Orphan #8 (4 page)

The lobby of the Old Hebrews Home was cooler than outside, the high ceilings and marble floors holding back the heat. I waved to the receptionist behind her desk and to the switchboard operator in her cubicle. My shoes clicked past the piano, a gleaming baby grand donated by some famous conductor. I usually took the stairs, broad and curving like the stage set for a musical, but I was too tired today. I’d slept badly last night, tossing alone in the sheets, screams from riders on the Cyclone interrupting my dreams. I was about to press the button for the passenger elevator when the doors slid open. I didn’t recognize any of the residents who exited. Without my uniform, they probably assumed I was a visitor, someone’s dutiful daughter dropping by to check on her parents. They shuffled down the corridor to wait for the dining room to open at seven, the smell of coffee and eggs already in the air. Like me, they’d probably been awake since five, but while I’d spent the last hour nodding on the subway, they’d been sitting in their rooms, dressed and alert, watching the minutes tick past until they could come down for breakfast. I promised myself that when I eventually retired, I’d sleep late every morning, have my coffee brought to me in bed.

I rode up to the fifth floor and ducked into the nurses’ lounge, eager to peel off my sticky street clothes. Early as I was for shift change, I thought I’d have the room to myself for a few minutes,
but there was Flo by the open window, white cap teetering on her teased beehive.

“Look who’s here,” she said, extracting a Chesterfield from her pack and flicking at it with a gold lighter. Leaning her shoulders out of the window, she aimed her exhalation at the sky. “I love a smoke on a hot day, don’t you, Rachel? Cools you off somehow.”

“If you say so.” I joined her at the window. We traded drags, her lipstick migrating to my mouth. No breeze came up on the rising heat, just the hiss of stopping buses and the occasional blast of a taxi horn. “I heard it’s going to be a scorcher.”

“Looks like it.” She finished the cigarette, ground the butt on the sill, and tossed it out the window. “Mr. Mendelsohn died last night.”

“Oh, Flo, I’m sorry to hear that. You’d gotten close to him, hadn’t you?”

She shrugged. “Occupational hazard.” She tried to sound tough, but I heard the catch in her voice.

Some of our patients fought tooth and nail against the end. Absorbed in their own suffering, they took their bitterness out on us: impatient, demanding, full of complaints. Not Mr. Mendelsohn. During the months he’d lingered on Fifth, he’d become a favorite of the nurses, thanking us for everything we did for him, grateful for our kindness. Though it had been nine years now since the war ended, he was my first patient with those numbers tattooed on his arm. I’d hesitated, when I bathed him, as my sponge passed over his inked skin. “Don’t worry, Rachel, it doesn’t hurt,” he’d reassured me in his wheezy voice. Something about his accent made me feel very young. When I asked what I could do to make him more comfortable, he said all he wanted was to look at the sky.
I opened his window wider, shifted his bed so he could see the clouds. At night, Flo told me, he’d watch for the moon, naming its phases as it passed over the city.

“Heart stopped in his sleep,” she said. “Best way to go. He deserved it, too, after everything he’d been through.”

I nodded. “Is he still in there?”

She shook her head. “The on-call doctor signed off on his chart. They came for his body early this morning. I guess you’ll be getting a new patient today.”

“Gloria said they’ve been calling up from downstairs all week, wanting a bed.”

“Speak of the devil,” Flo whispered as the lounge door opened and Gloria Bloom came in. She always wore her uniform to work, stockings and all. I’d never seen her in anything but white from head to toe, her only adornments a thin wedding band, a sensible watch, and the rhinestones on her cat’s-eye glasses.

“Good morning, Rachel. Clocked out already, Florence?”

“Just about to, Gloria.” Flo crossed the room to the time cards. “Should I get yours, Rachel?”

“Sure, thanks.” Flo clocked herself out and me in while Gloria retrieved her cap from her locker and pinned it over her gray bun.

“You’ll be along soon, Rachel? We have to prepare Mr. Mendelsohn’s room for a new patient.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I change, Gloria.”

As the door closed behind her, Flo muttered, “No respect for the dead.”

“You know that’s not it. She’s just doing her job.”

I went to use the restroom. Flo, eager now to be headed home, had changed by the time I returned.

“Don’t forget your cap,” I said.

She laughed, lifted it off her hair, and stowed it in her locker. “I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t screwed on. Oh listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you, my kids haven’t stopped talking about that day with you at the beach. All I hear is, ‘When can we visit Nurse Rachel?’ Think you could stand to have us all over again sometime?”

“Sure, it was fun. Let me check the schedule.” I went up to the calendar on the wall where Gloria wrote in our shifts, twelve hours on every other day, extra days off popping up as unpredictably as Jewish holidays.

Flo came to look over my shoulder. “How much longer is that roommate of yours going to be out of town?”

I flinched, keeping my face to the wall so Flo couldn’t read my pained expression. It still took me by surprise, sometimes, to have my own lies parroted back to me. “A few more weeks,” I said.

“Where’d she go off to again?”

“Miami, to visit her uncle. Look, I’m not seeing a good day. Anyway, with this heat, the beach will be too crowded. I’ll let you know.” I felt bad for the cold turn my tone had taken. I wondered if she’d noticed it, but she was shutting her locker and lighting another cigarette.

“Want me to leave you a few?” she asked, tapping at the pack.

“No, thanks, I don’t want to get in the habit. You shouldn’t smoke so much yourself. Didn’t you read about that new study they did, with the mice? How cigarette tar gave them cancer?”

“Go on, they’re good for me. Keep me slim. Calm me down. Pep me up. They’re little miracles.”

I had to smile. “Whatever you say, Flo.”

Finally alone, I kicked off my shoes and hiked up my dress. My thighs above the stockings were pink and damp. What a relief to unbutton the garters and roll them down my legs. I left them puddled at my feet as I pulled my dress carefully over my head. My slip was wet from perspiration. Irritated, I plucked the fabric away from my skin as I crossed the lounge, the soles of my feet sticking to the floor.

In the mirror above the sink, I saw that my penciled eyebrows were smeared from wiping sweat off my forehead. It annoyed me that Flo hadn’t said anything. Without the weight of brows or the frame of lashes, my black-brown eyes loomed too large, making my face look blank as a child’s doll. Shrugging off my irritation, I lifted my gaze to my hair. After all these years, I still couldn’t believe it was mine—piles of deep red locks shot through with gold and garnet strands that crackled like embers. I couldn’t count how many women had stopped me on the street over the years to comment on its color, how many men I’d heard mutter to no one in particular
Will ya look at that head of hair?
It was, without a doubt, the prettiest thing about me.

I turned on the cold tap, leaned forward, pressed my cheek against the porcelain basin. The water felt wonderful splashing over my face and down my neck. I breathed in short gulps, like the bowled goldfish children win at Coney Island. An electric fan on the table was swinging back and forth. I went to stand in front of it until the chill of evaporating water gave me goose pimples. After treating myself to a generous dusting of talcum powder, I put on my uniform, bleached and starched from the cleaning service. Buttoning it up the front, my hands paused to spread over
my breasts. My touch must have reminded them of the pleasure they’d been missing; beneath my palms, the nipples puckered.

Sighing, I straightened the collar of my uniform. Just a few more weeks, I told myself. Rummaging in my pocketbook for the wax pencil and a hand mirror, I drew in my eyebrows, jaunty arches that gave my face an alert and compassionate expression. I pinned on the white cap, buttoned white stockings into dangling garters, laced white shoes. Arranging my things in the locker, I shut it with a clang.

Gloria looked up as I approached the nurses’ station, those cat’s-eye glasses balanced halfway down her nose. “Lucia, you can go now,” she called over her shoulder to the other night nurse. “Rachel, would you get Mr. Mendelsohn’s room ready for our new patient? When you’re done, you can set up the cart for eight o’clock rounds.”

I went down the long corridor of the fifth floor. The patients’ doors were propped open to coax a cross breeze from the windows in each room, but the air moved sluggishly, weighed down with moisture. Mr. Mendelsohn’s room was at the end, next to the old freight elevator. The night janitor had already done his job: the floors shone from a recent washing and the room smelled of disinfectant. Still, there was the mattress to turn, the bed to make, the nightstand to restock. The cards from Mr. Mendelsohn’s children and grandchildren were still taped to the wall. I pulled them off one by one, thinking again how amazing it was that he’d had the foresight to send his children away before getting away had become impossible, the good fortune to have a relative in New York with the clout to sponsor them, the luck to get them papers despite the quota. Flo said it made her believe in miracles, but I didn’t
see it that way. For one person, one family, to have survived only reminded me of the thousands, the millions, who hadn’t. I recalled the suffocating hush in the movie theater when they ran newsreels about the camps, those desperate eyes staring out of skeletal faces.

I pushed the bed back into place, put the visitor’s chair against the wall, pulled the card bearing Mr. Mendelsohn’s name from the holder by the door. I wondered how many times I had done this in the year since I’d been working on Fifth, but it wasn’t a number I wanted to tally. I’d only transferred up here for the schedule. Downstairs, where each day was divided into eight-hour segments, I’d enjoyed rotating through the various shifts: morning, evening, night. But after moving out to Brooklyn, I figured the longer but fewer days on Fifth would save me hours I would have spent on the subway. This summer, though, rattling around the apartment by myself, I wondered what I needed them for.

I’d liked working downstairs. I could still picture it. In the dining room, breakfast plates would have been cleared by now, a few residents lingering over their cooling cups of coffee, newspapers folded open to the obituaries. In the bright solarium, gregarious men were shuffling cards for canasta while chattering women stacked mahjong tiles. I imagined them dealing past the empty seat where the new patient destined for Mr. Mendelsohn’s room once sat, the absence explained with a glance at the ceiling and the familiar phrase “Gone up to Fifth.” Later, there’d be a movie or a lecture, dance lessons or book club, the rabbi on Saturday, visits on Sunday, distractions to pull their thoughts away from the inevitable. Because, as pleasantly as their days downstairs rolled by, residents understood the companionable activities would last only as long as their health allowed. When they became senile,
bedridden, terminal, they’d be wheeled into the freight elevator and brought up here. Unless some crisis required hospitalization, Fifth was where they’d die.

“The room is ready,” I told Gloria, back at the nurses’ station. “Should I start on the meds?”

“Yes, please. I’d like them finished before the doctors come up for morning rounds.” She fished a jangling key ring from her pocket and opened the medication room. I rolled in the cart and began setting up—the little cups of pills in neat rows, syringes in parallel lines, charts following the order of patients’ rooms up and down the corridor.

“Ready for the morphine?” Gloria asked. I nodded. With another, smaller, key she unlocked the controlled-substances cabinet and watched as I plunged syringes into carefully counted vials and drew up measured doses. She signed off and relocked the cabinet, following to the letter procedures designed to prevent the pilfering of opiates.

When my cart was ready, I pushed it down the corridor. Mr. Bogan’s room would be first. He was propped up in bed, notes and papers scattered across the sheets. With a trembling hand, he tipped the pills I gave him into his mouth and accepted the cup of water I offered.

“How’s the book coming along, Mr. Bogan?”

“Slow going, slow going. You can’t rush a buh-buh-buh-book, though.”

“Not a good one. And I’m sure yours is going to be great, Mr. Bogan.”

“Thank you, Rachel. Aren’t you a duh-duh-dear to say so.”

I helped him straighten up his papers and settled the legal
pad on his bent knees. Wheeling the cart in and out of rooms, I stitched my way down the corridor. I returned to the nurses’ station just as the doctors came banging up the stairwell, their deep voices oscillating the humid air. Gloria looked at me approvingly over her glasses.

I
T WAS RIGHT
after lunch—patients’ trays stacked neatly in the tall cart they sent up from the kitchen, remains of their soft foods smeared across plates—when Gloria got the call from downstairs. “Finally,” I heard her say. “We’ve had the room ready for hours.” The other day nurse was on break, so Gloria sent me to wait by the freight elevator for an orderly to bring our latest patient up to Fifth. Through the elevator’s metal gate, I heard piano music wafting up the shaft. I leaned closer, trying to discern the tune. I pictured a retired accompanist or an elderly music teacher seated at the baby grand in the lobby, liver-spotted hands searching out a familiar melody.

Sweat trickled down my neck. I fanned myself with my hand, as if that tiny gesture could beat back the heat. It had gotten worse as the day wore on, the sun baking the bricks on the east side of the building before rising to the slate roof. The tall ceilings, open windows, and swinging fans were no match against it. I checked my watch. I was supposed to be going on break in a few minutes myself. I pictured the staff cafeteria on the ground floor, how much cooler it would be down there, and wondered what was the holdup.