Loving Time

thirty-two

Harold Dickey had until Monday morning to clear up this problem of Clara’s, and not a second longer. That meant he had two days—Saturday and Sunday—to sort through the hospital dirt. Dickey had been surprised that little Gunn Tram, who had always been so eager to be helpful whenever he needed information, suddenly got quiet when he asked about dissatisfied employees. After three decades of knowing every kink, every whisper of discontent from everyone on the payroll, Gunn suddenly could think of no one who had a problem of any kind with the Centre.

“Why are you asking?” she wanted to know.

“Because there’s some mischief going on, and I intend to find out who’s behind it. Have any ideas, Gunn?”

She shook her head so hard her double chins wobbled. “No, no idea. I haven’t heard a thing.”

Later, she actually claimed not to remember the tragic case the year before when a male nurse had given the wrong medication to a new inpatient and the patient had jumped off a terrace, impaling himself on the fence around a terrace several floors below. Harold remembered how angry the nurse had been when he was fired. His name was Bobbie something, and he’d been working at the Centre for many years. He claimed he’d been framed.

When Harold asked Gunn whatever happened to Bobbie, Gunn was almost hostile. “How should I know?” she replied angrily.

How indeed? The same way Gunn knew everything else. She was constantly asking questions and following up. She claimed it was her job to know things. She certainly must have known that Harold had had more than one run-in with Bobbie before the tragedy, when the Centre had had no choice but to terminate the man’s employment. Bobbie had a problem with authority, and probably with women, too. It was easy to imagine Bobbie harassing Clara. And Gunn didn’t want to hand over Bobbie’s file. To Harold, that was significant.

“Why won’t you leave him alone? He’s not even here anymore,” Gunn told Dickey. “How could he be the one you’re looking for?”

“All the same, Gunn …” Harold gave her a sharp look, and she quickly produced what he wanted.

On Saturday, Harold left Westchester before nine and was in his office on the nineteenth floor of the Centre by 9:45. He was fueled by the need to spare Clara the tremendous damage to herself that would result in her trying to force him out. Clara had made many mistakes. Harold knew he was loved and revered at the Centre, and Clara was not. If she foolishly tried to create bad feelings about him, there’d be a backlash. Clara would be the one to fall down like a house of cards, like a sun-dried sand castle hit by a tiny wave on the beach. He could not allow his own protégée to make a fool of herself and polarize the Centre in this way.

Harold carried up coffee from the cafeteria and began concentrating on the histories in the files Gunn had given him. There were so many incidents and problems with staff, every single one documented. The files he had collected contained case accidents of varying degrees of seriousness. And Harold’s committee had investigated every one.

Emily, a seventeen-year-old affective-schizophrenic girl on a locked ward with a special precaution re: sharps, had been confused with another female locked in for a food disorder. Emily asked for a razor to shave her legs, was allowed one by a nurse who thought she needed only arm’s-length supervision, then failed to provide that. The nurse went to the bathroom. Emily slashed her own arms and legs in a dozen places, started screaming, then attacked the orderly who heard her screams and tried to take the razor away.

Patrick, a thirty-eight-year-old paranoid epileptic male, had been put in restraints with the special precaution of checking vital signs every fifteen minutes. The man had a seizure and suffered brain damage during the twelve-hour period when no one had checked on him.

Martha, a sixty-five-year-old depressed woman on a weekend pass, was delivered by a nurse to the wrong house. The disoriented patient didn’t know where she lived and the nurse’s error was discovered only when the woman’s family called to find out why she was three hours late.

An adolescent male recovering from a psychotic episode was given an “arm’s-length” pass to buy a pair of shoes and get a Big Mac. The aide taking him out stopped at a newsstand to look at the sports headlines in the Daily News. Believing he was invisible, the boy walked out into oncoming traffic and was struck by a bus.

There were also cases of elopements—patients walking off locked wards and disappearing for days at a time, or forever. Patients getting off their floors and wandering around the hospital wreaking one kind of havoc or another. Nurses who didn’t show up, or who showed up and did the wrong thing. There were a lot of cases of screwups, many, many cases of poor judgment where self-destructive patients had opportunities to harm themselves or others.

As Harold reviewed case after case, the pain slowly receded from his head and chest. He could not allow Clara’s vicious attack of Friday morning to defeat him. He would not let it hurt him. He had no doubt that Clara would love him again, as she had loved him before—as soon as he uncovered the true culprit of everything she now blamed him for, all those evil pranks. He had no doubt of it.

All he had to do was find the rotten egg. Harold knew it could not be a member of the faculty or a senior administrator. At that level they were all too well screened for this kind of disorder. If it was not one of them, it had to be somebody who had access to the keys, someone who could wander around on all of the floors without attracting notice. It was somebody from the inside, but not one of them. He would find the person, was in control again.

All Saturday he felt better. To further assert his control, he took the bottle of Johnnie Walker out of his desk drawer and set it out where he could see it. He would not drink a drop until he had solved his problem and restored order to his life. The bottle was half full. That perplexed him. He remembered a nearly full bottle, with maybe an ounce missing at most. He drank a bottle a week in his office. Not a drop more. He was certain he’d replaced a full bottle on Friday morning, had only the tiniest sip on Friday afternoon. Yes, he was certain of it. He hadn’t felt well on Friday, didn’t want to drink.

From time to time he glanced at the bottle. Was he kidding himself about his consumption? He badly wanted a drink, particularly by late afternoon, when he was used to having one. He put it off and put it off, telling himself he was in control. He didn’t find what he was looking for in the files.

By Sunday he’d thrust them aside and opened his own files in the computer. It was there in his computer that he found his graphic notes on Bobbie—Bobbie Boudreau—and remembered the kinds of stunts the male nurse had pulled before they were finally forced to fire him. There was no question in Harold’s mind. Bobbie was Clara’s harasser.

The first thing Harold did was to leave a message for Clara. The second thing he did was have a celebratory drink while he waited for Clara to return from wherever she was and call him back.