Independence Day (63 page)

“Detachment,” I say. “They say he has a dilated retina. There’s no need to come right this second.”

“Is he
in
the hospital?” I have the feeling Ann is writing everything down now:
Henry Burris. Oneonta. Detachment, retina, batting cage? Paul, Frank
.

“Of course he’s in the hospital,” I say. “Where do you think he is?”

“What’s the exact name of the hospital, Frank?” She’s as deliberate as a scrub nurse; and I a merely dutiful next of kin.

“A. O. Fox. It’s probably the only hospital in town.”

“Is there an airport there?” Clearly she has written down
airport
.

“I don’t know. There should be, if there isn’t.” Then a silence opens, during which she may in fact have stopped writing.

“Frank, are you all right? You sound not very good.”

“I’m not very good. I didn’t have my eye knocked out, though.”

“He didn’t have his eye knocked out really, did he?” Ann says this in a pleading voice of motherhood that can’t be escaped.

From the door Irv turns toward me with a worried look, as if he’s overheard me say something bitter or argumentative. The black admissions nurse is looking at me too, over the top of her computer terminal.

“No,” I say, “he didn’t. But he got it knocked. It’s not very good.”

“Don’t let them do anything to him. Please? Until I get there? Can you?” She says this now in a sweet way that is tuned to the helplessness we share and that I would improve if I could but can’t. “Will you promise me that?” She has not yet mentioned her dream of injury. She has done me that kindness.

“Absolutely. I’ll tell the doctor right now.”

“Thank you so much,” Ann says. “I’ll be there in two hours or less. Just hold on.”

“I will. I’ll be right here. And so will Paul.”

“It won’t be very long,” Ann says half brightly. “All right?”

“All right.”

“Okay then. Okay.” And that is all.

F
or two hours that turn into three hours that turn into four, I walk round and round the little color-keyed lobby, while everything is on hold. (Under better circumstances this would be a natural time to make client calls and take my mind off worrying, but it’s not possible now.) Irv, who’s decided to toss in the afternoon “drinks party” with the ’59 Sox and keep me company, heads out at two and forages a couple of fat bags of Satellite burgers, which we eat mechanically in the plastic chairs while above us on TV the Mets play the Astros in audio-less nontime. Now is not an action period for the ER. Later, when the light fails and too much beer’s been guzzled on the lake, an extra base attempted with bone-breaking results, or when somebody who knows all about Roman candles doesn’t quite know enough—
then
resources here will be put to the test. As it is, one possibly self-inflicted minor knife wound, an obese woman with unexplained chest pains, one shirtless, shaken-up victim of a one-car rollover come through, but not all at once, and without fanfare (the last chauffeured in by the Cooperstown crew, who frown at me on their way back out). Everyone is eventually set free under his or her own power, all emerging stone-faced and chastened by the sorry outcome of their day. The nurses behind the admissions desk, though, stay in jokey spirits right through. “Now you wait’ll tomorrow ‘bout this time,” one of them says with a look of amazement. “This place’ll be jumpin’ like Grand Central Station at rush hour. The Fourth’s a
biiig
day for hurtin’ yourself.”

At three, a fat young crew-cut priest passes by, stops and comes back to where Irv and I are watching silent TV, asks in a confessional whisper if everything’s under control, and if not, is there anything he can do for us (it’s not; there isn’t), then heads smilingly off for the ICU wing.

Dr. Tisaris cruises through a time or two, seemingly without enough to do. Once she stops to tell me a “retina man” from Binghamton who did his work at “Mass Eye” has examined Paul (I never saw him arrive) and confirmed a retinal rupture, and “if it’d be okay we’d like to prep him for when your wife gets here, after which we can shoot him in. Dr. Rotollo”—the Binghamton hired gun—“will do the surgery.”

Once again I ask if I can see Paul (I haven’t since the ambulance left Cooperstown), and Dr. Tisaris looks inconvenienced but says yes, though she needs to keep him still to “minimalize” bleeding, and maybe I might just peek in unbeknownst, since he’s had a sedative.

Leaving Irv, I follow her,
squee-kee-gee, squee-kee-gee
, through the double doors into a brightly lit, mint-colored bullpen room smelling of rubbing alcohol, where there are examining bays around on all four walls, each hung with a green hospital curtain. Two special rooms are marked “Surgical” and have heavy, push-in doors with curved handles, and Paul is housed in one of these. When Dr. Tisaris cautiously shoves back the noiseless door, I see my son then, on his back on a bed-on-wheels equipped with metal sidebars, looking very bulky with both his eyes bandaged over like a mummy, but still in his black
Clergy
shirt and maroon shorts and orange socks, minus only his shoes, which sit side by side against the wall. His arms are folded on his chest in an impatient, judicial way, his legs out straight and stiff. A beam of intense light is trained down on his bandaged face, and he’s wearing his earphones plugged into a yellow Walkman I’ve never seen before, and which is resting on his chest. He seems to me in no particular pain and to all appearances except the bandages seems unbothered by the world (or else he’s dead, since I can’t detect rise or fall in his chest, no tremor in his fingers, no musical toe twitch to whatever he’s tuned in to). His ear, I see, has a new bandage.

I would of course dearly love to bound across and kiss him. Or if that couldn’t be, at least to do my waiting in here, unacknowledged amongst the instrument trays, oxygen tubes, defibrillator kits, needle dumps and rubber glove dispensers: sit a vigil on a padded stool, be a presence for my son, “useful” at least in principle, since my time for being a real contributor seems nearly over now, in the way that serious, unraveling injury can deflect the course of life and send it careering an all new way, leaving the old, uninjured self and its fussy familiars far back in the road.

But neither of these can happen, and time goes by as I stand with Dr. Tisaris simply watching Paul. A minute. Three. Finally I see a hopeful sigh of breath beneath his shirt and suddenly feel my ears being filled by hissing, so much that if someone spoke to me, said “Frank” again, out loud from behind, I might not hear, would only hear hiss, like air escaping or snow sliding off a roof or wind blowing through a piney bough—a hiss of acceptance.

Paul, then, for no obvious reason, turns his head straight toward us, as if he’s heard something (my hiss?) and knows someone is watching, can imagine me or someone through a red-black curtain of molten dark. Out loud, in his boy’s voice, he says, “Okay, who’s here?” He fiddles sightlessly with his Walkman to kill the volume. He may of course have said it any number of times when no one was present.

“It’s Dr. Tisaris, Paul,” she says, utterly calm. “Don’t be frightened.”

All hissing ceases.

“Who’s frightened?” he says, staring into his bandages.

“Are you still having flashes of light or vivid colors?”

“Yeah,” he says. “A little. Where’s my Dad?”

“He’s waiting for you.” She lays a cool finger upon my wrist. I am not to speak. I am the virus of too much trouble already. “He’s waiting for your Mom to get here, so we can fix your eye up.” Her starchy smock shifts against the doorframe. I catch a first faint scent of exotica from underneath its folds.

“Tell my dad he tries to control too much. He worries too much too,” Paul says. With his warty, tattooed hand he gropes down at his pleasure unit and gives it a delving scratch just like Irv, as though all lights were out and no one could see anyone. Then he sighs: great wisdom conferring great patience.

“I’ll see he gets that message,” Dr. Tisaris says in an echoless, professional’s voice.

And it is
this
voice that makes me wince, a not-small, mouth-skewing wince up from my knees, sudden and forceful enough that I have to clear my throat, turn my head away and gulp. Here is the voice of the
outer
world become primary: “I’ll see he gets that message; I’m sorry, that job’s filled; we’d like to ask you some questions; I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you now.” And so on, and so on, and so on all the way to: “I’m sorry to tell you your father, your mother, your sister, your son, your wife, your dog, your-
anybody
-you-might-ever-know-and-love-and-want-to-survive has left, disappeared, been called away, injured, maimed, expired.” While mine—the silenced voice of worry, love, patience, impatience, comradeship, thoughtlessness, understanding and genial acquiescence—is the small voice of the old small life losing ground. The Hall of Fame—impersonal but shareable—was meant as the staging ground for a new life’s safe beginning (and nearly, nearly was) but instead has had itself preempted by a regional hospital full of prognoses, voices without echoes, cheery disinterest, cold hard facts impossible to soften. (Why is it we’re never quite prepared, as I’m not now, for our plans to work out wrong?)

“Do you have any kids?” Paul asks sagely to his tanned doctor in a voice as echoless as hers.

“Nope,” she says, smiling jauntily. “Not yet.”

I should stay now, hear his views on child rearing, a subject he has unique experience with. Only my feet won’t hear of it and are inching back, shifting direction, then shoving off, getting out of range fast across the bullpen, headed for the doors, much as when I heard him years ago conferring ardently with his made-up “friends” at home and couldn’t bear it either, was made too weak and sick at heart by his inspired and almost perfect sufficiency.

“If you have any,” I hear him say, “don’t ever—“ Then that’s it, and I am quickly out through the metal doors and back into the cool watery room for relatives, friends, well-wishers, where I now belong.

B
y four Ann has not arrived, and Irv and I elect a walk out of the hospital, across the lawn and onto the summery afternoon streets of Oneonta, a town I never once for all my travels imagined myself in; never dreamed I’d be a worried father-in-waiting in, though that has been my MO for moons and moons.

Irv has blossomed into even wider good spirits, the net effect of awaiting dire events that aren’t truly dire for him, that will make him sorry if things go bad but never truly bereaved. (Much like your Aunt Beulah’s second husband, Bernie from Bismarck, who takes it on himself to tell jokes at your grandfather’s funeral and in doing so makes everyone feel a lot better.)

We troop purposefully out across the tonsured Bermuda grass and onto the warm sidewalk where hilly Main drops quickly toward town and is now much busier than when church was going. Here great shagbark hickories and American chestnuts, descendants of our central hardwood forest primeval, have bulged their roots through the aged, crumbly concrete and made strolling a challenge. Ranked along the descending street are old sagging frame residences built on the high ground above retaining walls, going gray and punky from the years and soon to be settling (if work’s not done and done soon) into perfect valuelessness. Some are deserted, some have American flags flying, a couple show familiar yellow ribbons, while others show signs that say FOR RENT. FOR SALE. FREE IF YOU MOVE IT. In my trade these are “carpenter’s specials,” “starter homes for newlys,” “not for everyone” homes, “mystery abounds” homes, “make offer” homes—the downward-tending lingo of loss.

Irv, being Irv, means to take up an issue, and in this case the issue is “continuity,” which is what his life at least seems to him to be “all about” these days—recognizing, he willingly admits, that his concern may be “tied to” his Jewishness and to the need to strive, to the pressure of history and to a certain significant portion of his life spent on a kibbutz after his first marriage went down the tubes and wrecked continuity big-time, and where he harrowed the dry and unforgiving Bible land, read the Torah, served six nerve-racking months in the Israeli army and eventually married another kibbutznik (from Shaker Heights), a marriage that also didn’t last long and ended in scalding, vituperative, religiously dispiriting divorce.

“I learned a lot in the kibbutz, Frank,” Irv says, his rattan sandals slapping the split pavement as we head down Main at a good clip. We seem by no particular design to be aiming toward a red Dairy Queen sign below on the Oneonta strip-commercial, a neighborhood where the houses stop and possibly it’s unsafe for strangers (a neighborhood in transition).

“Everybody I know who went over there says it was pretty interesting, even if they didn’t like it much,” I say. I actually know no one but Irv who ever admitted to living on a kibbutz, and all I
do
know I read in the Trenton
Times
. Irv, though, is not a bad advertisement for the life, since he’s decent and thoughtful and not at all a pain in the ass. (I’ve now recalled Irv’s boyhood persona: the exuberant, accommodating, gullible-but-complex “big” boy who needed to shave way too early in life.)

“You know, Frank, Judaism doesn’t have to be practiced just in the synagogue,” Irv says solemnly. “Growing up in Skokie, I didn’t always have that impression. Not that my family was ever devout in any way.”
Slap-slap, slip-slap, slip-slop
. Local toughs with local sweethearts notched under their bulging biceps are cruising East Main in hot-looking Trans Ams and dark, channeled S-10s. (No Monzas.) Irv and I stand out here like two Latvian rustics in native attire, which isn’t that uncomfortable since it’s our own country. (A common language alone
should
assure us entry-level acceptance anywhere within a two-thousand-mile radius of Kansas City, though pushing your luck could mean trouble, just like on a kibbutz, and we are now and then glared at.)