmakers. “It was Sadie who attended the closing with the lawyer. Afterward, she and I went down and had some coffee and talked.”
Dr. Haddad asked Joe if he would mind talking to her husband, Salman. Salman Haddad was Cedars of Lebanon’s chief security officer. Dr. Haddad called his office, but he was out. Nor could she reach Dr. Stimson, who had added the sisters to his log of disturbed sixty-two-pluses—one catatonic and the other who had turned out to be suicidal. Dr. Haddad asked Joe Bernstine if he
knew that Sadie Woodway had killed herself.
“Sadie! No way. Sadie Woodway?”
“Jumped off the roof on Fifty-seventh Street.”
“That was our Sadie?” Joe was struggling to superimpose the body in the courtyard onto the woman who had sat across the table from him holding her cup not by its handle but wrapped in her two hands. His chest, where he understood his heart to be, contracted. Here Lucy Friedgold arrived to visit Joe. He introduced her to the doctor as the member of his staff who had actually witnessed the suicide. He told Lucy, “Turns out she was one of the two dressmakers whose rooms we took over! Sadie Woodway had a nice laugh,” Joe told Dr. Haddad. “She thought it was hilarious that she turned out to have this flair for designing ugly men’s shirts for the U.S. Open—shirts with multilayered appliqués and—what do I know?—two-colored armpit insets. Next year they would tell her, ‘Make it the same but different.’ Sadie had this little internal laugh as if she’d swallowed a giggle and was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop. What,” Joe looked around, distraught, “is the chance of getting a cup of coffee?”
“Me too,” Dr. Haddad said. “You?” she asked Lucy. She beckoned over one of the nurse’s aides.
Joe said, “I think it was rough on both of them giving up the business, but Lilly’s hands were becoming too painful for her to work, and Sadie was having trouble with her heart.”
“That’s why her sister brought her to the ER,” Dr. Haddad said.
“How old was Sadie?” asked Lucy.
“Old enough,” remembered Joe, “to complain of forgetting the names of customers she’d known for years. They had a hand signal meaning, ‘Call this customer by her name because I can’t remember which one she is.’ I said—you know what one always says—‘It happens to all of us.’ Sadie said there were two customers she could never tell apart, and I remembered Nabokov’s Pnin, who never taught a class that didn’t have one pair of identical twins. Sadie loved that! ‘Excuse me,’ she should have said to her customer, ‘but are you the twin we’re letting out your old navy serge skirt for, or are you the twin come for a fitting of the mauve silk mother-of-the-bride costume?’ And she’d do her internal giggle. I can’t—I just don’t see Sadie Woodway jumping out of the window.”
Dr. Haddad said, “The roof.”
“And Lilly Cobbler? What happened to her?”
“They presented like two sensible women—the big one, Lilly, reasonably anxious when she brought her sister into the ER. Sadie was having palpitations. This was a Saturday. We gave her a referral to come back Monday to see the cardiologist, but Sunday morning, Sadie, the little one, brings in Lilly the way you see her now. Stays with her that whole day. Nurse alerts me to come and take a look. The two of us watch. Sadie is holding Lilly’s mouth to make it stay closed.”
The aide arrived with their coffee in three paper cups standing upright in three holes in a cardboard tray.
“I brought cookies. We have a picnic,” said Lucy sadly.
“Sadie spoons a little water into Lilly’s mouth,” went on Dr. Haddad, “and Lilly’s tongue pushes the water out. So then Sadie passes this little bottle of perfume under Lilly’s nose and goes ‘Sniff sniff sniff, Lilly! Lilly, smell this!’ Lilly sits with her mouth open. Sadie strokes her sister’s right temple, her left temple, both temples, chafes her cheek, pats it with a little slap, chafes, slaps, and chafes. She finds her sister’s foot under the sheet and massages it.
“When I went in Sadie was holding a photograph in front of her sister’s eyes. I asked if I might see: Big African American picnic. Little children sitting cross-legged on the grass and on the laps of the women on chairs in the first row, second row standing, rows and rows, everybody in a good mood. Sadie said at last count there were seventy-four Woodways. The great granddad brought his family north to Seattle. Now, of course, she said, everybody lives all over. Lilly’s husband died—he was from Chicago—Sadie, never married. Anyway, they came to New York and started sewing and did all right. Said that everybody goes to Seattle every five years for the family barbecue. Sadie said she’d stick close to her sister, who was fourteen when they left. Sadie was maybe nine? Lilly remembered the names of all the aunts and which cousin was married to whom and who had passed on, and if she didn’t remember the names of their children, she just went ahead and asked.
“The police have been here twice: The building super saw Sadie Woodway enter the elevator around eight in the morning—said he had known her and her sister for twenty years and thought nothing of it. She must have taken the elevator to the roof, but didn’t jump till noon. The police have been talking to my husband.”
It was here that Joe suggested how he and his staff might be helpful in relation to what, he thought, might be afoot in the Cedars of Lebanon’s ER. “If you’re interested,” he said to Dr. Haddad, “you might want to Google me. Check out my work at the Concordance Center.”
Dr. Miriam Haddad
But before Dr. Haddad Googled Joe Bernstine, she called the hospital’s legal department and told them that she had disclosed two patients’ health information to a third party.
Was the third party a family member or involved in the patients’ care, the legal department asked her. They were not? No problem. If the doctor would look at a copy of the Cedars of Lebanon’s Notice of Privacy Practices (which all patients were required to sign, though no one had ever been known to actually read it) all Dr. Haddad needed to do was have the patients sign “an authorization for the sharing of their health information.”
One of the two patients was catatonic and the other dead? In that case, offered the legal department, these were not patients likely to exercise their right “to receive an accounting of such disclosures.” And there were in any case the three exceptions that permitted patient information to be disclosed to a third party, if the doctor would look at— Here the legal department took a moment to count down to line 32: Exception [1] “To facilitate treatment,” [2] “To collect payment,” and [3] “General hospital business,” where the latter can usually be understood to cover all remaining contingencies. If there was anything, the legal department said, in which the legal department could be of further assistance, Dr. Haddad was not to hesitate to call.
Dr. Miriam Haddad and Salman Haddad Googled Joseph Bernstine’s twenty-year association with the respected Concordance Center, of which he had been a co-founder and, for eleven years, director. The Center’s Washington ties and its list of consultants, including two Nobel laureates, were impressive.
“We’re meeting Dad at Cedars of Lebanon,” Bethy informed Benedict when he arrived at the office.
“I thought he was getting out this morning.”
“Is out. Our regular Monday meeting, only at Cedars.”
“Where’s my mom?”
“How would I know?” offered Bethy.
“I mean is she at Cedars. Isn’t sick, is she?”
“Search me. Dad says to get her a cell phone.”
“A cell for my mom? She doesn’t know how to use a cell.”
“Dad says to show her.”
“This is where my dad died,” Benedict said. He followed Al and Bethy through the revolving doors. They tipped back their heads to look up into the atrium’s high vaulted ceiling.
“A young cathedral,” Al said.
“Giant fucking air container,” Benedict said.
They thought they were alone with the janitor, who was circling an industrial floor polisher around and around the expanse of blond marble, when Joe Bernstine said, “Hello there!” He hopped off the ledge of a marble basin where golden fish swam around an island from which grew a twenty-foot-high stand of bamboo. Another stand grew from another such basin over by the east entrance. Behind its great glass doors Benedict was relieved to make out his mother queuing at a Starbucks wagon.
“Getting us lattes,” Joe said.
Benedict scrunched up his eyes. “She doesn’t look sick or anything.”
Joe silenced him with a motion
of the head that appeared to refer Benedict to the giant grasses and mouthed: “Might be bugged.”
“Joe and his bugs,” Benedict said aside to Al, who laughed. Both assumed, mistakenly, that Joe’s account of a nifty piece of technology he called a “reverse bug,” which could be introduced into a room to broadcast to those on the inside the information they would have chosen not to hear, was another of his funny ideas. They followed their little boss to the center of the vast space, where a second janitor arrived with a set of nested designer chairs that he arranged in a circle.
“Sit down,” said Joe, “and keep your eyes skinned.”
“For what?” asked Bethy.
What was there to look at? A nicely coiffured elderly volunteer rummaging in a large handbag found her keys and unlocked a door. After a moment, the lights came on inside the hospital’s gift shop, the shelves of which specialized in objects that were not beautiful, interesting, or useful, and which nobody could be imagined to wish to own. Half a dozen interns, their white coats flapping open, with the good faces of people who have the stamina for extended study, moved briskly toward the east elevators. They were laughing.
Lucy came toward them walking on her upside-down reflection in the high polish of the floor. She carried two paper cups and she was coughing.
“We’ll have no trouble getting her past triage,” Joe said.
“What for?” Benedict asked, but Joe was rising from his chair. They all got up. Joe introduced his staff to Dr. Haddad: “You’ve met Lucy Friedgold, you remember, who happened to see the suicide; her son, Benedict Friedgold. Al Lesser. My daughter, Beth Bernstine. Dr. Haddad is going to brief us on a situation in the ER.”
“Our Chief of Emergency, Dr. Stimson, has been called away and has asked me to be the liaison. Mr. Bernstine likes calling it ‘copycat Alzheimer’s,’ whatever it is that we’re looking at. Alzheimer’s, of course, develops over decades, a lifetime, generations, and we seem to be watching patients becoming demented in front of our eyes. You,” Dr. Haddad said to Joe, “were in Emergency when Anstiss Adams went off the deep end. I’d always thought of her as the sanest person I know.”
