Half the Kingdom (7 page)

Al saw Lucy among the patients on the chairs and avoided her eye. He saw a fat girl asleep with her head on the shoulder of a fat mother and a teenage boy sucking on a Coke bottle. An old man who held a bloody napkin to his temple asked Al what time it was.

“I’m supposed to interview …” Al checked the name on the Intake Form for Seniors, “Francis Rhinelander?”

The nurse had the look people must mean when they said someone had a horse face. She picked up the left arm and checked the wrist of the other old man. This one might have been a movie extra made to look as if he’d been beaten up. “Take him in the second cubicle,” said Nurse Trotwood. “I’ll get him a gown.”

Francis Rhinelander

The old man dangled his legs over the edge of the gurney and tried in vain to pull the hem of his hospital gown down to cover his naked knees. Al asked him did he know where he was, and he did. He knew that he lived in the Hotel Strasburg on Madison Avenue. His sentences tended to end on the rising or “feminine” note as if they awaited confirmation.

Al wrote in the month, day, and a year of his birth in the second decade of the nineteen-hundreds. “Nearest relative?”

“My brother, George, in Godford, Connecticut? I just came back from a visit.” The Intake Form for Seniors had
no line for the brother’s wife, the several nephews, or the fact that the patient had that day returned from a visit.

“Marital status?”

“I’m single.” The patient did not add that he still, once in a while though never very strenuously, imagined that some pleasing, tall, and more than ordinarily forceful woman might come along and marry him.

“Education?”

“Godford High.” The patient said that their house had stood on School Street so that all he, his brother, and their dad, who, he said, taught Godford Middle School math, had to do was to just cross over. “I took piano at Juilliard,” said the patient.

Al said, “My mom plays the piano,” and blushed, wondering whether it was okay for an interviewer to have a mom.

“And composition,” Rhinelander said.

“Oh, wow.” The interviewer was interested. “What did you compose?”

For a moment the old man was silent. He said, “Did you know Verdi wrote
Otello
when he was seventy-four? He was seventy-eight when he wrote
Falstaff
.”

Al did not know this. “Employment history?” he asked the patient.

Until his retirement, Francis Rhinelander had taught math at Joan of Arc on Manhattan’s West Side. He had never grown accustomed to the global shriek that accumulates from the
individual shrieks out of young throats in confined spaces. But he had learned to suffer the small panic with which he had always opened the door to his next class. Francis Rhinelander would stand at his tall height in front of a room of leaping, circling, howling dervishes and call for order. “Will everybody come to order, please! Order! Everybody settle down! Order! Everybody!”

“Same vocabulary and same lack of effect as the speaker of our House of Commons,” the humorous Brit in the next classroom said to Francis.

“And I gave private piano lessons,” Rhinelander told Al.

Rhinelander mentioned that he had been responsible for producing the lower-school entertainment on annual grandparents’ day. “The chorus sang ‘Oh Happy Day,’ the solo piano played ‘Für Elise.’ The first-graders had colored boomsticks and banged them together.”

“That’s so cute!” Al said.

“Not really. Margaret West, my Godford piano teacher, used to say you’d be surprised how many children don’t have talent.”

“Psychiatric history?” asked the Intake Form. Had Mr. Rhinelander ever been in therapy?

“No. Well, yes, the time I checked myself into Bellevue, after I first moved to New York.”

Bellevue had transferred the patient to Upland State Hospital, where Dr. Lev Erwin was doing admissions. He asked the incoming patient what seemed to be the matter.

Rhinelander said, “I think I’m hearing music.”

“Aural hallucination,” the doctor penciled on his pad and said, “Hold on,” got up, and walked over to the window, where he let down the venetian blinds to block the winter sun’s horizontal rays. He came back, sat down, and said, “Where and when do you hear this music?”

“Think. I
think
I hear music.” Having contradicted a doctor, Rhinelander smiled and ducked his head.

“When and where do you
think
you hear this music?”

“All the time, everywhere.”

“Hearing the music of the spheres, are you?” joked the doctor. “What sort of music are the spheres into these days?”

“Orchestral, vocal, classical, light classical, pop, the standards, movie music, classic rock, punk, rap …”

“Dark in here, isn’t it?” The doctor got up, walked to the window, turned the plastic wand to halfway open the slats of the blinds, and came back and sat down.

The patient said, “I think I hear music in my dentist’s waiting room, my hotel, in the lobby, the elevator, the cafeteria? In the
men’s room
!”

“You mean Muzak,” the doctor said.

“And always—I
always
hear music when there’s somebody talking! This professor will be lecturing about the Cultural Revolution and I’m hearing a pentatonic
chink-chink
that I must be thinking is Chinese-type music, and so loud I have to strain to even catch the words? Particle physics and
I
think I’m hearing Philip Glass?”

“You’re talking about background music,” the doctor said.

“A man will be selling a car?
I think
I hear the Goldberg Variations!”

“You mean on the TV!”

“And on my little radio that I have on the chair next to my bed. This general says that making soldiers clean up after hurricanes will ruin their will to kill? I think I’m hearing Sousa.”

The alternating shadow and light that striped the top of the desk, striped the patient, irritated the doctor. He got up, walked to the window, and changed the slant of the slats of the venetian blind. “Stuffy in here, isn’t it?”

“A little,” said the patient agreeably.

The doctor opened the window an inch at the bottom, came back, and sat down. “You tell me if it gets too cold.”

“It’s fine,” the patient said.

“So. Let me ask you this,” said the doctor. “Do you ever hear any music you
think
might really be playing—let’s say on your TV?”

“Aha!” cried the patient. His ace in the hole (which he was going to repeat to his fellow inmates for the several weeks they kept him in the Upland facility): “Did you ever see that pretty girl who is brushing her teeth?”

“You mean the toothpaste commercial?”

“Right! And she smiles and brushes her teeth and sings ‘Brush your teeth with Physohilo, smile the Physohilo smile, oh!’? Now,” said Francis Rhinelander, “you can be brushing your teeth and be simultaneously smiling. If you think about it, you can’t
be
brushing your teeth and not be smiling. And there
are
people who can simultaneously sing
and
smile, but!”
cried the patient triumphantly as if he were his own prosecutor clinching the case against himself: “You cannot—because I’ve tried it in front of the mirror and you cannot brush and sing and smile and I
see
her smiling and think I hear her singing ‘Smile the Physohilo smile, oh!’
while
she is brushing her teeth.
Which is not possible!
”

The patient’s hysterical enthusiasm made the doctor pick up the telephone. “This is Dr. Erwin in admissions. See who’s on duty, will you?” The doctor, with the phone to his ear, turned to frown at the venetian blind, which faintly rustled like the little sound that balled-up paper makes when it relaxes in your wastebasket, and it was driving the doctor insane. “Fine! You send me Clarence,” he said into the telephone. “I have a patient ready to be taken to A North. Right away,
please
.” While they waited for Clarence to come and fetch Francis Rhinelander, the doctor got up, walked to the window, and shut it.

It was Dr. Erwin who, seven weeks later, signed Francis Rhinelander’s release, citing a diagnosis of “temporary reactive psychosis” with the question of the stimulus to which the patient had been reacting, as is so often the case, left unanswered. At his hearing, the patient affirmed the reality of the music that he had hallucinated to be hallucinating. It was no strain for Francis to appear his naturally courteous and apologetic self, which had assured the three examining doctors, correctly, that he presented no danger to himself or others. The hospital had released him on his own recognizance.

Ida Farkasz

Ida Farkasz did not recognize her name being called, and the triage nurse had to come out into the waiting area and lead the patient into her office.

“Do you know where you are?” the nurse asked the patient.

“Where you are,” said the patient and touched her forefinger to her lip, then to her chin, and then to her lip again.

The nurse spoke slowly into the patient’s face. “Do. You. Know. Where. You. Live?”

Ida Farkasz frowned and said, “Where you live.” Ida was frowning at not knowing what the person was saying to her. Not knowing had volume, was cloud-colored and located behind her eyes. Ida moved the finger from her lip to a place toward the back of the top of her head. She needed to put her hand inside, to reach around the way you reach around inside a drawer for—what?

The triage nurse had to walk the patient into the ER. “They’ll take care of you! You sit here.”

Ida sat on a chair and touched her lip, her chin.

The nurse went back out to the triage office and called Phyllis on the second floor.

Samson Gorewitz

Lucy saw Benedict. She watched him talking to a pleasant-looking nurse who had just come on duty.

“Yours is Samson Gorewitz,” the nurse was saying, “the transfer from Glenshore General.” The old man lay flat on his back and looked at the ceiling. Benedict had to lean over the gurney to place himself in the patient’s field of vision, and he said,

“Hi! Hello. I’m your interviewer.” Benedict asked the patient if he knew where he was and thought the old man said, “In heaven.” He spoke out of the right corner of his mouth, which was raised and might be smiling. He said,

“Iftheyfindmenotlookintheotherplace.”

Benedict experienced a powerful sense of ill usage: this was not what he had signed on for. He looked around for that pleasant nurse but she had her back to him, standing on tiptoe to write on the green chalkboard mounted high on the wall. Benedict looked to his mother, whose head was lowered over something she was writing on her lap. He wished himself back in the office, wanted his computer, but followed the orderly who had come to wheel his patient into one of the cubicles. It was like the cubicle where they had sat with his father; Benedict had stood because there was always only one chair. His mother had worried about it.

Benedict was alone with the old man the right side of whose face might be laughing.

“Name?” the Intake Form prompted Benedict to ask him.

The patient must be saying “Samson Gorewitz.” It was typed in on the form.

“Social Security?”

The patient palpated the chest of the hospital gown,
which had no pocket, but the number, his birth information, and a Columbus, Ohio, street address were also typed on the appropriate lines.

“Nearest relative?” asked the Intake Form.

“Mysn Stewrt.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mysn inpairs.”

A son, was it, in pairs! Let that go for the moment.

“Marital status?”

Benedict made out that the patient was widowed.

“Education?”

“Hiostate.”

“Ohio State? Is that right?”

“Ratrat!”

“Occupation?” Benedict was unable, first and last, to make out what the patient had done with, to, or about a “peppermill.”

Next to “Comments,” Benedict noted, One-sided facial paralysis (?) makes patient’s speech difficult/impossible to follow. May be confused/demented (?)

Lucy saw Dr. Haddad approaching and raised her hand, and then lowered it to adjust her hair at the back when the doctor passed without stopping. It’s what we do to keep the world from witnessing that we have been left standing on the sidewalk by an empty cab—the anti-Semite! Well, but hold on now: Haddad might be preserving the fiction that Lucy was like any regular patient, waiting to be attended to.
Lucy watched the doctor walk into the cubicle into which Benedict had followed the patient on the gurney, and out of which, in another moment, he emerged calling to the Pleasant Nurse: “The doctor wants you to get him a proper pillow.” Lucy’s eyes followed Benedict, who moved in the direction of the exit, where he passed the two old women hovering in the doorway.

Deborah and Shirley

Joe had praised Lucy’s powers of observation. It had her wondering about the things she thought she knew about those two women. They were sisters; their four black eyes peered in with identical anxiety. They were expecting to learn certain hideous news. This cruel anxiety of theirs, however, was momentarily displaced by the little acute malaise of not knowing if they were allowed to just walk into the ER. Lucy beckoned to them: Come on! You can come on in. They stepped into the foreign space in which they did not know whether they were meant to move forward, to the left or right: They suspected themselves of being the wrong people in the wrong place, about to be found out. Lucy liked the one with the gray hair. The other had home-dyed her hair a black color that does not exist in nature; some sales lady had instructed her to tie the scarf like that. She didn’t look like New York. The two women found the cubicle Benedict had come out of and went in.

Deborah and Shirley came through the curtains, which the young person with the—what do they call the thing they wear over their head?—parted for them. “You have visitors,” she said to Sammy on the gurney.

They had to arrange their faces before they came and kissed the smiling half of his face, the half that looked like Sammy. The other, the left half, had suffered a slippage. Shirley covered her mouth with her hand.