Love Among the Walnuts (7 page)

Sunnie rang the bell on the counter. At its sound, the voices behind the door ceased. There was a long pause, and then the door flew open as if it had been kicked. A figure in a flowered shift over gray sweatpants burst out. She wore high-top basketball shoes and a white nurse's cap, and a cigarette with a long ash hung from the corner of her mouth. She carried a screwdriver.

"Yeah?" she said.

"We want to talk to somebody about your facility," Sunnie said. "Are you in charge?"

The woman snorted and then yelled over her shoulder, "Hey, Doc! Some people to see you." Turning back to Sandy and Sunnie, she said, "Good luck keeping him awake." Then she hit the swinging half door at the end of the counter with her fist, rushed through it and out the office door.

From the inner office came a short man in an old-fashioned gray suit and round, wire-rimmed glasses. He blinked, smoothed his fringe of white hair, and asked hesitantly, "What can I do to help you?"

"We'd like a tour of Walnut Manor," Sunnie said.

"Really?" the man asked. "It's been years since I've given a tour, but sure, I can do that, I guess. How come you're interested in Walnut Manor?"

"We're looking for a good convalescent hospital for some members of our family."

"Some?" the man asked. "There's more than one?"

"Three," Sunnie said, deliberately neglecting to mention Attila. This would be hard enough to explain without bringing in a chicken.

"Three!" the man said, brightening considerably. "Well. I'm Dr. Waldemar, the director, and we definitely have room for three more." He came around the counter to shake hands with them. He gave them each a brochure and fee schedule.

"Who was that woman?" Sandy asked, unable to restrain his curiosity any longer.

"Oh, that's Opal, our nurse. But please, don't let appearances deceive you; she's highly competent. Living out here in the country, we've both gotten a little out of touch with current fashions. I believe that the quality of the heart that lies beneath the clothes is more important than the clothes themselves."

"Nobody could argue with that," Sandy said.

"I must tell you," Dr. Waldemar said, "that our patient count has been dwindling for some time. For one thing, we're so far from town that it's difficult for families to come visit. And for another, insurance companies don't pay for our services the way they used to, so we can keep only those patients who can personally afford our care. We've had to close off one wing to keep costs down, and we no longer, heat the pool. But I assure you," he added hastily, "our guests get the finest care."

"Could we see some of the guests?" Sunnie asked.

"Certainly. They should be in the library now. After breakfast they're supposed to straighten their rooms, and then they spend most of the rest of the day in the library. We keep the fire going, and it's quite cozy."

They crossed the wide central hall to the library's double doors, which Dr. Waldemar opened. The library was a large, elegantly proportioned room, with a coffered ceiling and two walls of bookshelves rising all the way to it. At the far end of the room, French doors opened out onto a stone porch. In the center of the remaining wall, a fireplace blazed away cheerfully.

A pale, potato-shaped man sat on a couch in front of a televised exercise program twitching his arms and shoulders in a pallid imitation of what the instructor on the screen was doing. Another pale, potato-shaped man sat next to him doing nothing.

At a table in the middle of the room, four men were playing cards. One of the men wore a yachting cap; one had a full, white, Santa Claus beard; and one had his thumb in his mouth. Everything about the fourth man could be characterized as "average"; the police would never have been able to identify him from a description of all his average attributes.

A thin young man was lying on a wheeled platform resting next to one of the bookcases, and another young man, who looked to be about seventeen and to weigh close to three hundred pounds, stood at the French doors looking out onto the empty flower beds.

"We're down to eight now," Dr. Waldemar said. "And most of them have been here for a long, long time. I don't know why they're all men. Maybe families are more willing to take care of their distressed female relatives at home. Maybe females don't get as distressed. I just don't know."

As Dr. Waldemar, Sunnie, and Sandy stood inside the door talking, all the men at the card table put down their cards and looked at them.

"We have some visitors today," Dr. Waldemar said. "We'll be on our best behavior, won't we?"

The man with the beard and the man with the yachting cap gave almost identical scowls and picked up their cards.

The average-looking man at the card table said, "'You can observe a lot just by watching.' Yogi Berra."

Sunnie glanced at Dr. Waldemar.

"That's Everett. He always speaks in quotations. He doesn't see any reason to speak in his own words because he thinks somebody else has already said it better than he can."

"'I quote others only the better to express myself.' Michel de Montaigne," Everett said.

"Michel de Montaigne. 1533 to 1592," Sandy said.

Sunnie stared at him. So did Dr. Waldemar and Everett. Then Everett jumped up, ran to Sandy, and embraced him. He drew back and regarded Sandy sternly. "'Beware of false knowledge,'" he said, "'it is more dangerous than ignorance.' George Bernard Shaw."

"It's not false," Sandy said, a little indignantly. "My family and I read a lot of Montaigne when I was growing up. Montaigne said something I've been thinking about a lot lately."

"What's that?" Dr. Waldemar asked.

"He said 'What do I know?'" Sandy replied.

Everett embraced Sandy again, with tears in his eyes. "'One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.' George Santayana."

"Sorry," Sandy said. "I don't know anything about George Santayana."

When Everett had gone back to the card table, Dr. Waldemar led Sunnie and Sandy out into the hall and closed the doors behind them.

"What's wrong with all those people?" Sandy asked.

"Nothing serious, most of them. Just bothersome to their families, really. You heard Everett. All those quotes were driving his wife crazy. And he gets overexcited by anybody else who knows a quote, the way he did with you. The one with the thumb in his mouth, Boom-Boom, now he's an interesting case. He's a split personality, one part grown-up, and the other part still a little child. Switches back and forth all the time. The man with the white beard, that's Whitney Hamilton Atherton Moreland III. Maybe you've heard of him. He's one of the richest men in the country, but he was getting so forgetful, he couldn't run his business anymore. He's so irascible, none of his family would take him in. He's been here for eight or nine years. Let's see. The one with the yachting cap, that's L. Barlow Van Dyke, another rich man. But hard to get along with, too. In fact, the last time he spoke to anybody was the day his family brought him here, about the same time Mr. Moreland arrived. Hasn't said a word since. But he can scowl volumes. The fat boy, Graham, is just too depressed about being fat to go to school anymore. He couldn't take the teasing. His parents won't let him come home until he slims down and cheers up, but he hasn't lost an ounce or smiled since he's been here."

"What about the boy lying down?"

"That's Eddy, our most serious case. One day he just lay down—said he was tired—and he's never gotten up again. Hasn't spoken again, either. He's not much trouble, but I do feel sorry for him, wasting his youth like that. His parents haven't been to see him in ages. The two on the couch, Virgil and Lyle, are bachelor brothers. They just aren't suited for modern life, I think. They're afraid of everything. When it got to the point where they were afraid to leave their house—they lived together—their married sisters shipped them here, where the only life they experience is on TV."

"Are the patients getting any kind of treatment?" Sunnie asked.

"Oh, no," Dr. Waldemar replied. "There's really not much we can do for them. Either they haven't responded to treatment, like Eddy and Boom-Boom, or they're too uncooperative to treat, like L. Barlow Van Dyke and Whitney Hamilton Atherton Moreland III, or they're perfectly satisfied the way they are, like Virgil and Lyle and Everett."

"What about Graham?" Sunnie asked.

"He won't even try. He just mopes and eats. So what we do is keep them comfortable and entertained. To tell you the truth, if any of them were to get better, they wouldn't have any place to go. Their families really don't want them back."

Dr. Waldemar showed Sunnie and Sandy around the rest of Walnut Manor, and everywhere they looked, they saw Opal at work. As they walked through the grounds, she was up in a tree sawing off a broken limb. Then she applied mortar to some bricks that had fallen out of the wall separating Walnut Manor from Eclipse.

Later, in the kitchen, they saw her chopping vegetables and tossing them into a large kettle on the stove. When she finished chopping, she stirred the soup with one hand and spread peanut butter on slices of bread with the other.

Upstairs, she skated down the hall, dust mops on her feet and a paintbrush in her hand, touching up chips in the wall as she went.

"How big is your staff here?" Sunnie asked Dr. Waldemar.

"Now there's just Opal and me. It's hard to get the kind of help we need, way out here in the country. When it got so we couldn't attract any nurses, Opal took a nursing degree through correspondence school. You never knew when she'd come flying at you to practice her tourniquets or try to change your bed with you still in it."

"How can you get a nursing degree through correspondence school?" Sunnie wondered.

"It ain't easy," Opal replied, skating by on her dust mops.

"We both live on the premises," Dr. Waldemar said as they started down the stairs. "So the patients are never left unattended. Opal grows a vegetable garden in the summer and cans the produce for winter. We're almost self-sustaining. We've got a few chickens for eggs and a cow for milk and butter."

"Thank you for the tour, Dr. Waldemar," Sunnie said. "We'll talk it over and let you know."

"Ah, exactly what is it that
three
members of your family have?" asked Dr. Waldemar as he walked them to the door.

"Comas," Sunnie said, opening the door. "Bye."

Dr. Waldemar's mouth gaped as if to say something, but Sunnie took Sandy's hand and pulled him down the stairs to their bicycles. Dr. Waldemar watched, his mouth still ajar, as they rode away.

As soon as Dr. Waldemar and Walnut Manor were out of sight, Sunnie began to giggle.

"What's so funny?" Sandy asked.

"Oh, Sandy, did you see the look on Dr. Waldemar's face? Do you think for one minute he believed we have three comatose relatives?,
Nobody
has
three
comatose relatives. Oh, is he going to be surprised when we move them in there."

"You think we should put them in Walnut Manor?"

"Yes, I do. Maybe something funny's going on there, but it's plain to see Dr. Waldemar and Opal like the patients and treat them well. That's worth a lot more than a heated swimming pool and gourmet meals. Besides, the location can't be beat."

"What do you mean something funny's going on there?" Sandy asked as they pedaled down the road toward Eclipse. "It didn't look like a funny place to me."

"Not that kind of funny. I mean, a place that charges the kind of fees that place does shouldn't have to turn off the heat in the swimming pool and serve peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and keep a cow and chickens. And they should have more staff. And those patients should be getting some kind of treatment, not just sitting around playing cards and watching TV. Oh, what a challenge that place could be. How I'd love an assignment like that. It would be heaven!"

"Sunnie, if we're going to put Horatio and Mousey and Flossie and Attila in Walnut Manor, I want you to go with them. Opal's too busy to give them the care they need. I won't feel right about sending them there unless you say you'll go, too."

Sunnie looked at him. Tears gleamed in her eyes and her bicycle wobbled precariously. "Oh, Sandy, what a lovely thing to say. There's nothing I'd like better. I could hardly bear the idea of leaving Eclipse and ... and my dear patients. If your lawyers say it's OK, then I'd love to stay. You know, I'm a little like the people at Walnut Manor; if I left here, I don't know where I'd go. I don't have any parents, and now that I'm finished with nursing school, I don't even have a dormitory to live in. And I'd have hated to leave here without knowing how the story ended. The story of your parents, I mean. I want to be around when they wake up. I'll stay right here with them until they're all right, even if it takes years."

"In a way, I hope it does," Sandy murmured, gazing at Sunnie with gratitude, and also with something else—something more complicated and harder to understand.

"You know," Sunnie said, pedaling straight again, "I like to think of life as a story. Somehow that helps it make sense. When something bad is happening, like when my, mother died, I think,
If I were making this into a story, what would I have happen next?
And I think up something that helps me get through the bad part. I admit I never would have thought of having my father die at the same time as my mother and leave me money for nursing school, but that turned out to be better than anything I did think up. Do you ever do that?"

"No," admitted Sandy. "But this is the first time anything bad has happened to me."

"Well, how would you like it to end?"

"Of course I want my parents and Flossie and Attila to be all right—"

"Don't worry," she interrupted. "They will be."

"And I want Bart and Bernie to get what they deserve. They were bad enough when all they were was lazy and greedy. But now, since they tried to kill us and then blame me for what happened, they're worse than anything I could have thought up for a story."

"Absolutely right," she said. "What else?"

"You're not going to like this part. I'd like to spend more time in the city. I know you think Eclipse is perfect, but you've known another life. There is so much energy and excitement in the city, something I've never felt, living in Eclipse. I like it."