Woman on the Edge of Time

A clam in a green chair, she sat in the day room, unmoving, and all the gossip of the ward trickled through her sore mind. Somewhere in this fund of trivial bits of garbage smelling of rotting shrimp and brown lettuce must be some clue on how to find herself again, how to fight. She sat facing the bronze plaque on the wall that said the ward was named for Mrs. John Sturgiss Baylor. Baylor was Dr. Argent’s middle name. Actually it was his mother’s name, Valente said. His first wife was dead too, and his second, Elinor, was in her late thirties—a hearty good-looking woman who seemed oddly transparent. Connie could never remember in between her appearances what she looked like. She seemed entirely beige and honey-colored and she would come marching rapidly through the ward for some momentary consultation with Dr. Argent, striding as if across a tennis court and looking at no one, cheerful enough and utterly indifferent to them all. She was the only wife who ever came into the hospital. She was on some committee that had to do with fund raising and managing volunteers. Finally at some point she began to speak to Dr. Redding when she encountered him, giving a measured smile, but she never greeted Dr. Morgan.

Dr. Morgan had married a nurse who stayed home with their children in Rye. Nurse Roditis liked her and they had long conversations on the phone, about Dr. Morgan and his temper and his vanities and whether he was or was not having an affair with a ward secretary named Pauline. Connie found it hard to imagine Dr. Morgan having an affair with anyone, but it sounded like he was meaninglessly but frequently unfaithful, like a nervous twitch.

But patients and staff had no gossip about Dr. Redding, who had four children and had always been married to the same wife nobody had ever seen. More was known about his kids, because he talked about them. Chaz Junior was doing his residency in urology. Betsey was married, expecting. John was studying physics. Karen, the youngest, he was bitter about He said she was spoiled and he made her go to a psychiatrist. She had run away from home, from school, from him.

Patients and staff talked over the doctors constantly. What could she make of this coffee grounds of gossip? That Redding’s family had a ski and summer house in Vermont and everybody commuted back and forth except him usually. That Dr. Argent was an Episcopalian and was always hurrying to a banquet or a fund-raising dinner for a senator or a wedding that would be in the Times.Elinor cared for neither New York summers nor New York winters, and Dr. Redding thought Dr. Argent took too many vacations.

Dr. Redding wanted Dr. Argent to invite him to some annual get-together, some bunch of men who went up to his family’s old hunting lodge in the Adirondacks to shoot at birds or deer or whatever they shot at. Dr. Redding didn’t want to go because he liked to shoot things. He didn’t seem to like anything except his work. He wanted to go because of the men who would be there drinking and shooting. Dr. Morgan admired and envied Dr. Redding, as Dr. Redding envied but did not admire Dr. Argent. Dr. Morgan was a nervous sneak who clung to the rules on the job, who loved procedures and methodology and other such words. Dr. Redding loved power and the feeling of success. He said Dr. Argent liked too much to be a man about town. She had no idea what Dr. Argent might have loved, but he was nervous now at the brink of retirement to carry off some final prize. Redding had an ulcer, Argent had a heart condition, and Morgan lied to his wife about where he spent his evenings.

Tuesday as she was being taken to the bathroom, suddenly she felt Luciente in her like a scream. Luciente came through her like a great wound ripping open that knocked her to the floor of the ward. Then Luciente was gone. Yet she felt an after-aura of Luciente’s presence. She knew her friend had been with her, there like lightning and gone. The attendant picked her up.

After supper she lay down while the patients were still moving around and talking, while the lights were still on all over the ward, while the laughter of the television set sounded like the pins going down in a bowling alley. She and Eddie had lived at first next door to a bowling alley in the Bronx; oh, maybe twenty blocks from Carmel’s apartment and beauty shop. She had been pregnant in that apartment: she remembered lying in the bed with the hollow rattling thunder of the bowling alley coming through the wall … . She felt Luciente approaching again. Again it was a wild careening approach, full of pain, and almost she resisted in fear; but what should she fear from Luciente? Something must be wrong. She had to find out. She went with the wave of pain, pushing over, and found herself hugging Luciente.

Luciente’s face was set with tears, twisted with agony.

“What’s wrong? What is it?”

“Person is dead!”

“Who? Who’s dead?”

“Jackrabbit,” Bee said behind her, laying his big hand on her shoulder.