Mr. X

Anger heightened the color in her cheeks. ‘I didn’t make her say anything, Mr Dunstan, she wanted to talk to me. Afterwards, I came up here and made a note. If my report to Dr Barnhill displeased your aunts, I’m sorry, but I was just doing my job. Stroke victims are often disordered in their cognition.’

‘She must have been grateful for your attention,’ I said.

Most of her anger went into temporary hiding. ‘It’s nice to deal with a gentleman.’

‘My mother used to say, No point in not being friendly.’ This was not strictly truthful. Now and again my mother had used to say, You have to give some to get some. ‘Could you tell me what you reported to the doctor?’

Zwick frowned at a stack of papers. ‘At first I couldn’t make out her words. Then we transferred her to the bed, and she pulled me in close and said, “They stole my babies.”’

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As regal as a pair of queens in a poker hand, Nettie and May surveyed their realm from chairs brazenly appropriated from the nurses’ station. Somehow they had managed to learn the names, occupations, and conditions of almost everyone else in the ICU.

Number 3 was a combination gunshot wound and heart attack named Clyde Prentiss, a trashy lowlife who had broken his mother’s heart. 5, Mr Temple, had been handsome as a movie star until his horrible industrial accident. Mrs Helen Loome, the cleaning woman in 9, had been operated on for colon cancer. Four feet of intestine had been removed from Mr Bargeron in number 8, a professional accordionist in a polka band. Mr Bargeron drank so much that he saw ghosts flitting through his cubicle.

‘It’s the alcohol leaving his system,’ said Nettie. ‘Those ghosts are named Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker.’

May said, ‘Mr Temple will look like a jigsaw puzzle all the rest of his life.’

Their real subject, my mother, floated beneath the surface of the gossip. What they saw as her heedlessness had brought them pain and disappointment. Nettie and May loved her, but they could not help feeling that she had more in common with the drunken accordionist and Clyde Prentiss than with Mr Temple.

Technically, Nettie and May had ceased to be Dunstans when they got married, but their husbands had been absorbed into the self-protective world of Cherry Street as if born to it. Queenie’s marriage to Toby Kraft and her desertion to his pawnshop had taken place late in her life and only minimally separated her from her sisters.

‘Is Toby Kraft still around?’ I asked.

‘Last I heard, dogs still have fleas,’ Nettie fired back.

Aunt May levered herself to her feet like a rusty derrick. Her eyes glittered. ‘Pearl Gates turned up in her second-best dress. Pearlie’s in that Mount Hebron congregation with Helen Loome, you know, she went there from Galilee Holiness.’

Nettie craned her neck. ‘The dress she dyed pea-soup green, that makes her look like a turtle?’

Aunt May stumped up to a hunchbacked woman outside cubicle 9. I turned to Nettie. ‘Pearlie Gates?’

‘She was Pearl Hooper until she married Mr Gates. In a case like that, the man should take the woman’s name, instead of making a fool out of her. Considering the pride your Uncle Clark takes in our family, it’s a wonder he didn’t call himself Clark Dunstan, instead of me becoming Mrs Annette Rutledge.’

‘Uncle Clark is all right, I hope?’

‘An expert on everything under the sun, same as ever. What time is it?’

‘Not quite twelve-thirty.’

‘He’s driving around the parking lot to find a good enough place. Unless Clark has empty spaces on both sides, he’s afraid someone’ll put a scratch on his car.’ She looked up at me. ‘James passed away last year. Fell asleep in front of the television and never woke up. Didn’t I give you that news?’

‘I wish you had.’

‘Probably I got mixed up if I called you or not.’

For the first time, I was seeing my relatives from an adult perspective. Nettie had not considered telling me about James’s death for as long as a heartbeat.

‘Here comes your Uncle Clark, right on schedule.’

The old man in the loose yellow shirt coming around the desk bore only a generic resemblance to the man I remembered. His ears protruded at right angles, like Dumbo’s, from the walnut of his skull. Above the raw pink of his drooping lower lids, the whites of his eyes shone the ivory of old piano keys.

Uncle Clark drew up in front of his wife like a vintage automobile coming to rest before a public monument. ‘How are we doing at the moment?’

‘The same,’ said Nettie.

He lifted his head to inspect me. ‘If you’re little Ned, I’m the man who saved your mother’s life.’

‘Hello, Uncle Clark,’ I said. ‘Thanks for calling the ambulance.’

He waved me aside and moved through the curtain. I followed him inside.

Clark went to the side of the bed. ‘Your boy is here. That should help you pull through.’ He examined the lights and monitors. ‘Hadn’t been for me, you’d still be on the kitchen floor.’ He raised a bent finger to a screen. ‘This is her heart, you know. You get a picture of how it beats.’

I nodded.

‘Up, down, up, then that big one – see? That’s a strong heart.’

I wrapped my hand around my mother’s. Her breathing changed, and her eyelids flickered.

Clark looked at me with a familiar combination of provisional acceptance and lasting suspicion. ‘About lunchtime, isn’t it?’

My mother’s suddenly open eyes fastened on me.

He patted Star’s flank. ‘Get yourself back on your feet now, honey.’ The curtain swung shut behind him.

Star clutched my hand, lifted her head a few inches off the pillow, and uttered my name with absolute clarity. ‘Hvv … tkk tt ooo.’

The machines emitted squawks of alarm. ‘You have to get some rest, Mom.’

She propelled herself upright. Her fingers fastened around my bicep like a handcuff. She dragged in an enormous breath and on the exhalation breathed, ‘Your father.’

A nurse brushed me aside to place one hand on my mother’s chest, the other on her forehead. ‘Valerie, you have to relax. That’s an order.’ She hitched up the bedclothes, introduced herself as June Cook, the head nurse in the ICU, and clasped my mother’s hand. ‘We’re going to go out now, Valerie, so you get some rest.’

‘She’s called Star,’ I said.

My mother licked her lips and said, ‘Rob. Ert.’ Her eyes closed, and she was instantly asleep.

Outside the cubicle, Uncle Clark was tottering up the row of curtains in black-and-white spectator shoes, like Cab Calloway’s.

‘Where’s he going?’ I asked.

‘Late for lunch,’ Nettie said. ‘Lunch is late for him, more like.’

On the way out, I took off my blazer, folded it into my duffel, and zipped the bag shut again.

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