Ten

It was about the time of the Christmas show that Barbara and I started dating. She was older than I was, but that didn't matter. She said from the beginning that she had no intention of getting married again, but she did want a baby before she got too old, and she needed a man to carry out the project. She assured me that wasn't her only reason for dating; but sometimes when we were having dinner with Ed and Romona in the cafeteria, I could sense her sizing me up, as if judging the quality of my gene pool. It was easy to imagine what sort of kids we might have had, since both of us were short, dark, and thin. They'd be all arms and legs with long teeth who were awkward on the dance floor.

We started going out with the others first, to a lively piano bar on State Street called Janie's. Romona was the one who discovered it, and it was very much of her era. I never met Janie and probably there was no Janie. There was a long bar along one wall and a piano in the corner with a bar built around it, in the curving shape of the instrument. Our group of five or six would always arrive around twelve thirty and sit at the piano, requesting songs from the Damon Runyonesque characters who took turns playing and singing. Usually it was a short skinny Irishman named Roark who looked like Hoagy Carmichael. He was always drunk, but that was the idea at Janie's. Nobody ordered beer, unless a shot came with it. Roark would lean into a song with his left cheek next to the keys, and you couldn't tell if he was hypnotized by its beauty or had fallen asleep. Suddenly he would lurch into the next phrase of a great talk song like "Scotch and Soda" or "My Funny Valentine," and Romona would toast him with watery eyes. His style was all camp and cliche, but it was noise.

Barbara and I always sat together, feeling part of the group and not. It was like we were visiting another culture, a society that hadn't changed since World War II. They were a sturdy generation in black and white movies -- almost unkillable, it seemed -- and ours was fragile in comparison in a thousand technicolors. How many of us had the strength to become the colorful characters lining the bar, wearing outdated clothes and living fearlessly in the present?

"Hey, Tony!" Romona yelled to a roly-poly bald guy behind the bar. "Sing 'Danny Boy.'"

"No, no!" He waved her off with a pudgy hand.

"C'mon, Tony," rasped Roark from the piano bench. "Sing it for the Moaner." His voice was almost a whisper, but Tony, a dark-skinned Italian in a white shirt who tended the long bar, responded to it. He nodded to Roark, braced both stout hairy arms on the bar, and waited for the piano to give him a note. Roark played a single note, and Tony took off with the corniest, most operatic a cappella version of the old classic you ever heard. The noisy bar went silent as his song filled the room. Even a flashy salesman and his sexy girl friend looked up from making out in a corner, their faces bright in the shadows. The scene was so wholesome and seedy at the same time, I expected thick snow to start falling past the single small window.

Tony finished the song and went back to washing bar glasses, and Roark did a pretty good "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" while his dangling cigarette got smoke in his grey eyes. Then Romona surprised us by doing a successful "Misty." She talked her way through it but had good presence and timing, and we were all a little stunned and a little proud of her.

"You didn't tell us about your hidden talents," said Barbara, while Roark took a break, which meant drinking as many ryes as he could with money from his tips.

"I used to be an entertainer," she confessed, "back when there were lots of clubs. Used to travel with an all-girl group called Eloise Lynch and the Flames. We played lots of big rooms, too, in Detroit, Cleveland, Albany."

"Really?" I said, half-believing.

"We really drew the crowds," she said. "It was a combination big-band and dance act, with some novelty numbers thrown in. I was a dancer in the chorus and did a roller-board act."

"What's a roller board?" said Barbara.

"You ever watch Ed Sullivan? It's where you put a short board on a cylinder, then stand on the board, rolling back and forth. Sometimes I'd sing while balancing, and sometimes I'd juggle things."

We thought that was amazing.

"Unbelievable!" said Janush.

"I can do that," said Ed smashing his glass on the bar.

"Who was Eloise?" I wondered.

"Oh, she was really something," Romona said with admiration. "She was seventy-two years old. She led the band, of course, and played the trombone and the harp until she lost them on the bus between Cleveland and Canton. In the opening number she'd come out dressed as a moth, and we'd all dance around her in our flame costumes -- it was beautiful."

I thought how could anyone lose a harp and a trombone on a bus between two Ohio towns. Apparently, Eloise Lynch could.

Roark came over to us, loose in the joints, and gave Romona a moist kiss on the mouth, which surprised us. She started away from him as if death itself had taken the liberty.

"That's a pretty girl," he muttered, swaying back and forth.

Romona apologized and said Roark used to work in the hospital basement in maintenance. She hurriedly walked him away from us. The couple making out in the corner looked up again for a second, a dazed look on their faces. Her face was very white and round, with full red lips, and his was dark and angular, with heavy eyelids.

Barbara wanted to leave, so we said good-bye to Romona and the others and I walked her north on State. It was about two in the morning. Along the way we saw a guy in long blue overalls take a butchered lamb out of the trunk of his car and carry it over his shoulder into a building. It looked like a lamb, anyway. I'd seen them hanging in the windows of a Greek butcher on Taylor Street. I guess it could have been a stripped dog for all I really knew in that city. It made Barbara shudder, and we walked arm in arm the rest of the way. By the time we got to her door on Goethe Street, it had begun to snow and she asked me in. Five minutes later we were in her bed, completely wrapped up in each other. We made love like we were starving, pushing ourselves fiercely inside each other. She tasted sweet all over. I tasted her mouth, her neck, the back of her knees, and all over until she shook like a kid with a fever. It was exciting how athletic we were, because Barbara seemed anything but athletic with her clothes on. She even walked carefully, the steps measured and arranged, like a horse in a canter. Now she was somebody else, throwing her pelvis around and pulling on my hair. She pulled me into her, petting and stroking, and when I climaxed, it was down to the last nerve ending. We collapsed on the pillows and talked for a while. Then she got up on her knees in bed and showed me how one breast was larger than the other, but I couldn't see the difference. Barbara looked great like that, so I got on my knees, too, and we faced each other like skinny wrestlers, touching each other sweetly here and there. We made love one more time, and once she called me Jack, her husband's name. I said I didn't mind, because while we were doing it, I kept thinking of Melinda.

It had been a busy evening at the hospital. Romona was down in X ray, gossiping with Don Leland, one of the technicians who winked and smiled when the subject of Romona came up, when a body flew by the window. That is, it bounced on the third-floor roof outside the window. Romona and Don rushed over, and sure enough, there was a middle-aged man in a hospital gown. Don opened the window and stepped onto the tar-and-gravel roof, but the man wasn't dead. He looked up at Don with clear eyes and said, "Hello," as if they'd met at a bus stop. It turned out that he had attempted suicide by jumping from his room on the eighth floor, but because he'd failed to look down, he landed square on his knees on a roof level with the sixth floor. The impact put two large indentations in the roofing, but he wasn't hurt. He stood up, shook himself off, and walked over to the edge. It was a sunny winter day, so he decided to jump again, but this time he landed by the X-Ray waiting area, and to his disappointment, he still wasn't dead. "Did you ever have one of those days?" he asked Don. We put him on a cart and they X-rayed his spine, and declared him in perfect health. When asked why he tried to kill himself, he said it was because he never succeeded at anything. I thought his failure to complete his suicide must have really sent a shock to his self esteem. As it turned out, he said it only solidified what he already knew about himself. He wound up on the psych ward, where he became the unit's Ping-Pong champion.

The championship was enough to sustain him for awhile and he got out eventually, married, and became an insurance salesman.

That night, all hell broke loose on Twelve South, which was ENT. They called a Dr. Blue for room 1201, right next to the nursing station, and when Barbara, Romona, and I got there, Ed was going crazy. It was his unit, and nothing was stocked right. They needed all sorts of things that could only be found in obscure locations, like the emergency room and surgery. He was in a lot of trouble, and he knew it. I never saw him looking so scared. As well as we could, we tried to cover for him.

None of us realized, until we got to the room, that it wasn't the usual cardiac arrest. It was what they call on ENT a "cartoid blow," meaning the carotid artery, which runs up the neck, had literally blown like an oil well. This sometimes happened after radical neck surgery, usually done for smoking related cancer, because the neck muscles that keep the artery in place are no longer there. They try to pack the wound with dressing so this won't happen, and drugs are administered to lower the patient's blood pressure, but the carotid, being so near the heart, has to withstand tremendous force, and its walls can simply give out.

This had happened to Mr. McKechnie. When Ed got to the room, right behind the nurse, McKechnie was sitting up in bed, desperately waving his arms. Blood was shooting from his neck, splashing all over the room, and his eyes were wide in fear. The nurse, a recent nursing-school graduate, pressed on the neck with a dressing, but already the room was slick with blood.

The doctors were working furiously on the patient when I got there, and the resident was angry. A scope they used for such emergencies had a dead battery, and the nearest one was on the first floor. Ed called to have them send it up by way of the pneumatic tube, but that wasn't going to work. The person who worked the tubes in Central Supply would often nod out and tubes would pile up for as much as half an hour. I yelled to the station clerk to have them hold it in the Emergency Room and headed for the stairwell. The elevator would be too slow, so I sailed down all twelve flights, leaping and swinging out on the railings. At the bottom of the stairs, holding the scope like a baton in a relay race, was the Emergency Room nurse. I grabbed it without a word and headed back, taking three stairs at a time. By the seventh floor, I was starting to give out, and by the twelfth I thought I was dead. Ed grabbed the scope as I fell to the floor just inside McKechnie's room, my chest in blood. I scrambled alligator style out of the room to get out of the way of the half dozen people working and screaming. After a minute or so, he returned, still holding the scope. Mr. McKechnie had died.

Donna, the new nurse on Twelve South, sometimes went out with us after work. I never saw her look so stricken. It was her first blow, and she broke down. Miss Cheever, one of the nursing supervisors, held her hand and talked with her. The nurse on the other unit came over and helped out for a while, but when she had stopped crying, Donna still had to mop up the blood and dress the body for the morgue. Now she understood why all the nurses on ENT are required to keep a second uniform on the unit, in case the first one "becomes soiled." The blood had sprayed all over her, even up into her hair.

Romona arranged to get me a spare uniform from maintenance and I took a shower. The four of us were waiting to take the body downstairs when Dr. Rocks came onto the unit. McKechnie was his case, and he'd been called by the resident to meet with the family. It looked like he'd just come from a dinner party, because he was wearing a tux under his coat, and his face was even more flushed than usual. He'd operated on McKechnie just that morning, but it wasn't his fault necessarily. Radical neck surgery has a large failure rate. Romona said only five percent survived three years after the surgery, and those were terribly disfigured. As a result, ENT surgeons were a very depressed group. Their suicide rate was high, even worse than dentists.

"Dentists?" I said.

"Yeah, how would you like to stare into people's mouths all day and have little children scared of you?"

"I see what you mean."

"There was a case at City when I was there," said Barbara. "An ENT man came to study a chart, and began looking out a window at the rear of the station. It was spring, and there was a park outside. After twenty minutes, he hadn't moved a muscle, so we checked on him. He'd turned catatonic. All that death around him and he turned to stone staring at birds and kids playing in the park. Dr. Kingman was his name. They carried him away in a stretcher. I heard he's still in a mental hospital somewhere."

"There was a baseball player like that," Ed offered. "He went bananas right in the middle of a windup."

"Bull," said Romona.

"It's true," I said. "It was in the newspapers."

"I don't care," she insisted. "It's the all-American game. Baseball players do not go nuts!" her voice rising.

"They do now," I said, and Barbara nodded her head in agreement.

"Next you're gonna say firemen like to start fires."

"As a matter of fact . . ." Ed began, but Romona cut him off.

"A bunch of bull!" she said. "It's all the fault of what's-his-name, the shrink with the cigar."

"Freud?" said Barbara.

"That's him," she said, poking the air with her cigarette hand. "Freud the fraud."

"You're probably right," Barbara said. "I certainly wasted enough on psychoanalysis."

Romona was shocked. A nice girl like Barbara seeing a shrink? It was hard to understand.

"Just remember," I said, "Freud means 'joy' in German."

"Aw, go on," said Ed.

Dr. Rocks came out of the room, looking tired but no less arrogant, and met the family in the visitors' lounge. Ed said they took the valuables home a couple of days ago, including even the toothbrush, and two of McKechnie's relatives had fought over the wristwatch. Pretty soon, Rocks reappeared with the family. They wanted to go back into the room.

"This could be trouble," said Romona. "You heard about Rocks, of course. He's the least respected surgeon on the staff. For one thing, he's some kind of a nut. He won't perform surgery when the moon is full, because he says there are tides in the blood. It makes the pressure too high or something."

"Could be true," said Ed. "You should've seen it in there."

"And he's a terror in the operating room. They say he bounces instruments off the wall and screams at the nurses. The nursing school won't let their students go into OR when Rocks is there. What's more, the interns and residents refuse to call him 'doctor,' that's how little respect they have."

"What do they call him then?" I asked.

"Mr. Rocks," said Romona hugging her clipboard and feeling cold all of a sudden.

Rocks and the family came out of the room again, but instead of escorting them back to the lounge, he brought them straight over to us.

"Mrs. Fish," he said. "This is the McKechnie family."

"How do you do?" said Romona with a nervous smile.

There were three in the family, a tall, stoop-shouldered man in working clothes, a thin woman in a black dress who appeared to be Mr. McKechnie's wife, and a younger man with a vacant look who must have been in his twenties. They didn't smile when they were introduced.

"We have an unusual situation," said Rocks. "The family would like us to release the body to them. Is this in any way possible?"

"You mean they -- you-- want to take the body yourself?"

"That's right," said the woman in a country accent, "no funeral home."

"We got a pick up truck," said the tall man.

Romona stiffened. "That's impossible. It's against the law."

"We don't care about the law," said the tall man.

"Let me get this straight. You want to carry the body yourself, down on the elevator, and out of the hospital?"

The tall man looked right at Romona and nodded yes.

"You're going to take the deceased home in your car?"

"Pick up truck," the tall man said.

"Chevy," said the younger man. His voice startled me. It was the first sound he made.

Barbara, Ed, and I looked at each other. Would they lay him in the bed or prop him up in the cab with a seat belt? In the bed the corpse would slide around on every turn and bump and bang around when they stopped at traffic lights. And how would things go when a cop pulled them over for speeding? I almost smiled thinking I missed Vietnam to witness this peacetime sanity.

Rocks displayed his impatience by glancing at his watch.

"I'll leave you to work out the details. I've an important engagement," he said, offering his hand to the widow.

"Thank you, Doctor," she said.

"Let me know how it works out, Mrs. Fish," he said, and walked to the back elevator. He was going back to his dinner party, where the bubbles in his champagne were still rising.

"What do you propose to do with the body once you've got it home?" Romona asked the wife.

"That's our business and none of yours," said the man.

"We're gonna bury him ourselves," the woman volunteered, "just like we always done in our family."

The young man nodded agreement to this.

"We take care of our own," said the tall man.

The Reaper arrived just in time. Ed, Barbara, and I stepped down the hall so they could hash things out. You could see the Reaper's head snap back when he learned their intentions and pretty soon he was waving his clipboard at the family. Romona had to step between Cane and the other men. Would there be a tug-of-war in the hallway, the body stretched between us and the family?

"Weird," said Barbara.

"Cane is right," said Ed. "The law is the law."

Dave the Poet was talking about something like this just the other day. There was a hippie movement called Freedom for the Dead. They believed you had the right to do what you wanted with your body, since, after all, what was more yours than your corpse? The state and the church conspired to tax even the dead, said the leaders of the movement, by means of requirements like embalming and watertight concrete vaults. A free death meant a return to the old ways of dying; the family put you in a plain pine box and buried you in the backyard. One night when he was high, Dave phoned his parents and said he wanted to be buried the natural way, he hoped they felt that way too, when their time came to die. He couldn't understand why they hung up on him, since it was only midnight in Boston.

"Maybe the McKechnies are right," I said. "There are so many laws already."

"You're full of yellow bananas," said Ed. I knew he had a financial stake in this argument so I let it pass.

Two security officers came to the floor, and Normal Cane and the family left with them. Romona came over and said Cane would have to call the Board of Health, since the family wouldn't sign the papers releasing the body to the funeral home. The Board of Health could take possession of the body after seventy-two hours. Meanwhile it would have to stay with us. All those years of life, I thought, and when you die you're an orphan.

When we entered the room to take the body to the morgue, the walls were still bloodstained, in spite of having been washed. Maintenance would have to repaint the room. I was also surprised to see a half-pack of Camels on the bedside table. McKechnie had died of cancer, and he had cigarettes in his room? Ed said he'd seen the guy smoking, but he didn't know it made any difference. When we put Mr. McKechnie onto the slab, a puddle of blood remained on the cart, and Rorschach of blood was blossoming on the shroud. Before we left the morgue, I gave him a snappy salute, because I thought he deserved one.

The Christmas talent show was an institution, though it was only five years old. It was the brainchild of Jimmy Johnson, the feisty public relations head who was nearing retirement, and Romona, who always loved a show. To our disappointment, Romona herself didn't perform, but there were some pretty good acts. Barbara and I got chairs together just as the show began, and lights went down in the first-floor chapel, the unlikely but useful location every year.

Jimmy Johnson came out first and did a recitation that was in the Christmas spirit. It was the old O. Henry story about the woman who cut her beautiful hair to buy a gold watch chain for her husband, but meanwhile the husband had sold the watch to buy a barrette for her hair. Barbara and I rolled our eyes, but several people near us, including James the Diener and his girl friend from Food Service, were wiping the tears from theirs. Jimmy Johnson was an elfin man with ruddy cheeks, and as he told the story, he clasped his hands in front of him and rose up on tiptoe. The applause he got was sustained and sincere, and it was a good beginning.

The next act, introduced by Romona after her "Thank you, Jimmy," was the Marveltones, three black guys from the laundry room who sang doo-wop songs from the fifties. The singing was excellent, but the choreography was less than great. They snapped their fingers, did little turns, and changed positions, depending on who had the solo, but you could feel them thinking through each action, and they often turned in the wrong direction. The result was unexpected comedy. I was so taken by their awkwardness that tears ran down my cheek, though only from one eye.

Then Arnold Egger, the head of Accounting, sang "What's New, Pussycat?" and it was exactly what you'd expect from an accountant singing a Tom Jones number. He rolled his hips and furrowed his brow. We could have died of laughter. It was like being a teenager again, trying not to laugh in church. Romona gave us a reproving look from where she was sitting.

After a few more numbers, including Mrs. Godlewski from Central Supply, who displayed her doll collection and spoke in doll voices, Emory Ashworth came out in a white satin costume and sang "The Candy Man" while holding a large candy cane. After the phrase "the candy man can," he'd lick the tip of the cane in a cutsey way, as if he were Shirley Temple. A number of black nursing assistants thought this was a howl, laughing and nudging each other. Must have been an inside joke. Then Santa Claus came out, who was really Henry, a maintenance man. He gave out little presents. Several employees had brought their children, and they shoved them toward the front. Henry played the role to the hilt; everyone thought it was funny when one of the kids slugged him in the stomach. The evening was warm and cheery, and it didn't matter who died that night. Death was simply part of our business. There was no point in sighing when the EKG went flat in our faces or the young husband died in Intensive Care. His wife and kids still had to sign for the belongings -- the wallet with six dollars, the shirt he'd been wearing -- and make the long drive home. During the following days, the widow would still have to decide if the shirt should be laundered and hung in the closet, and whether the money should be transferred to her purse, just for spending.