“I was told there would be no problem,” he insists to the admitting nurse. “We have an ambulance out there that is costing these people thirty-five dollars an hour.”
“I can’t help that,” the admitting nurse says. She is large and cheerful. The state police brought Susan in off the turnpike and that makes her a public charge. “She has to be released,” the nurse says patiently. This must be the way she talks to maniacs. With a melody in her voice. “I can’t do it and you can’t do it. We haven’t even typed the admitting diagnosis.”
I pace the lobby, pounding my fist into my palm. Phyllis sits on a bench, the baby sliding down her lap. Her earnest face tracks me, she pulls the baby back, it struggles, she pulls it back. I have no real desire to rescue Susan by force. But I wish I had her capacity to do things in a big way — that gift for causing public commotion, that family talent. Actually it’s just as well that Duberstein is kept away from her. And our parents too, for that matter. She has been going to Duberstein for years; once she told me she lost her respect for Duberstein when she found out he played golf twice a week. Then why do you go, Susan? “Alleviates parental anxieties,” said Susan the college girl. Alleviates parental anxieties. This makes me feel guilty for both of us. I look at the Lewins: pale, worried, under fire once again. I cannot bear the guilt. I begin to scold them. They should have called me sooner. I would have had the sense to get her out of here yesterday. “What were you trying to hide from me? What was the point!”
Lise, my mother, a tiny woman in a blouse and short skirt with low-heeled shoes and shoulder bag, is a curious combination of 1945 WAC and slightly aging Viennese charmer onto the new fashions. She sits down on the bench next to Phyllis and takes the baby, an unconscious maternal gesture which gratifies Phyllis because it brings her into the family. “Oh, Danny,” Lise says, “don’t be a fool. Nobody’s hiding anything. You are down there. We are here. We are her parents. We cope. And if someone in the family can be spared for twenty-four hours, why not? Or should everyone stop functioning?”
She seems to be taking the whole business with more fortitude than my father. My father speaks in his soft voice to Duberstein, suggesting various alternative courses of action. There are doctors at work even on Memorial Day. Find the senior doctor in charge. Talk to him. If he’s not in the building, find out where he is and call him. My father is very fond of Susan. Her excesses have always seemed to render him contemplative. This is the worst she’s been, the worst thing she’s done; it has occurred to him, perhaps, that the pattern of our lives is deterioration, that the movement of our lives is toward death.
With great justice he refuses to pick up my pusillanimous charge. I have long since given up rights in Susan’s welfare. Who am I to tell them what to do or not to do? But he grants me my rights. “Let’s go outside,” he says. We all wait in the parking lot while Duberstein goes off to find the medical administrator. The women and the baby sit in the Lewin car, a 1965 Impala with a regular shift, and leave the doors open; my father and I with our backs to the hospital lean against the car grille and look down the hill. Behind us, near the entrance, a sleek red and grey ambulance lurks in wait, the driver asleep behind the wheel with his cap tilted over his eyes. The hill is dotted with patients clutching brown paper bags.
“We knew she was depressed,” Robert Lewin says. “We wanted her to come home for the weekend. But she said she had to get away. She didn’t sound so bad. She’s been making her classes. She’s been doing her work.” My father is looking older by the minute. He is bound to feel that Susan’s attempt at defection is his fault. If my mother feels that way she won’t show it. It occurs to me that they didn’t call me immediately because they were afraid of my reaction. They weren’t sure what it would be, they weren’t sure that Daniel wasn’t capable of the same thing, as if what Susan did was contagious.
Suspense is all Robert Lewin can look forward to as the father of these children. He doesn’t even have the assurance of his own genes. I feel such sad tenderness for the guy, I put my arm around his shoulder. He’s no slouch. He works like hell, and belongs to committees, and practices law for poor people and writes for the law journals. He is big in the ACLU. He is popular with his classes, a thorn in the Dean’s side, a demonstrator against Dow Chemical recruiters. When he has the time, he likes to read The New Yorker.
Neither of the Lewins is capable of regretting what they did for Susan and me. As cruel as we are. And we are really terrible low down people. I mean really low down. But they must know we mean them no harm except the harm in our love for them. Everyone in the family understands the mythological burden of acts much smaller than their consequences. My sister and I can never inflict total damage — that is the saving grace. The right to offend irreparably is a blood right.
Suddenly Daniel was overwhelmed with a strong sweet sense of the holiday. The sun was trying to come out, the warm slight breezes of the overcast day played across the eyes, he was here with everyone in his immediate family standing on this really groovy prospect in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was thankful to Susan for relieving the dangerous tedium of his graduate life. She would be all right. In the meantime there was drama, a sweet fatality, a recharging of the weak diffused impulses of giving a shit. Robert Lewin felt his sympathy and was warmly reciprocating. Was Daniel all right? Had he or Phyllis eaten anything since leaving home that morning? He produced from the glove compartment a handful of candy bars. “Milky Ways all around,” he said with a sad smile. And there was a car to take care of, Susan’s car, still in the lot at the Howard Johnson’s near Exit II on the Westbound side of the Turnpike. The two men chatted quietly, building comfort for each other in the warm afternoon while Duberstein went about his futile attempts to get the hospital authorities to release Susan. Building concern for each other and then, in a widening circle of small talk, for their wives, for the innocent fat baby, and for anybody still within their power of concern, for anybody who could be saved by concern. The afternoon grew festive—
Bukharin was no angel, of course. In the course of his trial he spoke of condoning the murder of Whites in the heat of the revolutionary struggle. Going down before Stalin, he felt obliged to make the distinction between murder that was politically necessary and factional terrorism. In 1928, ten years before his trial, he criticized Stalin’s line of forced industrialization and compared Stalin personally to Genghis Khan. In September, 1936, a meeting of the Central Committee was called to consider the expulsion from the Party of Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov for leading a Right Wing-Trotskyite conspiracy. Bukharin said that the real conspiracy was Stalin’s and that to achieve unlimited power Stalin would destroy the Bolshevik Party and that therefore he, Bukharin, and others, were to be eliminated and that was the source of the charge against him. The Central Committee accepted Bukharin’s defense and voted not to expel him. The conspiracy charge was dropped. Within a year, ninety-eight members of the Central Committee were arrested and shot. (We learn this from N. Khrushchev in his address to the 20th Party Congress.) Then the charges were reinstated and Bukharin was put on trial.
Actually, there are separate mysteries to be examined here. Why do the facts of Russian national torment make Americans feel smug? Why do two state cops, finding a young girl bleeding to death in the ladies’ room of a Howard Johnson’s, take her not to the nearest hospital, but to the nearest public insane asylum? On second thought these mysteries may not be unrelated.
Subjects to be taken up: