The Journal I Did Not Keep Read online

“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. 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.”

  “Could you make the appointment for me?”

  “Well, no. Now Ms. Brooks is the associate that has 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 must have been before the first of this month, when Kastel Street was one of seven self-administrating local offices, before they reorganized us into a single, city-wide 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 a single, city-wide 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’ field day seeing clients in their homes, she wouldn’t be even coming into 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. Haze’s desk myself, so I’ll feel as if I’d been here and done something!”

  “What the heck, you go on and do it!” said the man behind the desk, who wasn’t a bad sort. “Round the corner, turn left. Her name is on the door.”

  With Mr. Warren’s notes in her hand, Maggie stood in the doorway of Ms. 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 her the idea. From her wallet, between snapshots of Jeff with little David and snapshots of baby Steven, Maggie took a photo of her mother and stapled it to Mr. Warren’s notes and walked round to the front of the desk. Maggie’s idea was to place Ilka’s face where Cloudy’s eyes, as she seated herself in her chair, could not help meeting Ilka’s eyes. But now 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.

  * * *

  —

  For two weeks Maggie called Kastel Street and left messages. The first time Ms. Brooks returned her call, she was out, taking her mother to the doctor. The next time, Maggie was getting dressed to return to the hospital where, shortly after midnight, she had left her mother in the Emergency Room, about to be transferred to a bed in Observation.

  “Go home,” Ilka had said to her. “You heard the doctor. They have a bed for me.”

  “I think I better just wait with you.”

  “Maggie, go home! Get a couple of hours’ sleep. You’ll come back at visiting time in the morning. Go!”

  * * *

  —

  Going home had been a mistake.

  Maggie went straight to Observation, where they knew nothing of any Ilka Weiss.

  “So where is she? I left the ER just after midnight because the doctor said you had a bed for her.”

  “What doctor?”

  “The doctor in the ER.”

  “Better go down there then.”

  The light in the Emergency waiting area is on twenty-four hours a day. But after last night, when the joint was jumping, the morning felt leisurely. The Coke and candy machines were at rest. A young mom closed the picture book she was trying to read to her toddler. The boy, around Stevie’s age, preferred climbing over the backs of the benches.

  A neat, dapper man was in conversation with the triage nurse through her window. Maggie stood behind him, assuming that he was probably an official person, that this conversation was official.

  A worried young man came and stood behind Maggie; she felt his impatience unpleasantly. The probably official person folded his arms on the sill of the triage window so that his head was inside the office. The conversation was going to take its time.

  Maggie left her place in line and walked to the door that led into the ER and knocked on it. When nobody answered, she opened it to face a large, surprised nurse. This was not a nurse Maggie recognized from last night. The nurse looked put-upon: No, Maggie could not come in to see if her mother was inside. There was no Ilka Weiss in the ER. Yes, the nurse was sure, and she did not know where Ilka Weiss might have been transferred during the night. Who might know? Maybe Triage. You can talk to Release Office.

  Not only had Maggie lost her place behind the official person, but now there was an old woman who held her older, sick husband by the elbow, standing behind the impatient young man. She went and stood beside the security guard who was leaning in the door of the Release Office. The Release Officer sat at his desk saying, “Is that right!” and “Is that a fact!”

  “Right over there! Large as life!” the guard was saying. “This old broad sheds every last stitch she has on.”

  “This is last night?”

  “This is last night. Just stands there, stark naked.”

  Talking over the guard’s shoulder, Maggie said, “Excuse me, but would you know where they transferred my mother. The name is Ilka Weiss? I went home around midnight because they told me they had a bed for her in Observation. But she doesn’t seem to be in Observation.”

  Nobody, it turned out, had left the ER since the Release Officer had come on at 8:30. According to the roster there had been no releases after midnight.

  “Could might have eloped.” The guard grinned at Maggie.

  “She’s got to be in the ER,” Maggie said.

  It was the put-upon nurse, unfortunately, at the door again. “Are you going to argue with me?” she said. “We do not have Ilka Weiss in this ER.” The doctor on night duty had left. It happened to be her day off and Dr. Moody, who took Maggie’s call, was not acquainted with the case. The nurse wore the look that comes into the eyes of official persons at a first suspicion that they’re dealing with someone who is going to be trouble: a kook. No, Maggie could not go into the ER and check for herself. “I will go and I will check for you,” pronounced the nurse, who didn’t care who knew that put-upon was what she was.

  * * *

  —

  And so it was nearly noon before Maggie got hold of her husband. “They’ve gone and lost my mom! That nurse did not take long enough to have checked each gurney and looked behind every curtain into all the cubicles! I think they’ve got her disguised with bandages like what’s-her-name in what was the name of that Hitchcock movie?” Joking failed to override a small ice worm of panic inside Maggie’s chest.

  “Call information,” Jeff said.

  “I called. I went down and talked to the woman who gives out the visitor passes and they have no record of her ever even checking in!”

  “Let me try calling information from outside.”

  There were moments when Maggie loved her husband: He was doing this with her. “Jeff, thanks, Jeff. Jeff, call me right back!” The cold worm attached itself under her ribs. Whom doth time stand still withal? Someone waiting for someone to call right back. Maggie could not wait another nanosecond and called Jeff whose line was busy, of course, trying, maybe, to call her? She hung up. She waited. Maggie started at Jeff’s voice on the line.

  “The reason they got no record of Ilka’s admission is she came in via Emergency. Why don’t you go down there?”

  “Jeff, that is where I am. I’m in the waiting area. There must be som
e reason they won’t let me into the ER to see for myself…”

  “Maggie,” Jeff said, “love, remember your monster scenarios when I’m late, or David isn’t where you imagine he is supposed to be? The explanation that doesn’t occur to you turns out to be mind-numbingly obvious?”

  “I know. Right. You’re right. I will remember. I think someone is coming over to talk to me. Talk to you later.”

  It was the dapper man—Arab? Indian?—who had been talking with Triage. “If your mother was in the ER, she’s been transferred to the seventh floor in the Senior Center Rehab department.”

  Maggie, needing to keep the worm from wriggling upward and spreading its mortal chill, said, “Rehab. That doesn’t sound critical? Does it mean they did or did not find something wrong with my mother?”

  “Nothing physically, necessarily. Old people’s confusions are often temporary.” Maggie scanned the man’s face for a gloss, an annotation on what he was saying. “Nurse, tell the lady how to get over to the Senior Center.”

  * * *

  —

  The Senior Center was housed in the northmost building of the hospital complex. It could be reached by going out and walking the several blocks up the sidewalk, or by taking the elevator down to the connecting sub-sub-basements. Because Maggie chose this second option, Jeff’s call could not reach her and she didn’t know the hospital had phoned to say that her mother had been moved to the seventh floor. Ilka was agitated and calling for Maggie, worrying how to pay for what she seemed to think was a room in a hotel.

  Maggie felt herself to be hiking for a period outside ordinary time through an unsuspected, unpeopled underground of white, too brightly lighted corridors. The unmarked doors must have opened from within, for there were no visible handles or knobs. Maggie walked and kept walking in a spatial equivalent of eternity where what will come is in no particular distinguishable from what has been. She pushed through a series of swinging doors into new reaches of corridors like the ones along which she had been walking. She glanced down corridors that branched to the left and right. Why did she suppose it was the one she continued to walk along that led to a destination, that would have an end? To turn, to retrace her steps occurred to her more than once—but do we stop to put our nightmares in reverse? Maggie pushed viciously through the next set of doors into a corridor that squared into a room and had a bank of ordinary elevators.

  * * *

  —

  Maggie stepped out into the sunny, modern seventh floor with its ample space around the central nurses’ station. The impatient young man from the waiting area was here before her. He, too, was searching for someone: “Friedgold? Is it her emphysema acting up?” It took the nurse at the desk a long, long moment to separate herself and surface from the computer screen.

  “Came in around ten thirty last night,” she said. “Does not have emphysema.”

  “Lucy Friedgold,” the man said. “My mother. She has emphysema.”

  The nurse scrolled and scrolled and said, “No emphysema.”

  “Can I have a look at that?” the man said.

  “No, you cannot,” the nurse said, and here’s where Maggie clearly heard her mother calling her. “Maggie!” She walked around the nurses’ station and saw Ilka sitting in a recliner wearing a fresh hospital gown.

  “There you are!” Maggie kissed her mother. “Major mix up! You were not in Observation, and for reasons unknown they wouldn’t let me into the ER to look for you. I told Jeff they had you disguised in bandages like—Dame May Whitty was her name! In The Lady Vanishes.”

  “Let me out!” said Ilka.

  “I have to see when I can take you home. They may want to keep you a bit, for observation.” Maggie was distracted, trying to not turn and look at the naked old woman spread-eagled on a recliner behind her. “Mom, hang on,” Maggie said and got up and walked over to the nurse typing at the counter. “Excuse me, but that woman has taken off her gown.”

  The nurse said, “Is that so,” and went on typing.

  “Maggie!” called Ilka.

  “Coming.” Maggie picked the blanket off the floor and handed it to the naked old woman, who threw it on the floor.

  “Odd, isn’t it,” said Maggie sitting down by her mother, “that what we’re ashamed of and hide from each other are the things we have in common, like peeing, and what we pee with.”

  “Let me out!” called Ilka.

  “Mom?”

  “Maggie!” called Ilka.

  “Darling, I’m right here.”

  “Maggie!” called Ilka. “Maggie!”

  “I’m here, Mom. I’m here with you. Mom?” But Maggie was speaking out of our common world from which no sound, or sign, no kiss, no touch of the hand reached into the nightmare in which Ilka Weiss was alone and terrified calling, “Maggie! Let me out!”

  Maggie, looking around for help, saw the naked old woman on the recliner, saw the nurse typing.

  “Maggie!”

  And now the ice age, presaged by the worm under her ribs, settled into Maggie’s chest. She thought that she had crossed into another era from which she would look back with nostalgia to her life and to the things as they had been. Maggie was mistaken. The ice age in her chest would become another of the things as they were. Maggie saw Jeff talking to the nurse who had stopped typing. She was pointing: it was all right, it turned out, for little David and baby Steven to visit their grandmother in the solarium.

  THE DROWNED MAN

  “Your patient is Gorewitz, Samson,” a nurse with a pleasant face told the new intern. “He’s a transfer from Glen Shore Hospital. Cerebral accident. Possible sunstroke. Possible hypothermia.”

  The patient lay flat on his back, hands folded on his chest, and looked at the ceiling. The intern had to lean over the gurney to place himself in the old man’s field of vision. “Hi. Hello. I’m supposed to interview you,” he said. “Do you know where you are?” was what they said you had to ask them.

  “In heaven,” is what he thought the patient said out of the raised right corner of his mouth, “andiftheyfindmenotlookintheotherplace.”

  “What?”

  “Andiftheyfindmenotlookintheotherplace.” Was he smiling? This was the intern’s first patient. He looked around for help but the nurse was already walking away. The new intern wished himself home; he thought of his computer, but followed the orderly who had come to wheel his patient into one of the blue cubicles. This cubicle consisted of a single wall and a blue curtain attached to a circular rail set into the ceiling. In here, the intern was alone with the old man who lay on the gurney, stared at the ceiling, and the right half of whose face looked to be grinning.

  “Name?” prompted the Intake Form for Seniors.

  The patient must be saying “Samson Gorewitz” because that’s what was already typed in.

  “Social Security?”

  The patient palpated the hospital gown that had no breast pocket, but the number, birth date, and a Columbus, Ohio, street address were typed in the appropriate lines.

  “Nearest Relative?”

  “Mysnstewrt.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Mysn. Inpars.”

  A son, was that? In pairs? Let it go for the moment.

  “Marital status?”

  He thought he understood that the patient’s wife had died.

  “Education?”

  “Hiostet.”

  “Ohio State? Is that right?”

  “Ratratrat!”

  “Occupation?”

  On the Intake Form for Seniors, next to “Comments,” the intern wrote: One-sided facial paralysis makes patient’s speech difficult/impossible to follow. May be confused/demented. Question mark.

  Here’s where the doctor entered through the blue curtains. She was young and pretty. The intern was told that he could leave.

  * * *

  —

  At the door of the ER, he passed two old women; they had to be sisters. Their four eyes peered into the room with the identical
, ghastly look of people expecting hideous news. This black terror of theirs was momentarily displaced by the smaller, more immediate malaise of not knowing if it was all right to just walk in? They stepped into the unknown. Were they supposed to go forward, left or right? They suspected themselves of being the wrong people in the wrong place about to be found out until a nice nurse came and asked them who they were looking for. They’d had a call, on the phone? Their brother, Sam, Samson Gorewitz, was in Emergency? The pleasant looking nurse pointed the way to the blue cubicle.

  * * *

  —

  “What was he doing in a hotel in Glen Shore in the first place?” Shirley was asking her sister Deborah, when the young person in a white coat parted the curtains for them.

  “You have visitors,” the white coat said to Sammy on the gurney.

  Deborah had to rearrange her face before she bent to kiss the smiling half of her brother’s face—the half that looked like Sammy. The other, the left half, had suffered a slippage. Shirley covered her mouth with her hand.

  Deb said, “Sammy, sweetheart, I’m furious with you! What made you go down that beach by yourself at five o’clock in the a.m.!”

  “I didn’t go by myself.”

  “What did he say?” Deborah and Shirley asked each other.

  “I did not go by myself.”

  They understood his shaking his head, “No.”

  “Yes you did, too,” Deborah said, “because I spoke to the people at the Glenshore hospital and they picked you up way down the beach and you were all alone!”

  Sam said, “I know, but the first morning I came down to breakfast and sat in an empty place. It turned out they were a family. The dad had on”—Sam made a sound like laughing—“it must have been the mom’s hat with a big old floppy brim, and he said, ‘On your feet, everybody.’ He didn’t mean me, of course, but I tagged along behind the kids, Joe and Stacey. The little boy, Charley, didn’t want to go and he cried.”