Far From the Sea

Monday

From his hotel room he could see the ocean on the east and the bay on the west. The hospital was on the bay side, not very far from the sea. He stayed in the room only long enough to unzip his bag and lay it flat on the bed.

It was stiflingly hot in the street outside.

The cab driver who responded to his hand signal wheeled the taxi up onto the hotel ramp and asked where he was going.

“St. Mary’s Hospital,” he said.

The light on the corner took an eternity to change. He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to three. Visiting hours were at eleven, two, four, and seven — for ten minutes each time. On the telephone last night, the doctor had told him he would leave word to admit him whenever he arrived.

“You got somebody in the hospital?” the driver asked.

“My father.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s sick.”

“Well, sure, a hospital,” the driver said, and fell silent for the remainder of the trip.

The receptionist in the main entrance lobby told him what floor Intensive Care was on and then said he could visit at 4:00 p.m. He thanked her and took the elevator up to the third floor. He walked past the nurses’ station opposite the elevators and then followed the signs directing him to Intensive Care. He passed a small waiting room, walked to the end of the corridor, and opened a door. There were overflow beds in the unit’s hallways. A thin, balding man with a mustache was sitting up in one of the beds. Smiling, he began walking toward the man, and suddenly realized it was not his father.

A nurse in green tunic and pants approached him.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m Morris Weber’s son,” he said. “I just got here from New York. Dr. Kaplan said he would leave word...”

“He’s in five.”

“How is he?”

“His condition is stable.”

He moved down the hall and stepped into the room he thought she’d indicated. A doctor was examining a woman on the bed. He saw her pale white breasts, her pale white belly, and backed away in embarrassment, out into the corridor again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “what room did you...?”

“Number five,” the nurse said. “On your left.”

“Thank you.”

His father’s eyes were closed. There was a tube in his nose. There were tubes taped to his arms. There were tubes running under the sheets. There were plastic bags with yellow fluids in them hanging on metal stands beside the bed. A brownish liquid bubbled and seeped along one of the tubes and drained into a soiled plastic bag hanging on a machine. Another machine on a higher stand alongside the bed beeped and flashed with orange digital numbers, glowed with the cool blue electronic peaks and valleys of his father’s heartbeat.

“Pop?” he whispered.

His father’s eyes fluttered open and then widened in surprise.

“David?”

“Yes, Pop.”

Disoriented for a moment, his father blinked into the room. The last time David had seen him — on his eighty-second birthday, three months ago — his hair and his mustache had been tinted black. Tufts of white now stood out on either side of his otherwise bald head. What had once been a neatly groomed line of black hair on his upper lip was shaggy and white. The upper lip seemed caved in. It took David a moment to realize they’d removed his father’s dentures.

“How are you?” he asked.

“What are you doing here?” his father said.

“Dr. Kaplan phoned me.”

“Dr. Kaplan,” his father said, and pulled a face. “I went to him for two weeks, telling him I had pains. He said they were gas. Some gas. He probably still thinks it was gas.”

“He knows it wasn’t gas, Pop,” David said, and smiled and took his father’s right hand between his own. There were puncture marks all over his father’s arm, dark angry bruises.

“So what was it?” his father asked.

“You know what it was.”

“Blockage.”

“It was a tumor, Pop. Dr. Kaplan told you that.”

“Malignant.”

“Yes, Pop.”

“But he got it.”

“Yes, Pop. No spread. He got it all.”

“So why am I still in the hospital? I came in three weeks ago, it’s three weeks already. What’s the matter with me?”

He did not know what to say. Now that he was here, he did not know what to say. The silence lengthened.

“They still have to do another one, don’t they?” his father asked.

“Another what?”

“Operation.”

“Well, that won’t be for a while yet. When they... they have to close up the intestines. So you won’t need the bag anymore.”

“Maybe this time I’ll get rid of the gas, too.”

David smiled again. His father seemed to be his same alert, cantankerous, sarcastically humorous self, and he was wondering whether Dr. Kaplan’s call last night hadn’t been somewhat premature. But all these tubes—

“You’re not in any pain, are you?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

His father nodded.

“I sent a check for your rent,” David said, “so you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Bessie called and said you were...”

“My mail must be piled up to the ceiling there.”

“Don’t worry about your mail.”

“I told Bessie not to bother you. I knew you had that big case.”

“Well, I thought I’d better come down.”

“How’s the case doing?”

“The trial ended last Friday.”

“Did you win?”

“We lost.”

“Terrific,” his father said, and shook his head.

“I’ve been talking to the doctor almost every day,” David said. “He tells me you’re coming along fine.”

“Then what are you doing down here?”

He hesitated.

“Well, you’re running a slight fever, Pop.”

“You’d run a fever here, too,” his father said. “They’re in here day and night, poking needles in my arm. How slight?”

“I don’t know exactly. Nothing to worry about.”

“When will they do the next operation?” his father asked.

“Well, as soon as you start getting better. You’ve got to help them beat this fever, Pop. Dr. Kaplan said you’ve been very depressed these past few...”

“There’s a hole in my belly,” his father said.

“I know that, Pop, but that’s because you’ve got the bag, you’re draining into a bag. Once they close up the intestines again...”

“Sure,” his father said. “Another operation.”

“Yes, but that’ll be the end of it. And then you’ll be able to go back to your normal life again.”

“Hello, swee’heart,” a woman’s voice said from the door.

“Here’s the bane of my existence,” his father said. “What is it this time?”

“I wann to check your dressin’, darlin’.”

She was wearing a green tunic and pants, like the other nurse. Her hair was black, pulled to the back of her head in a ponytail. Her eyes were a dark brown. She was quite pretty, no older than twenty-four or twenty-five, David guessed.

“Won’t leave me alone,” his father said. “Can’t keep her hands off me.”

“Tha’s ri’, darlin’.”

“Used to run a butcher shop in Cuba.”

“Tha’s ri’,” she said, and lifted his gown.

“Who gave you permission to look at my belly?” he said, and winked at David.

“I don’ nee’ permission,” she said, smiling. “I’m dee boss here.”

“Some boss. If you’re such a boss, tell them to feed me. I haven’t had anything to eat in three weeks.”

“You’re gettin’ free t’ousan’ calories a day, darlin’.”

“Through a tube.”

“There’s some nice Jell-O on the windowsill, you wann it.”

“I don’t want Jell-O. I want a cigar. A good Havana cigar. Tell your cousins down there to send me one.”

“My cousins are all here,” she said, and smiled. “You have any pain here?” she asked, her hands moving over his belly.

“No. Listen, you don’t expect me to take this lying down, do you?” he said, and again winked at David.

The nurse pulled the sheet up over him. “Are you Mr. Weber’s son?” she asked.

“Yes,” David said.

She turned to the bed again. “Aren’ you happy your son’s here?” she asked.

“I’d be happier if he could speak Spanish. They jabber in Spanish day and night out there. At the nurses’ station. They have wild parties in Spanish.”

“Champagne parties,” she said.

“You think I don’t know it? Six years of French, what good will it do him down here?”

“Four years, Pop,” he said, smiling.

“What good will it do you? They only speak Spanish at the nurses’ station. Are you happy with your station in life?” he asked the nurse. “Are you finished here?”

“For now, swee’heart. We goin’ to nee’ some blood from you later.”

“It’s a wonder I’ve got any left. They’ve got Dracula here, in the basement, in a coffin. They keep sending my blood down to him.”

“I’ll be back in a li’l while, okay, darlin’?”

“No, not okay,” he said.

“Nice to mee’ you,” she said to David, and went out.

“In and out all day long,” his father said, shaking his head. “Won’t give me any peace.”

“They’re trying to help you, Pop.”

“Sure.”

“She seems very nice.”

“Bane of my existence. Anyway, what help? I’m already over the fence.”

“Come on, what does that mean?”

His father shook his head.

“Come on, Pop.”

“Another operation,” his father said, and closed his eyes.

The doctor came into the waiting room at a little past three-thirty. There were several other people there by then, waiting for the four o’clock visit.

“Mr. Weber?” he asked.

“Yes,” David said, and immediately got to his feet.

“I’m Dr. Kaplan,” he said, and extended his hand.

He was a short, dark man with thick eyeglasses, thirty-five or thirty-six years old, David guessed. There was a somewhat rueful expression on his face. He was wearing a brown tropical suit with a yellow shirt and a riotously patterned silk tie.

“Could you step out into the hall, please?”

They stood beside a window streaming bright sunlight.

“I’m glad you could come down,” Kaplan said. “Have you seen him yet?”

“Yes,” David said, and hesitated. “He seems all right.”

“Well, yes, he’s a bit more alert today. But he still has serious problems.

“What are the problems, exactly?”

“As I told you on the phone last night, he simply isn’t healing. We know there’s an infection someplace, but we—”

“How do you know there’s an infection?”

“Well, the fever for one thing. And the white-blood-cell count. We’ve tried a wide variety of antibiotics on him, but the count keeps going up. We’ve run all the pertinent tests — cultures of the wound, liver and blood cultures, urine counts, X rays, and so on. It’s truly baffling, Mr. Weber, a very difficult case.”

“How high is his fever?”

“This morning? A hundred point four.”

“Is that very high?”

“Only in that it indicates infection. I’ve got him scheduled for a gallium scan this afternoon, perhaps the pictures will show something in his belly that will—”

“Like what?”

“Who knows? That’s the problem.”

“But you think that’s where the infection might be? In the belly someplace?”

“Possibly. We simply don’t know.”

“From the surgery, do you mean?”

“No, no.”

“Then what?”

“Well, that’s why we’re running the scan, Mr. Weber.”

“What do you hope to find?”

“Anything positive. An abscess we can drain. Or maybe a small piece of fecal matter that’s become opportunistic in there. Once we can find the source of infection...”

Kaplan paused.

“Yes?” David said.

“Well, let’s see what the scan shows, shall we?”

“When will you have the results?”

“It’ll be a series of pictures, we won’t know anything definite till sometime tomorrow.”

“Will you keep in touch, please?” David said. “I’m at the De Rochemont.”

“Yes, of course.”

“And I have your number.”

“Call me anytime,” Kaplan said.

Bessie arrived at the hospital at a quarter to four.

“You must be his son,” she said. “I would know you in a minute.”

She was in her late seventies, he guessed, a thin birdlike woman with beautiful blue eyes. His mother’s eyes had been blue, too. It was Bessie who’d accompanied his father to the hospital three weeks ago. It was Bessie who’d called New York two days after the trial started, to tell David his father would be undergoing surgery. David couldn’t get away just then, even though he’d wanted to. Besides, Kaplan had assured him on the phone that his father’s heart and lungs were very strong, and whereas no major surgery could be considered “routine,” the tumor was in an easily accessible spot, and he foresaw no complications. Before Bessie’s call three weeks ago, David had not even known she existed.

“Did you see him yet?” she asked.

“Yes. He looks okay.”

“Not yesterday,” she said. “Yesterday, he looked like I never seen him since he came here. I’ll tell you the truth, I almost called you, but I was afraid to.”

“Dr. Kaplan called last night.”

“So it’s bad, huh?”

“Well... he’s not healing properly.”

They had been talking in whispers. There were perhaps a dozen people in the waiting room now. The clock on the wall read five minutes to four. A television set high on the wall, angled into a corner, was tuned to a soap opera. The people waiting kept looking from the clock to the television set. The volunteer worker behind the desk, an old woman in a pink uniform, kept watching the clock.

“We usually go in a few minutes early,” Bessie whispered. “They don’t say nothing.”

“I appreciate your coming here every day,” David said.

“Well, I do the best what I can,” Bessie said. “He should have been out of here by now. They should already be taking away the bag, closing up the intestines. Instead...” She shook her head. “What does it mean, he’s not healing properly?”

“There’s an infection someplace.”

“From what?”

“They don’t know.”

“Some doctors, they don’t know,” Bessie said.

“Well, there are still some things even doctors don’t know.”

“There are plenty things they don’t know,” Bessie said.

The clock on the wall read two minutes to four. Several of the people in the waiting room were already standing.

“We can go in now,” Bessie said, loud enough for the volunteer worker to hear her.

“Yes, go ahead,” the woman said.

They went into his father’s room.

He watched as Bessie leaned over the bed and kissed his father on the cheek.

“Hello, kiddo,” his father said softly.

In the next ten minutes, his eyes never left Bessie’s face.

They talked quietly together, in a sort of hush, almost as if David were not in the room.

He realized all at once that he didn’t even know Bessie’s last name.

He got back to the hotel at four-thirty.

When he’d told the cab driver where to take him, his pronunciation was corrected with a curt, “You mean the Rocky Mount, don’t you?” Four years of French, he’d thought. What good will it do me down here, where the Hotel De Rochemont becomes the Rocky Mount and the Fontainebleau is the Fountain Blow?

The room was suffocatingly hot.

He jiggled the ON-OFF switch under the thermostat and then reached up to the vent to see if he’d had any effect. Nothing. Not a ripple. He went to the window and opened it. A blast of hot, moist air rushed into the room. Fifteen stories below, the pool was empty. Miami Beach in the offseason. He looked out over the sea. Cool, and vast, and eternal. A lone swimmer paddled toward the shore. David turned from the window, picked up the phone, and dialed twenty-two for the front desk.

“Is there something wrong with the air conditioning?” he asked an assistant manager.

“Yes, sir, they’re working on it now.”

“When will it be fixed?”

“I don’t know, sir. They’re working on it now.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Nobody knew when anything would be fixed. His father was in the hospital and nobody knew when he would be fixed, either, or even what was wrong with him. All those tubes, he thought. He picked up the phone again and dialed twenty-one for room service.

“This is Mr. Weber in fifteen twenty-nine,” he said. “I’d like a Canadian Club and soda, please. In fact, make it two.”

“Two Canada Dry club soda, yes, sir,” a man with a Spanish accent said.

“No, two Canadian Club and soda,” David said.

“Two Canadian club soda, right,” the man said.

“Are you sure you’ve got that?” David said. “I’m talking about whiskey and soda.”

“What kind of whiskey?”

“Canadian Club.”

“Yes, sir, Canadian club soda, right.”

“Is there someone there who speaks English?” David said.

“I speak English.”

“Do you know what Canadian Club whiskey is?”

“Sure.”

“That’s the name of the whiskey. Canadian Club.”

“Sure.”

“Look, never mind. Make it scotch and soda, okay? Scotch whiskey and soda. Two of them.”

“Two scotch whiskey and Canadian club soda, yes, sir,” the man said, and hung up.

David sighed and replaced the receiver on its cradle. He was still wearing his tie and jacket. He carried the jacket to the closet. Hangers attached to metal loops on the rod, insurance against theft. Class. But it was only four blocks from the hospital. He hung up his jacket, loosened his tie, pulled it free from under his collar, and then unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He would have to call home. Molly would be waiting for his call. He would do that after the drinks arrived. If they arrived.

He began unpacking.

“Molly?”

“David, hi, how is he?”

“Not so good.”

“What is it?”

He told her everything the doctor had told him, trying to repeat the conversation word for word. Molly said nothing during the recitation. When at last he finished, she said, “Shall I come down there?”

“No, no, what for?”

“You’re alone.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“If you want me to come down...”

“No.”

“... just say so.”

“I’m all right, really.”

“Did you have lunch?”

“On the plane.”

“When will they have the results? Of the scan?”

“Tomorrow sometime.”

“When will you be going back to the hospital?”

“At seven.”

“How’s the weather down there?”

“Hot,” he said. “Very hot.”

He remembered them as stained-glass summers. The summers of his boyhood. Warm yellow sunshine and vibrant green leaves, the deeper green of the sea. The flawless blue of summer skies. A silvery breeze blowing in off the ocean.

His grandmother lived in Bensonhurst, and every summer Sunday they would make the long subway journey from the Bronx to Brooklyn, where the family would congregate for the outing to the beach. There were three brothers: Morris, Max, and Martin. “The Three Stooges,” Uncle Max called them. He was the youngest and the handsomest. He wore his hair parted in the middle, thick black hair, though both his brothers were already going bald. Uncle Max drove a brand-new Studebaker, all shining chrome and gleaming paint. Uncle Max had a black mustache under his nose — “The famous Weber nose,” he called it, “hooked like Julius Caesar’s, the Roman greaser’s.” David’s father kept his own mustache trimmed to a neat narrow line, but Uncle Max’s was thick and full, and he had a little silver mustache comb for it. David loved to watch the little comb flash out of his uncle’s pocket, silver glinting in the sunshine, his uncle’s swift slender hands stroking at the mustache, the silver comb disappearing like magic into his pocket again. Uncle Max dressed like a movie star. Uncle Max was what David wanted to be when he grew up.

Uncle Martin was the oldest of the brothers, lean and thin, somewhat gaunt-looking, with sorrowful brown eyes. “I’m the only Jewish house painter in the city of New York,” he said. He was also the only one of the brothers who didn’t have a mustache. There was always the smell of turpentine around him. David could smell his Uncle Martin clear across a room. He loved the smell of him, and he loved his soft, gentle voice. But he loved his Uncle Max best of all. The three brothers all wore gold signet rings with tiny diamond stones. Grandma had given them the rings for their separate bar mitzvahs, two years apart, first Martin, then his father, and then Max. Their initials were woven into the thick gold like trailing snakes, the identical initials on each ring, M.W., M.W., M.W. The brothers always wore the rings. He had never seen any of them without those rings on the pinky fingers of their right hands. They even wore the rings when they went into the ocean, although Grandma warned they would attract sharks, all that gold, the diamonds, the diamonds.

Every summer Sunday, if the weather was good, they rode out to the beach in two cars, Uncle Max’s great big Studebaker leading the caravan and Uncle Martin’s rumble-seat Ford behind it. David rode in the rumble seat with his fat cousin Rebecca on one side of him and his skinny cousin Shirley on the other. They were Uncle Martin’s daughters; his Uncle Max wasn’t married, his Uncle Max was a handsome man-about-town who always showed up on Sundays with a new and beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed girl on the front seat of the Studebaker — “I like my coffee light and my women dark,” he said, and winked at David. His fat cousin Rebecca had blond hair that Uncle Martin said came from his wife’s side of the family. His wife’s name was Anna, thin, pale-haired, pale-eyed Aunt Anna. David didn’t like her because she was always pinching his cheeks and saying, “How’s my dumpling?” when David wasn’t fat at all, not like her own daughter Rebecca, anyway. But his mother said Aunt Anna’s heart was in the right place.

David hated sitting in the rumble seat with Rebecca because she was so fat and because she squirmed a lot. Shirley was much, much thinner, with the dark eyes and hair all the Weber side of the family shared. There was always a flushed, excited look on Shirley’s narrow face, as if she had just come from running somewhere and was out of breath. He liked Shirley a lot. She was the one who told him she had seen two dogs doing it behind Grandma’s house, and one of them was turned backwards and couldn’t get out. “Couldn’t get out of where?” David asked, and Shirley just turned away with that flushed, excited look on her face.

It was always very breezy in the rumble seat of Uncle Martin’s Ford.

“Cool enough for you back there?” Uncle Martin shouted.

The trees flashed overhead, sunlight glanced.

In the front seat were Uncle Martin and his pale wife Anna, with Grandma squeezed between them and telling Uncle Martin to slow down, did he think he was going to a fire? In the car ahead was Uncle Max with his latest dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty, and on the back seat were David’s father and David’s mother (who always complained about getting carsick) and also a friend of the family who everyone said was Grandma’s boyfriend, which was okay since Grandpa had died years ago. The man’s name was Louis Klein, and he ran a dry-goods store on Thirty-fourth Street, where David had never been in his life. Mr. Klein was always criticizing everything. “Tessa,” he would say to Grandma, “is this really and truly supposed to be borscht?” Grandma would smile. “Tessa,” he would say, “these kreplachs are like stones, actual stones.” Grandma would smile. Grandma had very big bosoms. Whenever she hugged David to her, he thought he would smother. “I’ll bet she has the biggest minnies in the entire world,” skinny cousin Shirley said one day, her face flushed and excited. It took a moment for David to realize she was talking about Grandma’s bosoms.

The beach was on Long Island someplace.

That was all David knew. Long Island someplace.

It always took them what seemed like hours to get there. There were picnic tables under the trees near the beach, and the whole family helped carry out all the food the women had prepared, and then spread a tablecloth on one of the big picnic tables, and then went to Uncle Max’s Studebaker and hung big towels inside all the windows all around, and changed into their bathing suits. David and the girls changed into their bathing suits together. Cousin Rebecca was even fatter without any clothes on.

They all went into the sea.

Uncle Max warned him to watch out for horseshoe crabs.

Grandma told her sons to take off their rings, but they never did.

David’s father held his hand, and they waded out to where it was a little deeper, and he swam in the circle of his father’s strong arms till his father got tired; then his father blew up a red inner tube for him and let him float and swim free under the wide blue sky.

It was so much fun at the seashore.

There was a coffee machine in the waiting room, but no coffee.

“They lock everything up after the four o’clock visit,” a woman explained to him. She was very thin, with pale hair and pale eyes. She was in her sixties, David guessed, and wearing a dark brown pants suit and wedgies. “You’ll learn,” she said. “We’ve been coming here for two months straight now.”

The woman sitting beside her was in her late forties, David guessed. Very fat, with hair bleached platinum, false eyelashes, scarlet slash of lipstick on her mouth, big gold rings on three of her fingers. He thought suddenly of fat Rebecca on his left in Uncle Martin’s rumble seat, squirming while the trees flashed broken sunlight overhead.

“Who’s your patient?” she asked.

“Mr. Weber. Morris Weber.”

“What’s wrong with him?” the thin, pale woman asked.

“He had a colostomy,” David said. “He’s not healing.”

“Well, give him time,” the fat woman said.

“My husband’s had open-heart surgery twice,” the other woman said.

“My father,” the fat woman said.

“This is his second time. He won’t eat anything. Been here three weeks this time, suddenly stopped eating. He threw himself out of bed this afternoon. Yanked out his IV, threw himself right on the floor. They’re restraining him now. They’ve got this strap across his shoulders so he can’t throw himself out of bed again.”

“We’ll have to come feed him,” her daughter said.

“Why? Will he eat if it’s us?”

“Do you live here in Miami?” the daughter asked David.

“No. New York.”

“So you came down here to see him.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s that woman who’s here all the time? Is she your mother?”

David hesitated. “A friend,” he said.

“She’s very loyal.”

“Yes.”

A man sitting under the television set suddenly said, “I’m here on vacation, supposed to be on vacation. My wife fell the other day, near the pool, slipped on the tile. She’s in coma. I don’t know what to do. Should I take her back to Toronto or leave her here, stay here with her?”

He was a tall, gaunt-looking man with sorrowful brown eyes and a soft, gentle voice. He was wearing a colorful Hawaiian-print, short-sleeved sports shirt and dark blue slacks. David could smell his aftershave clear across the room.

“What does the doctor say?” the fat woman asked.

“He doesn’t know how long she’ll be in coma.”

“They never know,” her mother said.

“How would you get her back home?” the daughter asked.

“I’d have to charter a plane, I guess.”

“They have these planes with oxygen equipment and everything, you know.”

“Yes, but they cost a fortune. Six thousand dollars, they told me.”

“Would it be safe to move her?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’d move her then. You can’t stay here forever, you know. She might be in coma for a long time.”

“I just don’t know.”

“I’d move her.”

“I just don’t know.”

“My mother’s been here for two weeks now,” a skinny woman across the room said. She was sitting on one of the green leatherette couches, smoking a cigarette. She had dark hair and dark eyes, and there was a flushed, excited look on her narrow face, as though she had just come from running somewhere and was out of breath. “Came in for a hernia operation. That’s a simple thing, am I right? Doctors. She’s still in Intensive Care. I hate doctors. Now she’s hallucinating. She told me they’re beating her. Is it possible they’re beating her? She wants me to call the police. She says if I don’t take her home, she’ll throw herself out the window.”

“Well, how can you take her home?” the pale woman said.

“I can’t! How can I take her home?”

“So tell her.”

“I told her, do you think she listens?”

“They’ll hallucinate,” the fat daughter said, and nodded.

“It’s all the drugs they give them,” the gaunt man said.

“Doctors and lawyers,” the excited woman said. “I hate them both.”

David said nothing.

The clock on the wall read three minutes to seven.

“You can go in now,” the pink lady said.

“What were those X rays this afternoon?” his father asked.

“They’re trying to find the cause of infection,” David said.

“What infection?”

“You’ve got an infection. That’s why you’re running a fever.”

“I’m running a fever because they’re driving me crazy here.”

“Well, the sooner you get rid of the fever, the sooner you’ll get out of here.”

“I’ll never get out of here,” his father said.

“Of course you will,” David said.

“Never. I keep getting worse every day.”

“Everything’s fine except for the fever.”

“Sure, everything’s fine. I’ve got a hole in my belly and tubes sticking out all over me, everything’s just fine and dandy.”

“You’ll get better, Pop, don’t worry. You’ll be out of here in no time at all.”

“And then what? Then another operation.”

“Not till you’re ready for it.”

“I’ll never be ready for it.”

“Well...”

“Back in again for another operation.”

“A very simple one.”

“Oh, yes, very simple. They’ll just cut me open again. Very simple.”

“To connect...”

“Sure, connect. Two weeks I went to him. He tells me it’s gas pains, the pisher. What kind of gas? It was blockage, is what it was.”

“Yes, Pop.”

“So why did he tell me it was gas?”

“I guess he didn’t know at first.”

“He’s supposed to know, he’s a doctor, isn’t he, the pisher? I had to check myself in here, you think he’d have checked me in here? Had to get here on my own steam. Thank God Bessie was here to help me. She wanted to call you, I told her no, you had the trial. You lost it, huh?”

“Yes, Pop.”

“A big one, huh?”

“Well, yes.”

“What was it, a contingency case?”

“Yes, Pop.”

“How much?”

“Our fee, do you mean?”

“Yes, your fee.”

“Well, a few hundred thousand.”

“And you lost it. So what good did it do, after all? I should have told her to call you. You could have kept an eye on that pisher with his gas.”

“Well, he seems like a good doctor, Pop.”

“What’s his name again?”

“The doctor, do you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Kaplan. You know what his name is, Pop.”

“Yeah, right, Kaplan. I thought it was Wolfe.”

“No.”

“There must be another doctor named Wolfe here. They’re in here all the time, you’d think there was a convention in my room. They have more doctors in this place...” His voice trailed. He shook his head. “So how’s The Shiksa?” he asked.

“Fine, Pop.”

“I want her to have my ring.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I die.”

“Pop...”

“It’s the same initials. M.W. I want her to have it.”

“Well, we don’t have to think about that just now.”

“I want Molly to have it, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Pop.”

“How’s little Stevie?”

He looked at his father.

“Pop...” he said. “Stephen’s dead. You know that, Pop.”

“Come on,” his father said.

“He died five years ago, Pop.”

“Come on, don’t kid a kidder,” his father said. “I can remember when Bessie used to change his diapers.”

“Bessie?”

“What?”

“You said...”

“Your mother, I meant. When she changed his diapers. Does he know his grandpa’s in the hospital?”

“Pop, please, he’s...”

“Does he know I have to have another operation?”

“Well, not for a while yet,” David said, and sighed.

“You don’t know how I suffered after the first one,” his father said, and closed his eyes.

The bar in the main lobby was closed. The clerk at the front desk told him it would be open next week, when a large party from South America would be arriving.

“Things should pick up next week,” he said. “Meanwhile, the disco bar is open.”

The empty lobby was vast, its vaulted ceiling supported by marble columns. His footfalls echoed on the polished marble floors, grew hushed when he crossed the Oriental throw rugs, clicked noisily again as he went down the wide curving stairway to the disco on the lower level at the far end of the hotel. There was no music playing at eight o’clock; a sign on the door advised him that the hours were from 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. But lights were rotating over the small dance floor, blinking, flashing. They reminded David of the lights on the machines all around his father’s bed. He sat at the bar and ordered a Beefeater martini, on the rocks, two olives, please. Aside from the bartender, he was alone in the place. The bartender told him they were expecting a large party of South Americans next week. He drank the martini and then went upstairs to the hotel restaurant. It was done entirely in red. Red crushed-velvet wallpaper, tablecloths and napkins the color of blood, waiters in red jackets. It was completely empty of diners.

He sat alone in a room he guessed could comfortably seat at least a hundred people, and he ordered clams on the half-shell and a New York strip, medium rare. As an afterthought, he ordered a Heineken beer. The waiter told him it might take a few minutes because he had to go all the way to the disco bar for it; the bar right next door wouldn’t be open till next week when they were expecting a big party from South America. David assured him he wouldn’t mind waiting, so long as the beer was very cold.

He was eating the clams when the girl walked in.

She was very tall, five-eight or five-nine, David guessed, with masses of blond hair piled on top of her head. She was wearing a pastel blue suit and matching patent leather pumps. David guessed she was in her late twenties. She hesitated just inside the doorway, her eyes opening in mild surprise as she surveyed the empty room. The headwaiter rushed over.

“Are you still serving dinner?” the girl asked.

British, David thought.

“Yes, Miss.”

“I don’t suppose you could possibly find me a table,” she said.

David smiled.

“Yes, Miss, of course,” the waiter said, “please” and bowed from the waist and escorted her to a table on the far side of the empty room. She sat, crossed her long legs, and accepted the menu he handed her.

“One Heineken beer, very cold,” David’s waiter said at his elbow. “Your steak’ll be along in a minute, sir.”

“Thank you,” David said.

The tall girl with the blond hair was still sitting alone at her table when David signed for his check and went upstairs to his room.

Ah, God, he thought, ah, Molly, he thought, how the hell did we get so old so young? You appeared — long blond hair blowing in the wind, the flutter of a summer dress, a hint of petticoat below — you appeared. And started to turn from the boardwalk railing, from the sea, green eyes flashing in the sunlight, golden sunlight splashing wanton freckles onto an Irish button nose (a shiksa, no less), recklessly tossing freckles onto a perfect Irish phizz. You laughed to a girl friend, the laughter was carried by the wind far out over the sea. And you turned. You turned in slow motion, perky Dublin breasts in a flimsy summer bodice, cotton print flapping, ocean breeze lifting the skirt over long legs, your hand reached down to flatten it. All in slow motion.

You stepped out of sunlight, Molly.

And my heart raced like the swift click of your sandals on that splintered Rockaway boardwalk. I stood transfixed and watched you moving away, chattering with your girl friend, drifting off into a crowded distance of hot-dog stands and cotton-candy carts. And I thought, oh, my God, I thought, Move! Follow her! Don’t let her get away! And I...

I don’t remember, he thought.

Flotsam and jetsam. Fragments of memory adrift. There was a storm, wasn’t there? One of those sudden summer things that rolled in off the sea and inundated the boardwalk and sent everyone scurrying for cover. The smell of kosher franks sizzling on a grill, delicatessen mustard, sauerkraut boiling in a big aluminum pot. A fringed awning dripped water. Water and wind lashed the steaming boardwalk. Beyond, the sea was gray and roiling. And beside me, under the melting awning, alone now, her girl friend magically whisked away by wind or water — Molly.

There was a flash of lightning, wasn’t there?

Drenched now, the long blond hair hanging limp, green eyes running mascara, summer cotton print clinging to breasts and legs and belly and thighs — I almost reached out to touch her! “It’s scary,” she said, or words to that effect, I forget, “Lightning always scares me,” something like that, and another ozone-stinking flash in that moment, a boom of thunder, she covered her face with her hands, I longed to see her face again.

Ah, Molly, Jesus, what a face!

In close-up now (you were standing no more than a foot or two from me, your hands unmasking your face as the thunder receded), the eyes seemed greener, the freckles more pronounced, a riotous bloom of pointillist dots. You took a tissue from your bag, and wiped smudged mascara from your eyes and your cheeks, and said — I don’t remember now. Do I look all right? Am I all right now? Something like that. And I said, I must have said, Yes, you look fine. The storm faded and was gone. There was sunlight £gain. We walked together, out from under the awning, onto the puddled boardwalk. I said (did I?), I said, “You’ve lost your girl friend,” and you said, “I seem to have, yes.” That I remember. The odd construction. I seem to have, yes. There was another flash of lightning, far out over the water. You didn’t flinch this time.

I was David Weber, twenty-six years old in that August of 1957, about to enter my second year of law at N.Y.U., my education interrupted by the Korean War. And you were Molly Regan — of course, what else could you be, the map of County Cork all over your face, eyes like shamrocks, hair like lager, those runaway freckles, what else, an Arab? A nurse, you told me. (Of course, a nurse.) At New York Hospital. Almost twenty-two years old, as fresh as the wind that blew in off the sea.

Were we ever that young?

But there were still surprises then. Back then, there were still surprises.

He fell asleep listening to the sound of the ocean.

He had left the window and the drapes open, and a faint breeze was blowing in off the sea. He imagined teeming life under the water.

In the middle of the night, he dreamed that someone was complaining about the plumbing in their New York apartment. Someone leaned over the bed and shouted, “You don’t know how to fix anything!” The white lampshade on the bedside lamp became a person’s face. The person shouting was a woman wearing dead white powder on her face. The woman shouting was Molly.

He screamed himself awake.