I turn the card and hold it so the daylight’s behind me. (Irv has gone to the trouble of laminating it as a seal of its importance.) And it’s not a card at all but a photograph, black and white, encased in layers and re-layers of plastic and for that reason is fogged and dim as memory. Here are four humans in a stately family pose, two parents, two adolescent boys, standing out on some front porch steps, squinting-smiling apprehensively at the camera and into a long-ago patch of light that brightens their faces. Who are these? Where are they? When? Though in a moment I see it’s Irv’s once-nuclear family in the greenage days in Skokie, when times were sweet and nothing needed simulating.
“Pretty great, Irv.” I look up at him, then admire the photo again for politeness’ sake and hand it back, ready to re-commence my own parenting tasks, put the pressure back on the moment.
Not far off I hear the wet thwop-thwop-thwop and realize the hospital has a helipad for such emergencies as Paul’s, and that this is Ann arriving.
“It’s us, Frank,” Irv says, and looks at me amazed. “It’s you and Jake and your mom and me, in Skokie, in 1963. You can see how pretty your mom is, though she looks thin already. We’re all there on the porch. Do you even remember it?” Irv stares at me, damp-lipped and happy behind his glasses, holding his precious artifact out for me to see once more.
“I guess I don’t.” I look again reluctantly at this little pinch-hole window to my long-gone past, feel a quickening torque of heart pain — unexceptional, nothing like Irv’s catch of dread — and once again proffer it back. I’m a man who wouldn’t recognize his own mother. Possibly I should be in politics.
“Me either really.” Irv looks appreciatively down at himself for the eight jillionth time, trying to leech some wafting synchronicity out of his image, then shakes his head and re-snugs it among his other wallet votives and crams it all back into his pocket, where it belongs.
I survey the sky again for a sight of the chopper but see nothing, not even the swifts.
“I mean, no great big deal, of course.” Irv is squaring up his expectations to my rather insufficient response.
“Irv, I better get inside now. I’m pretty sure I hear my wife’s helicopter arriving.” (Is this a sentence one usually says? Or is it me? Or the day?)
“Hey, don’t be crazy.” Irv’s heavy hand is again right up on my shoulder like a gangplank. (My heart has in fact gone rapid with its own thwopetty-thwop.) “I wanted to show you what I meant about continuity. It’s nothing dangerous. We don’t have to cut our arms and mingle blood or anything.”
“I might not agree with you about everything, Irv, but I—“ and then for an instant I lose my breath entirely and almost gasp, which makes me panic that I’m choking and need a quick Heimlich (if Irv knows how and would oblige). I’ve done wrong by taking this Dairy Queen walk and letting myself be hoodwinked just like Paul, by cozy, small-town plenitude, lured to think I can float free again against all evidence of real gravity. “But I want you to know,” I say just before a second, less terrifying gullet stop, “that I respect how you see the world, and I think you’re a great guy.” (When in doubt fall back on the old Sigma Chi formula: Ornstein = Great Guy. Let’s pledge him, even if he is a Hebe.)
“I don’t think I’ve miscalculated you, Frank,” Irv says. He is the stalwart project leader over in the yaw-pitch-and-roll lab now: always flying level even if the rest of us aren’t. Though I’ve been him (more than once) and won’t be caught again. Irv is entering his own Existence Period, complete with all the good and not-so-good trimmings, just as it seems I’m exiting it in a pitch-and-tumble mode. We have passed in daylight; we have interfaced, given each other good and earnest feedback. But ours is not life coterminous, though I like him fine.
I start off then toward the hospital doors, my heart popping, my jaw going stiff as an andiron, leaving Irv with my best words for our future as friends. “We’ll try to go fishing sometime.” I look around for emphasis. He is poised, one long, sandaled foot on the edge of the grass, one off, his bright cardigan catching the sunlight. He is, I know, silently wishing us both clear sailing toward the next horizon.
12
Ann is standing in the emergency room lobby all alone, in her buttoned-up tan trench coat, bare-legged, wearing worn white running shoes. She looks as if her mind is full of worries, none of which can be solved by seeing me.
“I’ve been standing here watching you through those doors as you crossed the lawn. And it wasn’t until you got to the door that I realized it was you.” She smiles at me in a daunted way, takes her hands out of her trench coat pockets, holds my arm and gives me a small kiss, which makes me feel a small bit better (though not actually good). We are less joined than ever now, so much that a kiss can’t matter. “I brought Henry Burris with me. That’s why I’m so late,” she says, immediately all business. “He’s already looked at Paul and his chart, and he thinks we ought to fly him down to Yale right away.”
I simply stare at her in confoundment. I have indeed missed everything important: her arrival, a new examination, a revised prognosis. “How?” I say, looking hopelessly around the apple-green-and-salmon waiting room walls, as if to say, Well, you can see what I bring to the table: Oneonta. It may be a funny name, it may not even be the best, but by God, it’s reliable and it’s where we are.
“We’ve already got another helicopter coming that can transport him. It’s maybe already here.” She looks at me sympathetically.
Behind the admissions desk there is a new crew: two tiny, neat-as-pins Korean girls in high Catholic-nursing-school caps, working over charts like actuaries, plus a listless young blond (a local), engrossed by her computer monitor. None of these knows of my case. It would encourage me to have Irv waltz in, take a seat in the back row and be my ally.
“What does Dr. Tisaris say?” I’m wondering where she is, wishing she would get in on this powwow. Though possibly Ann has already dismissed her and Dr. Rotollo both, put her own surgical team in place while I was out having my “dip.” I’ll need to apologize to her for a lack of faith.
“She’s fine about releasing him,” Ann says, “especially to Yale. We just sign a form. I’ve already signed one. She’s very professional. She knows Henry from her residency” (natch). Ann is nodding. Suddenly, though, she peers directly up at my eyes, her gray, flecked irises gone perfectly round and large, shining with straight-ahead imploring. She is not wearing her wedding ring (possibly for the wit’s-end, nerves-stripped-bare look). “Frank, I’d just like to do this, okay? So we can get him down to New Haven in fifty minutes? Everything’s all set there. It’s a half hour to get him prepped and an hour or so in surgery. Henry’ll supervise it. Then the best that can happen will.” She blinks at me dark-eyed, not wanting to say more, having played the big card first — though she can’t help herself. “Or he can be operated on in Oneonta by Dr. Tisaris or whoever, and she may be fine.”
“I understand,” I say. “What’s the risk to him of flying?”
“Smaller than the risk, in Henry’s opinion, of doing retinal surgery here.” Her features soften and relax. “Henry’s done two thousand of these.”
“That oughta be enough,” I say. “Is he a classmate of Charley’s?”
“No. He’s older,” she says curtly and then is silent. Possibly Henry’s our mystery mister; they almost always fill innocent roles as cover. Older, in this case; experienced in treating the ravaged victims of human suffering (such as Ann); uncannily bears Ann’s father’s name as a karmic asset. Plus, once he saves Paul’s vision (days of soulful waiting for the bandages to be removed and sight to re-dawn), it’ll be a snap to lay it all out to Charley, who’ll wryly, maybe even gratefully, stand aside, outmaneuvered round the final buoy. Charley’s a sport, if nothing else. I am much less of one.