by Lore Segal
“To you, you’re an emergency,” said the doctor who worked out. “To us you’re the next case.”
The old man cursed under his breath and went back to his chair. Lucy smiled the smile she would have given had she found herself sitting next to either of the doctors at a dinner party. “I think he’s scared,” she said to them. “And everybody wants some idea of how long it’s going to be.”
“Everybody will just have to wait, won’t they?” said the older doctor. He reminded Lucy of her accountant, who had been doing her taxes for the past quarter of a century. “Why,” he said to Lucy, “don’t you go and sit down?”
They don’t know who I am, thought Lucy, offended. “I’m supposed to connect with Dr. Miriam Haddad,” she said, but the doctors had returned to their conversation.
Lucy went and sat down, opened her handbag, and there, in the compartment dedicated to it, was the cell phone! Lucy found her reading glasses, took them out of their case, and had identified the “talk” button on the phone when a nurse, who looked like Betsy Trotwood, descended on her crying, “No phones in Emergency.”
Lucy said, “I’m supposed to connect with Dr. Miriam Haddad.”
“No phones!” said Nurse Trotwood.
The crying young woman lay still. The fat girl had another bout of vomiting. The brother said he was going to get a Coke, and the mother looked for coins in her purse.
“Hope the machine is working,” Lucy said to the boy, who drew his head back and away from the old woman who was talking to him.
A young woman came and sat down next to Lucy. Her tired face was narrow and pointed with anxiety. She’d got her red sweater on inside out and it had not occurred to her to put it right. Her name was Maggie, and she was wanting to talk. She said, “They’re figuring what to do with my mom. Last time, they moved her from the ER to the cardiac floor, to rehab. The rehab nurses thought my mom was going to transfer to the eleventh floor, for residents, but I thought I could handle it. I went to the Kastel Street Social Services office,” Maggie told Lucy.
“And discovered,” said Lucy, “that Kafka wrote slice-of-life fiction?”
Ilka Weiss
“I’ve got an appointment with a Ms. Claudia Haze at Social Services,” Maggie had said to her husband, Jeff. “Will you stay with the boys and look in on my mom?”
“I have an appointment downtown,” Jeff had said.
Maggie asked Jeff what time he was leaving, and Jeff asked Maggie when she expected to be back.
Maggie said, “That’s anybody’s guess. You’ll pick the boys up?”
“If I’m back in time,” Jeff said, but there is no need to pursue a discussion of the daily logistics where both parties are married to their own priorities.
The man behind the desk at Kastel Street Social Services was not sure if Ms. Haze was in. He hadn’t seen her around.
Maggie said, “I have a two-thirty appointment. For my mother, Ilka Weiss.”
The man picked up the office intercom. He was in his fifties and had an unhealthy pallor suggesting that his skin might feel dank to the touch. He wore a dark suit and his narrow tie looked to have been knotted by a hangman’s hand. Maggie imagined a wife who had married him, who sat across from him at supper when he came home after a day behind his desk in Kastel Street, and who lay beside him in their bed. With the phone at his ear the man said, “Not at her desk. She may not be back from lunch, or have left for the day, but as I say, I haven’t seen her around.”
“It took me a week and a half to get this appointment!” wailed Maggie.
“What I can do,” the man said, “is take down your information and leave it for her on her desk in her office.”
“Oh,” said Maggie, “okay. I guess. The argument I wanted to make to Ms. Haze—could I sit down?”
“Turn one of the chairs around.”
“Great. Thanks. I wanted to argue the advantage to the city if the department makes it possible for me to keep my mother at home.”
The man behind the desk wrote Maggie’s facts on a lined yellow pad. “The visiting nurse comes Tuesdays, but we’ve maxed out on the four-hour, four-afternoons-a-week caregiver. She was no great shakes, but she came; she was okay.”
“It’s tough,” the man said. His teeth were terrible but something not unsympathetic lurked about his mouth.
“Rehab had taught my mom to put her stockings and shoes on without having to bend.”
“They’re good,” the man said. “Come a long way teaching the old people to do for themselves.”
Maggie said, “I can sleep on the couch in my mom’s room. When she wakes and starts putting on her stockings and her shoes, I get up and tell her, Mom, it’s two o’clock, middle of the night. She shakes her head. We laugh, get her back into her bed. Twenty minutes later she’s putting her stockings and her shoes on. I get up …”
“Which you can do for one night, two nights,” the man said, “but you can’t be up night after night.”
Maggie said, “So, if you could put in a request for me, for someone to sleep over every other night—say three nights a week, I think that I can manage.”
“Yes, well, no, I can’t do that,” the man behind the desk said. “Ms. Cloudy Haze—Cloudy is what we call her in the office—is the associate in charge of night nursing. You’ll need to make an appointment because she’s not in her office.”
“So can you make the appointment for me?”
“Well, no. Ms. Brooks is the associate that takes care of Cloudy’s calendar.”
Maggie said, “I eventually got a Mr. Warren on the phone, and he made the appointment for today.”
“That was me,” said the man behind the desk. “That was on the first of this month—which explains why your appointment didn’t register—when Kastel Street was one of seven self-administrating local offices, before they reorganized us into a single citywide department under a new administrative czar whose mandate is to rid the department of the inefficiencies and inequalities that had crept into the system since the reorganization, in the Nineties, of the single citywide department, riddled with inequities and inefficiencies, into seven self-administrating local offices, but let me check for you if Ms. Brooks is at her desk in her office.”
“Thank you.”
The man’s smile was not unpleasant. “Nope. Not in her office. If this is Ms. Brooks’s field day seeing clients in their homes she wouldn’t be even coming in to the office. But,” the man tapped what he had written on the yellow pad, “as I said, I can put your request on Cloudy’s desk for you.”
“Mr. Warren, would you—Mr. Warren, please, let me take your notes and put them on Ms. Cloudy’s desk myself, so I’ll feel as if I’ve been here and got something accomplished?”
“What the heck, you go on and do it!” said the man behind the desk, who wasn’t a bad sort. “Around the corner, turn left. Her name is on the door.”
With Mr. Warren’s notes in her hand, Maggie stood in the door of Ms. Cloudy Haze’s office and took in the paper nightmare—paper stacks, towers of papers, wire baskets of in-papers and out-papers. The stapler gave Maggie the idea: From her wallet, between a snapshot of Jeff with David and a snapshot of baby Steven, Maggie took a photo of her mother and stapled it to Mr. Warren’s notes and walked around to the front of Ms. Cloudy’s desk. Maggie’s idea was to place her mother’s face where Cloudy’s eyes, as she seated herself in her chair, could not help meeting Ilka’s eyes, until Maggie’s eyes met the eyes in all the faces stapled, glued, and paper-clipped to all the notes and letters, and correctly attached in the upper right corner of the applications waiting for Claudia Haze’s perusal, determination, and appropriate action.
On her way out, Maggie went to thank Mr. Warren. He urged her in the direction of the door. “You just missed her! She’s been in with a representative of the new administration. If you hurry …”
Maggie had come out into the corridor in time to catch the tall, the towering back over-topped with hair so high and so black Ma
ggie thought it must be a wig, of what might or might not have been Ms. Claudia Haze stepping into the elevator, which had closed its door behind her.
Lucy was glad to see Dr. Haddad walking toward her, but the doctor was coming to speak to the young woman in the inside-out red sweater. The doctor said, “You can go ahead and take your mom home.” Dr. Haddad and the young woman walked away together, and Lucy saw Al Lesser hesitating in the doorway.
Al saw Lucy among the patients on the chairs and avoided her eye. He saw a fat girl asleep with her head on the shoulder of a fat mother and a teenage boy sucking on a Coke bottle. An old man who held a bloody napkin to his temple asked Al what time it was.
“I’m supposed to interview …” Al checked the name on the Intake Form for Seniors, “Francis Rhinelander?”
The nurse had the look people must mean when they said someone had a horse face. She picked up the left arm and checked the wrist of the other old man. This one might have been a movie extra made to look as if he’d been beaten up. “Take him in the second cubicle,” said Nurse Trotwood. “I’ll get him a gown.”
Francis Rhinelander
The old man dangled his legs over the edge of the gurney and tried in vain to pull the hem of his hospital gown down to cover his naked knees. Al asked him did he know where he was, and he did. He knew that he lived in the Hotel Strasburg on Madison Avenue. His sentences tended to end on the rising or “feminine” note as if they awaited confirmation.
Al wrote in the month, day, and a year of his birth in the second decade of the nineteen-hundreds. “Nearest relative?”
“My brother, George, in Godford, Connecticut? I just came back from a visit.” The Intake Form for Seniors had no line for the brother’s wife, the several nephews, or the fact that the patient had that day returned from a visit.
“Marital status?”
“I’m single.” The patient did not add that he still, once in a while though never very strenuously, imagined that some pleasing, tall, and more than ordinarily forceful woman might come along and marry him.
“Education?”
“Godford High.” The patient said that their house had stood on School Street so that all he, his brother, and their dad, who, he said, taught Godford Middle School math, had to do was to just cross over. “I took piano at Juilliard,” said the patient.
Al said, “My mom plays the piano,” and blushed, wondering whether it was okay for an interviewer to have a mom.
“And composition,” Rhinelander said.
“Oh, wow.” The interviewer was interested. “What did you compose?”
For a moment the old man was silent. He said, “Did you know Verdi wrote Otello when he was seventy-four? He was seventy-eight when he wrote Falstaff.”
Al did not know this. “Employment history?” he asked the patient.
Until his retirement, Francis Rhinelander had taught math at Joan of Arc on Manhattan’s West Side. He had never grown accustomed to the global shriek that accumulates from the individual shrieks out of young throats in confined spaces. But he had learned to suffer the small panic with which he had always opened the door to his next class. Francis Rhinelander would stand at his tall height in front of a room of leaping, circling, howling dervishes and call for order. “Will everybody come to order, please! Order! Everybody settle down! Order! Everybody!”
“Same vocabulary and same lack of effect as the speaker of our House of Commons,” the humorous Brit in the next classroom said to Francis.
“And I gave private piano lessons,” Rhinelander told Al.
Rhinelander mentioned that he had been responsible for producing the lower-school entertainment on annual grandparents’ day. “The chorus sang ‘Oh Happy Day,’ the solo piano played ‘Für Elise.’ The first-graders had colored boomsticks and banged them together.”
“That’s so cute!” Al said.
“Not really. Margaret West, my Godford piano teacher, used to say you’d be surprised how many children don’t have talent.”
“Psychiatric history?” asked the Intake Form. Had Mr. Rhinelander ever been in therapy?
“No. Well, yes, the time I checked myself into Bellevue, after I first moved to New York.”
Bellevue had transferred the patient to Upland State Hospital, where Dr. Lev Erwin was doing admissions. He asked the incoming patient what seemed to be the matter.
Rhinelander said, “I think I’m hearing music.”
“Aural hallucination,” the doctor penciled on his pad and said, “Hold on,” got up, and walked over to the window, where he let down the venetian blinds to block the winter sun’s horizontal rays. He came back, sat down, and said, “Where and when do you hear this music?”
“Think. I think I hear music.” Having contradicted a doctor, Rhinelander smiled and ducked his head.
“When and where do you think you hear this music?”
“All the time, everywhere.”
“Hearing the music of the spheres, are you?” joked the doctor. “What sort of music are the spheres into these days?”
“Orchestral, vocal, classical, light classical, pop, the standards, movie music, classic rock, punk, rap …”
“Dark in here, isn’t it?” The doctor got up, walked to the window, turned the plastic wand to halfway open the slats of the blinds, and came back and sat down.
The patient said, “I think I hear music in my dentist’s waiting room, my hotel, in the lobby, the elevator, the cafeteria? In the men’s room!”
“You mean Muzak,” the doctor said.
“And always—I always hear music when there’s somebody talking! This professor will be lecturing about the Cultural Revolution and I’m hearing a pentatonic chink-chink that I must be thinking is Chinese-type music, and so loud I have to strain to even catch the words? Particle physics and I think I’m hearing Philip Glass?”
“You’re talking about background music,” the doctor said.
“A man will be selling a car? I think I hear the Goldberg Variations!”
“You mean on the TV!”
“And on my little radio that I have on the chair next to my bed. This general says that making soldiers clean up after hurricanes will ruin their will to kill? I think I’m hearing Sousa.”
The alternating shadow and light that striped the top of the desk, striped the patient, irritated the doctor. He got up, walked to the window, and changed the slant of the slats of the venetian blind. “Stuffy in here, isn’t it?”
“A little,” said the patient agreeably.
The doctor opened the window an inch at the bottom, came back, and sat down. “You tell me if it gets too cold.”
“It’s fine,” the patient said.
“So. Let me ask you this,” said the doctor. “Do you ever hear any music you think might really be playing—let’s say on your TV?”
“Aha!” cried the patient. His ace in the hole (which he was going to repeat to his fellow inmates for the several weeks they kept him in the Upland facility): “Did you ever see that pretty girl who is brushing her teeth?”
“You mean the toothpaste commercial?”
“Right! And she smiles and brushes her teeth and sings ‘Brush your teeth with Physohilo, smile the Physohilo smile, oh!’? Now,” said Francis Rhinelander, “you can be brushing your teeth and be simultaneously smiling. If you think about it, you can’t be brushing your teeth and not be smiling. And there are people who can simultaneously sing and smile, but!” cried the patient triumphantly as if he were his own prosecutor clinching the case against himself: “You cannot—because I’ve tried it in front of the mirror and you cannot brush and sing and smile and I see her smiling and think I hear her singing ‘Smile the Physohilo smile, oh!’ while she is brushing her teeth. Which is not possible!”
The patient’s hysterical enthusiasm made the doctor pick up the telephone. “This is Dr. Erwin in admissions. See who’s on duty, will you?” The doctor, with the phone to his ear, turned to frown at the venetian blind, which faintly rustled lik
e the little sound that balled-up paper makes when it relaxes in your wastebasket, and it was driving the doctor insane. “Fine! You send me Clarence,” he said into the telephone. “I have a patient ready to be taken to A North. Right away, please.” While they waited for Clarence to come and fetch Francis Rhinelander, the doctor got up, walked to the window, and shut it.
It was Dr. Erwin who, seven weeks later, signed Francis Rhinelander’s release, citing a diagnosis of “temporary reactive psychosis” with the question of the stimulus to which the patient had been reacting, as is so often the case, left unanswered. At his hearing, the patient affirmed the reality of the music that he had hallucinated to be hallucinating. It was no strain for Francis to appear his naturally courteous and apologetic self, which had assured the three examining doctors, correctly, that he presented no danger to himself or others. The hospital had released him on his own recognizance.
Ida Farkasz
Ida Farkasz did not recognize her name being called, and the triage nurse had to come out into the waiting area and lead the patient into her office.
“Do you know where you are?” the nurse asked the patient.
“Where you are,” said the patient and touched her forefinger to her lip, then to her chin, and then to her lip again.
The nurse spoke slowly into the patient’s face. “Do. You. Know. Where. You. Live?”
Ida Farkasz frowned and said, “Where you live.” Ida was frowning at not knowing what the person was saying to her. Not knowing had volume, was cloud-colored and located behind her eyes. Ida moved the finger from her lip to a place toward the back of the top of her head. She needed to put her hand inside, to reach around the way you reach around inside a drawer for—what?
The triage nurse had to walk the patient into the ER. “They’ll take care of you! You sit here.”
Ida sat on a chair and touched her lip, her chin.
The nurse went back out to the triage office and called Phyllis on the second floor.
Samson Gorewitz
Lucy saw Benedict. She watched him talking to a pleasant-looking nurse who had just come on duty.
