The Broom of the System (5 page)

“....”

“Ginger ale?”

“Not right now, thank you though.”

A nurse’s aide threw the contents of a patient’s water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble, which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, one of which, preparatory to flight, released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while the birds flew away, making sounds.

Flowerbeds of pretend marble, the plastic sagging and pouty-lipped in places from the heat of the last month, flanked the smooth concrete ramp that ran up from the edge of the parking lot to the Home’s front doors, the late-summer flowers dry and grizzled in the deep beds of dry dirt and soft plastic, a few brown vines running weakly up the supports of the handrails that went along the ramp above the flowerbeds, the paint of the handrails bright yellow and looking soft and sticky even this early in the day. Dew glittered low in the crunchy August grass; light from the sun moved in the lawn as Lenore went up the ramp. Outside the doors an old black woman stood motionless with her walker, her mouth open to the sun. Above the doors, along a narrow tympanum of sun-punched plastic again pretending to be igneous marble, ran the letters SHAKER HEIGHTS NURSING HOME. On either side of the doors, impressed into stone walls that reached curving away out of sight to become the building’s face, were entombed the likenesses of Tafts. Inside the doors, in the glass tank between outer and inner entries, languished three people in wheelchairs, blanket-lapped even in the greenhouse heat of the mid-moming glass, one with a neck drooping so badly to the side that her ear rested on her shoulder.

“Hi,” Lenore Beadsman said as she hurried through an inner glass door frosted in the sunlight with old fingerprints. Lenore knew the prints were from the wheelchair patients, for whom the metal bar with the PUSH sign on it was too high and too hard. Lenore had been here before.

The Shaker Heights Home had just one story to it. This level was broken into many sections and covered a lot of territory. Lenore came out of the hot tank and down the somewhat cooler hall toward this particular section’s receiving desk, with the tropical overhead fan rotating slowly over it. Inside the doughnut reception desk was a nurse Lenore hadn’t seen before, a dark-blue sweater caped over her shoulders and held with a metal clasp on which was embossed a profile of Lawrence Welk. People in wheelchairs were everywhere, lining all the walls. The noise was loud and incomprehensible, rising and falling, notched by nodes of laughter at nothing and cries of rage over who knew what.

The nurse looked up as Lenore got close.

“Hi, I’m Lenore Beadsman,” Lenore said, a little out of breath.

The nurse stared at her for a second. “Well that’s not terribly amusing, is it,” she said.

“Pardon me?” Lenore asked. The nurse gave her the fish-eye. “Oh,” Lenore said, “I think the thing is we’ve never met. Madge is usually here, where you are. I’m Lenore Beadsman, but I guess I’m here to see Lenore Beadsman, too. She’s my great-grandmother, and I—”

“Well, you just,” the nurse looked at something on the big desk, “you just let me ring Mr. Bloemker, hold on.”

“Is Gramma all right?” Lenore asked. “See I was just in—”

“Well I’ll just let you speak to Mr. Bloemker, hello Mr. Bloemker? A Lenore Beadsman here to see you in B? He’ll be right out to see you. Please hang on.”

“I guess I’d rather just go ahead and see Lenore. Is she OK?”

The nurse looked at her. “Your hair is wet.”

“I know.”

“And uncombed.”

“Yes, thank you, I know. See I was just in the shower when my landlady called up the stairs that I had a phone call from Mr. Bloemker.”

“How did your landlady know?”

“Pardon?”

“That you had a phone call from Mr. Bloemker.”

“Well it’s a neighbor’s phone, that I use, but she didn‘t—”

“You don’t have a phone?”

“What is this? No I don’t have a phone. Listen, I’m very sorry to keep asking, but is my Gramma all right or not? I mean Mr. Bloemker said to come right over. Should I call my family? Where’s Lenore?”

The nurse was staring at a point over Lenore’s left shoulder; her face had resolved into some kind of hard material. “I’m afraid I’m in no position to say anything about ... ,” looking down, “... Lenore Beadsman, area F. But now, if you’ll just be so kind as to wait a moment, we can—”

“Where’s the morning nurse who’s supposed to be here? Where’s Madge? Where’s Mr. Bloemker?”

Mr. Bloemker appeared in the dim recesses of a corridor, beyond the reach of light from the reception area.

“Ms. Beadsman!”

“Mr. Bloemker!”

“Shush,” said the nurse; Lenore’s shout had produced a ground-swell of sighs and moans and objectless shouts from the wheelchaired forms lining the perimeter of the circular reception station. A television went on in a lounge off the hall, and Lenore caught a glimpse of a brightly colored game show as she hurried down toward Mr. Bloemker.

“Mr. Bloemker.”

“Hello Ms. Beadsman, thank you so much for coming so quickly and so early. Were you to be at work soon?”

“Is my great-grandmother all right? Why did you call?”

“Why don’t we just nip over to my office.”

“Well but I don’t understand why I can’t just ...” Lenore stopped. “Oh my Lord. She didn’t ... ?”

“Oh dear me no, please come with me. I-careful, watch the ... good morning, Mrs. Feltner.” A woman careened past in a wheelchair.

“Who’s that nurse at the desk?”

“Just through this door, here.”

“This isn’t the way to Gramma’s room.”

“This way.”

Well, now, just imagine how you’d feel if your great-grandmother-great it could really probably be argued in more than one sense of the word, which is to say the supplier of your name, the person under whose aegis you’d first experienced chocolate, books, swing sets, antinomies, pencil games, contract bridge, the Desert, the person in whose presence you’d first bled into your underwear (at sixteen, now, late sixteen, grotesquely late as we seem to remember, in the east wing, during the closing theme of “My Three Sons,” when the animated loafers were tapping, with you and Lenore watching, the slipping, sick relief, laughter and scolding at once, Gramma used her left arm and there was her old hand in Lenore’s new oldness), the person through whose personal generosity and persuasiveness vis à vis certain fathers you’d been overseas, twice, albeit briefly, but still, your great-grandmother, who lived right near you—were just all of a sudden missing, altogether, and was for all you knew lying flat as a wet Saltine on some highway with a tire track in her forehead and her walker now a sort of large trivet, and you’ll have an idea of how Lenore Beadsman felt when she was informed that her great-grandmother, with whom all the above clauses did take place, was missing from the Shaker Heights Nursing Home, in Shaker Heights, right near Cleveland, Ohio, near which Lenore lived, in East Corinth.

Combination Embryonic Journal and Draft Space for
Fieldbinder Collection

 

25 August

 

Lenore, come to work, where I am, remove yourself from the shower immediately and come to work now, I’ll not come down for my paper until you are here, Mandible is getting suspicious when I call.

The outside of a door, which like all the doors here looked like solid wood but was really hollow and light and rattled in its latch when the office window was open and the wind blew, said DAVID BLOEMKER, ADMINISTRATOR OF FACILITY. The office, like the rest of the Home, smelled faintly of urine.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand what you’re saying,” Lenore said.

Mr. Bloemker had sad wet brown eyes and blinked behind round glasses as he pulled and scratched at his beard, in the heat. “What I am saying, Ms. Beadsman, is that with all possible apologies and every assurance that we are doing everything within our power to resolve the situation, I must report to you that area F’s Lenore Beadsman is at this point in time missing.”

“I don’t think I understand what ‘missing’ means.”

“I am afraid that it means that we are unable to determine her present whereabouts.”

“You don’t know where she is.”

“That is unfortunately right.”

“What,” said Lenore, “you mean you don’t know where she is in the Home?”

“Oh my no, if she were on the grounds, there would be no situation of any significance. No, we have—those of us on hand at the moment have covered the entire facility.”

“So, what, she’s somewhere off the grounds?”

“That would seem to be so, to our extreme distress.” Mr. Bloemker’s fingers, with their long nails, sank into his beard.

“Well how may I ask did that happen?” said Lenore.

“This is not entirely clear to anyone,” looking off, out the win . dow, at the sun through the trees on a car right by the window. It was Lenore’s car, with the spot on the windshield.

“Well was she here last night?”

“We are at this time unable to determine that.”

“There must have been a nurse who looked in on her last night—what does she say?”

Mr. Bloemker looked at her sadly. “I’m afraid we are at present unable to contact the relevant nurse.”

“And why is that.”

“I am afraid we don’t know where she is.”

“Either?”

A sad smile. “Either.”

“Gee.”

Mr. Bloemker’s telephone buzzed. Lenore eyed it as he went to answer it. Not a Centrex, no crossbar. Something primitive, single-line unretrievable transfers, no hunters. “Yes,” Mr. Bloemker was saying. “Yes. Please.”

He hung up gently and went back to blinking moistly at Lenore. Lenore had a thought. “All right, but what about Mrs. Yingst, in the next room?” she said. “She and Lenore are like this. Mrs. Yingst is sure to know when she was last around. Have you talked to Mrs. Yingst?”

Mr. Bloemker looked at this thumb.

“Mrs. Yingst is ... around, isn’t she?”

“Not at this time, unfortunately, no.”

“Meaning she’s missing too.”

“I am afraid I must say yes.” Mr. Bloemker’s eyes shone with regret. Lenore thought she saw a bit of egg in his beard.

“Well, listen, what exactly’s going on here, then? Is everybody gone and you have no idea where they are? I think I just don’t understand the situation, yet, completely.”

“Oh Ms. Beadsman, nor in truth do I, to my profound grief,” a, movement in one side of his face. “What I have been able to determine is that at some point in the last, shall we say, sixteen hours some number of residents and staff here at the facility have become ... unavailable to access.”

“Meaning missing.”

“Yes.”

“Well how many is ‘some number’?”

“At this time it looks to be twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four. ”

“Yes.”

“How many of them are patients?”

“Twenty residents are at this time unavailable.”

“Meaning twenty patients.”

“We prefer to call them residents, Ms. Beadsman, since as you know we try to offer an environment in which—”

“Fine, well, but don’t a lot of the missing ‘residents’ need IV’s to get fed and stuff? And little things like insulin, and antibiotics, and heart medicine, and help dressing and taking showers? Lenore can hardly even move her left arm this summer, and plus it’s pretty cold for her, outside, for very long, so I just don’t see how they could—”

“Ms. Beadsman, please rest assured that you and I are in more than complete agreement on this. That I am as confused and distraught as are you. As disoriented.” Mr. Bloemker’s cheeks yielded to the force of his beard-abuse, began to move around, so it looked like he was making faces at Lenore. “I find myself facing a situation I, believe me, never dreamt of possibly encountering, monstrous and disorienting.” He licked his lips. “As well, just allow me to say, one for which my training as facility administrator prepared me not at all, not at all.”

Lenore looked at her shoe. Mr. Bloemker’s phone buzzed and flashed again. He reached and listened. “Please,” he said into the phone. “Thank you.”

He hung up and then for some reason came around the desk, as if to take Lenore’s hand, to comfort. Lenore stared at him, and he stopped. “So have you called my father over at Stonecipheco?” she asked. “Should I call him? Clarice is just over in the city, my sister. Is she in on this news?”

Mr. Bloemker shook his head, his hand trailing. “We’ve contacted no one else at this time. Since you are Lenore’s only really regular visitor from among her family, I thought of you first.”

“What about the other patients’ families? If there’s like twenty gone, this place should be a madhouse.”

“There are very few visitors here as a rule, you would be surprised. In any event we have contacted no one else as yet.”

“And why haven’t you.”

Mr. Bloemker looked at the ceiling for a second. There was a really unattractive brown stain soaked into the soft white tile. Light from the sun was coming through the east windows and falling across the room, a good bit of it on Bloemker, making one of his eyes glow gold. He leveled it at Lenore. “The fact is that I have been instructed not to.”