“Well, there are still some things even doctors don’t know.”
“There are plenty things they don’t know,” Bessie said.
The clock on the wall read two minutes to four. Several of the people in the waiting room were already standing.
“We can go in now,” Bessie said, loud enough for the volunteer worker to hear her.
“Yes, go ahead,” the woman said.
They went into his father’s room.
He watched as Bessie leaned over the bed and kissed his father on the cheek.
“Hello, kiddo,” his father said softly.
In the next ten minutes, his eyes never left Bessie’s face.
They talked quietly together, in a sort of hush, almost as if David were not in the room.
He realized all at once that he didn’t even know Bessie’s last name.
He got back to the hotel at four-thirty.
When he’d told the cab driver where to take him, his pronunciation was corrected with a curt, “You mean the Rocky Mount, don’t you?” Four years of French, he’d thought. What good will it do me down here, where the Hotel De Rochemont becomes the Rocky Mount and the Fontainebleau is the Fountain Blow?
The room was suffocatingly hot.
He jiggled the ON-OFF switch under the thermostat and then reached up to the vent to see if he’d had any effect. Nothing. Not a ripple. He went to the window and opened it. A blast of hot, moist air rushed into the room. Fifteen stories below, the pool was empty. Miami Beach in the offseason. He looked out over the sea. Cool, and vast, and eternal. A lone swimmer paddled toward the shore. David turned from the window, picked up the phone, and dialed twenty-two for the front desk.
“Is there something wrong with the air conditioning?” he asked an assistant manager.
“Yes, sir, they’re working on it now.”
“When will it be fixed?”
“I don’t know, sir. They’re working on it now.”
“Thank you,” he said.
Nobody knew when anything would be fixed. His father was in the hospital and nobody knew when he would be fixed, either, or even what was wrong with him. All those tubes, he thought. He picked up the phone again and dialed twenty-one for room service.
“This is Mr. Weber in fifteen twenty-nine,” he said. “I’d like a Canadian Club and soda, please. In fact, make it two.”
“Two Canada Dry club soda, yes, sir,” a man with a Spanish accent said.
“No, two Canadian Club and soda,” David said.
“Two Canadian club soda, right,” the man said.
“Are you sure you’ve got that?” David said. “I’m talking about whiskey and soda.”
“What kind of whiskey?”
“Canadian Club.”
“Yes, sir, Canadian club soda, right.”
“Is there someone there who speaks English?” David said.
“I speak English.”
“Do you know what Canadian Club whiskey is?”
“Sure.”
“That’s the name of the whiskey. Canadian Club.”
“Sure.”
“Look, never mind. Make it scotch and soda, okay? Scotch whiskey and soda. Two of them.”
“Two scotch whiskey and Canadian club soda, yes, sir,” the man said, and hung up.
David sighed and replaced the receiver on its cradle. He was still wearing his tie and jacket. He carried the jacket to the closet. Hangers attached to metal loops on the rod, insurance against theft. Class. But it was only four blocks from the hospital. He hung up his jacket, loosened his tie, pulled it free from under his collar, and then unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He would have to call home. Molly would be waiting for his call. He would do that after the drinks arrived. If they arrived.
He began unpacking.
“Molly?”
“David, hi, how is he?”
“Not so good.”
“What is it?”
He told her everything the doctor had told him, trying to repeat the conversation word for word. Molly said nothing during the recitation. When at last he finished, she said, “Shall I come down there?”
“No, no, what for?”
“You’re alone.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“If you want me to come down...”
“No.”
“... just say so.”
“I’m all right, really.”
“Did you have lunch?”
“On the plane.”
“When will they have the results? Of the scan?”
“Tomorrow sometime.”
“When will you be going back to the hospital?”
“At seven.”
“How’s the weather down there?”
“Hot,” he said. “Very hot.”
He remembered them as stained-glass summers. The summers of his boyhood. Warm yellow sunshine and vibrant green leaves, the deeper green of the sea. The flawless blue of summer skies. A silvery breeze blowing in off the ocean.
His grandmother lived in Bensonhurst, and every summer Sunday they would make the long subway journey from the Bronx to Brooklyn, where the family would congregate for the outing to the beach. There were three brothers: Morris, Max, and Martin. “The Three Stooges,” Uncle Max called them. He was the youngest and the handsomest. He wore his hair parted in the middle, thick black hair, though both his brothers were already going bald. Uncle Max drove a brand-new Studebaker, all shining chrome and gleaming paint. Uncle Max had a black mustache under his nose — “The famous Weber nose,” he called it, “hooked like Julius Caesar’s, the Roman greaser’s.” David’s father kept his own mustache trimmed to a neat narrow line, but Uncle Max’s was thick and full, and he had a little silver mustache comb for it. David loved to watch the little comb flash out of his uncle’s pocket, silver glinting in the sunshine, his uncle’s swift slender hands stroking at the mustache, the silver comb disappearing like magic into his pocket again. Uncle Max dressed like a movie star. Uncle Max was what David wanted to be when he grew up.
Uncle Martin was the oldest of the brothers, lean and thin, somewhat gaunt-looking, with sorrowful brown eyes. “I’m the only Jewish house painter in the city of New York,” he said. He was also the only one of the brothers who didn’t have a mustache. There was always the smell of turpentine around him. David could smell his Uncle Martin clear across a room. He loved the smell of him, and he loved his soft, gentle voice. But he loved his Uncle Max best of all. The three brothers all wore gold signet rings with tiny diamond stones. Grandma had given them the rings for their separate bar mitzvahs, two years apart, first Martin, then his father, and then Max. Their initials were woven into the thick gold like trailing snakes, the identical initials on each ring, M.W., M.W., M.W. The brothers always wore the rings. He had never seen any of them without those rings on the pinky fingers of their right hands. They even wore the rings when they went into the ocean, although Grandma warned they would attract sharks, all that gold, the diamonds, the diamonds.
Every summer Sunday, if the weather was good, they rode out to the beach in two cars, Uncle Max’s great big Studebaker leading the caravan and Uncle Martin’s rumble-seat Ford behind it. David rode in the rumble seat with his fat cousin Rebecca on one side of him and his skinny cousin Shirley on the other. They were Uncle Martin’s daughters; his Uncle Max wasn’t married, his Uncle Max was a handsome man-about-town who always showed up on Sundays with a new and beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed girl on the front seat of the Studebaker — “I like my coffee light and my women dark,” he said, and winked at David. His fat cousin Rebecca had blond hair that Uncle Martin said came from his wife’s side of the family. His wife’s name was Anna, thin, pale-haired, pale-eyed Aunt Anna. David didn’t like her because she was always pinching his cheeks and saying, “How’s my dumpling?” when David wasn’t fat at all, not like her own daughter Rebecca, anyway. But his mother said Aunt Anna’s heart was in the right place.