“Behaving yourself?” Mr. Persichetti asked. And the boy drew out a long, “Yes, yes.”
“Yeah, I bet you are,” Mr. Persichetti said sarcastically. He looked up at the orderly and winked, and then at Mary Keane, as if they were all in on some joke the young man would never understand. For a moment, she thought this cruel, or just childish, on Mr. Persichetti’s part, but as the elevator rose again, she saw how he kept the boy’s hand in his, clasping it between both of his own, and then, briefly, tightening his grip before letting go when the doors opened again. Alone with him once more, she said, “I don’t know how you do what you do.” But Mr. Persichetti only shrugged. “Oh, Larry’s a piece of work,” he said, refusing her the larger meaning.
The hallway on Pauline’s floor was no worse and no better than Mary Keane had imagined it would be. There were all the usual hospital smells, food and urine and disinfectant, along with the smell of the old building itself, a subway smell of dust and metal.
Some of the patients were in the hall, tied into wheelchairs. Old women, mostly, or so it seemed, hair streaming and yellowing eyes, glimpses, here and there, of bruised flesh under the limp white and speckled blue of the hospital gowns. “Hello,” one or two of them said as they passed by, Mr. Persichetti with his hand on her elbow. One or two of them called out a name. Mary Keane tried to smile at them all. “Hello,” she said, passing by. “How are you?” A lifetime of friendliness. A shout went up briefly, from one of the rooms, and then a low moaning. At the end of the hall there was a dull window of either smoked glass or grime, black wire inside its frame, and she had a moment of utter disorientation because although she knew they were on an upper floor, that the elevator they had just ridden had risen, she believed, for just a moment (perhaps it was the subway smell of the old tile walls), that they were underground.
Mr. Persichetti stopped briefly at the nurse’s station-she was glad for his hand on her arm-and then he led her down another corridor. She had some guilt that she had not visited Pauline before, not since the night she fell, that Pauline had been alone all these weeks in this place. But she knew too that she could not have done it, in the midst of all that these weeks had held. In this corridor, another woman, her dark skin stretched thinly over her bones, sat in a wheelchair with her head bent into one hand and her long fingers held up over her face, touching her eyes and her mouth. Her other hand, in her lap, was white-palmed, empty. She was the weary image of every sorrow women knew. Seeing her, Mary Keane felt herself absolved, at least briefly, of all she had neglected in these past weeks. Were she to bend down and speak to this woman she would say, “I have buried my child.” She would ask, “And you?”
“Here we are,” Mr. Persichetti said, and with his hand on her arm guided her into Pauline’s room. She was in a chair by another opaque window, crossed with wire. Her hair was longer than she usually kept it, swept back from her face and showing a good line of gray roots, but she looked well, even younger, perhaps-Mary was surprised to see it-than she had that last night at dinner. It might have been that she was more rested, or better fed. It might have been that she was no longer drinking (psychosis brought on by depression and alcoholism, was what they had said), although never in a million years would she have guessed that the drinking was a problem. It might simply have been, Mary Keane was suddenly sure it was true, that Pauline looked better without her makeup. Her complexion, she had always been glad to point out (usually just after Mary had complained about her own), had always been good.
She crossed the room and kissed Pauline on the cheek. There was only the hospital bracelet on her wrist. Not a hint of the broken nose. Or the shock treatment. “You look good,” she told her and Pauline said, as she might of old, “What’s new?”
Mary found herself speaking more loudly than she wanted to, the way you spoke, mostly inadvertently, to an invalid or a child. “We’re going to bring you back to our house, Pauline,” she said, leaning down to her in the chair. “You’re going to stay with us for a while.” Pauline nodded. Mary was surprised to see her fur-collared coat was laid out on the bed. Pauline was dressed in the clothes they had picked up for her when they emptied out her apartment, gray pants and a pale blue sweater, although someone had given her an old white cardigan as well, oversize and somewhat pilly. The only indication, perhaps, that Pauline had been changed.
“I know,” Pauline said. She looked to Mr. Persichetti, standing at the door. “Sam told me all about it.”
Mary turned to look at him over her shoulder. He shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his Windbreaker. “Oh, I’ve been stopping by,” he said. “Checking up on her. Seeing how she’s been doing.” He looked at Mary Keane. “Being the mayor and all,” he said. And then he added softly, “I knew you had your mind on other things.”
“That was good of you,” she said, and wanted to say more, but the floor nurse was bustling in with the wheelchair, shouting instructions, pulling prescriptions from her smock, referring to Pauline in the third person. Mr. Persichetti pushed the wheelchair back to the elevator, Pauline staring straight ahead as they passed through each corridor. “Goodbye,” Mary Keane said to the women who spoke to them. “Take care.” Pausing for a moment when a shuffling old woman suddenly clasped her hand, holding it between her own as Mr. Persichetti had done for the boy on the elevator. This woman was no older than she. Her blue eyes seemed to race back and forth across Mary Keane’s face as she told a nonsense tale-my sista, was all she could get, my motha, my sista-that grew more urgent as it grew more incomprehensible. The floor nurse stepped between them. “That’s enough, now, Marion,” she shouted. Mary Keane said, walking on, “I’ll pray for you.” The name of Saint Dymphna came to mind.
In the elevator, she resisted the memories the whiff of hospital food and of ether wanted to bring. She had been a patient herself only when her children were born, a visitor most recently when Michael had his tonsils out and Jacob had appendicitis and her husband had the surgery for the slipped disk. When her children were born, she recalled, they had marked each homecoming with a bakery cake, thick with sweet icing, and she felt some guilt again that she hadn’t thought to have anything special at home for Pauline.
When they were settled into John Keane’s car, she and Pauline in the backseat, the two men once again up front, Pauline said, “This is very nice of you,” and crossed her hands in her lap. In the pale light of day, she now seemed older without her makeup, with that sad line of gray along her temples and her forehead. Mary planned a trip to the beautician for both of them, lunch afterward, somewhere nice, a stroll through A amp;S. As the car pulled away and into the street, Pauline suddenly sat up, something brief and childlike in her eyes, a spark of fear or confusion. And then, haltingly, she sat back again. She turned to Mary. “That raincoat doesn’t suit you,” she said. “You’re not good in black.”
Mary only smiled.
“You’ve lost weight, too,” Pauline said. It wasn’t a compliment.
At the house, John Keane gave Pauline his arm to help her up the steps. They paused in the hallway and he took her coat and hung it in the closet, as if this were just another one of her visits and the world hadn’t altered utterly since last she was here.
They had lunch in the kitchen, the three of them, and then John went to work and Mary walked Pauline upstairs. The last time she had slept in this house, when Clare was born, she had been given Annie’s room, but now they made a right at the landing. She was to stay in the boys’ room instead. It was nice enough, a little chilly after the overheated rooms of the hospital. Mary pulled open the drawers of the oak dresser the boys had once shared. She had lined them with floral paper and arranged all of Pauline’s underclothes and nightgowns and sweaters inside. She had brought her jewelry box, her gloves, her drawerful of saved Playbills and greeting cards.