Finding Moon

Still the Second Day

THE FIRST WORDS Victoria Mathias said were, “We have a granddaughter.”

“Yes,” Moon said. “I saw the letters in your purse. How are you feeling?”

“What day is it? How long have I been here?”

“Just one day,” Moon said. “It’s April thirteenth.”

“I’ve got to go get her,” Moon’s mother said. She was in a different room now, moved to a different floor, in a different bed. But the wires were still there, and the tubes. Her skin had the pale, waxy look of death and her eyes the glaze of those who can barely discern reality. Moon took her hand. A cold and fragile hand.

“Ricky’s dead, you know,” she said. “Dead. But he had this daughter.”

“I know,” Moon said. “I know about Ricky and the baby.” My brother. My niece. “Don’t talk if it tires you. You take it easy now.”

Victoria Mathias turned her head slightly and looked at him. She had said, We have a granddaughter.

We. There was that.

“I called Ricky’s lawyer,” she said. Her eyes closed. A long pause. Moon looked nervously up at the monitor screen. The lines on it still moved in a regular pattern, telling him only that his mother was still alive. She’s just asleep, he thought. Good. But then she was speaking again, her voice so weak he could hardly understand the words. “…that man in the Philippines with the Spanish name. I don’t think she ever got there.”

“I saw the letter,” Moon said. “She will get there, okay? It takes time. You take care of getting well. The nuns in Manila will take care of the baby.”

“He didn’t seem to know anything,” his mother said.

“How about the mother?” Moon asked. “Why can’t she bring the child?” He had other questions. Why isn’t the mother keeping the baby? was one of them. But Victoria Mathias seemed no longer aware that he was there. Her body, already shrunken under the sheet, seemed to shrink even more.

She frowned vaguely, and her lips moved. “Very unsatisfactory,” she seemed to say. But the voice was too weak to be understood and Moon thought he might have only guessed at that phrase. Victoria Mathias communicated by letter. To his mother, all telephone conversations were very unsatisfactory.

The person in charge of saving his mother’s life was a doctor named Jerrigan. Dr. Jerrigan made his rounds from ten to eleven and should have been in this ward at about ten-thirty. Now it was fifteen minutes after eleven and Dr. Jerrigan had not arrived.

Moon had sat on the slick plastic chair in the waiting room for more than an hour. During the first thirty minutes of waiting he’d exhausted every possible speculation about his mother’s condition and what he should do about it. He had devoted only a few minutes to considering what needed to be done about Ricky’s daughter. Obviously, he would first call the lawyer in Manila for today’s reading on that problem. The second step would depend on the first. With that decided, he let his mind drift back to the problems he’d left behind him in his rush to the airport.

First, as always, there was Debbie. He could take care of the birthday by finding her something special in Los Angeles -if he could ever get away from this hospital. And then there was the spaniel left in his custody by Shirley until Shirley was safely moved into her new apartment, where spaniels were tolerated. The spaniel had an appointment with a veterinarian and he was supposed to have dropped the damned dog off on his way to work. He’d forgotten about that until he got to the airport at Denver and had had to call the paper. It was Shirley’s day off, so the burden fell upon Hubbell. Hubbell hadn’t sounded happy about it, but he said he’d try to find somebody to take care of it. And he would. Hubbell was grouchy but reliable. A little like himself, he thought.

So don’t worry about the dog. Worry about the other responsibilities he’d left behind. Like J.D.’s truck. Moon inspected his knuckle, which seemed to be scabbing over nicely, and his hands, which despite heavy soaping in the shower still showed evidence of grease in deep cracks and under his fingernails. The grease and the scab were both evidence of J.D.’s failure to maintain his vehicle properly. The baby blue paint always glittered, but J.D’s interest stopped with appearances. He never kept the engine properly tuned. Or cleaned it, which explained Moon’s greasy hands, slippery wrench handles, and a bloody knuckle. In Moon’s opinion, carelessness was only one of J.D.’s several shortcomings. But he was a good-looking kid, good-natured, and great on the tennis court. And, according to Debbie, even better on the ski slopes. And now J.D’s cute little GMC Jimmy sat in Moon’s garage, its cute little diesel engine not quite reassembled. J.D. would be without wheels, which didn’t bother Moon much. But Debbie was counting on J.D. to drive her up to Aspen this weekend.

The plastic of the waiting room chair crackled as Moon shifted his weight. His back ached. And suddenly the tension that had kept sleep at bay began draining away. He yawned. And when that was accomplished, he felt utterly exhausted. He looked at his watch, eyes barely in focus. Where the hell was Dr. what’s-his-name?

Dr. Jerrigan was walking into the waiting room. He was about Moon’s age, but a third smaller and a lot trimmer, with a California surfer’s tan and the hard, wiry physique of the handball courts. He glanced at Moon, saw nothing to inspire interest, and looked down at his clipboard.

“Morick,” he said. “Morick. It looks from this like he’s suffering a coronary occlusion of some sort. The situation will probably require a coronary bypass. But we won’t know until-”

“Wrong gender,” Moon said. “It’s Mrs. Victoria Mathias Morick. I am her son.”

Dr. Jerrigan frowned at Moon.

“Whatever,” he said, and checked his clipboard again. “Oh, yes. She’s that woman they brought in from the airport yesterday. Emergency Room checked her in.” He flipped through the pages on his clipboard. “We don’t have the data we need back from the lab yet but-let’s see-” Dr. Jerrigan studied his clipboard, frowned at it. “The EKG shows equivocal coronary abnormalities.”

“So what’s the prognosis?” Moon said, hoping that prognosis was the correct word. “How bad is it?”

Something on Dr. Jerrigan’s belt went beep-beep-beep. Dr. Jerrigan glanced at his watch, walked about ten steps to a paging phone, picked it up, and talked awhile. When he returned, he looked again at the clipboard. “It doesn’t look too good,” he said. “But until we get the results of the tests they did last night, I can’t really tell.”

“Well, then,” Moon said, “let’s go get those test results. Right now. Let’s go find somebody who can really tell.”

Like many big men, Moon rarely had any need to show his anger and rarely did. But when he did, most people were properly impressed. Dr. Jerrigan was not one of them. He met Moon’s stare with no sign of a flinch.

“Mr. Morick,” he said, “your mother is not the only sick person in this hospital. She’s not my patient. Dr. Rodenski checked her in at ER. This is Sunday. He’s off today. I’m looking after her along with my own patients. There’s not a damn thing we can do until we know more about her condition except keep her comfortable and stabilized. We can’t get those lab reports until they’re ready. And I’ve got a gunshot victim who seems to be trying to die right now.”

“Well, goddammit, what’s her condition?” Moon asked. “It sounds to me like she had a heart attack. Give me a rundown on her condition. Her chances for survival.”

“You want a guess?” Dr. Jerrigan asked, his face slightly flushed. “How can I guess, not knowing any more than we do? But here is your guess. This was probably brought on by some sort of coronary blockage to the heart. A heart attack. Most people survive them.”

“In other words, some don’t?”

“Of course,” Dr. Jerrigan said. “Some don’t.” Then his gadget was beeping again, and Jerrigan was hurrying away.

At the Pentagon, some senior officers compared the South Vietnamese rout with other military disasters: Napoleon’s debacle in Moscow, the fall of France in 1940, the Chinese Nationalist collapse in 1949.

Time Magazine, APRIL 14, 1975