He had left her with a single responsibility when he went into the hospitaclass="underline" to see that the car was taken off the street where it was parked and put into the public garage a block away. It turned out to be a task that she was too frazzled to undertake, and so, as he later learned, she'd had to ask one of his friends to do it for her. He hadn't realized how observant his cardiologist was of nonmedical matters until the man came to see him midway through his hospital stay and told him that he could not be released from the hospital if his home care was to be provided by his wife. "I don't like to have to say these things, fundamentally she's not my business, but I've watched her when she's come to visit. The woman is basically an absence and not a presence, and I have no choice but to protect my patient."
By this time Howie had arrived. He had flown in from Europe, where he'd gone to do business and also to play polo. He could ski now, skeet-shoot, and play water polo as well as polo from atop a pony, having acquired virtuosity in these activities in the great world long after he'd left his lower-middle-class high school in Elizabeth, where, along with the Irish-Catholic and Italian boys whose fathers worked on the docks at the port, he'd played football in the fall and pole-vaulted in the spring, all the while garnering grades good enough to earn him a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and then admission to the Wharton School to earn an MBA. Though his father was dying in a hospital in New Jersey and his brother recovering from open-heart surgery in a hospital in New York – and though he spent the week traveling from the one bedside to the other – Howie's vigor never lapsed, nor did his capacity to inspire confidence. The sustenance the healthy thirty-year-old wife proved incapable of providing her ailing fifty-six-year-old husband was more than compensated for by Howie's jovial support. It was Howie who suggested hiring two private duty nurses – the daytime nurse, Maureen Mrazek, and the night nurse, Olive Parrott – to substitute for the woman he'd come to refer to as "the titanically ineffective cover girl," and then he insisted, over his brother's objections, on covering the costs himself. "You were dangerously ill, you went through hell," Howie said, "and so long as I'm around, nothing and nobody is going to impede your recovery. This is just a gift to ensure the speedy restoration of your health." They were standing together by the entrance to the room. Howie spoke with his brawny arms around his brother. Much as he preferred to appear breezily superior to the claims of sentiment, his face – a virtual replica of his brother's – could not disguise his emotions when he said, "Losing Mom and Dad I have to accept. I could never accept losing you." Then he left to find the limo that was waiting downstairs to drive him to the hospital in Jersey.
Olive Parrott, the night nurse, was a large black woman whose carriage and bearing and size reminded him of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her father owned an avocado farm in Jamaica, and her mother kept a dream book in whose pages, each morning, she recorded her children's dreams. On the nights when he was too uncomfortable to sleep, Olive sat in a chair at the foot of the bed and told him innocent tales about her life as a child on the avocado farm. She had a West Indian accent and a lovely voice, and her words soothed him as no woman's had since his mother sat and talked to him in the hospital after the hernia operation. Except for the questions that he asked Olive, he remained silent, deliriously contented to be alive. It turned out that they'd caught him just in time: when he was admitted to the hospital, his coronary arteries were anywhere from ninety to ninety-five percent occluded and he'd been on the verge of a massive and probably fatal heart attack.
Maureen was a buxom, smiling redhead who had grown up something of a roughneck in an Irish-Slavic family in the Bronx and had a blunt way of talking that was fueled by the self-possession of a working-class toughie. The mere sight of her raised his spirits when she arrived in the morning, even though the postsurgical exhaustion was so severe that merely shaving – and not even shaving standing up but while sitting in a chair – tired him out, and he had to return to bed for a long nap after taking his first walk down the hospital corridor with her at his side. Maureen was the one who called his father's doctor for him and kept him informed of the dying man's condition until he had the strength to talk to the doctor himself.
It had been decided peremptorily by Howie that when he left the hospital Maureen and Olive would look after him (again at Howie's expense) for at least his first two weeks at home. His wife was not consulted, and she resented the arrangement and the implication that she was unable to care for him on her own. She particularly resented Maureen, who herself did little to hide her contempt for the patient's wife.
At home it was more than three weeks before the exhaustion began to diminish and he felt ready even to consider returning to work. After dinner he had to go back to bed for the evening simply from the effort of eating sitting up in a chair, and in the morning he had to remain seated on a plastic stool to wash himself in the shower. He began to do mild calisthenics with Maureen and tried each day to add another ten yards to the afternoon walk he took with her. Maureen had a boyfriend whom she talked about – a TV cameraman whom she expected to marry once he found a permanent job – and when she got off work at the end of the day, she liked to have a couple of drinks with the neighborhood regulars in a bar around the corner from where she lived in Yorkville. The weather was beautiful, and so when they walked outdoors he got a good look at how she carried herself in her close-fitting polo shirts and short skirts and summer sandals. Men looked her over all the time, and she was not averse to staring someone down with mock belligerence if she was being ostentatiously ogled. Her presence at his side made him feel stronger by the day, and he would come home from the walks delighted with everything, except, of course, with the jealous wife, who would slam doors and sometimes barge out of the apartment only moments after he and Maureen had swept in.
He was not the first patient to fall in love with his nurse. He was not even the first patient to fall in love with Maureen. She'd had several affairs over the years, a few of them with men rather worse off than he was, who, like him, made a full recovery with the help of Maureen's vitality. Her gift was to make the ill hopeful, so hopeful that instead of closing their eyes to blot out the world, they opened them wide to behold her vibrant presence, and were rejuvenated.
Maureen came along to New Jersey when his father died. He was still not allowed to drive, so she volunteered and helped Howie make the arrangements with Kreitzer's Memorial Home in Union. His father had become religious in the last ten years of his life and, after having retired and having lost his wife, had taken to going to the synagogue at least once a day. Long before his final illness, he'd asked his rabbi to conduct his burial service entirely in Hebrew, as though Hebrew were the strongest answer that could be accorded death. To his father's younger son the language meant nothing. Along with Howie, he'd stopped taking Judaism seriously at thirteen – the Sunday after the Saturday of his bar mitzvah – and had not set foot since then in a synagogue. He'd even left the space for religion blank on his hospital admission form, lest the word "Jewish" prompt a visit to his room by a rabbi, come to talk in the way rabbis talk. Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness – the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it – he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body. But after retiring he tried becoming a painter, not a writer, and so he gave that title to a series of his abstractions.