Beautiful Kate (25 page)

“So I’m going to the hospital, am I?”

“My, what big ears you have.”

“Nothing wrong with my hearing,” he assured me. “I asked you a question.”

“Yes, you’re going to the hospital. And I don’t want any argument.”

“There won’t be any—because I’m not going anywhere.”

Straight and reasonable discussion never had worked with him, so I tried a more oblique approach. “That really puts me in a nice position, you know? You get sicker and sicker and finally die, and what do I say to the doctors? To the police even?
Oh yeah, I knew he was dying, but he didn’t want to go to a hospital. So I didn’t take him
. That’s the predicament you want to put me in? Christ’s sake, they’ll probably charge me with criminal negligence. And when Sarah gets back, she’ll blame me. Everyone will.”

“What
everyone
?” he scoffed. “I could die tonight and not two people in the whole world would ever know about it or give a damn.”

I sighed and sat down in the chair next to his bed. This obviously was going to take a while.

“Jason, do you know what’s wrong with you?”

“Of course I do. Congestive heart disease.”

“Well, that’s treatable, isn’t it?”

“By all means. They thin your blood and put you in an oxygen tent, and you live a few months longer. Big deal.”

“So what’s the alternative? Just lie here and die?”

“Don’t we all finally?”

In my frustration, I got up again and went over to Sarah’s window, which looked out on a long row of ranch-house roofs, all of them the same shape and set the same distance from the street. They were like stepping stones, a giant’s walk into infinity.

“I guess I’ve got choice then,” I said. “Finally I’m just going to have to pick you up and carry you out to the car and take you to the hospital.”

I was not looking at him as I said this and for sometime he made no response. But when he did, I could hear the new thing in his voice, the ring of old steel.

“Gregory—we have a few hundred dollars left. Enough for me to lie here in peace a while longer. I will not die in a hospital. Do you understand that? I
will not die in a hospital
.”

There was not much I could say to that. To argue the matter any further would only have infuriated him and put an even greater burden on his weakened heart and lungs. When the time was right—and I imagined that would be soon enough—I would simply bundle him up and take him to the hospital, by ambulance if necessary. Ultimately it would have to be done and I did not doubt that he knew this as well as I did. For now, though, I felt an overwhelming need to get away from him and out of the house, so I brought the phone up from downstairs and plugged it in next to his bed. I made sure he was comfortable and then I left him, assuring him that I would be back within an hour.

Walking—and especially walking along the beach—is something I have sorely missed since leaving California. Often, when I was sharing a house at Malibu, I used to walk all the way to Sunset before turning back, a distance of at least six miles, much of it decorated with the most beautiful female bodies in the western world, which may have had something to do with my remarkable stamina. Here, though, one can’t help taking into consideration the fact that being alone on foot often means being a lone white man among hostile blacks, usually kids, who just might want something you have, like your life. Which brings to mind as I write this one of Ellen’s better lines, tossed off as we drifted down the Harbor Freeway through Watts in the cool hush of her Rolls Silver Cloud:
Cowardice doth made liberals of us all
.

But enough of cynicism. This day I needed fresh air and movement more than I needed security, and I set out walking up the road, past that long row of roofs which had looked so neat and orderly from Sarah’s room but which here at street level served only to divide the leaden sky from the ramshackle blight of Woodglen Estates. Most of the houses, the abandoned the same as those in use, had broken windows and boarded-up windows and some were even doorless (though none had any holes quite so grand as ours). The yards were mostly dirt and littered with a decade’s accumulation of discarded toys and appliances and other junk, including automobiles, all of it patrolled by packs of skinny, shivering dogs, scouring the debris for scraps of food.

So it was not quite the same as Malibu, except perhaps for the fact that I did not feel any more at home there than I did here. Fortunately it was a cold dismal day and I had the streets pretty much to myself, just me and an occasional crew of winos passing the bottle around a barrel fire in their Goodwill costumes, probably feeling the cold a good deal less than I was. And it crossed my mind that there had been a time—not many years ago, in fact—when my properly liberal Hollywood heart would have bled outrageously at the sight of such social and economic want. But now that I am playing fair to join their impoverished ranks, I find my capacity for moral indignation somewhat diminished, much I suppose as a man in a burning building does not overly concern himself with fire codes. Maybe later on, again, if I am lucky.

In any case, I continued on my way through the Estates, down streets that cut across fields where I once had mended fences and baled hay. And I kept going, on through the Regan place and past it, to what had once been Detweiler and Morgan land, all of it dismally the same now: a grid of identical streets running through a blighted forest of government-subsidized housing. At the west end of the Morgan farm, along a street named Park Place, there was indeed a park: a swimming pool, skating rink, and a half-dozen tennis courts, all radiating from the charred ruin of a central administration building and surrounded by a chain-link fence that for the most part was lying flat on the ground, severed from its posts. Not unexpectedly, the pool and the courts stood empty; but so did the skating rink, the government in its wanton generosity evidently having overlooked the little matter of providing ice skates as well as the rink on which to use them.

It was the area beyond the park, though, that was my real concern, and my goal too, all along, I realized now as it came into view up ahead, like a childhood night-mare flashing back to life. Yet there was beauty in the sight too, the spare old winter trees reigning over the stones and the few faded mini-flags and a single new grave, its flowers already scattered and frozen. Coming upon it in the midst of Woodglen Estates, the cemetery at first glance appeared serene and inviolable, like an artifact from another time, possibly because the fence surrounding it was not chain-link but wrought-iron and would have required a bulldozer to knock it over. But as I entered through the open gate and started up the hill, I saw that I had been wrong, that everything here—the scarred trees and grassless ground as well as the gravestones—was very much a part of the present. Those markers too sturdy to push over had been lavishly spray-painted, to the point where the graffiti on them eerily resembled the work of Jackson Pollock, undecipherable hieroglyphics for some confounded twenty-fifth-century Champolion.

But in truth, I barely saw the other gravestones as I threaded my way back toward a particular one standing on a slight rise near the cemetery’s back fence. It was about the size of a gasoline pump, a stout chest-high block of polished gray marble, with a single word cut into it, a word all but invisible under the graffiti. To satisfy myself, I took off my right glove and
felt
it, like a reader of braille. And I was relieved to find that it was all there, nothing chipped away, no letters missing, just that single word,
KENDALL
, as if it said all there was to say about those who lay under it. It crossed my mind that its obscene coating of paint would one day fade away just like that on the Parthenon and human eyes would see it again as it was meant to be seen, by our standards if not by those of the ancient Greeks. Jason had it cut and put in place at the time of my mother’s death, as the family stone, with the individual markers arrayed in front of it, each rising only about six inches above the ground.

It took an effort of will for me to look down at them now, my mother’s first. Happily I saw that she had survived relatively unscathed, with only an orange squiggle running across her name:
Emily Simpson Kendall 1911-1971
. But Cliff and Kate, not so lucky, had been raked with spray cans of many colors, the topmost one a lavender rendering of the central message of our time: Kate, on the outside, had caught the FUC; Cliff the KU. And I realized, kneeling there on the ground, that even if I’d had some paint remover, I would not have used it, for fear of what other messages would take this one’s place.

By then, I was feeling an enormous sense of regret that I had not brought something with me to place on the graves, even plastic flowers, anything that might have served as a token of what I felt for the three of them, the lifelong sense of loss and deprivation and useless love. But all I had were tears, which felt as if they were beginning to freeze on my face. So I impulsively placed my hand on the sharp corner of Kate’s stone and pushed down on it, twisting the heel back and forth until the skin finally broke and blood began to run onto the painted marble. Then I touched the wound to Cliff’s stone and to Mother’s. And standing, I placed it against the family marker as well, for what reason I really don’t know. All I remember is that it felt good. Maybe blood is thicker than tears, too.

I wrapped a handkerchief around the hand and put my glove back on. And as I turned to leave I saw a small old black man watching me from behind a tree. His wiry gray hair exploded out from under a stocking cap topped by a fedora and he was wearing an incredibly ratty fur coat over an odd assortment of sweaters, suit-coats, and sweatpants. At my glance, he gave me a wide toothless grin and nodded vigorously, as if he were in profound agreement with me about something important. Leaving the graves, I had to walk past him, which only seemed to broaden his smile and quicken the pace of his nodding. Though I assumed he was mad, I smiled at him and nodded slightly myself, as if to confirm our accord. Then I went on down the hill and out through the gate of the cemetery. And it was only then that I realized it had begun to snow, light random flakes, confetti for my lonely parade.

11

By the time I reached home those random flakes had turned into a snowfall heavy enough to make even Woodglen Estates look soft and lovely. But that evidently was not Mother Nature’s ultimate intention, for the snow continued to fall all through that evening and on into the night, increasing in intensity so steadily that I found myself unable to go to bed and instead spent my time checking on Jason and feeding wood into the kitchen stove and staring out the dining room windows at this new white world raging under the streetlamps. By ten o’clock, there were no cars moving on the road, not even snowplows, and at midnight, as I sat watching a television newsman give assurances that the storm was about to end, the electricity abruptly went off—out in the street as well as in the house. When I checked the phone and found it dead too, I felt a cold breath of panic, as if a door suddenly had blown open.

The reason of course was Jason. It had been two days since his ill-fated attempt to get out of bed and I was beginning to wonder if he would ever try again. He ate almost nothing and had not had a bowel movement since before Junior and Toni left. Though his breathing seemed almost normal on occasion, much of the time it was so labored he could barely speak. He no longer listened to the radio and he rarely rang his little bell or did anything else except just lie there in Sarah’s bed trying to stay warm under a half-dozen covers. Even during normal weather the gas furnace in the basement failed to heat the upstairs bedrooms adequately, which was why I had kept the kitchen stove going lately, hoping most of the heat would rise through the back stairway and edge into his room. But now, with the electricity off and the furnace inoperable, the problem of keeping the old man warm became critical.

If we had not been snowed in, I would surely have taken him to the hospital that night. As it was, all I could do was try to move him down to the kitchen, near the stove. But he was so opposed to the idea, by turns cussing me out and weeping helplessly, that I relented for the time being and instead tried to fashion by candlelight a giant makeshift heat duct running from the kitchen up into his room. Essentially all this involved was tacking blankets over the doorway to the dining room and across the upstairs hallway so that what little heat there was would more easily find its way into his room. I also tried to get him to drink some blackberry brandy I had found in the pantry, but he refused that too, leaving me with little choice except to knock off a few ounces of the stuff myself.

I then tried to get some sleep, stretching out on the sofa that we had moved into the kitchen earlier. But between keeping the fire going and listening for Jason, I was unable to fall asleep for hours. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was the fire in the stove, its open door a kind of miniature trapdoor to the infernal regions. And all I heard was the wind as it began to pick up outside, moaning and whistling under the eaves and around the corners of the house.

Time after time I got up and went over to the window, hoping to see something outside, especially the lights of a snowplow. But there was nothing save blackness and the soughing wind and I could only wonder if snow was still coming down, driven now by a blizzard wind. By the firelight I saw the porch thermometer standing at eighteen degrees, which should have been too cold for it to continue snowing. But I was not convinced. I drank more brandy and went upstairs to check on Jason again. Finding him peacefully asleep, I returned to the kitchen and put more wood on the fire and again stretched out on the sofa, under an unzipped sleeping bag. And in time I dropped off, sleeping until the morning light woke me in a cold and fireless room. The windows were frosted over and I had to open the door to see out, forcing it against a three-foot snowdrift, even there, on the side porch. Through the opening I saw a world of whiteness in which nothing moved or sounded. The snow was drifted high against the barn, covering the door to the Congo Lords’ clubroom as well as the corral running east to the garage, which itself was invisible except for a narrow two-foot strip under the eaves. I closed the kitchen door slowly, telling myself like a budding Pollyanna that at least it wasn’t snowing anymore.