The View from the Vue (25 page)

“Sure do,” she answered. “We bofe bin here a loooooong time, her and me t’gether. Ah wuz s’prised not t’ see her tonight.”

“What I need to know,” I went on, “is what her mind was like. Was she sort of out of things—senile—when she was with you?”

The nurse laughed raucously. “Lawd,” she said. “That pore li’l of lady ain’t said a word y’ could make sense outa in years. But she shore is sweet.”

I agreed that she did seem very nice.

“Whutsamatta wif Miz O’Leary, anyway?”

“Looks like kind of a bad heart attack.”

She knew. After years as graveyard-shift nurse in a nursing home, you learn. She didn’t ask me whether or not Mrs. O’Leary would be okay. She just said, “Keep ‘er cumftable, now, heah?”

I said I would, and thanked her very much. I went back to the bed where Mrs. O’Leary was dozing. I’d do what I could, but now if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t have to feel so bad.

She remained stable through the night, not short of breath, constantly smiling and patting. About 6
A.M.
she suddenly worsened; you could see the cardiograph tracings of the heartbeats slowly but progressively became smaller and farther apart. She still was smiling and breathing easily, but she was getting drowsier and her irrelevant words gave way to unintelligible mutterings. Her blood pressure was falling. Nothing that the cardiology consultant or I tried did any good. A little after 7 o’clock she blew a couple of bubbles from her lips and turned blue. The cardiograph line stayed level. It happened so gradually, it really seemed hard to do anything as definite and well-defined as to pronounce her dead, but that was part of the job, so I did it.

Her original admission slip had listed no next of kin, but our experience with New York City nursing homes being what it was, I waited till 8
A.M.
and then called the office of the home’s director. I explained that I was pretty sure that his establishment had not been housing and feeding Mrs. O’Leary unless some next of kin had been footing the bill. He snappishly said he’d check his records and put me onto the hold line. Some people just have no sense of humor.

A minute later, he cut back in. “Doctor,” he barked. “The next of kin is her daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Oursley, who lives at…”

He read off the address and phone number, but I didn’t listen, since I knew them very well. I thanked him and hung up.

A minute or two later, my co-intern, Gerald Sanders, walked in. “Another all-nighter?” he grinned. “Christ, you look awful.”

I grabbed him by the tie. I actually did. “You’ve got to help me, Gerry,” I croaked. I rapidly told him the story of Loony Lizzie and her erotic nocturnal delusions. “My God, Gerry, I can’t call her now,” I said. “She’d really go off the deep end.”

“You want me to call her?”

“Yes, and sign the death certificate.”

Notifying the relatives was probably the least favorite job of an intern. None of us had yet accumulated enough experience with grief-stricken, guilt-ridden relatives to be anything but acutely uncomfortable in this circumstance.

Gerry grimaced. “What’s it worth to you?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you what it’s worth—to you. You won’t have it on your conscience that you’re responsible for sending some poor nutty lady to the hatch. And furthermore, if she decides to kill me, you’ll have to work every single night for the next month.”

“Come on, Larry, she’s not that bad.”

“Haven’t you worked at Bellevue long enough yet, Gerry?” I stared at him.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “All right. I’ll call her.”

Gerry called her, and she came right over to the hospital. I hid in the sleeping quarters until he returned to tell me that she had left. I asked him how she had taken it.

“Fine, Larry. She just said she’d been kind of expecting it for a while, and her mother was so senile anyway. She thanked me and left. No tears or anything.”

“God, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

“She seemed perfectly okay to me, Larry.” He grinned again. “The way I figure it, maybe you really ought to move your bed.”

A couple of months went by, and all was quiet from the direction of Apartment 15. I thought that it was over, once and for all. Then, one night, after another all-night stand at The Vue, I was slumped on the bed, absorbing the night’s supply of pap from the tube. Folks were singing and dancing and telling jokes, and I was almost asleep. Then the phone rang, and my wife picked it up. She called out, “It’s for you.” I reached over and said hello.

“Mr. Karp, this is Mrs. Oursley. I have something I’d like to ask you about.”

Omigod, I thought, she found out. She thinks I killed her mother. “Yes…yes?”

“Mr. Karp, I just wonder: do you have a motor running in your bedroom.”

I briefly considered asking her whether her real worry was that I had managed to invent automated coitus, but I decided not to. I merely assured her that there was no motor in our bedroom, that we were peacefully watching television, and that there was only singing, dancing, and joke-telling coming over the airways. No motors. I even offered to permit her to inspect the premises.

“Oh no, Mr. Karp, that won’t be necessary. I just wanted to check. It sounds like…like there’s an
airplane
in your bedroom. That’s all.”

“Well, there’s no airplane in the bedroom, Mrs. Oursley. You know they don’t allow them in Stuyvesant Town apartments.”

“Oh, certainly, Mr. Karp. I just wanted to check. Thank you.” With that, she hung up.

That episode was, in fact, the end of it. For the remaining year and a quarter that we lived in Stuyvesant Town, I neither saw nor heard from Lizzie again. But ever since we moved out, I’ve often felt the urge to call the present occupant of Apartment 14 to ask him whether anyone has been taking auditory exception to his unconscionable lasciviousness. However, I’ve never been able to get myself to do it. Probably in 1964, there was a guy somewhere who never quite had the nerve to call me and ask me the same question.

Generally speaking, hospitals aren’t exactly what you’d call wide-open institutions. In fact, their security systems probably are exceeded only by those of federal penitentiaries. Even at that, it’s close.

For example, consider what’s involved in paying a visit to your Aunt Martha while she’s recovering from her hysterectomy at your community hospital. As you go through the revolving door into the glistening lobby, you barely get past the entry to the gifte shoppe when you hear a squeaky, “May I help you, sir?” You turn to see two little old ladies wearing cotton dresses and snappy volunteer caps, sitting behind a rectangular wooden table. One of them looks like your grandmother, and the expression on the face of the other suggests that you made her an indecent proposal.

You walk up to the table and explain your mission, whereupon your grandmother smiles benignly and begins to rummage through a shoebox in front of her. “I’m sorry,” she finally says. “But her cards are all out.”

Your heart jumps into your throat as you wonder whether Grandma meant to say that Aunt Martha has cashed in her chips. But then she goes on to explain that patients are allowed two visitors at a time, and that each is given a card to use as a sort of hall pass. “If you’ll have a seat over there,” she says, gesturing across the lobby, “I’ll call you when one of her visitors comes down.” Meanwhile, the other old bird is giving you a look calculated to straighten out any potential sinner who might even consider the possibility of exhausting a poor recuperating woman by becoming her third simultaneous visitor.

You sit down on an unpadded wooden chair and, within fifteen minutes, you feel like a candidate for disk surgery. You try to take your mind off the pain that’s shooting down the back of your legs by leafing through a year-old copy of
Time
magazine, but it doesn’t help. Carefully, you stand up, and cautiously, you take a few steps. Hands behind your back, you try to get interested in the stuffed animals and boxes of candy in the windows of the gifte shoppe. You try to calculate the average number of colored splotches in each square of the tile floor.

After an endless three-quarters of an hour, Grandma summons you over, gives you your hall pass, and sends you toward the elevators. Before you can go up, the burly elevator operator checks to be sure you’ve been officially sanctioned. The surveillance is repeated by the nurse on Aunt Martha’s floor, who then makes certain you go into the proper room. Just checking to see that there’s no sneaking in of any unauthorized visiting to other patients.

Ten minutes after your arrival, Aunt Martha is in the middle of an animated speech extolling the manifold advantages of a spayed existence when the nurse comes in to tell you that visiting hours are over and you will have to leave. Cut off more sharply than she was from her generative organs, Aunt Martha voices her disappointment, whereupon the nurse tells her that patients must get their rest, and it’s really too bad that her visitor (as she looks at you balefully out of the corners of her eyes) has been so inconsiderate as to come so late in the day. Then she personally escorts you from the room, making it clear that the thoughtlessness which set off the little sermon has cost your aunt a precious and irreplaceable forty-five seconds of repose.

At The Vue, however, that’s not quite the way it worked. Although there were flyspecked signs posted on various walls to announce the proper visiting periods, no one paid much attention to them. At the end of visiting hours, a voice would announce that fact over the loudspeaker system, but the innumerable bedside chats went on as before. If there happened to be a nurse or an aide on the ward, she might try to personally reinforce the message, but her plea would almost inevitably turn out to be a cry in the wilderness. Visitors came and left at will, as well as in unregulated numbers. More than once on afternoon rounds, we had to claw our way to a patient’s bedside through a solid pack of children, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, spouses, lovers, and neighborhood kibitzers. Then we’d have to shoo them all away to a distance that would allow us to examine the patient and discuss his prognosis and therapy.

Nor did patients at The Vue get nearly as much rest as did their counterparts in private hospitals. Frequently, a family would bring dinner for a shut-in, and for themselves as well. Some nights, you could have closed your eyes and been in any rib emporium on the West Side. We often had to make late-night rounds to pick up the half-empty Malta Corona bottles and uneaten pieces of fried chicken, lest some patient be trampled to death by the stampede of rats and
cucarachas
which otherwise surely would have ensued.

The reason for the freedom of movement in The Vue was as much a function of the topography of the hospital as of understaffing. Physically as well as conceptually, Bellevue was an open building. No barriers, structural or human, existed to impede the flow of visitor traffic. To gain access to the wards, one didn’t even have to go through the lobby. There were several wide, parallel corridors which led directly to stairs to the ward areas. Even in the lobby itself, though, there were no obstacles. The bums sleeping on the rows of benches couldn’t have cared less who went where in the hospital.

So if you knew where your friend or relative was located, you simply walked through or around the lobby to the stairs or the elevators. If not, you went over to one of the information clerks, who were located on the left side of the lobby, behind a row of black-barred cages.

“Sadie Murphy’s on Ward G-2,” the clerk would growl at you. “Take them stairs over there up one flight and make a left. But you can’t go up till visiting hours; that’s two-thirty.” Then the clerk would go back to her confession magazine, while you went up them stairs one flight and made a left.

Not all the visitors to The Vue were exactly what one might call friends and relatives. One day, my co-intern, Jack Thorn, called me over to say that he thought there was something peculiar about the grimy-looking small fellow who was visiting Mr. Rodriguez in the back of the ward. I looked the man over for a few minutes, and then shrugged my shoulders.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t look any more peculiar to me than anyone else here.”

“There’s something about him,” Jack said, with a scowl. “I just can’t put my finger on it.”

During the next two days, Jack studied the little man. He would come in about midafternoon, walk directly to the back of the ward, and sit and talk with Mr. Rodriguez for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then he’d get up and walk out.

On the third day, Jack came up to me, all excited and agitated. “I’ve got it,” he announced with finality. “I know who that bastard is.”

I looked toward the back of the ward, where the visit was progressing according to schedule. “All right then,” I said. “Who is he?”

Instead of answering my question, Jack asked me one. “What’s Rodriguez here for?”

I think I must have looked at Jack a little sharply. “He’s got hepatitis,” I said. “And he’s—”

Suddenly, at that point, the light began to dawn. “—a junkie.”

Jack smirked, and smugly nodded his head.

I glanced back at Mr. Rodriguez and his guest. “You think that guy’s selling him drugs?” I asked. “You think he’s a pusher?”

“I’m sure of it,” Jack answered quickly. “I told you I thought there was something funny about him, and I just realized what it is. You remember Charlie Jackson, don’t you?”

I made a face. It would be a long while before any of us on that ward would be able to forget Charlie Jackson. He was an addict who had been our patient a month before. With his filthy needles, he had injected bacteria into his blood stream. The bacteria then had proceeded to set up colonies on his heart valves, a condition known as acute bacterial endocarditis. It’s not a very good thing to have even now, but in 1963 it was virtually 100 percent fatal. Charlie Jackson lingered for three weeks, gasping for breath in his oxygen tent. His last intelligible words were “Gimme methadone.”

I assured Jack that I remembered Charlie Jackson very well indeed.

“Well, this same character used to visit Charlie every afternoon, too,” said Jack. “That’s where I know him from. And if I’m not wrong, he stopped visiting about the time Charlie became so weak it would have been impossible for him to give himself a fix.”