David Dickinson: Death of a Pilgrim

As the carriage rattled through the empty streets of Manhattan, Michael O’Brian Delaney thought bitterly that he would happily give them all away in return for just one thing, the life of his only son.

Michael Delaney was in his late fifties. He was slowly turning into a patriarch. He was over six feet tall and with a great barrel of a chest. Dark eyebrows hung over brown eyes that were liable to flash with anger or excitement. His hair was brown, turning silver at the temples. He radiated a vast energy. One of his employees said that if you could somehow plug yourself into Delaney you would light up like a candelabrum. Oil paintings of a more peaceful Delaney adorned the boardrooms of his corporations.

By the time his carriage drew up at the hospital entrance there was only one candle burning, to the left of his son’s bed. The little ward looked out on one side to the night streets of Greenwich Village, on the other to the main ward for the terminally ill in St Vincent’s Hospital. Not that the nuns or the doctors ever referred to the ward in terms of terminal illness. It was St James’s Ward to them. All the wards on this floor were named after one of the twelve apostles. Only in private did some of the less religious nurses refer to it as Death Row. As Delaney tiptoed into the room on this November evening, nearest the main section an elderly nun, her entire working life spent in tending the sick and the dying on these wards, sat perched lightly on a chair and stroked a young man’s hand, as if her caress could prolong his stay in these sad surroundings.

‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Delaney. We felt we had to call you. We thought the end might be near, you see, but the crisis seems to have passed. He is no better, of course, but at least he’s still with us.’

‘Thank God,’ said Michael Delaney, and sat down on the other side of the bed. These were familiar surroundings to him now, the dim lighting, the crisp white of the sheets, the antiseptic pale green paint on the walls, the picture of a saint – Delaney didn’t know which one – on the wall above the bed, the faint smells of soap and disinfectant, the light rumble of the trolleys outside taking away the dead on their last journey to the morgue, or bringing fresh consignments of the dying into the terminal ward. But he could not sit still for long. He was restless, now leaning forward to peer into the young man’s face, now pacing on tiptoe over to the window and staring out into the snow swirling round the streets of his city.

This elder man was the father of the patient lying unconscious in the bed. Michael Delaney was one of the richest men in America. The patient was his only son, James Norton Delaney, and the doctors were convinced he could not last more than a day or two. He was suffering from a rare form of what the doctors thought was leukaemia but knew little about. He was eighteen years old, James Delaney, and this evening he was lying on his left side. He had been on the other side when the father sat on vigil until ten o’clock the evening before. Perhaps, the father thought, the nuns had turned him over to make him more comfortable. James was a couple of inches shorter than his father’s six feet two. He had, as Michael Delaney recognized every time he looked at him, his mother’s pretty nose and his mother’s mouth. Only in that high forehead, Michael Delaney thought, had he left his own print on the face of his only son. The young man’s forehead was lined and wrinkled as if he had added thirty or forty years to his age. He was deathly pale. The light brown hair, almost straw in colour, straggled dankly across the pillow. His father had lost count of the number of days his James had been in this isolation ward on his own now. Four? Five? Days and nights blended into one another; the vain hope that those light brown eyes might open, that the lips in his mother’s pretty mouth might part and speak even a few words, was dashed as the ritual timetables of the nurses and doctors measured out their patients’ days. Still there was no movement. Delaney leant down and kissed his son very lightly on the forehead. Every time he did this he wondered if it would be the last time his lips touched a living creature rather than a corpse.

Shortly before seven o’clock in the morning the order changed in the Hospital of St Vincent. The elderly nun was replaced by a younger one. Delaney was conscious of shadowy figures flitting silently to their places along the main ward. The Matron of the hospital materialized by his side and led him away.

‘You must have a change for a little while,’ she whispered. ‘Come with me.’

She led him through a series of passageways, the walls now pale blue and filled with paintings of the Stations of the Cross or scenes from the Gospels. Then she slipped away and he nearly lost her. The Matron, Sister Dominic, was a considerable force in St Vincent’s. Almost all the male patients she met, even the very sick ones, were absolutely certain that she had chosen the wrong profession. Think, they said to themselves, of those translucent pale blue eyes. Think of that face with its delicate features and that soft blonde hair. Think of that figure, alluring to some of them even through the folds of the habits of her order. Quite what the right occupation for Sister Dominic might be they had no idea, but central to it, in the male view, was non-nunnery. No veils, no wimples, no rosary beads, no strange garments, no prayers, let her be just another example of that great institution, American womanhood, available for courting, wonder, romance and, for the lucky one, love and marriage. Often the male patients would dream about Sister Dominic, coming slowly back from drugged sleep after visions of nights spent in her company. Matron herself was well aware of these strange currents of male interest, even male desire, that flowed invisibly around her person. She prayed regularly that God would punish her every time she thought about her appearance. There was one quality, central to her personality, that most of the male patients did not see. Her faith was the most important facet of her life. And she had a deep, intense, very personal calling to heal the sick. Sometimes she would tell herself that somebody in her care was just not going to be allowed to die. It would be too unfair. Sister Dominic never told any of her colleagues about these missions of salvation. When all her efforts failed she would repair to her bare cell and weep bitterly until she was next on duty, sometimes refusing to eat or sleep for days at a time. Failure did not come easy to the Matron of St Vincent’s Hospital.

‘Where are we going?’ Delaney whispered.

‘We are going to the chapel,’ she replied. ‘We are going to pray.’

The man stopped suddenly. He told her he had forgotten how to pray. Bitterly he remembered the times he had ignored all forms of religious instruction as a boy and had played truant, the church services where he had deliberately ignored the words and the responses, the Sunday mornings he had managed to flee from the Church of the Blessed Virgin and gone to hang around the waterfront, the beatings from his father for not taking his faith seriously. He remembered too his father shouting at him that one day he would be sorry he had not paid attention to the priests. One day the sins of his past would come back to haunt him. Well, Judgement Day had finally arrived, here in this place where the sheets were changed twice a day and crucifixes and rosary beads were as common as top hats on Fifth Avenue.

Matron told Delaney he should not worry about the praying on this occasion. She would find him something else to do. She asked him to wait for a moment outside the main entrance to the chapel. When she came back there was a ghost of a smile about her face. She led him into the little church, for so many of the nuns the very heart of the hospital. There were enough pews to hold about forty people. All of them were filled, mostly with kneeling women. All of these Sisters, she told him, had come to pray for his son James. It was a special effort for a special young man. When Delaney asked her what he had to do, she gave him a box of matches. She pointed to the great banks of candles inside all the side chapels and below the paintings on the walls.