The View from the Vue (26 page)

“Son of a bitch!” I muttered. “No wonder Charlie’s blood cultures stayed positive. He was shooting in the bugs as fast as we were running in penicillin.” “That’s right,” agreed Jack. We looked again toward the back of the ward, where at that moment the suspect was taking his leave of Mr. Rodriguez.

“I’m going to fix that little scumbag good,” said Jack.

He did, too. The next morning, Jack went down and spoke to the captain of the guards, and at midafternoon, when the scrawny man walked onto the ward, two of the biggest guards took him by the arms and led him into the examining room. There, out of sight of all possible witnesses, they frisked him and found several bags of heroin which, we later found out, were just as dirty as they could be. That pusher was a walking disease vector, a Typhoid Mary of the first class. God only knows how many other addicts he made suffer and die like Charlie Jackson had. When the guards found the heroin on him, he began to squeak out his innocence, and then he protested that the guards had no right to strong-arm and search him. Perhaps because he knew that was true and it upset him, the larger of the two guards hauled off and clouted the pusher solidly in the solar plexus. Then he and his buddy dragged the white-faced, gasping man out and down to the local precinct house. I don’t know whether he was eventually convicted, but I am quite certain he was never again seen plying his trade at The Vue.

Not only drugs were sold by Bellevue visitors. One evening I had to draw a blood sample from Mr. Harris, one of our long-term residents. He had been admitted for a particularly severe case of viral pneumonia, and for a while we all despaired of his leaving our ward any way other than feet first. But he proved to have considerable recuperative powers, and although it took a few weeks, he overcame his microbial invaders and was on the verge of discharge. As I approached Mr. Harris’ bed with my needle and syringe, I noticed that the curtain was drawn, but I didn’t think anything of the fact. Usually, this was nothing more than a sign that the patient wished to get a little sleep and the tumult on the ward was distracting him. So I strode up to the curtain and briskly threw it open. In the same motion, however, I even more briskly threw it shut, and more briskly yet walked away and into the examining room where I dropped my syringe and needle on the floor.

Mr. Harris hadn’t been alone in his bed. There had been a young woman there with him, and what she was doing to Mr. Harris—well, I used to try to tell people about it, but I’ve long since given up because it makes me stutter so badly no one can understand me. God Almighty, I didn’t think the contortionists in the circus were capable of such feats.

Well, I decided I was going to just sit in the treatment room and pretend that the whole thing had never happened. Perhaps I might never come out. Certainly I wouldn’t budge until the following afternoon, by which time Mr. Harris, and presumably his acrobatic guest, would be off the ward.

Not ten minutes later, though, as I was staring at the garbage scows on the East River, I was startled by a strident “Hey, Doc,” from behind me in the doorway. I turned around to see Mr. Harris’ lady friend standing there, wearing the most lecherous leer I’ve ever seen. If a face can possibly turn both red and white at the same time, I know mine did. I realized she required an acknowledgment, but I couldn’t collect myself sufficiently to say, “Yes, what can I do for you?” Actually, maybe it’s just as well I couldn’t. In any event, I just stood there with my eyes and mouth wide open, staring at her.

She looked pretty much like your average New York hooker, in her early twenties, heavily made-up, with a goodly assortment of those black spots painted on her face, and none-too-neat jet-black hair hanging past her shoulders. Her skirt barely covered her gizzard.

Eventually she took my agitated silence for an answer of sorts, and waved her hand in what might have been a disparaging fashion. “Don’t worry none about breakin’ in on us like that, Doc,” she said in her brassy street voice. “It ain’t the first time I had guys watching me do my thing, and Bob, it didn’t bother him, neither. Fact, he thought it was kinda funny.”

I said something to the effect that I was glad to have been able to brighten Mr. Harris’ day.

The leer disappeared from the woman’s face. “Bob ain’t gonna get in no trouble becuz of this, is he?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” I said. “No. No, no, no, no.” I had a brief, horrible vision of filling out an incident report on the matter. I was afraid that even my writing would stutter if I tried to do that.

“I wouldn’t tell anyone here a thing about it,” I said fervently.

The hooker smiled in relief. “Oh, that’s good,” she said. “Y’know, Doc, me and my friends work this place a lot. You got a buncha guys here, y’know, maybe they were sick bad when they came in, but then they get better, and, well, y’know, they get a little lonesome, and they can’t wait till they get out. So my friends and me, we just cruise around the wards during the visiting hours, and when one of the boys gives us the signal, we go on over, pull the curtain, and go to work.”

“How do you get paid?” I asked. “All their money’s locked up in the hospital safe.”

The leer returned. She pulled a little notebook out of her purse, and held it aloft for inspection. “We write down our jobs,” she said. “Then, when the boys get out, we go and look them up. I won’t say I never lost no money on a Bellevue trick, but no more’n I get shafted on the street.”

“I guess it’s warmer working the wards than the streets in wintertime, too,” I said.

The leer changed into a genuine good-natured grin. “Yeah, that’s for darn sure,” the girl said. She turned to leave. “Be seeing you around, Doc. Thanks a lot,” she called over her shoulder, as she went out the door.

Since that day, I’ve acquired a genuine respect for a closed curtain around a hospital bed. Respect, hell—it’s close to being a phobia. I’ve never again opened a bed curtain, either on an open ward or in a private room, without first having announced my presence and requested permission.

Thus, some visitors to The Vue brought death with them, and others brought life. The strangest member of the former group was the woman I called the Crow.

I first noticed her one afternoon, a few days after I had been transferred onto B-2, one of the male medicine wards. She walked onto the ward at precisely two-thirty, the official starting time of visiting hours. She was tall, about five-nine, and very thin. Her most noticeable feature, though, was her clothing. She was wearing a floor-length black dress which swished around her ankles as she walked. Her mouth seemed to be frozen into just the smallest trace of a smile, which might have been described as a shit-eating grin. In combination with her dress and general appearance, however, it gave me the creeps. As she went past me, she set off a general wave of goose pimples on my body. I shook my head and figured I just hadn’t been getting enough sleep.

She moved to a point approximately at the middle of the ward, and stood there a moment, looking around. Then her eyes fell on Howard Runyon. Howard was a Bowery fellow who had partaken of the grape too hard and too long. First he had developed cirrhosis of the liver, and then liver cancer. Now, yellow and shrunken, he lay semicomatose in his deathbed.

The strange woman glided over to Howard and sat down noiselessly on a metal chair at the bedside. She took the dying man’s hand in hers, and leaned over him, obviously whispering tender words of affection and comfort into his ear. For two hours, she continued to do so, and at four-thirty, when the loudspeaker announced the end of the visiting period, the woman kissed Howard lightly on his forehead, stood up, and walked silently off the ward, her facial expression unchanged.

This whole business surprised me. I hadn’t known that Howard Runyon had had anyone in the world who cared about him, and certainly not anyone who looked like that. But life at The Vue was full of little surprises, and it seemed entirely reasonable that this was a girlfriend, or perhaps an estranged wife, temporarily come a bit unglued over Howard’s obvious moribund condition. So I paid much less attention the next day when the entire act was repeated.

The night after the second visit, Howard Runyon died. After making the necessary official pronouncement, I went to check his next of kin. I did so with a good bit of uneasiness. The idea of having to call up that peculiar woman didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. Hence I was both relieved and surprised to discover that Howard had no listed next of kin, and no one to call in case of emergency. I quickly got over the surprise: I knew very well that any Bowery relationships that do take place are noteworthy for their absence of formalities. But then I realized that I’d have to watch for Howard’s visitor at two-thirty the next afternoon, and my relief passed along with my surprise.

The woman never showed up the next day, though, and it wasn’t until the day after that that I saw her again. She had come onto the ward while I was busy, and it was about three when I noticed her at the bedside of Mr. Rosario, an octogenarian Puerto Rican whose kidneys had given up for good, and who was then in the terminal stages of uremia. Mr. Rosario was by no means a Bowery Bum: he was the head of a large and devoted family who came religiously to see him every evening. Yet here was this black-gowned female, holding his hand and crooning into his at-best semi-hearing ear.

Mr. Rosario looked nothing like Howard Runyon, but I imagined that in her grief, perhaps the woman hadn’t noticed the difference. She was unquestionably at least a little dippy, and we had, in fact, moved Mr. Rosario into Mr. Runyon’s bed after the latter’s departure.

As hard as I tried, I couldn’t figure any way out of the situation, so I clenched my teeth and sidled over to the bedside. “Excuse me, Madam,” I said, as I drew up. “I…I don’t think you’ve noticed, but this isn’t Mr. Runyon. It’s Mr. Rosario. Mr. Runyon…er…well, died. Two nights ago.”

She looked up at me with that same little smile on her face. “Oh, I know,” she said. “Poor Mr. Runyon. It’s so sad, isn’t it? There’s
so
much sadness in the world.” She looked back at the bed, where Mr. Rosario’s chest was slowly, rhythmically rising and falling. Her smile widened, ever so slightly. “And now, Mr. Rosario is going to die, too. Poor Mr. Rosario.”

She turned back to Mr. Rosario, leaned over him, and whispered throatily, “But don’t you worry, dear. It doesn’t hurt at all. It’s just like dropping off to sleep. Just as easy and natural as that.” She patted his hand.

I quickly retreated to the front of the ward. The case of the creeps I had had upon first seeing that woman was a pleasant experience compared to what I felt now. I knew she was playing about as deep as possible in left field, but I still wasn’t exactly sure what the game was.

That night, Mr. Rosario died, and two days later the Crow, as I had christened her, was giving solace to Mr. Clark as he was going down for the count from lung cancer. Three days after that, she moved on to Mr. Holley and his intractably failing heart. By then, I had all I could take. There was something obscene about the way the Crow would unerringly select the farthest-gone patient on the ward, visit with him for the brief time he had left, and then, after a decent day off to mourn for the dead, reappear to claim her next victim. I decided to go over to the psychiatry building and discuss the matter with my friend Sid Albright, who was a psych resident.

Sid listened to my speech, and then nodded and said, “Uh-huh.”

“It makes sense to you?” I asked.

“I think so,” said Sid. “Some people might say that this is a lady who happens to have it in for men, for some reason, and enjoys watching them die, but I think there’s more to it than that. To me, it sounds like a type of necrophilia, a morbid fascination with corpses. It may even involve eroticism. Since dead bodies are a little hard for laymen to come by, sometimes these characters develop an attachment to the almost-dead.” Sid looked thoughtful for a moment, and then continued. “I really think it’s almost as though they suck their own vital energy from the dying; in a psychic sense they feed upon the moribund.”

“So you think this lady must have figured a big city hospital would give her all the nourishment she could handle?” I asked.

Sid shrugged. “Who the hell knows how she got started coming here?” he said. “Maybe she really did come to visit a friend or a relative and saw how easy it would be to just keep coming. What difference does it make?”

“None, really,” I answered. “Just tell me how to get rid of her, that’s all.”

Sid looked at me curiously. “Why do you want to do that?” he asked. I returned the curiosity with interest.

“Why?” I squeaked. “You think I should just leave this crazy necromaniac loose on the wards, to choose a new dying patient every day like you or I would pick out a cream puff?”

“I don’t see why not,” Sid said calmly. “When you come right down to it, what’s she doing that’s illegal? Or even immoral, for that matter? So she comes in and visits dying men. At least while she’s there, they know that they’re not alone and that someone cares about them while they’re dying. That’s more than they get from either you or me. So she gets a thrill from doing it. So what? If I were to analyze the reasons why you’re in training to become a doctor it’s entirely possible that no decent examining board would ever give you a license.” He laughed.

“Very funny,” I said. “I should have known better than to ask a shrink for advice. I should have realized it’d be me who’d end up having perversions and a twisted mind.”

“That’s right,” said Sid. “Feel good and guilty. Guilt is such a wonderful thing. If it weren’t for guilt, psychiatrists all over the world would be starving.”

I stomped back to the ward and kicked a large indentation into the metal wastebasket. At that moment, the Crow was savoring her current cream puff, a seventy-five-year-old man with a stroke and pneumonia. I felt an overwhelming urge to rush over, grab her by her neck, and pitch her out the nearest window into the parking lot two flights below. But then, I began to think about what Sid had said. That old stroke victim had been on the ward for two full weeks, and the Crow was the first and only visitor he had had. So I capitulated. Live and let live. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. For the rest of my rotation on Ward B-2, I had twenty-four to forty-eight hours’ notice when to throw in the towel on a patient. She proved to be an infallible prognosticator. But right up till my last day on the ward, she still gave me a hideous case of the creeps.