Patty McGraw Simmons had always detested hospitals, probably, she admitted to herself, because they both frightened and embarrassed her. She was a healthy young woman and her feeling always in a hospital was that because of the obvious well-being she was resented. It was as if the silent eyes that watched her walk down the corridor were saying. “You have no right to be as you are when I am suffering. Go away.”
But she could not go away this time, and that, somehow, made it worse. They had Bert McGraw in what they called the Coronary Care Unit in University Hospital, a room seen only when the door opened occasionally, a room filled with dials and shiny cabinetlike things whose use Patty could only guess at; and the bed her father lay in looking like some ancient torture rack with tubes and wires leading from it and him.
Oh, other people had heart attacks. You read about them every day. But not Bert McGraw, indestructible father and man. That concept was ridiculous, of course; it was just the Irish in her exaggerating. And yet there was more to it, at that, than could have been thought of other men.
Her first memories were of him, big and boisterous, shouting with laughter, treating Patty, as her mother said, “More like a bear cub, Bert McGraw, than like a tiny girl daughter. You’ll break every bone in her body the way you fling her around.”
And Patty herself had squealed denial to match Bert’s “Nonsense. I’ll not have her kept wrapped up in cotton wool. She loves it.”
It was not the usual tomboy-father relationship, the way the books said. Once Patty had asked him point blank if he would rather she had been a boy. His answer, like all of his answers, was without hesitation, without guile, “Hell, no. If I had a boy, then I wouldn’t have you, and that would make me a lonesome old man, it would indeed.”
The door to the Coronary Care Unit opened and a nurse walked out. Patty had her brief glimpse before the door closed again without sound. A lonesome old man—the phrase was in her mind, and she could not have said why or how. A proud lonesome old man, lying helpless on a white bed.
When you are young, Patty thought, they do for you. They pick you up and brush you off and kiss you where it hurts; they are always there when you need them, and you take them for granted. Then their turn at helplessness comes along, and what can you do but sit and wait and wish that you could believe in prayer because a little simple faith would go a long way?
Mary McGraw, located at last among her good works in Queens, came walking quickly, breathlessly along the corridor. Patty rose and took her mother’s hands, kissed her.
“There’s nothing to say,” Patty said. “He’s in there.” She nodded toward the closed door. “No one can see him. The doctor is a great heart man who’ll tell me nothing, maybe because there is nothing to tell. Sit down.” Mary McGraw said, “He had been complaining of shortness of breath. I told him he was overweight and overworked. Maybe—”
“You’ll stop right there,” Patty said. “Next you’ll be working it into being all your fault, which it is not.” Maybe it is at least partly mine, she thought, for laying the burden of my troubles on him at lunch. And then a new thought occurred. “Paul was with him when it happened,” she said. And where was Paul now?
Mary McGraw looked pleased. “I’m glad Paul was with him,” she said. “He is such a fine boy, your Paul. He and your father get along so well.”
What point, what purpose in saying otherwise? Patty was silent.
Her mother said, “Your father was always afraid you would marry some roughneck—like himself, he always said, which was not so, as he knew very well. Then when you brought Paul home, your father and I stayed awake half the night talking about him and wondering if he was the one for you. Do you remember the wedding? Of course you do. All those grand people on Paul’s side and you on your father’s arm—”
“Mother.” Patty said, her tone almost sharp. “Daddy isn’t dead. Other men have had heart attacks and recovered You—you are talking as if he were already gone, and he isn’t.”
Man McGraw was silent.
“We’ll just have to see,” Patty said, “that he doesn’t work so hard, carry so much on his own shoulders.” Mary McGraw smiled. “Maybe Paul can help. He is young and strong, and doing very well, your father says.”
“Yes.” Automatic response.
“I just hope,” Mary McGraw said, “that your father doesn’t hear of the trouble they’re having at the World Tower opening. He was to have been there, and he asked me, but I said no, all those important people, the governor and senators and congressmen and the mayor and the like, they just make me uncomfortable. But not your father. They don’t impress him. He—”
“Mother,” Patty said, and again her tone was commanding, “what trouble are they having?”
“It was on television. I heard about it on the T.V. when I passed through the lounge downstairs.”
“We’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon.” Unimportant now. “What kind of trouble?”
“There is smoke. A fire. Nobody seems to know.” Mary was silent for a moment. And then, suddenly, “Bert! Bert! Please!” in a soft, urgent voice.
“He’s going to be all right, Mother.”
“Of course he is.” There was quiet strength in her, now for the first time showing. Mary shook her head as if to clear it, brushed back a strand of hair. “You’ve been here a long time, child.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Waiting is the hard part.” Mary smiled faintly. “It is a thing you learn.” She paused. “I will stay with him now.”
“You can’t see him.”
“He’ll know I’m here. You go off. Have a cup of tea, go for a walk. Come back when you’ve rested a little. I’ll be here.”
“Mother—”
“I mean it, Mary McGraw said. “I’d rather be here alone for a bit. I’ll say a few prayers for both of us.” Her voice was stronger now. “Go along. Leave me with your father.” Dismissal.
Outside gratefully into the bright sunlight, away from the place of, yes, think it, say it, the place of death. Not for you, Daddy, please, please. Oh, it will happen one day, but we don’t think about that: we pretend that Death, that dark man, will stay in the shadows indefinitely, even when we know that he will not.
Where does one walk at such a time? To the park, greenery, trees in leaf? Where Daddy used to take you on Sunday Manhattan excursions to watch the monkeys at their antics, the sea lions enjoying themselves in their pool; to eat popcorn, too much popcorn, and perhaps ice cream as well? No, not the park.
Patty walked, and afterward had no memory of her route or direction, but compulsion of some kind must have been at work because suddenly here was the great shining World Tower she had visited so often during the years of its construction. But it was crippled now, a helpless giant, like Bert McGraw its builder; with a nasty plume of smoke standing out near its top, and here in the plaza fire hoses, so like the hoses and wires leading from Bert McGraw’s bed, writhing through open doors into the concourse and disappearing in heavy smoke inside.
There were police barricades and gaping people staring like ghouls, spectators at a public execution lusting for more blood, more terror. God! Patty wondered if she was going to faint.
“Are you all right, miss?” A policeman with a black face, polite solicitous. Behind him stood another cop, scowling his concern.
“I’m fine.’* Patty said. “It’s just”—she gestured vaguely at the tormented building—“this.”
“Yes. ma’am,” the black cop said. “A sad business.” He paused and studied her. “Are you looking for someone?”