“Do you know your name?” Frank Haggerty asked.
He was the hospital’s Chief of Staff, one of the two medical men who stood around the bed, a man some sixty-three years old with a mane of white hair, riveting blue eyes, and a skin prematurely wrinkled by years of indifferent exposure to the sun. With him in the old lady’s room were his E.R. Chief and his Director of Social Services. This was the sixth case of abandonment the hospital had experienced in the past month, up from four the month before. Granny dumping was back—with a vengeance. Haggerty couldn’t afford any more of these incidents; the city had cut its hospital budget by thirty-five percent last year and the Chancery was a city hospital. It was now working with a skeleton staff more appropriate to a clinic in Zagreb than to a hospital in one of the world’s largest and most influential cities.
“Ma’am?” he said. “Can you tell us your name?”
The old woman shook her head.
She’d been carrying no identification. All of the labels had been cut out of her clothes: the nightgown and robe she was wearing, the panties underneath those, even her diaper.
“Do you know where you live?” Max Elman asked.
The other doctor, E.R. Chief, forty-seven years old, brown eyes, black hair, dark complexion, looking more like one of the Indian residents working under him than he did an American Jew. His wife was a doctor, too, working at a hospital in Calm’s Point. The only way they really got to see each other was to retreat to the little farmhouse they’d bought in Maine; they particularly liked it during the winter months, go ask.
“With Polly,” the woman said.
“Who’s Polly?” the third man asked.
He was the only civilian in the room, even though, like the two others, his title was Doctor . Dr. Gregory Sloane, whose master’s had come from the USC School of Social Work, and whose doctorate in Social Medicine had come from Ramsey University, right here in the city. At thirty-eight, he was the youngest of the three men, twice divorced and going bald, a not-unrelated physical phenomenon; his hair had begun falling out when his first wife, Sheila, left him for a man who scouted ballplayers for a major-league team. He guessed that along about now, she’d be with him in some backwater town someplace, watching would-be stars shagging pop flies. Buck, his name was. The scout.
“Polly,” the old lady said. “That’s who.”
“Is she your daughter?”
“Don’t have any.”
“No daughters?” Sloane asked.
“You deaf?” she said.
Four out of five American families were caring at home for their sick or elderly parents. Women constituted seventy-five percent of these caretakers, who sometimes got stuck with aging uncles or aunts as well, relatives who’d been dumped on them when a spouse died or a son suddenly ran off to Outer Mongolia. Millions of American women who’d once thought they might begin pursuing their own lives once their children were grown and out of the nest now discovered they’d been sadly mistaken: They were doomed to care for their parents even longer than they’d had to care for the children. Which was why they’d asked if Polly was a daughter.
“How about sons?” Elman asked. “Have you got any sons, ma’am?”
“I can’t remember,” she said.
“Any grandchildren? Would you remember any grandchildren?” Haggerty asked.
“Ralph,” she said.
“Ralph wha…?”
“That’s not a dog’s name,” she said.
“Ralph what, would you remember?”
“Here, Ralph,” she said.
“What’s his last name, do you know?”
“I can’t remember,” she said. “He drowned.”
“Any other grandchildren? Any boys or girls you can…?”
“Buddy,” she said.
“Buddy what? What’s his last name?”
“I can’t remember. Where am I?”
“Old Chancery Hospital,” Haggerty told her.
There were four million Alzheimer’s sufferers in the United States of America. This number was expected to triple within the next twenty-five years. But not all cases of abandonment were Alzheimer’s victims; some of them were suffering from other chronic illnesses, some of them were merely old and frail. The woman seemed to be an Alzheimer’s victim. The care of an Alzheimer’s patient was at best trying on a family, at worst debilitating, a round-the-clock regimen of incessant attention that more often than not led to stress, despair, burnout, and eventual physical, emotional, and financial breakdown. It was easy for these men to understand why Polly—or whoever—had wanted out.
Two of these men were doctors.
They had taken the Hippocratic oath.
But what were they to do when someone requiring extensive testing and exhaustive personal care was dropped off on their doorstep with no one in sight to pay the bills?
“Can you tell us anything at all about yourself?” Sloane asked.
“I always wet the bed,” the woman said. “Polly doesn’t like it.”
Haggerty sighed.
“Let’s call Missing Persons,” he said. “Maybe she wandered over to that railroad station all by herself. Maybe somebody’s out there looking for her.”
Sloane doubted it. Besides, wouldn’t the people at the Eight-Six have called Missing Persons before bringing her here? Actually, he doubted that, too. This was a pass-the-buck society.
“Couldn’t hurt,” he said.
But he was thinking they were stuck with her.
THE FROZEN-YOGURT PLACE was on Stemmler and North Fifth, not too distant from the Eight-Seven’s station house. This was now only nine in the morning. The teenage kid working the counter had just opened the place when the man walked in, and stood there for a while, looking at the chart, and finally told the kid that what he wanted was the no-fat chocolate on a cone. Then, so he’d have his hands free when the kid served him, he said, “How much will that be? So I can get the money out now.”
The kid said, “Depends what size you want.”
His wallet already in his hand now, the man said, “What are the different sizes?”
“There’s the small and the large,” the kid said.
“What’s the difference between them?”
“The small is about this high,” the kid said, holding the palm of his hand some three inches above the top of the cone, “and the large is about this high,” he said, raising his palm a few inches higher.
“I’ll take the small,” the man said.
“Okay,” the kid said, and pulled a lever and began swirling yogurt onto the cone.
“So how much will that be?” the man asked, ready to take from his wallet the bill or the several bills or whatever it would cost to pay for the yogurt before he was unable to handle cone and wallet at the same time.
“I have no idea,” the kid said. “I just started…”
“Excuse me,” the man said, his wallet still in his hand, “but didn’t you just tell me the price depended on the size?”
“Yeah, but…”
“So I ordered the small, you’re making me a small right there, so what’s this you got no idea what the price’ll be?”
“What it is…”
“You tryin’ a be a wise guy?” the man said.
“No, sir, it’s just…”
“You tryin’a make a fuckin fool outta me?”
“Sir, today’s my first…”
“You don’t know what the fuckin price is, huh? You know what this is?” the man said and the kid found himself standing there with a no-fat chocolate on a cone looking into the barrel of a gun. The kid began shaking. The man said, “Never mind, I don’t want the fuckin thing no more,” and shot the kid in the chest.