“Can it wait two hours?” Ann says.
“They said today. I don’t know.” My anger, just as suddenly, has gone.
“I’m going to come up there,” she says.
“It takes four hours.” Three, actually. “It won’t help.” I begin thinking of the clogged FDR, holiday inbounds. Major backups on the Triborough. A traffic nightmare. All things I was thinking about on Friday, though now it’s Sunday.
“I can get a helicopter from the East River terminal. Charley flies down all the time. I should be there. Just tell me where.”
“Oneonta,” I say, feeling strangely hollowed at the prospect of Ann.
“I’m going to get on the phone right now on the way and call Henry Burris. He’s at Yale-New Haven. They’re in the country this weekend. He’ll explain all the options, tell me exactly what’s wrong with him.”
“Detachment,” I say. “They say he has a dilated retina. There’s no need to come right this second.”
“Is he in the hospital?” I have the feeling Ann is writing everything down now: Henry Burris. Oneonta. Detachment, retina, batting cage? Paul, Frank.
“Of course he’s in the hospital,” I say. “Where do you think he is?”
“What’s the exact name of the hospital, Frank?” She’s as deliberate as a scrub nurse; and I a merely dutiful next of kin.
“A. O. Fox. It’s probably the only hospital in town.”
“Is there an airport there?” Clearly she has written down airport.
“I don’t know. There should be, if there isn’t.” Then a silence opens, during which she may in fact have stopped writing.
“Frank, are you all right? You sound not very good.”
“I’m not very good. I didn’t have my eye knocked out, though.”
“He didn’t have his eye knocked out really, did he?” Ann says this in a pleading voice of motherhood that can’t be escaped.
From the door Irv turns toward me with a worried look, as if he’s overheard me say something bitter or argumentative. The black admissions nurse is looking at me too, over the top of her computer terminal.
“No,” I say, “he didn’t. But he got it knocked. It’s not very good.”
“Don’t let them do anything to him. Please? Until I get there? Can you?” She says this now in a sweet way that is tuned to the helplessness we share and that I would improve if I could but can’t. “Will you promise me that?” She has not yet mentioned her dream of injury. She has done me that kindness.
“Absolutely. I’ll tell the doctor right now.”
“Thank you so much,” Ann says. “I’ll be there in two hours or less. Just hold on.”
“I will. I’ll be right here. And so will Paul.”
“It won’t be very long,” Ann says half brightly. “All right?”
“All right.”
“Okay then. Okay.” And that is all.
For two hours that turn into three hours that turn into four, I walk round and round the little color-keyed lobby, while everything is on hold. (Under better circumstances this would be a natural time to make client calls and take my mind off worrying, but it’s not possible now.) Irv, who’s decided to toss in the afternoon “drinks party” with the ’59 Sox and keep me company, heads out at two and forages a couple of fat bags of Satellite burgers, which we eat mechanically in the plastic chairs while above us on TV the Mets play the Astros in audio-less nontime. Now is not an action period for the ER. Later, when the light fails and too much beer’s been guzzled on the lake, an extra base attempted with bone-breaking results, or when somebody who knows all about Roman candles doesn’t quite know enough— then resources here will be put to the test. As it is, one possibly self-inflicted minor knife wound, an obese woman with unexplained chest pains, one shirtless, shaken-up victim of a one-car rollover come through, but not all at once, and without fanfare (the last chauffeured in by the Cooperstown crew, who frown at me on their way back out). Everyone is eventually set free under his or her own power, all emerging stone-faced and chastened by the sorry outcome of their day. The nurses behind the admissions desk, though, stay in jokey spirits right through. “Now you wait’ll tomorrow ‘bout this time,” one of them says with a look of amazement. “This place’ll be jumpin’ like Grand Central Station at rush hour. The Fourth’s a biiig day for hurtin’ yourself.”
At three, a fat young crew-cut priest passes by, stops and comes back to where Irv and I are watching silent TV, asks in a confessional whisper if everything’s under control, and if not, is there anything he can do for us (it’s not; there isn’t), then heads smilingly off for the ICU wing.
Dr. Tisaris cruises through a time or two, seemingly without enough to do. Once she stops to tell me a “retina man” from Binghamton who did his work at “Mass Eye” has examined Paul (I never saw him arrive) and confirmed a retinal rupture, and “if it’d be okay we’d like to prep him for when your wife gets here, after which we can shoot him in. Dr. Rotollo”—the Binghamton hired gun—“will do the surgery.”
Once again I ask if I can see Paul (I haven’t since the ambulance left Cooperstown), and Dr. Tisaris looks inconvenienced but says yes, though she needs to keep him still to “minimalize” bleeding, and maybe I might just peek in unbeknownst, since he’s had a sedative.
Leaving Irv, I follow her, squee-kee-gee, squee-kee-gee, through the double doors into a brightly lit, mint-colored bullpen room smelling of rubbing alcohol, where there are examining bays around on all four walls, each hung with a green hospital curtain. Two special rooms are marked “Surgical” and have heavy, push-in doors with curved handles, and Paul is housed in one of these. When Dr. Tisaris cautiously shoves back the noiseless door, I see my son then, on his back on a bed-on-wheels equipped with metal sidebars, looking very bulky with both his eyes bandaged over like a mummy, but still in his black Clergy shirt and maroon shorts and orange socks, minus only his shoes, which sit side by side against the wall. His arms are folded on his chest in an impatient, judicial way, his legs out straight and stiff. A beam of intense light is trained down on his bandaged face, and he’s wearing his earphones plugged into a yellow Walkman I’ve never seen before, and which is resting on his chest. He seems to me in no particular pain and to all appearances except the bandages seems unbothered by the world (or else he’s dead, since I can’t detect rise or fall in his chest, no tremor in his fingers, no musical toe twitch to whatever he’s tuned in to). His ear, I see, has a new bandage.
I would of course dearly love to bound across and kiss him. Or if that couldn’t be, at least to do my waiting in here, unacknowledged amongst the instrument trays, oxygen tubes, defibrillator kits, needle dumps and rubber glove dispensers: sit a vigil on a padded stool, be a presence for my son, “useful” at least in principle, since my time for being a real contributor seems nearly over now, in the way that serious, unraveling injury can deflect the course of life and send it careering an all new way, leaving the old, uninjured self and its fussy familiars far back in the road.
But neither of these can happen, and time goes by as I stand with Dr. Tisaris simply watching Paul. A minute. Three. Finally I see a hopeful sigh of breath beneath his shirt and suddenly feel my ears being filled by hissing, so much that if someone spoke to me, said “Frank” again, out loud from behind, I might not hear, would only hear hiss, like air escaping or snow sliding off a roof or wind blowing through a piney bough — a hiss of acceptance.
Paul, then, for no obvious reason, turns his head straight toward us, as if he’s heard something (my hiss?) and knows someone is watching, can imagine me or someone through a red-black curtain of molten dark. Out loud, in his boy’s voice, he says, “Okay, who’s here?” He fiddles sightlessly with his Walkman to kill the volume. He may of course have said it any number of times when no one was present.