Styx & Stone (12 page)

The door opened and Raul peered out. A gregarious, rotund man in his fifties, he had worked the elevator for ten years, always chattering, always smiling. My mother used to warn me never to tell him anything confidential because he was a terrific gossip.

“Those people who just left,” I said, “How did they get up here?”

“I brought them,” he said, perplexed by my question.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

He smiled. “I didn’t call you because they were going to 1504.”

“Mrs. Farber? But they came to see me.”

Raul shrugged his entire torso. “The gentleman asked for 1504. I thought they were going to Mrs. Farber’s. I usually work days,” he explained. “And I just had a knee operation.” He pointed to his left leg. “So I haven’t been around for the past three months. I don’t know all the people who come at night. But us guys chat before coming on a shift, you know, to pass along messages.”

“About Mrs. Farber,” I prompted.

“Right. Well, you know that we announce all visitors. So, when I came on duty tonight, Rodney tells me Mrs. Farber is expecting her usual gentleman, and I’m supposed to let him up without calling.”

“Mr. Walter?”

“That’s the guy,” said Raul. He shook his head. “Mrs. Farber called me about an hour ago to say she was expecting company. But since I never seen the guy before, when they asked for her apartment number I assumed they were OK. I thought it was a little strange for three of them to come. And from what Rodney said, I figured this Walter guy to be a little older, but that’s not my business. Sorry for the mix-up, Miss Stone. And about your father, too.”

“What about Mr. Walter?” I asked. “Did he show up?”

Raul shook his head. “She called me up about ten minutes ago asking if I seen him.”

I returned to my father’s apartment and found Gigi waiting in the foyer, wearing his shirt and nothing else.

“Where were you?” he asked.

“Just talking to the elevator man,” I said. “Chalmers is gone.”

“What did he want? Did he know I was here?”

I shook my head. “No. He wanted to talk to me about Ruggero Ercolano. To explain how he had happened to find the body at such an hour.”

“And?” he said finally. “What was his explanation?”

“He said someone called him from Ercolano’s apartment. A young lady. It seems Chalmers wants to protect this girl’s reputation, so he didn’t tell the police about her.”

Gigi listened, attentive but not overly interested. “Did he tell you who she was?”

I shook my head.

He shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know.”

I felt vaguely guilty about my night with Gigi. He was attractive and eager, and I had no qualms about what he wanted from me, but I couldn’t shake the shadow of my father’s regard, particularly in his own house. God knows I didn’t want to care what he thought of me, but I was still subject to shame when I thought about how undignified the rut of intercourse would seem to him. (Why had I let that enter my mind?) And should I be enjoying so pleasant a pastime while my father hovered near death a few blocks away? The last few days had been a thorny journey for me. Returning home after so long, for the first time since my mother had died; sensing Elijah’s presence and absence all about me; seeing my father so fragile, without a voice; and facing the prospect of the rest of my life as the last Stone standing. And then there was my shameful behavior with the shameless Mr. Lucchesi. He was a comfortable diversion, a blur in my head. I had lots to do but felt no drive to get on with it. I was like Ulysses in the thrall of a curly-haired siren. Or an incubus.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 1960

The next morning, Wednesday, in the light of day, a palpable discomfiture hung in the air. After our intimacy, covered by the darkness of night, we had to face each other as the virtual strangers we were; we had little to say if we weren’t flirting. I covered myself shyly with a robe before slipping into the bathroom to dress.

When I emerged a while later, I had composed myself, and the façade was up again. I smiled at my guest, waved for him to follow me to the kitchen, and asked him how to make a proper pot of Italian coffee, what they call
espresso
in coffeehouses like the Figaro on Bleecker. Once he’d finished his demonstration, as he rinsed out the machine, I took the coffee into my father’s study where I planned to have one last look around before asking Nelda to clean up.

My father’s collection comprised more than six hundred LPs and 78s, plus about a hundred reel-to-reel tapes. I examined the pile of disks on the floor, separating the shattered from the merely scattered. I matched the undamaged records to their jackets and stacked them on the corner of the desk. Of the broken ones, I collected the identifying labels in a separate pile that I planned to catalogue in case my father wanted to replace them. In case he’d still be around to want to replace them. Then I checked the titles against the orphaned dust jackets, all of which had been torn. It took only a few minutes to figure the damage: four LPs of Mendelssohn’s (
Lieder
,
Italian Symphony
, and incidental music to
A Mid-summer Night’s Dream
); two Mahlers (symphonies V and IX); Bruch (the violin concerto and
Kol Nidrei
); one Meyerbeer and Bloch (
Poèmes juifs
). Arthur Rubinstein, Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
and
An American in Paris
; and Bruckner’s Second Symphony. Thirteen disks by my reckoning, and an eclectic, anachronistic collection to boot. The destroyed records crossed generic boundaries and spanned centuries, in what appeared at first glance to be a random fashion. But what alerted me to a pattern was the destruction of more than one LP by a particular composer. Mendelssohn, Mahler, Bruch, and Gershwin each had been hit at least twice. The burglar hadn’t destroyed all of their work, but they were certainly targets.

I circled the room, rethinking every detail with new intensity. The constant traffic through the apartment had disturbed nearly everything, making it impossible to reconstruct the state of the mess the morning after the burglary. Easing myself into the leather sofa, I sipped my coffee and thought hard. I stared at the torn dust covers on my father’s desk, searching for an explanation, something to justify the burglar’s apparent dislike of the music before me. It didn’t take long, and I almost laughed at myself for not having seen it right away.

“What are you doing, Ellie?” asked Gigi from the study door.

“Thinking of changing the locks.”

Gigi ducked out a few minutes before I left, asking me to buzz the elevator in five minutes.

“I’ll take the stairs,” he said.

I asked why.

He blushed. “A girl doesn’t want everyone to know she’s had a gentleman spend the night.”

“You’re no gentleman,” I smiled.

“Five minutes, OK? I’ll listen for the elevator to go up before I sneak out the front door.”

I agreed, wondering if this was his routine or some spontaneous inspiration. God, he was beautiful. More than that, he was a kick. And I didn’t know what I was doing with him.

Morning at Saint Vincent’s: puffy-eyed attendants, slow starters even in summer, lean on their gurneys and flirt with the nurses. The residents and interns, wearing stethoscopes like badges, scurry up and down the corridors, attending to their urgent cases. The doctors shuffle in later, sipping their coffee, reading their charts, and mumbling directives to the nurses, all without the haste of their juniors. The patients just lie there.

I sensed something was wrong as soon as I reached my father’s bed. His breathing was low, almost imperceptible. Yet despite the weakness, he seemed to be struggling for air beneath the breathing tube. I hit the call button and yelled for help. A few seconds later, a thin blonde nurse arrived.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. “Look at him.”

The nurse bent over the patient, checking his vital signs, while the respirator bellows continued to pump its usual rhythm. Still, it wasn’t right. My eyes darted to the tube snaking from the oxygen tank to the bellows, following it along the floor to its juncture with the glass jar. I could hear air whistling through the respirator, so I knew the problem wasn’t there. Maybe the bellows’ exit tube—the one stuffed down my father’s throat—was blocked or twisted. Starting from his mouth, I felt my way up the tube, and immediately found that it was lying on the floor. The nozzle of the glass jar was uncovered, oxygen hissing from its mouth into the room as the respirator tube lay harmlessly on the white-tiled floor below. The thumb-screw clamp on the nozzle was open wide. I snatched the tube off the floor and stuffed it onto the nozzle. My father’s chest inflated immediately.

The nurse, noticing what I was doing, glided around the bed, slipping past the machinery like a nimble pixie. Without a word, she relieved me of the respirator tube, sliding the clamp back over the end of the hose and screwing it tight. When the apparatus was secure, she turned to me.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded. “Isn’t this the ICU? How about some intensive care?”

The nurse, whose name tag identified her as
R. Tielman
, smoothed her white frock and pursed her lips. “I don’t know how this happened, miss, but I’m going to find out. I’ll get a doctor,” she said as she rushed down the corridor.

The confusion mounted. I became aware of a low, pulsing beat coming from the machine next to the bed. The rhythm bounced, dipped, then sped up and began to flutter wildly in short beeps. An intern arrived at a gallop, Nurse Tielman at his heels, and a second nurse bringing up the rear. The young doctor pushed past me and hunched over my father, checking his pupils, respiration, and pulse rate. He watched the blipping machine for a moment before turning calmly to Nurse Tielman.

“Riley, I need some epinephrine and digoxin. And get me a cardiac needle.”

She took off on a run toward the pharmacy, and the doctor addressed the other nurse: “Phyllis, get a crash cart in here, now. And page Dr. Frankel. He should be in Cardiology.”

Phyllis, too, disappeared, leaving me with the intern and my father, whose chest was rising and falling violently. He was struggling for his life. I felt powerless, useless, and in the way. Then the fluttering beeps ceased, and a steady, high-pitched tone shrieked from the EKG machine next to the bed. I stared at the paper-strip recorder. The stylus had stopped moving and was leaving a flat line in its wake on the scroll.

“What is it?” I demanded. “What is it? Tell me!”

The intern was massaging my father’s chest, over the heart. He didn’t turn to look at me. “You shouldn’t be here for this,” he said, the machine still howling like a siren. “His heart has stopped. Please wait in the lounge, miss. We’ll send for you.”

Stunned, I wandered out of the ICU and into the waiting room. I felt flushed, not faint, as I dropped into a chair. My eyes blurred, sweat beaded on my brow, and a nauseating watering filled my mouth. There was a ringing in my ears, an echo of the flat line alarm, and everything slowed to an unreal pause.

I deconstructed the events I’d just witnessed. How could the respirator tube have come undone? And when? Then, in horror, I recalled how I had dallied at my father’s apartment, enjoying a few extra moments with Gigi before making my way to the hospital. Would five or ten minutes have made a difference? Might I have been there to hear the tube fall to the floor? How much difference might five or ten minutes of oxygen have made to my stricken father? Why was I such a wretch? He was going to die, damn it! And all because I’d wanted Gigi to show me how to make Italian coffee. I hadn’t even paid attention to his lesson, captivated instead by the beauty of his face and not even watching his hands.