Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Secrets Can Kill

New York City

1978

On Monday morning when the cleaning woman let herself into Dena’s apartment, she was not prepared for what she saw. Blood was everywhere. Smeared on the walls, on the floor, in the hall. It looked as if a massacre had occurred. When she saw her employer lying on the floor in the doorway to the kitchen in a pool of dried blood, she ran out of the apartment screaming, “Missus Nordstrom’s been murdered!” She ran down sixteen flights of stairs, shouting, “There’s been a murder!” The doorman immediately called the police. He was reluctant to go up alone, worried that the murderer was still in her apartment. When the police arrived, they entered with guns drawn but nobody was there except her dead body, or at least what looked like her dead body. But when the doctor came and started to examine her, he looked up and said, “Call an ambulance. This girl is still alive.”

The paramedics felt a weak pulse. She had lost so much blood the emergency room doctor did not hold out much hope, but he started a transfusion anyway. They checked her for bullet or stab wounds but could not find any. Later, they discovered that she had bleeding ulcers, one had hemorrhaged, and she had almost bled to death. They got her into emergency surgery.

As sick as Dena was, being unconscious was at least some relief from what she had been going through. She had tried not to think about the letter, but it had haunted her. She kept wondering when it might happen, would it happen. When she had gone to the market, she had been too frightened to look at the papers displayed right by the cash register. Would she wake one morning and it would be all over? At night she was haunted by the fact that what she had read might be true. How could it be true? But there were so many unanswered questions. Why did her mother even speak German? Who was that man in Elmwood Springs? Who was the man in the lobby her mother so feared? Why did her mother never let anyone take her picture? Why had her mother never told her she played the piano? She kept going over everything, like a movie that ran again and again. She could not get it out of her mind. Suddenly it seemed like everything about her mother that she had worked so hard to remember became suspicious. She cancelled all her appointments, including Dr. Diggers. The only way she could get any sleep was to drink until she passed out. At four o’clock in the morning on Monday, she sat up in bed and started to throw up blood and could not stop. She tried to crawl down her hall to buzz the doorman but became unconscious.

For days it was touch and go. She remained in the intensive care unit and on the critical list. Nobody knew if she would pull through but her doctors felt that after all the blood she had lost, it was a miracle she was alive at all. And Dena, who did not believe in God, much less in prayer, had the most unlikely people praying for her in the most unlikely of places. When it was announced on the news that she had been rushed to the hospital and was on the critical list, Peggy Hamilton called her husband, Charles, who was in Russia on a world crusade. That night, five thousand or more Russians, who barely spoke English, bowed their heads and prayed for a woman in New York they did not know. Elizabeth Diggers and the entire congregation of the AME Baptist Church on 105th Street said a prayer for her. Sandy Cooper did what a lot of people do when they are terrified of losing something; he started to make a lot of promises and vows he would keep if she lived. When Norma heard about it she was so frightened that she completely bypassed hysteria. She immediately picked up the phone and called her minister. That night in Elmwood Springs, people in all three of the churches came to do the only thing they knew to do. They prayed for her. Calls were made to the Unity Prayer Hot Line for Dena. In Selma, Alabama, Sookie, who was now on a first-name basis with Jesus Christ, had a lot to say, and just to be on the safe side, alerted all the Kappa Bible study groups in the country to say a special prayer for their sister. Sookie’s mother, Lenore, instructed every board member of the local chapter of the International Coalition of Christians and Jews to pray and to get everyone they knew to pray for her as well, and as an afterthought, went right over poor Archbishop Lipscomb’s head, saying to Sookie, “This is too serious to fool around with. We need to go straight to the top.” The next day, a telegram arrived in Vatican City:

DEAR YOUR HOLINESS,

I NEED YOU TO PRAY FOR A FRIEND OF OURS WHO IS GRAVELY ILL. HER NAME IS DENA NORDSTROM AND I NEED YOU TO DO IT IMMEDIATELY IF NOT SOONER. THANKING YOU IN ADVANCE.

MRS. LENORE SIMMONS KRACKENBERRY

SELMA, ALABAMA

If God had been listening, it is most likely the prayer that might have done the trick was Aunt Elner’s, who talked to God every day. She went out into her yard and looked up and said, “Please don’t take her now, Lord. She’s just getting started and that poor little thing has had so many hard knocks. And if you need a family member, just go ahead and take me. I’d be tickled to death to see you and I don’t have a thing planned except for putting up some preserves. Other than that, I’m free as a bird to come on up.”

After three days, Dena was taken off the critical list. Whether or not it had been all those prayers or the skill of the doctors, nobody could say for sure. But to put it in Elner’s words, “It sure didn’t hurt her any.”

A lot of things went on during those long days that she was totally unaware of. Visitors came and went. Reporters and fans tried to get in, but were turned away. As usual when a celebrity gets sick, rumors spread that she had tried to kill herself, that she had overdosed on drugs, that she had suffered a nervous breakdown, that Julian had caught her in bed with another man and fired her. None were true, but it did give the gossips, professional and amateurs alike, something to talk about.

Julian Amsley had called several times and sent flowers, and he had come to the hospital once. But Gerry O’Malley came every day. He had been sitting outside Dena’s room when an intern he had not seen before came down the hall and went into it. Gerry wondered what he was doing in there, and when he saw a flash of light go off, he knew. That son of a bitch had taken a picture. The “intern” came out and hurried down the hall toward the stairwell, but Gerry jumped up and grabbed him just as he hit the first step. Gerry said quietly, so as not to disturb the other patients in intensive care, “Hey, buddy, how about letting me have that camera?”

“Screw you,” the guy said and he kept going. Gerry pulled him by the back of his smock down the stairs to the landing, where a nurse passing by heard a loud snap that sounded like someone had stepped on a twig. A minute later Gerry came back up the stairs with a camera and went over and sat back down.

Five minutes later, the fake intern, who was out a lot of money he could have made from the sale of that picture, was informed that he had a broken arm. He was lucky. When you attend military school, as Gerry had, you learn a few things. The guy should have been glad it had not been his neck.

And Dena never knew Gerry had been there.