The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [85]
A policeman stopped them when they tried to approach the hospital and waved them toward a parking lot. “We want to get to the hospital,” Moses shouted. The policeman leaned toward them. He was deaf. “We have a woman here who is dying,” the stranger cried loudly. “This is a matter of life and death.” Moses got past the policeman and through the fair, approaching a brick building, darkened by many shade trees. The place was shaped like a Victorian mansion and may have been one, modified now by fire escapes and a brick smokestack. Moses got out of the car and ran through an emergency entrance into a room that was empty. He went from there into a hall where he met a gray-haired nurse carrying a tray. “I have an emergency in my car,” he said. There was no kindliness in her face. She gave him that appalling look of bitterness that we exchange when we are too tired, or too exacerbated by our own ill luck, to care whether our neighbors live or die. “What is the nature of the emergency?” she asked airily. Another nurse appeared. She was no younger but she was not so tired. “She was thrown by a horse, she’s unconscious,” Moses said. “Horses!” the old nurse exclaimed. “Dr. Howard has just come in,” the second nurse said. “I’ll get him now.”
A few minutes later a doctor came down the hall with a second nurse and they wheeled a table out of the emergency room down a ramp to the car and Moses and the doctor lifted the unconscious woman onto this. They accomplished this in a summer twilight, surrounded by the voices of hawkers and the sounds of music that came from the fair beyond the trees. “Oh, can’t somebody stop this?” the stranger asked, meaning the music. “I’m Charles Cutter. I’ll pay any amount of money. Send them home. Send them home. I’ll pay for it. Tell them to stop the music at least. She needs quiet.”
“We couldn’t do that,” the doctor said quietly, and with a marked upcountry accent. “That’s how we raise the money to keep the hospital running.” In the hospital they began to cut off the woman’s clothes and Moses went into the hallway, followed by her husband. “You’ll stay, you’ll stay a little while with me, won’t you?” he asked Moses. “She’s all I have and if she dies, if she dies I don’t know what I’ll do.” Moses said that he would stay and wandered down the hall to an empty waiting room. A large, bronze plaque on the door said that the waiting room was the gift of Sarah P. Watkins and her sons and daughters, but it was difficult to see what the Watkins family had given. There were three pieces of imitation-leather furniture, a table and a collection of old magazines. Moses waited here until Mr. Cutter returned. “She’s alive,” he sobbed, “she’s alive. Thank God. Her leg and her arm are broken and she has a concussion. I’ve called my secretary and asked them to send a specialist on from New York. They don’t know whether she’ll live or not. They won’t know for twenty-four hours. Oh, she’s such a lovely person. She’s so kind and lovely.”
“Your wife will be all right,” Moses said.
“She isn’t my wife,” Mr. Cutter sobbed. “She’s so kind and lovely. My wife isn’t anything like that. We’ve had such hard times, both of us. We’ve never asked for very much. We haven’t even been together very much. It couldn’t be retribution, could it? It couldn’t be retribution. We’ve never harmed anyone. We’ve taken these little trips each year. It’s the only time we ever have together. It couldn’t be retribution.” He dried his tears and cleaned his spectacles and went back down the hall.
A young nurse came to the door, looking out at the carnival and the summer evening, and a doctor joined her.
“B2 thinks he’s dying,” the nurse said. “He wants a priest.”
“I called Father Bevier,” the doctor said. “He’s out.” He put a hand on the nurse’s slender back and let it fall along her buttocks.
“Oh, I could use a little of that,” the nurse said cheerfully.
“So could I,” the doctor said.
He continued to stroke her buttocks and desire seemed to make the nurse plaintive and in a human way much finer and the doctor, who had looked very tired, seemed refreshed. Then, from the dark interior of the place, there was a wordless roar, a spitting grunt, extorted either by extreme physical misery or the collapse of reasonable hope. The doctor and the nurse separated and disappeared in the dark at the end of the hall. The grunt rose to a scream, a shriek, and to escape it Moses walked out of the building and crossed the grass to the edge of the lawn. He was on high land and his view took in the mountains, blackened then by an afterglow